The High Heart
Joseph Bathanti
Eastern Washington University Press
ISBN Number: 978-1597660334

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          Joseph Bathanti’s The High Heart is a collection of linked short stories, all set in East Liberty, a working class enclave of Pittsburgh, in the 1960s and 70s. Gritty, violent, humorous and heartbreaking, Bathanti’s stories revolve around Fritz Sweeney, a young man who lives with his mother and father, Rita and Travis. Rita works as a hostess/stripper at the Suicide King Club and Travis is a waiter at the Park Schenley, an upscale restaurant. For as long as Fritz can remember, both have left for their shifts in the late afternoon to return home around 4am. Told almost entirely from Fritz’s first-person perspective, these stories could stand on their own, but together leave the reader with an indelible imprint of Fritz and his neighborhood. “I felt like a mongrel, and looked like one, too. I’d think about my future, but all that appeared on the screen was static, a scrambled signal.” We learn that what he wants most is love and to make his mother happy, but these wishes are unlikely, it seems, to be fulfilled.

          Bathanti’s writing is detailed, fresh and imagistic, but it’s even more so when Rita Sweeney makes an appearance in either her loosely-tied robe, wearing nothing underneath, or in her tight black dress and white go-go boots. Proudly Italian with an explosive temper, she and Fritz’s doting father constantly argue when they’re together, yet magically make love after every heated argument. Sometimes she’s preoccupied with having a baby and spins into a depression when she finds out she’s not pregnant. Fritz confesses in “Hod,” the first story, “I craved love. Desperately. But I knew—I knew, I knew, I knew—that all there would be for me was running away. If I split—when I split—no one would ever know I had left.” But Fritz doesn’t leave home within these stories; he endures, like his father, and tries to do the right thing in his struggles with Rita, in his initiation into construction work at his Uncle Pat’s, and in his match with the blind wrestlers at Saint Sebastian’s, his Catholic high school.

          Perhaps no other story in the collection is as suspenseful and gut-wrenching as the one detailing Fritz’s preparation for his wrestling match with the blind team. In “School for the Blind,” the longest story in the book, Fritz starves and binges to ensure his match weight of eighty-eight pounds. (“To make weight, I fasted like an Old Testament ascetic. I lived by the mirror, carried in my book bag a bathroom scale, weighed my spit and urine and excrement. Hungry every minute of every day, I dreamt about food.”) Rita convinced him to try out for wrestling and he realizes that the way to get ahead in life is through fear and cruelty. His mother doesn’t want Fritz to become like his father, “a gutless wonder,” as she perpetually calls him. She even attends one of his matches, to Fritz’s horror. Although he remains afraid of his opponents and what bodily damage they might inflict upon him, Fritz doesn’t quit.

          He also doesn’t quit when he works a construction job for his Uncle Pat, his mother’s brother. Fritz befriends Shotty, Pat’s fastest and best bricklayer who lost a son either in or after Vietnam—the true circumstances are unclear. In the stories “Hod” and “Scaffold,” Fritz considers death more and more frequently: “There’s the scaffold and Shotty’s kid and there’s Shotty. But mostly it’s me. Up on the scaffold. And I’m scared.”

          Throughout the book, Bathanti hints at the unhealthy relationship between Rita and her brother, Uncle Pat. It could be incest or something else, but whatever it is makes Rita push Fritz into being more like Uncle Pat, the golden sibling who is a millionaire thanks to his construction business. Each story teases the reader that Pat’s and Rita’s secret past will be revealed by the book’s finale, but the reader is left guessing at this storyline, as well as at the conclusion of several other stories that end right at the moment of crisis. Perhaps this is Bathanti’s method of perpetuating what Fritz calls “a lockbox of secrets,” but readers could find it frustrating and deceptive.

          The High Heart’s cover art is more ironic than deceptive in that it shows an image of the Jack of Hearts, when the true “high heart” would of course be the Ace of Hearts. The titular story is about saving face when everyone knows you’re a nobody, as Fritz’s friend Keith tries to do after he loses a poker game. Fritz offers incredible insight into this situation:

I was suddenly ashamed of everything: my home, my mother and father, my entire being. I saw my life as a succession of hourly wages that would keep me poor and sorry, as though it had all come down to this moment of Keith’s knowingly false accusation and my inability to stand up and tell the truth. Keith and I. We’d rather die than tell the truth, admit how empty everything was, what losers we were. Stupid East Liberty kids whose only mode of dealing was to call someone out, true or not, then take a beating—death if it came down to it—and call it honor.

          The High Heart leaves the reader with the sensation of being trapped by her own circumstances. Even the arrangement of the stories induces this feeling of being trapped, since they aren’t told in chronological order. Rita and Travis are destined to continually bicker, and Fritz is destined to be a nobody. Or is he? I’d like to think that Fritz eventually made his way out of Pittsburgh and is narrating these stories years later after his return. But how did he escape and what happened to his parents? Did Rita ever accept her unhappiness? But perhaps what’s more important is that Bathanti has rendered his characters with such realism that you could point them out in a lineup and that the Pittsburgh he describes is more accurate than what you could glean from a map. You feel the cold January wind whipping around the Highland Park Bridge, smell the Chesterfields burning in the ashtrays, and taste the bitter Rolling Rocks with their trademark “33” on the back label. Most of all, this is Bathanti’s love letter to the Pittsburgh of forty years ago, a faded town that never lost its heart.