Your Eyes in Stars (7 page)

E
ARLIER
, E
LISA HAD
come by on Gertie Sontag’s bike and said she was going to Hollywood Hangout for ice cream for her father. Richard was with her. Lately he was with her every chance he got. Last week he had left a fake gardenia on the Sontag porch. Mother had seen him do it, and she had told me that no young man was going to buy a flower for me as long as I rode down streets on my bicycle no hands. “Boys do that sort of thing on bicycles, not girls. Not girls boys give flowers to.”

Heinz and Sophie Stadler were sitting on the front porch swing across the street, holding hands. After I was sent to my room, I watched them from my bedroom window and wondered again about my own embarrassing family. Something was radically wrong with my parents. My mother was caring enough on the surface, but she seemed to pull back at any demonstration of affection—not that there was any coming from me. I
knew she favored Seth, knew he was honey and darling and I was Jess—or Jessica Osborne Myrer when she was furious.

But my mother seemed not to want Daddy’s touch either, despite their walking rituals and their grasshoppers. How could Daddy stand not being hugged or kissed? I couldn’t remember a time they’d acted like lovers, except in old photographs around the house. They looked a lot younger in them, too.

At the other extreme were Elisa’s parents. No wonder Elisa got out of the house when he was around. I’d seen that sort of thing only in the movies: long clinches, fingertip kissing, and staring into each other’s eyes. Then he’d always light the two cigarettes and pass her one.

As I stared at them from my window, there was a knock on my door.

“Sweetie?” My father’s whisper. “Ready for some dessert?”

I let him in, and Mugshot, the cat, slid through the door with him. My father had a slice of chocolate pie on a plate and a glass of milk.

“How did you sneak this up here?”

“Your mother is taking a walk with Seth. She told me you were being punished.”

He sat down on my bed.

“What happened at dinner?” he asked.

“I was a
Dummkopf
.” Then I told him all about it.

“You were asking for it, weren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“I thought since your friendship with Elisa, you haven’t been teasing your mother. She can never take a joke, you know.”

“You tease her too. You make fun of her when she makes those malapropisms.”

“Oh, that’s all in fun.”

“Seth doesn’t think so. He thinks you’re belittling her.”

“He’s going through a stage, Jess. He doesn’t like me right now. I went through it with my own father.”

“And Mother’s cold. I don’t know why you like such a cold woman.”

“I love her, Jessie.”

I plugged my ears. My father pulled my hands down gently.

“You love her too,” he said. “I thought you’d changed since you became friends with Elisa. You’ve grown up. But we don’t lose our old ways overnight. I know that, honey. Old behavior is hard to shed,” he said. “That’s why we have so many recidivists up on The Hill.”

“Are there more of them there than one-timers like Slater Carr?”

“There used to be. Nowadays life inside is easier than life outside, so some men do something purposely, to come back to us.”

“I bet Slater Carr would never come back if he got out.”

“He’ll never get out,” my father said emphatically. “And I think Mr. Carr is learning to make the best of it.”

“Once I get out of here,” I said, “I won’t be back.”

“You think of this house as a prison?”

“This town is. In my school they don’t even read important books like
Les Misérables
.”

“What’s stopping you from checking it out of the library?”

“Because it’s a hard book. I would never read it unless it was a school assignment.”

“Oh, honey, you’re just blue tonight because you had a fight with Mother.”

“I’d like to see something of the world. I’m tired of being a hick! I may not finish high school.”

“Okay. Will you write home?” A smile tipped his lips.

“It isn’t funny, Daddy.”

My father changed the subject. “Seth seems unhappy about a lot of things. Do you think so?”

“He’s only unhappy about one thing. He’s worried about J. J.’s father because he’s broke and he’s drinking.”

“Oh, I don’t think Seth need worry,” said Daddy. “I’m
in Rotary with Horace. He’s a levelheaded fellow. Shall I tell you a secret?”

“Okay.”

“You’re not to tell anyone. Not anyone! It could cost me my job.”

“I promise I won’t spill the beans.”

“I have Mr. Carr helping Horace out. Mother told me Mrs. Stadler doesn’t like prisoners working here, so Mr. Carr will do his away work at the Joys’.”

“I wondered where the prisoners were.”

“I’m not a hero. A lot of us are helping Horace. The Rotary saw that his car was paid up. I know that the Joys can’t afford a gardener anymore, so Mr. Carr is doing his lawn, mowing it, pulling weeds and that sort of thing. Mother’s sending Myra over one day a week as well.”

“Does Seth know?”

“If he knows, he hasn’t mentioned it to me. Your brother doesn’t talk to me very much anymore.”

“He doesn’t talk to me, either. He does all his talking to Mr. Joy, I bet.”

“Could be, sweetie.”

When I finished the pie and milk, my father said he had one more surprise for me. He opened the bedroom door, reached down on the hall rug for something, and came back with a poster still rolled up.

“Baby Face Nelson?” I said.

“Nope.”

“Pretty Boy Floyd?”

“Unt-uh.” He shook his head.

Then he unrolled the sheet, and I saw:

I threw my arms around his neck. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome, sweetie pie.”

“He looks younger than twenty. Look at that baby face!”

“I look at it every day, and I think what a waste it is to have him locked up. Here’s a young man who never
finished high school, never went on dates, never went on a picnic, owned a bike, a boat, a dog. No family anyone knows about.”

“Who taught him how to play the bugle?”

“He’s self-taught, I suspect.”

“Doesn’t he ever tell you about himself?”

“Very little. I don’t encourage it. He has to live in the here and now.”

“You never told me his nickname was Goldilocks.”

“I don’t call my inmates by their nicknames. I want them to think of themselves as men. Men who keep their nicknames into adulthood aren’t taken seriously, in my opinion. Who would follow my orders up on The Hill if I still called myself Blocker?”

The poster made up for the fact I wasn’t allowed to meet Elisa that night.

On the phone I told her I had a huge surprise for her. No, I would not tell her about it. Elisa had to see it.

At nine thirty sharp I went to the window. Most Cayutians had gotten used to his bugle by then. I had the feeling some, like me, stopped what they were doing and listened with the feeling of tears behind their eyes. When that happened to me, I was surprised. It had nothing to do with Slater Carr, but what was it making me sad?

Elisa said that when Slater played, she thought of
what her favorite American poet, Sara Teasdale, said about beauty.

I felt that I was on the verge of understanding poetry, on the verge of having more feelings than I’d ever had too.

But I was still only on the verge. I’d even tried reading T. S. Eliot ever since the librarian said Mrs. Stadler read him. At first I believed I had found a poet who could speak in plain, understandable language, but within a few lines I would find myself lost. I would stumble on

and worse.

“Tell me something beautiful that could make your heart break,” I asked Elisa.

“Richard. When he gave his coat to the tramp last winter. That was beautiful. It made me cry to know about it.”

“Richard’s not very beautiful with those rubber bands popping out of his mouth and hickies all over his face.”

“It’s what’s inside him. He cares.”

“
Caritas
. I remember.”

“And it takes courage to care, I think. I don’t have it. I talk about it, but what do I do? Maybe I will grow up to be like
Mutter
. Inside, a stone.”

“My mother too.”

“No. She is different with her tramps and her animal love. My mother loves only my father, me, and Omi, my grandmother. But we are part of her. It’s when you care about something beyond you.”

“What will become of us, Elisa?”

“I know. I will be at the top of the Eiffel Tower sometime in the future, waiting for you to overcome your fear of things at a slant. You have to get over it, you know. All of life is at a slant.”

M
ISS
P
URRINGTON ALWAYS
told Slater Carr she knew him like the back of her hand.

The trouble was that no part of Purr’s anatomy could help her understand Slater Carr once Daisy Raleigh hit Peachy.

“Hit” would be the best way to put it, too, because she came roaring into town in a bright-red Pierce-Arrow, slamming smack into the Caribbean cabbage palm tree in front of Peachy School.

Sixteen years old, daughter of a judge from Auburn, New York, Daisy was driving from Savannah to Atlanta to meet her father. Judge Raleigh was there attending his sister’s funeral.

Nellie Purrington had made the mistake of saying, “Help her, Slater. I think that young lady is off her rocker speeding that way.”

For the one and only time in his life, Slater fell in love. She was wild and beautiful, and she could get him to do anything.

He would have followed Daisy anywhere, and he did—to Auburn, the Finger Lakes town in upstate New York where the Raleighs lived.

Two years from the day she leaned against him laughing, her long blond hair in her beautiful blue eyes, as Slater led her away from the smoking automobile, judge Raleigh had had it! It was not the first time she’d done something crazy, with someone she hardly knew, but the judge never put any blame on her. He got a court order forbidding Carr to come within ten miles of Auburn. Carr found a job pumping gas, seven miles away, living in a room above the service station.

Daisy Raleigh took the telephone during one of Slater’s dozens of calls to the family home and told him when to meet her in front of the Naybor Pancake Shop. Her Pierce-Arrow would be out front, where he should get behind the wheel and wait for her. He would have to be on time and prepared to take off immediately, because she would be running from her father.

Actually, Daisy was running from Mr. Naybor. She had her father’s pistol tucked into the waistline of her jeans and bills of all denominations crammed into a gym bag. There was the sound of gunfire and steps running toward Slater. Daisy dropped to the ground, which was where he last saw her, in a pool of her own blood.

She died there, with Mr. Jeff Naybor dead too, on the steps where Naybor had shot at Daisy.

Slater got in the Pierce-Arrow and escaped the law for one month, hiding five miles away at the Won’t You Come Inn, washing dishes in the diner across the street.

One of the arresting officers had witnessed the crime, seen Slater race away, then made it his business to find him eventually and take him in.

“You never should have run, Goldilocks.”

“Oh, sure, I’d get a break around here. I had to run!”

“It’s over now, Goldilocks.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“That’s my name for you. “

That was the first time anyone had ever called him by a nickname. He rode in the backseat of the patrol car thinking that the dead girl was as strange to him as the nickname. What had he ever really known about her?

Although he told the police he knew nothing about a plan to rob the pancake shop, no one believed him. He was an accomplice, no matter what he said to the contrary. Two people were dead, one the daughter of Judge A. G. Raleigh and the other the local sheriff’s son, owner of the shop.

“You can pick ’em, Goldilocks,” the arresting officer said. “You go before a judge with those two dead, you won’t even be considered a nonkilling accomplice. They’ll throw the book at you!”

I
T WAS SUCH
a scorching end of July, people were sleeping both in Hoopes Park and up by Cayuta Lake in Joyland Park. Some would just take blankets from their beds and go to the parks late at night, and others would make an event of it, packing coolers of cold drinks and sandwiches, their swimsuits, bathing caps, toy sailboats, and inner tubes.

We had to depend on fans. Standing, ceiling, window fans positioned throughout the house. When my mother was canning vegetables in the kitchen, she ordered a block of ice from the iceman. He put it in a pail near the fan, so it blew icy air at Mother and Myra from Elmira, who was always allowed to take a few jars back to her room at the reformatory.

Up on The Hill, honor inmates could sleep in the yard under the stars. That was a big treat for the dozen my father selected nightly. To keep fights from breaking out,
Daddy allowed the inmates to play chess and checkers in the common room after supper, although Taps at nine thirty remained the signal for lights out.

Elisa was teaching me to waltz. She would bring over her album of music from
Der Rosenkavalier
by Richard Strauss, and we would dance to the “Baron Ochs Waltz” up in my bedroom.

Soon school would begin. I would see in my mind’s eye the two of us, going up the long circular walk with everyone by then used to the idea that we were fast friends.
“Guten Tag,”
I’d say when anyone said good morning, or perhaps just
Tag
, as Elisa sometimes said.
Tag, Süsse.

Special times Elisa would treat me, after school, to an ice-cream soda I had invented: a strawberry soda with pistachio ice cream. We would share a booth in Hollywood Hangout. Elisa had a bigger allowance than I did, and she declared that in return for buying me the soda, I must tell her any tale I could think of about the Chi Pis, who crowded into booths at Hollywood Hangout and all wore green socks on Thursdays.

I would tell Elisa the Cowpies were made to lie in closed coffins for hours as part of their initiation and, blindfolded, made to kneel by toilet bowls and fish out bananas that felt like turds, then eat them.

“
Lieber Gott!
Who told you?” Elisa would ask, eyes alert,
covering her mouth with her hand as though those around us could read lips.

“I can never tell my source.” Some stories about the Cowpies I made up, and some I put together from rumors Seth had heard about frat boys’ initiations at Cornell University. Seth, true son of Olivia Myrer, liked intrigue and scandal too.

Gone were the days when I would sit in Seth’s room hanging on every word from his mouth. I began to think of those days as part of my childhood, silly really, and gone forever. Elisa had come into my life like some new color never before seen.

Daddy took Mother for an extra-long walk when it cooled just a trifle, despite the fact all weather reports promised the heat would return with a vengeance. They went all the way to downtown Cayuta and bought peanut sundaes at Hollywood Hangout.

“Even if he is not intimate with her, he seems to love her,” said Elisa. “Last night he took her downtown for ice cream,
ja
?”

“He always takes her for walks! Big deal!”

“Why do you want to believe they do not have relations?”

“Because she’s an icicle.”

“Maybe not to him.”

Elisa had put aside an English-language edition of Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
. She was allowed an “open choice” veering from the summer reading list for tenth graders at East High. I was reading a new writer, Thomas Wolfe, copying lines into my diary like: “Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?”

We were lollygagging about on the front porch swing, painting our toenails and drinking raspberry Kool-Aid.
Lollygag
was one of my father’s favorite words. It meant “hang around and do nothing.” My father had grown up down south, and southern expressions would slip into his speech now and then. He would say Mother was “strutting Miss Lucy,” evenings she got all dolled up to go to dinner with him. He would say, “If you knock the nose, the eye will hurt,” meaning if you hurt anyone in a family, the whole family felt it. Sometimes in the shower he would sing “Alabama Bound.” He would clown around: “I’m Alabamy bound….”

Across the street, Elisa’s parents were getting into their black Duesenberg.

“Where are they off to?” I asked Elisa.

“My mother’s driving him to the university.”

“He’s like my father, “ I said. “He never gets time off.” I was admiring the fit of Heinz Stadler’s white pants. He was tall with long legs, and his trousers with their white belt gave his body a slender, sexy look. My father and
brother never wore tight pants.

“He is not like your father. He is home every chance he gets. Family is everything to my father. You know what? Grandmother will live with us when she is finally here. That is the way my father is. He is devoted to family. And she is Mother’s mother, not even his own.”

“When is she coming here?”

“Soon. She is trying to sell her house. She is very old, and my father says we cannot miss the opportunity to be with her in her end years.”

I had nothing to say to that. My mother’s parents had both died of alcoholism at early ages. My father’s lived in the south, still regretting the fact their only son lived up north and had not carried on the family tradition and become a dentist. Every two or three years the Alabama Myrers traveled to upstate New York for an awkward Christmas or Easter dinner with us. Arguments would break out and then be quickly stopped with my mother’s reminders it was a holiday and we hardly ever saw one another.

My grandmother would say things like “When we do see one another, there’s always a penitentiary right outside the windows! And it takes hours and hours to get here!”…We never went down south to see them. Daddy would not leave The Hill that long.

Elisa said, “I have a surprise for you.”

“What?”

“We have been invited to the Schwitters’.”

“We have?” I was amazed. “I don’t even know them. Did you get me invited?”

“I’m sorry, Jessica. I put it a wrong way. Tonight I have to go there with my parents. The Schwitters are having a party.”

“And you were invited?”

“My father has been talking to Herr Schwitter about Omi, my grandmother. Herr Schwitter has relatives in Germany too.”

“Will you tell me everything that happens there? I’ve always been curious about the Schwitters’ parties.”

“Yes. Of course I’ll tell you.”

“Every detail, the way I tell you things. What I like to know is what is said, what is strange, and what suspicions you might have.”

“Suspicions?”

“Secrets, undertones, the way I told you about Slater Carr. Remember? The fire, the naked man, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t think that kind of thing will be there, Jessica.”

“Just keep your eyes and ears open for anything juicy!”

“I will try. Do you want to see the new dress I bought for the occasion?”

“Not right now.”

I didn’t feel like waiting for Elisa to go across the street, change her clothes, return in a dress, then go back again.

I wore white shorts and a shirt of Seth’s I’d cut the sleeves out of. I wore my old white sneakers I was always thinking of cleaning but never did. Still, I was hands down more presentable since Elisa had entered my life. I actually believed I was even slightly sophisticated and when I was exasperated I would say
Bitte!
as Elisa did: Please! At other times, when I wanted something, I would say
Bitte?
sweetly.

“Please come with me while I make sure my dress fits.”

“You mean go over to your house with you?”

“Yes, unless you would rather wait here.”

I almost never felt my heart react to anything, but now I could feel it moving under my shirt.

“I’ll tell my mother where I’ll be,” I said.

Elisa screwed the top of the nail polish on tightly and stood up. “If you hate my new dress, do not say so. Please?”

“It’ll probably be just fine, for a dress.”

“I like to dress up,” said Elisa.

“I don’t hate it myself,” I said. “It’s just that there’s not much reason to dress up around here.” My voice had a strange hoarse tone to it as I called out, “Mother? I’m going across the street to Elisa’s.”

Silence.

“Faculties back in my homeland have parties regularly,
and the wives and children of professors are invited. I have always dressed up, all my life, and I miss that here,” said Elisa.

Mother’s voice from inside the house. “You’re going where?”

“Across the street,” I said, my heart beating wildly.