My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “But a stranger cannot know what we Lichts know,” Abraham says. “He would be judging you merely by your appearances; by your superficial selves. As for what is inside, and hidden—only we know that. As if Elisha is to be known by way of his skin!”

  “But Father—” Millie protests.

  “What we know is this: that you and Elisha are linked from childhood by ties of blood that are far deeper than the ‘love’ of which you speak,” Abraham says.

  “But there is nothing deeper—more beautiful—than the love of which we speak!” Millie says boldly; and Elisha says, “We want only to be allowed to marry—and to leave Muirkirk—because we realize we can’t stay here where we’d be misunderstood.”

  “‘Misunderstood’!” Abraham laughs. “My boy, you would be ‘understood’ only too readily. For shame!”

  As if for mutual support the lovers stand close together, Millie’s arm still thrust through Elisha’s, and her opened hand, in a gesture of supplication, pressed unconsciously against her agitated breast. How strange that they seem unable to look at each other but only at Abraham, who glowers smiling upon them, baring his teeth.

  From somewhere close by in the churchyard a nighthawk cries wanly, a soul in torment.

  “There is nothing deeper than the love of which we speak,” Millie repeats, in a chastened voice. “There is nothing deeper than . . . our love.”

  Abraham smiles a hard white fleeting smile, but does not condescend to reply.

  Elisha mumbles words to the effect that they want to marry, they will marry, but want his blessing; and Millie says softly, “Yes, Father, we want your blessing—please.”

  Yet Abraham will not reply.

  He is their father, of course. Elisha’s no less than Millicent’s. They know, they cannot doubt, for, in the beginning, even before their awakening to childish consciousness, was his Word, his Truth, unassailable. From what reservoir of profane strength might come their capacity to doubt? Already it seems that Millie for all her precocious belligerence is weakening; her lovely eyes are narrowed as if she faces too powerful a light, her smooth forehead is creased with lines of worry and apprehension. And poor Elisha—why does he stare so helplessly at Abraham?

  “Oh, Father, we want your blessing—please!” Millie whispers.

  And now like figures on a brightly lit operatic stage, as if Abraham were empowered with the majesty and cunning of Wagner’s Wotan, a role for which, had he only the powerful voice, he might have been born, Abraham takes Millie gently by the wrist, and detaches her from her lover’s side, and gazes into her eyes. His large, strong fingers encircle and frame her face; his fingertips stretch the delicate blue-veined skin at her temples; for a long moment father and daughter stare into each other’s eyes, as into each other’s soul, the fine shivering of Millie’s arms the only sign of strain she betrays.

  So rapid is their exchange in lowered, urgent voices, like lovers, Elisha might be listening to a foreign language, uncomprehending.

  “But you are not yet his?”

  “Oh no, Father—we’re waiting to marry.”

  Abraham releases the girl who’s gone deathly pale with guilt and terror and turns, brusque and smiling, to Elisha, to say, “You and I, Elisha, will talk now in private.”

  MILLIE, HEARTSICK AND exultant, seeks out Katrina for comfort.

  As Abraham leads Elisha to the rear of the house, to shut them together in his study.

  Millie, her teeth chattering with excitement, or with fever, presses herself into Katrina’s reluctant arms, saying that she and Elisha are in love and will marry, and Father hasn’t forbidden it. And Katrina says with a shiver of disgust that of course they can’t marry because they are sister and brother—“And because Elisha is not of your race. He is Negro.” Millie says, “’Lisha is not ‘Negro’—but only himself.” Katrina says sternly, “The world sees ‘Negro.’” Millie says fiercely, “The world is blind!—mistaken!” Katrina says, “In some matters, Millie, the world’s blindness is not mistaken.”

  At that instant in Abraham’s study Elisha has fallen to his knees, sobbing. His handsome face contorted in pain, disbelief, mortification. For no sooner were the two inside the door, and the door locked behind them, than Abraham wheeled on the young man and struck him a savage blow across the face with the back of his hand.

  Taken by surprise, unresisting, Elisha made no attempt to defend himself; but staggered backward, hurt, dazed, sinking to his knees on the hardwood floor.

  “You!—and my daughter! My Millie,” Abraham Licht says, in a voice out of the whirlwind and his eyes flashing fire. “It is not to be borne.”

  Accusing the young man of treachery, betrayal and wickedness; forbidding him ever to approach Millie again; even to speak with her again; not because they’re brother and sister (though they are brother and sister) and not because Elisha’s skin is black (though as any fool can see, Elisha’s skin is black) but because it is Abraham Licht’s command. And Elisha protests he can’t help it, he had not intended this to happen, he loves Millie, he would die for Millie, and Millie loves him, and they must be married, for they’re already lovers, man and wife; and at this point Abraham Licht flies into a greater rage, saliva frothing at his lips, beating Elisha now with both his fists as Elisha, head bowed, cringes before him.

  “You lie! You lie!—you black devil.”

  Is it terror, or pride?—this refusal of Elisha to so much as raise a hand against the older man, for Abraham Licht is Father; and many years ago saved Elisha from the flood; and in his heart Elisha knows, whether there is sin or not, he has sinned.

  MILLIE CRIES HERSELF into a delirium in Katrina’s arms, and Katrina sighs impatiently, for it’s all so absurd, such tears are so absurd, how grateful she is she’s an old woman now and her heart calcified and protected against such hurt. And at last, as she knows he would, Abraham calls to her to bring Millie to him, into the parlor where by the light of a kerosene lamp her father and her lover are waiting. Millie grips Katrina’s hand hard, but Katrina pushes her away.

  Millie wipes her inflamed eyes, sulkily; seeing that something, unless it’s everything, has changed. Father is very angry and has not forgiven them and Elisha is no longer her handsome young lover but a disheveled, shamed, confused young man; a very dark-skinned man; looking too desperately to her for solace.

  “Elisha has decided to leave Muirkirk immediately tonight,” Father says evenly. “And it’s his belief, my girl, that you’ve agreed to go with him.”

  Millie blows her nose. Where in another, nose-blowing is a crude, commonplace act, in Millie, as in any stage ingenue, it’s an act of sniffy, petulant defiance. Millie says, in a high childish voice, looking at Father and not Elisha, that, yes, she will go with Elisha if that’s what he wants—“If that’s what he has told you.” Elisha says, rawly, that that is what he wishes—“And what you wish, too, Millie.” Father says, his voice still even, judicious and measured, “If you go away with Elisha, my girl, then you will never again come home to me. This, I hope you understand.” And Millie doesn’t speak, though she’s smiling. Dabbing at her nose with her embroidered little handkerchief. For her eyes, too, flash fire; and fire burns. Yet Elisha blunders forward, reaching his hand to her as if they were alone together. Saying, pleading, that Millie must come with him because they are promised to each other; they love each other; how many times they’ve vowed this. And Millie will—almost—take Elisha’s extended hand, for it’s a hand she loves, those slender fingers she has loved, swooning beneath their caress, she’s kissed and stroked those fingers yet she can’t seem to lift her arm, her arm has gone leaden, her spirit has gone leaden, her eyes are swollen and aching and ugly, she has rubbed them so hard the lashes are coming out, for it’s wrong, it’s unfair, it’s cruel of these men to summon her to them as if in a court of law, putting her to such a test, demanding such a performance of her. And no preparation! Not a single rehearsal! Millie would whisper I hate you both! Elisha continues to speak, growing ang
ry, impatient, but Millie can’t concentrate thinking Hate you both!—bullies. Leave me alone I want to sleep. Abraham says nothing, merely smiling his hard, knowing smile, his eyes glinting like chips of glass; Millie can see that he is herself in her innermost soul . . . Father is her . . . as Elisha, a mere lover, can never be.

  And so the scene plays out, until at last Millie sinks in a faint into Father’s arms, at the jarring sound of a slammed door.

  5.

  And so it happens that Elisha Licht departs Muirkirk forever in October 1913 and the following Sunday Millicent departs for Rhinebeck for an extended visit with the Fitzmaurices.

  And so it happens that Abraham Licht will begin to forget Elisha, as one forgets any disagreeable episode; or, if forgetting is too extreme, he ceases to speak of Elisha; for, indeed, what’s there to say? The past is but the graveyard of the future, as the future is but the womb of the past. And his thoughts are focused upon Rhinebeck, and the Fitzmaurice clan about which he will soon know as much information as he can garner.

  Millie has ceased her silly schoolgirl tears. Millie has torn up a packet of letters, and tossed them into the marsh. Katrina never alludes to Millie’s lost love except to lightly scorn it as an attack of nerves such as high-strung fillies often have, at certain phases of the moon; she never speaks of Elisha except to assure Millie that once she’s away from Muirkirk and its unwholesome vapors she’ll forget him—“As you’ve forgotten so much.” And Millie laughs a high, startled laughter, a laughter that seems to pierce her like pain, saying, “Oh, Katrina, I almost wish what you say isn’t so; but I know it is so; and such is Millie’s fate.”

  “I HAVE NO FEELING OF ANOTHER’S PAIN”

  1.

  Why—is it myself, transmogrified?”

  So thinks the superintendent of the Camp Yankee Basin Mining Company, Mr. Harmon Liges, when, in the late afternoon of 9 April 1914, in the bustling lobby of the Hotel Edinburgh in Denver, Colorado, he happens to catch sight of a stranger, a stocky young gentleman in a brown herringbone tweed topcoat and a matching cap, who closely—indeed, uncannily—resembles him. So unnerving is the similarity, Harmon Liges cannot simply pass by; stations himself behind one of the lobby’s stately marble pillars, in order to stare at the man unobserved; feels a curious sensation of excitement mingled with repugnance, anticipation mingled with dread . . . for the stranger, apart from superficial differences, might be a virtual twin of his. Or so it strikes Harmon Liges.

  Fascinated, even as he’s obscurely offended, Liges studies the man in the tweed topcoat to satisfy himself that he is a stranger; and very likely a new arrival from the East, on the 4:45 P.M. train from Omaha. Is he traveling alone, as he appears . . . ? Might he be on business? Yet he lacks the self-assured and expectant air of the businessman; seems to be, in fact, ill at ease in his new surroundings, though smiling a nervous, quizzical smile, even as the impertinent registration manager keeps him waiting. (“That is not the tack to take with the Edinburgh staff,” Liges thinks impatiently, “—they will only mark you down for a fool.”)

  Like himself, the man is about thirty years old; of but moderate height, no more than five feet seven inches; thick-bodied; with a large-pored, slightly flushed skin; heavy dark “beetling” brows; and small, moist, pink, curiously prim lips. His head is innocently round beneath the tweed cap, his face moon-shaped, the ears somewhat protuberant; assuredly he is not handsome—though, to Liges’s practiced and unsentimental eye, he is more attractive than Liges himself, being boyish and vulnerable in his manner, and clean-shaven, while Liges is guarded, and sports a close-trimmed Vandyke beard. (It is remarkable how this beard disguises Liges; how very simple a matter it invariably is, to radically alter one’s appearance by way of a minor, though clever, change in grooming, dress, speech, bearing, etc.) In addition, while Harmon Liges is barrel-chested, muscular, and fiercely compact, with a fighter’s unconscious habit of bringing his weight forward onto the balls of his feet, the Easterner is plump, harmless, burdened by some thirty or forty pounds of baby fat, and a natural ungainliness in his movements.

  Yet more significantly, Liges has cultivated the Westerner’s skill of taking in all that is of importance in his surroundings, even as he appears oblivious of them; while the gentleman in the tweed topcoat, though glancing from side to side, and blinking, and smiling his sweet quizzical smile as if expecting a friendly acquaintance to step forward at any moment, very likely sees nothing at all.

  “He has not seen me, in any case,” Harmon Liges thinks.

  Since he has a pressing engagement with an agent for the Union Pacific Railroad in the gentlemen’s bar of the Edinburgh, Harmon Liges does not linger by the marble column; having in any case learned that the stranger’s name is Roland Shrikesdale III, his hometown is Philadelphia, and he intends to stay in Denver for an indeterminate period of time.

  (“Indeterminate” being, after all, the amount of time most visitors spend in Colorado—or indeed, on earth generally.)

  2.

  Again, at eight-thirty the next morning, entering the hotel’s dining room for breakfast, Harmon Liges is given a shock by seeing across the room his “twin” of the previous day; whom, oddly, he seems to have forgotten in the intervening hours.

  (Or had he in fact dreamt of the plump smiling man? Waking toward morning with a foul taste in his mouth, and an anxious, quickened heartbeat; and a sensation of arousal in his groin.)

  Him—!

  Yet again—!

  Liges deliberately takes a table close by the stranger, though he finds the man’s very presence disquieting. “Is it myself, transmogrified?” he thinks, watching the stranger covertly, “—or an unsuspected cousin, or brother? For I have no doubt that Father has sired numberless bastard sons across the continent.” This morning the young gentleman, sportily attired in a suede coat, string tie, and trousers of a casual cut, is occupied in eating a lonely breakfast and halfheartedly reading the Denver Gazette, even as his gaze moves restlessly about the room. He too has an unevenly receding hairline, though his hair is considerably fairer and curlier than Liges’s; his skin is similarly rough, yet mottled, and pasty-pale beneath, while Liges’s is tanned. Indeed, he has the appearance of a man not fully recovered from an illness who hopes to speed his convalescence by journeying out West where the climate is supposed to be health-inspiring—in the much-publicized way of Teddy Roosevelt.

  A rich man’s pampered son and assuredly not a bastard, thinks Harmon Liges with a thrill of hatred—“Like myself.”

  Shortly afterward, however, when breakfast is brought to him, Liges relaxes. Devours with his usual appetite beefsteak, eggs and potatoes; drinks several cups of black coffee; lingers over his own copy of the Gazette, though columns of print fatigue his eyes and arouse in him a vague feeling of resentment and an urge to do hurt; luxuriantly, he fouls the air about him with a long thin Mexican cigar; quite by accident glancing up as the gentleman across the way glances toward him . . . with that faint, simpering smile of the Easterner hoping to be made welcome. (Apparently the stranger doesn’t note the similarity between himself and Liges, for Liges doesn’t look like “himself” these days, having changed his appearance considerably, and practicably, from that of Elias Harden, who’d run a surprisingly successful gambling operation in Ouray, Colorado, the previous winter; just as Elias Harden bore but a superficial resemblance to Jeb Jones, an itinerant salesman for Doctor Merton’s All-Purpose Medical Elixir, previously.) Inspired, Liges smiles warmly, bracketing the cigar; being so clearly a Westerner, he feels it his obligation to be kindly and welcoming to an Easterner. This smile is magic! For Father has said Smile and any fool will smile with you. The young man, lonely Roland Shrikesdale, leans forward eager as a puppy, nearly spilling his cup of cream-marbled coffee, and smiles in Liges’s direction.

  So it begins. And no one to blame.

  SO LIGES AND Shrikesdale meet on the morning of 10 April 1914 in the spacious dining room of the Hotel Edinburgh, and Liges invites Shr
ikesdale to join him for more coffee; the young men talk amicably of travel in Colorado, and of hunting and fishing in the remote Medicine Bow Mountains, where Liges has been; an oddity of their meeting being that, though Harmon Liges introduces himself in a fairly forthright manner as the superintendent of the Camp Yankee Basin Mine, though in fact he’s the former superintendent of this ill-fated mine, Roland Shrikesdale introduces himself as—Robert Smith!

  (“Which means that Shrikesdale is a name I should know,” Liges shrewdly reasons, “—for he hopes to hide his identity. But it’s a name I shall know, shortly.”)

  3.

  Yet during the several weeks of their friendship, up to the morning of his disappearance in the foothills of wild Larimer County, the nervous young Easterner continued to represent himself to Liges as “Robert Smith”—a harmless if puzzling bit of subterfuge Liges thought more appealing than not. Always encourage it when a man will lie to you Father has said for, in the effort of lying, it will never occur to him that another might play his game, too. And it pleased him who had no friends he could trust, in truth no friends at all, to be in the position of warmly “befriending” the incognito Easterner who declined to speak of his family except to indicate that they were “financially secure, yet sadly contentious” and that his widowed mother perhaps loved him “too exclusively”—all this while knowing that he was in fact befriending Roland Shrikesdale III of Philadelphia, principal heir at the age of thirty-two to the great Shrikesdale fortune. (In Denver, Liges learned within a day or two that Roland was the son and grandson of the infamous “Hard Iron” Shrikesdales who’d made millions of dollars in the turbulent years following the Civil War: their investments being in railroads, coal mines, grains, asbestos and predominantly nails. Roland’s mother was the former Anna Emery Sewall, heiress to the Sewall fortune (barrels, nails), a Christian female who’d brought censure and ridicule upon herself several years before by giving more than $1 million to the Good Samaritan Animal Hospital in Philadelphia, with the consequence that the animal hospital was better equipped than nearly any hospital for human beings in the region. The Shrikesdales were a contentious lot, quarreling among themselves over such issues as how to deal with striking miners in their home state: whether to use the militia or hire a battalion of even more bloodthirsty Pinkerton’s men, and risk public criticism. (The Pinkerton mercenaries were hired.) Roland was an only child, rumored to be almost frantically doted upon by his mother; though appalled by the excesses of his family, particularly the cruelty with which they treated their workers, Roland stood to inherit most of the fortune when she died. Since there were numerous Shrikesdale and Sewall cousins of his approximate age, some of them involved in running the family’s companies, it was believed that they would share in it as well—to some degree. Liges’s sources concurred that Roland, or “Robert Smith,” was generally believed to be somewhat simpleminded; not mentally deficient exactly, but not mentally efficient; a passive, weakly affable, religious young man with little interest in the Shrikesdale riches, let alone in increasing them.)