by M. E. Kerr
“‘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.”
13
ELISA 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.
14
SLATER CARR
WHEN 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.
15
THE FOURTH 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 Y
ork, 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!”
