Your Eyes in Stars (5 page)

A
T FIRST
W
ARDEN
Myrer and the prisoner didn’t talk, just smoked and looked around at the town, or the lake if Carr was doing away work up there, wherever he was, because Myrer had started picking him up to take him back to The Hill.

Eventually they talked some, mostly about music. Except for Miss Purr of Peachy, Georgia, Carr didn’t know anyone who knew that much about bands and good songs for them to play. After the warden heard that the prisoner could sing, he’d say Carr should do that, too, when The Blues were performing. He’d keep after him. “What song do you like, Mr. Carr?”

“‘Till Times Get Better.’”

“I don’t know that one.”

“It’s a song Jabbo Smith sings.”

“I never heard of him, either.”

“Because I’m making it hard for you. He’s out of Georgia. Did you ever hear of Roy Eldridge?”

“The trumpeter. Sure.”

“Jabbo Smith bested him in a cut session. That’s how good he is.”

Silence for a while, and then the warden said, “One thing I like.”

“What?”

“Relaxing like this. Talking about music. I never talk with anyone about it.”

“You got kids?”

“Neither of them cares about it. My wife does, sort of, but her musical knowledge doesn’t go that deep.”

“Jabbo Smith is like me,” Slater Carr said.

“How come?”

“We were both born on Christmas Eve. He’s a southerner from Georgia, same as me, and he was brought up in an orphanage too. Did you ever hear of The Jenkins Orphanage Band?”

“Oh, sure. A Reverend Daniel Jenkins started a band called The Pick-a-Ninny, way back. A famous band. How’d you hear about them?”

“I heard of them from a lady at the Peachy Orphan Asylum. Her ambition is to do something similar. She started a band called The Georgia Peaches. I played in it when I was back there.”

“Well, she’ll probably never do anything as good, because The Jenkins Band was all Negroes,” said the warden. “They
used to play on the streets of Charleston, South Carolina.”

“Miss Purr always says that’s a myth about the colored playing music better than us.”

“I’d like to believe it’s a myth, Mr. Carr.”

“Why’s that, boss?”

“That’s what we’ve got for competition, Mr. Carr. That’s what The Blues are up against every year. Negroes. To make matters worse, these boys are from New Orleans.”

“Why is that worse?”

“Down in New Orleans it’s all music. You hear it everywhere.”

“I bet we can do it!” said Slater Carr. “I bet we can lick them!”

“I dream of one day having that big Baaa on my desk,” the warden told him. “You know they give out little Baaas for the band.”

“It’s something to shoot for,” Slater said. Then he corrected it to “Aim for. It’s something to aim for.”

E
LISA TOOK THE
kitten.

“It was
Papachen
who said I could have it, but remember something: If you should ever meet my father, you must never tell how the prisoner loved the cat.”

“If I ever meet him,” I said.

“He has no time, Jessica…. The Sontags had mice in the basement, which helped convince Papa to let me have her,” Elisa continued. “I name her Marlene, after my mother’s favorite film star. Then maybe she will not care that this kitty lives with us.”

“There’s no movie star named Marlene.”

“Marlene Dietrich. She is a German, but now she’s in your Hollywood. Someday you’ll see this kitty’s namesake in the films. My mother believes she resembles Marlene, so she will like her named that too.”

“The only Marlene in our town is Mayonnaise Marlene,
who’s a telephone operator. Call her Dietrich instead.”

Mostly white with one black ear and a black paw, Dietrich was at the Sontags’. Elisa said the cat liked to snooze inside a straw sailor hat belonging to Sophie Stadler.

It was a Friday night, and we had gone over to Hoopes Park to catch pollywogs for an aquarium we were starting. Mr. Stadler came back from Cornell on Friday nights, and Elisa said she had to get out of the house then.

“Why? I thought you liked your father.”

We were sitting on one of the pale-green park benches, in front of the rose gardens with their heady perfume. We were throwing bread crumbs to the swans. The pollywogs we had collected could not be seen swimming in the murky water inside a Chase & Sanborn coffee can with holes punched in the top. The park lights had just come on, so we knew it was nine o’clock.

“Of course I like my own father,” said Elisa. “I love him. But I have to give them time to be intimate.”

I winced. “Don’t talk about it. I don’t even want to think about parents doing it. Thank Gawd mine don’t do it.”

“How did you get here, then, if they don’t do it?”

“They did it twice. Once for Seth. The second time for me.”

“Married people do it all the time.”

A major mystery to me at that point in my life happened to be how I got there. Never mind the long-legged large white wading bird with the red beak; I wondered if my parents could have summoned forth stand-ins to go through the motions that produced children. My father had built a sleeping porch for himself and Seth. Once, when I asked my mother why most of my classmates’ parents slept in the same bedroom, my mother shot back: “That’s because they can’t afford a bigger house.”

“Your parents must be intimate, Jessica.”

“No. They don’t even sleep in the same room.”

“Are they estranged?” Elisa asked.

“No. They get along just fine. He often comes home early to take a walk with her. Then he makes her grasshopper cocktails.”

“I believe they do it secretly,” Elisa said. “Even if it’s
alle Jubeljahre einmal.
That’s how we say once in a blue moon.”

“Why would they do it secretly? They’re married.”

“They might not want you to know they do it.”

“I’d just as soon not know,” I said, “although I do know they don’t do it…. Can’t your father wait until they go to bed?”

“My
Mutti
prepares hors d’oeuvres for
Vater
, and they
have wine,” said Elisa. “Remember, he has been gone all week.”

I liked to watch the Stadlers on their front porch weekend nights he was home. I’d seen Heinz Stadler light two cigarettes at the same time and pass one to Mrs. Stadler. Mrs. Stadler put it into a long cigarette holder, which she held between two fingers. He sat with his arm around her and looked as if he were whispering sexy things to her.

One night my mother had moved away from the venetian blinds muttering, “I wouldn’t let a man maul me right in plain view of the neighbors.”

“Where would you let a man maul you?” I asked her.

She acted as though she hadn’t heard me.

Elisa said, “Jessica, tell me something honestly. Is Seth never home because I’m there so much?”

“He started staying away from home before you moved across the street,” I said. “Why do you always think about boys? I can take them or leave them.”

“You are not German, that’s why. We even have a word for the fear we’ll be left behind when we’re twenty-one, with everyone else married.
Torschlusspanik.
I love our language more than any other. We have a word for everything. One word for something it takes six words to describe in other languages. I miss so Potsdam, where I’m from.” Elisa picked up the coffee can with our pollywogs
in it. She said, “We’d better go. It’s getting dark…. I think so much of whom I will marry someday. He will be my
Verlobter
first. My fiancé. My mother is always saying who would be a good
Verlobter
for me. The answer is someone like
Vater
. I want to marry a man like my father.”

“I want to marry one like mine but with a different job.”

“I want mine to be an idealist, and romantic.”

“I wonder if my father is romantic,” I said. “He couldn’t be that romantic married to her. He’s too involved with the prison anyway. Hey, I saw a note from Slater Carr to my father. You want to know what it said?”

“Of course! Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I was saving it to tell you. The note said, ‘Boss, I have learned a special song for you, and I am ready to sing it. Yours truly, Mr. Carr.’”

“What song?”

“Search me. But I think I know why he learned it. I have a surprise for you.”

We would often save surprises until we felt it was just the right time.

I said, “Slater Carr learned that song for the Fourth of July, I bet. The Blues are playing right in this very park on the Fourth. We can see Slater Carr plainly, up on the bandstand.”

“Can we talk to him?”

“No one can talk to any of them.”

“Someday perhaps I will marry a musician…. Oh, Jessica, listen!”

“What?”

“He’s playing,” Elisa whispered.

When Taps was over, Elisa said, “Jessica, one of us should fall in love. Then the other one can help her through it. From what I know of the subject, it is filled with pitfalls.”

“
You
fall in love then. I don’t feel like it.”

“Don’t make a comedy of it. I am telling you something more serious than our usual topics.”

“I’m sorry. Don’t fall for Seth, because he’s undersexed.”

“Who said?”

“I said. Coming from the kind of parents we have, where there is no action to speak of in the master bedroom,
ever
, how would he turn out? Undersexed.”

“Are you undersexed too?”

“I must be. I never think about it.”

“I hope that’s not true for your sake,
Süsse
. I think it is important to want a man. I can’t say want a boy. I don’t want a boy.”

“Who do you want?”

“If I could choose anyone we both know?”

“I hope you’re not going to say Slater Carr.”

“I like what you have told me about him.”

“You do? What did I tell you about him that you like?”

Elisa grinned. “I like that he’s a hothead when it comes to love.”

“And that he murdered someone because of it?”

“There’s the rub, as Mr. Shakespeare would say.”

“As anyone would say.”

“So I pick someone we both know. We both don’t know many sharp boys. So it would have to be Wolfgang Schwitter.”

“You hardly spoke two words to him, Phyllis.”

“I know he called me Phyllis. But he didn’t know me. He didn’t know his father got us tickets. Hundreds of girls must speak to him—he’s dark and handsome.”

“Tall, dark, and handsome,” I said. “Lots of luck.”

“Thank you,” Elisa said, not understanding the sarcasm.

Our conversation was suddenly halted by the sight of a swan swooping down on the same little brown dog that had chased Dietrich up a tree. The dog was swimming hard toward the swan. Its owner was wading in after it, waving a stick.

“I can’t watch this,” Elisa said. “He’s going to beat that dog.”

“Hey, you!” I shouted. “Leave him alone!”

The man paid no attention. He caught the dog by its collar and began beating it as the dog yelped. Both Elisa and I ran down to the water, shouting at the man to stop.
He cursed at us and disappeared into the woods near the park, the dog under his arm.

“We have to do something!” I said. “There must be something we can do for that poor scruffy dog.”

“Poor Scruffy,” said Elisa. “We have to get Richard. He can find a way to rescue the dog.”

“Maybe. He knows where the tramps are in town.”

“I admire Richard,
Süsse.
He has
caritas
. That is the main emotion of Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
. It means something like your word
charity
. It means an active, outgoing love for others. Have you read
Les Misérables
?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Both Richard and Slater have
caritas.
They try to make things better for people. Slater with his beautiful music and Richard with his giving ways and his word games. I don’t think Richard is appreciated. I feel sorry for him.”

“You feel sorry for everyone, if you ask me.”

“No, that is you,” Elisa said. “My mother thinks both you and your mother are underdog lovers. You stick up for tramps and miscreants.”

“I don’t stick up for miscreants. I don’t even know what miscreants are.”

“The difference between you and me,” Elisa continued as we walked past the rose garden, “is you pity the underdogs and I feel contempt for those who make people into
underdogs. How does someone get the notion they are better than another?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Girls like the Chi Pis. Anyone who looks down on others. Sometimes my own mother does. She often thinks she is superior to others.”

“To my family?”

“I never said that,
Süsse
.”

“It’s strange, anyway, that she never speaks to us.”

“Oh, of course she would speak to you if she saw you.”

“She sees me,” I said.

W
HEN THE WARDEN’S
daughter was not home, Carr could go there for away time. The warden said, “If my wife or Myra, the maid, appears, you are to ignore them.”

When Myra went out to hang up clothes in the backyard, Slater would try to smile at her, touch his head in a little salute, almost manage a hello. The warden had told Slater she was on probation and could do housework off grounds until her freedom was granted.

Slater thought of his own mother, said to be crazy, sent to the Peachy Insane Asylum in her teens, pregnant, only to learn later a lot of girls like that weren’t tetched at all; there just wasn’t anyplace else to put them. When their babies were born, the POA took them in and raised them. That’s how he wound up there.

Myra wouldn’t look at him.

“She afraid of me?” he asked Warden Myrer once.

“Her freedom’s coming up in another two years. She just doesn’t want to get in trouble.”

“I wouldn’t hurt her.”

“If she smiled at you, someone might say she was asking for it. She could even lose her away privileges.”

“Some of us just don’t ever get lucky, do we, boss?”

“Focus on now, Slater, not then.”

First time the Warden didn’t call him Mr. Carr.