Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  boy may slide behind the wheel but it's really me, his mother, drives.

  The boy is my medium behind the wheel. I'm the adult responsible.

  I'm the mother. I'm the mother of this child and of these two others"--she indicated the shy, cowering boy and girl in the back seat--"and if must deal with anyone, it's me." This odd impassioned speech left both the and Matt Trowbridge slightly breathless. Those "sea-green" eyes.

  And a glisten of talcumy damp in the cleavage between her breasts.

  "And that is my father, Aaron Leander Heart, Of ficer. He doesn't say much but he's one hundred percent alert and reliable helping out if Johnny needs help--aren't you, Daddy?" The old man, wild-white-haired, with deep ironic creases in both cheeks, a burnt-cork flush to his face, muttered what sounded like, "Why sure." It did flash through Trowbridge's dazzled mind That old guy might armed but in the next instant, staring at Dahlia Heart, w, ho was smiling at him, so reasonably, so intelligently, he'd forgotten the thought, or any thought at all. Snapping shut his packet of traffic tickets and shoving them, quick and embarrassed, back into his pocket. Every word this Magdalena Heart had said made perfect sense.

  Omitted from Matt Trowbridge's account of his initial encounter the Heart family was the fact that, as a Willowsville police of ficer, one of the younger members of a police force noted for its civility and courtesy to Willowsville residents, if not invariably to nonresidents, especially with darker than Caucasian skin, he'd felt obliged to escort the family to their new home in the St.. Albans Hill neighborhood. For of course they were strangers to the village's tricky "lanes"--"drives"--"passes"--"circles"-"ways"--and "places." For of course they'd have gotten hopelessly lost without his assistance. Trowbridge leapt onto his motorscooter to lead the way, Dahlia Heart, who'd traded places with little Johnny, followed in the Cadillac, driving cautiously, the U-Haul in tow. North on Spring Green Trowbridge led them, a quick right east onto Lilac Lane, again north on Meridian Boulevard in the direction of the old historic village and of the old, grand Willowsville estates, another uphill mile to elm-sheltered, Meridian Place where he might have been surprised, if he'd been coherently, and not distracted by afterimages of Dahlia Heart like mysterious, seductive yet elusive dream residues that continue to haunt us long after we wake from sleep, to pursue him through weeks, eventually years, for the primary and most enduring sexual organ the human male is the eye--he might have been surprised to discover Hearts' destination was the stately if rundown old Dutch Colonial house at 8 Meridian Place between better-kept properties owned by the Thruns and the G. George Bannisters. Trowbridge would have assumed, any Willowsville resident, that this landmark house had been owned by the Edgihoffer family since the death of the retired Colonel Esdras Edgihoffer, whose obituary he'd read a few weeks ago in both the Buffalo Evening News and the Willowsville Weekly Gazette.

  "Is this it, Mrs.. Heart? This?"

  "It is, Officer." Splendid the woman Dahlia Heart stood in the sun, whitely blinding as a vision. Radiant face of no age Trowbridge could have stated with certainty (no more than twenty-five or -six, he'd have inaccurately sworn), the bone-pale luxuriant hair, her sea-green that weakened his knees. And the shining key held aloft in her fingers--the key to Willowsville itself.

  "Thank you for your kindness today, Of ficer, which I will never forget." He murmured ma'am it was only just his duty.

  Years would pass. If not tragically, for there is no tragedy in Willowsville, then sadly. Before Matt Trowbridge would again exchange words with Heart. Or even come into her presence again. Though glimpsing the frequently, alone or in the company of men, less frequently, in of her own children. Observing her at a discreet distance with lovesick, yearning, yet unjudging eyes. As, by degrees, he aged, thickened at the waist and began to gray, and she of course did not. As her son the little fellow

  "Johnny" matured by quick degrees into a lanky, good-looking adolescent astonishingly sinuous as an upright snake on the court--the "John Reddy Heart" Trowbridge would read about in the high school section of the Gazette. Until at last the summons came as he'd known it would. For Dahlia Heart was a woman to inspire illicit passion, not in Of ficer Trowbridge himself (happily married, with three children below the age of ten who adored their policeman daddy) then in other less men Though he could not have anticipated the shocking nature of the summons, bringing him and three other police officers to the Dutch Colonial at 8 Meridian Place at 2,12 A. M. of a frigid March morning approximately four years and eight months after Trowbridge had escorted the Hearts to new house. Pistols drawn, breaths steaming, crouched and for a sudden eruption of gunfire, Trowbridge and his comrades cautiously approached the large fieldstone-and-wood house whose windows were ablaze with lights and whose heavy oak front door, glaring an robin's-egg blue, was flung open. They had been summoned by a in response to a 911 call by a distraught neighbor of the Hearts, Mrs.. Irma Bannister, who'd cried into the phone, "Help! Pqlice!

  Emergency!

  Hurry!

  Those white-trash Hearts--they're killing one another next door!"

  John Reddy, so cool.

  John Reddy's mom, burning-hot.

  John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.

  Like it's her wedding day, every day"--it was said of Dahlia Heart, John Reddy's mom. Because the woman always wore white. Because if you saw a flash of white, a kind of hurtful, intense, dazzling-blinding white, a white whiter than most white, a white to sear your eyeballs and leave an afterimage that would burn for hours, it was likely to be Heart.

  But nobody in Willowsville ever called her the White Dahlia--a reference to some notorious never-solved murder case in Los Angeles

  1940s. (Where the female victim, a beautiful young woman who'd worn black, thus called the Black Dahlia in the press, was found murdered, sexually abused and grotesquely mutilated, her torso nearly from her legs. ) "The White Dahlia" was meretricious made-for-TV and not Willowsville's style.

  John Reddy Heart and his mom never knew (for who would have wished to tell them? ) that, before they arrived in Willowsville, Dahlia Heart was a crude rumor in certain Willowsville circles--"that woman" she was called. Or, "that conniving blackjack woman." Or, "that conniving criminal blackjack woman." In their emotional distress the sudden death of retired Colonel Esdras Edgihoffer (about which circulated), the Edgihoffers themselves must have spread the rumor, speaking unguardedly to friends, even to their hired help, who the lurid story through Willowsville. It could be summed up in its phase as an outcry of shock, hurt and class betrayal, as Reggie Edgihoffer remembers vividly, decades later, his mother exclaiming on the phone to a relative. "Oh, Bessie! You won't believe it! The Colonel is dead, and he's teft his fortune to a blackiack woman in Las Vegas!" At first it was believed, or in any case declared, that the fifty-nine-yearold Colonel had died in a hospital of cardiac arrest. But where was the hospital? Palm Beach, where the Colonel had allegedly been living in retirement?

  Washington, D. C. , which the Colonel often visited? Then it out, revealed to Kenny Fischer's mother by her Monday-Thursday woman Carlotta, who did housework for the Matthe Edgihoffers, that in the Colonel had died in Las Vegas where he'd been "gambling away his life savings." (This wasn't entirely true. The Colonel was believed to have lost approximately $75, 000 in the casinos, over a period of twelve days, but he had assets worth much more than that, including property in Palm and at 8 Meridian Place in Willowsville. ) Later it came out, revealed by a half-dozen sources simultaneously at a women's fashion luncheon at Willowsville Country Club, that the Colonel ha) died not in a room but on the floor of Caesars Palace Casino, at a blackiack table where ironically, he hadn't lost with a turn of the card but had won--sums ranging, as the luncheon ladies told and retold the amazing tale, from 5, 000 to 50, 000. But shortly after this it was revealed, by an source close to the grieving family, that the Colonel had in fact died in a private suite on the thirtieth floor of Caesars Palace Hotel where he'd been staying for some time, registered under the name

&n
bsp; "Ike Egan" of Washington, D. C. hadn't been alone.

  He had, though, died of cardiac arrest.

  Discovered by a medical emergency team on the floor beside a "pharaohsized bed" (as the hotel described these mammoth beds), naked, amid tangle of bedclothes partly torn from the bed in his death throes, Colonel had been in close proximity to a woman at the time, and it was this woman who'd called the front desk to report the Colonel's collapse.

  "woman in white"--as described by the medical emergency crew who'd rushed to the suite--had left the premises almost as soon as they arrived, slipping away without anyone taking notice, they'd had but a vague, confused impression of her, believing her to have been a nurse, perhaps, a nursecompanion of the stricken man who'd seemed, in the blue-faced of such a death, to be much older than his age. Closely by legal investigators in the hire of the Edgihoffers, who'd valiantly sought to break the Colonel's last, clearly demented will, the medical attendants said that deaths like "that old man's" occurred so frequently in Las Vegas, in the big hotels, it was difficult to remember one from another--"And the women sort of look alike, too."

  "The Edgihoffer tragedy"--that was exclusively a subject for the generations. Our parents, grandparents, relatives--and their help, too-spoke obsessively of it in the weeks and months following the Colonel's death. (His funeral was strictly private, attended only by close relatives, at the St.. Luke's Episcopal Church where the Colonel had been baptized, as everyone remarked, almost sixty years before to the day. The funeral was so private that even the Amherst Edgihoffers weren't invited--the large, diverse family of Edgihoffers having split off, at about the turn of the century, into two generally rivalrous factions. ) The Colonel with his drooping white mustache, polished-looking bald head and exaggerated military bearing was something of a local celebrity and a war hero, decorated for his valor in France, in World War II, a friendly acquaintance of General Dwight Eisenhovaer during the war years and an occasional visitor to the when

  "Ike" was president, and the Edgihoffers were a well-to-do, much respected local family who owned property in downtown Buffalo, years a thriving Great Lakes city whose original name, Beau Fleuve French, "beautiful rivery meaning the Niagara), wouldn't have seemed so ironic as it would in the economically depressed years to come.

  Edgihoffer name was associated with Christian charity, goodness, standards. It was boring and embarrassing to be an Edgihoffer, Reggie complained, even at Colgate where he went to college there'd be an aura attached to his name, or possibly it was just the sound of it--"Like some old echo out of the dead past." Reggie was stricken with embarrassment by any talk of the

  "Edgihoffer tragedy" because everybody knew that what meant was sex, but sex involving a man of such an advanced age, even forty, it was mortifying even to contemplate. "Whose is it what Uncle Ez did with his money? Or anything any old guy does?

  to do? Christ's sake." We all felt the same way.

  The sexual behavior of older generations--just to think of it made queasy. 4't t "But I have the key. Colonel Edgihoffer placed it in my hand, and doesn't have to be probated in any will." It was true. Colonel Edgihoffer had not only willed his family home at 8 Meridian Place to the woman named Dahlia Heart, of whom no one Willowsville had ever heard, he'd presented her with the actual to the house--"For safekeeping," he'd said mysteriously. As if he'd had presentiment of death. Or a sense that things would shortly veer out of his forever.

  Naturally, the Colonel's children had expected the house, and other properties, to be willed to them. And, in an earlier will, they'd been the principal heirs. But now there was a new will, said to have been "hastily drawn up" in Las Vegas, Nevada, only a few days before the Colonel's death.

  Since the death of Esdras Edgihoffer's wife Mildred a few years before, it was generally conceded that he'd begun to behave strangely.

  Unpredictably.

  Their marriage had not been a happy one--though, by the standards of their era, it hadn't been an unhappy one, but it had nobly for more than three decades and had acquired, in the view of Willowsville society, the featureless stolidity of the most grave-marker in the Episcopal cemetery, the black marble monument J W W Edgihoffer (1834-1910) who had established the family's early fortune in trading on the Great Lakes in the boom years following War The Colonel and his wife had, in later years, traveled separately, belonged to separate clubs, and had distinctly different favorites among their four adult children. Never would they have established separate residences, nor would they have contemplated divorce, for such things weren't done in good society, but there was a collective sense of relief among the when, after years of querulous illnesses and convalescences, Mildred Edgihoffer settled into a serious kidney condition, and died. "Now nothing scandalous can possibly happen between her and Esdras!" The Colonel had genuinely stricken with grief, for several months.

  Around this time, Colonel Edgihoffer was invited to speak at our school for Memorial Day. The red-white-and-blue-striped and starred sixfoot flag was repositioned at stage center, behind the podium at which, in full dress uniform, his left breast gleaming with military decorations bright as tinsel trinkets from our breakfast cereal boxes, the Colonel spoke passionately of "patriotism"--"democracy"--"sacrifice"--"valor"--"vigilance against the Red Menace." You couldn't help but be impressed with the man's rapid-fire speech, which emulated (we thought) the staccato machine-gun fire and flak. And his fierce white mustache of the of Ivory White our moms, or our moms' Negro cleaning ladies, used on day.

  And his ramrod-straight posture, and the flash of his bloodhound eyes. Sure, some of us were bored out of our skulls, since infancy we'd heard tales from our dads and other old guys about World War II, and other wars, the Colonel made a strong impression. And then at the conclusion Colonelxs speech, when our principal, Mr.. Stamish, invited questions from the audience a swarthy sophomore named Ricky Calvo shot his hand the air before anyone else and asked in a wise-guy voice, "Colonel, dld the U. S. drop A-bombs on Japanese civilians?" There was a p"Use Mr.. Stamish, a pork-faced man with polished glasses, in dismay. The Colonel's face reddened. Who the hell was Ricky Ca]vo? A kid, belonging to one of those Italian families who lived on the eastern edge of Willowsville on lower Spring, or Water, or Division. His was a carpenter for Skelton Construction. Or worked for Moss Lawn Service.

  Ricky Calvo wasn't one of us and we sort of resented him for speaking up like that as if he was, but it was thrilling, too, to see the Colonel's reaction, glaring out at him, like an officer glaring at an underling before he orders him shot, saying in a blustery voice, "Why, son, to stop the war.

  Mr.. Truman offered the Japs--Japanese--plenty of opportunities to surrender but they refused. And so--" But wise guy Calvo interrupted, continuing, "On children? on babies? on elderly people? on hospital patients?

  My dad says--" The Colonel interrupted, his voice rising, "The Japs--Japanese--would not surrender unconditionally! Their own pride destroyed them! Their madness!

  They gave us no choice, son." The Colonel had stepped from behind podium to squint angrily into the audience at this defiant adolescent. Fearful of his bloodhound eyes, we cringed in our seats. "Who's been talking to you, son? You have been imbued with the wrong, wrong, wrong idea."

  Calvo could rcfly, Mr.. Stamish quickly cut off the exchange.

  One by one four Calvo boys and three Calvo girls, all swarthy-skinned and good-looking, would attend our high school. Sasha Calvo, one day to acquire renown as John Reddy Heart's girl, was the youngest. We'd never forget Ricky, though he wasn't one of us and never would be.

  He lived at the wrong end of Willowsville. He'd come along years too early to be Italian. ) After this the Colonel began to miss golf dates with old friends.

  He was observed entering the enormous dining room of the Willowsville Club, halting in his tracks, turning, and walking out again.

  vividly white mustache began to droop. He declined dinner invitations without excuses or, unforgivably shocking in Willowsville society as a br
each of promise, he accepted and failed to show up. It was realized that he'd ceased attending church since his wife's funeral. And he'd ceased giving money to the church. Without informing anyone, including even his housekeeper of twenty years, he began to disappear from Willowsville for varying periods of time. He was rumored to be "gambling." He was rumored to be "drinking." The handsome old landmark colonial at 8 Meridian Place, in which Edgihoffers had lived since the late 1890s, began to be neglected, repainting, repair. The intricate rock garden in the side lawn, much-photographed pride of the Gardeners' Club of Buffalo, began to be overgrown and weedy.

  The Colonel's old friend and neighbor Aickley Thrun remarked philosophically, "Even before the blackjack woman, Esdras was consorting with unsavory, treacherous people. The end was foretold." The Edgihoffer family lawyers, the old Buffalo firm of Chase, Rush, Beebee & Pepper, fought to break the Colonel's Las Vegas will, but Heart, following the confidential advice of Jerry Bozer, of Metropolitan Life, with whom she became acquainted (how closely, was disputed)