Little Bird of Heaven (31 page)

A few blocks away at Dock Street church bells were ringing: St. Patrick’s. For it was 11
A.M.
of that Sunday morning in February 1983 when Aaron Kruller’s life was torn in two.

How long had Aaron sat there on the front stoop instead of going for help?—he would be asked afterward. And he’d had no idea. Ten minutes? Fifteen? A half-hour? In his trance of oblivion he might have been waiting for Delray to come fetch him. He might—almost—have been waiting for Zoe to come fetch him. He was not even registering the cold, which was below ten degrees Fahrenheit. Though shivering convulsively, his parka and trousers blood-smeared, smears of white talcum powder weirdly mixed with the blood. Until a neighbor noticed him, lonely-looking kid just sitting there on the front stoop like an abandoned dog, bareheaded, gloveless, hugging his knees to his chest. The dazzling-white snow caused Aaron’s thoughts to move with unnatural slowness. He could remember Zoe upstairs in the bed but had no clear memory of having opened the
window beside the bed or of sprinkling the powder onto her.
Why did you do such things Aaron
the police officers would ask him and Aaron said simply
Mom liked things to smell nice. Mom would’ve felt bad how she was left.

This was so. Everyone said this of Zoe Kruller. How Zoe had never left the house looking less than good. It was Zoe’s intention to look
terrific, a knock-out.
Zoe would’ve been deeply shamed to know she would be discovered by strangers naked and in a bed filthy with her own urine, feces, blood. The shame of it would follow her after her death.
If I could help a little
Aaron said
maybe that was it.

L
ABOR
D
AY
1977

O
N THE DAZZLING-LIT STAGE
at the park there was Zoe in her sparkly red dress and high-heeled shoes looking so beautiful you just stared and stared, seeing yes it was Zoe, it was Mommy yet at the same time a stranger with a special connection to the crowd that adored her singing her best-known song “Little Bird of Heaven” at a fast bright pace so different from the way she’d sung this song to Aaron, as a lullaby when he’d been a small child thinking it was a special song just for him, that Mommy had made up.
Who’s my little bird of heaven?
Zoe had asked leaning over the bed to nuzzle her face against Aaron’s face, kissing Aaron’s nose, tucking him into bed
Who’s my little bird of heaven—you are! You are my little bird of heaven.
And now to Aaron at the age of eight it was unsettling and disturbing, it was a betrayal to hear Zoe sing the song he’d believed was special to him in this new, altered way and to see Mommy smiling and winking at the audience of strangers and in this sparkly dress he’d never seen before that dipped in front to show the tops of her breasts, and the tight fabric that clung to her narrow ribcage, waist, hips like something liquid.

Of course Aaron understood: Zoe was a singer with a band, and this was what you did, if you were a singer—you dressed in special costume-clothes, you stood up on the stage at a microphone, you smiled and sang like someone on TV and the audience cheered and applauded. Aaron understood and yet—Aaron was hurt. Seeing the glamorous blond woman who wasn’t Mommy in the spotlight singing with the band that called itself Black River Breakdown that Daddy resented, those guys Daddy disliked and complained of to Mommy—the white-haired fiddler, the Elvis-looking guitarist, and the heavyset man strumming what looked like a large violin resting on the floor that had a deep bass sound like frogs croaking out back of the house on Quarry Road.

Though Daddy said yes, he was proud of Mommy, too. He was.

Aaron and his father were sitting in the first row close by the bandstand. Had to crane their heads back, to see. And the loud music-sound swept over them, like waves. These first-row seats had been
reserved
for special family members and friends of the band, it was a privileged place to sit close by the bandstand. There were other songs of Zoe’s the audience liked, too—“Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Footsteps in the Snow.” You could see how excited and anxious Zoe was for the audience to love her, to cheer and applaud. With narrowed eyes Aaron looked over his shoulder at the rows of seats, so many people, faces unknown to him, all of them staring at Zoe on stage, Aaron counted thirty-two rows of seats, and in each row there were twenty-five seats, and so there were—was it 800 people at the bandstand? But others were standing, and in the grass there were people sitting on blankets and close by in the park people at picnic tables and outdoor grills. Maybe 700 people. Black River Breakdown was the third or fourth band to be playing in the Labor Day concert and had the largest audience. Aaron knew, he should be proud of his mother. He wanted to be proud of his mother. He did not want to think how Mommy had betrayed him, that was a wrong thing to think Aaron knew, a baby-way of thinking, and he was older now, and happy for his mother except it made him feel strange, it made him feel dizzy like seeing somebody wearing a mask, or a department
store mannequin he’d mistaken for a real person, there was something wrong about this, hearing
little bird of heaven
in this place and in an altered voice of Mommy’s that was not the voice of the lullaby, the voice that was special for
him.

And beside Aaron in the folding chair seated with his legs sprawled, an opened can of beer on his knee there was Daddy listening with his face shut up tight staring at Mommy on stage and lifting his hands to clap only at the end of a song, not in spontaneous applause like others in the audience. Deliberately and loudly and lifting his hands so Zoe could see—if she wished to see—how he was clapping, and proud of her, and happy for her.

He
was.

Not just clapping but other noises were disturbing to Aaron, and to Delray. Cheers, whistles, shouts—these were from men, boys—and the looks in their faces—you could tell. Aaron was only eight, but Aaron could tell.

Showing off your body like that. Don’t tell me you aren’t. The way you move your mouth, too. Think I can’t see?

That was Daddy, telling Mommy what she had not wanted to hear.

What Aaron was not meant to hear.

After the concert there was a reception. Aaron believed that they were going to the reception but before even the applause subsided Delray lurched to his feet and walked away leaving Aaron to follow in his wake. Maybe Delray had murmured
C’mon!
or maybe he’d said nothing at all and so Aaron had no choice but to make his way through the crowd jostled by strangers and feeling anxious, excited. Feeling the sting of Zoe’s betrayal like sunburn on his face.

Nearing the parking lot Aaron said, dangerously, “You let Mommy do it—you didn’t stop her.”

Delray was walking ahead, unhearing.

“Why’d you let her, Daddy? Why didn’t you stop her?”

Now Delray heard. Delray was unlocking the car. Delray said, as if this were a subject he’d given thought to, and not a subject that made his
mouth sneer, “‘Stop her’—what? It’s something for your mother to do that makes her happy. She’s got a good voice. She always wanted to sing with some band. She won’t always have this chance.” Delray laughed, and now you could detect the sneer. In the car leaving the park—Delray was one of the first to leave—it seemed he’d forgotten to switch on his headlights until other motorists signaled him. Aaron said, “Why didn’t we stay with Mommy? How will Mommy get home?” and Delray said, laughing, “Don’t worry. Mommy will always get a ride anywhere she wants to go.”

In his bed without Mommy to tuck him in he’d been miserable not able to sleep feeling restless, itchy—he’d been bitten by mosquitoes at the damn park. He was excited, yet—shut his eyes and saw Zoe on stage—heard Zoe singing—and the deep-bass bullfrog-sound from the man with the oversized violin. You had to resent how Zoe drew the light and warmth from him in his bed—from any room she left—you could feel the temperature dropping, the chill of her absence. The emptiness.

M
AY
1978

“M
OM?
H
EY
M
OM
—”

Wandering through the house calling for her. Knowing she wasn’t there. Everything so quiet: no radio, no humming/singing in the kitchen. Early mornings Zoe would rap on the door to Aaron’s room, come inside to poke, prod, tickle and urge him out of bed if he wasn’t up yet. Calling him
sleepyhead, lazybones.
Yanking the covers off him as he woke with effort his skin clammy and heartbeat slowed like the heartbeat of a creature drowsing in the mud of the deepest sea.

But not this morning. This morning was quiet. Nobody gave a damn if Aaron woke in time for the school bus. If he got out of bed at all.

In a quiet choked voice Delray said
There’s no way to stop her what she wants to do. What she thinks she wants to do, that we can’t give her.

He was nine years old. He was a big-boned child with somber staring eyes and lusterless dark hair standing up in tufts around his carved-looking face. Rubbing his fists into his eyes in hurt and in fury at his departed mother. He knew that Zoe had done a very wrong thing and that Pa was disgusted with her and Aaron must side with Pa so that Pa wouldn’t be disgusted with Aaron.

He’d seen Pa take after Zoe, a few times. No one had known he’d seen. Pa would not like it if he’d known. How Pa slammed out of a room in pursuit of Zoe grabbing her shoulders and shake-shake-shaking her and his yellow teeth bared in a wide mean Hallowe’en pumpkin grin but
he’d never hit Mommy he would claim, he would claim to Aaron
never with closed fists.

And Mommy would dare to slap at him, her hair in her flushed face. And Mommy would dare to claw at him, breaking her fingernails.
Bastard you son of a bitch hitting a woman. Weigh twice as much as me you big brave man you sorry son of a bitch.

If Aaron rushed out of his hiding place, Pa would turn on him cuffing him, balling up both fists to punch him in the head, in the gut, in the buttocks if Aaron dared to get in Pa’s way.

Mommy was gone but Aunt Viola came by to cook for them. Viola was Delray’s younger sister who’d defend Zoe to him saying Delray had got to learn to ease up some, you know how much it means to Zoe this singing career of hers, what a sweet voice Zoe has, everybody says so. And Delray said meanly what my wife has is a nice sweet ass. Nobody’s listening to her damn voice.

Viola said laughing, Well. Delray would know.

One night when Delray was out and it was just Aunt Viola and Aaron in the house eating macaroni-and-cheese out of Aunt Viola’s casserole dish and watching TV she told him a secret: that Zoe and her music-friends Black River Breakdown had driven to New York City for an “audition” with a recording company and if this “audition” went well Aaron would be seeing Zoe on TV one day before long and hearing her on the radio. Maybe they’d be invited to Nashville and appear on Grand Ole Opry. Maybe they’d be friends with Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, June Carter. People would buy their records and they’d all be rich and could move out of Sparta to some city like Nashville or New York or to a better part of Sparta like Ridge View where people had their docks and boats on the river.

Aaron was astonished to hear this. Delray had never told him any of this. Viola drank Delray’s ale from the can eating and talking and her eyes dreamy saying how she’d gone to see Zoe off and wished her good luck. No she didn’t approve of all that Zoe did but she understood why Zoe needed to do it. Traveling with her musician-friends in a cream-colored
Chevy van with
Black River Breakdown
in purple letters on its sides and in this van they carried their instruments (guitars, drums) and sound equipment to what they called “gigs”—weddings, family gatherings, summer concerts, bandstands. Black River Breakdown was three musicians and a female singer and they all had full-time jobs and families and no one knew of them yet beyond Herkimer County though they’d been doing these “gigs” for almost five years now and as Zoe said
Not getting any younger!

In the house on Quarry Road there was an antiquated upright piano Zoe had bought as a girl for forty dollars from an elderly neighbor. Zoe kept wanting to take piano lessons but in the meantime had learned to pick out melodies on the keyboard with two fingers replicating songs she heard on the radio or in records. In this way Zoe learned many songs, she was very patient, and very hopeful. Hearing Zoe pick out tunes on the piano Aaron listened closely as if the notes of the piano—sometimes halting, sometimes fluid—were a special code, for him to decipher.

When Aaron struck the keyboard with his clumsy fingers, or with his fists, the strings inside vibrated with alarm, pain. In frustration Aaron set his thumb against the keyboard as far to the right as he could get and run his thumb hard and fast down to the left making a terrible noise and skinning his thumb so it bled.

Zoe had another hope: to write songs!

Wanting to write “love ballads” most of all for Black River Breakdown to record but each time she wrote a song, no matter the song sounded original at first, soon it shifted into something by the Supremes.

“Like their music has burrowed into my brain. Damn!”

Each day Zoe was away in New York City she called home at 6 P.M. speaking first with Delray and then with Aaron. Delray was brusque and sullen with Zoe saying little before handing the phone over to Aaron, who felt strange hearing his mother’s voice on the phone, a novelty for him, and yet so warm and intimate as if she was leaning over him in bed, blowing in his ear and tickling him awake.

The first three calls, Zoe chattered excitedly telling Aaron what a wonderful time they were having—what a “fantastic” city New York
was—next time she came, she would bring her family with her. But the fourth, final evening Zoe burst into tears saying she couldn’t wait to get back home, she was missing them so.

Hearing his mother cry over the phone, Aaron was astonished. Almost Aaron began to cry too, except his father took back the receiver from him.

“Zoe? Get the hell home. Or I’m coming down there after you.”

After Zoe returned home crestfallen and discouraged it would be revealed, maybe Black River Breakdown had made a mistake hurrying off to New York City as they had. Arranging for “audition recordings” to be made at Empire Music Productions, Inc., for a fee of $1,650.

“This terrible ‘studio’! On the twelfth floor of the rattiest old building on Forty-third Street just a few blocks from Times Square, you would think it was
legitimate
at such an address, wouldn’t you?—we sure did. After we paid our fee it turned out there were all sorts of ‘surplus fees’—‘hidden expenses’—and this contract we had to sign so confusing to read, we just gave up and signed it. Should’ve known it was a bad sign this building where junkies and vagrants—‘homeless people’ they are called in New York City—were camped out on the sidewalk out front, you practically had to step over them to get inside. And this ‘Mr. Goetsche’ who introduced himself as ‘CEO of the company’ takes our money, a cashier’s check, and there’s a ‘sound engineer’ and this room supposed to be a ‘recording studio’ and we spent at least six hours making these short records you can actually play, I mean they are real records, but small, and they give them to you and I’m feeling shy asking, Is this it? So much money and all we are getting in return is these little plastic records of Black River Breakdown singing, that we already have tapes and cassettes of, at home? Mr. Goetsche says we will be hearing from him in another day or two about our ‘audition’—whether we will be moving to the ‘next stage’—and in the meantime we’re staying in a Howard Johnson Motel on Forty-seventh Street, and there’s roaches in the bathrooms, terrible noise all night long—sirens, ambulances, fire trucks—firecrackers?—maybe gunshots?—like the worst stories you’d hear of New York City,
you’d have thought were exaggerated. Oh God, I had to check my bed for
bedbugs.
Seems like I could feel those nasty things crawling over my skin! Days we went sightseeing for instance to the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center which we did not think was so very impressive, nights we saw shows like the Rockettes, so that was all right but very expensive, worse even than what people here might think and all the money I’d been saving from my work at Honeystone’s is mostly gone, I am so sad about that. I am just sick about that…. So a day goes by, and another day, and a morning, and we don’t hear from Mr. Goetsche who said he was going to send our ‘audition records’ out to agents, music companies, radio DJs and some TV people for feedback but he doesn’t call us and when we try to call him, some switchboard operator puts us on hold. So I think—I’m feeling desperate like there is nothing to lose at this point—so by myself I go back to see Mr. Goetsche, and sure enough in the ‘recording studio’ there is another group being auditioned, looks like high-school-age kids trying to imitate Mick Jagger, and Mr. Goetsche stares at me like he’s pretending not to recognize me, says he doesn’t have time for me right now, but I tell him he had better make time for me, or I am going to the police. Mr. Goetsche all but laughs in my face, I must appear so foolish to him.

“He’s older than he’d seemed the first day. Kind of oily-skinned and puffy-faced and the whiskey fumes coming off him and it isn’t even noon. He takes me into his office—takes my hand, and squeezes it—like there is some special feeling between us—his office is so cramped and depressing and looking out onto a blank wall and I’m saying, Mr. Goetsche I know that there are all kinds of amateurs in music hoping to be discovered, just tell me is there any chance for Black River Breakdown, or for me?—and Mr. Goetsche starts in saying, Yes of course there is, dear Zoe, this is America there is always a chance for success, but then he stops as if he has run out of steam, he gives me this sad crooked smile and paws around in a drawer, pulls out this large glossy road map of the United States, opens it on his desk top like a school teacher might do, he’s put on his glasses, bifocals, he’s breathing heavy through his nostrils that are thick with hairs, with a pencil he’s tapping this road map north and south, east and
west, saying in this somber voice, Zoe you look like a sweet decent young woman and I know you have tremendous ‘heart’ and could be a legendary performer but I am going to level with you, dear, like you deserve: see all these towns? cities? everywhere, in every state?—in each of these there is at least one very pretty girl with a good voice, a ‘promising’ voice, hoping to make a career for herself in ‘entertainment,’ hoping to be famous and rich and make her family proud of her and her high school classmates green with envy, and it’s her hope that one day strangers will come up to her on the street and ask for her autograph and to have their pictures taken with her. All the far-flung states of the United States, all the cities, towns, desolate little crossroads settlements shortly to become ghost towns, covered in dust in the next few decades, and no one remaining to remember, or give a damn—just dots on the map, see? And the tragedy is, Zoe, there are just too many of you. Too many ‘Zoe Krullers’—and not enough places for you. Like sea creatures in the ocean, all so hungry, and never enough food. And so the sea creatures themselves must become food. If there were not all the other ‘Zoes’—plus ‘stars’ desperate to hang onto what they have with their fingertips, whose names would be known to you—you might have a chance. But there isn’t, see, Zoe?—and so you don’t.”

Telling this story Zoe lowered her voice to imitate Goetsche’s deep-bass voice. You could see that Zoe meant to entertain her listeners yet tears came into Zoe’s eyes always by the end of the story, she wiped at lightly with her fingertips.

Aaron wondered was he meant to laugh? Did Mommy want him to laugh? Each time Mommy told this story, to different people, it was becoming a funnier story, the voices more exaggerated, and Mommy’s expression more comical, yet there were those tears, Aaron saw.

How he hated the man in New York City who’d told Zoe such things!

Hated to think of anyone making his beautiful mother cry and hated to think of people like starving-hungry fish, and so many of them. And so many to be eaten.

“Oh hell—I have to concede he was right. He is right. There in Times
Square, in the vortex—is that what I mean?—‘center’—of all that hunger, and all that hope. And he knows. Maybe his name was even ‘Goetsche’—we were thinking later, driving back to Sparta in the van, maybe the name meant ‘Got-cha’—like ‘I gotcha, sucker!’—maybe it was a joke-name. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he wasn’t joking then. With just me, I mean. Other people, that was different. With me, he spoke sincerely. I’m sure he spoke sincerely. He’d been drinking some but he wasn’t drunk. He called me Zoe in such a tender way, he asked would I like a drink, just the two of us could toast Break River Blackout—that was what he called it, but he wasn’t joking—and I said no thanks and he said O.K. Zoe, he kissed me on the cheek. O.K. and
bonheur toujours.
And I took the elevator back down out of that place, and walked out onto Forty-third Street, and was crying, and laughing too, and I thought
Too many Zoe Krullers, and all so hungry.”

Aaron said protectively: “Mom, I like how you sing!”

“Well! That’s all that matters, then.”

Zoe smiled and leaned over to kiss Aaron, lost her balance and her pursed lips missed his nose, and there was a sweet-sour smell to Mommy’s breath too, Aaron wondered if she had brought back from New York City.