"Oates, Joyce Carol - Broke Heart Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

Heart reeked of alcohol and of something damp and rotted. He was stony-faced, with an affectation of deafness. But Miss Bird talked. Like all teachers she was ninety percent words. So she talked. "But only when I mentioned John Reddy-'Your grandson is one of my most promising students'--did Mr..

alive. He snorted, "Promising"--huh! That don't mean a hill of beans." Each time she told this story, Miss Bird laughed excitedly at this point. With the passage of time her red-dyed hair would retain its aggressive luster even as it thinned, her pale, plain face began to wither when she was only in her fifties, yet\it was with girlish vigor she spoke of John Reddy--"Those remarkable ysars. That saga." Forever in our eyes she would be our Miss Bird whom, when we'd been her students, we'd hated, from authority she derived an air of the proprietary and the secretive.

For instance, Miss Bird would only hint, yet would never come out and say explicitly, how startled she'd been by seeing the former Edgihoffer house, a village landmark, so transformed--its oaken front door, shutters, and trim painted a bright robin's-egg blue instead of black or dark green. And the beautiful rock garden invaded by painted plaster-of-paris gnomes and gigantic frogs. And John Reddy's salmon-colored Cadillac a glaring presence in the where, evidently, he'd been repairing it, in the innocent way in which, in less prestigious neighborhoods than St.. Albans Hill, teenaged boys wolked on their cars and motorcycles in full view of neighbors and passersby.

Of these distractions, Miss Bird would only exclaim, ruefully, "Well!

Hearts certainly made their mark on the community, didn't they." Of John Reddy's private life, Miss Bird invariably hinted that there was much she knew that she couldn't reveal. It was her conviction, though, that John Reddy's father had been married to his mother--"John Reddy is as legitimate as anyone in Willowsville." Whether the identical man was the father of the and sister wasn't so clear.

There was a way we admired that Miss Bird drew herself up to her height of five feet one inch, jammed her harlequin-style maroon glasses against the bridge of her narrow nose, and declared, as was on record having declared to numerous inquisitive reporters, "Yes, have been a tragic' family. But a thoroughly American family.

"Judge not, lest ye be judged." It was Coach Woody McKeever whose claim to have known John Reddy intimately seemed the most plausible, though Coach had a hyperbole and even hysteria, like many high school sports coaches.

throat was raw from yelling at generations of oafish high school athletes but he spoke in a cracked, tender voice of John Reddy--"The son Mrs..

McKeever and I never had, by God's inscrutable grace." Yet Coach couldn't resist hinting that he too was in possession of "confidential information" about the Heart family he would never reveal. Of the faculty and staff of Willowsville High, including even our harassed principal, Mr..

Stamish, it was Coach McKeever who was most pursued by reporters and TV camera crews, he complained of having to have his telephone number changed to an unlisted number, having to leave school by a different exit every afternoon, and having to wear dark glasses in public. He limited interviews sessions at such excellent local restaurants as the Old Eagle House where, though by degrees he became drunk, and maudlin-weepy, he nothing away that might have embarrassed or offended John Reddy.

favorite, much-quoted utterance remained, without adornment, "My is broken for that boy." (At our fortieth class reunion we'd still be quoting Coach with affection, it would be Art Lutz who could imitate him with eerie facility in that cracked, tender voice. ) We admired Coach's reticence, his air of propriety. For it did seem, in fact, with the loss of the spectacular basketball player he'd been grooming for a big basketball school, that his heart was broken.

Except, at one of our early reunions, possibly the tenth, at a beer tent in Tug Hill Park where Coach, a guest of honor, had consumed ice-cold beer (to be precise, beers--light, dark, mellow, strong, domestic, imported, "gourmet"--our WHS jocks were beer fanatics) with a dozen or more of his favored former athletes, he turned emotional toward evening, hinting that he knew "a damned lot more than I would ever disclose to the police or the D. A. s office" about what had happened in that bedroom at 8

Place on the night of Melvin Riggs's death. "Not half of it came out in the trial, you can be sure. Not one-third." By this time Coach surprised us, he'd gotten so drunk. Swaying on his feet so that Bo Bozer, Ken Fischer, Tommy

"Nosepicker" Nordstrom (never a favorite of Coach's in the days) had to hold him up. Coach's eyes wzere brimming with tears and his flaccid skin looked boiled. We expected him to shake us off and yell something comic and insulting, but Coach was deathly serious.

We all knew, but would never out of tact have alluded to the melancholy fact, that since the departure of John Reddy Heart from varsity basketball, Coach had never led any team through a really satisfactory season and the school board and local alums had hired a younger, more competitive coach to ease him out, if he was kept on the WHS faculty it was for sentimental reasons and because he had tenure and belonged to the A. F. of L. teachers' union and couldn't be fired. He was saying loudly in our startled faces, in his cracked, husky voice, "That boy John Reddy was a damned good boy despite his background, noble boy, y'know what I'm saying? Protectlve of his mother, eh?

Y'know what I'm saying? Protective of that"--he was puffing, out of breath, eyes contracted with an unspeakable vision, almost choking on the word he was forced to utter so he spat it out like something foul and stinging--"womun." Nor did we ever learn if Dahlia Heart had been a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. All information pertaining to Mrs.. Heart's private life prior to her move to Willowsville was excluded from trial procedure and testimony, thanks to the aggressive tactics of the defense attorney Rollie Trippe, whom she'd hired to represent John Reddy, but anecdotal evidence seemed to suggest she'd teen an employee of some kind at Caesars Palace.

Mr..

Trippe, who played squash regularly at the Buffalo Athletic Club with Blake Wells's dad, told Mr.. Wells that Mrs.. Heart had been "in public relations" at the casino. And that it was as she'd testified--"She fainted easily.

" Other men acquainted with Dahlia Heart refused to provide information about her private life, but it came to be believed, with scorn, that in fact they knew little--"It's easy to be discreet if somebody's pulled wool over your eyes." Melvin Riggs's assistant at the Buffalo Hawks, Inc. , spoke with grudging admiration of Dahlia Heart as a "shrewd businesswoman if only she'd herself." From other sources, among them Herman Skelton's wife, Irma, it was said that Mrs.. Heart had been, variously, a "photographer's model"-an "exotic dancer"--a "high-priced call girl." (Embittered by the ruin of her marriage, Irma Skelton was not considered, even by her loyal friends, a reliable witness. ) The Thruns and the Bannisters, neighbors of Mrs.. Heart's in the sequestered elm-shaded cul-de-sac Meridian Place, denied any knowledge of her and her family, though it was reported to Mrs..

Thrun by her cleaning woman that the Hearts must have moved into Colonel's house with next to no possessions. "Myrtle said that and no moving van ever arrived. All that family's worldly goods were in the ratty U-Haul. Imagine!" Mrs.. Bannister's cook reported having seen, out of the U-Haul by the Hearts, "spangled dresses on satin coat hangers" and a "huge big tumble, in a bushel basket, of fancy high-heeled shoes"-which bolstered theories of modeling, dancing and so forth.

Yet other reliable sources, including the assistant prosecuting who'd tried so hard to send John Reddy away for life like a hardened criminal, insisted that Mrs.. Heart had a "shrewd legal and contractual mind"

her public pose of being uninformed and confused and overwhelmed by proceedings They insisted (though without confirmation from Rollie Trippe's side) that Dahlia Heart had helped direct her son's defense. It was said of the boy that he took after his mother in crucial ways.

Despite his erratic school record, he was believed by certain of his teachers to have a "mind for numbers and abstract thought." He was certainly physically to a remarkable degree, with, as Coach McKeever liked to say, marveling, "reflexes swift and accurate as lightning." Of course, Farley Heart was immediately recognized by his teachers at the Academy Street School as a "math whiz"--"a budding genius." Shirleen Heart, that strange, shyly child, who in another, later era might have been diagnosed as mildly autistic, was acknowledged to have neither any aptitude for numbers nor much of grammar and syntax and communication skills, but she could precisely define "big" vocabulary words with astonishing accuracy--"Like an intense little robot," as one of her teachers said. John Reddy never spoke of his mother, of course. Not to us. Not in our hearing. Taciturn about all things, he would've been doubly taciturn about her, as about his family in general.

Dwayne Hewson insisted that John Reddy was proud of his younger brother, though. There'd been a photo in the Gazette of three prize-winning at the Academy Street School, one of them Farley Heart, at the eighth grade, and Dwayne had mentioned this to John Reddy and John Reddy brightened and said, "Yeah. My brother's getting grades enough for us both. I'm glad. ") But one day in the locker room after basketball practice, when they were sophomores, Dougie Siefried who had a crush on Dahlia Heart blurted out to John Reddy impulsively, "Was your mom ever in the movies, John? She coulda been!" and John Reddy, scratching roughly at a cluster of bleeding pimples between his shoulder blades, said, wincing, "Shit, man, why ask me? Our moms have their secret lives." Our moms have their secret lives. This, too, became a much-repeated remark of John Reddy's. "Wow! Cool." We didn't believe it, though.

Years later, Scottie Baskett found himself in Las Vegas, Nevada, at a convention of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, and impulsively--"Why the hell not? "--to try to track down the Vegas of the mysterious Hearts. "See if I could find out something about no one else knew." (The notorious woman had long since vanished Willowsville, of course. Like John Reddy. ) A less zealous, optimistic and dogged individual than he would not have even supposed that, so years after the Hearts had emigrated east from Vegas, that city of all American cities phantasmagoric and insubstantial as a delirium hallucination, there could be any trace, any vestigial memory of them. But went to the Las Vegas County Clerk's office and came away with street addresses, for the appropriate years, of