Heartbreak House was a real house, my house.
The war would make America into its own heartbreak house.
HEARTBREAK HOUSE BY LEONARD BEEGHLEY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 137
Every so often watching the sun rise and drinking a cup of tea I think of Heartbreak House, a play by George Bernard Shaw. It affected the trajectory of my life. The play describes the emotionally stunted, morally hollow British elite callously watching a generation of young men go to their graves in the first world war.
I hadn’t read the play in 1963, so I didn’t know that Shaw’s metaphor for world war England would also apply to a real house, my house, and my family.
My mother Norma divorced my father, ending a marriage scarred by alcohol-fueled violence. She suddenly moved my sister Emma and me from Frankfort, Indiana, to Ontario, California.
In Frankfort, a town of about 15,000 people surrounded by pig farms and cornfields, kids relaxed at the A&W Root Beer stand, where they added gin to the sassafras flavor, made out in their pickups, and dreamed of moving to Indianapolis.
In Frankfort’s small public library I discovered William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer introduced me to the study of politics and war. I didn’t know it then, of course, but war—specifically, the war in Vietnam—would shape my life and make America into its own heartbreak house.
Norma said she wanted a new beginning in California, that we would escape the harsh Midwestern winter, with its ice storms, and enjoy blue skies 360 days a year. She said we would like living there. But I did not.
The August afternoon skies were black not blue. A 1000-foot smog of hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide shifted inexorably from Los Angeles to hang over Ontario.
The boys cruised Euclid Avenue with surfboards tied to the roofs of their cars and girls in the passenger seat. Everyone looked effortlessly beautiful.
I didn’t own a car, I had never seen the beach, and I was not beautiful. Walking past Walter’s Restaurant, where the kids hung out, I was a mirage in the summer heat.