Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Alva rarely replied to Lydia’s letters, except from time to time to notify her of another change of address, on the printed form provided by the post office. But Alva never failed to cash the checks.

  “She reads my letters, at least. That’s how we keep in touch.” This had to be so. Lydia would explain to the prying detectives.

  “Not an interrogation, Mrs. Ulrich. An interview.”

  Mrs. Ulrich. The wife, the mother. She was their subject.

  Lydia’s nervous offer of coffee? tea? soda? was politely declined. A woman whose home is entered, a woman who can’t provide some gesture of hospitality, is a woman disoriented, disadvantaged, like one suffering from that infection of the inner ear that determines our ability to keep our balance.

  Lydia’s offer of a smile was politely declined.

  Their names were Hahn and Panov. Lydia stared at the cards handed to her. Already she had forgotten which man was which.

  Hahn, Panov. Was Hahn the elder? He led the interview.

  “. . . won’t mind, will you, if we tape this . . .”

  Lydia invited them to sit down. It must have been choreographed: the detectives took seats in chairs facing her but at a little distance from each other. Lydia would glance at one of the men, and at the other; back to the first, and again the other. While Hahn questioned her, Panov studied her in profile.

  Alva was in danger, Lydia thought. It had to be drug-related, and it had to be a serious crime.

  How she, the mother, was connected, Lydia could not imagine.

  Wanting to cry, Please tell me! Don’t torment me.

  It was unnerving to think that these strangers glancing about casually at Lydia’s attractive living room flooded with May sunshine, making no comment on it, as other visitors would naturally have done, seemingly not very impressed, knew something about Alva, and something about Lydia, that Lydia didn’t know.

  Unnerving to think that these men, who’d driven from the Philadelphia area to Bethesda to speak with Lydia, had flown to Carbondale, Illinois, to speak with Alva.

  Yet more unnerving, Alva had been the one to contact the detectives. Alva, who feared and despised figures of authority like police, social welfare officials, judges!

  Lydia was told that her daughter had been encouraged to contact the Upper Darby Police Department by a therapist whom she’d been seeing as well as a faculty member at the state university, because in recent weeks she had been haunted by memories of having witnessed a violent crime as a child. Alva had come to believe that she had crucial information to offer police, to aid in the investigation of a homicide of 1974 that had recently been reopened by Upper Darby police.

  Homicide! Lydia was astonished.

  “This can’t be. Alva couldn’t have been more than seven at that time.”

  Not drugs? Not Illinois?

  Lydia smiled nervously. Looking from Hahn to Panov, from Panov to Hahn, thinking this had to be a misunderstanding. Surely not a joke?

  Alva had never been one to joke. You couldn’t reason with Alva by speaking playfully. Couldn’t coax her, even as a little girl, out of a mood by making her laugh, because Alva couldn’t be made to laugh. Instead, Alva would stare at you. Blankly.

  So the detectives regarded Lydia, not exactly blankly but with professional detachment, a kind of clinical curiosity. They were seeing a sixty-one-year-old woman who looked much younger than her age, a widow, a professional woman, obviously educated and well-spoken and not the Mrs. Ulrich they might have expected, having first met her daughter.

  They were seeing a woman who needed to be assured that her daughter wasn’t ill, wasn’t in danger. “For some reason I have only a post office address for Alva in Carbondale. I would so appreciate it if you could give me her street address before you leave.”

  A reasonable voice. Not exactly begging. A mother concerned for her child, though the child is thirty-seven.

  “She moves so often, that’s why I seem to have lost . . .”

  Lydia had forgotten that she’d been told that Alva didn’t want her to know her street address. You’d have thought she had forgotten.

  Neither Hahn nor Panov acknowledged her remark. Lydia wanted to think, They’re being kind, they feel sorry for me. They are on my side.

  So you yearn to think when investigators enter your home.

  The detectives would have recognized Alva at once: one of the walking wounded, casualties of the drug culture. Young people whose early promise had been destroyed by drugs as by a virulent disease.

  They would recognize Lydia, the brave left-behind mother.

  “. . . a witness, you say? Alva? As a child of . . .”

  Lydia spoke respectfully of her daughter, though also skeptically. She would not suggest that her daughter had to be fantasizing, as so often, through the years, Alva had done.

  Hahn was telling Lydia that the newly reopened case was a notorious one: “Pink Bunny Baby.” Did she remember it?

  A very young child, believed to be about two, had been found dead in a remote area of Rock Basin Park. She’d been tightly swaddled in a blanket, bruised but not visibly injured, having been smothered to death. The little girl wore an article of clothing with pink bunnies on it, and so in the media she was the Pink Bunny Baby. A police sketch of her doll-like face as it must have been before her death had been replicated many thousands of times in the press, for weeks, months.

  Pink Bunny Baby had never been identified. Her murderer or murderers had never been identified.

  Lydia was stunned. Whatever she’d been expecting, it could not have been this.

  “Of course I remember. That nightmare. We lived only a few miles from Rock Basin Park. Alva was in second grade at the time. We tried to shield her from . . .”

  It came back to Lydia, the clutch of fear she’d felt then. A mother’s fear that something terrible might happen to her child.

  When your child is an infant, you’re in terror that somehow she will die, simply cease breathing; you must check her constantly, compulsively. When she’s older and often out of your sight, you worry that a madman might steal her away.

  Though it was widely believed that Pink Bunny Baby had been killed by a parent or parents, not a roving madman. For who else would wish to kill a child so young, except a deranged parent? That was the nightmare.

  Lydia spoke slowly at first, with a kind of recalled dread. By degrees she began speaking more rapidly, as if a mechanism had been sprung in her brain.

  “For months, every day it was Pink Bunny Baby in newspapers, on TV. There were fliers and posters. Everyone spoke of it. You couldn’t escape it. We censored everything that came into the house and we never let Alva watch TV alone, but still she was badly frightened by older children at school. She was a high-strung, nervous child. Extremely intelligent, with a talent for drawing and music, but too restless to sit still for more than a few minutes. Today she would be diagnosed as ADD, but in the 1970s no one had identified attention deficit disorder, and the only medication for hyperactive children would have been tranquilizers. We took Alva—that is, I took her—to pediatricians, child psychiatrists, neurologists. Hans was outraged when she was diagnosed as borderline autistic—we knew this couldn’t be accurate, Alva was a bright, communicative, verbal child who could look you in the eye when she wanted to. Even before the child’s body was found she’d had nightmares, and these got worse. She did astonishing crayon drawings of the ‘little pink baby’ she called her baby sister. She begged us to let her sleep with us at night—but she was too old, Hans insisted. She begged us to take her to the place where Pink Bunny Baby was found.”

  Words spilled from Lydia, leaving her breathless. The detectives listened without comment and without the usually encouraging smiles and head signals that accompany conversation.

  This wasn’t a conversation, of course. This was an interview.

  The elder detective asked, “And did you take your daughter to the park, Mrs. Ulrich?”

  “Of course not! You
can’t be serious.”

  “Did your husband take her?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Neither of you ever, alone or together, took your daughter to Rock Basin Park?”

  Lydia looked from one detective to the other. Hahn, Panov

  She was confused; she was speaking incoherently. Wanting to plead with them: What did my daughter see? What has she told you about me?

  “Well, yes. Before the child’s body was found. But not to that terrible place.”

  “You knew where the place was, then? You were familiar with that part of the park?”

  Lydia hesitated. It had been so long: thirty years.

  “Only just from the newspaper. There were countless stories, photographs of the park. Even maps.”

  “How long did you live in Upper Darby, Mrs. Ulrich?”

  “Five years. Hans had an academic appointment at—”

  “In all those years you’d never been to that part of Rock Basin Park where the child was found? Yet you could recognize it from the newspaper?”

  Lydia tried not to speak sharply. As an administrator, knowing that a sudden break in civility, a breach in decorum, can never really be amended. “Yes, probably we’d been there. It was a hiking area, wasn’t it? A very beautiful part of Rock Basin Park—a stony creek, wild-growing lilac, wood-chip paths through a pine forest, massive outcroppings of granite . . . When I took Alva to the park by myself, which was most of the time, while Hans was working, we kept to the playground area, where there were other children, but when Hans was with us, on Sundays usually, he wanted to hike along the creek. Once, when Alva was about four, very bright and precocious, she slipped away from Hans and me and we’d thought she was lost, or abducted. We were searching for her everywhere, calling for her, terrified she might have drowned in the creek, but it turned out that Alva was only hiding from us—a kind of demon got into her sometimes—she was hiding from us inside a hedge of lilac, she was feverish-looking, giggling at us, and when Hans caught up with her he was furious, lost control and grabbed Alva by the shoulders and shook her hard, like a rag doll, shouted into her face, she was paralyzed with fear. I wasn’t able to stop Hans in time. I think Lydia paused, trembling. She had never told anyone this. She had never entirely acknowledged this. Between Hans and her there had been patches of blankness, lacunae to which no language accrued, therefore no knowledge. Perhaps Hans had hurt Alva; the child was white-faced with terror, mute. That Daddy had turned on her, Daddy whom she adored. And the truth was, Lydia hadn’t dared intervene; she’d been frightened of Hans herself. Wondering afterward if Alva had known how her mother had failed her at that crucial moment. “I tried to hold her, comfort her, but . . . Ever afterward, if I took Alva to the park, to the playground area, she was anxious, frightened. She began to have a thing about dolls—not her own dolls, Alva hadn’t wanted dolls, but dolls left behind in the playground, lost and broken dolls. She was fascinated by them and frightened. ‘Look at the baby, look at the baby’—she’d laugh, hide her mouth with her hand as if there were something naughty, something obscene, about the doll, or about seeing it, and I would say, Alva, it’s only a doll, you know what a doll is, Alva—don’t be silly, it’s only a doll.’ And this went on for years.” Lydia paused, not liking her anxious, eager voice. She stared at the tape recorder. The slow-turning cassette inside. What was she revealing, to strangers, that could never be retracted? “But none of this has anything to do with the little girl found in the park in 1974. This happened years before. Alva was seven when the child was found. She was in second grade at Buhr Elementary. As I said, she became morbidly fascinated with Pink Bunny Baby. At this time Hans began traveling often. He’s a—he was a—prominent scientist, and ambitious. When he was away, Alva became particularly anxious. It was ‘Daddy, Daddy, where is Daddy, is Daddy coming back?’ As if Alva could foresee, many years later, that Daddy would leave us—leave me. Of course Hans was flattered by our daughter’s fixation on him, but he couldn’t tolerate any sort of household upset. Emotions have very little to do with science, I mean with the methods of science. If you’re a psychologist, like me, you might study emotions—but not in an emotional way. As I grew out of being a mother, I grew into being a scientist. But not a scientist like Hans Ulrich. Not of his originality, genius. Not of his stature. Hans was a quintessential male scientist—he needed a domestic household, he needed a wife who was in no way a rival. He’d been born in Frankfurt, and he was contemptuous of the ways in which Americans spoil their children. Not all Americans—just the affluent, the privileged. He hadn’t been a child of privilege, and he didn’t want a child of his to be one either. So he wasn’t the sort of father to indulge a child as imaginative and headstrong and sensitive as Alva. He believed that she was exaggerating her fears—her nightmares—to manipulate us. Especially Daddy. I found it hard to discipline Alva, even to scold her. Like tossing a lighted match onto flammable material! I was afraid my daughter wouldn’t love me. Maybe Hans was right, I wasn’t a good mother—something went terribly wrong. Already in middle school she began to grow away from us, and in high school the drugs began. So Alva left me, anyway. Whatever I did, it must have been a mistake.”

  Lydia paused. She was breathless, agitated. Yet awaiting assurance: Of course you aren’t to blame, how wrong you are to blame yourself, obviously your daughter has a biochemical imbalance, you are wrong to blame yourself, Mrs. Ulrich! But the detectives from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, allowed the moment to pass.

  Is it a cliché of speech, a sinking heart? Yet Lydia felt a sinking sensation in her chest at this moment. They aren’t kind men. They don’t feel sorry for me. They are not on my side.

  Now the interview must conclude, for Lydia had told the detectives all she knew.

  “Mrs. Ulrich, your daughter was adopted, yes?”

  “No, Alva isn’t adopted. I’m sorry.”

  Sorry my daughter misled you. Sorry my daughter wishes not to be my daughter.

  She went away to bring the birth certificate to show the detectives. Moving stiffly, like one with knee or spinal pain. Moving stiffly, like an elderly woman.

  The detectives studied the document without comment. Alva Lucille Ulrich. Parents Lydia Moore Ulrich, Hans Stefan Ulrich. The certificate had been signed by an obstetrician at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School Hospital, Philadelphia, PA, February 19, 1967.

  “. . . a common fantasy, adoption. In imaginative children. It isn’t considered pathological unless carried to extremes. Just a fantasy, a kind of comfort. That you’ve been adopted, your real parents are . . .”

  Somewhere else. Someone else.

  Lydia recalled the birth pains. Excruciating labor that had lasted nearly ten hours. She had wanted, she’d thought, a natural childbirth, what’s called, bluntly, “vaginal.” Her obstetrician and her husband had not thought this a very good idea. And so it had not been a very good idea.

  In the end, Lydia had had a C-section. An ugly razor scar in the pit of her now sagging belly, which she might show to the detectives if they were skeptical of her credentials as a biological mother.

  “Alva asked if she’d been adopted. We told her no. Yet the fantasy persisted. Except as an adult she should have grown out of it.”

  They were asking Lydia if she’d adopted another child. A younger child. Or had she had another child, younger than Alva?

  A younger sister to Alva. Who had died.

  “No. I did not.”

  It was bewildering to contemplate the shadow figure who was somehow Mrs. Ulrich in Alva’s imagination. Mrs. Ulrich, whom the detectives were pursuing.

  While she, Lydia, recalled through a haze of pain someone bringing her a squirming wet red-faced baby, hers. The astonishment of this baby so naturally in her arms, sucking at her milk-heavy breast. It had seemed to transpire in a dream. The dream could not have been her own, for it was too wonderful for Lydia to have imagined. Out of the massive labor, the exhilaration of the baby, the nursing. The eager youn
g father who’d loved her then.

  Detectives’ questions are circular, tricky. Another time Lydia was asked if she’d adopted a child, any child, and Lydia explained no, never. And another time she was asked if she’d had any other children apart from Alva, and she said no. Any other children apart from Alva who had died.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  In their marriage it was Lydia who had wanted more children and Hans who had not. All marriages are fairy tales, Once upon a time there was a man and a woman, and the Ulriches’ tale was of a man who’d pursued a career and a woman who’d delayed her career to be a devoted mother to a difficult daughter who would repudiate her and break her heart. In fact, Lydia hadn’t really wanted another child. She had allowed Hans to think so; in a way it was flattering to Hans to think a woman would wish to have a second child with him after the stresses of the first, perhaps a son this time, to perpetuate the Ulrich name, but truly, in the most secret recesses of her heart, Lydia had not wanted another child, not a son, certainly not another daughter, after the first.

  Wishing in secret, in weak moments, If Alva had never been born.

  Lydia’s own mother had suggested an abortion when Lydia was newly pregnant. Before Hans had known. For Lydia and Hans weren’t yet married. They had not even been living together. Hans was finishing his doctorate at Penn; Lydia was only midway in her graduate studies. She was twenty-three. She was a very young twenty-three. She was a brilliant but self-doubting student whose professors had encouraged her to continue, but she’d fallen in love with Hans Ulrich—how difficult not to fall in love with Hans Ulrich, though her mother warned her she was too young to be a mother, she had so much life before her, children might wait, marriage might wait, to another man perhaps, for Hans Ulrich was not a man to give comfort but only to take comfort—and in the spell of sexual enchantment she’d defied her mother, married Hans Ulrich and had his child.