Your Eyes in Stars by M. E. Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

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. “Theyused 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
    E LISA 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