My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Stubbornly, Mina refused to name the father of her child. No matter if Sir Charles angrily locked her away, or allowed her a measure of freedom as a kind of bribe; no matter if Sir Charles denounced her, or pleaded with her, or prayed for her, or refused to speak of her. As her pregnancy progressed, and her belly grew more and more swollen, Mina pouted that so much was made of it, and that she was being persecuted. “Why, when it’s only Nature?—when ‘Mina,’ like any of you, is only Nature?” At times, strangely, she seemed to awaken to the enormity of her sin . . . struck dumb with shock and grief when she hid herself away to pray on her knees, begging God for help. In one of these queer repentant states Mina told her mother that she should be banished at once—driven into the wilderness—wrists and ankles bound and her sinful body thrown into the swamp; yet, within an hour, the other Mina returned with greater vehemence, screwing up her hardened face in scorn, that fools should have taken her “silly remarks” seriously.

  Mina began to hint that, when her baby was born, she would hand it over to the father, for the secret would be immediately revealed. “Everyone will see, at once, seeing it.” And again she laughed, her cruel cutting laugh.

  Yet the outcome of the mystery was to be, tauntingly, no outcome, no resolution; for on the eve of giving birth (as her physician calculated) Mina slipped away from the Governor’s mansion high above the river, and fled alone, or with an accomplice, never to be seen again in all of the Chautauqua Valley.

  FOR A LONG moment the children were silent, rapt with listening. Millie, Darian, and six-year-old Esther. Then, in a sudden temper, as if old Katrina had willfully deceived them, Millie cried, Why Katrina, that’s no proper story, I hate that story! (For though Millie was now seventeen, almost grown, and had been told the tale of the Crown Governor’s daughter a hundred times since she’d been a baby, her excitable nature was such that she never failed to anticipate an ending, a real ending. The ending that must have been.)

  But Katrina, offended, rose with dignity from her chair beside the hearth, and wrapped her warm-knit shawl about her thin shoulders, and said, in her typically enigmatic way, leaving Millie, Darian and little Esther to puzzle over her words among themselves, It is hardly your privilege to hate any such story, miss—as if you were not a Licht, and that fated girl’s blood your own.

  “IN ADAM’S FALL . . . ”

  In the village of Muirkirk few indisputable facts were known of Abraham Licht and his mysterious family (if “family” they were, indeed); but, beginning with that autumn day in 1891 when Abraham Licht first appeared, on horseback, to make his unexpected bid at the auction of the Church of the Nazarene, so many theories were aired, debated and sifted through and promoted as truth, hardly an inhabitant of the region was without an opinion.

  (Some even argued that the dashing Mr. Licht reappeared in Muirkirk that day. That he was in fact a native of the countryside, born there, returning home after years of absence.)

  So many tales told of Abraham Licht: so many fancies spun of his women, his children, his “profession”—!

  For instance:

  He had a wife named Arabella, mother of his two eldest sons (discounting his dark-skinned son Elisha, whose mother was unknown); he had a wife named Myra, or Morna, whom no one in Muirkirk ever spoke with except Dr. Deerfield, who delivered her of an infant girl in the summer of 1892; he had a wife named Sophie, delicate, blond, withdrawn, the mother of the youngest son Darian and of little Esther, whom Dr. Deerfield delivered in March 1903. (And what of these fated women? Arabella disappeared from Muirkirk and was never seen again, abandoning her sons to their father; Myra, or Morna, disappeared from Muirkirk and was never seen again, abandoning her little girl to her father; poor Sophie died of childbed fever within two weeks of her baby girl’s birth and was buried by a distraught Abraham Licht in the old churchyard behind the rectory in which the family lived.)

  Of course, the most speculation centered upon dark-skinned Elisha. Who was the boy’s mother?—was Abraham Licht truly his father? For here was a Negro boy who behaved as if he was “white”—who behaved, indeed, as if he were of royal blood, arrogant and “uppity” like no other Negro the inhabitants of Muirkirk had ever glimpsed. Mr. Carr, the banker with whom Licht dealt, claimed that Licht had once indicated that Elisha was a “valet” of his whom he would “trust with his life”—and with sums of cash. Reverend Woodcock, the Methodist minister who tutored Darian and Esther, and taught Darian to play the foot-pedal organ, was convinced that Elisha was a foundling, an orphan, brought home by Abraham Licht as an act of Christian charity; for Darian claimed that “my brother Elisha” was born in a storm and a flood “on a great river thousands of miles away.” If the dark-skinned boy grew to resemble Abraham Licht by adolescence, it was less a matter of physical appearance (for Elisha had distinct Negroid features: a smooth mahogany-dark skin, very dark thick-lashed eyes, wide nostrils, an upper lip thick and broad as the lower) than of the acquired: as Abraham Licht was accustomed to walking briskly in all weather, with a military bearing, head high, so was young Elisha; as Abraham Licht smiled happily, and brightened, whenever he caught sight of another person, like an actor striding out on stage to confront his audience, so too did young Elisha; as Abraham Licht was always impeccably groomed and stylishly dressed, exuding an aura of virile self-assurance, so with young Elisha.

  Despite the fact that the boy was after all black; which is to say, not-white.

  Fortunately, Elisha Licht was rarely glimpsed in Muirkirk, now that he’d grown up. For years it was believed the youth was “away at college” somewhere in Massachusetts. When he returned, it was for brief periods, sometimes no more than a week, so that his cocky airs couldn’t cause much harm; and if he was entrusted with business errands in the village, making a deposit at the First Bank of the Chautauqua, for instance, or paying Reverend Woodcock his fee for the children’s lessons, or spending within an hour $500 at the saddlery in a purchase “for Mr. Licht”—the handsome youth was so charming, so well-spoken and congenial, even the most rabid Negro-haters felt compelled to comment, in his wake, “Elisha Licht is different.”

  Except: there was one occasion, about eighteen months before the time of this narrative, when Elisha and his white brothers Thurston and Harwood were observed at the Sign of the Ram, a popular tavern on the Innisfail Pike, drinking ale together at the bar, talking earnestly, laughing loudly, seeming oblivious of the attention they drew; and in response to a remark made to him by a fellow drinker, apparently in reference to his racial ancestry or the color of his skin, Elisha flashed his dazzling Licht-smile and said, “True, my skin is black; and my soul—well, in fact, my soul is black as well.”

  SINCE THE GENTLEMAN who called himself Abraham Licht had bought the abandoned property belonging to the Church of the Nazarene in 1891, there were periods of time when he not only indicated he’d retired permanently to the countryside (“So blessed an atmosphere,” he told his neighbors, “—set beside the polluted city”) but gave every sign, by his zeal in becoming acquainted with Muirkirk’s most influential citizens, that he planned a local career of some sort, probably in politics. So congenial was Abraham Licht, so animated and well-spoken, both Republicans and Democrats (a minority in the Chautauquas) believed he would surely go far, if he wished. But then, with no warning, Licht would break his connections by vanishing from Muirkirk for months at a stretch. Some of his family he left behind, and others he took with him; but never in any pattern that his neighbors could discern. And when he returned, he often made no effort to reestablish his old connections, as if he’d forgotten them.

  What was more curious, when Licht reappeared he often looked subtly changed: having gained or lost weight; having grown a beard, or having shaved one off; now older, or more youthful; now in robust good health, or slightly sickly; and so forth. Sometimes Licht dressed in the very height of fashion, and sometimes with the austere plainness of a well-to-do Quaker businessman. Sometimes he drove a handsome new motorcar, sometimes an
old Selden buggy, sometimes he rode on horseback, exposed to the elements like a figure out of a Wild West illustrated tale. Always, he was triumphantly himself and could never be mistaken, as observers said, part admiringly and part critically, for anyone else.

  How many children has Abraham Licht?—was a question frequently posed in Muirkirk, in the bemused tone of a riddle. And what was the man’s relationship with the old woman Katrina who had long managed his household?

  Over the years, so many were the comings and goings in the Licht household, it was claimed that Abraham had ten or eleven children. Then again, it seemed he might have as few as four. By the summer of ’09, a consensus was reached that there were six young people in his household, no more and no less. These were Thurston, the eldest (blond and fair-skinned as a Viking, grown taller than his father); Harwood, who was two or three years younger than Thurston (stocky, muscular, with hair the color of ditch water, of middling height); the enigmatic Elisha (believed to be about twenty years old); Millicent, or Millie, seventeen years old (as fair as Thurston, with a delicate, porcelain beauty and striking bluish-gray eyes); and the younger children, who never left Muirkirk—Darian, who was nine, and gifted musically; and Esther, who was six.

  And what of Katrina? It was she who shopped in Muirkirk, and she whom tradesmen and other women knew. A formidable presence, in her mid-sixties, fierce-eyed and dignified, a woman who spoke with a distinct German accent and who wore her pewter-colored hair in braids like a helmet. “Yesss thank you”—“Nooo thank you”—“That is enough thank you”: so Katrina spoke, when obliged to speak, rarely smiling at anyone outside the family, even shopkeepers with whom she’d dealt for years. Generally it was believed that Katrina was Abraham Licht’s housekeeper (though entrusted by him with much autonomy in his absence) but there were those who believed, or out of mischief claimed to believe, that Katrina was Abraham Licht’s own mother.

  AND WHAT WAS Abraham Licht’s business, or profession? How did he support himself and his family, seemingly so well?

  It had long been a matter of curiosity that a gentleman of Abraham Licht’s self-evident talents and background should wish to bury himself away in a remote corner of the Chautauqua Valley, at the edge of a marsh; and to make a home for himself and his attractive children in an abandoned stone church of all places. (This had been the church of the evangelical Nazarenes whose faith had died out in Muirkirk decades ago. The Church of the Nazarene, however, whose original foundation dated back to 1851, was no ordinary clapboard country church but was built of irregularly matched fieldstone, stucco and untreated timber; it had a steep roof at the peak of which was a crude, dignified stone cross; its windows were tall and narrow; its rectory consisted of four small rooms; to the rear was a churchyard of weatherworn gravestones and markers, long allowed to grow wild. The main interior of the church was plain, spartan, of “Protestant chill” as Abraham Licht described it: twelve oak pews, a pulpit of modest proportions, a foot-pedal organ, a carved hickory cross that was imposing though but three feet in height. This interior was more spectral and aqueous than holy, as a result of the atmosphere, laden with moisture from the swamp close by.) Over the years Abraham Licht had greatly improved the property, expanding the building at the rear, creating sizable living quarters adjoining the rectory, adding a stable, and the like. But why sink cash into such a property, why not buy a new house?—invest in more valuable land, in a more prestigious part of the Valley? Such questions, common in Muirkirk, were never addressed to Licht himself.

  Because of this eccentricity it was vaguely believed that Abraham Licht must be a defrocked minister, possibly of an evangelical sect. For there were occasions when the public tone of his personality suddenly changed; even his voice, so rich, deep and self-assured, grew somber. He might allude to pessimistic passages of what he called the Hebrew Bible (“And what is that, Mr. Licht? Do you mean the ‘Old Testament’?” he was asked in genuine bafflement), particularly the teachings of the prophet Ecclesiastes; he murmured such Latin expressions (vae victis, tempus fugit, caveat emptor, fiat justitia, ruat caelum) that seemed to signify an immense sorrow tinged with anger. Speaking with Reverend Woodcock in the Methodist minister’s office, Abraham Licht was likely to make reference to one or another of the Church Fathers, American Puritan preachers like Cotton and Increase Mather, and to quote, in a tone of seeming sincerity:

  “In Adam’s fall

  we sinneth all.”

  Reverend Woodcock would then counter by saying that such a pessimistic vision had been modified by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, surely; the New Testament had modified, if not entirely erased, the dour claims of the Old; just as the New World of North America had surged far in advance of the Old World of Europe. “Our Savior entered history to alter it,” the soft-spoken yet impassioned Woodcock insisted, “and bring us the ‘good news’ of salvation.” Abraham Licht would murmur, staring at the older man’s face as if he hoped there to see the promise of his own redemption, “Ah, did He! Is that it!”

  More worldly Muirkirk citizens were scornful of the mere idea that Abraham Licht, one of their own kind, might have once been a minister! Instead, Licht had obviously been a man of the world, possibly an actor; trained in the classics, and most of all Shakespeare; possibly he was an actor at the present time who for reasons of privacy hid away periodically in the country incognito. For on the dreariest midwinter day when the sky above the Chautauqua Valley glowered a soulless white like dirty snow, and all of Earth seemed flat and stale, didn’t Licht carry himself with the arrogant self-confidence of a Hamlet, an Othello, a Lear?—wasn’t his broad, handsome face flushed with good health as if illuminated by footlights? Didn’t he seem, pausing after certain of his remarks, to be awaiting applause?

  And there was mysterious Elisha (valet, adoptive son, bastard son!) with the bearing and personality of an actor too, like P. T. Barnum’s famous Master Diamond, who’d been the most celebrated Negro performer of his day. And there was pretty, volatile Millicent with the airs and fetching, if unpredictable, ways of a Broadway ingenue. The wife of the owner of the Muirkirk Journal, who loved opera and traveled by train to New York City expressly to attend openings at the Met, claimed that Abraham Licht had “obviously been trained in opera”: for it happened that one fine June day when she was working in her rose garden in Muirkirk, imagining herself alone and singing a few bars of Tannhäuser‘s Venus in her bower, she was answered by a rich baritone voice out of the very air!—the rogue Tannhäuser himself stealing up behind her with hands clasped in mock gallantry, eyes bright with pleasure, in the guise of Abraham Licht.

  And it didn’t go unremarked how musically gifted the child Darian was. At the age of four, this amazing little boy with his father’s dark, brightly alert eyes was already composing melodies in his head, and he’d learned to play both the piano and the organ, so far as his small hands allowed him, by the age of eight. “A prodigy”—as Reverend Woodcock called him.

  But other observers scoffed at the notion that Abraham Licht had ever been a “mere actor . . . entertainer.” A certain sobriety in his manner, his forceful personality and his habit of seemingly firsthand war reminiscences (one of his favorite subjects was the recent War with Spain and the “filthy little war” with the heathen Filipinos) argued that he was obviously an ex-military man, of officer status. Yet if questioned closely, Licht grew evasive and changed the subject; which led a contingent of Muirkirk veterans, the oldest of whom had fought for the Union in the War Between the States, to suspect the man of having been dishonorably discharged from the Army, or a deserter. (“For what ex-military man will deny his past except if there is something in it to shame him?”—so their reasoning went.)

  Dr. Deerfield, the only Muirkirk resident to have ever set foot in the mysterious Licht household, disagreed with all these theories, insisting that Abraham was some sort of collector or dealer of antiques of all kinds: furniture, arts and crafts, clothing, costumes, aged books and maps. Though Deerfield had
seen little of the Licht residence apart from the room in which Abraham’s wife Sophie was bedridden, he’d had a distinct impression of a household crammed with odd, miscellaneous items—“Some of them fairly ugly, in my opinion. But then, what do I, a country doctor, know about ‘antiques’ and ‘objects d’art’?”

  But there was the opinion of Edgar Carr, president of Muirkirk’s First Bank of Chautauqua, who, claiming to know firsthand of Abraham Licht’s “wildly fluctuating” finances, believed that the man was either a professional gambler (his specialty Thoroughbred racing) or one of the notorious new breed of Wall Street speculators, capable of making, and losing, and again recouping, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a day’s trading, by abstruse manipulations Carr himself could not fathom. Such gentlemen, Carr said, were spiritually descended from the “dark geniuses” of Jay Gould, Lord Gordon-Gordon and their brethren—individuals we can’t help but admire yet would never wish to do business with.