Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  "Yes. An actual force. But it won't succeed." And one day, approximately eight months after the Hearts moved their new house (still known generally as the Edgihoffer house) while the Edgihoffer suit was still pending and extensive repairs were being made on the property of which not everyone in the Village approved including all sixty-four members of the Village Historical Society who signed a petition to Mrs.. Heart delivered by certified mail protesting the robin's-egg-blue paint, the felling of many beautiful trees and

  "grotesque disfigurement" of the formerly prize-winning rock garden), Heart in her usual white costume, white satin pillbox hat with a dottedswiss veil perched on her lustrous white-blond hair fashioned a French twist, was the conspicuous guest of Willowsville businessman and entrepreneur Jerry Bozer for lunch at the Willowsville Country Club other diners stared ("That fool! Does he think we're supposed to believe he's having a 'business lunch' with the blackjack woman? "), and the youthful middleaged Negro waiter serving the couple in the sun-filled dining overlooking the golf course suddenly grunted, staggered, dropped the tray of plates he was carrying, gasped for air and fell heavily t, o the floor began to shake, writhe, kick, and the beautiful Mrs.. Heart leapt up, crying, "He's having a convulsion! He's an epileptic! Call an ambu]ance!

  " While every other woman in the dining room looked on in terror and repugnance, Heart squatted beside the writhing man, whose eyes were rolling back in his head and whose lips were covered in froth, lowering herself so abruptly that her tight-fitting white skirt rode up her thighs, and her thighs and calves were revealed thickened with muscle, causing her stockings to myriad runs. With strong capable hands, not minding if her elaborately lacquered nails broke, Mrs.. Heart held the writhing man down and forced his jaws open and with "a wicked-looking long-handled steel comb" (as it was described) from out of her handbag pressed his tongue down flat to him from swallowing it. And all so fast! Without missing a beat!

  the time the emergency medical crew arrived from Amherst General Hospital a minutes later, the crisis had passed. The black man was breathing again, al. most normally, his face, grayish, mottled with sweat, resembled face again and not a death mask. Panting, Dahlia Heart rose to feet. No one thought to assist her. The pillbox hat was crooked on her head and a strand of synthe ic-looking blond hair had slipped loose from her twist. Both her stockings were ruined. Her stylish white suit the bolero top and skirt slitted at the back was damp and smudged, as if by the black mzan's mahogany-dark skin. It was only when Mrs.. Heart glanced up to see the dining room of white faces still staring at her, and Mr..

  Bozer's among them, that it might have occurred to her she'd made a blunder.

  There's a melancholy story in the background of John Reddy's life our suburb that has to do with Dahlia Heart expecting to be invited one day to join any of our private clubs. After all, her affluent, influential business associates Mr.. Bozer, Mr.. Skelton, Mr.. Wells, Mr.. Pepper, Mr.. Riggs and others belonged to these clubs and occasionally took her to them as their guest, * the Willowsville Country Club, the Glenside Tennis Club, the Union Club, the Buffalo Athletic Club, the Country Club of Buffalo.

  there was the Gardeners' Club of Buffalo, even the Village Women's League.

  And others. But even before the Riggs scandal, when the few she'd cultivated would drop her cold, this just wasn't going to happen.

  That day at the country club when the Negro waiter went into convulsions sealed Heart's social fate in Willowsville--though she hadn't known, of course. ) Months later, Herman Skelton had a near-fatal accident, never explained, on the Peace Bridge returning to the United States. It was past midnight of a weekday when Mr.. Skelton's newly purchased somehow skidded out of control at the crest of the long, magisterial bridge, swerved across the median and narrowly missed an oncoming car before it crashed into the railing, the car would have plunged hundreds of feet down into the rushing Niagara River if the railing hadn't held.

  Unconscious, badly bleeding, Mr.. Skelton was rushed by ambulance to Buffalo General Hospital, he'd suffered a concussion, his collarbone and several ribs were broken and his handsome ruddy-freckled face was lacerated and would be badly scarred.

  The damage done to his car and his marriage of twenty-six years was more serious, for Herman had lied to his wife Irma, telling her he was attending a business dinner in Buffalo when in fact, as it immediately came out, there had been no business dinner, and there'd been a woman the car with him at the time of the accident--Dahlia Heart. Herman had taken Mrs..

  Heart "sightseeing" in Fort Erie and Niagara Falls, Ontario, they'd had a engthy dinner at the Top of the Flame, the twentieth-floor revolving dining room of the Niagara Tower, and had gone drinking and dancing afterward at the Horseshoe Lounge, overlooking Horseshoe Falls from the shore, to add to his other injuries, Herman would be charged with driving and driving while intoxicated. Dahlia Heart, his companion, who'd chosen not to ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital, but, for his own good, to return directly to her home, by some miracle hadn't been injured at all.

  Yet Dahlia Heart was prone to accidents herself. A number of times in the years this mysterious woman lived among us, Mrs.. Heart conspicuous dark glasses in public because--we surmised one or both eyes might be blackened. These glasses were Hollywood style white-plastic frames with very dark lenses--"shades." These glasses had the of riveting a guy's attention almost as much as Mrs.. Heart's face itself.

  Once John Reddy began playing varsity basketball we saw her sometimes at home games, usually with John Reddy's grandpa (a character, white-haired and wearing a cowboy hat even indoors) and maybe with John Reddy's younger brother Farley and sister Shirleen (not that we knew their names, we didn't), she'd get to the game on time but often leave at the point no matter how exciting the game was or how spectacular John was that night. Every one watched Mrs.. Heart enter the gym, clad trademark white, in cold weather a luscious white (ermine? though moms swore it was fake) fur coat to her ankles, making her way in spikeheeled white shoes or in cold weather spike-heeled white boots the reserved seating, and everyone watched her leave. Possibly she'd take time to shake hands with sweaty Coach McKeever and congratulate him in her husky, honeyed voice--"Coach, these boys are terrific. John-ny tells me you are the best"--leaving Coach blinking and shaken as if he'd been hit on the head with a sledgehammer. Possibly she'd exchange a few cheery with our principal, Mr.. Stamish, who came to all home games, Mr.. Cuthbert, Mr.. Larsen, Mr.. Dunleddy, Mr.. Schoppa. We men staring at Dahlia Heart, the more transfixed if she was dark glasses, and we liked it that, for those fleeting seconds, teachers' thoughts were identical with our own and the "generation gap" was bridged.

  Speaking for his less articulate buddies, Dougie Siefried rolled his eyes, moaning, "That woman is sex-y," making suggestive motions like he was trying his damnedest to keep his hands off his crotch. "You can smell her at one hundred yards. You got to wonder--who's banging her around, she's got a black eye she has to hide? Who's banging her?" Sometimes we'd trail her checking out the Avenue of Fashion, Saturday afternoon. We'd sighted her in the Bon Ton Shop, in the Village Tearoom, in Nico's or the Crystal--alone or with her stumpy daughter. In a brave platoon of several cars we the cul-de-sac of Meridian Place, hoping to catch sight of Mrs..

  Heart working in the infamous rock garden (we thought the two-foot gnomes, freaky green frogsx and sunbonneted little girls with sprinkling cans fashioned from wood Mrs./Heart had placed amid the rocks and flowers were a touch--"Like E)isney's Fantasia," Blake Wells said thoughtfully.

  "It allows you to peer into the woman's mind"). We hoped to hell the nosy old who lived on either side of the Hearts, Mrs.. Thrun and Mrs..

  Bannister, wouldn't call the cops on us. We hoped to hell John Reddy wasn't around to n@tice us.

  As time passed it became unclear in our minds if we'd actually or only just imagined Dahlia Heart's sexy blackened eyes, bruised and (well, we couldn't have seen this) breasts, belly, thighs.

  was unclear whether we
were normal horny-crazed kids of sixteen and seventeen or sick perverts. "What'd it be like, do you think, if your mom was--her?"

  Rindfleisch wondered. "If, y'know, you were in the same house--bathroom, bedroom--with her?" We tried to imagine John Reddy's domestic life our imaginations failed. Ketch Campbell startled us by saying with a lewd grin, "She's a woman you gotta kiss--or kill." And Dougie moan as if in actual pain, "Who's banging her? It's gotta be somebody." For hours we sat in Nico's chewing pizza crusts and swilling Coke, which one of our dads might be Mrs.. Heart's mystery lover. We'd plenty of rumors (overheard, our moms gossiping on the phone) that Mrs..

  Heart saw married Willowsville men, we didn't know exactly what "saw" meant, but we had hopes. Dwayne Hewson volunteered his old man, former quarterback at U-B and now a go-getter executive at Metropolitan Life. Smoke Filer volunteered his old man, fattish but not bad-looking, "to hear him talk, a real stud." Art Lutz, Pete Marsh, Roger Zwaart--we argued it might be our dads since they weren't home much, worked late at of fices and traveled out of town on business. Only Bo Bozer whose old man was, in fact, long rumored to be one of Mrs.. Heart's close male friends, off the subject like a bad smell. It was weird how Bo lit a cigarette and smoke through both nostrils with a sneer, saying, "My old man?

  Don't make me laugh. The poor sap couldn't get it up with a crank--if he had chance." Once at Nico's, making this statement, Bo started to cry. Tears spilled out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks and the rest of us kept on eating pizza, swilling Coke, making dumb-ass jokes and never noticing a thing.

  Girls never believed that John Reddy Heart was accident-prone in careless, negligent sense. As Trish Elders argued, "John Reddy tries to keep things from going wrong." Brooding Janet Moss agreed, "He has a soul." Verrie Myers, edgy, excited, making husky sighing noises like her mother, broke in," The tragic hero'--Mr.. Lepage was telling us today--'is the force of action, and is acted upon. Like Hamlet." Millie Leroux objected in her nasal way, "But isn't Hamlet a sacrificial hero, too? Because he has to die. Like Othello." Mary Louise Schultz said, lighting a she'd just begun to smoke, stressed by the drama of John Reddy's first trial, which had abruptly ended in a mistrial), "That is so damned sad.

  And so unfair. You get to be a hero but you must be sacrificed." Shelby countered, "Look, Millie, say you're Ophelia, you're sacrificed, too. But you never get to be a hero." Verrie Myers said impatiently, her deranged eyes ranging across our faces

  "What's any of this got to do with John Reddy Heart anyway? He's an American, for Christ's sake.

  He's one of us." But the remark hung tenuously in the air like curls and coils of smoke from our shared cigarettes. We didn't want to contradict Verrie couldn't believe it was so--that tohn Reddy Heart was one of us.

  Swinging his legs up onto the lowermost rung of the fire escape at rear of the Academy Street School, and hauling himself up, and to climb. You wouldn't have said he was showing off. He was possibly restless, bored. A skinny-lanky boy of only eleven, with gnarly-muscled arms. That Western drawl you wouldn't want to smile at. A pack of Strikes stuffed in his back pants pocket. As every kid in the watched, John Reddy climbed swiftly, unerringly, monkeylike, up escape ladder, over the edge of the building and disappeared.

  "Disappeared?" someone always asked, doubtfully. "He didn't disappear."

  "In fact, he did," we said. "He disappeared."

  "But that's impossible. You just didn't see where he went."

  "The Academy Street School is a building that stands by itself.

  Johlreddy climbed up onto the roof, and we ran around the side, arojtd the front, we ran around the entire building--he'd disappeared." At once other boys tried to follow him, competing with one another to up the ladder. Demott Duncan, a fattish eighth grader, slipped, fell ten feet onto the pavement, broke his left forearm and was half-carried by one of our teachers, bawling. After this, John Reddy was observed and respect. Girls liked it that boys feared him. He had a quick temper, quick fists. He could attack without warning. He rarely spoke unless he had something to say and then his words were terse and matter-of-fact, adult. It would be many times recounted how he'd come into homeroom one Monday morning, this was in eighth grade, one of his eyes swollen welts on his face and Miss Koithan, shocked, asked what had happened to him, John Reddy said in his polite Western drawl, "Ma'am, I was coldcocked." The boys in the room laughed to disguise their anxiety at not knowing what "coldcocked" meant. The girls pretended they hadn't heard the words. After a moment, her cheeks reddening, Miss Koithan hadn't heard the either. A few years later, when John Reddy was sophomore in high school, we heard he was in fights involving police--he'd been picked up one night in Niagara Falls. Who he'd been fighting, and why--we didn't know. At the age of fifteen, he was reported to have grown-up girlfriends, women who weren't in school, no one who lived in Willowsville or was known to us. In the spring of John Reddy's sophomore year occurred the famous Tug Hill battle between guys from Amherst and from Willowsville, these Amherst guys were in the habit of cruising streets after school, trying to pick up girls and yelling crude remarks, and one day they went too far whistling at Sasha Calvo, only a freshman, home on Main Street, "Hey wop-girl, wanna ride?" John Reddy of this and organized a dozen Willowsville guys, fellow teammates of his, and there was a fight in Tug Hill Park, an actual fistfight. For years Art Lutz would marvel, "My God, John Reddy was fighting like a maniac. It was a sight." Smoke Filer said, "It never surprised me he killed anybody, afterward.

  Nobody who'd seen him use his fists wouldtve been surprised."

  "The worst was, when John Reddy almost died. On the Millersport Highway."

  "He didn't almost die. He wasn't even hurt." "He might've died! He said so himself."

  "But that accident wasn't his fault. Not in any way." And that was so, It hadn't been John Reddy's fault, except there something in him that seemed to draw, like a magnet, such incidents. Three weeks before the shooting of Melvin Riggs, John Reddy was driving his glaring acid-green Cadillac north on the Millersport Highway when a carload of stoned guys in their twenties from South Buffalo drew up dangerously close behind him in a black Trans Am, yelling insults, hitting the horn in an effort to goad John Reddy into racing with them, but John Reddy wasn't in mood and gave them the finger and the Trans Am retaliated by almost ramming his rear bumper, the two cars traveling at about seventy an hour on the three-lane highway, across which thin, wraithlike streams snow were being blown, John Reddy sped up to try to escape, but of this was what the driver of the Trans Am wanted, now swinging around to pass the Cadillac close as if to sideswipe it, the two cars along, shuddering in the wind, as other vehicles braked, swerved to avoid them, fled bumping and bouncing onto the shoulders of the road. The Trans Am was in the process of passing the Cadillac and shifting into its lane--John Reddy svas pumping his brakes by this time, praying the car wouldn't fishtail as he'd tell police--when it went into a skid, lurched off the highway to crash headon into a concrete abutment near Dodge Road. "The most thing I've ever seen," a witness, driving another car, told police. "That black devil-car just crumpled." The driver of the Trans Am was killed outright, the top of his sheared away, the young man in the passenger's seat died in the wreck, and two other passengers in the back seat were critically injured.

  "You could see the blood, the actual blood, seeping out of the wreck," a said.

  "Blood, oil, gasoline! Some of us worried it might be combustible.

  wreck might explode." How John Reddy managed to save himself, the Cadillac to a stop on the highway shoulder, he wouldn't afterward recall.

  It had all happened in a daze. It had happened in an evil dream.

  had happened (he would tell Mr.. Dunleddy this, though not until later) in the way his father had died, spiraling down from a slate-blue desert sky with such force that a crater measuring one hundred feet in circumference would be ripped into the sandy earth. When police paramedics arrived at the wreck they would discover sixteen-year-old John Reddy within a few yards of
the twisted Trans Am, kneeling on the ground, his head bowed and eyes shut, lips moving as if he was praying. Other drivers stood about, shivering and staring, aghast at the carnage. Inside the wreckage of the Trans Am were mangled, lifeless bodies but the driver of the acid-green Cadillac, a boy in a well-worn black leather jacket, jeans and battered leather boots, hatless, his black, oiled hair around his brooding face, was not looking. "That young man's face was dead-white," one of the paramedics said, "--I'd have said he was in shock but he was O. K. , just wanted to go home." Luckily for John Reddy witnesses to the accident who would explain to police what had happened, absolving him of any blame. In the morning Courier-Express there was a front-page article, with a photo of the Trans-Am and inset photos of the four young men who'd been in the car, no photo of John Reddy Heart, but name and address were given. Everybody at school was talking about accident but--where was John Reddy? He stayed away for days. And he returned somber, frowning and distracted, he shrugged off talking about the accident even with his varsity teammates. "I was kinda hurt, tell the truth," Dwayne Hewson complained. "I come up to John Reddy who's buddy, give him a punch on the shoulder with the edge of my fist, not hard, arsay, Close call, eh, John? I heard--" and John Reddy cuts his eyes at me lik'm Nosepicker Nordstrom and just walks away." Similar responses reported from other sources, including those senior girls in the habit of boldly loitering at John Reddy's locker or begging rides from him in the Caddie after school. Verrie Myers who believed by this time that she a "psychic rapport" with John Reddy slipped notes through the slats his locker and affixed them to the windshield wipers of his car--without response. But Mr.. Cuthbert encountered John Reddy at Farolino's Carpentry where John Reddy worked part-time, and bluntly asked him, for bluntness was Mr.. Cuthbert's classroom style, what truth was there to the tale everyone was telling that he'd almost been killed the other day.