My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  No expense was spared in Anna Emery’s effort to locate her missing son, whether she paid out extraordinary sums for the design and printing of the soon-famous poster, and its distribution everywhere in the West; or allowed her private detectives unlimited expense accounts. (One of the detectives dared submit a tally sheet for $11,000 in expenses alone, for the single month of July; which sum Anna Emery promptly paid.) Bagot, whom Anna Emery believed an old friend, as well as one of the shrewdest lawyers in Philadelphia, was paid $8,000 simply to go out to Fort Sumner, make the crucial identification, and bring poor Roland home.

  And of course it was Roland—as Anna Emery saw at once when Bagot led him into the room, though her poor heart was pounding, and her eyes had misted over in tears.

  Her Roland, after so many days away!—her boy!—one side of his face grotesquely bandaged, and his hair darker and coarser than she recalled; his lips less moistly pink and soft; his very figure thickened, and given a fearful simian cast by all he’d endured. Anna Emery had been warned that Roland suffered from a temporary amnesia, could not recall his name or anything pertaining to his circumstances, etc., yet it amazed her to see for a brief flickering moment how he stared at her, eyes narrowed in that old squinting habit, yet luminous, with dread, exaltation, and wonder.

  “Mother—?”

  In the next instant he was crouched beside her bedside, weeping in her embrace. “My darling Roland, my baby, God has sent you back to me,” Anna Emery cried. And so it was.

  4.

  Sharp-eyed old Stafford Shrikesdale saw within seconds of their meeting that this “amnesiac nephew” of his, talked of obsessively through Philadelphia, and heralded in the national press, was an imposter. Yet so stunned was he, so thrown off balance by the audacity of the man’s game, Stafford could do no more than stare at him and stammer a faint, faltering greeting and, to his subsequent chagrin, shake the bastard’s hand.

  Which was cool, moist and clammy yet momentarily hard in its grip as never in the past, that Roland’s uncle could recall.

  And the squinting flash of the imposter’s eyes, nothing like Roland’s watery gaze.

  Yet: there was poor Anna Emery, radiant and quivering with joy, clinging to her boy’s arm and clutching at Stafford’s as if to bring the two into an unlikely embrace. It was as everyone said: Anna Emery was convinced that this man was her lost son Roland, and who would wish to quarrel with her, at least at such a time? She was urging the stranger, “Roland, dear, try to remember your uncle Stafford, please! Your late father’s brother. Do try.” The thick-bodied young brute gave every appearance of trying, staring at Stafford Shrikesdale with narrowed eyes, his mouth working mutely as if . . . as if he were genuine. And when he did at last speak, it was in Roland’s very voice. “Y-Yes, Mother. I will try. If but God will help me.”

  So sharp-eyed old Stafford Shrikesdale went away from his first encounter with his “amnesiac nephew” both knowing that the man was an imposter and shaken in his conviction. For what if? . . . Couldn’t an ordeal in the Southwest, great physical hardship have altered Roland Shrikesdale?

  STAFFORD’S SONS, WHO were Roland’s cousins, and never very close to the pampered, petted sickly creature, found themselves, as usual, in sharp disagreement. For each saw what was obvious; and was filled with contempt for anyone who disagreed.

  Said Bertram, “He isn’t Roland. Any fool can see.”

  Said Lyle, “But he must be Roland—how could he deceive so many people, and Aunt Anna Emery most of all?”

  Said Willard in his ironic, lawyerly voice, “The man’s way of speaking, the nervous little inflections and his squinting smiles and sighs, the way he wriggles his shoulders and buttocks like a female, and carries himself, and is—it’s Roland, God damn him. Yet at the same time if one looks carefully, as I’ve done, studying him from the rear, and the side, from a distance and at close range—it seems to be our cousin in the form somehow of another man, a stranger a few years older than he, or as we remember him.”

  “Willard, are you mad? What are you saying?” Bertram interrupted. “‘Our cousin in the form of—’ What?”

  “—not so fleshy as Roland but more muscular,” Willard continued, irritably, “—with a slightly different mouth and chin—and those eyes. Yet the expression of the face, that sort of droopy doggy hopefulness—”

  “I would have said he looks younger than Roland. Than Roland would have been.”

  “Younger? Surely older.”

  “I mean—for one who’s endured such an ordeal. How many days wandering in the desert? And those injuries . . . ”

  “His eyes are darker than Roland’s.”

  “Lighter, I should say. Steelier.”

  “I believe he knew me. I could have sworn—it is our cousin.”

  “Aunt Anna Emery is a silly old woman, and half-blind. You know everyone laughs at her.”

  “—pities her, I should have said.”

  “If I went away, and was lost, and suffered injuries, and almost died, and returned to Philadelphia—you would wish, I suppose, not to know me,” Lyle said hotly, “—in order to defraud me of my position—yes? Is that it?”

  “You, Lyle? What has this to do with you?”

  “It has to do with us all. If Roland can be dismissed—so can we all.”

  “But that’s absurd. You are not Roland. You are not an imposter.”

  “This man’s head is larger than Roland’s, I swear. His forehead squarer.”

  “Yet he’s wearing Roland’s hats, it seems. You saw him.”

  “His neck—it’s thicker, obviously. Like a young bull’s.”

  “Yet this might be Roland, toughened and made ‘manly’ by the West.”

  “No longer a virgin.”

  “Roland? Impossible.”

  “That man—? Certainly, possible.”

  “Yet I was thinking, God help me—I like him much more than I did, when we were boys.”

  “This Roland, or—?”

  “His ears don’t stick out so much as they did. But the points are sharper.”

  “Hairs in his ears. Like my own.”

  “His eyebrows are more gnarled—”

  “The man’s presence somehow more real. More of a physical fact.”

  “As poor Roland never seemed a fact.”

  They stood for some time smoking their cigars, pondering.

  At last Lyle said impatiently, “He must be Roland. No one has said he isn’t.”

  “Except Father. And us.”

  “I haven’t said it isn’t Roland, not exactly,” Willard said.

  “Well, I have,” said Bertram. “I know the man is not Roland.”

  “Look, it’s inconceivable that a stranger could deceive so many of us, beginning with Bagot. Bagot is no fool. Many of the relatives have seen him, and granted some of them are idiots like Aunt Anna Emery, yet they would sense if Roland weren’t Roland; the Sewalls were all so fond of him. The servants at Castlewood appear to accept him—not that they matter greatly. But—there is Bagot. How d’you account for Bagot?”

  “A fellow conspirator,” Bertram said bitterly.

  “Not Bagot!”

  “Surely. The man isn’t to be trusted, he has never been on our side.”

  “Father spoke at length to Bagot—”

  “And Bagot was, Father said, rude.”

  “To Father?”

  “To Father.”

  “Well, he’ll regret that.”

  “They will all regret that.”

  “In the meantime—”

  “What of the man’s handwriting? A sample—”

  “It was that, partly, Father saw Bagot about.”

  “And—?”

  “This Roland’s handwriting is very close to the old—allowing for a certain shakiness. He isn’t well, after all; they say he nearly died in New Mexico.”

  “He may have died—but this one lives.”

  “And he will live to regret it. If, of course, it is not the right man.�
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  “—an imposter, a brazen criminal, hoping to deceive the Shrikesdales, of all people—”

  “That would be intolerable.”

  “—inconceivable!”

  “Not to be borne.”

  “Yet,” said Willard, breathing harshly, “—perhaps it is Roland after all?—and we are the ones who have somehow changed in our perceptions. For it isn’t likely, nor would any jury be inclined to think so, that a man’s very mother—”

  “Anna Emery is not this man’s mother,” said Bertram.

  “She is Roland’s mother—that is in fact all that she is.”

  “No, you are speaking carelessly. She is a woman of advanced years, susceptible to all sorts of sickly fancies, on the verge, if she has not already crossed over, of senility, as any forceful attorney might argue.”

  “But simply to erect so preposterous a case, with the man’s very mother testifying in his behalf—”

  “—we would be laughed out of court, we would never live it down—”

  “Anna Emery Shrikesdale is not this man’s mother. She is Roland’s mother; and this man, as I keep telling you, is not Roland Shrikesdale. He is not our cousin.”

  “Then who is he?—and how can it be humanly possible, that he so closely resembles Roland?”

  Said Bertram contemptuously, “That’s your idiotic notion, that the man resembles Roland. Father and I see clearly he does not.”

  “I hope, Bertie, you won’t embarrass the family by trying to demonstrate that Aunt Anna Emery doesn’t know her own son,” Lyle said curtly. “The wisest course of action is to stop thinking about this; to continue with our lives as if nothing were wrong.”

  Willard said, with lawyerly aplomb and disdain, “On the one hand, I counsel extreme caution. On the other, if the man is an imposter, this is doubtless what he wishes. Consider the fortune that’s at stake: more than two hundred million dollars, as Father calculates. Of our money! And it’s intolerable that a criminal should inherit Castlewood Hall and our name, without our putting up a fight. Yet—”

  “Yet—?”

  “—the prospect of an open legal disagreement, a lawsuit dragged through the civil court, terrifies me. As a man of the law, I know what we might expect. For the defense would be formidable, if not unshakable, with poor Aunt Anna Emery testifying for ‘Roland’ as her beloved son, and the Sewalls, and Bagot, and the Pinkerton men—their testimony would weigh heavily in the court. I’m afraid it’s all but hopeless. Unless—‘Roland’ reveals himself by accident.”

  “Certainly ‘Roland’ will reveal himself,” said Bertram. “I’ll see to that.”

  “But how? Without tipping our hand?” Willard said. “The man must be devilishly clever—in fact, he frightens me.”

  “Ah, then you side with me!” Bertram said.

  “I don’t necessarily side with you,” Willard said stiffly.

  “You admit the possibility, however.”

  “There is always a ‘possibility’—in the law. Yet another possibility remains that this man is our cousin and that his memory will eventually return—queerer things have happened in the annals of law, believe me. And we Shrikesdales would be committing a grave injustice if we took action against a blood relative—”

  “That brute!—he’s no blood relative of mine,” Bertram said angrily. “And two hundred million is at stake, at the very least. Our aunt is sure to die within a few years—”

  “No, no—the Sewalls live forever. Like that ghastly race of Struldbruggs of which Jonathan Swift wrote, who never die but only live and live, in total senility. She will outlive us all.”

  Lyle said, exasperated, “The man is Roland, I’d swear to it. I’ve seen in him the very person we’d pitied and disliked. You want to imagine that that weak, ineffectual, overgrown baby is someone other than our cousin; you’re simply too eager, brothers, to want to believe that our cousin is dead.”

  Again they fell silent; sucked at their cigars; stared at the floor.

  After some minutes Bertram said, with a sly sidelong smile at his brothers, “If he’s died once, y’know—he can die a second time.”

  And Willard, the eldest and most responsible, wheeled upon Bertram, giving his upper arm a hard blow, as if they were boys. “God damn you for a fool, Bertie—you must never say that sort of thing where anyone else, even a servant, might hear.”

  5.

  Roland Shrikesdale III was recovering his health by degrees, painfully and haltingly. But everyone agreed that he was recovering.

  By early winter he was strong enough to dress, and to take most of his meals downstairs at Castlewood; to walk about the grounds unescorted; to attend church with his mother; to sit, nervous, smiling, but for the most part silent, at small social gatherings that did not overtax him. He ate heartily, which delighted Anna Emery; he slept very well indeed—“like a baby”—being capable of staying abed for twelve hours at a stretch, until Anna Emery herself gaily roused him. Despite the frequency with which they received invitations—for Roland Shrikesdale III was one of Philadelphia’s most eligible, and wealthy, bachelors—Anna Emery and Roland condescended to accept few invitations to dine out; they much preferred the theater or the concert hall, where, as Roland said, he felt his spirit quicken and vibrate, as of old.

  Ah, what joy, what balm, to listen for hours to the music of Mozart, or Wagner, or Beethoven!—to give himself up to the caprices of Rigoletto, as he’d done of old! There, seated close beside his mother in the Shrikesdale family box, leaning forward to drink in, with quivering intensity, every note—that was the pale, stocky, ravaged young Shrikesdale heir, oblivious of the attention he drew on all sides; so immersed in the music, it was as if he’d never left the safety of Philadelphia to suffer his mysterious adventure. (Indeed, it remained mysterious, for Roland was incapable of remembering save in jagged and incoherent fragments; and no trace was found of his companion, who must have died somewhere in the wilds of New Mexico.)

  “He’s Anna Emery’s boy as he has always been,” observers noted, eyeing him covertly, “—though he is much changed.”

  By degrees, the scar tissue on the side of Roland’s face acquired a less painful, and a less startling, appearance; where once it had ached violently, Roland now confessed it was numb. And, too, was not something gone now from the corner of his eye, that he dimly recalled was ugly?—a birthmark, a mole?

  Anna Emery snatched his hand away from his face, squeezing it hard, as one might do with a small child; partly to reprimand and partly to comfort. She told him it had been a mole; but it had not been at all ugly; for there was nothing ugly about him—neither now nor in the past.

  Ah, but the warts scattered across his hands!—Roland said with a fastidious shudder. Surely these were ugly—?

  At this, Anna Emery flinched; for, it seemed, she too had warts on her hands—they were a family affliction of the Sewalls, vexing but harmless.

  “You have had them all your life, dear, and have not often complained,” Anna Emery said, hurt. “Indeed, I remember you speaking of them as a minor sort of curse, as curses go.”

  Roland showed some embarrassment at his rudeness, and tried to make amends. He stooped to embrace his trembling mother; kissed her cheek; and said earnestly, “Yes, you are right, Mother—I believe I remember now: a minor sort of curse, as curses go.”

  IT BEGAN TO happen that, in the presence of marveling witnesses, Roland Shrikesdale was struck by flashes of memory—whole episodes out of his former life resuscitated by way of a stray word or gesture, or an accidental combination thereof. Ah, what an experience, to see the amnesiac waking, as it were, from a part of his eerie trance—!

  For instance, in January of 1915, at a small dinner party given by a friend of Anna Emery’s, at which Stafford Shrikesdale happened to be a guest, Roland astonished everyone by suddenly clutching at his head, when his hostess happened to speak of Admiral Blackburn. He grimaced, as if he were in fearful pain; and rocked in his chair; saying finally in a hoars
e, halting, yet elated voice that the name “Blackburn” stirred such a memory!—if memory it was, and not a child’s dream—of a sweet-tempered pony, a Shetland with long shaggy mane and tail, liquid-bright eyes, a black hide streaked with gray—his beloved pony Blackburn!

  Then, as everyone listened in great excitement, Roland shut his eyes, and, speaking slowly and dreamily, yet deliberately, proceeded to recall not only the Shetland pony, but the green-painted pony cart in which he had ridden at the age of six . . . the “big farm” out in the country (in fact, in Bucks County) . . . a young black boy, a favored stable hand named Quincy, who had been allowed to supervise little Roland’s play . . . and a dignified elderly gentleman with snapping black eyes and white, white hair who must have been . . . must have been . . . Grandfather Shrikesdale himself, dead since 1889.

  Poor Anna Emery could contain herself no longer; but began to sob helplessly; and had to be comforted by Stafford Shrikesdale, of all people—who’d begun to tremble himself, hearing Roland’s remarkable recitation.

  On another occasion, hardly less dramatic, at a reception at the home of Mrs. Eva Clement-Stoddard, Roland lapsed into an extraordinary fugue state, as if he had been hypnotized, when the name “Maclean” was mentioned—for this triggered a memory of a Scots woman of that name who had been little Roland’s nanny at Castlewood; which in turn triggered a memory astonishing in its visual and tactile detail of the nursery in which Roland had spent his first eight years. The stuffed toys with which he played, and slept . . . the floral print of his bed quilt . . . the view of the old rose garden and the fountain from his window . . . poor Miss Maclean who spent a great deal of her time weeping and sighing, for what reason the child Roland did not know . . . and, most vivid of all, most poignant of all, Mother with her hair loosed on her shoulders, rocking him, crooning to him, kissing him . . . reading to him his favorite fairy tales in her sweet melodic voice . . .