Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  Heart took Shirleen, in her cumbersome cast, to the Crystal and

  Ton Shoppe, she took Shirleen to the children's wing of the Public Library, helping the beetle-browed, perspiring child with her crutches- "Shirl honey, come on. You can manage these stairs.

  Mom's right here, aren't l?" For such excursions Dahlia Heart modified her ordinarily dazzling-white costume, she wore an oyster-white trench coat over slacks of a similar offwhite hue, she tied a pale pink diaphanous scarf around her throat, or wore powder-gray gloves, a matching velvet hat. When at last the cast was removed from Shirleen's leg, Dahlia celebrated by taking the girl to Brown's for several pairs of new shoes, including black patent-leather ballerina flats of the kind all the girls were wearing, she charmed the salesgirls at Junior Miss, bringing in the shy, finger-sucking fifth grader who had to be coaxed into trying on spring jackets and coats, obstinately refusing to contemplate her image in the three-way mirrors. "But you are a pretty girl, if only you wouldn't frown so," Dahlia encouraged Shirleen, as the chimed in like a chorus, "--Yes you are!" Dahlia continued the by providing a luncheon for Shirleen and eight of Shirleen's "closest girlfriends" from her fifth-grade class, at the Village Women's Club.

  Reid, mother of one of the girls, marveled at how adroitly Dahlia whom she scarcely knew finessed her into arranging for the luncheon, since she, and not Mrs.. Heart, was a member of the club. At least the paid," Frannie told her friends. "Paid me. ") On another occasion, took Shirleen downtown to Kleinhans Music Hall where mother and daughter saw a lively stage version of West Side Story, tickets by the Buffalo personality Melvin Riggs who sat with them for most of the performance.

  We'd heard that, after Riggs's death, interviewed by police, Shirleen couldn't identify photographs of Melvin Riggs. We wondered if she'd erased memory of West Side Story, too. ) At our fifteenth class reunion there was Verrie Myers, now Hollywood star Veronica Myers, on the eve of the opening of her seventy-sixmillion-dollar film starring Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, how in the Crystal one afternoon she, Ginger McCord and Mary Schultz spied on Dahlia Heart and her mysterious daughter. That girl who looked nothing like her mother, or her brother John Reddy--"Sort gnomish creature, like something that'd crawled up from underground, blinking in the light. Yet she was appealing, too. When her eyes glanced up, through the mirror, you remember that ellipsis of mirrors in the Crystal? if you sat in a corner? --you'd feel an actual shock thinking Why, poor little girl without exactly knowing why because, my God, we'd all have died to have a mother glamorous as Dahlia Heart. I mean--that's what we at the time." Verrie laughed, startled, as if she was having a now. It was like music how Ginger joined in, though since Siefried, with Dougie's drinking problems, which possibly she hadn't comprehended were actual problems at the time of marrying him, Ginger lost most of her old flirty-teasing ways and was now almost somber, severe- "Yes. We were there in the booth watching John Reddy's the mirrors seeking some clue to her, and through her to him.

  Because there was magic to her, as much as to him. So we were studying her, smoking our grown-up cigarettes and studying her, the way adolescent girls do, not just memorizing but absorbing, like through our pores. And then gradually it happened we were studying the daughter. Shirleen, who'd one day this remarkable nun, this teacher of autistic children, on 60 Minutes they compared her practically to Helen Keller reaching into another's and bringing in light'--only who could have imagined such a thing, then?

  My God. Like Verrie says, she was a gnome. Maybe we're a little, we're drunk, but anyway we can say the kid wasn't any of her I m, om. But we got riveted by her. A kind of spiritual tugging.

  This wasn't long after that pathe ic ugly cast had come off her leg, and about a month before the shooting. This was winter. And as Verrie says the girl was somehow. Her eyes. As a hurt animal is appealing." Verrie said, "But a hurt 4 animal can be dangerous, too." We looked at her expectantly, there was such a vivid, electric intensity to her face, it was natural to her in a film, and ourselves as mere background figures. Because of her public prominence, anything Veronica Myers said had a tone of authority.

  scripted, not, like our own language, improvised and faltering.

  "John Reddy's sister was one of those ancient children," Verrie said.

  "As if her soul had passed through many incarnations. Dahlia Heart looked and young, the girl looked and acted old. It didn't surprise me to learn she became a nun, to salvage not just her soul but her life.

  " Verrie held her glass * out for her host Doug Siefried, Ginger's husband, to pour champagne into, it was Verrie's second, or perhaps third, glass, she'd grown breathless with the recitation as if it held a special significance of which she wasn't herself certain. Shirleen had eaten her Crystal Banana Split (chocolate and strawberry ice cream, Reddi Wip and maraschino cherries) hungrily while Heart spoke to her, calling her "hon"--"honey"--"sweetheart" with a pleading in her voice which the girl seemed to ignore. Ginger said, thoughtfully, "There was a glisten of hurt, or fury, in the girl's eyes. I recognized it years later when Jennifer, our daughter, was two years old. That sudden eruption of a child's will." Verrie said, "There was something in Dahlia Heart's eyes, too. But no one ever saw. Publicly, I mean."

  "Her lover Riggs was abusing her. Threatening her."

  "But nobody knew.

  "John Reddy knew."

  "Oh yes--John Reddy knew. But maybe not exactly, then." It was crucial for us to recall the exact sequence of events in the life of John Reddy Heart for we knew how, with the passage of time, our would melt and lose definition, like our muscles. We'd noted the example of our elders who easily and even affably confused decades, mistook sons for fathers, and fathers for sons. In the Crystal that day the girls were compulsively pushing quarters into the jukebox. You had to be quick to get a quarter in, to beat out other booths. Verrie favored sentimental pop classics like Elvis Presley's

  "Heartbreak Hotel," Ginger favored down-and-dirty like Lollipop

  "Die Lovin' You," Mary Louise had a weakness for the Shrugs' rockabilly

  "Broke Heart Blues." (We were missing Mary Louise at this reunion. She'd come for the tenth, and she'd come for the twentieth, but she was missing the fifteenth--she had a new baby, her fourth, living in Albany with her politician bureaucrat husband we called Ice Eyes. ) Verrie was saying, "When Mrs.. Heart left the Crystal with her daughter, stared.

  It was like a movie. And the girl who'd been waiting on them, Ray Gottardi's sister Gloria, told us how Mrs.. Heart had been bringing the girl into the sweet shop twice a week, like she was trying to cheer her up--'You know, trying to be like other mothers and daughters. Especially in public.

  We asked her what did Mrs.. Heart say to her daughter, that she could hear, and Gloria said, She's trying to get the kid to smile at other kids in the place. "C-'mon, honey, try. So they'll come over and talk to you. To us." But kid can't smile. It's like you'd try to get a wounded animal to smile. But Mrs.. Heart is a classy lady, leaves me real tips not pennies and nickels like certain cheapskates. Gloria paused to let that sink in. The three of us wanted to hide under the table! Then she says, And she's nice to me.

  Like I'm not a servant but somebody real. Just now she left me a two-dollar tip and says, "I know what it's like to be on your feet all day, Gloria--it's hell."

  she winked at me. A woman who lives in St.. Albans Hill, winking at me." It was a remarkable performance of Verrie's. Not only could we hear Gloria Gottardi (whom some of us dimly remembered) we could see Gloria Gottardi. Verrie had become, for the duration of the anecdote, Gottardi.

  "Why didn't Verrie continue with a stage career?" was a question sometimes batted about by her old friends. "She had talent. She act. It was something that came over her, her voice, her eyes would turn liquid. She could make you doubt you'd ever known her. ") Of course most of us had heard this story, seen this performance, before.

  Even Wayne Butt who'd transferred to WHS in our senior year and had never seen the notorious Dahlia Heart in person had he
ard this story more than once. But we loved it. We were thrilled by it. Words to us as the words of an old childhood movie. I know what it's like to be your feet all day, Gloria--it's hell.

  Had gorgeous Dahlia Heart who'd inherited the Edgihoffer property Meridian Place once been a waitress? We filed such a notion away for the record.

  And for the record, too, certain remarks the Hearts made to one in the Glen Theatre one Sunday evening a few days after news broke of Jerry Bozer's "nervous collapse" and hospitalization. (It was said that Mr.. Bozer was drinking heavily, fired from his job at Metropolitan Life he'd been a top executive for twelve years, and had moved out of the family home on Castle Creek Lane. Bo never spoke of his dad any longer, not even in derision, and none of his friends wanted to ask. In time, like others, Mr.. Bozer would disappear from Willowsville. ) Suzi Zeigler and Roger Zwaart spoke of how they'd happened to be sitting in their usual seats in the back row of the Glen Theatre at a second-run showing of The Sound of Music when who should file in two rows ahead of them but the Hearts--the entire family!

  They'd come at the most popular time for families, Sunday at seven p. m.

  Friday and Saturday nights were date nights, of course. None of would've wished to be caught dead at the Glen on Sunday evening with our families. ) The theater was about two-thirds full and everybody, Suzi said, knew the Hearts were there within seconds of their appearance, stealing glances at them, or frankly staring if they were in a strategic position.

  and Roger who ordinarily slouched in their seats, sort of partially worn-velvet seats in the middle of the row, by now fitted to their buttocks in the strained posture in which they sat for hours pressed together, kissing dreamily, now sat alertly upright and leaned forward to observe the Hearts. It was amazing- "How normal they seemed. I mean, like anybody else," Suzi said.

  John Reddy oblivious of eyes snatching at him from out of the semi-dark led the way, carrying a giant box of popcorn and a large Coke, he looked older than sixteen, needing a shave, his hair greasier than usual, slicked to the back of his head but falling down in quills, Roger thought, sure, John Reddy was embarrassed like anybody'd be, seen in public with his family at the Glen, but Suzi disagreed--"John Reddy always had such poise. You could never tell thoughts." They did note that John Reddy was patient to the point of impatience with his younger sister, the beetle-browed girl of ten or eleven who walked stiffly as if her leg was still in a cast, she was slow to settle in her seat, puffing and fussing, carrying a Coke and what appeared to be a fifty-cent box of M&M's. Beside her sat John Reddy's younger brother, a pigeonbreasted boy with glasses and a skeptical look--"Sharp kid, " Roger said. "My brother Jamie's in his ninth-grade class." Then there was Heart, amazing to see her in the role of mother, not that she looked like anybody's mother, she might've been (this was Suzi's observation) John Reddy's slightly older sister or even (but this was weird to contemplate) his woman friend, the two glancing toward each other (so both Suzi and Roger noted) from time to time during the movie as if to check How're we doing?

  O. K. ?

  Bringing up the rear was old Mr.. Heart in his cowboy hat, rumpled and noisy boots, both he and Dahlia had their arms full with Cokes, and popcorn boxes, one of which old Mr.. Heart promptly spilled as soon as he sat down. "God damn." And Dahlia whispered, "Daddy. Hush."

  feature began with a burst of Technicolor. Fortunately Suzi and Roger had seen The Sound of Music before, or in any case they'd sat through it, Suzi loved the movie, Roger couldn't bear it. This time, Roger said, Julie Andrews's almost too luminous face reflected on as much of Heart's face as he could see from his seat. Suzi marveled, "It amazing thing. How on the Hearts' faces, which were such rapt, faces, I could see The Sound of Music like ghost images rippling water." Except John Reddy must have grown restless, for he slipped away three times during the movie to use the men's room or possibly to step outside the exit, which you weren't supposed to do at the Glen, to have a quick smoke though smoking, of course, was forbidden for WHS team during basketball season. Neither Suzi nor Roger dared follow John Reddy to find out what he was doing, nor did Mimi Duncan behind the counter know though she calculated he was out in the alley for "somewhere between five and eight minutes each time. Alone. ") Of all the Hearts, Dahlia seemed the most moved by the sentimental story of children, dogs, nuns and love in the scenic Swiss Alps, she wiped at her eyes during crucial scenes, and laughed joyfully during others, though Mrs.. Heart, too, away from her seat several times, to use the ladies' room presumably, and, as Suzi subsequently learned, by querying Mimi Duncan, to make a call in the manager's office--"Something Mr.. Nordstrom doesn't anyone do, but he let her. That real pretty blond woman. It must've been an important call, huh?" Old Mr.. Heart, his cowboy hat in his lap, nodded off frequently during the movie but, when he was awake, could be responding to it emphatically, laughing, muttering, even groaning.

  And when THE END flashed onto the screen amid buoyant, deafening music, music of happiness, without a cue from Mrs.. Heart all five Hearts burst into spontaneous applause. "What a lovely movie!" Mrs.. Heart exclaimed, eyes shining with tears. "What a wonderful, true movie!" The Hearts' enthusiasm was contagious, others in the audience joined in. Filing out of the theater, The Hearts were heard to say to one another, as Suzi and Roger tried not to be too conspicuous about following after them, especially John Reddy's eye, these remarks, "This was fun!"

  "This was fun!"

  "Let's do this again--soon!"

  "Would anyone like the rest of my popcorn?"

  "Would anyone like the rest of my M&M's?"

  "Would anyone like the rest of my Coke?"

  "Would anyone like the rest of my popcorn?"

  "I love Technicolor, it's like real life."

  "I love Technicolor, it's better than real life." tohn Reddy looked his man in the eye.

  Said lohn Reddy, Time to die! tohn Reddy, tohn Reddy Heart.

  Evangeline Fesnacht was our chronicler of disaster. Already in school she'd exhibited those strains of precocious morbidity and hyperscrupulosity that would distinguish her, years later, in an adulthood forged beyond the leafy perimeters of the Village of Willowsville as E. S. Fesnacht, a voice of disturbing but penetrating insight into the tragic human condition.

  In seventh grade, elected secretary of our class, Evangeline insisted upon including in her fastidious minutes not only every minor transaction of our meetings but parenthe ical synopses of events that had occurred the weeks between meetings--accidents, illnesses, traumas, and even deaths as they pertained, however obliquely, to members class. Miss Scholes, English teacher and seventh-grade advisor, looked on in amazement as Evangeline read in a somber, quavering voice of MacLeod's "nine-day chickenpox," Demott Duncan's "broken left and facial lacerations, when he fell from a fire escape at the of the school," the "near-fatal vehicular accident on Youngman Highway"

  Campbell's older brother Ryan, our social studies teacher Mrs..

  Carlisle's "miscarriage--her second in two years," Dwayne Hewson's grandfather's death "by coronary thrombosis while teeing off at the Willowsville Club" and the removal of a "cancerous lung" from Smitty, one of custodians. Evangeline's mild, suety eyes glowed behind the of her pink plastic glasses as she recited these grave yet poetic facts that gave to the ordinary dimensions of our meeting room in the Academy Street School an air of opening out not onto the familiar rear of the rain-washed grounds and freshly laid asphalt pavement but onto eternity. Miss interrupted, "Evangeline! Those items have nothing in the to do with our last meeting!" and Evangeline replied, with equanimity startling in a twelve-year-old, "Miss Scholes, excuse me. These items are far more significant than the minutes of some silly old meeting. They are of the great world of chance and fate that surrounds us." Never again would Fesnacht be elected class secretary though each spring at election time, year following year through our junior year, stubbornly, spitefully, she presented herself as a candidate, taping hand-lettered posters urging te. S. FESNACHT FOR CLASSSECRETARYTTRUTH, TRUTH &
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTHW to school walls and telephone poles nearby, she argued reproachfully, it seemed to us almost warningly, "I am taking minutes' on our lives you allow me to or not." As Ritchie Eickhorn said of his old, abrasive schoolgirl-rival, "From the first, you knew that E. S. Fesnacht' was out for blood." It wasn't generally acknowledged that Evangeline Fesnacht had school in Willowsville in kindergarten, that is, she was a member of that elite (if unofficial) group of thirteen known, enviously by some, as the Circle. (Eight girls, five boys--by chance, it seemed, all well-to-do, from prominent Willowsville families. Yet those in the Circle claimed never to think of their special status, some professed to be embarrassed by it--"I think it's all just so ridiculously trivial and snobbish," Verrie Myers said. "I want to be known for other things for God's sake! --like talent." The five of the Circle--Dwayne Hewson, Ken Fischer, Smoke Filer, Roger Zwaart Rindfleisch--denied emphatically that the Circle existed and pointed out that there were a number of others in our class who'd begun with them at the Academy Street School--"But their dads are nobody special, or they don't live in the right part of town, so, somehow, it doesn't count. ") Evangeline Fesnacht's father was president of Fesnacht Electronics, Inc. , her mother belonged to the exclusive Village Women's League, Fesnachts lived in a large half-timbered English Tudor house on the Common between the Burnhams and the Lerouxs, yet none of this made difference, "Poor Vangie. Not only didn't she fit in, she didn't even know it." Decades later, a literary journalist preparing