"Oates, Joyce Carol - Broke Heart Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)
Trish forced herself to stare straight ahead, blindly, at the windshield streaming rain. I am in John Reddy Heart's car. The very place my parents would forbid me to be. If they knew. But they don't. No one knows. I, Trish Elders, am alone with John Reddy Heart in his car. She would marry young, babies, and divorce in heartbreak (though as for most of us, divorce would be her decision) and remarry, all along pursuing the elusive mirage of art into middle age and beyond, somehow knowing, that day in John Reddy's salmon-ored Caddie with the ridiculous swinging dice, littered notes, that her subject was seated just a few inches away--"But just the feeling of John Reddy. It would be futile to try to draw or paint him." She was thinking, gloating, that never had any other girl of the ridden in this car. Never had Trish's closest dearest friend, Verrie Myers, who confessed of dreaming of such rides with John Reddy, ridden in car. Wait till I tell Verrie, Verrie will die. Already Trish was rehearsing how she would tell her story, she'd been caught in the rain without an umbrella, carrying the awkward-sized sketch pad, her purse and books, about to cry she'd been so vexed stumbling along the sidewalk at the intersection of Main and Lane and a car braked to a stop at the curb and a voice, deep, gravelly, not familiar, called out, "Climb in," as if it was the most natural thing in the world and since this was the Village of Willowsville at a time of such innocence in our history that a girl like Trish Elders might unhesitatingly, trustingly climb into any car whose driver was thoughtful enough to offer her a ride in the rain, Trish climbed in. And saw the driver was John Reddy Heart.
And so Trish Elders fell in love. Though John Reddy scarcely spoke her, or glanced at her. Trish was one of the popular girls in her class, a JV cheerleader, secretary of Hi-Y, accustomed to attention from boys and even, though it was unwanted, unsought, from men, but John Reddy didn't perceive her in such a way at all--"It was like he'd have given anyone, possibly even a dog, a ride in such rain. As a favor. Just to be nice."
roaring in Trish's ears swelled. She couldn't wait to be alone in her room, her parents' half-timbered English Tudor house on Mill Race Lane, to try to sketch, with shaky fingers, the phantom John Reddy Heart, not yet knowing such an effort was doomed to failure, thinking I am alone with tohn Reddy Heart, a fact that means nothing to him though my life will never be the same again.
And already the ride was over. Six swift minutes. It would've still, except for slow-moving Willowsville traffic. John Reddy didn't seem to know the exact location of the public library so Trish had to point it out to him, and gallantly he swung the Caddie into the library's drive so that Trish could get out beneath an overhang and run to the door. "T-thank you," Trish stammered, unable to call him by name, though in dreamy recapitulations of this scene she would murmur Thank you, tohn Reddy! and John Reddy the steering wheel said, smiling, "O. K. , honey. Shut the door hard, huh?" Trish shut the car door as hard as she could and stumbled blindly into the library, nearly fainting. It was fortunate that no one saw her--one of the librarians, or a friend of her mother's. For John Reddy had called her "honey"!
"It wasn't until years afterward that I realized," Trish said, sighing, "--John Reddy obviously hadn't known my name." For that was the hurtful, humiliating fact. The knowledge we had to accept, that these intimate exchanges with John Reddy Heart were intimate on one side only--ours.
For next time you encountered John Reddy, even if it was that same day, he'd be likely to ignore you, just not-see you. If, say, you out cheerfully, "Hi, John, how's it going?" he'd be likely not to hear.
As Dwayne Hewson summed it up years later, in a tone unusually thoughtful for Dwayne, and not at all tinged with irony, "It wasn't out of cruelty or meanness that John Reddy ignored us. Nor even out of distraction or forgetfulness or because he smoked dope with his buddies or exhaustion--you know, John Reddy never got enough sleep. But just because in some essential way, in his innermost world, the rest of us didn't exist."
So we were never to know. So many things. Even after both John Reddy's trials. Because we couldn't ask John Reddy and there was no one else.
For instance, this was a question that vexed our mothers more than it did us, why was Dahlia Heart always known as
"Mrs.. Heart"? With a oldfashioned formality the woman persisted in signing her name Mrs..
Heart. When you met her, she shook hands and, smiling emphatically, introduced herself as
"Mrs.. Dahlia Heart." Yet she introduced her
"Aaron Leander Heart"--evidently
"Heart" was her maiden name?
Unless, as Roger Zwaart's dad said, tongue-in-cheek, she'd married a man Heart in addition to having been born Heart. We puzzled over such possibilities. We were led to wonder if Dahlia Heart had ever been married at all.
It was not an era in which women who were mothers were without designated as "fathers." It was not an era in which women who were husbands were comfortably designated as "mothers." We didn't want think that John Reddy was illegitimate. Yet it was an era in which, if you lacked a legal father, and your mom lacked a visible husband, it might well be murmured of you that you were illegitimate.
The cruder term, bastard, was not to be uttered.
In the Village of Willowsville, there were no bastards. Even on slumping-down east edge of town, beyond Spring Street, Water Street, Division, women who were mothers were married.
Our moms pondered the possibility that the Heart children--John Reddy "and the two others," whose names no one could remember--hadn't the same father. For it was generally conceded that the younger brother and sister more closely resembled each other in their plainness, doggedness, and myopia than either resembled John Reddy. But then these two didn't resemble their mother, either.
And with the passing of time, Farley and Shirleen would resemble Heart less and less.
Among those WHS teachers who'd claim to have gotten to know John Reddy after he returned to school, sobered by his year at Tomahawk and shorn of his luster as a star athlete, it was Mr.. Dunleddy junior-senior biology teacher who relayed the information--"But it's confidential"--that John Reddy's father had died a hero's death in the Air Force, a test pilot who'd been killed in the line of duty and "lost somewhere in the vastness of a desert--possibly the Sahara." Whether John Reddy's father and Dahlia Heart had been legally married, Mr.. Dunleddy said stiffly, "I wouldn't presume that such private information was any of my business." Our teacher's heavy bulldog face expressed a strange, touching protectiveness for John Reddy (whose grades in biology were barely passing) and scorn for gossip-mongers.
Miss Bird, our brilliant and caustic-tongued English teacher, was equally, strangely, protective of John Reddy. Perhaps she, like Mr..
Dunleddy, perceived him as an orphan, as more vulnerable than we who were his contemporaries could perceive him. Her claim to intimate knowledge of the mysterious Heart family was based upon frequent after-school with John Reddy (who was barely passing English, too) and upon a more curious episode, she'd given a lift one evening in her car to Reddy's grandfather Aaron Leander Heart, whom she discovered "wandering by wayside" several miles east of Willowsville on the busy highway Road, the white-haired old gent appeared to be disoriented, like sleepwalker, smelling of whisky and dressed in mismatched clothing a hefty burlap sack whose contents, clanking and clicking like glassware, he'd declined to identify. Old Mr.. Heart hadn't known Miss Maxine Bird, course, but Miss Bird recognized him, for she'd seen him once or twice in Willowsville in the company of John Reddy and deduced their kinship.
Was Miss Bird watchful of John Reddy even outside of school? It was an open secret in those days that ferocious Maxine Bird with her red-dyed skinned-back hair and intolerant green eyes and high-strung nerves and fervent idealism about all things literary had a crush on John Reddy, less clear was whether the thirty-five-year-old teacher was aware of it. ) It took considerable cajoling, Miss Bird said, to convince this eccentric old man to climb into her car, though traffic on Transit Road was rushing by as usual, and the weather was miserable--rain laced with sleet, that perpetual cold wind from Lake Erie. But at last Mr.. Heart was persuaded and slid into the rear with his bulky burlap bag, which must have weighed thirty pounds, and Miss Bird, fired with a sense of mission, drove him directly home. Old Mr..
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