Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  You were wise to fall in love, and marry, have children--a real' life. While "E. S. Fesnacht' has no existence apart from the spines of a few books. And "Evangeline'--that was my girlhood name, and that girl is gone."

  protested, "My real' life isn't anything I'd actually chosen, Evangeline. It was more like it happened. I was standing there, and it happened me."

  "But you're happy, aren't you? I mean--happily married?" "Yes, course," Ritchie said vaguely, though he wasn't sure if this was so, and imagined his wife Annie overhearing, with her sardonic, I-know-your-bullshitter-heart smile, that devastated him even in contemplation, "--but what's profound about happiness? Most of the time it lacks depth, texture"--he groped for a word, as if he'd spoken these words before, possibly in a poem, yes, an early poem of his zestful twenties, "Happiness, An Elegy,one of the few poems of Richard Eickhorn to appear in The New Yorker and to been actually read by numerous old classmates--"timbre. It might even be claimed that happiness, as an existential condition, can't be 'real' but only provisional." Evangeline said, "But to write, to truly write, exhaust your heart in the effort, you have to feel that someone cares. That someone's heart will be moved." Ritchie said, shocked, "You? You're things? E. S. Fesnacht'. 7--you've won a National Book Award for Christ's sake. Every one of your books is in trade paperback for Christ's sake. While my three books, which sold a grand total of two thousand four hundred and six copies--" I le heard his adolescent, adenoidal voice in alarm and disgust.

  Evangeline Fesnacht seemed to have recoiled from him, wiping at blood-veined eyes, faint with exhaustion. Her curdled-pale face that had looked, in other circumstances, striking as the face of a Greek statue, now was merely curdled-pale, like slightly rancid cottage cheese, were sharp indentations beneath her eyes, and her starkly white hair, so brutally short, seemed to betray, at its roots, a penumbra of brunette. Of course, Evangeline Fesnacht had had brown hair like everyone else. Yet felt a surge of sympathy for the woman, his exact age, for perhaps she was, old coeditor of Will-o'-the-Wisp, himself somehow, his soul-mate, weak, confused, insecure and undefined as he. He said, "Evangeline, I'll read what you write. Anything you write. My heart will be moved. I know."

  "You--will?"

  "Of course. Why do you think I'm with you in this ridiculous place? --at our old high school, thirty years after graduation, at six in the morning? Both of us wrecks from last night? Why do you think I came to this ridiculous reunion weekend, except in the hope of seeing you? since you seem never to answer my letters." Evangeline stared at Ritchie in alarm. She'd begun to cry, her face crinkling like crumpled tissue paper, fumbling for Kleenex but couldn't find one in the zipper-pockets of the stained purple jumpsuit, fumbled in her bulky canvas totebag imprinted with the words Black Oak Berkeley, but gave up, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand, as Ritchie too searched for a tissue, all the tissues in his pockets wadded, stiff, God damn. Evangeline said, "And to think--John Reddy Heart was here, just a few hours ago, in Willowsville. And like fools we missed him."

  "You think--he really was here?"

  "Don't you?" Evangeline stared at him belligerently. "Well--no one saw him, exactly."

  "Yes, Jenny Thrun and Chet Halloren told me they'd seen him. On the front walk at Dwayne's.

  He'd his motorcycle and was approaching the house and--maybe he heard ludicrous rock music? He'd outgrown? Changed his mind and--he's gone." Evangeline said ferociously, "I hate our classmates, don't you, Ritchie? They never read Will-o'-the-Wisp. Once in the cafeteria Smoke Filer was reading a poem we'd published to the guys at his table, cracking them up, might've been a poem of yours, in fact--that's what they are. They ruin everything.

  I've never come to any reunion but I came to this reunion for--well, I don't know. But they've ruined it, and I hate them. John Reddy was here, and he's gone. I wanted to tell him, I know you're innocent, you were innocent all along. I wanted to tell him--" Ritchie took hold of Evangeline's again, suddenly inspired. Never in ordinary life, in ordinary circumstances, could he, Richard Eickhorn, have behaved so decisively, having survived the long night, he felt his consciousness ascend to a dizzying, visionary plane. "I have a plan, Evangeline, we'll redeem John Reddy Heart's name.

  me. Together."

  "What do you mean?"

  "We'll write to the district of Erie County, whoever he is. Dill's retired, or dead. We'll insist that they reopen the case, which they bungled. They arrested and tried the wrong person, and the true murderer was never punished." "Actually, I've thought of that," Evangeline said, "--but after all, John Reddy was acquitted.

  It's hopeless."

  "Why is it hopeless? We want to redeem a man's name. We could get our classmates to sign a petition." As he spoke, as Evangeline gazed at him with doubtful, yet admiring eyes, he felt enthusiasm swell in his heart, that old, nearly lost sensation as of burgeoning love, the sensation that once signaled the onset of a poem. Small bluish flames like the flames of a gas jet licked about his brain. Flatly Evangeline said, "Ritchie, there's no evidence. The law requires evidence. Mere ideas, theories, even correct, aren't enough." Ritchie protested, "But if the true murderer confessed--"

  " The true murderer' might no longer be alive. And a confession, in such circumstances, so many years later, without evidence, wouldn't be enough, either."

  "But, Evangeline, we have to try. If we want justice for John Reddy Heart." Already Ritchie envisioned the dense, difficult would spring from this effort, Richard Eickhorn's longest and most ambitious poem, in lush Whitmanesque cadences, Broke Heart Blues, Elegy. w Or, Broke Heart Blues, A Love Song. He would pour everything in it--he would empty his soul. Evangeline was regarding Ritchie with startled, respectful eyes. Her fingers that had been stiff and ungiving all evening now clutched at his. Still she said doubtfully, "He might not want us to do this, Ritchie. John Reddy Heart. He might not be alive. And we couldn't him back his youth in any case." Extravagantly Ritchie said, "Maybe doesn't want his youth back, Evangeline. Do you?" It was 6,16 A. M. None of us (except Ketch Campbell who'd remained behind at Dwayne Hewson's for a final nightcap, at Dwayne's insistence, and was there at the time of Dwayne's collapse, thank God, to dial and summon an ambulance) could know that another of our classmates died, and would never be seen by us again.

  "Here. He used to park here."

  "Wasn't it more over here? Closer to that sign." Ken Fischer had driven them around to the rear of the school, Kate Olmsted in his wake, and now several of them were trying to precisely John Reddy Heart had usually parked the Cadillac. "When it was its original salmon color, I think he parked it farther back," Trish Elders said pedantically, for she alone of the Circle had actually ridden in that car, "but after he painted it that green so sharp it hurt the eyes, I he parked closer in. About here."

  "Yes, but more to this side," Verrie pettishly. Extricating herself from the Jag as from a stranglehold of an embrace, Verrie'd been so light-headed she'd almost fainted but now, with that resilience for which, even as an amateur actress, she'd been known, she seemed made a full recovery. In fact, she stood tall and splendid on bare, slender, swordlike legs, her feet bare, too. In the stained cerise dress that exposed her lovely back, and a good deal of her breasts, blond hair tangled past her shoulders, she yet retained an exotic glamour, Ken Fischer stared at her mesmerized. Of course, his beloved Verrie was real, and yet--?

  Might her makeup, her grimy feet and that embarrassing pig-grease stain at about the position of her navel be part of a performance? "I had to ask myself, not for the first time--'How real are any of us?" Parking her Lexus by, Kate Olmsted reached for her camera, as if reaching for a part of her body, and emerged already snapping--"I had a premonition that this would be one of those radiant moments--an epiphany." Shelby Connor was saying, Lyric drunkenness, "Ohhhh no. You're wrong, Verrie. I used to out that window, right there"--pointing to a second-story window of the school, "in Mr.. Cuthbert's class, my desk was beside the window and every day I saw John Reddy's car. I mean, every day h
e was here. Days he wasn't, and the space was empty--well, you know how that felt. But when John on the premises, the Caddie was here." Verrie turned hot-eyed and vexed to Ken, as to a (male) arbiter of fact.

  "Darling, of all the guys in our crowd, you were closest to John Reddy. Where didhe park his car?" But wily Ken Fischer, running a hand over graystubbled jaws (he hadn't shaved since flying from Frankfurt than thirty hours before) backed off, smiling, "Hey, I wasn't John Reddy's friend--really.

  I hardly knew him, and he sure as hell didn't know me." Verrie whispered, "I love you anyway." She'd left her handbag in the car, went to fetch it and seeing we were her old friends, no one to judge her harshly, she dumped its contents out onto the asphalt. Wallet leaking credit cards and carelessly wadded bills, liquid makeup in small jars, loose-powder compact, dented lipsticks, of prescription pills, multiple vitamins, calcium and melatonin, book and cellular phone and a half-dozen felt-tip pens, and--what was this?

  An empty aluminum Coke can. A dented Coke can of a design and hue we hadn't seen, without realizing we hadn't been seeing it, in decades.

  Shelby cried, "Is it--?" Trish cried, "It is." Verrie snatched up the Coke can, held it aloft and with a flourish it on the pavement, where Shelby had said John Reddy parked his Caddie.

  "There. I'm done with it." It could have been only a coincidence but at that moment, on the side of the stadium, Artie Lutz gunned the motor of his sports vehicle and drove away. "Back to the real world, I suppose," he said, stealing a sidelong glance at Mary Louise who was serenely repairing the damage done to makeup, but Mary Louise merely gave him a sidelong glance in return, enigmatic as the Mona Lisa. Ritchie Eickhorn and E. S. Fesnacht had driven away--where? We were never to know. In Kate's Lexus, poor Merchant we'd somehow imagined had been dead for years, continued sleep, lost in a virtual dream-reality that compelled him to grind his back teeth. Hard not to feel a tinge of exasperation, if a guy like Petey is your sole romantic hope for the future, as he was Kate's--"Oh, why do these 'brains' miss everything crucial? Always in their damned brains." It was then that, across the high school lawn and playing fields, dozens of sprinklers suddenly switched on. Across the campus a startling play of water appeared, translucent-aqua Willowsville water subtly with the colors of the rainbow, a dozen rainbows simultaneously, rainbows no more than eight or ten feet in length. Verrie gave a shout of laughter and seized Trish's hand (no matter that just now rerish had been seriously pissing Verrie off with her self-important talk of John Reddy's Caddie) and pulled her along, running across the lawn sparkling skeins w of water toward the hockey field. Both were barefoot, bare-legged.

  and shrieking like young girls. Kate limped after them, snapping her camera, while Ken and Shelby watched rapt in admiration. What an exquisite sight, the women's uplifted faces! --luminous, radiant, in the moist early-morning light. Ken said, sighing, "I've been in love with Verrie Myers since kindergarten. It's a curse--I mean, my destiny. Can you keep a secret, Shelby? In Stuttgart, it's possible that I did contemplate--but only for a minute! -hanging myself, in my four-star hotel. First the minibar, and then--oblivion.

  But I gave myself a pep talk in Coach McKeever's toughguy voice--'How the hell would that improve your lot, Fischer?" Ken laughed happily, wiping at his eyes. He was terribly jet-lagged, sympathe ic Shelby could see.

  Weren't the Germans six hours ahead of our American time?

  "Sometimes I wonder, Shelby, what my life would have been if that little blond girl hadn't stalked over to me, first day at the Academy Street School, and kissed me on the nose." Shelby said, startled, "But that wasn't Verrie, Ken.

  That was me." Across the distant hockey field, through the sprinklers, Verrie and Trish ran, ran. The Coke can in the foreground had toppled and was forgotten, mere teenage litter. America is filling up with teenage litter.

  Verrie in her water-splotched cerise dress, Trish in her tattered gypsy costume that looked as if it were made of cobwebs. Already it was nearing six-thirty and there was a champagne brunch scheduled for eleven at Trish's lakefront house/studio on Fleet Farm Road but not one of us, including the hostess herself, would make it, Trish, totally wiped out, would sleep for fourteen hours straight, missing the remainder of the reunion weekend--the Open House at the school, the tennis tournament, the softball game, drinks at Art Lutz's and a farewell, and somewhat anticlimactic, cookout at the Zwaarts'

  Jenny Zwaart would be conspicuously absent). A time of joy, if a time of sorrow, a time of bittersweet laughter, and a time of tears. Our thirtieth reunion. And already some of us were planning our thirty-fifth, and fortieth. We loved seeing those of you who came but we missed of you who stayed away and as always we couldn't help but wonder where you? --Carol Banks, Joann Windle, Jack Schmidt, Gordie Stearns, Nordstrom, Jean Windnagel, Jerry Hugar, Rev. Matt Watkins, Glass, Perky Ensminger, Marietta Bongiovannia, Emily Jane Paxson, Meguin, Al Riggs, Marilyn Mason, Gary Stranges, Janey Plummer, Fullenweider and

  "Buck" Weisbeck, Wayne Butt, Bruce Burnham, Ogren, Gail Gleasner, Alice Goff, Nancy Catena, Patti Ann Rathke, ' f Dickke, Hilde Faxlanger, Faith Ryan, Sandy Bangs, Bette Pancoe, Kevin Koehler, Marvin McClenathan, Dottie Palmer, Chris Carr, Slosson, Deanna Diebold, Molly Eimer, Ray Kaiser, Rick Ludlow, Corky Castle, Charley Chriswell, Marian Mattiuzzio, Dino Calvo, Johnny Olinger, Reddy Heart--we miss you, we're thinking of you, we want to see you again, we love you.

  The End