Give Me Your Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

  "I saw. I saw who killed her. My sister. I was a witness."

  Phone rang. Friday evening. Believing it to be a friend, she lifted the receiver without checking the ID.

  The voice was a stranger's. Low-pitched, somehow insinuating.

  "Mrs. Ulrich?"

  Here was the wrong note. To her students and younger colleagues at the institute she was Dr. Ulrich. To friends and acquaintances, Lydia. No one called her Mrs. Ulrich any longer. No one who knew her.

  She felt a stab of apprehension. Even as she tensed, she spoke warmly and easily into the phone: "Yes, who is it?"

  By the age of sixty-one she'd acquired a social personality that was warm, easy, welcoming. You might call it a maternal personality. You would not wish to call it a manipulative personality. She was a professional woman of several decades. Her current position was director of a psychology research institute at George Mason University. She'd been a professor at the uni versity for eighteen years, much admired for her collegiality and ease with students. Her deepest self, brooding and still as dark water at the bottom of a deep well, was very different.

  "...of the Upper Darby police department. I have a few questions to ask you, preferably in person."

  Upper Darby! She'd moved away nearly twenty-five years ago.

  Lydia, her husband, Hans, and their young daughter, Alva.

  Her friendships of that time, when she'd been an anxious young wife and mother, had long since faded. Her husband had had professional ties in the Philadelphia area, but long ago.

  "But—why? What do you have to ask me?"

  "Your husband is deceased, Mrs. Ulrich? Is that correct?"

  This was correct. Hans had died in 2000. Already four years had passed. For seven years in all, Lydia and Hans had not been living together. They had not divorced or even formally separated, because Hans had not believed in any outward acknowledgment of failure on his part.

  The detective, whose name Lydia hadn't quite heard, was asking if he and an associate could come to her residence in Bethesda to speak with her the following day, at about 2 P.M. They would drive from Upper Darby for an interview of possibly forty minutes, or an hour.

  The next day was Saturday. This was to have been a day of solitude. When she needn't be Dr. Ulrich. In the evening she was going out with a friend; through the long hours of the day she intended to work, with an afternoon break for a long, vigorous walk. As a professional woman, she had learned to hoard her privacy, her aloneness, while giving the impression in public of being warmly open and available.

  It was difficult to keep the edge out of her voice. "Why must it be in person? Can't we speak over the phone?"

  "Mrs. Ulrich, we prefer not on the phone."

  Again Mrs. Ulrich. Spoken with an insinuating authority. As if the police officer knew Mrs. Ulrich intimately, it was Mrs. Ulrich he wanted.

  In this way Lydia understood: the subject of the inquiry would be family. Whatever it was, it would have nothing to do with her professional identity and reputation.

  She could not avoid asking this question, with dread: "Is this ... about my daughter?"

  Lydia strained to hear, behind the detective's low-pitched voice, background voices, muffled sound. The man was calling from Upper Darby police headquarters. His intrusion into her life, into the solitude and privacy of her apartment (a tenth-floor condominium overlooking a shimmering green oasis of parkland), was impersonal, as if random. He didn't know her, had no care of her. He was pursuing a goal that had nothing to do with her. And of course it couldn't be random but was calculated. He'd acquired her (unlisted) home telephone number in Bethesda, Maryland. He knew about Hans's death. This meant he probably knew other facts about her. That he might know facts about Lydia Ulrich she didn't know about herself caused her to feel dizzy suddenly, as if a net were being closed around her.

  The detective hadn't said yes, nor had he said no. Was this call about Alva?

  "Is Alva in trouble? Is she ... ill?"

  Has she been arrested, is she in police custody, has she overdosed on a drug, is she in a hospital, is she...

  Since answering the phone, Lydia had been placating herself with the thought that, so far as she knew, Alva was in Illinois, not Pennsylvania. Since they'd moved from Upper Darby, Alva had never been back. Lydia was sure.

  The detective whose name Lydia hadn't caught was telling her, in a voice that didn't sound friendly, that their daughter was not ill, so far as he knew. But the subject of his inquiry had to do with her, Alva Ulrich, as a possible witness in a criminal investigation.

  Criminal investigation! Lydia's heart stopped.

  It would be drugs. Since the age of fourteen Alva had been involved with drugs. Like malaria, the disease persisted. Lydia jammed her fist against her mouth. The detective's words had struck her like an arrow. Damned if she would cry out in pain.

  No doubt many more times than her parents knew, Alva had been arrested for drug possession. She'd been taken into police custody, briefly jailed, discharged to rehab, discharged "clean." Drifting on then to the next state, another sprawling university campus. Another improvised fringe life in pursuit of some sort of artistic career ... The last time a call as jarring as this had come from a stranger, years ago, when she and Hans had been living in Georgetown, their thirty-year-old daughter, from whom they'd long been estranged, had been hospitalized in East Lansing, Michigan, after a drug overdose. She'd been comatose, near death. Dumped by her druggie friends on the pavement outside the ER one night in winter 1997.

  Immediately Lydia had flown to East Lansing. Hans had refused to accompany her.

  The detective was asking, wasn't Lydia in contact with her daughter? Lydia wondered if the question was a trick, for already he knew the answer, from Alva. Quickly Lydia said yes, of course she was in contact with her daughter: "Alva is an art student, a painter, at..." But was it Illinois State University at Carbondale or Springfield? Alva had provided Lydia with post office box numbers in both cities recently. "I just wrote to her about two weeks ago. I sent her a check, as I often do, and she seems to have cashed it. Please tell me if something has happened to my daughter."

  "When is the last time you spoke with her, Mrs. Ulrich?"

  Lydia could not answer. She was being humiliated, eviscerated.

  Yet the stranger at the other end of the line continued, with a pretense of solicitude. Asking, hadn't Lydia a street address for her daughter either?—so Lydia was forced to admit no, "Just a post office box. It's been that way since she left home. Alva has wanted her privacy. She's an artist..."

  Lydia's voice was weak now, faltering. Not the self-assured voice of Dr. Lydia Ulrich, director of the Pratt Institute for Research in Cognitive and Social Psychology at George Mason University, but the broken, defeated, bewildered voice of Hans Ulrich's wife.

  "Springfield, is it? Alva is studying art there..."

  The detective murmured something ambiguous. Maybe yes, maybe no.

  "...don't seem to have her street address, officer. Maybe, if you know it, you could tell me?"

  "Sorry, Mrs. Ulrich. Your daughter has requested that we not inform you of her exact location at this time."

  "Oh. I see."

  This hurt. This was unmistakable. An insult. Shame.

  Not my fault. How is it my fault! I tried to love her. I do love her.

  Now Lydia was broken, defeated. Quickly now she gave in. Of course the detectives could come to see her next day. The net was tightening; her breath came short. Before they hung up Lydia heard herself ask, "If a—a crime has been committed ... Alva isn't in danger, is she? Alva is being protected—is she?"

  The detective's answer was terse and enigmatic; she would ponder its meaning through much of the night: "At the present time, ma'am, it appears, yes she is."

  Of course, Alva was in Carbondale, not Springfield! Lydia knew this.

  A few minutes after her conversation with the Upper Darby detective, she realized.

  ***

&nbs
p; She would cancel her plans for the weekend. Both Saturday and Sunday. She knew, seemed to know, that the Upper Darby detectives would not be bringing her good news.

  "My daughter. Alva. Something has happened. She has become involved in a criminal case out in Illinois, I think. She's a witness..."

  Witness to what? Lydia shuddered to think.

  She was rehearsing what she would say, telephoning friends. To cancel their plans for dinner, a play. To explain her state of mind. (Agitated, anxious.) In the turbulent years of her marriage to a demanding and difficult man, Lydia hadn't had time for the cultivation of friends, but now that her life was spacious and aerated as a cloudless sky, she'd acquired a circle of remarkable friends. Most of them were women her age, divorcées, widows. A few remained married. Their children were grown and gone. All were professional women nearing retirement age but, like Lydia, in no hurry to retire. They did not wish to speak of it.

  Not yet! Not yet! The women clung to their work, at which they excelled, with a maternal possessiveness.

  Their children had not only grown and gone but in some cases had disappeared. Like Alva, they were of the legion of walking wounded, drifting into a drug culture as into a vast American inland sea. The women did not speak of these children except in rare, raw moments. Lydia's friends knew about Alva, and knew not to ask after Alva. The son of Lydia's closest friend had committed suicide several years ago in a particularly gruesome way; only Lydia knew among their circle of friends. But never spoke of it.

  The women had come to these friendships late in life, but not too late. Theirs was the most precious sisterhood: no blood ties between them.

  Genes are the cards we're all dealt. What we do with the cards is our lives.

  This was a remark of Hans Ulrich's, frequently cited in intellectual journals.

  "I tried. I have never given up on..."

  He had given up. The father.

  And how painful for Lydia to realize that long after Hans had coolly detached himself from their daughter, refusing even to hear from Lydia what Alva's latest problems, crises, predicaments were, Alva still preferred him to Lydia: the powerful, elusive father.

  Seductive even when elusive. Especially when absent.

  "But where is Daddy, why isn't Daddy with you? Are you keeping Daddy from me? Are you lying to Daddy about me? Does Daddy know that I almost died? I don't want you here, I want Daddy. I don't trust you, I hate you."

  It was a child's accusation. Hateful, unthinking, intended purely to hurt.

  In the hospital in East Lansing, at Alva's bedside, Lydia had tried to disguise her horror, seeing her daughter so haggard and sallow-skinned, her eyes bloodshot, sunk deep into their sockets. Alva had been too weak to sit up, to eat solids, to speak except in a low hoarse broken voice, almost inaudible and terrible to hear. Lydia wanted to believe it was Alva's sickness that spoke, not Alva. For how could Alva hate her!

  "Darling, I'm your mother. I love you, I'm here to help you..."

  "You're wrong. You're stupid. It's Daddy I trust. His judgment."

  Lydia was stunned. Thinking, Even in her sickness, she knows.

  Not Lydia's judgment but Hans's judgment was to be trusted. Hans's moral repugnance at what he called the slow train wreck of their daughter's life. Not a mother's unconditional love and forgiveness the wounded daughter craved, but a father's righteous fury, unforgiving.

  You disgust me. You and your kind. If your mother can stomach you, good for her. Not me.

  Hans had refused to go with Lydia to East Lansing, and he would refuse to discuss the arrangements Lydia made for Alva to be admitted to a drug rehabilitation clinic after her discharge from the hospital. He was departing for Europe. Medical conferences in Berlin, Rome. Hans Ulrich was a consultant to the UN and would be named to the president's advisory board on matters of health and public welfare. His life was a worldly one; he'd become one of the preeminent epidemiologists of his generation. Not the effluvia of family life but the grandeur of public life would define him. Not fatherhood, not marriage. Not love, but professional achievement and renown. Hans was a man who, when he died (prematurely, aged sixty-one, of cardiac arrest, thousands of miles from Lydia), would be eulogized in prominent obituaries for his "seminal" work in this crucial field. Survived by wife, daughter was the most perfunctory afterthought.

  In the hospital in East Lansing, at her daughter's bedside, Lydia had seemed finally to understand. It had to be a fact others knew, to which Lydia had come late: to love unconditionally is fraudulent, a lie. There is a time for love, and there is a time for the repudiation of love. Yet Lydia protested, "I can't change my love for you, Alva, even if..."

  Even if you don't love me.

  Alva grimaced and shut her eyes. A shudder passed over her thin body. She could not have weighed more than ninety pounds. Her skin looked jaundiced but was coolly clammy to the touch. An IV tube drained liquid into her bruised forearm. The hair that had been a beautiful ashy blond through Alva's girlhood was coarse, matted, threaded now with silver like glinting wires. A sour odor lifted from her; Lydia would carry it away from the hospital in her clothing, her hair. She thought this must be the odor of dissolution, impending death.

  She returned to her hotel room. She showered, washed her hair. She left a message for Hans with his assistant. You must try to come! Our daughter may be dying.

  But Alva had not died. Another time Alva recovered.

  So quickly that one day she checked out of the hospital and eluded her mother. It was a bleakly comic scene Lydia would long recall: her astonishment at Alva's vacated bed, her naive query put to one of the floor nurses: "But didn't my daughter leave any word for me?"

  No word. Only the hospital bill.

  A considerable bill, for eight full days.

  That had been the last time Lydia had seen her daughter, or spoken with her. Terrible to realize, when the detective from Upper Darby called her, that it had been more than seven years.

  Seven years. A child's lifetime.

  Genes are the cards we're all dealt. What we do with the cards is our lives.

  Hans Ulrich was denounced in some circles as cold, unfeeling, a statistician and not a medical man. In other circles, politically conservative, he was honored as a seer.

  In fact it had been more than seven years that Lydia had been sending checks to Alva in care of post office boxes in the Midwest. After dropping out of college for the third and final time, Alva had drifted westward, to Ohio, Indiana, Iowa. To Michigan, Minnesota. To Missouri, to Illinois. Impossible to determine if Alva traveled alone or with others; if she'd acquired, in her itinerant life, some sort of family; if she'd even married, and if so if she'd remained with her husband or drifted away from him as she'd drifted away from her parents. Lydia sent checks, and Alva cashed them. At the outset, Lydia and Hans were still living together in Georgetown, where both had academic appointments; Hans disapproved, but never interfered so long as the money Lydia sent was clearly her own, from her salary. With the checks Lydia never failed to enclose a handwritten letter or card. She would wish one day that she'd kept a record of these, as a kind of journal or diary of her own life, the crucial facts of her life offered to her daughter in a relentlessly upbeat tone, for words are the easiest of deceits, so long as they aren't spoken aloud. To write a thing is to make it true, Lydia thought.

  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, disadvan
taged, 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.