Your Eyes in Stars (6 page)

T
HE
F
OURTH OF
July, Richard showed up alone for the band concert and asked if he could sit with us.

“Where’s Seth?”

“Over there,” said Richard. I looked in the direction Richard pointed and saw Seth with J. J. Joy.

“What is he doing with her?”

“She’s his date for the concert. Do you want to know something else?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Seth’s fallen for her. It’s been going on since January.”

“I thought she couldn’t date until she was seventeen.”

“She was seventeen the first of July. Seth’s been trying to butter up her father for months. Seth never cared about rescuing impounded cars last winter. He just wanted to save Mr. Joy’s car. He thinks J. J.’s father hung the moon!”

“How could this happen right under our noses?” I said.

“They haven’t been right under our noses,” said Richard.
“They’ve been sneaking off together.”

“I can’t believe she’d sneak off with Seth,” I said. “She hardly speaks to me. Just because she’s the Cowpie president, she thinks she’s queen of High East!”

“She’s not so hotsy-totsy anymore,” said Richard.

Cayutians were still in shock about the collapse of Joystep Shoes. It had been the town’s leading industry.

“I think that J. J. Joy looks hotsy-totsy,” said Elisa. “All the Cowpies do, which doesn’t mean I like them. But I would like a gardenia for my hair too.”

“It’s not a real flower,” Richard said.

“I would still like it.” J. J. Joy wore her dark-red hair pageboy style, a tight white sweater, and a flowered skirt. It was said she had ambitions to go to New York City one day and be a Powers model.

After a selection of band favorites, Slater Carr walked to the microphone with my father, who had worn his best summer suit, a white linen one, with a light-blue-and-white polka-dot tie.

My mother was off in Rochester, New York, at her semiannual physical examination to thwart any return of her old nemesis, pneumonia.

I always thought my father looked handsome enough to be in the movies. That was before Heinz Stadler came roaring up the street in his Duesenberg.

Now there was a new contender.

Slater Carr was not very tall. What was most noticeable about him was this angel face he had. It was like the faces of cherubs painted on the stained glass windows at Holy Family Church. He had light-green eyes, and straight white teeth when he smiled. But he was not a smiler—anyone could tell that. He had the expression of a small boy who had been sent to his room for something he did not do. He stood military straight on the bandstand, the slight breeze blowing a lock of his golden hair to his forehead.

His tan was too bronze for him to have gotten it in the prison yard. The cons took turns, there were so many of them. One never spent more than half an hour a day out there.

My father must have been giving Slater Carr a lot of away work. I knew he didn’t get that color in our yard, because thanks to my mother, he didn’t come to our yard anymore. My mother’d said, “Miss Germany gets too excited, and I am not going to be responsible for her making a fool of herself over one of our inmates.”

“How fortunate we are to have Mr. Slater Carr with us,” my father began. “How many have heard him play Taps evenings?”

There was wild applause, even from the band behind him.

Although Slater Carr got red, he didn’t smile or take a bow.

“Like most fine musicians, Mr. Carr is not limited to one instrument.” My father continued. “You know he can play the bugle, but right now he is going to treat us all to his talent with the trumpet.” I couldn’t believe the jovial sound to my father’s voice. Even Richard gave me a puzzled look, his nose wrinkled with questioning: What’s gotten into your old man?

“Watch out, music lovers!” my father bellowed. “Here’s The Blues’s answer to Louis Armstrong. I give you
Slater Carr
!”

More applause. My father must have told Slater Carr to smile when he introduced his number, because then he did, so quickly you had to have your eyes glued to his face to see it.

“I am going to play a song called ‘Till Times Get Better,’” Slater Carr said.

“I never heard that song,” I said.

Both Elisa and Richard stabbed my sides with their elbows. “Shhhhh!” they said.

W
E HAD TO
sit in our seats until the entire band marched off to the orange vans waiting to take them up Resurrection Hill. Richard was scratching himself, but I couldn’t see any mosquitoes. I knew my father had sent some prisoners to the park earlier, to apply bug spray.

Now the prisoners went single file, holding their caps in their hands, heads bent, making no eye contact with the audience.

As they marched away, Elisa told me that she had waited all her life to hear someone play the trumpet like that.

“I could fall in love with him just for the reason of how he plays,” she said. “But he is locked up for his whole life, so how can I feel the way I now feel?”

I shrugged. “You said yourself love is filled with pitfalls!”

Richard had fallen behind us, still scratching.

“It is so unbearably sad what happened to him because of love,” said Elisa.

“Very, very sad,” I said. I loved making things up for Elisa. She was like an actress, her eyes opening wide, her hands flying to her cheeks, cussing in German, in English saying something was unbearably sad or unbearably beautiful.

Richard had been tagging along silently. He finally spoke up. “What’s the story on that Slater Carr?”

I said, “What’s the story on you? You’ve been scratching your arms all night.”

“I’m allergic to something,” Richard said.

“Slater Carr committed a crime of passion,” I told him.

“Another crime of passion?” Richard said suspiciously. “Who did he kill?”

“Jessica can’t give away prison secrets,” said Elisa, winking at me, “but my whole family is musicians, except for my father, so I know one thing about Slater. He is a genius.”

“I know music too,” said Richard. “I play the accordion.”

“And you play the comb,” I said, but Richard wasn’t in the mood to kid around.

He said, “I know you know music, Elisa. I heard you
play the piano once when I went by a practice room at school.”

“Thank you, Richard,” said Elisa. “Someday, Jessica, I’ll come to your house and play the piano for you.”

“The Sontags have a piano,” I said. Summer nights past, Gertie Sontag would play loud, trying to drown out my mother.

The pair had an affectionate rivalry over everything from their serenades to the elaborate hats they made for their grand appearances Easter Sundays at Holy Family.

“If we only did have a piano,” said Elisa. “My mother misses so a piano. She does not sing now without one.”

“What could have happened to the Sontags’ baby grand?”

“They did not pay for all of it, so it was taken, right before we moved in.”

“My mother didn’t know that…. You know, your mother could play our piano. You can too.”

“I do not think your mother likes me, Jessica. I do not think she is glad I’m your neighbor.”

“Wrong!” I said. “My mother was afraid the Goldmans were going to buy the Sontag house. Then we would have had the first Jews in the neighborhood, right across the street from us.”

There were not many Jews in our town. The nearest
synagogue was in Syracuse, twenty-eight miles away. The one thing our neighbors agreed on where Jews were concerned was that if they moved to a street, all the houses would automatically sell for less money.

“Does your mother want the neighborhood to be
Judenrein
?” Elisa asked me.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means ‘Jew free.’ Is that what your mother wants?”

“We don’t own our house; the prison does,” I said. “But the neighbors were all worried the Goldmans would move in where the Sontags are. Do you have Jew-free neighborhoods in Potsdam?”

“If
Dummkopf
Herr Hitler had his way, all would be, but the German people are not prejudiced as Americans are,” said Elisa. “Many of my father’s colleagues at the university are Jewish. In Germany we revere intellectuals.”

“
Dummkopf
Herr Hitler!” Richard laughed. “That’s good!”

I put my first finger up to my lips to make a mustache and cried, “
Dummkopf
Herr Hitler!” doing the goosestep walk I’d seen his soldiers do in newsreels.

“Shhhhh,” said Elisa. “People look now at us.”

“Let them look,” I said, elbowing Richard, expecting him to agree with me. Since when did we care if people looked? But Richard wasn’t himself. I figured he had poison ivy or something to make him so quiet except for
the sound of him scratching himself everywhere.

Elisa said, “This has been a special evening.”

“Because of you, Elisa,” Richard managed to mumble. It was as hard for him to compliment anyone female as it was for a cat to laugh. Because of his braces, Richard was shy with all girls except me. His face was red. “I have to go, Elisa. We have to solve my problem too, or I will scratch myself bloody. See you!” He scurried along a path that led away from Elisa and me. No good-bye to me.

It was almost dark, and then there would be fireworks.

“What’s Richard’s big problem? Why is he itching so?”

Elisa said, “There’s something I want to talk to you about, Jessica. I know you are a cheerleader for the unlucky ones in life, and that is what I admire about you. You will be glad to hear that Richard has captured Scruffy.”

“The tramp’s dog? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was to be your surprise when the firecrackers go off. I told Richard to leave before, so you and I can decide something.”

“Where is Scruffy?”

“He’s at the Nolans’, but he can’t stay there. Richard is allergic.”

“That’s why he’s scratching.”

“Yes…. Jessica, can we give Scruffy to Wolfgang Schwitter? That mean tramp would never know the dog was on Lakeview Avenue. You can’t even see the Schwitter
house from the street. I’ve tried!”

“But would Wolfgang take him?”

“Remember last winter he spoke of his dachshund dying? Scruffy must have dachshund in him.” Elisa laughed. “He’s a little sausage! I name him Wurst!”

“Wurst Schwitter,” I said, and the first rocket of the night zoomed above us.

H
E’D FIND HIMSELF
singing the same song over and over, about Georgia, about having Georgia on his mind. Nobody could have told him he’d ever be homesick for the place, but he was.

Inmates on The Hill didn’t know the song was about the state of Georgia. They’d ask him, “What’s she like, your Georgia?” He’d tell them, “She’s beyond description; I don’t have words to describe her.”

The first time he ever heard “Georgia on My Mind,” Purr played it for him and told him all about the man who wrote it, Hoagy Carmichael.

“He was your kind, Slater, a musician down to his bones,” she said. “His mother used to play piano for silent movies, was where he got his love of music. She sent him off to the university in Indiana, and he got a law degree. So with his law degree he naturally set off to be a musician. He could have had a degree in you-name-it, wouldn’t change his destination. You’re
like that too. Guess what else you share with Hoagy?”

“What else, ma’am?”

“How many people you going to meet in a lifetime called what you’re called?”

“How many people had a midwife named Anne Slater deliver them? No, I never heard of another Slater.”

“You ever hear of another Hoagy?”

Miss Nellie Purrington, called Purr by students at Peachy School, taught music, history, English, and geography. She could play the trombone, the trumpet, the cornet, and the saxophone. Slater had her all eleven grades. He’d stay after class to clean the erasers and empty the pencil sharpeners. He learned about all the composers from Hoagy Carmichael to Bix Beiderbecke to Lorenz Hart, and how to play the piano, the harmonica, the trumpet, and the bugle.

His favorite composer of all of them remained Hoagy Carmichael, and the song he liked best, of course, was called “Georgia on My Mind.”

I
T WAS EARLY
Saturday night, warm the way July evenings are upstate New York.

Sometimes my father would call from the prison and announce that he was having dinner there. It was his habit to drop into the mess hall now and then unannounced, to show the inmates that he kept the cooks on their toes. They saw that whatever was good enough for them to eat was good enough for the warden too.

“I suppose Dad thinks he’s some kind of hero because he does that,” said Seth.

“He
is
a hero to eat that food,” said my mother. “We’re so overpopulated, it’s hard to serve decent fare.” Our mother always said “we” and “us” when she was talking about the prison. “This depression is as hard on us as it is on anyone.”

Seth said, “They’re not eating steak up there—you can bet on that.”

The Myrers
were
eating steak. Mother had won two dollars in a bridge tournament and had planned to surprise Daddy that night. Then he’d called to say he would eat on The Hill. The superintendent of prisons was visiting.

Nights my father wasn’t present for dinner, we ate in the dinette instead of the dining room. Nights he didn’t come home in time to walk around the block with Mother, she would occasionally ask me if I wanted to walk with her.

I wasn’t crazy about hearing everything that was wrong with me while we strolled along, from my posture to what Mother called my “fantasy” that Elisa Stadler was my friend. Seth would walk with her readily. She never found fault with Seth.

Olivia Myrer, animal lover supreme, had been told by Elisa and me, just before Seth arrived for dinner, that Wolfgang Schwitter had adopted the wire-haired brown dog, now called Wurst. Richard had taken him to Lakeview Avenue himself. My mother merely said, “All’s well that ends well.” She was too excited to have Seth home for dinner. She had gone on to fuss over the special Thousand Island dressing Seth liked on his salad, and where was his favorite yellow sweater he’d been missing for weeks? There was a white
M
on the right sleeve.

At the table Seth said, “We don’t have it hard, Mom.
You want to know who has it hard because of this depression? J. J.’s father.”

“Oh, well,” said my mother, “I know people who worked for him, and that’s another story.”

“Why is that another story?”

“Those people don’t have enough to eat,” Mother said. “They don’t have savings like the Joys do.”

“He lost everything, Mother. His business. His name. They don’t have savings either!”

“People like the Joys land on their feet, dear.”

“The Joys may have to move to Iowa,” Seth said.

“Oh, they won’t have to move, honey. Something will come up. Something always does.”

“He’s really down in the dumps. He’s drinking!”

“Drinking?” My mother’s ears pricked up.

“You must never tell this.”

“Of course not!”

“J. J. says he sneaks drinks. They keep a bottle of scotch in a cabinet in the dining room. J. J. sees him going in and out of there with his coffee mug. He spikes his coffee.”

I knew my mother was in seventh heaven! Later that night she would be on the phone to one of her girl friends. Often her conversations began, “Wait till you hear this!”

“Hard times make everyone blue,” said our mother.

“I’m not talking about feeling blue,” said Seth. “I’m not talking about Dad’s fretting over his precious prison,
unaware there’s a world going on outside The Hill! What’s happening to the Joys is a monumental disaster! J. J. even worries Mr. Joy might kill himself!”

I couldn’t help myself. I put down my fork and made gestures as though I were giving someone’s phone number to the operator. I said, “Wait till you hear this. Horace Joy is getting pie-eyed nights because he’s lost his shoe company. He goes into the dining room—”

“Jessica Osborne Myrer!” my mother exclaimed. “Just what are you doing?”

“Imitating a certain someone gossiping,” I said, knowing it was one of those bad moves, the kind I had sometimes been compelled to make right before I met Elisa. I would get home and immediately be sent to my room for misbehaving in school: dropping Alka-Seltzer tablets in the inkwells, making the ink rise and spill across desks; letting the air out of teachers’ tires; spreading gossip my mother told on the telephone.

“Mom would never tell something I told her in confidence,” Seth said. “And Mom would never spread rumors about Mr. Joy!”

“We think the world of Horace Joy,” Mother answered. She gave me the evil eye and said, “Go to your room. You’re not having dessert.”

Seth now viewed J. J.’s father the way he might a king who had lost his throne. Seth would remain his loyal
subject even after the basket under the guillotine contained Horace Joy’s head.

“Just when I thought you were beginning to grow up,” said my mother as I was leaving the table. “You’re the same old tomboy show-off. Someday tell me where on earth Elisa Stadler got the idea the name Jessica suits you.”

“You were the one who named me that.”

“I didn’t know how you were going to turn out,” said my mother, “or I never would have.”