Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  "E. S. Fesnacht, Profile" for The New Yorker, would canvass us, Evangeline's old classmates, memories, anecdotes, impressions. Of course we were tactful and duplicitous. We spoke of Evangeline's "early, budding talent"--her "strangeness"-"uniqueness." We did not say that Evangeline Fesnacht displayed no attractions whatsoever. "Not just she lacked personality-plus, she lacked 'personality' altogether."

  "An ugly duckling amid Willowsville's glamour," Mr.. Lepage once remarked. "A bold, strong-willed girl," Miss recalled.

  "We wanted to like her." Evangeline's face was spade-shaped, with a fleshy wedge of a mouth. For years she wore glinting wire braces of a webbed complexity and when they were finally removed, just before graduation, her teeth were still rnildly crooked, odd greenish-pale baby teeth that shone when she smiled. Evangeline's complexion! --a baby-smooth perversely stippled with bumps, pimples, pustules which with she picked in class, often causing to bleed. ("Fesnacht sure grosses me out," Art Lutz said, admiringly. "And that isn't easy to do. ") Evangeline's eyes, her most distinct feature, were yet small, beady, myopic, watchful, shrewdly intelligent, of the color, as Dexter Cambrook recalled, of "slightly zinc." Her hair was a darkish nondescript brown, kinky rather curly, always cut short, exposing her large, creamy-pale ears.

  When, after away for thirty years, Evangeline would return for our thirtieth reunion, we were startled at her short stature, for we'd remembered her as tall, hulking, and clumsy, in fact she was about five feet three inches tall, and by the age of sixteen, when other girls were acutely conscious of their figures, dieting to maintain perfection, Evangeline Fesnacht must have weighed one forty pounds and walked with a rolling, flat-footed, swaggering gait--"Like, from behind, Clyde Meunzer." (We laughed, but it was so, Clyde one of a number of North Country hicks bused into our school district from outlying regions of Erie County. ) Ken Fischer, urged by his well-intentioned mother to be nice to certain girls (whose mothers belonged to the Women's League) whom it would not have occurred to any boy to "be to" otherwise, went out of his way to speak with Evangeline at school, once, as the rest of us laughed behind our hands, and Verrie Myers flushed crimson, Ken asked Evangeline to dance with him at a noon St..

  Valentine's Day hop. How comical to watch good-looking Ken Fischer with his wavy chestnut hair and dreamy eyes, one of the most popular guys in our no one, not even his closest friends, could find much fault with), pushing a perspiring, beetle-browed Evangeline around the gym floor. Ken defensively, "Evangeline isn't bad. She's kind of fun, actually.

  If you get to know her. But it's kind of hard to get to know her, and possibly not worth the effort." We didn't tell the inquisitive journalist for The New Yorker how, as a teenager, Evangeline Fesnacht wore her mother's clothes--or so we believed. Mrs.. Fesnacht was frankly middle-aged, as plain and as her daughter, though more inclined to smile in public and to make an effort to be friendly, gracious. Certainly mother and daughter eerily resembled each other, like sisters, in near-identical black wool tentlike coats with large shiny buttons that gave them the look of ungainly but enthusiastic vultures when they appeared, as they invariably did, at the homes of families the St.. Albans Hill area in which there was illness. Mrs..

  Fesnacht and her were known for their casseroles and home-baked pies delivered to neighbors who hadn't yet realized what was in store. "We knew would never make it," Pete Marsh said, shuddering, "when Mrs.. Fesnacht turned up with their tuna-breadcrumb-baked casserole." In ninth grade when poor Dickie Bannister who'd been such an outgoing, athletic kid grew thinner, paler and bluer-veined in our appalled midst, it was Evangeline who predicted his eventual demise. "He has that look in his eyes.

  I know that look." Evangeline spoke flatly, as if reading numbers from a blackboard. By the time Dickie died of leukemia over the summer, before we entered WHS, his death seemed seconthand even to his closest friends. But Evangeline was most notorious for keeping in her locker a large photo album with black satin covers she called Death Chronicles, which she allowed some of us to inspect, though only in her immediate presence, turning the pages and closely monitoring, with her small beady bright eyes of no color, our reactions. In the album were pasted with schoolgirl neatness and in chronological order articles and photos from local papers, some were formal obituaries, but most were front-page stories with such headlines as 4 BUFFALO TEENS KILLED WHEN CONVERTIBLE OVERTURNS--WEST SENECA PROM TRAGEDY, 3 DEAD, 2 INJURED--ENGAGED COUPLE KILLED AT TRAIN ONE WEEK BEFORE WEDDING. It was exclusively girls to whom showed these clippings and to whom she murmured huskily, "It's feel sony for some people. These girls out on dates with their boyfriends and 'fiances." Evangeline also collected stories of girls and women murdered by men--husbands, boyfriends, stalkers and total strangers. She Trish Elders, her wedge of a mouth contracting, "See? That's what being pretty and 'popular' gets you. Like you." Trish was too shocked to reply, seeing the look in her face Evangeline laughed harshly, shut the album and said, "Oh who am I kidding? No man would ever kill me." After Melvin Riggs was shot down dead less than a half-mile from Fesnachts' house, Evangeline began to specialize almost in John Reddy Heart. Of course she'd been aware of him for years. She had dismissed the interest of other girls in him as "female adolescent infatuation" which, after the shooting, would escalate to "mass-hysteria mode")

  insisting that her own interest was pure, abstract, metaphysical.

  When the news broke she declared calmly, "It was fated to happen. I know killer eyes when I see them." Evangeline pasted into Death Chronicles local papers covering the crash of the Trans-Am on Millersport with which John Reddy had been involved, according to an offended Buhr, she'd "hung around John's locker trying to get him to autograph some of it, but John froze the goofy chick out." Subsequent to the car crash, in the approximately three weeks before the shooting of Melvin Riggs, we that Evangeline Fesnacht was becoming transfixed by John Reddy Heart as she hadn't been before. In addition to hanging about his locker in the junior corridor, where she was conspicuously out of place, and vying for Reddy's attention with other, more aggressive and glamorous senior girls, Evangeline dared to follow him to and from classes, trotting to keep up with his long-legged stride, in a kind of swoon she passed close by him whenever she could, on the stairs amid a stampede of feet, her pug nose twitching in his wake and her mild eyes widened and blinking behind her pink plastic glasses. She panted, she sweated, her wool jumpers, darkish lugubrious plaids, betrayed half-moons of sweat at her underarms. Several girls of the Circle whose mothers had admonished them to "be to" Evangeline Fesnacht complained of how, if they paused to speak Evangeline, she scarcely seemed to listen but was "forever looking over our shoulders--looking for him." Shelby Connor and Pattianne Groves were particularly insulted when they invited Evangeline to have lunch with them, an enormous concession since our cafeteria tables seated only ten, seat was precious, only to witness Evangeline rushing off, behind a bowl brimming with chili con carne and crushed oyster crackers--"She'd sighted him. She's shameless." We'd recall, a decade later, the time we watched from a second-floor library window as Evangeline Fesnacht dared to approach John Reddy in parking lot behind school. "Not one of us good girls' would've gone out there. God." John Reddy was talking with his buddies Orrie Buhr, Calvo, Clyde Meunzer, leaning against the acid-green Caddie and passing a butt among them (a reefer? marijuana? there were rumors), we saw rough-looking guys in their leather jackets, soiled jeans and battered boots, hair long and oiled to slick duck's-ass points at the backs of their heads, pause in their conversation to stare at Evangeline Fesnacht in beyond derision and even beyond sexual belligerence. Hardly daring breathe, we pressed close against the windowpane watching as the widehipped dark-clad girl spoke to John Reddy who'd separated from the others, thumbs stuck in the pockets of his jacket, head politely bowed as Evangeline spoke with him--how earnestly, we could judge by the puffs of steam, like exclamation points, of her breath. John Reddy, a head taller than Evangeline, gazed not at her but toward her. He didn't to be speaking to her, only
just listening. But he was listening. For those several minutes, on a March day less than four days before Riggs's death, Reddy Heart listened to Evangeline Fesnacht as, we couldn't help but think, steaming the window with our own yearning breaths, he wouldn't listened to any of us.

  The cruder guys had a name for Evangeline--"Frog Tits." But John Reddy wasn't one of these.

  Years later, in Kenawka, Minnesota, Ritchie Eickhorn, now Eickhorn, would ask Evangeline Fesnacht, now E. S. Fesnacht, she'd said to John Reddy that day. Evangeline told him without hesitating, as if the incident had happened only the previous day, "I was trembling.

  I came up to him and I said, John Reddy, you will be the agent of your own destiny.

  I can see it in your eyes. I was excited, stammering. I was I might faint, John Reddy standing so close to me, and looking at me--he'd looked at me before. And his buddies staring at me like I was a freak. I said, "It's possible you can avert your destiny. I saw it in a dream and I've come to tell you. I--" But I ran out of breath. I couldn't continue. He must've thought I was crazy. He said, embarrassed, O. K. Thanks. He didn't know my name, I don't believe he knew any of our names. That was all of it. I turned around and made it back into school and there was this roaring in my ears and whatever else happened--I didn't faint. ") "If the boy was going to kill any one of them, Mel Riggs was the man." Passing by the living room of his home on Coventry Circle a few days after the shooting, Bert Fox told us how he happened to overhear his make this remark to some friends at the house for cocktails, and Bert almost stopped dead in his tracks, he said, struck by a note of harsh jocosity in his father's voice, and by the laughing agreement of other men in the room. (The women, including Bert's mother, made no response he hear. ) "You don't expect them to be cynical like us," Bert said, shocked. Yet Mr.. Fox's opinion was general through Willowsville.

  Pattianne Groves reported that her father, a doctor, actually in her hearing, "Riggs! At last, somebody had the guts to do it." In Willowsville circles, such a remark had a special resonance elsewhere in America. It was a witty, perhaps cruel echo of a notorious remark loudly uttered at the Willowsville Hunt Club when news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was announced to members, "Well.

  At last, somebody had the guts to do it." Though Carolyn Cameron would one day tell us that her husband, who'd grown up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, reported that the same exactly had been made at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club that day! ) In public, though, everybody said What a shock, what a shame,

  tragedy. A man like Mel Riggs shot dead. A sixteen-year-old boy arrested for murder. And Dahlia Heart--"Can you imagine how the woman feels, now?

  Now it's too late?" We'd hear till we wanted to puke What a terrible thing to happen in Willowsville of all places. In Buffalo, maybe. In Buffalo, certainly.

  You expect people to shoot one another in Buffalo, in some (that is, "colored") neighborhoods. But--in Willowsville? Where there's practically no crime? One of the four lowest crime rates in any community in New York State, with no violent crime, ever?

  Melvin Riggs, Jr. ! Shot down dead. A big funeral, to which a number of our parents and relatives went, but none of us, except Artie Riggs, the dead man's nephew. (Artie, who'd never much liked his uncle, kept a on the subject. He never allowed himself to be interviewed, for instance.

  He'd say to us, shrugging, gazing off in a corner of the room, little embarrassed, "Yeah. Shit happens. ") In the media, Melvin Riggs, Jr. , was described as a "Buffalo-area personality"--"a local figure of controversy." For what seemed like all our lives we'd * been seeing Riggs's fat face on billboards and in newspapers, we'd switched on the TV to see him being interviewed on local stations. First he'd run for Erie County treasurer as an independent, and lost, then he ran for one of eight positions on the Erie County Board of Supervisors as a Republican can didate, which he managed to win, after pouring many more thousands of dollars into the campaign than the token yearly salary would appear to justify.

  But the county board of supervisors ruled on zoning issues, and real estate was a hot commodity, and certain of Melvin Riggs's friends were developers. ) How familiar his face on billboards at the edge of where such advertising was allowed--a full, florid, brimming face like a sunflower in full bloom, with a big toothy smile. MELVIN RIGGS, JR. FOR COUNTY SUPERVISOR. QUITE SIMPLY THE BEST. Even in these carefully posed ads, Mel Riggs stared at you with a look of bemused animosity. His hair was sandcolored in a fluffy fringe around a bald crown that shone with imperial luster.

  His eyebrows were several shades darker than his hair, fierce and knotty, his nose was frankly big, with widened, dark nostrils as if he was perpetually sniffing. His smile looked like elastic--if it stretched too far, it would snap.

  Melvin Riggs owned property in downtown Buffalo, including a wellknown supper club, the High Life, on Elmwood Avenue, he was co-owner of the Buffalo Hawks, but he'd lived most of his adult life in Willowsville where he'd married a woman named Laetitia Palmer, from an old, revered family. In Willowsville he'd soon become controversial--"notorious"--for buying a fieldstone colonial on Brompton Road which he razed to make way for an immense neo-Georgian house, to the fury and protests of neighbors he cut down dozens of elms, poplars and junipers, with the bluff

  "They got in the way of the view" of the Willowsville Country Club course. For much of a summer that end of semirural Brompton Road was a nightmare of bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks and chain saws, Riggs would be known as "the man who brought carnage to Brompton Road." Yet he was most "controversial"--"notorious"--as owner of the Buffalo Hawks, our National League baseball team we grew up though the poor guys usually hovered in the bottom third of the league and hadn't been in play-offs since the last year of the Korean War. Still, we the red-hawk insignia on their gray caps and their red-and-gray-striped uniforms, we wore their T-shirts and sweatshirts though each of us, at least once, suffered bouts of revulsion at the Hawks' bad luck and destroyed such articles of with scissors, knives or bare hands. (But was it bad luck, exactly?

  players, hired by the Hawks, soon began to play "erratically"--to use the sportswriters' word--for Buffalo, while players who'd had mediocre seasons in Buffalo, shipped to other parts of the country, immediately improved. ) Melvin Riggs was publicly sanctimonious about the role of baseball in American life, calling it our "natural American religion"--a "great game, a noble game, a sacred' game." To understand America, Melvin Riggs preached, you have to understand baseball, "Of all athletes it's baseball players who are models for American youth." Such were the speeches Riggs made regularly, often on TV To some of us these speeches were uplifting though we see in the man's eyes he was probably bullshitting. "But the best adults say are bullshit. We've got to believe something." Riggs's critics called him an "exploiter of dreams"--a "traitor to sportsmanship"--a "saboteur of baseball." He was accused of betraying his team. Of not giving a damn about individual players, only about money.

  Every baseball season the sports pages of the local papers were with articles, columns and letters pertaining to Riggs and his luckless but scrappy team, Riggs and his quick temper, Riggs and his firings managers, trainers and players. At about the time Dahlia Heart and her preparing to leave Las Vegas for Willowsville, several years Riggs's death, he'd burst into the local media for trading the much-loved pitcher Billy Florence to St.. Louis after Florence had overcome knee surgery to pitch his best season in years, raising the Hawks from dismal place to almost-respectable eighth place, denounced on all sides, his Niagara Square office picketed by outraged fans, Melvin Riggs had boldly gone on the Sal Morningstar Show on WWBN-TV to be interviewed, saying into camera, "Look, friends. I'm not running a charity. Nobody in business--nobody in any business--is running a charity. And the Hawks ain't a charity hospital. The name of the game, friends, hardball." For weeks furor raged in the media. Melvin Riggs appeared in caricature on the editorial page of the News, a rare distinction. More fans picketed his office and a Niagara Falls congressman charged him with "the hometown equivale
nt of the Nazi Final Solution." Garbage would have been on the Riggses' elaborately landscaped front lawn and strips of toilet paper flung into the highest branches of their few remaining trees if alert security cops hadn't turned cars away at Brompton Road and Sheridan Drive.

  Among the guys in these cars were Hank Siefried and his younger Dougie, Jon Rindfleisch who'd one day purchase the Riggs house himself at a price of $1. 5 million, Jax Whitehead and Tommy Nordstrom--all ended up that night, drunk, dumping the garbage across the steps of Amherst High and flinging the toilet paper into the highest branches of the trees in classy Westwood Heights near the Amherst Country Club. )

  season, Riggs coolly canceled the contract of an even more popular player, Jimmy O'Grady, a good-looking hotheaded twenty-six-year-old Lackawanna with whom Riggs had "temperamental differences." So it began to be noted and in some quarters admired that Melvin Riggs, Jr. , had so strong a sense of what he called principle and others his own rampant ego. "You have to hand it to Mel--the S. O. B. is fearless." And, "The S. O. B. answers to no man but himself." Even in Willowsville were women who found him "maddening, but attractive"--a man with "personality"-"personality coming out of his ears." In his trademark fedora, smiling broadly, a cigarette holder clamped between his teeth FDR-style, Riggs took delight in antagonizing others. His quarrels with his business partners, the public and the media became part of his legend. At home games, Hawks fans booed him with gusto. Obscene Lyrics were chanted in his honor. If the poorly Riggs was to blame for "low team morale." If the Hawks played well, it was "iespite Riggs." Picket signs abounded, and became part of TV coverage. RIGGS, BUFFALO NAZI--RIGGS ARE YOU ASHAMED.7--RIGGS DIE!