Mr. X Read Free Page A

your mother. I said, ‘My boy Neddie’s smart as a whip, and he’s seeing if his shadow followed him inside the house.’ They shut up, because that was exactly how you looked—like you were trying to find your shadow.”
    I can scarcely describe the combination of relief and uncertainty this caused in me. Star had given me proof that my sense of loss was real, for it had been a part of me long before I could have made it up. Even before I could walk, back when my thoughts could have been little more than the recognition of states likehunger, fear, comfort, warmth, I had been aware that it had been missing, whatever it was, and when I tried to look behind me, I was trying to find it. And if at the age of six months I was looking for the absent thing, didn’t that mean that at one time it had not been absent?
    A few days later, I resolved to ask her about the difference between me and other children. A couple of things made me hesitate, as I had before. Did everyone else’s claim to a father mean that I had to have one? Or could someone like Uncle Clark or Uncle James have stepped in to sign the papers, or whatever men did to make them fathers? Uncle Clark and Uncle James displayed so little paternal feeling that they had to make an effort merely to tolerate my existence. From the start, I felt welcome in their houses only by virtue of my best behavior. A child knows these things. You know when you have to earn acceptance. On top of that, I already had the caretaker child’s sense of emotional obligation, and my mother was as unpredictable as the weather.
    In the summer of my seventh year, Star was comfortable and relaxed with her family. She moved at about half her normal speed. For the first time in my life, I heard stories about her childhood and what I had been like as a baby. She helped Aunt Nettie in the kitchen and let Uncle Clark expound without telling him he was a bigoted ignoramus. Being Star Dunstan, she had signed up for a poetry workshop and a night class in watercolor painting at Albertus, which Uncle Clark called “Albino U.”
    Three days a week, she clerked at the pawnshop owned by her stepfather, Toby Kraft, who in spite of universal Dunstan disapproval years before had married Star’s mother. Toby Kraft had reinforced the family’s distrust by moving his bride into the apartment above his shop instead of submitting to Cherry Street. Despite their general dislike, he had participated in family gatherings for the rest of Queenie’s life and continued to do so after her death, the occasion for Star’s most recent return to Edgerton and my release from the latest set of foster parents. It did not occur to me until much later that the death of her mother was behind Star’s new ease. She must have experienced an elemental relief at the lifting of Queenie’s everlasting scorn. Her second job involved what she described as “modeling” a couple of nights each week at Albertus. I did not grasp at the time that this meant posing nude for students in a life-drawing class.
    Our orderly existence permitted me to ask my question. I waited until we were alone in Aunt Nettie’s kitchen, me drying the dishes she washed while Nettie gabbed on the porch rocker with Aunt May, and Uncle Clark and Uncle James watched a cop show on television. Star handed me a dish, and I rubbed the cloth over its glistening surface while she described a jazz concert she had seen in the Albertus auditorium a month after my conception.
    “At first, I wasn’t even sure I liked that group. It was a quartet from the West Coast, and I was never all that crazy about West Coast jazz. Then this alto player who looked like a stork pushed himself off the curve of the piano and stuck his horn in his mouth and started playing ‘These Foolish Things.’ ” The memory still had the power to make her gasp. “And, oh, Neddie, it was like going to some new place you’d never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched