by M. E. Kerr
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.
16
WE 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.
17
SLATER CARR
HE’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, histor
y, 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.”
18
IT 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.”
19
EARLIER, ELISA 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?”
