Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  upon strategic occasions Buffalo's longtime mayor, Democrat Budd Dorsey, joined in the chorus of Riggs denouncers, Dorsey and his entourage often sat with Riggs and his entourage in Riggs's elevated box at Pilot Field. Sometimes the governor and his entourage joined them. Riggs's grown children sometimes included in the party but more often not, Riggs's wife never appeared, with the excuse that baseball crowds "oppressed frightened her", it wasn't Melvin Riggs's style to pass himself off as a family man.

  Often in his Pilot Field box as often at the High Life Supper Club there were beautiful young women "assistants" with ambiguous duties. Though looked like models or showgirls they were identified as "political aides," for in stance, attached to Mayor Dorsey's office, or "public relations consultants," or "liaison officers." One of them was a "business associate" of Riggs's introduced as

  "Mrs.. Heart"--a striking platinum-blond woman of perhaps who wore very dark Hollywood-style sunglasses even on overcast days and entirely white, dazzling-white clothes. Through the baseball game, during lulls s_ in the action, TV cameras would cut to Riggs's box providing closeups of the big gregarious man with the florid sunflower face seated beside the woman in white--"Controversial Melvin Riggs, Jr. , co-owner of the Hawks.

  With a lady friend." Riggs too wore dark glasses, checked suits and neckties, a fedora tilted on his head and his cigarette holder clamped between his teeth as he smiled into the camera, winking. Eat your hearts out, suckers.

  On an August afternoon seven months and eleven days before Melvin Riggs would be shot down dead, naked, in her upstairs bedroom at Meridian Place, Willowsville, Riggs and Mrs.. Heart were seated together in Riggs's box at Pilot Field watching the Hawks, fueled by desperation, almost win against the Chicago Cubs, 4-3. It was a tumultuous game of rollercoaster intensity at moments and Mrs.. Heart was observed jumping to feet with the others, clapping, laughing giddily in the spirit of the occasion as Riggs, swaying on his feet, his face flushed more vividly than usual, slung an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her against him--"What'd I tell you, eh? These guys are O. K." A Hawks player with two strikes, against him swung and connected with the ball hitting an almost-home run deep into left field where a Cubs player, as if by perverse magic, fumbled the ball. Screams, cheers! Two runs! You might have believed that Mrs..

  was a baseball fan, or a fan in any case of the Buffalo Hawks, so did she applaud. A woman resplendent in white, white jersey dress with a matching coat, silk-lined, a white silk scarf knotted about her throat, a white satin slouch hat with a veil to protect her complexion from the sun, the dark glasses, crimson lipstick and crimson nail polish, on her slender feet, spikeheeled white kidskin shoes. The beautiful but mysterious Mrs.. Heart been introduced to other guests in Riggs's box as a "business associatefriend" of Riggs's whom he'd been advising, he said, on stocks and other investments, it seemed that Riggs's advice had paid off, for Mrs..

  Heart said, "I have reason to be very grateful to Mr.. Riggs," with a sidelong smile at the beaming Riggs. After Riggs's death a friend of Riggs's who'd watched the game with them that day remarked, "Sure, it was pretty clear that Mel and the Heart woman were close. But Mel was always close with good-looking women if he could manage it. You don't plan on dying over a hobby. Melvin Riggs, Jr. , hadn't planned on dying at all, it seemed--he'd gotten around to making out a will, and his accounts would be left in a complicated, disheartening snarl after his death, tied up in litigation for years.

  He would be fifty-three years old, seven months and fourteen days old at the time of his death.

  Not even Evangeline Fesnacht was ever to determine how exactly Riggs, Jr. , met his fate--that is, Mrs.. Dahlia Heart. Or when. Mrs..

  Heart herl self couldn't recall the circumstances of their first meeting, questioned for hours by Willowsville police detectives, she burst into tears, suffered fainting spells, migrainc headaches and what her physician pronounced to be "poststress traumatic amnesia." ("We didn't want to upset Mrs..

  Heart any further," Willowsville police detective Leroy Stearns said.

  "She'd been beaten by Riggs and her son was wanted for murder, we figured she'd gone hell enough. ") It seemed, though, that Riggs and Mrs.. Heart had met in Willowsville but in Buffalo. Mrs.. Rindfleisch, Jon's mother, claimed to have sighted "that adulterer Riggs" and "that blond blackjack woman"

  in Riggs's red Fiat sports car only a few weeks after the Hearts' arrival in Willowsville--"They were just turning out of the drive at the Inn, obviously they'd had a late lunch, and he leaned over to her in broad daylight! I swear." Yet evidence suggests that Riggs and Mrs..

  Heart had not met, and certainly hadn't been lovers, for so long. Instead it s t. hey'd met within a year of Riggs's death. Mr.. McQuade, Clarence's father, liked to dramatize, for us as well as to older people his own age, how he'd been an "unwitting witness" to the very moment of the "doomed"

  pushing himself into Bob Rush's face asking to be introduced to Heart sometime the previous spring. "I was having lunch with my in the Niagara Room of the B. A. C. "--the Buffalo Athletic Club--"when I heard someone say, There's Mel Riggs! and I looked up, and was old Melvin weaving his way across the dining room half tanked at two p. m. , his eyes lit up, drawn to that woman as if by a magnet. You have to admire the poor son of a bitch--he knew what he wanted, and he got it." Months later witnesses reported Riggs and Rush quarreling in the exclusively male Jockey Club Bar at the B. A. C. , Riggs was said to have thrown the remains of his double malt whisky into Rush's face and stalked out.

  Heart was presumed to be the subject of the disagreement, but she to be nowhere in the vicinity at the time. ) An equally reliable source associated with Buck Pepper claimed that the lovers first met in Riggs's nightclub, the High Life, where Mrs..

  Heart had been brought one evening by a Buffalo money-manager named Hooks.

  terror of a grand jury investigation that might expose his private/professional life, this

  "Hooks" disappeared from Buffalo immediately after Riggs's death and was rumored to be living abroad. ) The glitzy High Life, at razed in 1991 to make way for a Four Seasons Hotel commandeering most of a on lower Elmwood Avenue, had long been Buffalo's premier nightclub, "classic" singers and musicians presumed dead elsewhere in the were booked there regularly, like Nat

  "King" Cole, Dick Haymes, Stafford, Dinah Shore, the Kay Kyser and Tommy Dorsey bands. On the night Riggs's meeting with

  "The White Dahlia" (who was wearing an eye-stopping white satin-brocade dress that evening, with a "dramatic cleavage," and a "mesmerizing" French perfume, LHEURE Bleue) it was the Brothers who sang such old favorites as

  "Paper Doll" to waves of applause. The High Life was crammed with patrons, many of them celebrities, but Mel Riggs in his trademark tux and red-and-gray cummerbund made his way unerringly as a hound on the scent to Hooks's table to be introduced to the gorgeous Mrs.. Heart--"Wel-come to Buffalo--'Belle Fleuve'!" He was said to have "fallen hard" for her and pursued for weeks before she agreed to meet him for a "strictly business luncheon" at the Black Derby on South Street. The financial advice Riggs provided Mrs..

  must have been valuable, for the two began to meet two or three times a week, usually downtown, for, as Mrs.. Heart was heard to complain to Rathke in the Village Food Mart, "Willowsville is all eyes!"

  the shooting Mrs.. Heart would vehemently deny she'd ever invited Riggs--or other man friend--to her home at 8 Meridian Place, she made it a point to "separate my business life from my domestic life." Yet Mrs.. George Bannister and her housekeeper Tina spoke of witnessing, from a kitchen pantry at the rear of the Bannisters' house, a episode involving Jerry Bozer, drunk and disheveled, turning up morning to ring the Hearts' doorbell and to call out piteously for Mrs..

  Heart to let him in, to no avail, another time, the mailman whose itinerary St.. Albans Hill reported seeing two "furious, grim men in cars, a Lincoln and a Porsche, ramming each other's bumpers" at the foot driveway at 8 Meridian Place. (One of these men, the driver of Linc
oln, was almost certainly Mr.. Bozer, by this time dismissed from Life and under investigation for embezzlement, the identity of the was never established. ) On the night of the shooting, Bob Rush up uninvited at the Hearts' at approximately eleven o'clock, Dahlia had unwisely let him in, he'd stayed for forty minutes and was on his way out when Melvin Riggs showed up, apparently without warning, the struggled in the front doorway of the Hearts' house, and Rush was persuaded by Mrs.. Heart to leave, Melvin Riggs was allowed to stay.

  Proof that Riggs, of Mrs.. Heart's several businessmen friends, was her favorite? Her preferred lover? Or proof that Riggs exerted some sinister control Dahlia Heart the other men didn't? ) And by 2,10 A. M. Melvin Riggs was dead, and John Reddy Heart, the house with the "murder weapon," had become a fugitive from justice.

  Said John Reddy, This will be the day I died. tohn Reddy, our Prince of Pride.

  John Reddy, John Reddy Heurt.

  He might've been killed by state troopers, it's true. Shot down like a hunted animal in the mountains. (Some of us expected this. We vigil death watch for as many of the seventy-two hours as we dared. ) But it didn't happen that way, they tracked him down exhausted, starving freezing in subzero temperatures and "using forcible means to subdue the prisoner who was resisting arrest" brought him back to Willowsville shackles.

  WILLOWSVILLE TEEN CAPTURED IN ADIRONDACKS ARRESTED IN RIGGS SHOOTING UPSTATE MANHUNT RESULTS IN CAPTURE OF 16-YEAR-OLD MURDER SUSPECT We hadn't wanted John Reddy to be caught but we loved it that, in on the front pages of the News and Courier-Express, our classmate glared out at us from bruised eyes, his unshaven face bloody and battered a mask, his mouth set in a scowl like Brando's in The Wild One. (And been beaten, too. ) Within days of John Reddy's capture, the interiors of at least two-thirds of all lockers in junior and senior high schools in Buffalo and vicinity contained copies of this famous photo, many of them laminated for preservation. (Lamination would preserve even a newspaper photo, some of us discovered, for decades. ) Some girls, like Verrie Myers, to their bedroom walls close beside their pillows. Or, if their parents objected, hid them in secret places in their underwear drawers, between pages of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, beneath their pillows. At the age of fortyone, Shelby Connor would bring her laminated photo of John Reddy's twenty-five years before to discuss earnestly with her therapist in Bethesda, Maryland, where, the wife of a middle-rank State Department of ficial, she was under treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome and depression--"Doctor, I realize this is an adolescent fantasy. I realize my marriages have been damaged by it. But if I outgrow John Reddy Heart, what will I have left?" Frankly, it's bullshit that John Reddy ever uttered the words This will be the day I died. Any one who knew John knew he was an individual of words and these were carefully chosen words, never anything fancy.

  the rest of us chattered and goofed off continuously like monkeys in a monkey house, John Reddy had dignity. Teachers were wary of calling on him in class because, if he didn't know the answer, he'd stare at them and just barely move his mouth--"Guess I don't know. Sorry." He'd to look pretty tough yet at the same time courteous, like being a smart-ass was beneath him. It was known that, after his arrest, he'd to be interrogated by police. He'd told them, "O. K. Do what you have to do," like he was detaching himself from his own fate. Like even his own fate, his possible imprisonment for life, was beneath him to consider. He refused to his own lawyer's questions and at the start of both trials he stood silent, sullen and stony-faced in a dark blue serge suit too tight across the shoulders, a white shirt and dark-striped tie, declining to look up at the enraged judge when the man asked how he pleaded, so that Mr.. Trippe at side answered on his behalf, "My client pleads not guilty, Your Honor." Maybe it isn't exactly bullshit that John Reddy was our

  "Prince of Pride." We admired like hell his refusal to cooperate with authorities, even the most loudmouthe guys (Dougie Siefried, Art Lutz, Nosepicker for instance) would've panicked in the presence of actual police, the Gestapo-uniformed New York State troopers, who had a roughing guys up before bringing them into headquarters. We Reddy's strange, stubborn silence. His stoicism through months of detention. Because he was guilty of killing Riggs and didn't repent.

  Because he knew he'd done the right thing so the hell with explanations. This was exactly how we'd have behaved if we were John Reddy Heart! For after all, we too were rebels. In Nico's, in the Crystal, in our cars cruising Main Street, Transit Plaza, the Millersport Highway, swigging beer, and our parents where we were, exactly--we were rebels! We just didn't want to our allowances or cause our parents worry, especially our moms.

  Most of us got along with our moms really well. Or anyway O. K. Our moms and Librium and smiled a lot and were good-looking for their ages.

  Our dads might've been a different story but most of them weren't home that much.

  You could gauge your dad's success by how little you saw him. If you saw a Iot of him, that was bad news. When Babs Bitterman's father was forced to resign as president of a plastics company in Niagara Falls he set up an office in the Bittermans' house, to do freelance work and to seek a new job, and Babs told us, "God, it's weird. Every day, Daddy's home. But aren't supposed to acknowledge him. Like he's invisible. Mom and I go shopping all we can to get out of the atmosphere so we can breathe." At the other extreme, Scottie Baskett once boasted that he hadn't seen his dad, a corporation laywer, in seven weeks, and Jenny Thrun, Pete Marsh and Steve whose dads were investment bankers at the same top Buffalo firm joked of not being able to remember clearly what they looked like--"Except, know, Sort of generically." We were proud of our dads and anxious for them.

  They flew constantly, even weekends, to New York City, to Washington, D. C. , to Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Tulsa, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. To Toronto, Mexico City, London, Paris, Rome, Madrid. Their flights left Buffalo International Airport at an hour when we were deeply asleep. What they did in those cities wasn't clear to us but we understood that they worked hard, "damned hard" (as a dad sometimes sourly remark on those occasions when he was able to join family at the dinner table) to maintain our Willowsville homes and "lifestyle" and so we loved and feared them at a distance. We Eickhorn who confided in us in his cracked, tremulous voice after his dad had dropped dead at the age of forty-seven of a coronary thrombosis negotiating a contract for a steel company in Pittsburgh, "I feel like I'll get to know Dad now, now he's settled down some. I can think of him now he's in one place." When Bo Bozer's dad moved out of the house, at Mrs.. Bozer's request, and the locks on all the doors were changed, Bo said with a grin, "So what's new? He was gone before, he's gone now." Ken Fischer cracked the guys up one night in the Haven telling about his dad he hadn't seen much of for a long time taking him hunting up at Scroon where the family had a lodge, "It's, like, he knows I hate hunting, and he hates it, too, but it's this father-son thing to do, right? So we're tramping around in the snow with these twelve-gauge shotguns that weigh a ton looking for, what.7--'The kind with antlers, Dad says, puffing--and this weird scary thought comes to me Dad hopes I'll shoot him in the back. To put him out of his misery. I got the shakes, I was so scared I almost puked. So we interpreted it I had the flu and we came home early and Dad hasn't said a word to me about hunting since." For such reasons we admired John Reddy Heart who had no father.

  far as we knew. ) We admired his aloneness. We admired his courage.

  believed it to be courage--his decision not to cooperate with anyone. Basically we didn't want to believe the way John Reddy was acting was selfdestructive. We didn't want to believe that a refusal to remorse for his crime on the part of a swarthy sixteen-year-old kid wearing his hair long and oily in duck's-ass style who'd killed a fifty-three-year-old known as an "area personality" might not be the shrewdest defense strategy.

  How many hundreds, thousands of times in the weeks, months and to come would we proud classmates of John Reddy Heart communicate one another in John Reddy's words--Do what you have to do. In a o
f legs and feet at the high school, in the sweaty quavering sweet backseats of cars, downtown in the Village on Saturday mornings, on any Willowsville street, cruising the drive-in restaurants on Transit, leaning our heads out car windows as we burned rubber taking off from stoplights- "DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO!" As if any of us had a clue what John Reddy meant.

  "At last--democracy has come to Willowsville." Mr.. Lepage may have spoken in irony, for such was his style, that of other WHS teachers who couldn't afford to live in our suburb, but it was true, overnight, after the shooting of Melvin Riggs, all social barriers dissolved. Suddenly you saw Verrie Myers, Trish Elders, Groves and Ginger McCord huddled together at a cafeteria table earnestly with Orrie Buhr, Dougie Siefried, Janet Moss, Dexter Cambrook Eickhorn. "Preppies, hoods, jocks, geeks"--as more than one observer noted.