My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Whether such a debacle is fate, or mere luck—“Somebody must pay.”

  5.

  Harmon Liges and Robert Smith leave Denver on the morning of 15 April 1914, bound for Adventure. For Smith has shyly revealed that he has a substantial amount of money in traveler’s checks, and the promise of more “whenever and wherever I require it.”

  It is Harmon Liges’s general plan that they will travel by rail as far south as El Paso; perhaps, if all goes well, they will venture across the border into Mexico.

  It is his plan that they travel as far north as the Bighorn area in southern Montana.

  They will hike in the mountains, they will traverse Long’s Glacier, they will explore unknown canyons along the Colorado River; they will visit a gold mine; they will visit one of the great ranches (there is the Flying S, east of Laramie, where, Liges says, he is always welcome); they will hunt, they will fish . . . for bear, elk, antelope, mountain lions! . . . for brook trout, black bass, pike! (Liges, not in the strictest sense a sportsman, is vague about the sort of equipment required for such activities, but fortunately his excited companion doesn’t notice.)

  “And we will camp out a great deal, too, won’t we?—when it’s warm enough,” Smith says.

  “Certainly,” says Liges. “We will camp out all the time.”

  So caught up is Smith in their plans for the next several months, so deeply involved in plotting their itinerary on a large map of the Western states, he might very well have forgotten to send off a telegram to his mother, had not Liges thoughtfully reminded him. “Ah yes, thank you!—I should tell Mother not to worry if she doesn’t hear from me for a while,” Smith says, pulling at his lip. “For two weeks, at least, do you think, Harmon?—or three, or four?”

  “Why don’t you tell her five,” says Liges, “—to set her mind at rest.”

  SO THE TWO friends depart Denver on a spring day so brilliant with sunshine that Harmon Liges is required to wear snow glasses; and Robert Smith is excited as a small child. Already, he declares, he feels “fully recovered from his illness.” Already, he declares, gripping his companion’s arm tight, he feels “one hundred percent a man.”

  To which Liges replies with a broad smile, “I should hope so, Robert.”

  Though Smith has informed his mother that he and a friend are traveling south into New Mexico, Liges announces an abrupt change of plans: he’s heard from an Indian guide that trout fishing north of Boulder in the Medicine Bow Mountains is now ideal, and they’d be well advised to go into the mountains instead. Naturally, Smith agrees—“I’m entirely in your hands, Harmon. Anywhere you wish!”

  So Liges, with Smith’s money, buys two train tickets to Boulder, and the men settle in companionably in their private car, or in the club car, gazing out the window at the scenery, or gazing at each other; and talking together, as men do. It is all very natural, their conversation—it is all very relaxed and casual. Smith confesses that he has never before had a friend with whom he could talk openly. “This is all something of a revelation for me,” he says shyly. “Not just the West, Harmon, but you as well. Especially, you know, you!”

  Which outburst causes Liges to blush with a curious sort of half-angry pleasure.

  ON ONE OR another train, in hackney cabs, in rented motorcars, dining together three, or even four, times each day—Liges and Smith become such intimate companions, there is hardly a particle of Smith’s soul left unexamined, though the rich man’s son is careful never to hint at his true identity. Sometimes it is a task for Liges to detest him, as he knows he should; sometimes it is very easily done. For Smith chatters. For Smith eats in a vague nervous fashion, as if not tasting his food. For Smith perspires even more readily than does Liges; and often pants, after climbing a flight of stairs, or hurrying along the street. Smith’s eyes are a clouded muddy brown (while Liges’s are a hard stony gray), Smith’s skin is pasty-pale, and then sunburnt (while Liges’s has the appearance of stained wood). His voice is frequently too shrill and causes people to glance in his direction. He giggles rather than laughs; and giggles too frequently. (Liges must goad himself to laugh at all—for why do people laugh?—it’s a mystery to him.) There is a fat mole near Smith’s left eye that particularly annoys Liges, and he has come to notice that, like himself, Smith has a scattering of warts in his hands. Like himself Smith has pronounced brows, tangled and dark (darker than his fair hair), and a habit of squinting. (Though Liges cannot recall whether this habit has always been his, or whether he has picked it up from Smith.)

  Odd, Liges thinks, that Smith has never once commented on their resemblance to each other. Is he too stupid?—has he never dared look fully into Liges’s face?—doesn’t he see?

  Still, no one else seems to have noticed either; in public places, so far, the two men have attracted no unusual attention.

  “How ugly he is!” Liges sometimes thinks, involuntarily scanning Smith’s face. Then again, with a sensation of confused pity: “But I suppose he can’t help himself, any more than I can.”

  “DO YOU KNOW, Harmon,” Smith says suddenly, one morning near the end of April, as Liges is driving them in a rented Pierce-Arrow touring car out of Fort Collins, Colorado, “—I don’t always wake up in the morning to God. To faith in God. That is, I know that God exists, but I cannot always believe it.”

  To which Liges replies vaguely that he often has the same doubts.

  “I’m afraid that I have sometimes sinned against the Holy Spirit,” Smith says in a quavering voice, staring sightlessly at the remarkable landscape. “I mean—by falling into despair of being saved. And only the perfect love of Jesus Christ has brought me back to myself.”

  To which Liges replies that it has often been likewise with him.

  “ . . . Except, out here in the West, in these extraordinary spaces, it seems a very great distance for Christ to come,” Smith says. He fidgets in his seat, and glances at his companion, and, grown quite emotional, says, “You see, Harmon, there is God—certainly. And there is Christ—of that I have no doubt. But sometimes, out here, so far away from everything, I cannot quite understand, you know, what they have to do with me.”

  Indeed, murmurs Liges.

  “ . . . Yet,” says Smith, almost aggressively, as if rousing himself, “I must always remember that even if we lose our human faith, that does not affect God. For He continues to exist, you know, Harmon, even if we do not.”

  “Does He!” Liges softly exclaims.

  TWO AND A half days in Boulder . . . a day in Estes Park . . . by touring car up through Passaway, and Black Hawk, and Flint, and Azure . . . to Fort Collins . . . to Brophy Mills . . . to Red Feather Lakes and the Medicine Bow Mountains and the very trout stream that Liges has fished before, he says, many times before, and which has yet to disappoint him.

  “What is the name of the stream, Harmon?” Smith asks.

  “Oh—it has no name,” Liges says.

  “What is it near, then? Perhaps I can find it on the map,” Smith says.

  “You cannot find it on the map,” Liges says, rather abruptly. “Such things are not marked on a map . . . .When I see it, I will recognize it. Never fear!”

  So they make their way up through the foothills, up into the mountains, Liges at the wheel of the smart black touring car, Smith staring out the window. As a consequence of his days in the sun, Smith is no longer quite so pallid; and, in honor of their expedition, he has even begun to grow a beard—at the present time, rather sparse and sickly a beard. (“Perhaps I will never shave again,” he says with a wild little laugh. “No matter how Mother begs.”)

  Of late, Smith is given to uncharacteristic periods of silence; as if brooding, or regretful, or apprehensive. It is very lonely, away from the bustle of the city. It is very strangely lonely. The mountains after all are so very high, the sky so piercing a cobalt-blue—a man’s soul is dwarfed. And it is cold. Though nearly May, it is bone-chilling cold. Back home in Philadelphia, Smith says wistfully, the spring flowers must be bloom
ing.

  “And what is that to us?” Liges asks.

  SHORTLY PAST NOON of 28 April—a brilliantly bright windy day—they come to the very trout stream Liges has been seeking. It is twenty-odd miles beyond Red Feather Lakes, in a wild region of small mountains, steep sandstone canyons, narrow tumbling brooks whose rocks are edged, still, with ice. At this point the dirt road Liges has been following is little more than a trail; in the canyon sides, enormous scars have been cut in the very rock, by snowslides and avalanches. Here, it is very lonely indeed.

  Smith climbs dazed out of the car and stands with his hands on his hips in a pose of supreme satisfaction. His breath steams, his eyes begin to water, his lips move silently. So this is it.

  He shouts his awkward approval over his shoulder, to Liges, who is impassively preparing their fishing poles, and doesn’t seem to hear.

  (In Fort Collins the men equipped themselves with fishing gear of the highest quality, at the most expensive sporting goods store in town: twin rods and reels, tough resilient line, a stainless steel gutting knife, a collection of exquisite feathered flies, rubber hip boots, rubberized gloves, hand nets, etc. “All this paraphernalia merely to catch a fish!” Smith marveled; then hastily emended, “But of course it’s worth every penny.”)

  There’s a small problem securing the reels to the rods, and looping the lines out clearly; a problem adjusting the thigh-high rubber boots; but by 12:10 P.M., by Liges’s watch, the men wade out into the bracing, icy stream, moving with extreme caution, and cast out their lines.

  And minutes pass.

  And, swiftly, a half hour.

  A chill wind whistles down thinly from above. The mountain stream splashes white, and very cold. Liges finds himself regarding Smith with a brotherly sort of compassion. Now, at last, they are here, and peaceful; he’s in no hurry; for it’s always undignified to be made to hurry, or to act in intemperate haste—snapping that woman’s neck between his hands, for instance. Though she would have had to be killed in any case. As he matures, Liges, who is Harwood Licht his father’s son, sees the logic of Abraham’s philosophy in which crime is dissolved in complicity and much is meditated before the simplest move is played. He knows he’s been clumsy in the past but he’s learning, and one day soon, perhaps by next Christmas, he will make his tyrant of a father blink in awe of him; and Thurston, and Elisha, and even the spoiled bitch Millicent, will be forgotten.

  So, as they fish the idyllic mountain stream, Harmon Liges regards Roland Shrikesdale III with a grave little smile. His pudgy child’s face creased in concentration, his close-set eyes narrowed against the splashing water as if he’s frightened of it; his body taut with anticipation of a fish snapping up his lure and yanking him off balance. (For many are the tales told of fishermen, fallen in icy-cold streams, whose thigh-high boots fill up with water and weigh them down to drown, if they don’t die beforehand of hypothermia.) Now that he’s begun to grow a beard Smith looks less vulnerable than he had; now that his skin isn’t so pasty, and so mottled, he’s begun to resemble . . . Harmon Liges.

  Poor Roland: poor Robert! Casting out his line again, and getting it snarled; and now the thread is jammed in the reel; and the gaily colored little fly, a bit of red, orange and yellow feathers, is caught in the fabric of his trousers. Smith’s face crinkles with an infant’s despair as if, were he alone, he might burst into tears . . . but, fortunately, he’s not alone, his friend and companion Harmon Liges has been watching him closely, and will come to his rescue.

  Yes. It’s time. Liges draws the gleaming stainless steel knife out of his waist sheath and makes his way carefully to Smith. “Here, Robert,” he says, “—I can fix that for you.”

  “I BRING NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD”

  1.

  So mysterious does young Darian Licht seem to his classmates at the Vanderpoel Academy for Boys, with his inward gaze, his dreamy frowning smile and fair light feathery hair, the way like a flame he appears, and disappears, and again appears out of the very air—his suitemate “Tige” Satterlee (of Baltimore, Maryland; father an attorney for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad) one day asks him in the blunt bluff Brit style affected by the more sophisticated Vanderpoel students why he is the way he is.

  Breathless Darian, only just returned from the school chapel where he’s been playing the organ, turns baffled, blinking, “But—how ‘am’ I? What do you mean?”

  In the room with Satterlee are several other boys—all regarding Darian with quizzical stares. He’d be intimidated by them except why should they want to hurt him? Satterlee’s soccer teammates.

  Satterlee says, accusing, “You’re so God-damned happy.”

  “I am?—I don’t mean to be.”

  “God damn, you are happy, aren’t you?”

  Darian looks nervously at the other boys—“Chitt” Chesterson, “Fritzie” van Gelder, “Benbo” Morgan—and sees they aren’t smiling. Husky boys with arms folded, facial hair beginning to sprout on their jaws and upper lips where, on Darian’s, there’s only the smoothest fairest down. All men are our enemies, as they are strangers.

  Darian stammers, “I don’t know,” seeing that the unpredictable Satterlee may be in a dangerous mood, “—I don’t think about things like that. I was playing my—music.”

  Has a lighted match been touched to Satterlee, causing him to flare up, contemptuous, grinning—“Your music! ‘Your’ music! What is this that makes you so happy, some place you go to?—like playing with yourself?—some place that isn’t here?”

  Satterlee stamps his feet, big feet for a fourteen-year-old, and the floor shudders. Here’s here, and no mistake.

  Uneasily Darian says, “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Benbo” Morgan, who’s J. P. Morgan’s grandson, lurches forward with a threatening grin. “Y’know—you act like nothing touches you. Like you’re above it all, Licht.”

  Darian protests, “But everything touches me.”

  He’s backing off, smiling. They’re going to hurt him, not just give him orders. Can he escape? Turn to smoke, so they’re striking only the air? Disappear through the single mirror in the room, a gleaming slanted rhomboid atop a bureau? Or transform himself into a few bars of music, cascading treble notes like shattering icicles, flying into his head as his hands wandered over the organ’s keyboards too swiftly for him to pause and jot them down—

  “Touches you, maybe,” Satterlee says in his drawling mid-Southern accent, in which fury and hurt commingle, “but goes right on through. Doesn’t it! Eh!”

  Shoving Darian back against a table, and the books in Darian’s arms go flying, Bach’s Two- and Three-Part Inventions, Chopin’s Preludes, Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas, and Darian freezes and goes inward and he’s in his secret place in Muirkirk invisible as musical notes swirl about him as the boys, whooping and yelping, close in upon him.

  WHAT IS THIS that makes you so happy and of such happiness he can’t speak. He’d never inform on his tormentors, they know they can depend upon him, Darian Licht isn’t going to crack like certain of the other targets of their animosity for whom they feel only contempt while for Darian, rumored to be a genius, they feel a grudging admiration, respect if not affection, there’s something so . . . strange about him, a light that comes up in his eyes, luminous as a cat’s.

  Perhaps, he’s beginning to think, he’s Abraham Licht’s son after all: a master of escapes, disappearances. Of things not quite what they seem.

  It’s a thought that fills Darian with dread. For though he loves Abraham Licht with a fierce, helpless love, he’s old enough now and mature enough to know he can’t approve of the man. And certainly I never understood him.

  THERE’S DARIAN LICHT in his navy blue woollen blazer and school tie (dull rust-red stripes upon a dull gold background). Darian whose eyes are watering with a sinus headache. Darian whose heart pounds with excitement as the sonorous old bell in the bell tower tolls calmly and massively reverberating through the chatter of hundreds of boys in the dining hall like
the very speech of God, wordless. There’s Darian frowning over problems in plane geometry, there’s Darian in baggy shirt and shorts trailing after a screaming pack of boys on the soccer field, shuddering with cold and his lips and fingernails purple yet stubbornly or out of futility he continues to run, trot, stagger, stumble actually managing as in a dream of comical implausibility to kick the ball once, twice, a third time . . . and to make a goal. There’s Darian silently obeying the commandments of upper-form boys, military-style orders barked in raw adolescent voices Attention! Sweep up in here, Licht. Attention! Polish my boots, Licht. Attention! But his attention is elsewhere, that place to which he escapes, Muirkirk, music, the wind in the marsh grasses, the high whistling wind out of the Chautauqua Mountains, the gentle touch of his mother’s fingers at the nape of his neck what is this that makes you so happy so happy released in the late afternoon from classes running breathless and graceful as a deer across the school’s back acre to the gravel road and to Academy Street and so to Twelfth Street where his piano instructor lives upstairs in a tall narrow putty-colored row house, Herr Professor Adolf Hermann, lately of Düsseldorf, Germany, eyes awash with rheumy tears behind gold-rimmed glasses, droplets of sweat easing down his fatty cheeks and neck, he says not a word to any of his (American) pupils of the grief festering in his heart, the hope that Germany will crush her enemies, the terror that Germany will crush her enemies . . . and then? What will be the fate of Germans in North America? Darian Licht, his most gifted American student, perhaps indeed the most gifted student Herr Hermann has ever had, sees newspapers scattered about the steam-heated parlor, the war headlines GERMAN SUBMARINES SINK FOUR U.S. MERCHANT SHIPS, WILSON VOWS WAR, the newspaper photographs, averts his eyes and goes at once to the piano and adjusts the stool to his height (still short for his age, he despairs of growing), begins nervously with his warming-up scales, his technical exercises, today it’s F-sharp minor, harmonic forms, melodic forms, contrary motion, triads solid and broken. Darian is always nervous, always falters initially, Professor Hermann grunts in sympathy, he quite understands, you are a servant of the piano and of the music that rushes through it, you will never be its equal.