Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The cruder term, bastard, was not to be uttered.

  In the Village of Willowsville, there were no bastards. Even on slumping-down east edge of town, beyond Spring Street, Water Street, Division, women who were mothers were married.

  Our moms pondered the possibility that the Heart children--John Reddy "and the two others," whose names no one could remember--hadn't the same father. For it was generally conceded that the younger brother and sister more closely resembled each other in their plainness, doggedness, and myopia than either resembled John Reddy. But then these two didn't resemble their mother, either.

  And with the passing of time, Farley and Shirleen would resemble Heart less and less.

  Among those WHS teachers who'd claim to have gotten to know John Reddy after he returned to school, sobered by his year at Tomahawk and shorn of his luster as a star athlete, it was Mr.. Dunleddy junior-senior biology teacher who relayed the information--"But it's confidential"--that John Reddy's father had died a hero's death in the Air Force, a test pilot who'd been killed in the line of duty and "lost somewhere in the vastness of a desert--possibly the Sahara." Whether John Reddy's father and Dahlia Heart had been legally married, Mr.. Dunleddy said stiffly, "I wouldn't presume that such private information was any of my business." Our teacher's heavy bulldog face expressed a strange, touching protectiveness for John Reddy (whose grades in biology were barely passing) and scorn for gossip-mongers.

  Miss Bird, our brilliant and caustic-tongued English teacher, was equally, strangely, protective of John Reddy. Perhaps she, like Mr..

  Dunleddy, perceived him as an orphan, as more vulnerable than we who were his contemporaries could perceive him. Her claim to intimate knowledge of the mysterious Heart family was based upon frequent after-school with John Reddy (who was barely passing English, too) and upon a more curious episode, she'd given a lift one evening in her car to Reddy's grandfather Aaron Leander Heart, whom she discovered "wandering by wayside" several miles east of Willowsville on the busy highway Road, the white-haired old gent appeared to be disoriented, like sleepwalker, smelling of whisky and dressed in mismatched clothing a hefty burlap sack whose contents, clanking and clicking like glassware, he'd declined to identify. Old Mr.. Heart hadn't known Miss Maxine Bird, course, but Miss Bird recognized him, for she'd seen him once or twice in Willowsville in the company of John Reddy and deduced their kinship.

  Was Miss Bird watchful of John Reddy even outside of school? It was an open secret in those days that ferocious Maxine Bird with her red-dyed skinned-back hair and intolerant green eyes and high-strung nerves and fervent idealism about all things literary had a crush on John Reddy, less clear was whether the thirty-five-year-old teacher was aware of it. ) It took considerable cajoling, Miss Bird said, to convince this eccentric old man to climb into her car, though traffic on Transit Road was rushing by as usual, and the weather was miserable--rain laced with sleet, that perpetual cold wind from Lake Erie. But at last Mr.. Heart was persuaded and slid into the rear with his bulky burlap bag, which must have weighed thirty pounds, and Miss Bird, fired with a sense of mission, drove him directly home. Old Mr..

  Heart reeked of alcohol and of something damp and rotted. He was stony-faced, with an affectation of deafness. But Miss Bird talked. Like all teachers she was ninety percent words. So she talked. "But only when I mentioned John Reddy-'Your grandson is one of my most promising students'--did Mr..

  alive. He snorted, "Promising"--huh! That don't mean a hill of beans." Each time she told this story, Miss Bird laughed excitedly at this point. With the passage of time her red-dyed hair would retain its aggressive luster even as it thinned, her pale, plain face began to wither when she was only in her fifties, yetit was with girlish vigor she spoke of John Reddy--"Those remarkable ysars. That saga." Forever in our eyes she would be our Miss Bird whom, when we'd been her students, we'd hated, from authority she derived an air of the proprietary and the secretive.

  For instance, Miss Bird would only hint, yet would never come out and say explicitly, how startled she'd been by seeing the former Edgihoffer house, a village landmark, so transformed--its oaken front door, shutters, and trim painted a bright robin's-egg blue instead of black or dark green. And the beautiful rock garden invaded by painted plaster-of-paris gnomes and gigantic frogs. And John Reddy's salmon-colored Cadillac a glaring presence in the where, evidently, he'd been repairing it, in the innocent way in which, in less prestigious neighborhoods than St.. Albans Hill, teenaged boys wolked on their cars and motorcycles in full view of neighbors and passersby.

  Of these distractions, Miss Bird would only exclaim, ruefully, "Well!

  Hearts certainly made their mark on the community, didn't they." Of John Reddy's private life, Miss Bird invariably hinted that there was much she knew that she couldn't reveal. It was her conviction, though, that John Reddy's father had been married to his mother--"John Reddy is as legitimate as anyone in Willowsville." Whether the identical man was the father of the and sister wasn't so clear.

  There was a way we admired that Miss Bird drew herself up to her height of five feet one inch, jammed her harlequin-style maroon glasses against the bridge of her narrow nose, and declared, as was on record having declared to numerous inquisitive reporters, "Yes, have been a tragic' family. But a thoroughly American family.

  "Judge not, lest ye be judged." It was Coach Woody McKeever whose claim to have known John Reddy intimately seemed the most plausible, though Coach had a hyperbole and even hysteria, like many high school sports coaches.

  throat was raw from yelling at generations of oafish high school athletes but he spoke in a cracked, tender voice of John Reddy--"The son Mrs..

  McKeever and I never had, by God's inscrutable grace." Yet Coach couldn't resist hinting that he too was in possession of "confidential information" about the Heart family he would never reveal. Of the faculty and staff of Willowsville High, including even our harassed principal, Mr..

  Stamish, it was Coach McKeever who was most pursued by reporters and TV camera crews, he complained of having to have his telephone number changed to an unlisted number, having to leave school by a different exit every afternoon, and having to wear dark glasses in public. He limited interviews sessions at such excellent local restaurants as the Old Eagle House where, though by degrees he became drunk, and maudlin-weepy, he nothing away that might have embarrassed or offended John Reddy.

  favorite, much-quoted utterance remained, without adornment, "My is broken for that boy." (At our fortieth class reunion we'd still be quoting Coach with affection, it would be Art Lutz who could imitate him with eerie facility in that cracked, tender voice. ) We admired Coach's reticence, his air of propriety. For it did seem, in fact, with the loss of the spectacular basketball player he'd been grooming for a big basketball school, that his heart was broken.

  Except, at one of our early reunions, possibly the tenth, at a beer tent in Tug Hill Park where Coach, a guest of honor, had consumed ice-cold beer (to be precise, beers--light, dark, mellow, strong, domestic, imported, "gourmet"--our WHS jocks were beer fanatics) with a dozen or more of his favored former athletes, he turned emotional toward evening, hinting that he knew "a damned lot more than I would ever disclose to the police or the D. A. s office" about what had happened in that bedroom at 8

  Place on the night of Melvin Riggs's death. "Not half of it came out in the trial, you can be sure. Not one-third." By this time Coach surprised us, he'd gotten so drunk. Swaying on his feet so that Bo Bozer, Ken Fischer, Tommy

  "Nosepicker" Nordstrom (never a favorite of Coach's in the days) had to hold him up. Coach's eyes wzere brimming with tears and his flaccid skin looked boiled. We expected him to shake us off and yell something comic and insulting, but Coach was deathly serious.

  We all knew, but would never out of tact have alluded to the melancholy fact, that since the departure of John Reddy Heart from varsity basketball, Coach had never led any team through a really satisfactory season and the school board and local alums
had hired a younger, more competitive coach to ease him out, if he was kept on the WHS faculty it was for sentimental reasons and because he had tenure and belonged to the A. F. of L. teachers' union and couldn't be fired. He was saying loudly in our startled faces, in his cracked, husky voice, "That boy John Reddy was a damned good boy despite his background, noble boy, y'know what I'm saying? Protectlve of his mother, eh?

  Y'know what I'm saying? Protective of that"--he was puffing, out of breath, eyes contracted with an unspeakable vision, almost choking on the word he was forced to utter so he spat it out like something foul and stinging--"womun." Nor did we ever learn if Dahlia Heart had been a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. All information pertaining to Mrs.. Heart's private life prior to her move to Willowsville was excluded from trial procedure and testimony, thanks to the aggressive tactics of the defense attorney Rollie Trippe, whom she'd hired to represent John Reddy, but anecdotal evidence seemed to suggest she'd teen an employee of some kind at Caesars Palace.

  Mr..

  Trippe, who played squash regularly at the Buffalo Athletic Club with Blake Wells's dad, told Mr.. Wells that Mrs.. Heart had been "in public relations" at the casino. And that it was as she'd testified--"She fainted easily.

  " Other men acquainted with Dahlia Heart refused to provide information about her private life, but it came to be believed, with scorn, that in fact they knew little--"It's easy to be discreet if somebody's pulled wool over your eyes." Melvin Riggs's assistant at the Buffalo Hawks, Inc. , spoke with grudging admiration of Dahlia Heart as a "shrewd businesswoman if only she'd herself." From other sources, among them Herman Skelton's wife, Irma, it was said that Mrs.. Heart had been, variously, a "photographer's model"-an "exotic dancer"--a "high-priced call girl." (Embittered by the ruin of her marriage, Irma Skelton was not considered, even by her loyal friends, a reliable witness. ) The Thruns and the Bannisters, neighbors of Mrs.. Heart's in the sequestered elm-shaded cul-de-sac Meridian Place, denied any knowledge of her and her family, though it was reported to Mrs..

  Thrun by her cleaning woman that the Hearts must have moved into Colonel's house with next to no possessions. "Myrtle said that and no moving van ever arrived. All that family's worldly goods were in the ratty U-Haul. Imagine!" Mrs.. Bannister's cook reported having seen, out of the U-Haul by the Hearts, "spangled dresses on satin coat hangers" and a "huge big tumble, in a bushel basket, of fancy high-heeled shoes"-which bolstered theories of modeling, dancing and so forth.

  Yet other reliable sources, including the assistant prosecuting who'd tried so hard to send John Reddy away for life like a hardened criminal, insisted that Mrs.. Heart had a "shrewd legal and contractual mind"

  her public pose of being uninformed and confused and overwhelmed by proceedings They insisted (though without confirmation from Rollie Trippe's side) that Dahlia Heart had helped direct her son's defense. It was said of the boy that he took after his mother in crucial ways.

  Despite his erratic school record, he was believed by certain of his teachers to have a "mind for numbers and abstract thought." He was certainly physically to a remarkable degree, with, as Coach McKeever liked to say, marveling, "reflexes swift and accurate as lightning." Of course, Farley Heart was immediately recognized by his teachers at the Academy Street School as a "math whiz"--"a budding genius." Shirleen Heart, that strange, shyly child, who in another, later era might have been diagnosed as mildly autistic, was acknowledged to have neither any aptitude for numbers nor much of grammar and syntax and communication skills, but she could precisely define "big" vocabulary words with astonishing accuracy--"Like an intense little robot," as one of her teachers said. John Reddy never spoke of his mother, of course. Not to us. Not in our hearing. Taciturn about all things, he would've been doubly taciturn about her, as about his family in general.

  Dwayne Hewson insisted that John Reddy was proud of his younger brother, though. There'd been a photo in the Gazette of three prize-winning at the Academy Street School, one of them Farley Heart, at the eighth grade, and Dwayne had mentioned this to John Reddy and John Reddy brightened and said, "Yeah. My brother's getting grades enough for us both. I'm glad. ") But one day in the locker room after basketball practice, when they were sophomores, Dougie Siefried who had a crush on Dahlia Heart blurted out to John Reddy impulsively, "Was your mom ever in the movies, John? She coulda been!" and John Reddy, scratching roughly at a cluster of bleeding pimples between his shoulder blades, said, wincing, "Shit, man, why ask me? Our moms have their secret lives." Our moms have their secret lives. This, too, became a much-repeated remark of John Reddy's. "Wow! Cool." We didn't believe it, though.

  Years later, Scottie Baskett found himself in Las Vegas, Nevada, at a convention of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, and impulsively--"Why the hell not? "--to try to track down the Vegas of the mysterious Hearts. "See if I could find out something about no one else knew." (The notorious woman had long since vanished Willowsville, of course. Like John Reddy. ) A less zealous, optimistic and dogged individual than he would not have even supposed that, so years after the Hearts had emigrated east from Vegas, that city of all American cities phantasmagoric and insubstantial as a delirium hallucination, there could be any trace, any vestigial memory of them. But went to the Las Vegas County Clerk's office and came away with street addresses, for the appropriate years, of

  "D. Heart", took cab to the first, on Paradise Street, a commercial street behind the Hotel & Casino, and was stunned to see that the entire block was now a lowrental Days Inn motel, a parking garage, and a Taco Bell, took the cab to the second, El Dorado, behind the shimmering Mirage Hotel & Casino, d, isappointed to see a car wash where a dwelling of some sort had once stood, in a bustling Latino neighborhood, took a cab to the third, on a more distant street near the dissolving edge of the city, and here, at 837 Arroyo Seco, Scottie discovered an adobe bungalow. He wasn't prepared for the impact of such a sight. "I thought, Jesus. Why didn't I have a camera.

  Dahlia Heart and John Reddy lived here." Years--as many as thirty--had passed since the Hearts hadlllived in this modest bungalow that looked as if rust-corroded, but it seemed clear that the residence, like the neighborhood, couldn't have changed much. Single-story dwellings with postage-stamp front one-car garages like doghouses--built in the forties, or earlier.

  At 837 Arroyo Seco, the facade appeared to be cracking even as Scottie stared.

  The oncegarish, now dulled orangish-red paint had peeled in patches, the s small windowpanes had the milky lustre of glaucous eyes, the windows were further obscured, from the inside, by what appeared to be strips aluminum foil. Yet there was a miniature, crumbling porch upon Scottie eagerly hypothesized) the lovely young mother Dahlia Heart might have sat, cradling an infant John Reddy in her arms. "I could see it, almost!" Scottie told us, with a look of pain. "And me, Dr..

  Baskett, kidded by the girls on my staff I'm always so overprepared, with no camera." Next door at 839 Arroyo Seco, on the crumbling adobe porch of a smudged custard-yellow bungalow, a replica of the Hearts' old bungalow, sat a grizzled old man with a bare, sunken chest and flaccid breasts, Scottie and sipping beer from a can. So Scottie called over cheerfully to inquire if the man had lived in this neighborhood for very long, and the man said sourly, with the deadpan air of a stand-up comedian, "Long?

  Only half my fuckin life, doc." Scottie asked if the man could remember a resident of 837 Arroyo Seco who'd lived there years ago, as many as thirty, more--"A really beautiful, gorgeous woman named Dahlia Heart. She had children, two boys and a girl, a father who lived with her, a white-haired old fellow with some strange name of antiquity--Leander, I think." Seeing bare-chested man's look of disdain, Scottie added, "It's likely that this woman, Mrs.. Heart, worked at Caesar's Palace, or some other casino." Scowling, the man scratched both his breasts with spiteful vigor.

  He said, "For prostate cancer the fuckers give you fuckin hormones that grow tits like a woman. Kindly explain to me, doc, you make a million a year can't you figure out
the fuckin dosage?" Scottie said, startled, "How--do I'm a doctor?" and the man snorted with laughter, saying, "What?

  You gotta be kidding, doc." Scottie tried to steer the subject back to Heart. He was convinced this old man had known her. Of course this old man have known Dahlia Heart." Then it happened my life was sort of passing before my eyes. I tasted panic, the way that guy was looking at me.

  He's seen the Hearts, now he's seeing me. Soon I'll be gone, too. It was unnaturally hot for November--the sun was wrongly positioned in the sky. A winter sun, you're thinking, but summer heat. My hair's thinning and I should've worn a hat. I'm so old--almost forty-five. Did you ever dream you'd get so-old? I weigh thirty pounds more than I did in high school. I was such a skinny, hopeful kid in high school. Just four ballots short of Most Likely to Succeed. After taxes and insurance I pull in about five thousand a year.

  This practice in Westchester. I've got four kids I'm proud of--more or less.

  I'm an officer of this plastic surgeons' association and I'm giving a talk the next morning at the Hilton. My marriage is O. K. I married a Cornell who was looking to marry, I guess, a doctor. But it's O. K. But here my life's passing before my eyes in Vegas, in this old lost neighborhood-'Arroyo Seco. I mean I really was panicking, like going under anesthesia. I felt like crying--I'd never been friends with John Reddy Heart but I'd lost him. The girls I'd wanted to date, Pattianne Groves, Verrie Myers, knew I existed. It came over me--nobody's happy anymore. Nobody's with their bodies, or with their spouse's body. We're too old too fast. We aren't ready to be so old. We're our parents for Christ's sake!