Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  " one of us managed to cry in a cracked, reproachful voice. We were astounded then as, suddenly, Ken Fischer, still handsome though ravaged-looking from hours of determined drinking and (it was rumored) marital difficulties back home in Quincy, Mass. , fell forward onto his knees and boldly shuffled across the carpet to press his hot tremulous mouth against the strawberry-red heart on the luminous floating breast.

  Near dawn at the Hyatt Regency at Buffalo International Airport was Veronica Myers swooning naked into her former boyfriend's arms, "Oh God, Kenny--maybe I've always loved you. All these years. Can ever forgive me?" They tried to put John Reddy away.

  Man, they tried to put ohn Reddy away.

  Tried tried tried to put tohn Reddy away.

  You gonna try to put Iohn Reddy away? tohn Reddy, tohn Reddy Heart ain't gonna stay.

  In all, John Reddy Heart would be incarcerated--that was the of ficial term, "incarcerated"--for twenty months. Twelve months in the Tomahawk Island Youth Camp and eight months in the Erie County Detention Center in downtown Buffalo.

  There were those, most of our fathers in fact, even to this day they'd get hot in the face and say That greaser-killer-kid should've gone to prison for life.

  You can't argue with them, so why bother?

  Judge Hamilton W Schor of the Erie County Criminal Court denied lohn Reddy bail. Even $1 million bail (despite that rumor). The agreed with the county prosecutor that John Reddy Heart was a "flight risk"--already he'd fled police and eluded them, making fools of them, for seventy-two hours. It had taken more than thirty of them to "bring him back alive." There was much embarrassment, and outrage, that Willowsvilleamherst police had allowed John Reddy to escape the village on the night of Riggs's death. "A vicious, mad-dog murderer," the prosecutor argued.

  "His relative youth shouldn't blind us to that fact." Dill was for insuring that John Reddy would be tried as an adult, in criminal court.

  Not as a minor, in juvenile court.

  Not even Dahlia Heart, pleading personally with Judge Schor, induce the judge to change his mind.

  So John Reddy was locked up. Held in detention awaiting his trial in the fall. That long hot-humid spring and summer. The Erie County Center was a grim weatherworn fortress-building with coils of razor strung about it like nasty-glinting Christmas tinsel. Prisoners on trial who couldn't make bail or had been denied bail were transported to the County Courthouse a few blocks away by van, wrists and ankles shackled.

  Bart Digger who would become a criminologist dated the onset of his interest in such a subject to the summer of John Reddy's incarceration--"It made you think. That's where he is. So what's it like, what is it?

  How does it connect to us?" Most of us just cruised the expressway along the river on slow summer nights, nothing better to do or anyway nothing that drew us.

  As Ritchie Eickhorn said we got to know the Erie County Detention

  "intimately from the outside." As Millie Leroux who'd begun said, "It's like your soul's some other place." There was a guy with a T-Bird who boasted he'd taken, "by a conservative estimate, a dozen" WHS girls, including the most popular varsity cheerleaders, cruising past the detention center with a six-pack and ending up in La Salle the river--"Jesus, something comes over those girls. It's like crying makes them hot. You practically have to fight them off." There was talk that summer of condoms. Who bought them, or tried to.

  Condom jokes. Condom anxiety. Out back of the school (where John Reddy's acid-green Caddie was no longer parked) some of the guys around, hoping to befriend the tougher guys like Orrie Buhr, Meunzer, Dino Calvo and Ray Gottardi. Nosepicker Nordstrom cracked us blowing up an actual condom like a balloon--or was it a balloon, fact, long and slender as an eel.7--until it burst, spraying a liquid into our faces. Guys packed condoms like chewing gum or cigarettes.

  Patting their back pockets, sniggering. Somebody, probably Art and Bo Bozer, raked a mess of used condoms like expired fish from La and brought them back to Willowsville where they were spread out on school lawn in mimicry of our school insignia, Nice girls shunned us, revulsed. We were virgins waiting to explode.

  But not always, for even nice girls like the girls of the Circle needed to be taken on illicit drives into downtown Buffalo, if they wanted see John Reddy Heart's place of "incarceration" and if they didn't have their own cars. Mary Louise Schultz was seen with Art Lutz because Art had car, what other reason? Ginger McCord, Bibi Arhardt, Sandy Bangs who had cars they were allowed to drive into Buffalo or who had parents who didn't know they were driving fifteen miles through the center of gritty Buffalo, cruising the expressway and looping back restlessly to cruise it another time before returning on Delaware Avenue or Main Street to the Village of Willowsville which was, as Ginger McCord said, wiping tears from her eyes as if she'd come a very long distance in only a few hours, "Like floating in the night--like a beautiful gleaming white yacht anchored in a nasty dark sea." This was the long hot-humid summer Willowsville girls learned to cry. In that special bittersweet way. "It all began then, but when will end?" Not yet sixteen, and so not yet in possession of the canary-yellow birthday convertible, Verrie Myers strained her sensitive relationship with Ken Fischer by hinting she'd be willing to date other boys, with cars, if he wouldn't drive her past the Erie County Detention Center at least once a week, after dark, so that Verrie could flash the car headlights as they approached the grim building, eliciting from its interior, not always or clearly, an answering sequence of flashes like Morse code, what was probably a hand-held mirror inside one of the barred windows.

  Verrie responded passionately to skepticism on our part--"How do I know it's Reddy and not someone else returning my signals? I don't. But I have faith." Ken Fischer made no comment. You couldn't even elicit a wink from him, an ironic or disdainful grimace. He was a sap in love with Verrie Myers since, as he'd said, at least kindergarten at the Academy Street School when the bewitching little blond girl had run up to him and, to the delight of all watching adults, kissed him on the nose.

  Why had little Verrie Myers kissed little Kenny Fischer that day.7--"I don't know, I just did. I wanted to." We'd all expected them to get married someday. But Verrie's career intervened. And Ken, well--Ken married another girl. It never right to us but many years would pass before it was made right.

  It's a phenomenon of age, aging. You get to know from repeated experiences what absence means. That, one day, one hour, one minute, or something ceases to exist in relationship to you. When you're young, even high school age, you don't get it at once. "It has to, like, sink in." So it sank in upon us in gradual waves of comprehension that John Reddy Heart was gone. Gone from Willowsville. Not permanently but gone.

  Gone for now. (In fact, maybe gone for good. The rumor was, would sell thehouse. She'd never be able to live in Willowsville again. ) The beautiful eye-aching acid-green Caddie was no longer parked behind the high school, nor was it sighted on our leafy streets like a quickdarting green flame you fear might singe your eyeballs if you look--but you look. And gone, too, the sound of the Caddie's engine, hoarsened by its aging muffler, whining, gravelly, thrilling to the ear, at least to the adolescent ear, like a deep mock-bass voice, wordless, pushing up through layers of dark earth until you feel, more than hear, its power.

  "St.. Albans Hill is so damned quiet, my ears ache."

  "Young lady, don,t let your father hear you say such a ridiculous We live here because it is quiet." Abruptly, too, Dahlia Heart was gone from Willowsville. And old Mr..

  Heart, and John Reddy's younger brother and sister whose names no could remember. Guys came to realize they'd been gazing along the of Fashion or glancing up at some white-luminous object in the corner of their eye looking for--her. Attendance at basketball games plummeted and not just because the team, missing John Reddy, was bottoming out, wasn't the possibility of Dahlia Heart showing up and making her grand entrance, shaking the hands of Coach McKeever and other male that we could observe, we swore, their knees actually vibrating.
/>   All that was gone. Like a TV program that ends its run, tearing a hole in your heart.

  The Hearts had had to move hastily away from St.. Albans Hill as soon as news broke of Melvin Riggs's scandalous death in Mrs.. Heart's bedroom, while John Reddy was still a "fugitive from justice"--"object of a manhunt"--his name and glowering face on TV countless times a day in every area paper. Like something bursting, strangers as reporters, photographers and TV camera crews swarmed onto Meridian Place, daring to ascend the drive, ring the doorbell, trample the lawn.

  Worse yet, these strangers dared to ring the doorbells of the Thruns, the Bannisters, the Kaisers, the Johnstons. Roland Trippe gave a conference to announce that the family had gone "into seclusion"

  would not be available to meet with the media. Willowsville Township police officers to protect the handsome old Dutch Colonial that was known, in St.. Albans Hill, as the Edgihoffer house. Still there were trespassers. Curiosity seekers from Buffalo and suburbs, yet more media people, freelance and amateur photographers.

  NUDE SHOOTING DEATH OF MEL RIGGS CONTROVERSIAL BASEBALL PERSONALITY IN AFFLUENT BUFFALO SUBURB 16-YEAR-OLD FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE SUSPECT IN KILLING OF MOM'S LOVER ELUDES POLICE CAPTURE SECOND DAY such headlines, going out on national news wires, drew people from considerable distances. Motorcycle gangs from Olcott Beach, and Erie, Pennsylvania, with straggly greasy hair, beards and black leather and swastika tattoos whose leaders, photographed for the Buffalo News, resembled older, coarsened brothers of John Reddy Heart. St..

  residents were frightened, angered. "I know it's disrespectful to speak ill of the dead," Mrs.. Bannister told friends at the Village Women's Club, "but I blame the Colonel! He started it all by taking up with that woman, and left us to stew in his disgusting juices, and where will it end?" Photographs and video footage were taken of not only 8 Meridian Place but houses and grounds as well. Mrs.. Thrun's cleaning woman of twenty years, Myrtle Thrasher, who'd never once set foot in Mrs.. Heart's house, and had never so much as glimpsed the infamous woman, was nonetheless approached at her bus stop on Main Street and telephoned by people offering her as much as fifteen hundred dollars for "inside, reports" on Dahlia Heart and her lovers. Mrs.. Bannister's woman of twenty-five years, Tina Florence, was offered three thousand dollars for similar reports and an "eyewitness description of the bullet-riddled bedroom" she was believed to have been hired to clean.

  were overwhelmed. Trespassers approached the darkened house from rear, scaling a six-foot stone wall to wander through the weedy, rock garden that had once been Mildred Edgihoffer's pride, within days of the scandal, Dahlia Heart's controversial lawn ornaments had been away as mementos. Jon Rindfleisch and Steve Lunt encountered, by windravaged moonlight in the lane behind the Heart home, two girls who'd long claimed to be secret lovers of John Reddy Heart, and spent much of the night with them in Jon's car in the woods beyond St..

  Peter and Paul Cemetery--"Don't ask us what those girls are like. Man, we're wasted.

  Man, there just aren't words." It seemed to us that the Hearts' house, once as distinguished as any house in St.. Albans Hill (with the exception of the old Wise mansion on its fiveacre lot on the Common) began to deteriorate almost overnight.

  Cracks began to define themselves between the large fieldstones of which the central, "historic" part of the house was constructed. In bright spring sunshine, the robin's-egg-blue shutters and front door glowed like lurid neon.

  One of the second-floor windows, believed to be a window in Dahlia Heart's bedroom, was cobwebbed with cracks. When the Hearts first fled into seclusion (somewhere in downtown Buffalo, it was assumed), Pasquito's Lawn Service continued to tend to the grounds, by mid-June, the lawn service longer in Mrs.. Heart's employ and the two-acre lot, lush from our spring rains, began to grow rapidly, a tumult of wild grass, dandelions, tall spiky thistles. A violent thunderstorm at the end of June split a giant hundredyear-old elm bordering on Aickley Thrun's property, and Mr..

  paid for it to be trimmed and repaired--at a cost of above $2, 000, it was believed.

  Mr.. Thrun and other neighbors of the Hearts began to send their lawn crews or groundskeepers over to 8 Meridian Place, since the absent Mrs..

  seemed to have sloughed off her responsibility, almost overnight, in early July, the property was restored to nearly the distinction it had once had in the old, lost days of Mildred Edgihoffer and repeated awards from the Buffalo Gardeners' Club. Yet when a reporter and a photographer from the Courierexpress came to do a feature on "neighborly compassion" in Willowsville, no one in St.. Albans Hill would consent to an interview and all any special "compassion" for the Hearts. Aickley Thrun allowed himself to quoted, photographed grim-faced in the doorway of his handsome Tudor home, "I happen not to condone murder, and I happen not to adultery. Nor do I condone, if you want to go into it, a drunken old derelict scavenging in our midst. But we all have to look at that house, damn it!" In the weeks preceding John Reddy Heart's trial (in mid-September, months after his arrest) we began to hear about a beautiful, woman dressed entirely in white, wearing a white wide-brimmed hat a white lace veil, white gloves, white shoes, carrying a white handbag, who was observed attending church services in Buffalo churches, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Metl , dist, Unitarian, Roman Catholic, Catholic. Sometimes the woman was accompanied by an elderly whitehaired gentleman with trimmed white whiskers. Sometimes she accompanied by two children who appeared ill at ease and bored in church, a somber, thin bespectacled boy in his early teens and a somber, plumpish bespectacled girl of eleven or twelve. But usually the woman was alone. She entered church quietly and took an inconspicuous seat at the rear.

  not always familiar with the service, she knelt, she prayed, she sang with the congregation, often overcome with emotion, wiping away tears with a white lace handleerchief. She was said to drop five-dollar bills into but left immediately at the conclusion of the service, before anyone could greet her, or get a good, clear look at her veiled face.

  "A vision in white. Like an angel." When John Reddy's trial began, the media returned to Buffalo/ Willowsville in greater numbers than before. At first, we thought it was exciting--"Like we'd all won a lottery," as Dexter Cambrook said.

  In those days TV cameras were forbidden in courtrooms.

  were forbidden. But press sketch artists were allowed to attend trials, so there began to appear in newspapers and on TV pencil sketches of Reddy Heart. "That isn't John Reddy! That isn't him at all." We were in-censed, disgusted. We were puzzled. Most of the so-called portraits of our classmate John Reddy Heart were of an almost-ugly stranger, much than sixteen, frowning, simian, malevolent, with heavy-lidded and a sensuous, pouting mouth. As Evangeline Fesnacht had said months before, those were killer eyes. These were portraits of the vicious mad-dog killer the prosecutor Mr.. Dill was trying to imprison for life. Meaning to mock these adult distortions of a reality we knew intimately, someone anonymous (generally believed to be Dougie Siefried but, in fact, as she'd confess many years later, Elise Petko! ) thumbtacked the ugliest of the sketches, in the Evening News, on the cork bulletin board across from Mr..

  Stamish's office, embellished with devil's horns and a red glistening forked tongue, but it was torn down almost immediately by an infuriated Ginger McCord ripped it into tiny shreds.

  TV cameras were forbidden inside the Erie County Courthouse but couldn't be banned from the enormous old building's numerous front. steps.

  We in Willowsville who were forbidden even to attempt to attend the were amazed to see, on TV, dozens of teenaged pickets who were totally unknown to us--glamorous girls with teased hair, heavily made-up faces and harsh voices chanting

  "Free John Reddy! Free John Reddy!" identified as from Cheektowaga--a somber-faced, pious group in suits and dresses carrying signs that read LOCKPORT CHRISTIAN YOUTH FORGIVE US OUR SINS. Naturally the TV cameras for WWBN, WWBF and WWNT favored Buffalo celebrities like Mayor Dorsey who'd been a friend of Melvin Riggs, Jr. , and who intoned gravely into the
camera, "Under our law even a criminal is innocent until proven guilty' but we all know this is very, very tragic thing that our friend Mel Riggs who loved Buffalo so much has from us." There was Sal Morningstar the popular TV-talk-show host the rubbery face and glistening eyes--"I can't believe that Mel is gone. I like to think Mel isn't gone. He's here with us, looking down, maybe"-mugging for the camera--"looking up, praying that justice will be and he won't have died in vain." There was a procession of Hawks, presentday and past members of the team, interviewed on their way into and of the courthouse. Shortstop Mick Boyer looking ruddier and fleshier than we remembered who winked into the camera and said in a mock-sorrowful voice, "It's real sad what happened to our beloved boss Mel Riggs.

  All the guys on the team are taking it hard. Couldna happened to a sweeter fella." Hal West and Buck Sweeney who'd had much-publicized contractual difficulties with Riggs the previous season said, smirking, in the tones of men who'd been warmed by a drink or two, that they were attending the

  "with the hope of seeing justice done." Jimmy O'Grady who'd been photographed trading blows with Riggs three or four years before, had been fired from the team, said, laying his finger alongside his puffy nose, "Some cruel folks is saying they'd like that kid Heart's autograph. Some folks is saying that kid Heart would get the Buffalo Good Citizen Award this year.