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

boy may slide behind the wheel but it's really me, his mother, drives.

The boy is my medium behind the wheel. I'm the adult responsible.

I'm the mother. I'm the mother of this child and of these two others"--she indicated the shy, cowering boy and girl in the back seat--"and if must deal with anyone, it's me." This odd impassioned speech left both the and Matt Trowbridge slightly breathless. Those "sea-green" eyes.

And a glisten of talcumy damp in the cleavage between her breasts.

"And that is my father, Aaron Leander Heart, Of ficer. He doesn't say much but he's one hundred percent alert and reliable helping out if Johnny needs help--aren't you, Daddy?" The old man, wild-white-haired, with deep ironic creases in both cheeks, a burnt-cork flush to his face, muttered what sounded like, "Why sure." It did flash through Trowbridge's dazzled mind That old guy might armed but in the next instant, staring at Dahlia Heart, w, ho was smiling at him, so reasonably, so intelligently, he'd forgotten the thought, or any thought at all. Snapping shut his packet of traffic tickets and shoving them, quick and embarrassed, back into his pocket. Every word this Magdalena Heart had said made perfect sense.

Omitted from Matt Trowbridge's account of his initial encounter the Heart family was the fact that, as a Willowsville police of ficer, one of the younger members of a police force noted for its civility and courtesy to Willowsville residents, if not invariably to nonresidents, especially with darker than Caucasian skin, he'd felt obliged to escort the family to their new home in the St.. Albans Hill neighborhood. For of course they were strangers to the village's tricky "lanes"--"drives"--"passes"--"circles"-"ways"--and "places." For of course they'd have gotten hopelessly lost without his assistance. Trowbridge leapt onto his motorscooter to lead the way, Dahlia Heart, who'd traded places with little Johnny, followed in the Cadillac, driving cautiously, the U-Haul in tow. North on Spring Green Trowbridge led them, a quick right east onto Lilac Lane, again north on Meridian Boulevard in the direction of the old historic village and of the old, grand Willowsville estates, another uphill mile to elm-sheltered, Meridian Place where he might have been surprised, if he'd been coherently, and not distracted by afterimages of Dahlia Heart like mysterious, seductive yet elusive dream residues that continue to haunt us long after we wake from sleep, to pursue him through weeks, eventually years, for the primary and most enduring sexual organ the human male is the eye--he might have been surprised to discover Hearts' destination was the stately if rundown old Dutch Colonial house at 8 Meridian Place between better-kept properties owned by the Thruns and the G. George Bannisters. Trowbridge would have assumed, any Willowsville resident, that this landmark house had been owned by the Edgihoffer family since the death of the retired Colonel Esdras Edgihoffer, whose obituary he'd read a few weeks ago in both the Buffalo Evening News and the Willowsville Weekly Gazette.

"Is this it, Mrs.. Heart? This?"

"It is, Officer." Splendid the woman Dahlia Heart stood in the sun, whitely blinding as a vision. Radiant face of no age Trowbridge could have stated with certainty (no more than twenty-five or -six, he'd have inaccurately sworn), the bone-pale luxuriant hair, her sea-green that weakened his knees. And the shining key held aloft in her fingers--the key to Willowsville itself.

"Thank you for your kindness today, Of ficer, which I will never forget." He murmured ma'am it was only just his duty.

Years would pass. If not tragically, for there is no tragedy in Willowsville, then sadly. Before Matt Trowbridge would again exchange words with Heart. Or even come into her presence again. Though glimpsing the frequently, alone or in the company of men, less frequently, in of her own children. Observing her at a discreet distance with lovesick, yearning, yet unjudging eyes. As, by degrees, he aged, thickened at the waist and began to gray, and she of course did not. As her son the little fellow

"Johnny" matured by quick degrees into a lanky, good-looking adolescent astonishingly sinuous as an upright snake on the court--the "John Reddy Heart" Trowbridge would read about in the high school section of the Gazette. Until at last the summons came as he'd known it would. For Dahlia Heart was a woman to inspire illicit passion, not in Of ficer Trowbridge himself (happily married, with three children below the age of ten who adored their policeman daddy) then in other less men Though he could not have anticipated the shocking nature of the summons, bringing him and three other police officers to the Dutch Colonial at 8 Meridian Place at 2,12 A. M. of a frigid March morning approximately four years and eight months after Trowbridge had escorted the Hearts to new house. Pistols drawn, breaths steaming, crouched and for a sudden eruption of gunfire, Trowbridge and his comrades cautiously approached the large fieldstone-and-wood house whose windows were ablaze with lights and whose heavy oak front door, glaring an robin's-egg blue, was flung open. They had been summoned by a in response to a 911 call by a distraught neighbor of the Hearts, Mrs.. Irma Bannister, who'd cried into the phone, "Help! Pqlice!

Emergency!

Hurry!

Those white-trash Hearts--they're killing one another next door!"

John Reddy, so cool.

John Reddy's mom, burning-hot.

John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.

Like it's her wedding day, every day"--it was said of Dahlia Heart, John Reddy's mom. Because the woman always wore white. Because if you saw a flash of white, a kind of hurtful, intense, dazzling-blinding white, a white whiter than most white, a white to sear your eyeballs and leave an afterimage that would burn for hours, it was likely to be Heart.

But nobody in Willowsville ever called her the White Dahlia--a reference to some notorious never-solved murder case in Los Angeles

1940s. (Where the female victim, a beautiful young woman who'd worn black, thus called the Black Dahlia in the press, was found murdered, sexually abused and grotesquely mutilated, her torso nearly from her legs. ) "The White Dahlia" was meretricious made-for-TV and not Willowsville's style.

John Reddy Heart and his mom never knew (for who would have wished to tell them? ) that, before they arrived in Willowsville, Dahlia Heart was a crude rumor in certain Willowsville circles--"that woman" she was called. Or, "that conniving blackjack woman." Or, "that conniving criminal blackjack woman." In their emotional distress the sudden death of retired Colonel Esdras Edgihoffer (about which circulated), the Edgihoffers themselves must have spread the rumor, speaking unguardedly to friends, even to their hired help, who the lurid story through Willowsville. It could be summed up in its phase as an outcry of shock, hurt and class betrayal, as Reggie Edgihoffer remembers vividly, decades later, his mother exclaiming on the phone to a relative. "Oh, Bessie! You won't believe it! The Colonel is dead, and he's teft his fortune to a blackiack woman in Las Vegas!" At first it was believed, or in any case declared, that the fifty-nine-yearold Colonel had died in a hospital of cardiac arrest. But where was the hospital? Palm Beach, where the Colonel had allegedly been living in retirement?

Washington, D. C. , which the Colonel often visited? Then it out, revealed to Kenny Fischer's mother by her Monday-Thursday woman Carlotta, who did housework for the Matthe Edgihoffers, that in the Colonel had died in Las Vegas where he'd been "gambling away his life savings." (This wasn't entirely true. The Colonel was believed to have lost approximately $75, 000 in the casinos, over a period of twelve days, but he had assets worth much more than that, including property in Palm and at 8 Meridian Place in Willowsville. ) Later it came out, revealed by a half-dozen sources simultaneously at a women's fashion luncheon at Willowsville Country Club, that the Colonel ha) died not in a room but on the floor of Caesars Palace Casino, at a blackiack table where ironically, he hadn't lost with a turn of the card but had won--sums ranging, as the luncheon ladies told and retold the amazing tale, from 5, 000 to 50, 000. But shortly after this it was revealed, by an source close to the grieving family, that the Colonel had in fact died in a private suite on the thirtieth floor of Caesars Palace Hotel where he'd been staying for some time, registered under the name

"Ike Egan" of Washington, D. C. hadn't been alone.

He had, though, died of cardiac arrest.

Discovered by a medical emergency team on the floor beside a "pharaohsized bed" (as the hotel described these mammoth beds), naked, amid tangle of bedclothes partly torn from the bed in his death throes, Colonel had been in close proximity to a woman at the time, and it was this woman who'd called the front desk to report the Colonel's collapse.