My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So the tempestuous couple moved to the crude village of White Sulphur Springs, where in the early, harsh winter of ’85, a son, Thurston, was born; from there they moved to Contracoeur; next to Mulligar, where their son Harwood was born; then, as bad luck would have it, to the small city of Powhatassie Falls, where Abraham Licht suffered an embarrassing setback in his promising business career.

  (Except, though Abraham was arrested and made to spend forty-eight repugnant hours in the country jail, he was not to be convicted of any crime. As records will show.)

  In all, he and Arabella lived together for five turbulent years. They were never officially man and wife, though Arabella gave birth to two strapping boys and their neighbors generally supposed them married. It had been an early, ardent hope of Arabella’s that they would marry; but with the passage of time, and the gradual escalation of their quarrels, her hope faded until she thought no more of it. And perhaps she wouldn’t have wished it, in any case. For if she were Abraham Licht’s wife under the law, the law that so definitely favored men, she would not be able to escape him, should she wish to escape him, quite so easily.

  For though Arabella loved the fierce young Abraham Licht, a man so handsome women would stare after him in the street, she believed that for the sake of her soul as for the sake of her physical being (which could not tolerate another pregnancy—not in such impoverished circumstances) she felt she must leave him.

  Their life together was wayward and unpredictable, and gave her little sustained happiness. Nor did motherhood appeal to her: her hungry babies were always “at” her, like her husband himself.

  “Such hunger,” Arabella thought, a panicked fluttering in her heart, “—can I satisfy it? And at what cost?”

  If at times they were poor and transient, and objects of community suspicion, at other times they were unexpectedly flush with money from one or another of Abraham’s business transactions, or gambling triumphs—and objects of community suspicion as well. They dined extravagantly, it seemed to Arabella, or they did not dine at all. They costumed themselves in fine clothes which, within weeks, ill became their diminished station in life. They traveled by first-class train or carriage, or they did not travel at all—except to steal away, usually by night, from one or another residence. Sometimes Abraham adored her; sometimes, with no warning, he seemed to despise her as a temptress who allowed other men “to court her—to caress her—and to make love to her with their eyes” and who even deceived him, in a subtle way, with their sons. For didn’t she love Thurston and Harwood more than she loved him?—when he spied upon his family, didn’t it seem self-evident, they were happier without him, more relaxed, more inclined to laughter? “Born of her flesh, far more closely bound to her than ever a husband could be, a woman’s children must usurp his place,” Abraham reasoned, tormenting himself. “For if I could give birth, out of my loins, I know that would be true, for me.”

  Arabella denied such fancies, as she called them. If, having drunk too much, Abraham persisted, she lost her temper, saying what never failed to upset her young husband: “D’you know what you are getting to be?—mad.”

  Which was the deepest insult to his soul. And how to reply to such a charge, without flushing hot and chagrined, or lashing out in stinging words of his own?

  (Yet, Arabella was devious. As Abraham would one day discover. Hiding away what money she could, from unknown sources, over the months and years; encouraging Abraham to buy her expensive jewelry when he had money and the “spending fever” was on him. As if she’d planned to be female indeed, when the opportune time came.)

  FIVE YEARS OF turbulence and passion; waxing, and waning; and waxing again; by no logic Abraham Licht could comprehend.

  And bitterly I resented it, that I could not comprehend.

  That life is a riddle, I could not comprehend.

  That to be the teller of riddles is a destiny, while to be the one to whom riddles are told is but fate.

  It infuriated him that Arabella was a beautiful woman who was his, and the mother of his children, yet so independent in her thoughts and emotions. “What do you want of me, Abraham, and of the world?” she frequently asked him, with a pretense of female bewilderment. “What do you want, why can’t you settle down to one occupation, to one residence, to one life?—why, for God’s sake, must you want so much? Like a giant baby at the nipple, too famished to be fed.”

  This so wounded Abraham, and enraged him, he saw himself in an instant in fine clothes, bathed in light, on a Broadway stage, confronted with a glamorous young woman, beguiling, seductive yet (as the audience well knew) duplicitous. With the ease of the matinee idol who understands how much, how uncritically he’s adored, and quite shares in the adoration, Abraham laughed gaily and said, “Then will you marry me, my darling? Tomorrow morning? Yes?”

  “Are you serious, or joking?”

  Abraham laughed again. He heard, at a distance, the murmured approval of the audience, invisible to him but palpably there.

  “Surely a man may be joking, yet serious? Serious, yet joking? If you know me at all, Arabella, you must know that.”

  Arabella gazed searchingly into his eyes. As so many others had, and would. And how futile, such a search. For my soul is not to be had cheaply. “Yes,” she said finally, with an odd melancholy smile, “—I know.”

  The next night, in November 1888, Arabella slipped away from their boardinghouse in Vanderpoel while Abraham was out of town on business; leaving four-year-old Thurston and year-old Harwood behind, attended by a young neighbor girl, whom she’d befriended, and a brief, cruel message.

  Farewell. Do not follow. Your “love” is too hungry. I am not to be consumed!

  A.

  Arabella took with her only her finer clothes, and her jewelry, and about $300 in cash of which Abraham knew; the word on the street was that she hadn’t run off alone, but Abraham in his pride and fury refused to make inquiries. Nor would he hunt Arabella down.

  “Your mother has left us. You must not ask of her. She has behaved badly, yet is not a bad woman. ‘Crime? Then complicity.’ We trusted her, we were fools, we are to blame. But not a word of her, ever—d’you understand?”

  Wide-eyed, little Thurston nodded mutely, and one-year-old Harwood blinked and gaped with a baby’s sweet acquiescence. For they were their father’s sons after all.

  OF THOSE FIVE years of Abraham Licht’s young manhood and the first flowering of his genius he cares to recall primarily the wondrous hour of his eldest son’s birth. In a rooming house in White Sulphur Springs, in a bed smelling of must and mildew and very shortly of the laboring Arabella’s sweat, and finally of her blood; when after eleven agonizing hours the midwife at last shouted for him to enter the room and dazed, frightened, his heartbeat sounding in his ears, the young father stepped inside to be presented with a red-faced gasping infant boy, so heated, so perfect in all his proportions, so magically alive, wailing and squirming with life, tears ran freely down Abraham’s cheeks. “My son? Mine?”

  Arabella, her face drained of blood, gaunt as a death’s-head, tried to smile at him, as in his astonishment he tried to smile at her. Yet for that instant they might have been strangers. For it was the squirming baby that drew all attention, as if a bright beam of light were shining upon him. “Thurston. Thurston Licht. My son.” Abraham was holding the baby in his awkward arms, trembling violently. The midwife smiled broadly at him, bemused by his youth, his handsome face, his new-father’s look of commingled pride and terror. A shrieking hairless monkey, a beautiful creature only minutes old, with his father’s features and spirited energy—obviously!

  For wasn’t the baby a form of Abraham Licht’s very self, reentering the world, like an act of Hindu reincarnation, to conquer the world again? and yet again?

  THE FATE OF “CHRISTOPHER SCHOENLICHT”

  1.

  It could hardly be held against the bookmakers of Atlantic City and their sporting clients, that hundreds of bets were placed on the outcome o
f Christopher Schoenlicht’s trial for first-degree murder, in December 1909, in the Atlantic County Courthouse: not whether the defendant would be acquitted (for that was never an issue), but whether he would be hanged by the public executioner, as the county prosecutor passionately urged; or sentenced to life imprisonment, as Bullock, his attorney, yet more passionately urged. For neither the prosecution nor the defense doubted that Schoenlicht, and Schoenlicht alone, was guilty of the murder of his “fiancée” Mrs. Eloise Peck; nor did young Schoenlicht himself deny the charge.

  The interest of the trial, then, lay exclusively in its outcome; and its mystery, or mysteries, in several isolated elements—the background of the defendant (if, indeed, he had any: for no one could discover anything about him); his motive for the brutal murder, in circumstances in which he could not fail to be apprehended; what had become of the money and jewels he had taken from her room; why did he stubbornly refuse to speak to police, or even to defense counsel, when his life was at stake; and so forth. Though, being an open-and-shut case, with no courtroom surprises or reversals, the trial ran its course in four swift days, newspapers in Atlantic City and New York City sought to enliven proceedings by publishing interviews with persons who claimed to be acquainted with the “Doomed Heiress” (as the papers called poor Eloise), and others, mainly employees of the Hotel Saint-Léon, who claimed to have known “Christopher Schoenlicht.” Photographs of the deceased woman were run daily, as were companion photographs of the young man charged with her murder: though Schoenlicht now looked so drawn and fatigued, and carried his tall frame with such lethargy, it might be said that he was no longer a young man at all.

  And in the courtroom itself, exposed to all eyes, with nowhere to turn that he might hide his face, Schoenlicht was the very image of sorrow: yet a sorrow of bone-weariness, and indifference: his skin grainy and flaccid, the flesh beneath his eyes puffy, and the eyes themselves glazed over, like those of a somnambulist. Was this Eloise Peck’s dashing young lover, whom she had loved with such fatal results?—so observers wondered.

  It was the wily Bullock’s strategy, in the face of a succession of damning witnesses for the State (for who, in fashionable Atlantic City, had not seen Mrs. Peck hanging on the arm of Mr. Schoenlicht?), to argue to the court that his client was mentally infirm; mentally deficient; with no volition of his own, and no “free will”; sunk at the present time (as the gentlemen of the jury were invited to observe) into so pathological a torpor, very likely he did not see or hear distinctly; and could have no interest in his own fate. “To condemn a human being so helpless, and, indeed, so harmless now to society, would be an act of greater cruelty than the unpremeditated crime for which he is being tried”—so Bullock charged with such evident passion, and such finely calibrated drama, Abraham Licht himself (who was paying the attorney his customary handsome fee) felt forced to admiration.

  A Boston alienist of “unassailable reputation” took the stand, to argue, for the defense, that Schoenlicht was of a catatonic disposition; he had long, it might be inferred, exhibited symptoms of acute mental disease, which went unrecognized by persons about him, or were interpreted as but traits of character. He had examined the defendant closely, he said, and was satisfied that the man was distinctly abnormal; of a temperament that might well crack under emotional pressure; go berserk; commit a savage crime under compulsion, without being aware of what he did, or remembering it afterward.

  This, the prosecution handily countered with the testimony of an alienist for the State, who argued that all criminals might be said to suffer “mental disease”—the proof of it being, they are criminals. And, granted the compulsive nature of most violent crimes, and the lack of conscious volition on the part of the criminal, was it not a felicitous thing indeed, that capital punishment was the law of the land?

  Yet more damningly, the prosecuting attorney called attention to the fact that, long before Schoenlicht had “gone berserk” and committed his “savage crime,” he and the late Mrs. Peck were widely known to have been behaving in an immoral manner: cohabiting together (with all that implies of the violations of Christian morality, the standards of decent society, good taste, and the like) with no discretion or shame. And if, as it was rumored, Schoenlicht had once studied for the ministry, surely his public embrace of sin must be judged the more reprehensible; for he knew what he did, and might have known what a price would be exacted from him.

  In all, the prosecution called thirty-five witnesses, of whom only a few were cross-examined by Bullock, to avoid testimony further damaging to his client; and of these only one, Mrs. Peck’s personal maid, evinced any doubt on the witness stand regarding her statement to the police. She had said that she heard the voices of Mrs. Peck and Mr. Schoenlicht, in a room adjacent to her own; yet, some minutes before that, she believed she had heard the voices of two men . . . although she could not swear to it. “And who was the second man?” the prosecuting attorney asked skeptically. But the shy young Filipino woman, who spoke English haltingly, could not answer, and the subject of the “second man” was dropped. Next morning when Bullock tried to pursue it during his cross-examination of the witness, the young woman denied she had heard any such voice—only the voices of Mr. Schoenlicht and Mrs. Peck, which she knew well.

  THE TRAGEDY OF one son convicted of murder, and taken forcibly from me might only be compounded by the tragedy of two sons taken from me.

  A gamble this veteran gambler dared not take.

  (BEHIND THE SCENES of the trial things progressed as badly. By degrees Abraham Licht’s money was being drained away in desperate stratagems overseen by the wily Bullock and executed by his secret, unnamed assistants: the attempted bribery of key prosecution witnesses, those members of the jury who appeared most susceptible to persuasion, the examining physician, the county coroner, and so forth. The manager of the Saint-Léon accepted a generous sum of money to be used on “repairs” in the damaged room in which Mrs. Peck had died, yet on the witness stand spoke distastefully of the defendant as a “cold and calculating youth” who had pretended to be good-natured and charming while doubtless planning his crime for weeks. One of the jurors expressed an initial interest in an arrangement by which, in return for his promise to abstain from voting, and thereby hang the jury, he would receive a generous sum of money as a “donation” he might then give to charity; but when a fellow juror suspected the plan, he hurriedly backed away saying he would vote “as God, and not the Devil, directed.” Several “character witnesses” were found by Bullock, and coached and rehearsed in praise of the defendant, but were such poor, unconvincing actors, Bullock conceded it would be a mistake to bring them into court to be cross-examined. The idea of involving Elisha in some way was considered, but finally dropped, for Elisha, even in an ingenious disguise, might be linked by police or newspaper reporters with the Black Phantom of Chautauqua Falls, which would be unfortunate indeed.

  The trial proceeded swiftly. The day of summation approached. Abraham Licht’s heart was wrung by the pitiful spectacle of his eldest, beloved son a prisoner in the courtroom, in shackles as he was led in and out of the building by uniformed guards; his handsome face ravaged with sorrow, lost to all hope; his gaze steadfastly averted from his father’s, in despair and shame. For one Licht must never betray another even to save his own skin. For what could be done in such circumstances? Abraham Licht urged Bullock to try a higher, more idealized philosophical defense, in the manner of the celebrated Clarence Darrow, where the issue of capital punishment itself would be tried—for in these years, a number of liberal-minded persons opposed execution as a punishment in violation of the United States Constitution. But Bullock countered by saying dryly that he had tried that ploy too often, finding to his chagrin that while an individual judge might be swayed by such humanitarian pleas, juries never were. For a jury was a microcosm of the public and the public wanted hangings.

  “Even if the defendant is innocent?” Abraham asked in so plaintive and sincere a tone that Bullock
stared at him, embarrassed, and could think of no reply. For of course he believed that his client was guilty.)

  SO IT HAPPENED that the sensational, much-publicized murder trial, the People of the State of New Jersey v. “Christopher Schoenlicht,” ended within four days; to the disappointment of all, particularly the platoon of newspaper reporters crowded into the front rows of the courtroom, the somber young defendant declined to take the witness stand to plead on his own behalf; the judge, visibly disdainful of both defendant and defense counsel, as if a bad smell permeated his courtroom, gave brief, perfunctory instructions to the jury, without troubling to lay particular emphasis on the principle of “reasonable doubt”—for was any doubt reasonable, in so lurid a case; the twelve frowning jurors retired to deliberate, and vote; and were out of the courtroom, as newspaper banner headlines excitedly reported next day, only eight minutes—a “record-breaking” brevity of time for any murder trial, in any known United States court of law.

  2.

  Before and during his trial there came to visit Christopher Schoenlicht, in his solitary cell in the Atlantic County jail, a gentleman legal consultant of Mr. Bullock’s named “Murray M. Kirk” of Manhattan. An optimistic middle-aged fellow with a habit of pressing his pince-nez against the bridge of his nose, and speaking loudly and clearly (so that the prisoner’s guard would not become suspicious); with a handsome, tired face, and shadowed eyes, and a head of thick, fawn-colored hair always impeccably combed; in a three-piece gray woolen suit, a white shirt with a stiff wing collar, a bow tie with ends tucked neatly beneath the collar and a smart black homburg hat. Mr. Kirk carried black gloves and an ebony cane and had folded a fresh white linen handkerchief into his lapel pocket. The very image of legal propriety; and authority; yet how odd, that he should stare with such baffled yearning at the young Schoenlicht, who shifted uneasily on his hard-backed chair, and sat with bowed head reluctant to meet the elder man’s gaze.