Joyce Oates - Little Bird of Heaven

Want to see me cry? Want to see my broken heart? You won’t.

In the 1980s, in Sparta, New York, the expectations of a young woman of Lucille’s class—working-class/middle-class/“respectable”/“good”—were not essentially different from the expectations of Lucille’s mother in the late 1950s and early 1960s: you yearned to be engaged young, married young, start to have your babies young. You yearned to attract the love of an attractive man, possibly even a sexy man, certainly a man who made a good living , a man who was faithful.

In the late 1960s, elsewhere in the country, or, at least, in the tabloid America fantasized, packaged and sold by the commercial media, there had been a sexual revolution: a hippie take-over. But not in Sparta, and not in Herkimer County. Not in upstate New York in this glacier-raddled region in the southern foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. Here, despite a rising divorce rate, more “single-parent” homes (i.e., Negro mothers on welfare, much talked-of, disapproved-of), and other unmistakable incursions of the 1960s fallout, the America of the 1950s yet prevailed, beneath a showy veneer like the faux yellow pine hardwood floors my father’s construction company sold, since prospective homeowners didn’t want to pay for the real thing.

Not publicly but to her family, repeatedly and dazedly my mother would say—not quite within my hearing, but I managed to hear—that she’d never known Eddy: she’d lived with a man for all those years, she’d had two children with him and she’d never known his heart.

(Was this so? Neither Ben nor I had any idea. Photographs of our young parents showed two strikingly attractive individuals: a very pretty round-faced girl with a cheerleader-smile, glamorous teased hair and a sizable bust straining against silk “designer” blouses; a tall broad-shouldered rust-red-haired young man with a jaw like a mallet, wary eyes and a sly half-smile very like the signature smile of the young Elvis Presley. Neither Ben nor I would have wished to acknowledge what seemed obvious if you studied these photos, especially a wedding photo in which the groom’s husky arm is slung about the bride’s shoulders all but crushing her against him, the groom’s large male hand cupped about the bride’s bare upper arm beneath a white lace stole, and the thumb of that hand unobtrusively pressing against, very likely rubbing against, the sweet fatty talcumed flesh of the bride’s right breast. Sex! Our parents! That was it .)

Over those eighteen years, Lucille had gained weight. And then, during the eighteen months preceding her divorce, Lucille had lost weight. Her moon-shaped face that had been such a pretty girl’s face well into her thirties became ravaged, cruelly lined; she’d lost weight too quickly for her skin to shrink, there were loose pockets and pouches of skin everywhere on her body she took pains to keep hidden. But Lucille had the sort of features that took well to make-up, still she could exude an aura of smalltown glamour. She never left the house without dressing presentably: “primping.” She never left the house without fresh-applied lipstick. Not long after the divorce—in September 1984, on the very Tuesday public schools began classes—Lucille had her hair cut and restyled and “lightened” and overnight those single steely hairs like nails had vanished, to her adolescent daughter’s immense relief.

Naively Ben said: “Mom looks different today, you notice?”

“Maybe she was smiling.”

“Ha-ha,” Ben said, in a way meant to convey heavy sarcasm. In all things having to do with my mother Ben flared up quickly, he hated our father for how our father had hurt our mother, thus had to love our mother blindly, without judgment and without nuance. If I persisted in criticizing Lucille, Ben had been known to punch me.

Not that Lucille smiled, much. Not at home.

Away from home, yes Lucille smiled. Returning to church—the First Presbyterian Church of Sparta, a grim triangle-shaped limestone structure that made my heart clutch like a fist, in adolescent resistance each time I was dragged into it—and to her “old, best friends” she’d “all but lost” while married to Eddy Diehl who “hadn’t any patience with nice people.”

Boring people, Mom meant. Nice boring kind-Christian women whose boring husbands hadn’t left them, not yet. Or anyway so far as anyone knew. Yet.

“Krista, Hilda Smith’s daughter Pearl—you must know her, she’s in your class at school?—belongs to Sparta Christian Youth Alliance—they have the most wonderful summer campground at Lake George, Hilda was telling me. I told her I’d speak to you…”

O.K., Mom. You’ve spoken to me.

“We need to put this behind us, Krista. This ugliness. Like an earthquake, or a flood, you’re in shock but then, you know, you galvanize. You come alive. The idea of the Gospels is—‘Good news is possible.’”

Lucille spoke with a hard gritty optimism like one grinding away with her teeth at something lodged in her mouth—some careless takingin of a substance not quite edible, grindable. But she would grind it down, she would swallow it. If you weren’t careful she would make you swallow it, too.

The Herkimer County order of restraint against Edward Diehl had originally been issued in April 1984 and since that time reissued at least once. By this order Edward Diehl was forbidden to approach his (ex)-wife Lucille and his children Benjamin and Krista in any public or private place; he was forbidden to come closer than one hundred feet of any of them; he was forbidden to “trespass” on the Huron Pike Road property that he himself had purchased with a thirty-year mortgage, twelve years before. Of course he dared not approach the house, nor even make telephone calls to the house, which he’d partly remodeled and in which he’d executed so much carpentry over a period of years. (In an extravagant and reckless gesture my father had simply deeded the property over to my mother—“The least he could do,” my mother said bitterly.)

In the months following the divorce, so far as we knew, Daddy lived in Sparta with friends, or relatives; Daddy may even have been taken in by a woman friend; for there were many who knew Eddy Diehl well, who’d gone to high school with him, and been drinking-friends of his, scarcely known to Lucille or to us. These people—mostly men but not exclusively men—were convinced that Eddy Diehl hadn’t done what it was claimed by others that he had done, committed an act of murder: “homicide.” They would not cease to believe in Eddy Diehl’s innocence even after he’d been taken into Sparta police custody, even when it was leaked to the media that he’d “failed” a polygraph test; even when his picture began to appear in local papers and on local TV news in the company of the other “prime suspect” in the case, the father of a classmate of a Sparta man uncannily resembling Eddy Diehl in age, height, physical type.

SUSPECTS IN KRULLER HOMICIDE QUESTIONED BY POLICE

THOUGH MY MOTHER HAD had our telephone number changed, and removed from the directory, yet my father managed to acquire the number as if by magic, and called us. Sometimes when one of us answered he didn’t speak: you listened and heard only a crackling sort of silence, like flames about to erupt. Timidly I said, “Daddy? Is that—you?” but Daddy would not answer, nor would Daddy hang up the phone; at such times I did not know what to do, for I loved my father very much, and was frightened of him; I had been made to be frightened of him; among the Bauers it was whispered that he was a brute , a murderer. And there were many in Sparta who believed yes, my father was a brute , a murderer. If Ben answered his voice went shrill, he was furious, half-sobbing: “We don’t want you to call us, Dad,” but Ben’s voice weakened when he uttered Dad , though he’d steeled himself not to say Dad , yet Dad had come out. Once when I picked up the phone expecting to hear my friend Nancy’s voice instead the voice was a man’s, low and gravelly: “Krista? Just this, honey: I love you.” On trembling legs I stood in the kitchen dazed and blinking as the voice continued, “Is your mother nearby? Is she listening?” and I could not manage to answer, my throat had closed tight, “Don’t hang up yet, honey. Just want you to know I love —” but the look in my face was a signal to my mother, with an angry little cry Mom took the receiver from me and slammed it down without a word.