Your Eyes in Stars

by M. E. Kerr

  “You’re welcome…. Why wouldn’t Jessie become good friends with Miss Germany?”

  “Because the mother thinks she’s better than anyone else.”

  “She’s just aloof,” I said. “She’s not gregarious.”

  “Where’d you learn that word?” my father asked.

  “Her sidekick taught it to her,” said my mother. She looked at me and said, “Richard Nolan. Right?”

  “Wrong,” I lied. “Elisa Stadler.”

  “I bet you haven’t met the mother,” my mother said.

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t hold your breath while you’re waiting. I’ll bet you never get inside that house either.”

  “Who cares?” I said.

  “Miss Germany waltzes into this house as if she owned it, but I very much doubt you’ll get a return invitation.”

  “Maybe I don’t want one,” I said.

  “Mrs. Stadler is not just aloof! She has no manners. And she’s a renter, so how dare she put on airs! Who knows what her background is!”

  “Olivia, don’t talk that way,” my father said. “We have to live in this town.”

  “I have to. You don’t. You live up on The Hill.”

  “But I’m always thinking of you, sweetheart. Always.”

  “Pfffft!” My mother tried hard not to smile. She enjoyed my father’s teasing her, but she pretended not to notice it. She pursed her small lips and ran a hand through her wiry red hair. She was such a little woman to have hooked this huge husband with hands like a bear, towering over her.

  “Let me tell you what the mother had to say to me one day in the aisle of Holy Family,” said my mother. “I said to her that since we are new neighbors, we should get to know each other. Then I said, ‘Do you want to stop by the house now? Now is as good a time as any.’ She said, ‘Oh, I cannot. My husband is waiting outside.’ And I said, ‘Bring him. Of course I want to meet Mr. Stadler.’”

  My father said, “She said, ‘Herr Stadler and I have very little time together. Not enough time for neighbors, I fear.’”

  My father and I had heard that story three or four times. He said, “Ollie, maybe it’s as simple as that. They prefer their own company.”

  “No, Arthur, she was incinerating something. What I don’t know.” I knew the word she meant to say was insinuating, and of course the warden did too.

  My father was always amused by her malapropisms. He said, “You don’t know what she was incinerating, but it burns you up.”

  My mother didn’t get it. She never got it.

  “You’re exactly right, Arthur. It burns me up!”

  Seth was a mama’s boy, and he didn’t like it when our father made fun of her without her knowing it. Seth would cuss out the warden behind his back. At seventeen Seth was going through a stage where he was angry with our father most of the time.

  My father said it was a natural stage.

  He said Seth was just jockeying for position in a house of two males.

  “You never let him win, though,” my mother said. She always let Seth win.

  “It’s just a game, Ollie. All fathers and sons play it.”

  “It isn’t a game to Seth,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t take it seriously.”

  He didn’t either. What my father took seriously was what went on up on The Hill.

  What my father took really really seriously was the Bands Behind Bars Annual Award, known as the Black Baaa.

  Last year he had lost again to The Louisiana Stripes, a band from New Orleans.

  6

  SLATER CARR

  IN COASTAL GEORGIA if you seemed crazy or you did something crazy, you were liable to hear someone tell you, “You belong in Peachy!”

  It was the Peachy Insane Asylum, where Slater Carr had been born. He really did belong in Peachy for most of his life—not in the mental institution but farther down the road, in an asylum of another kind, the Peachy Orphan Asylum.

  Whether you were from PIA or POA, Peachies knew.

  Peachies knew which place you were from too.

  The insanes sometimes got out for supervised walks, and that was a sight and a half, some of them drooling, their eyes wandering around the sockets, some of them mumbling, screeching, sticking their tongues out not at anything.

  Times they ambled around Peachy, people rocked on their porches, shaking their heads—those who didn’t go inside and hook the screen doors. Some wrote to The Peachy Banner complaining, “Let them stay on the asylum grounds! We don’t want the loonies loose.”

  The orphans were another story. Peachies would call them “poor things.” Christmastime Peachies gave them old clothes cleaned and pressed to look like new and stockings filled with candy and fruit. The ladies of the Peachy Baptist Church wrapped one toy for each orphan in Christmas paper. POAs went to Peachy schools and anywhere anyone else in Peachy went, except for nighttime, when they stayed in the asylum from six P.M. to six A.M.

  The favorite punishment for wrongdoing at POA was an old-fashioned one: Anyone who misbehaved was locked inside the closet next to the headmistress’s office.

  Slater could not stand being shut up in there. He would scratch himself until he bled. He would shiver and cry and call out for God to help him. He had never known fear like that, nor could he ever predict the offense that would land him there: playing his harmonica after night bell, holding a mirror under the downstairs steps to see up girls’ dresses, sleeping in church.

  When he first heard of The Hole, notorious in prison gossip even before he was taken off to Cayuta, he made sure to include it when he wrote the required account of his crime. He wanted it written on his records: claustrophobic.

  7

  SINCE OUR ARRIVAL in Cayuta, my father had ruled over The Hill like a benevolent dictator. He was strict but not cruel or unfair. On Citizens’ Day, for the first time, Cayutians over twenty-one saw for themselves what went on inside the walls. They saw the workshops, which turned out the state license plates, the laundry, the library, the kitchen and dining room, and most of the men serving time there.

  My father had thought up Citizens’ Day to make it possible for him to get The Blues included in certain public holiday celebrations. It was fair to say his major preoccupation was with this band. It had come in second two years in a row. There was one prison band from New Orleans that nearly always won the Baaa, but Daddy told me that was because it was all Negro. He believed Negroes were known for a superior sense of rhythm.

  That Louisiana band used trick steps and to my father’s way of thinking were more performers than musicians. Anyone who heard Slater Carr would know the difference, my father told me. Mr. Carr needed no frills or gimmicks, he said.

  He sent shivers down your spine just doing what he did, just blowing that horn, he said.

  Daddy talked a lot about this new man. His name would come into conversation a surprising number of times when he was with me.

  “I’ll tell you one thing about Mr. Carr, Jessie. He’s claustrophobic. That’s underlined three times on his profile.”

  “Then how can he stand to be locked up in his cell from four-thirty in the afternoon until seven-thirty A.M.?”

  “I worry about that a lot, sweetheart.”

  “You really like him, don’t you?”

  “I was never a young man of talent, Jessie. I guess we Myrers aren’t blessed that way. Your grandfather is a dentist. Your brother follows after me with football skills. But Seth has never said anything about what he wants to do when he’s through school. I don’t think he knows or cares. This kid is different. He lives for his music. I got a little radio for him.”

  “You always spoil the murderers, Daddy.”

  “Mr. Carr is an accomplice to murder, Jessie. The ones I spoil are the ones I don’t think got a fair shake.”

  “Remember when you gave Rhubarb Boxer some away time and he stole a hundred dollars from Crazy Carl Plum?”

  “I never believed the Plums. Carl is no angel, but
they treat him like one. He can’t do anything wrong, just because he’s not all there…. Rhubarb Boxer didn’t deserve The Hole.”

  “I hope Slater Carr never does something to land in The Hole, if he’s claustrophobic.”

  “I wish we could get rid of that thing,” my father said. “No one can say I haven’t tried.”

  Anyone, everyone in Cayuta Prison feared going to that underground chamber below the basement. My father said there was not an inmate on The Hill who hadn’t heard about it. It was fifty feet long, a dark, stinking cave lined with cells made out of solid rock and sealed with iron doors. The cells were bare. There was no sink, no toilet, and no bed. The only place to sit or lie down on was the dank cement floor. The only food was a single meal each day, a watery stew without meat, only a few carrots and potatoes. A paper cup of lukewarm water with it.

  Silence was the rule in The Hole. Complainers were lashed. Any who whimpered or groaned were punished with fumes of lime wetted down with water.

  I said, “Well, Daddy, at least you got rid of the electric chair.”

  “I didn’t do that, honey. That’s gone thanks to Reinhardt Schwitter. He knows how to manipulate the city planners and our board. He made them aware of how bad we looked to visitors when we put a man to death. He also mentioned the dreadful drain on electricity.”

  “I’m surprised Mr. Schwitter cared.”

  “Nobody liked all the lights in the house blinking every time someone from The Hill was electrocuted. Schwitter had the clout to stop it.”

  8

  CONTRARY TO MY mother’s prediction, Elisa and I became fast friends. Richard complained to me at first, telling me that he felt abandoned, particularly at lunchtime, when the sharks circled the High East cafeteria. I invited him to join Elisa and me, but he said he didn’t want to be a third wheel, and the funny thing was I was glad. He was my very best buddy, but there was a difference between hanging out with a boy and having a girl friend.

  Elisa and I ate lunch together in the cafeteria and walked to and from school. That established us in everyone’s eyes as what my mother’d call bosom pals. I sometimes looked around to see if J. J. Joy was watching and if she was still of the opinion I should have been at West.

  Since we could see into each other’s bedrooms, sometimes Elisa would put a record on her windup Victrola and play some big hit of the day for me. She said she’d done it before we’d become friends, just to see if I would look out at her.

  “Why me?” I said.

  “Because of Seth,” she said. “I wanted to meet Seth.”

  “Well, at least you’re honest,” I told her. “I looked out, but I hid behind the curtain.”

  “I knew you were there.” She chuckled. “I wanted to meet you both, you and Seth.”

  “So what do you think of Seth?”

  “I met him only that one time when he was leaving as I was arriving. He hardly spoke.”

  “He’s not used to girls,” I said.

  “What a waste! He looks like such a heartbreaker.”

  “He’s got the name without the game.”

  Elisa loved languages and, besides German and English, could speak Spanish fluently and some French as well.

  She could sing all the words to “What a Difference a Day Makes” in Spanish. She would stand at her bedroom window and croon, “Cuando vuelva a tu lado.”

  “I think of the difference the day we met made in my life,” Elisa said. She was helping me put into Seth’s crime scrapbook the news of John Dillinger’s escape, that past March, from the Crown Point, Indiana, jail. Seth was an Indian giver, so I knew he’d want the scrapbook back one day, which was okay with me. He was the big gangster fan. I didn’t mind keeping the scrapbook up-to-date for him. Whatever it was he was going through was making him miserable.

  Elisa had made a paste from flour and water in our kitchen. She said, “I have never had a close friend, because we move so much. I was always too full of bash. And too ashamed of my accent.”

  “There’s no such word as bash. Just say bashful. If I had your accent, I’d never shut my mouth.”

  “You don’t much now,” Elisa teased. “I was so tired of my hobbies: looking at stars through my binoculars, pasting stamps in my stamp book. I will always remember the first time I saw your John Dillinger poster up in your bedroom. You said he was so sharp, which was an English slang I didn’t know. Then when we went to the movies, you would not say Lew Ayres was better-looking. You are so stubborn, Jessica!”

  “Lew Ayres is a close second. But Lew Ayres would never have the brains to escape from prison with a pistol whittled from the top of a wooden washboard. Next John blackened it with shoe polish. Since then, the heat has been off Pretty Boy Floyd.” I told her what my father had told me about the jailbreak, adding, “They’re all out to get John again.”

  “Why are all your gangsters handsome or pretty?” Elisa asked.

  “Those are just their nicknames,” I explained. “Most aren’t that complimentary. There’s Bugsy and Bugs, Legs and Machine Gun Kelly. A lot of them have acne scars on their faces. A lot of them are really homely, Elisa.”

  “My mother says in her opinion you glamorize criminals in this country.” Elisa continued. “You give them nicknames, as though they were your pets.”

  Elisa ran her hands under water to wash off the paste she’d made.

  “Don’t your criminals have nicknames?” I asked.

  “I do not remember a single criminal. Neither does my mother. In Germany we never feature them, as you do here. Even your own maid is a criminal with a nickname. Myra from Elmira.”

  “No, that’s just what I call Myra. She’s no criminal. She’s in the Elmira Reformatory because she got pregnant when she was thirteen.”

  “Is that all she did? Got pregnant?”

  “See, she was an orphan and some older boy at the orphanage got her pregnant.”

  “That’s enough to get sent to a reformatory?”

  “If you’re an orphan, it’s enough. She didn’t have any money to bribe the judge either.”

  “Why would your mother hire her to work for you?”

  “She works for us because we don’t have to pay her anything. Employees of the penal system get maids from Elmira Reformatory for nothing. It’s a courtesy.”

  “Speaking of free help, are you going to tell me what you found out about Slater Carr? If he’s a lifer, he must have done something really bad.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I can’t discuss him with anyone?” I said.

  “I told you I don’t want to be just anyone.” She was grinning as though she knew me better than that.

  “Okay then,” I said. “What I’m going to tell you has to stay between us. Say, ‘I swear!’”

  “I swear!”

  “Okay.” I slammed the scrapbook shut and faced Elisa across the kitchen table. “Slater Carr killed the man who took his sweetheart from him. My father said, ‘Think of it, Jessie. All because of one great, powerful love of a woman, he is now behind bars for life.’”

  It was not something my father would ever say.

  The warden would never romanticize a crime of passion, which I believed he scorned because he was not a passionate man. Sentimental but not passionate. Daddy would maybe be sympathetic with a man committing a crime to feed his family or accidentally killing someone in a fight that got out of control.

  “Ach!” Elisa exclaimed. “He killed the man who took away his woman.” Now her eyes were wide and excited.

  I loved making up stories. Both Seth and Richard would find me out and protest, “You made that up!” but I could see that Elisa believed every word. Maybe it was the only way I was superior to her. I could make her believe me.

  I had just finished one of Olivia Myrer’s under-the-mattress books called Union Square, by Albert Halper. A shy and idealistic man had burst into his dream girl’s house to save her from a fire, and with her was a man, naked as she was.

  The rest of the s
tory was solely mine.

  “That was when he riddled the other man with bullets,” I continued. “Then he reloaded his pistol, preparing to riddle her with bullets too, but she said, ‘Oh, love, forgive me.’ He threw down the pistol and embraced her, his one and only love.”

  “I would never forgive that Hure!” Elisa said.

  “Well, he loved her.”

  “And she was in bed with a nobody?”

  “He wasn’t a nobody, see. He was the sheriff’s son.”

  “I only blame her,” Elisa said. “That Sau! You tell me so much about life, Jessica.”

  “I do?”

  “Always,” Elisa said. “Thank you for telling me about Slater Carr. Will he take John Dillinger’s place now in your heart?”

  I had never thought of Dillinger’s having a place in my heart, but neither had I ever seen Elisa that excited about anything. I told her that before Slater Carr took Dillinger’s place in my heart, I had to see him.

  I had never yet seen a handsome man from The Hill. The ones I watched from the window, clipping our hedges or shoveling our sidewalks, seemed to have big noses, pimples on their faces, or big bellies from the starch and grease in the prison diet. My father liked to tease my mother and me: “Do you think I’m going to send the good-looking ones down to you two?”

  “Pfffft,” my mother would answer, hiding her smile behind her hand.

  9

  SLATER CARR

  MISS PURRINGTON STARTED him on the drums because that was what every little kid at Peachy wanted to play. Next she taught him the trumpet. He’d learn by playing hymns like “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  His favorite hymn became “Lord, I’m Coming Home”:

  I’ve wasted many precious years,

  Now I’m coming home;

  I now repent with bitter tears;