My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yet it’s odd, Elisha thinks it extremely odd, that Harwood won’t be in the East when Father requires help (surely Father will require help from both Elisha and Harwood is freeing Thurston?); that Harwood, with an excuse of illness (he who is never ill) failed to attend a single session of Thurston’s trial; and seemed uneasy, even annoyed, when informed of its progress.

  Harwood, who’d once sneered at Elisha when they were boys the mysterious ugly-sounding epithet “nigger” . . .

  Nigger? What’s that?

  By this time Harwood is aware of Elisha watching him. But stubbornly, defiantly, he won’t turn. Continuing with his slow, awkward packing as if such an activity, involving folding, stacking together, a certain measure of gentleness and order, was new to him and untrustworthy. Harwood with thick neck and shoulders, torso solid with muscle, skin the hue and seeming texture of lard; snoutish nose, small resentful eyes; worried forehead; bristles of hair in ears; cheeks bunching upward in an unconscious grin or tic . . . the young man is shorter than Elisha by perhaps two inches but heavier by at least thirty pounds so Elisha thinks He will hurt me Elisha calmly thinks He will take pleasure in hurting me still more calmly, with resignation Yet it can’t be helped.

  Saying bluntly what he’d wished for months to say, in a level, easy voice, “Thurston would not have committed such an act but you would, you did, yes?” And Harwood, whistling, misses but a beat or two, a strand of hair slipping across his forehead, he makes no reply, and Elisha says, thumbs hooked in his belt in a casual swaggering gesture, “Then why are you going away now? why now?” and this time Harwood grunts a reply, not quite audibly, head ducked, securing the first of the valises, and then the other: they are expensive new purchases, handsome russet-brown leather, small brass buckles and trim, just to draw one’s finger along the smooth hide, just to carry one in each hand, the weight, the splendid odor of the leather, the assurance, the excitement: how Elisha envies his hateful brother, who will walk so calmly out of their lives, and out of their grief—!

  Harwood is loading up a buggy in the front drive, Harwood is moving methodically, taking his time, Harwood is careful to give no indication that he is troubled by Elisha’s presence, annoyed that Elisha follows him outdoors, asking in a voice that has begun to tremble, “Why now? why is he sending you away now?”—to which Harwood mutters a vague quick reply over his shoulder that has to do with the copper mine in Colorado, one or another “partnership,” “no time to waste”—as Father has said. Elisha sees that his brother is edgy, resentful, perhaps even frightened: for Harwood of late is always frightened: since Thurston’s arrest, since the trouble in Atlantic City, Elisha has noted that Harwood is always frightened: so he says again, softly, now slightly short of breath, daring to pull at his brother’s sleeve: “Thurston would never have done it but you—you would!”

  Being touched, Harwood is galvanized at once: he drops the valises in the snow, leaps away, turns crouching, head lowered and jaws working, eyes narrowed and mean: saying, as if the word gives him pleasure, as if he has been waiting to say it for a very long time: “Nigger.”

  So they fight.

  So it begins.

  Suddenly the brothers are at each other, grappling, shoving, striking with fists—bare fists on bare flesh—shouting profanities—epithets of the sort the household has never heard—Elisha wild, rangy, aggrieved, Harwood slower and more calculating—Elisha is no fighter, hasn’t been trained, hasn’t any instinct, Elisha swings and misses, swings wide and misses, Elisha is thrown off balance as Harwood waits, knees bent, shoulders raised and hunched—he is cunning, a fighter by instinct, knows he can depend upon his weight, his strength, his entire body enlivened by the need to hurt, the ecstatic delight in hurting, for every fight is a fight to the death. Why otherwise does his fear so rapidly drain away, and this splendid manly strength suffuse his being?

  The fight is no contest, as any sporting gentleman would see at a glance, for one of the young men is fighting out of emotion, and the other is fighting simply to do injury; one of the young men imagines the struggle a matter of justice, a means by which justice will be exacted out of pain, and the other young man knows that the fight, like all fights, is simply about fighting: the very word an incantation: fight.

  To do injury, to give hurt.

  In theory, to kill.

  (But one must not allow oneself to go that far: at least, not in the presence of witnesses.)

  (For Millie has run up behind them, screaming for them to stop.)

  (And old Katrina is somewhere in the house. And little Darian and Esther.)

  A blow to Elisha’s jaw so powerful that his body is thrown back like a rag doll, his eyes roll in their sockets, blood springs from his mouth—immediately there’s a second blow, harder, crueler, with the force of a sledgehammer, against Elisha’s unguarded chest, to his heart. A blow so hard that Harwood winces, his knuckles cracked.

  And Elisha is down, half-sitting in soiled snow, bleeding from his torn mouth yet more profusely and alarmingly from the chest—for a surface artery has been broken. Harwood picks up his valises and strides jauntily to the buggy saying, through a mirthless twitchy grin, “Goodbye, nigger.”

  In this way Harwood Licht departs Muirkirk, for the vast open sky and windswept spaces of the West.

  WHAT OF ELISHA?—never in his life has this self-confident young man felt such physical shock; for Harwood, within minutes, has driven him into a place beyond pain, so numbed, so much in a state of visceral astonishment, he hardly feels pain; though knowing that, yes, pain will come—soon. Sprawled gracelessly in snow, panting through bloodied mouth like a dog, hardly aware even of Millie’s cries, Elisha Licht, a.k.a. “Little Moses,” thinks bemused Why, I am not a god after all, it seems.

  What of Millie?—an equal shock overcomes her, for even as Elisha is being pummeled by Harwood, falling to the ground, handsome face no longer handsome but contorted in childlike fear, rich dark skin no longer dark but ashen, and bright blood soaking his stylish wing-collar shirt and close-fitted woollen trousers and sprinkled like dirty raindrops on the snow—even as these horrors occur, quite apart from Millie’s sisterly wish that the brothers cease fighting, and her cries of “Stop! Stop!” she realizes suddenly that she loves Elisha, not as a brother, for Elisha is not her brother, but simply as Elisha, ’Lisha, a stranger she must no longer deceive herself she knows.

  In that instant the old Millie, the child-Millie, dies.

  In that instant the young woman Millie, seeing her beloved is fallen, and bleeding, and in need of aid, hurries to him, wasting no time in stifled little cries and screams; mature, deft and determined as never before in her life Millie tears open Elisha’s shirt and rips a strip from her cotton petticoat and wads it and presses it against the mysterious wound with as much force as her strength allows; kneeling beside him in the snow, comforting him, partly embracing him, her arm cradling his head against her shoulder, her voice rapid and soothing, trying to show no alarm, for now such intimacy is allowed, now such intimacy is needed, when the wadded cotton is soaked with blood another must be quickly torn, and pressed against the broken artery, and Elisha, frightened Elisha, with none of his Negro swagger now, none of his coolness in her presence, trembles in terror murmuring, “Don’t let me die, Millie!—don’t let me die!” and Millie grasps him tighter and says, as if scolding, “Why, it’s nothing, the bleeding will stop soon, he has not the power to hurt you.”

  SECRET MUSIC

  Something is wrong, gravely wrong, but when Darian wakes early one morning, before dawn, to a sound of wild geese flying overhead, he forgets the sorrow of the household—forgets that something is going to happen, something to change all their lives—and lies trembling with excitement. He will not open his eyes, he wants to keep the sound pure, a music that wakes him from sleep, unbidden, mysterious, fading even as he strains to hear: wild geese, Canada geese, their queer faint honking in the sky, why such sudden beauty, why any world at all, this world, and not si
mply—Nothing?

  To express the life, the certitude, the quivering happiness that courses through him at such times—this, Darian thinks, must be what is meant by God.

  BUT HE WILL not tell anyone, he will keep his secret to himself, this is God, trembling in his very body.

  SUCH SOMBER CHILDREN, Darian and Esther!—forgotten children, perhaps, appearing younger than their ages; even Katrina feels sorry for them, is drawn into the parlor to listen to Darian playing the piano (but how odd, the compositions that child invents!), sits for an hour at a stretch with little Esther in her arms, in the window seat watching rain falling into the marsh.

  “No one will ever come back, will they, Katrina?” the child asks drowsily. She is not agitated, not even curious, such questions have been asked many times before, they are a child’s questions, not to be taken seriously. “And he will never come back, I know,” Esther adds, after a confused pause, having forgotten (for she is so very sleepy suddenly) the name of her eldest brother.

  YEARS LATER DARIAN is to recall: they are told that Thurston is away, traveling, on business for Father; he is in Mexico, he will be going to Cuba; returning home sometime in the summer . . . or a little later.

  DARIAN WAS TOO small still to sit at the piano so Father hoisted him onto his lap, gripped his hands firmly in his, Darian’s stubby fingers enclosed in Father’s big fingers, and they played at making music, Like this, Father said gaily, and like this! this! striking chords haphazardly up and down the keyboard. (Darian’s hands began to smart, in the morning they would be bruised.) In a loud full baritone voice Father sang fragments of a song (“Gott, der Herr, Ist Sonn’ und Schild”) while Darian, baby Darian, picked out the melody, frowning in a concentration so intense that droplets of perspiration appeared on his forehead. “Ah, can you do it? Can you?” Father cried. “As well as I . . . ” With a flourish he tried to play as he sang, striking notes hurriedly and carelessly, the ring on his smallest right-hand finger clicking against the keys, his fingernails tapping, clicking, as well, everything rushed and frantic, until his two-year-old son squirmed in displeasure, and wrenched himself away. For this was not right, this was not the way it should be, the wrong notes and the wrong rhythms cut through him like a knife blade.

  ON MONDAYS AND Thursdays Darian walks into the village to take his music lesson with Reverend Woodcock, but his happiest times are alone, alone with the piano, hour upon hour and day following day, he is suspended at such times, Darian and not-Darian, he sits at the piano though his fingers are stiff and the nails blue with cold, outside the freezing rain pelts against the windows, against the roof, clattering against the chimney, the sound of the rain is constantly modulated by the wind, as the piano’s notes, struck with different degrees of force, acquire mysteriously different textures and meanings: how happy he is! what peace! as if something has closed over his head protecting him from them.

  There are flights of music that spring up, Darian has no idea how, out of the rain drumming on the roof, the thin howling wind, the harsh staccato cries of birds in the marsh . . . certain brittle strands of Bach, delicate turns of Mozart, the Civil War marching songs he has heard the band play in the square . . . the gospel hymns he has sung at the Church of the Pentecost where he is Darian and not-Darian simultaneously, clapping his hands, his heart swollen with joy, as Reverend Bogey strides about leading the congregation in song. And there is the sound of Millie’s airy insincere laughter, the pretty twist to her lips, the anxious flash of her eyes . . . the sight of Elisha trying to sit up in the snow, blood streaming from his chest (his very heart?), soaking his white, white shirt, splattering onto the ground . . . and the ferocity of Father’s embrace, the way he grips Darian beneath the arms, lifts him, kisses him, hard, his hot damp thrusting lips against Darian’s mouth: ah, he has been away so long, so very long, it is his fate, it is Fate, he cannot bear it that he is required to be away so very long . . . .

  Flights of music interrupted by muffled blows, queer arrhythmic runs, sudden halts and starts . . . flights of music of such uncanny beauty Darian knows they are not his . . . though they stream through his aching obedient fingers, as sunlight shatters on a pool of standing water, transforming it without touching it. And, more precious, most secret, the music that has the power to draw Darian’s mother Sophie to him . . . gliding silently through the rooms of the rectory . . . appearing in the doorway at his back . . . and he must continue playing, he must not hesitate, or miss a note, or turn his head . . . for if he makes a mistake she will vanish . . . he sees her by way of the music, he sees her through his fingertips, the girl with the riding crop, is it? the haughty young woman of the portrait, dark level gaze, the head tilted slightly to the left, and not the wan dying woman amid the bedclothes smelling of sickness . . . that wasted hand extended . . . Darian? Darian? the blistered lips, the eyes glazing over . . . not that woman, never that woman but the other, Darian’s true mother, the handsome girl in the painting who nods in time with his music, who knows his music beforehand, who is his music.

  He must continue to play without making a mistake, he must never become frightened, or excited, he must not turn his head, as Sophie advances . . . advances . . . to stand behind him, silent, for long ecstatic minutes at a time . . . .How happy, Darian thinks, God is everywhere but God is here! . . . and sometimes she will brush her fingertips against his hair or the nape of his neck, sometimes she will stoop to kiss . . . and then he cannot help his reaction: he shivers violently, loses the thread of the music, strikes a false note, and, when he turns his head, he sees that she has vanished.

  But Darian knows she has been with him: so very close, her lips had touched his burning skin.

  THE DESPERATE MAN

  Though sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead on 29 May 1910 at the State Correctional Facility at Trenton, New Jersey, surely “Christopher Schoenlicht” who is Thurston Licht, Abraham’s eldest, beloved son, will not be hanged; nor will he be incarcerated for the remainder of his life.

  “Preposterous!”—Abraham snorts in derision.

  “Preposterous!”—Abraham fumbles to relight his stumpy Cuban cigar, which maddens him by so frequently going out.

  How many weeks, how many months has Abraham pursued the challenge of how to save his son. It seems like years by now, as 29 May 1910 rapidly approaches. He will be saved, must be saved—but how? As if a glass were steamed or scummy preventing me to see through. Preventing my vision. A sensation hitherto unknown to Abraham Licht, like Odysseus the man of twists and turns, the man of cunning, and calculation, and duplicity, this sensation of paralysis: his fierce mental powers flash like lightning in one direction, and in another, and still another—but to no avail. He will deny it to Katrina and Millie, but his health has been affected; he’s lost weight, obviously; his face bears the look of an elegant Roman bust struck by a hammer and threaded with hairline cracks, about to crumple into pieces.

  Yet, alone, in his study with the door shut against his family, he contemplates his image in a mirror and finds his spirit, if not his appearance, unchanged. Eyebrows shaggy as steel wool, gaze cold, level and unflinching, the hastily shaven jaws adamant. So long as I have breath, strength, genius, and cash—I cannot go down in defeat.

  Strange how Abraham Licht’s talent for invention seems to be hindering him: for he hasn’t too few ideas, but too many. “If only I could settle upon a strategy. If only—” Too excitable to remain seated, pacing in his study with the door shut against the others, clutching at his head, sighing, muttering to himself, angrily sucking at the damned cigar that has again gone out.

  His first move was naturally, through (generously paid-off) connections in the Democratic party to apply to the Governor of New Jersey for clemency; for a commutation of Christopher Schoenlicht’s sentence to life imprisonment. (With the possibility of an “executive pardon” in a few years when it would no longer arouse local interest.) Negotiations along these lines were going smoothly well into February, when an agent of h
is named “Albert St. Goar” met with the Governor in secret, at the Governor’s private estate in Princeton, to pledge no less than $5,000 to the Governor’s upcoming campaign, plus a scattering of smaller donations to “charitable institutions” throughout the state. The Governor, robustly shaking St. Goar’s hand, all but gave his word that Christopher Schoenlicht would not hang; a commutation of sentence was “a definite possibility.” Nothing was said of plans for the young man’s escape from prison, of course; for it was very likely that the Governor would disapprove.

  Then suddenly, without warning, word came from the Governor’s closest aide that the understanding was cancelled. And no further conversations between the Governor and Mr. St. Goar, or between Mr. St. Goar and any of the Governor’s men, were to be arranged. “What has happened? How can this be?”—so Abraham Licht protested. Only belatedly learning that the Trenton Post, one of the state’s “crusader” papers, was investigating the Governor’s business connections since stepping into office; and what had seemed to Abraham Licht a fait accompli was rudely erased.

  “And I’d already handed over twenty-five hundred dollars of the payment. God damn me for a fool, and him for a knave!”

  Only in his memoir would Abraham Licht confess to having been so swindled. It was not a fact he could bring himself to share with any living person at the time.