My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  1.

  What is the source of this daring, this giddy springtime bravado, and Eloise Peck née Ingram the granddaughter of the renowned Episcopal bishop?—French champagne at midnight on the terrace of the Saint-Léon Hotel, in Atlantic City, New Jersey; and here in the suite, in the sumptuous bedroom, more champagne at noon; and Russian caviar lavishly spread on toast (though he, with an overgrown boy’s appetite, prefers marmalade or peanut butter); pheasant-brandy pâté, rum-butter-balls, croissants greedily devoured in bed . . .

  Christopher! . . . are you asleep?

  . . . No ma’am.

  Did I wake you?

  Oh no ma’am.

  I did, didn’t I? . . . I’m so sorry.

  Oh no ma’am, I was awake . . . .I was waking.

  But, dear Christopher, why do you say “ma’am”? . . . Haven’t I begged you to call me “Eloise”? . . .

  . . . Eloise.

  Don’t you love me, Christopher?

  Oh yes . . . Eloise.

  Then why are you so shy, you silly boy? . . . Why now? . . . after these many days of happiness . . . when you know how I adore you?

  . . . I am sorry, Eloise.

  . . . now that I am your fiancée, and we have only to wait until the decree, and then, oh sweet Christopher! . . . we will be married.

  Yes Eloise . . . ma’am.

  Why, is she not young? . . . Eloise Peck née Ingram so very young? . . . to have been married twenty-three years to an old man who will not die?

  Christopher!

  Yes ma’am.

  . . . We will be wed when I am free, it is not a mere dream? . . . a champagne fancy?

  Not at all, ma’am. Which is to say . . . yes.

  And you love your Eloise?

  Oh yes.

  And you will be tender with her?

  Oh yes.

  And you don’t care a fig for the world’s censure?

  Not at all, ma’am.

  And you have no fear of my vindictive husband?

  Not at all, ma’am.

  And you don’t regret your lost vocation? . . . for you would have made, dear Christopher, so very handsome, so very . . . so very powerful a man of the cloth!

  . . . Why yes ma’am, Eloise I mean, I do regret . . . some things.

  But your heart is not broken?

  Oh no.

  Your heart is whole . . . wholly . . . mine?

  Oh yes.

  We will be wed till death do us part? . . . in sickness and in health, whether rich or poor?

  Oh yes certainly, ma’am.

  And you do love your Eloise? And no one else?

  And no one else . . . ? Oh yes.

  ON THE SUNDAY-THRONGED boardwalk, on the wide windy splendid beach, Eloise Peck and her strapping young blond lover (said to be a former farm boy?—a former seminarian?), Eloise Peck and her twin Pomeranians (Princess and San Souci—so sweet), Eloise Peck causing heads to turn in her aigrette-adorned silk turban, her sapphire-and-diamond choker, her printed silk Poiret frock (Empire waistline, loose flowing sleeves, tight “V‑necked” bodice) . . . She carries a white chiffon sunshade, wears white net gloves (showing stark little rhomboids of flesh), her face is hidden by a white tulle veil but everyone in Atlantic City knows who she is: who else but old Wallace Peck’s runaway wife?

  Christopher!

  Yes?

  Give me your arm, dear, and don’t take such long strides . . . .I am quite out of breath in this wind.

  Sorry ma’am. Yes ma’am.

  . . . Eloise, dear.

  Oh yes: Eloise dear.

  . . . And you are tugging too hard on Princess’s leash, the collar is cutting into her throat, do take care, dear.

  Yes certainly Eloise dear.

  Ah, that’s better!

  Yes?

  AFTER TWENTY-THREE YEARS of being good, whence comes, and so suddenly, this delicious badness; after twenty-three years of being Mrs. Wallace Peck in her gilded cage, whence comes, with such exhilaration, this certainty in being . . . Eloise? Glasses of champagne, and French burgundy, and Swiss chocolate almond liqueur, and, in the candlelit Crystal Room of the Saint-Léon, squeezing, sub rosa, the blushing young Christopher’s knee: Do you love me, Christopher dear, or is it all a . . . fancy? In the airy vestibule of St. John’s Episcopal Church the renegade Mrs. Peck snubs, before they can collect their wits, and snub her, the dowager sisters Vandeventer; in the clubhouse at the Atlantic City racetrack Mrs. Peck manages a coolly blithe flirtation with old Elias Shrikesdale, a friend of her late father and her yet-current husband. She drinks a good deal these days (as she is the first to admit!) but she is always in control, perhaps too generous in her tipping, too lavish in her confidences, telling dressmaker, masseuse, hotel manager, telegraph operator, tearoom proprietress, most of all her Filipino maid . . . certain ecstatic plans for the future (honeymoon voyage to the Greek Isles, renovation of the old Ingram estate in Newport) once she is, legally, Mrs. Christopher Schoenlicht.

  Sometimes she weeps, it’s true. But only out of joy. For she is shortly to inherit a great deal of money (by way of a long-delayed court settlement following her father’s death) and she is shortly to be freed of her marital bond to the dyspeptic old tyrant Wallace Peck (who visited upon his young bride two miscarriages, one stillbirth, and a nameless infection eventually cured by way of hydrotherapy and mercury treatments).

  But why should Love hide its face?

  Why should she hide her face? . . . coldly explaining to cousins, to friends, to skeptical Manhattan acquaintances, that she and young Christopher love each other, she and young Christopher honor each other, it matters not at all that, yes, he is nearly twenty years her junior, that he is from a modest rural background in upstate New York, that, apart from a year at the Mount Chattaroy Bible Institute, he has had very little formal education; it matters not at all—this said with an angry flaring-up—that the world professes doubt as to the charity of Mrs. Peck’s behavior in taking up with, or taking advantage of, a sweet but somewhat simpleminded farm boy.

  WHENCE COMES, WITH such force, the conviction that she is mad with love for the boy, that she would die for the boy, that though he is not the first, nor the second, nor even the third, of her “enthusiasms,” he has replaced them all in her heart—in truth, obliterated their memories altogether? Whence comes this defiance, so uncharacteristic of the Ingrams, or of anyone, female particularly, in their circle, that she is not ashamed and she will have her way . . . though discreet enough here in Atlantic City, where of course she is known, to have taken two rooms, a suite for her and an adjoining room for him, to forestall wagging tongues, and the censure of the Saint-Léon management? Whence this delirium of desire? . . . an intoxication of brawny sprawling limbs, hard-muscled limbs, limbs covered in fuzzy blond hair . . . a slow shy crooked smile . . . a deep flush rising from the throat to the cheeks when Eloise, slightly tipsy Eloise, admires him too ecstatically, or caresses him with too-eager clumsy hands: dear boy! dear innocent boy!—do you love me above all the world?

  2.

  The talk in fashionable Atlantic City in the summer of ’09 was of nothing but scandal: scandal in politics, scandal in horse racing, scandal in the behavior of Wallace Peck’s “estranged” wife.

  Was there ever a woman of good family who behaved, in public, with such defiance?—glimpsed on the boardwalk, on the beach, in one or another dining room or salon or restaurant, in the company of the lanky rawboned youth she called her fiancé: a boy young enough to be her son, as the ladies angrily observed.

  And her elderly husband back home in Manhattan, said to be in ill health . . . (It had come to the point, as the gentlemen whispered among themselves, that the expression Wallace Peck’d was beginning to be heard, bandied cruelly about in clubs and drawing rooms: for to be Wallace Peck’d was to be most conspicuously and shamefully cuckolded.) A divorce was in progress, it was known, and Peck had allegedly washed his hands of her, but still!—what scandal!—Eloise Peck in her costly designer
clothes (favoring, this season, the controversial Parisian Poiret, who preached the abolition of the corset), her chestnut-red hair too fiercely hennaed, her face powder and kohl too much in evidence, and didn’t she make a spectacle of herself, smiling and simpering at everyone in sight, as if she imagined they might wish her well?

  Eloise Peck, married off at twenty, had grown into a plump coquettish woman with startled eyes and a busy, bustling, rather too sunny nature, quicker to smile than was absolutely necessary, and given to distracting peals of laughter . . . as if (as her detractors said jeeringly) she found much in the world to cheer her. Until recent years, when her slender waist began to thicken, and the flesh about her jowls and throat slackened, most of the gentlemen in her circle found her charming enough; the ladies were more ambivalent, as ladies invariably are judging one of their own—for was Eloise Peck a silly, vain, shallow woman, the very epitome of the Gay Nineties, or was she a woman of mysterious depths, injured in her girlish spirit by a bad marriage and marked, perhaps, for a tragic fate?

  Harry von Tilzer’s wildly popular song of 1902 was rumored to have been penned with Eloise Peck in mind—

  ’Tis sad when you think of her wasted life,

  For beauty cannot mate with age,

  And her beauty was sold

  For an old man’s gold,

  She’s a bird in a gilded cage.

  And now—was the bird to flee her cage?—to spread her brave wings and fly, and fly, and fly?

  SHE IS A fool, says one observer.

  She is a common adulteress, says another.

  A harlot—but to be pitied.

  A slattern. A doxy. A traitor to her class.

  3.

  In politics the fresh scandal was: Senators Zalmon Briggs (Republican, Ohio) and Denver Cosby (Democrat, New Jersey) were exposed as hirelings of Standard Oil!—certain incriminating letters having been published on the front page of Mr. Hearst’s crusading Journal. (For now it was William Randolph Hearst’s turn to retaliate for his having been exposed only a few months before by the New York World and Harper’s Weekly for his own cloudy deals in Wall Street.)

  In Thoroughbred racing the fresh scandal was: the much-acclaimed winner of the Preakness, a three-year-old filly named Belladonna, was believed to have been injected with cocaine before the race, a charge bitterly denied by her owner, who threatened to bring suit against Preakness officials for “slander and character defamation.” And sporting gentlemen were still shaking their heads over the debacle at Chautauqua Downs, where so many had lost their bets, and the beautiful Xalapa was put down, and the armed robber the “Black Phantom” ran off with hundreds of thousands of dollars—despite an intensive manhunt and the posting of a $12,000 reward, he was still at large.

  “A topsy-turvy world!”—Mrs. Eloise Peck was heard to observe laughingly at the Broadway opening of the operetta Mademoiselle Modiste, where she was clothed in stylish finery including a summer ermine and several strands of costly pearls; and as usual attracted a good deal of attention for herself and her handsome young escort Christopher. A sharp-eyed woman, Mrs. Peck didn’t fail to observe how certain of her acquaintances snubbed her, yet in this new phase of her life, enlivened by champagne and by love, she seemed not greatly to care. In the theater lobby she spoke intimately yet rather loudly to her young man, as if they themselves were performers, deserving of others’ attention.

  So Eloise Peck declared with a tinkling laugh of both bemusement and sorrow that the world had lately become “topsy-turvy”; and her fiancé was heard to reply, shyly, in a voice that betrayed a rural upstate accent, “Ma’am, it is said ‘As above, so below’—which means that, however wicked things seem to our eyes, they are ordained in the heavens.”

  Mrs. Peck ceased to smile, and stared at her husky blond escort in his formal attire, as if she had never seen him before. “Why, Christopher,” she said at last, laughing, “—you are a philosopher and metaphysician, too?”

  4.

  Eloise Peck had met Christopher Schoenlicht at—was it Saratoga Springs? or another fashionable watering place—where he’d been a stable hand, or a bellboy, or a waiter, or . . . a chauffeur? A social acquaintance of Eloise’s claimed that Eloise had confided in her that Christopher had “dropped out of Heaven one day in answer to my prayer that my life be saved”—helping her climb down from a hackney cab at the Waldorf-Astoria. Yet another female acquaintance claimed that Eloise had confided in her that she’d been introduced to Christopher by the pastor of her church—Christopher being a luckless Christian youth forced to terminate his studies in Bible school when his father died a bankrupt. “Someday, we hope, Christopher will resume his studies,” Eloise said, with a mischievous wrinkling of her nose, “—but not, we hope, too soon.”

  Soon it was whispered that Wallace Peck’s wife was separated from him, and traveling about openly with a mysterious young man; not a nephew, nor any blood relation; nor yet a member of her extravagant retinue, which included, from time to time, a Parisian hairdresser, a Canadian “nerve doctor,” and a Jamaican masseuse in addition to a Filipino servant. At first it was hoped by Eloise’s friends that young Christopher was an errand boy (for Eloise frequently sent him on errands to deliver telegrams, fetch a shawl or a fur wrap for her and, in disagreeable weather, to walk the yapping Pomeranians), but in time this fiction dissolved as the lady herself, gaining courage with the passage of weeks, began introducing him as her fiancé. And Eloise Peck not yet divorced from her husband!

  Though clearly not a youth of sophistication or exceptional intelligence, Christopher Schoenlicht was sensitive enough to know very well how people talked; how eyes fastened covertly upon him and the glamorously dressed Mrs. Peck, in public; how whispers and innuendos were exchanged sub rosa. At such times, he blushed fiercely and tightened his jaws, enduring in silence what Eloise Peck, if she knew of it, would have remarked upon with her sharp, shrill laughter. The young man was in his mid-twenties, though still boyish; about six feet two inches, with broad shoulders, a frank strong-boned face, and the sort of rapidly growing beard that requires shaving twice daily. (“At the State Fair at Syracuse, such a specimen would win a blue ribbon,” one of Wallace Peck’s friends dryly observed.) Christopher’s hair was white-blond, like his eyelashes and brows; his eyes were a pale bluish-gray; he carried himself with an awkward sort of grace, rather like (as a columnist for the New York Post slyly commented, alluding to the “Bird out of her Gilded Cage with her new companion”) a bear walking on his hind legs.

  Mrs. Peck, who’d never had children, dressed her young friend with flair, yet with taste: in tailored blazers, white flannels, ascot ties, narrow-pleated silk shirts, smart Panama hats of the kind made stylish by Broadway’s George M. Cohan; yet it couldn’t be said that the young man wore them with ease, and more than one observer, introduced to young Schoenlicht, noted that his nails were ridged with dirt and his linen, though presumably fresh that morning, was fresh no longer. Whether in shyness or in shame, his gaze was often downcast; he had the guarded manner of one who, in childhood, has been the butt of cruel jokes.

  Even so, Christopher Schoenlicht wasn’t so backward as Mrs. Peck’s critics wished to believe. He could exert surprising authority when sent about town as her emissary: speaking firmly with shopkeepers, tradesmen, hotel employees and the like, when the situation required. Mrs. Diggett, the admiral’s widow, reported having seen him smoking a cigar on the beach while walking the twin Pomeranians, at dusk; and reported too that the young man spoke harshly to the dogs, when their yapping grew frenzied and their leashes became wound around his ankles. “He is no fool, it seems, when he’s alone.” Mrs. Amos Sellick, a young Manhattan matron, reported that Christopher was “kindly” and “gentlemanly” in her presence; when Mrs. Peck was elsewhere, Christopher took time to set up a beach umbrella for the Sellick children and to play with them for hours, splashing in the surf, carrying them on his strong shoulders, building elaborate sand castles. Within a few days of their acquaint
ance, Christopher was like a big brother to the Sellick children; a decent, sweet-tempered, honest Christian youth and hardly an immoral gigolo living openly with a woman old enough to be his mother. “He is her victim—the shameless seductress!” Mrs. Sellick whispered. “And what a pity, he seems not to have any family to rescue him from her.”

  5.

  Christopher! . . . are you listening?

  . . . Yes ma’am.

  Yes Eloise.

  Yes Eloise.

  Are you listening, dear, or daydreaming? . . . I swear your mind was miles away!

  Not at all Eloise.

  Are you bored here in Atlantic City . . . Are you happy? . . . Is it time for us to move on?

  Whatever you wish, Eloise.

  . . . time for us to wed, surely!

  Yes surely.

  And you do love your Eloise, above all the world?

  Oh yes.

  And you have no worry of the future . . . of the world’s cruel censure?

  Oh no.

  And you don’t regret your lost vocation? . . . Please tell me, dear, that you don’t; for it would be very wrong of me to come between you and God’s wishes for you.

  God’s wishes for me?

  That you were meant to be a man of the cloth . . .

  But God’s wishes for me, ma’am, must be that I would not be a man of the cloth . . . since He caused my father to die, and my studies to come to an end.

  Oh yes dear! . . . I suppose you are correct, dear.

  And it can’t be that you, ma’am, could come between me and God’s wishes for me . . . for God has told me you are His wishes for me. If not, I couldn’t be here in such a place.

  Yes sweet Christopher: I suppose you are correct.

  But how, ma’am, could I be anything other than correct, if God has sent me to you? . . . if all that we do or say or think or wish is prescribed by Him?