Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  We convened for vigils and stayed up much of two nights. Sudden formed among us while older and seemingly stable friendships shattered.

  We were in a state of ecstatic suspension. Our parents and at us, we were deaf. It did not seem possible that John Reddy be found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison--"God wouldn't let such a thing happen. I just know He wouldn't." But Evangeline said with her melancholy smile, which some of us misread as a smirk, "If he's guilty, he's guilty. John Reddy knows that. He expects a fate." Each side, prosecution and defense, had clearly learned from the practice run. Judge Schor whom we believed to be our enemy was brisk and matter-of-fact and must have learned to disguise his repugnance for Reddy. Police and forensics testimony were pruned and condensed to minimize boredom in the courtroom, Dill, a wiser man, would not Heart to the witness stand. Roland Trippe's cross-examinations tinged with sarcasm. He dressed less stylishly. He seemed to be with his opponent Dill to appear earnest, sincere, without guile.

  Often he addressed the jury as if they were alone together, his peers, "embarked upon a mutual quest for justice tempered with mercy." At the defense table, John Reddy Heart appeared less wooden than previously. Several of us attended sessions reported back that "he doesn't look like himself exactly but you could still recognize him, sort of." His skin was a sallow curdled-color.

  There were deep shadows beneath his eyes as if he'd been thumbed.

  twitches in his eyes. Frequently during testimony he licked his lips (Bibi Arhardt wished she could've passed him her lip balm! ) and shifted tightly muscled shoulders inside the snug-fitting blue serge suit coat but not once (so far as we knew) did he turn to look at Dahlia Heart or old Mr.. Heart seated almost directly behind him nor did he glance in their direction when guards brought him, handcuffed, his head held defiantly high, courtroom.

  Still at this time, most of us were waiting for John Reddy to take the witness stand. It was painful for us to realize that, for reason, he never would. fust won't play their rotten game. Good for him!

  He's guilty as hell. It would all come out.

  He's just a kid. Frankly, he's scared.

  Him? A kid? You see those eyes?

  I know killer eyes when I see them.

  It was a wild, giddy time. Rumors circulated in Willowsville like haphazard gusts of wind. Now from one direction, now from another. It wasn't even mid-November but already--we were perversely proud of living in the "Snow Belt" tucked between two massive, brooding Great Lakes--we ankle deep in snow from a flash snowstorm that had knocked out power in parts of rural Erie County. At school, one of the rumors was that Calvo had returned to Willowsville to testify at John Reddy's trial. She would testify that John Reddy had been with her at the time of Riggs's murder--he was innocent. (Which left--who.7--to have committed crime. Maybe Dahlia Heart. Maybe old Mr.. Heart--"It was his gun.

  yet, as Bart Digger suggested, "Mrs.. Heart's other boyfriend, Mr..

  Rush, who might've come back after Riggs thought he'd chased him away. ") It was also a possibility that Sasha had been subpoenaed by the prosecution and be forced to divulge incriminating evidence against John Reddy.

  Sasha hadn't returned to school, suddenly everyone claimed to be her. Sandi Scott said she'd seen Sasha and her parents "hurrying sort of shamefaced" into Mr.. Stamish's office. Ken Fischer and Bonnie Patch, leaving the Glen Theatre, late, reported they'd seen Sasha in a car driven by one of the elder Calvo brothers, on Main Street. (Ken and Bonnie were a startling, controversial new couple. Bonnie was a senior who drove her own Fiat sports car and boasted of "making it" with good-looking younger jocks. )

  disturbing rumor was that Sasha was pregnant. ("Oh God. Will he have to marry her? I'll kill myself," Verrie Myers cried, heartbroken.

  Evangeline Fesnacht, contemptuous of all rumors except those initiated by herself, reasoned calmly that it was unlikely that Sasha could be since John Reddy had been in custody since mid-March--"If she'd been pregnant, which there's no evidence for at all, she'd have had the baby by now." But this, in turn, was transformed into a new rumor which even our teachers and parents circulated. In fact, the rumor at school could be traced back to Trish Elders (already on the verge, as she said, of a total nervous breakdown--it was the second week of John Reddy's trial) who happened to overhear mother on the phone with a woman friend, saying in a shocked murmur, "Sallie, did you hear? That Calvo girl had a baby. That's why Calvos sent her away--to Brooklyn, I think. Or back to Italy. A baby boy say looks exactly like tohn Reddy Heurt." The rumor that most upset our parents was an old one, resurfacing.

  Dahlia Heart had been keeping an "intimate diary" of her friendships with Buffalo-area men. Quite a few men. And prominent men. Skip the Village Food Mart was a font of excited information on this subject, he'd heard from an "absolutely reliable source" in the Willowsville Police Department that Mrs.. Heart had been involved with just about every man you could name. "Mel Riggs, that sap, was merely one."

  was Buffalo's Mayor Dorsey, there was Buffalo's TV personality Durrell. There was the Hearts' neighbor Aickley Thrun, a retired businessman and philanthropist who'd been reported trespassing on Heart property the day following Riggs's murder, in clear violation of the yellow crime-scene tape. It seemed to be an open secret that the Buffalo chief of police had the authority of suburban Willowsville police, ordering Mrs..

  Heart's diary "suppressed" because prominent local citizens were named in it.

  Zwaart's father speculated, "There have been payoffs, certainly.

  We're waiting to see if some names will be leaked to the press and withheld." An uncle of Scottie Baskett, also a lawyer, hinted that several potential "names" had contacted him in anticipation of being exposed. "This Dahlia Heart' situation may involve not only payoffs but blackmail and extortion as well." It seemed to be general knowledge that Bo Bozer's father, Mrs.. Bozer, fired from his job of many years and seriously in debt, "but still in love with Dahlia Heart," had tried to commit suicide in a motel Batavia by swallowing a large quantity of barbiturates, this was why Bo played football like such a demon, amazing his teammates with his endurance and recklessness, and why, it was believed, Coach had arranged for him to have sessions with "some kind of adolescent psychiatrist.

  " Shelby Connor astonished us by saying bitterly, one evening at Verrie's when a gang of us was watching the six o'clock local news in the Myers's family room, on about the fifth day of John Reddy's trial, that her father had the house at five that morning supposedly to fly to New York but she really believed, having overheard her mother on the phone, talking with friends, crying, that her father had been involved with Mrs.. Heart and he'd decided to confess before it hit the newspapers--"My mom was just devastated. She's like hit her on the head with a sledgehammer." In the luridly glamorous made-for-TV film The Loves of the White Dahlia, the beautiful blond actress who played Dahlia Heart was as icily calculating, under the pretense of establishing herself in a semimythical suburb of Buffalo called

  "Williamsville" as a businesswoman, she inveigled loans and gifts from a number of naive, smitten middle-aged men, managed to be invited to join the most prestigious country club, where one of her lovers was on the executive board (one of the film's numerous steamily erotic scenes was in, appropriately, a Jacuzzi tub), out of a pure love of evil there were numerous provocative close-ups of this

  "Dahlia Heart" gloatingly admiring herself in a full-length mirror) she set her against one another, broke up marriages and neglected her own family, to our horror and disgust, she was depicted as a near-incestuous mother, in several scenes approaching her terrifically handsome teenaged son in erotic circumstances. The film was advertised with suggestive copy, A Mother's Ultimate Temptation-A Son's Ultimate Revenge. And, She led men--men of power, men of passion-to their doom. And she never looked back--but once. The part of the film was its depiction of John Reddy as a hellion teenager involved in a motorcycle gang, drugs, fights and sex leather-wearing girls meant to be teenagers but played by actresses
who more resembled hookers.

  This John Reddy was too handsome. One of the film's few elements with any historical veracity was an action in which John Reddy leads members of his motorcycle gang, the Avengers, in a milling fistfight in a park with affluent, suburban-type boys to revenge the honor of a beautiful young Italian girl who'd been raped by one of them. But the John Reddy of the film played by a young soap opera star to have a brief career in Hollywood films, and die of a cocaine overdose at the age of twenty-three) wasn't our John Reddy. And he played, in fact, a relatively minor role in the film!

  In The Loves of the White Dahlia there was only one trial. John did not take the witness stand, as he hadn't done in real life.

  Dahlia Heart took the stand, at the film's climax, her periured was interspersed with slow-motion flashbacks to the shooting scene, so that the viewer could see that, though Dahlia Heart was claiming not to l I 1.

  seen what happened, all the while implying that of course her son was the killer, in fact it was Dahlia Heart who'd handed the gun to her and urged him to kill her lover--"If you're a man, prove it!" (The plot involved Dahlia Heart's shadowy financial dealings and her insistence that Melvin Riggs divorce his wife and marry her, which he'd resisted. ) This

  "Dahlia Heart" resembled the original physically, to an uncanny degree, but was no attempt in the film to convey a vulnerable woman, a confused woman, an affectionate girl-woman, in her way naively trusting and hopeful.

  There were many of us who believed John Reddy's mother to be more than the sum her glamorous appearance and behavior. We never hated her like our mothers did. Though we weren't enthralled by her like the guys.

  Decades later, Dougie Siefried would confess he still dreamt about Dahlia Heart.

  "Though she's become more of an abstract idea, you know? Like an actual gets to be an idea at a certain point in a man's life. ") The grown girls of the Circle would recall, thrilled, the time they'd eavesdropped on Dahlia Heart and her little girl (whose name we could never remember--Shirley?

  Kathleen? ) in the Crystal. Those teasing words she'd said to the waitress, I know what it's like to be on your feet all day, Gloria--it's hell.

  We wondered what happened to Dahlia Heart after the trial. Much of what we heard was contradictory and vague. She'd moved away, of course.

  She'd disappeared. Even John Reddy didn't know where she'd gone.

  She'd changed her name--and the color of her hair. She'd gotten married.

  She'd returned to her old life in Las Vegas as a blackjack dealer. She'd returned to her old life in Las Vegas as a hooker. She'd died there of a drug overdose.

  She'd died in Los Angeles of a drug overdose.

  She'd married a rich man, and gone to live in New Mexico on his thousand-acre ranch, happily ever after.

  On the fifth day of the trial, the prosecution called Dahlia Heart to the witness stand.

  Though in The Loves of the White Dahlia, the perjured testimony of "Dahlia Heart" would be the climax of the film, in actual life, Heart's testimony, delivered in a hushed courtroom, was brief and inconclusive. She was, in legal terms, a hostile witness--a witness for the defense, but pressed to testify by the prosecution. Dill, who'd learned lesson exposing Farley Heart to the jurors, was overly cautious Heart. "You can't trust any witness in a trial," Roger Zwaart's father told us.

  "But you sure can't trust a hostile witness." Every one stared greedily at Dahlia Heart. The mother of the "alleged killer." The woman who had brought Melvin Riggs, Jr. , to his "untimely end." The surprise was, Mrs.. Heart didn't resemble a voluptuous Monroe or Kim Novalwbut a more fragile, vulnerable, ladylike Grace Kelly. Her clothes were carefully chosen (by Roland Trippe?

  she wore a white linen suit with a silk blouse beneath the sheathlike jacket, her flared skirt fell decorously to midcalf. Pale glimmering stockings.

  her slender throat, a single chaste strand of pearls. Her blond hair seemed to have a silver sheen and was worn in a French twist. Her makeup was subdued, minimal, a "natural" look. Her nails, of moderate length, were frosted silver.

  When she removed her dark glasses to face her interrogator, it was throughout the packed courtroom Here is a grieving mother! For her beautiful eyes were melancholy, ringed with fatigue. Here is a grieving, mother! Dill began his questioning carefully. He would hint at, could not pursue, for this was inadmissible evidence, Mrs.. Heart's shadowy "business relations" with men besides Melvin Riggs, he would hint at, but could not pursue, Mrs.. Heart's ambiguous, some would say outright relationship with the late Colonel Edgihoffer. If Dill asked too probing a question--"Exactly how would you characterize your relationship with the late Melvin Riggs, Mrs.. Heart? "--Dahlia Heart quivered as if he'd raised his hand to strike her. "It was like a stage play," Verrie Myers reported excitedly, for at last she, Trish Elders and Millie Leroux had dared to skip school to attend the trial, cleverly disguised as older, matronly women in makeup and dowdy clothes secretly borrowed from their mothers' closets, "--the only thing that was real was what you could see. It's all now." The girls were riveted by Dahlia Heart's testimony, though they seated near the back of the courtroom, at the extreme right, and their view of the witness stand was partly blocked. They were distracted by what they could see of John Reddy at the defendant's table--the back of his head, his short-trimmed black hair. (Fearful of being caught by county officers, the girls tried to be inconspicuous. They were able to catch only a fleeting glimpse of John Reddy's face, or profile, at the close of the day's session, when guards led John Reddy away and he'd seemed, almost, to turn, glance around like one who has heard his name called--"I swear, Reddy saw me. Our eyes locked. Just for a fraction of a second.

  didn't dare wave of course. He didn't. But--" Verrie murmured. Trish might have been so but Millie, the most phlegmatic and doubtful of girls of the Circle, said bluntly that John Reddy hadn't even turned his head. ) Dahlia Heart spoke in a faltering voice, so softly that Dill had to ask her to please speak louder. She insisted she'd been "entirely surprised-shocked" that her friends Mr.. Rush and Mr.. Riggs had come to her home on

  1, the night of March 18, uninvited, separately, for neither had there before, and her relationship with Mr.. Rush had been "purely business, and recently concluded." Melvin Riggs, she hesitantly confessed, was a matter. Yes, she'd been "romantically involved" with this for several months. He had told her from the start that he was from his wife and when she learned otherwise, she'd insisted upon off the relationship--" I'm not the kind of woman who sees another woman's husband. I respect the institution of marriage. I respect integrity and fidelity. I could not live with myself ever if I did not." Dill asked, with a hint of irony, "You've never before been 'romantically involved, Mrs.. Heart, with a married man? You expect the court that?" Dahlia Heart said, hurt, "Sir, not knowingly! But men--you must know-don't always tell the truth. Especially to a woman." Dahlia Heart continued her testimony, saying that, at first, seemed to respect her feelings, he'd ceased telephoning her as he'd been doing at all hours of the night. He'd lent her a sum of money--less than five thousand dollars, in cash--for "purely investment purposes"--and she was hoping to repay him soon, as he knew, but for some reason he up, unexpected, drunk, at her home, by coincidence at the time Rush leaving, and the men quarreled, and she made a mistake, "a mistake I wish to God I could undo," in allowing Riggs to stay with her as he'd pleaded.

  "That man had a certain power over me--he could be so charming, so warm, so convincing--and so cruel." Within an hour Riggs had abusive and threatening. He'd begun by saying he loved her and marry her, when she demurred, saying that she could never trust a who'd betrayed his wife, he turned nasty, she had to admit, to shame, they'd both been drinking whisky--"Mel liked his whisky neat. Once started, he couldn't seem to stop." What happened after that was nightmare of threats, blows, shouts, screams--"and next thing I knew, was trying to revive me. A paramedic! I seemed to be Lying across a bed, in a place I couldn't recognize though it was my own bedroom. My face swollen and blee
ding and my head was ringing with pain. I was terrified. I knew that something terrible had happened but I didn't know what it was." Dahlia Heart had begun to speak so faintly, Dill had again to urge her to speak louder. She said, pressing a hand against her chest as if were short of breath, "I hadn't heard any gunshots. I swear. It was all up with that terrible man shouting at me. And my head being pounded. I strangers--paramedics, police officers--and couldn't comprehend were there. I was frightened for my children--my little girl especially, she's so sensitive, shy of strangers--I hoped nothing had happened to her, or my other child. I mean--my other young child, Farley. I wust have Mr..

  Riggs's body on the floor, but--I don't remember seeing lt. I didn't see John Reddy at any time that night. I guess I would have thought he wasn't home, he'd gone out with his friends and he did stay out late sometimes, even on school nighj, he's a mature boy, he's had to be mature most of life, growing up in a household without a father. So far as I know, John-Reddy had never met Melvin Riggs. He had never set eyes on Melvin Riggs.

  I-don't believe he shot Melvin Riggs. I don't... " Her voice trailed off miserably. She'd begun to cry, and was dabbing at her eyes with a handleerchief.