by M. E. Kerr
“That is Almighty Ida,” said Elisa. “My grandmother.” She grinned at me. “Oh, how she will hate living in America!”
“Has she ever been here?”
“No. She does not think Americans are interested in culture. Already she is putting down her feet.” Elisa laughed. “Sie spielt die beleidigte Leberwurst!” She was starting upstairs. “That means ‘She’s playing the prima donna.’”
I said, “You don’t put down your feet. You put your foot down.”
“Grossmutter’s foot is definitely down when it comes to the United States of America! It is not just the dangers here, but also the looks of things. Potsdam is so beautiful, Süsse!”
Elisa said that her grandmother was once a famous opera star, but now she owned an antiques shop in a small town near Potsdam. “She would faint—how do you say it?—she would keel over if she saw this.” She held up the poster of Slater I had given her.
She said she would never be allowed to hang it in her room. She wished I would keep it for her. She had pasted a handwritten poem on it, copied from a book of Constantine P. Cavafy’s poems. Cavafy was a favorite of her parents’. This poem her father had once sent her when she was having a hard time at a new school.
“When you hang Slater’s poster in your room, Jessica, you will have these words for him, even though he’ll never read them. I believe they will carry in the air to his soul and soothe him.”
AS MUCH AS YOU CAN
Even if you cannot shape the life you want,
try this, at least
as much as you can; don’t demean it
in too much contact with the world,
in too many movements and too much talk.
Don’t demean it by taking it,
spinning it about and exposing it
to the everyday foolishness
of relationships, of alliances,
til it becomes a tiresome, alien life.
CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY (1913)
“Slater Carr won’t have to worry much about coming into too much contact with the world,” I said.
“Will you take Dillinger’s poster down and put this one in its place?”
“I’ll have both up. Now that John is loose, he might need something in the air to soothe his soul.”
“I think he has a different kind of soul,” said Elisa. “I don’t think he is as deserving of anything in the air to soothe him.”
How easily we talked of Slater and John, almost as though they were members of our families or close in some other, undefined way. While Elisa had made it plain she did not admire Dillinger, we both would chatter away about Slater Carr, imagining his life before The Hill. I think we talked about him more than we cared about him. I think he was someone we could love safely together, no rivalry, no qualms about what he was. He was being punished for that. Unlike Dillinger, he was not the sort of habitual convict whose mind was always contemplating escape.
Dietrich was sleeping on a pillow. Elisa picked her up and hugged her as she talked. “Grossmutter—I call her Omi—she thinks America is filled with Dillingers,” said Elisa. “She and my Mutter prefer to be at home. Not my father. He loves everything about America. He began speaking English to me when I was a little child.”
“What if she refuses to come here?”
“She will come because of my mother. Mother is going there in a few months to bring her back here. My father will join the faculty at Cornell University next year. Poor Omi is afraid to live here. She is like my mother, who feels safe only in Germany.”
“Who does your mother think would hurt her?”
“First, the prisoners up on The Hill. Then your cowboys. Your Indians. Your gangsters. That Crazy Carl.”
“Carl wouldn’t hurt anyone. He’s just mentally retarded.”
“What about the prisoners? Even I sometimes am afraid the prisoners will break out!”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the truth, though, Jessica. You don’t believe me and that’s why I can confess it to you. Then I don’t feel naïve because you don’t believe me anyway,” Elisa said. “My mother feels safe only in the library and at church.”
“All the town nuts hang out in the library.”
“Don’t ever tell her that.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind the next time your mother and I have a conversation.”
“Now you become sarcastic.” Elisa put Dietrich back on the pillow and changed the subject. “My kitty is attached to my odor, I believe. She wants to be only near me or something of mine,” she said. “I am flattered!”
Dietrich fled as I flopped spread-eagle on the bed.
“Do you think I’ll ever go anywhere, Elisa?”
“You mean to Europe?”
“Anywhere! Europe, Africa, the Orient.”
“Do you want to travel so badly?”
“You did that to me, Elisa. I want too much contact with the world! I want to be like you. Speak many languages. Like you.”
“I want to be like you.”
“Oh, what is there about me to envy?”
“You are a storyteller. You are sensational, unbearably sensational! And you are a great reader of the modern novel. You find out about the prisoners and the Chi Pis, and you know juicy secrets.”
“What I know any hick with ears knows. I want to be someone who can tell about the elevator going up at a slant in the Eiffel Tower. I don’t think I’ll get farther away than California my whole life, if I even get there.”
“I like America best if I can’t be in Germany. Do you know that? I like the popular music. I like lollygagging around with you. I wish you were going to the Schwitters’ too.”
“Are you excited?”
“Mutti is. I guess I am too. That’s why my father is going to Cornell. He does not have to work this week. His dinner jacket is there. On the invitation it reads black tie.”
“Do you have to wear an evening gown?”
“A long dress. Want me to show you now?”
“Yes! Let’s see it!”
“I will tell you everything that happens at the Schwitters’! You’ll think you’ve been there. You know, I like describing things. I may become a travel writer someday.”
“I wouldn’t mind being a travel writer either. Then I’d see something of the world.”
Elisa got up and walked to her closet. “We are soul mates.”
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“Through thin and thick.”
“Through thin and thick,” I agreed.
Just as Elisa was pulling her new dress over her shoulders, a voice called from downstairs.
“Girls? Where are you? Jess? Elisa?”
“That’s not my mother?” I said, knowing it was.
23
MY MOTHER, RED-FACED, sitting in one of the Sontags’ stuffed chairs, carpet slippers off, had just finished complaining that her corns and bunions hurt her when Sophie Stadler walked through the door.
“You have unexpected visitors,” my mother said brightly, though I knew Mrs. Stadler was the last person she had expected or wanted to see.
White dress, white picture hat, white high heels, Sophie Stadler lighted a cigarette and shook her head with disbelief at whom she saw sitting there. She slipped the cigarette into a long silver holder, giving Mother a perfunctory nod, saying hello in such a quiet voice she might as well not have said it. She inhaled, exhaled, and sighed loudly.
Did my mother’s feet stink or was I imagining it?
“I was just showing Jessica my dress, Mutti,” Elisa said. “I thought you took Vater to Cornell.”
“It is sweltering, and the traffic is captured by people who drive to the lake. Your Vater went on, and I walk back from town.” Her English was not anywhere near as good as her daughter’s.
I said, “My mother came over to get me, so we were showing her Elisa’s dress too.”
“I didn’t come to get you,” said Mother. “I came to tell you something I happened to h
ear on the radio.”
“What?” I asked.
“Never mind now. Now is not the time. I will tell it to you later.”
Mrs. Stadler’s displeasure at finding us in her living room was very apparent. She frowned, and her nostrils flared when she spoke. Instead of speaking to my mother, she spoke to me.
“You must be my daughter’s Jessica.” She blew out yet another puff of smoke.
“Yes,” I said. “And you are Mrs. Stadler. I’ve seen you in church.”
“When you go to church,” said Mrs. Stadler coolly.
“And I’ve seen you in the library too,” I said.
“You don’t see my daughter in church because she’s not a good Catholic. I’m the good Catholic,” said my mother. She was in one of her “housework” housecoats, a cotton rag splashed with an odd floral design and tomato and beet stains, left from last week’s canning. “I’m the one you see in church!”
I knew that my mother had seen Heinz and Sophie Stadler drive away and had crossed the street believing only Elisa and I would be in the Sontag house. She never would have appeared before Elisa’s mother wearing a housecoat of any kind, much less the soiled one she had on. Maybe she had heard something important over the radio, and maybe she just wanted to see what the Stadlers had done with Gertie Sontag’s house. Face-to-face with her nemesis, she was determined not to be forced out of there by a renter who fancied she was better than her neighbors.
My mother was fond of saying that she never saw Sophie Stadler with anyone but her husband or Elisa and that she bet her life Mrs. Stadler had no friends. That was often followed with the fact that at her own last birthday, Olivia Myrer had received fifteen birthday cards from dear friends. She never added that all came from the wives of guards on The Hill.
I knew my mother well enough to know that secretly she would give anything to have Mrs. Stadler’s approval.
“I will go up and change, then meet you at your house,” Elisa told me.
She wore white satin slippers, a simple white off-the-shoulder ankle-length silk dress, with a string of pearls around her neck.
“Yes, take off the dress immediately. It is for the party only,” said Mrs. Stadler, avoiding any eye contact with the short redheaded woman who was trying secretly to slide her tortured feet back into her slippers.
I said, “Guess what, Mother! The Stadlers are going to the Schwitters’ tonight for a party!” I knew deep down it was the wrong thing to say. What could my mother reply to that?
“Do you tell all our business?” Mrs. Stadler addressed the question to Elisa.
“Is it such a secret, Mutter?”
My mother slowly got her small body up out of the large cushioned chair. “The Schwitters and their fancy parties are old news to me.”
Mrs. Stadler put her initialed platinum lighter and a pack of her French cigarettes on the round table near where my mother was standing.
“I knew it would not be an American cigarette,” said my mother. “The smell is different. I gave up smoking when we moved here. I came down with pneumonia. It nearly killed me.”
“Come on now, Mother,” I said, for it was so obvious that Elisa’s mother did not want us there. “We must go, Mother!”
Elisa’s mother was a corner-of-the-mouth smoker. The Gauloise drooped from her lips, smoke curling up into the room. This started my mother coughing. Almost anything could, ever since her pneumonia.
“We’ve had our share of invitations up to the Schwitters’,” she finally managed to continue. (Stop her, God! I prayed.) We had no more than a nodding acquaintance with the Schwitters. Reinhardt Schwitter was the only musician whose music my father seemed not to admire. He called him a “longhair highbrow.”
“Speaking of my pneumonia,” Mother continued, although Mrs. Stadler was looking everywhere but at her, “I took sick with it the very night of one of Reinhold Schwitter’s fancy dances in their ballroom.”
“Reinhardt, not Reinhold,” I said softly.
My mother went on, “I couldn’t go because I was ambulatory.”
“Ambulatory?” Elisa asked.
“Waiting for the ambulance,” said my mother.
Elisa covered her mouth to hide a smile. “Then I am mistaken. I thought ambulatory meant ‘able to walk.’”
“We have to go, Mother. Now!” I said.
“Well, it has been an honor to meet you, Mrs. Stadler,” said my mother, bowing, shuffling forward in her slippers, hand extended. Then, when it was ignored, it was plunged into the pocket of her housecoat. She rocked on her heels. “We Myrers may not be as ritzy as the Schwitters, but my husband’s father, Dr. Seth Merchant Myrer, was a dentist of some renown in Montgomery, Alabama.”
“I have a headache,” said Mrs. Stadler. “I must lie down.”
My mother said, “We’ll talk another time. I would hope we could talk about many of the interesting facets of life in Cayuta. Oh, we aren’t Europe, not by any means, we aren’t the Taj Mahal or the London Bridge, but we have very lovely parks, a lovely lake, and country clubs. Two country clubs. There is the one for people of the Jewish persuasion, and there is the one for Christians. We Myrers are not joiners, though. We prefer—”
“Please. I am not well.” Mrs. Stadler headed for the stairs.
“Mother? Come with me now,” I said, praying that whatever my mother was going to say the Myrers preferred would not get said. What could it be that the Myrers preferred, snooping through venetian blinds at people with lives?
“Hold your horses, Jess,” said my mother. “I’m coming.”
“She’s coming, Jessica.” Elisa smiled. “See, she’s ambulatory.”
“Lay off her,” I said under my breath. I remembered what my father sometimes said: If you knock the nose, the eye will hurt.
The sound of a door slamming upstairs shook the house.
My mother said to Elisa, “I hope nothing is wrong with your mother. Or did the wind do that?”
“I’m sorry,” Elisa whispered to me. “I should not have said that about ambulatory.”
I could feel my face in flames. “Never mind!”
“You’re right to be angry, Süsse,” Elisa whispered. “I like that you stick up for your mother.”
But my mother never missed anything. “Oh, in a pig’s eye,” she said. “She never sticks up for me.”
“She just did,” said Elisa.
Now I had Mother by the arm, pulling her along. I said over my shoulder, “I’ll get the poster later, Elisa.”
24
Dear Slater,
Hello after a long time. I have gotten over my mad finally. I should have known of all my boys I could not have stayed mad at you. But maybe it was myself I was really mad at anyway, because I sit here hating to think I had a part in your crime.
I never should have asked you to help that hoyden from up north. Now is your chance to get out the dictionary and learn a new word if you don’t know what a hoyden is. You were so proud of the headway we made putting The Georgia Peaches together before that day she ruined our tree out front. I could not believe you ran away from the band. I have to face the fact I could not have held you here. You had too much talent, and you are the type those kinds of girls fall for with your good looks.
I believe what you wrote about not knowing that girl had a gun. I know you, Slater, and you are no killer.
I am writing to get this off my chest because my heart is now going off on its own track when it feels like it and the doctors don’t like it. I don’t like it either. I was planning to save money and come north just so’s I could see your smile one more time, put my hand in yours, and say I would give anything to take you back home with me.
And now I have said it.
Yours very truly and with love,
Nellie Purrington
25
THE NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK, MONDAY, JULY 23, 1934 TWO CENTS.
DILLINGER SLAIN IN CHICAGO; SHOT DEAD BY FEDERAL MEN IN FRONT OF MOVIE THEATER
>
REACHED FOR HIS GUN
OUTLAW’S MOVE MET BY FOUR SHOTS, ALL FINDING THEIR MARK
HAD LIFTED HIS FACE; DESPERADO HAD ALSO TREATED FINGERTIPS WITH ACID
26
GOOD EVENING, MR. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press.
The 11,520-ton passenger liner Morro Castle caught fire during a voyage between Cuba and New York and burned to a gutted shell. One hundred thirty-three persons, mostly passengers, were either drowned or burned to death.
Two months had gone by since the party at the Schwitters’. What little Elisa told me about that night had to do with Wolfgang, which was why we were listening to Walter Winchell on a Sunday night in September. Elisa told me Wolfgang Schwitter said “everyone” listened to Winchell on Sunday evenings. Wolfgang was going to be a big theatrical producer one day. He was already in New York City working on a real Broadway musical called Anything Goes. At the Schwitters’ party, with Wurst wearing a new diamond collar and sitting beside Wolfgang on the piano bench, Wolfgang had sung a new song to Elisa. He had looked right at her the whole time. Because of the excitement he’d made her feel, she couldn’t remember many of the words, just “your face in every flower, your eyes in stars above.”
“Do we have to hear Winchell?” I complained.