My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  For white is the hue of purity. Of idealism.

  Esther’s secret, which she would tell Darian alone of all the world: Past terror, there’s happiness. I am on earth to serve, not to be served.

  ZEALOUS ESTHER, IMPULSIVE Esther, Esther who’s so good-hearted and naive writes also to a young man named Aaron Deerfield, away taking premedical courses at the university in Albany. Aaron she’s adored since eighth grade; Aaron who’s embarrassed by her attention and loyalty yet allows her to love him though he can’t, as he’s painstakingly explained, love her in return.

  Yet, Aaron has made a vow that if he ever loves any young woman (which maybe he can’t, he has tried) it will be Esther.

  Which fills Esther with a hot embarrassed pleasure. As if, indeed, she were already loved.

  To Aaron Deerfield, Esther writes several lengthy letters a week, not minding that he replies no more than once a month, and then briefly. It’s her privilege to write to him describing her nursing classes, her routine at the hospital, her more interesting cases, providing sharply detailed little sketches of the doctors on the hospital staff, the older nurses, her instructors, her nurse-classmates who are emerging as “characters”—as it’s her privilege to love him. But she won’t embarrass him by making such claims. Concluding her letters not with Love but As always.

  Most of her fellow nurses have boyfriends. Fiancés of one kind or another. Lovers. And some of the older, prettier girls—so excited rumors wash about, spilling and splashing as they will—are said to be involved with doctors at the hospital.

  Married men.

  (And what are the results of such affairs, sometimes?)

  (Of such matters, Esther doesn’t write Aaron Deerfield.)

  YES ESTHER IS happy, yes she’s privileged. It’s human beings that fascinate, more than disease and accident; though these are the means by which she, as a nurse, might come into intimate contact with them.

  A fascination of flesh. Examining anatomy-text drawings, photographs. The extraordinary drawings by Leonardo da Vinci reproduced in a portfolio-sized book she’d purchased for $8 in a secondhand-book store in the city. The revelations of the dissection lab, that initially shock, disgust, terrify; then excite and illuminate. For how natural the body is, how . . . ordinary. Yet the amazing subtlety of flesh, its variations in thickness, solidity. How inadequate, mere words: to say of an individual’s skin white, black, colored. And how strange that we’re encased in flesh from birth to death.

  Our first obligation is to serve the flesh. Others’ flesh.

  To relieve pain, to restore health. To allow the spirit to shine forth.

  Not to punish by withholding all we can do.

  Not to judge, not to moralize, not to punish. Not to give aid to Death.

  ESTHER’S HEAD RINGS from twelve hours, fifteen hours on her feet. Sleepless hours of being commanded to hurry here, to hurry there, do this! do that! and promptly. The hospital is a vast ship at sea amid unpredictable weather, its captain is an elder doctor and his officers a hierarchy of doctors, exclusively male; below them a hierarchy of nurses and nurses’ aides, exclusively female. Esther doesn’t yet question this double hierarchy for it seems to her as to everyone else, including the elder, head nurses who are so much more experienced and capable than the younger doctors, that this is the very principle of the universe, inviolable. It’s true, in high school, Esther Licht and Aaron Deerfield were both A students and possibly Esther was more imaginative in biology class than Aaron, but neither of them would have thought that Esther, and not Aaron, should go to medical school. Esther’s father, and her sister Millie, even Katrina have expressed disapproval of Esther going to nursing school. Ugh. Blood and bodies. Excrement. How can you soil your hands?

  There’s the concern, too, unspoken—Who would wish to marry a nurse?

  Yet Esther’s happy. No matter she’s frequently sick with the flu that passes continuously through the nurses’ residence hall and the hospital. Fevers, infections, racking coughs that kill the weaker of the patients, even if they’ve been hospitalized with other ailments. Such are the facts of medical life, not to be helped. Or so it seems in 1918. Or so Esther wishes to think, in love with her destiny.

  IN THE END, Esther’s father agreed to her request, seeing how passionately she wanted to become a nurse. Seeing, perhaps, that like Darian she was stubborn and self-determined, and would become a nurse with or without his blessing. Making a show of taking out his checkbook with a flourish—“And how much is a semester’s tuition? Or better yet, a year?”

  Poor Father. He’d returned to Muirkirk just before Christmas of 1917, exhausted and ill; he’d had a breakdown like the one he’d suffered when Esther was a little girl, many years ago; once again he was forced to abandon his business and retreat to Muirkirk, where Katrina and Esther nursed him back to health.

  He’d been sick for nearly three months. He’d lost weight, and aged; what most frightened Esther, as she wrote to Darian, was He has aged in his soul. Something has happened of which he will never speak.

  Abraham Licht was enough himself to be annoyed that a daughter of his should “wear her heart on her sleeve so openly” for a neighbor’s son, Aaron Deerfield; and should admire in such schoolgirl fashion Dr. Deerfield, who was an ordinary village doctor—“A sawbones, as I believe his ilk are called.” Abraham’s scorn was rejuvenating to him; as Esther shrewdly saw, her father took heart when there was someone to oppose, a presumed adversary or enemy. It worked out well for her, as she overheard Abraham remarking to Katrina, “Let the girl go to nursing school, if she wants. Away from Muirkirk and the pernicious ‘Deerfield’ influence. A daughter of mine in love with such a dolt!”

  The days, the weeks, months . . . at the start, Esther kept a meticulous diary but soon fell behind for there wasn’t time, never enough time; losing count of all who’d died (and each death so precious, unique) . . . of the babies born (and each birth a miracle, beyond comprehension) . . . and the many letters written in head-on haste and emotion to Aaron Deerfield and others . . . Father, Millie, Darian, Katrina . . . who fail to reply to her in the spirit in which she writes to them, or fail to reply altogether. Am I too eager with love for them? Do I repel them with my hunger?

  At the nursing school, Esther’s energy, stamina and idealism are spoken of with awe, admiration, exasperation, in some quarters mockery and envy. To no one’s surprise Esther Sophia Licht will graduate first in her class of seventy-three students.

  Yet one day in early spring rapidly climbing three flights of stairs to her airless, cramped room, shared with three other nursing students; in a basin of tepid water she washes her face, dries her eyes, pressing a towel against her eyeballs she sees suddenly the blood-rose illuminated in fire where previously it had been dark; and shocks herself by beginning to cry; she, Esther Licht, who never cries, unable to stop crying for many minutes though by this time she’s accustomed to Death and, as she tells herself, happy, very happy.

  THE WISH

  1.

  I am not ill—I am well.”

  “I am not ill—I am well.”

  “I am not ill—I am well.”

  This mantra the patients of the Parris Clinic, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, are instructed to chant one hundred or more times a day; silently or together in a swelling communal orison; with eyes open or tightly shut. The discipline is known as Autogenic Self-Mastery, the discovery of Dr. Felix Bies, cofounder with Dr. Moses Liebknecht of the Parris Clinic. Here, the infirm are taught that as the physical being can be cured of affliction by way of elixirs, diet, hot baths, hydrotherapy, herbal medicines and the like, so too can the spiritual being be cured of its more insidious afflictions by way of Self-Mastery. It’s an Eastern discipline descended from ancient yogic practices and Buddhist teachings yet as Dr. Bies and Dr. Liebknecht insist it’s a discipline uniquely suited to North America—“Where will and destiny are one.”

  Paralysis, cancer, nervous disorders; feebleness of intellect and of personality
; anemia, otalgia, migraine, multiple sclerosis, myxedema; senility, aging—these are but symptoms of spiritual disequilibrium that can be treated at the Parris Clinic; with the contractual understanding beforehand, fully documented and notarized, that only by way of the patient’s “active volition” can a true cure be effected. Among the permanent residents of the Parris community are an eighty-seven-year-old woman cured of glaucoma and ileitis; a ninety-three-year-old woman once crippled by arthritis and now capable of hiking on the Clinic’s fifty-acre grounds, and of playing lawn tennis; an eighty-six-year-old man wounded in the chest in the Battle of Bull Run and subsequently subject to numerous ailments—heart trouble, dyspepsia, fatigue, asthma—until recently, by way of a strict diet, hot baths and Autogenic Self-Mastery, he declared himself one hundred percent cured, and a candidate for remarriage. The Clinic’s most renowned patient is an elderly man said to be one hundred nineteen years old who suffers intermittently from the usual infirmities of age (arthritis, gum disease, vertigo, etc.) but as a result of Autogenic Self-Mastery and other Parris disciplines, he not only recently married for the eighth time but sired his twenty-first child, a healthy baby boy—an event written up in the New York newspapers. The Clinic’s former patients include a chess grand master, a youth of nineteen who’d once suffered from extreme melancholia; numerous veterans of the Great War now entirely cured and returned to active life; and numerous women—neurasthenic, hysterical, melancholic, amenorrheic, abnormally willful or will-less—also cured to various degrees and returned to the world as well-adjusted daughters, wives and mothers.

  The Parris Clinic was founded in 1922, by way of a generous gift from a convert to Dr. Bies’s teachings, an elderly woman named Mrs. Flaxman Potter who willed her estate, including a spacious Georgian house and numerous outbuildings, to the controversial physician-researcher. There have been numerous other gifts from cured, grateful patients; for the servicing of the physical dimension of being (the maintenance of the forty-room mansion, the grounds, the baths, etc.) is recognized as no less necessary than the maintenance of the spiritual. It is the promise of the Parris Clinic’s directors that none who enter through its wrought-iron gate will come to grief from any mortal affliction including age itself; yet such are the vicissitudes of natural and human frailty, a certain percentage of patients do occasionally fall short of this goal and come to unfortunate ends, with the result that the Clinic is often being sued, or is threatened with lawsuits, by relatives of the deceased, disinherited children, former physicians and the like. In addition, the goodwill of county and state officials is frequently costly. Financial solvency, therefore, is required—that’s to say a healthy cash flow. The Parris Clinic, despite the idealism of its directors, can’t open its doors to all who have need but only to those who can afford its high fees.

  In spring 1926 when a Wall Street investor named Arthur Grille arranged for his neurasthenic daughter Rosamund to be admitted to the Clinic, on the eve of his departure for Naples with his new bride, he was initially shocked by the price quoted by Dr. Bies; yet came around to the doctor’s position as in such matters where health and peace of mind are concerned, money should be of secondary significance. Mr. Grille was a recent widower who’d come into prosperity like so many investors and speculators following the Armistice; he’d seen an investment of $400,000 in various stocks soar to $2.3 million in a whirlwind eighteen-month period in the early 1920’s, and was now a millionaire many times over. Yet it was his tragedy that, simultaneously, he lost his wife to a premature death and his only child Rosamund to numerous mysterious ailments—fainting spells, tachycardia, migraine, anemia, loss of appetite, chronic melancholia and the like. Rosamund was an ethereal girl with a fondness for poetry, professing a morbid obsession with the work of such poets as Keats, Shelley, Chatterton, Byron—poets who’d all come to tragic or shameful ends. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty Rosamund experimented with poetry of her own, so caught up in writing verse that the family was forced to intervene and forbid her to continue, to prevent a complete mental breakdown; which provoked the rebellious girl to burn her poetry in a roaring blaze on the front lawn of the Grille estate on Long Island, and to lapse into a near-catatonic state afterward. Rosamund’s coming out at the Cotillion Club was cancelled, to her mother’s grief; and the New York City débutante season of 1920 passed her by gaily and indifferently.

  Eventually, when Rosamund emerged from her lethargy to try her hand at sculpting small figures in clay under the tutelage of a prominent society sculptor, she again became so involved with her work, as she called it, that she had to be chastened a second time, with more extreme results, for now the unstable girl broke out of seclusion with a manic zeal, attending jazz parties in Manhattan where drinking, only just prohibited by federal law, took place, as well as dancing of a wild, abandoned, lascivious kind; she became engaged to a young entrepreneur of whom the Grilles disapproved and, after breaking up with him in a tumultuous scene at the Plaza Hotel, she became engaged to a young tap dancer and Broadway actor whom the Grilles liked even less; at the height of her hysteria, as her condition was diagnosed by the family physician, Rosamund frequented such notorious Manhattan speakeasies as the Marlboro Club, the Stork Club, and Helen Morgan’s, where she was once swept up and arrested in a police raid. And all her antics were performed, as observers noted, without pleasure; indeed, in defiance of pleasure.

  As if the new generation sought pain, humiliation, defeat and even death through the forms of “pleasure”—to spite their elders.

  In his interview with Dr. Bies and Dr. Liebknecht, Arthur Grille explained that his daughter had been inclined since infancy to a certain degree of willfulness; but beyond the age of thirteen, when her mother first took ill, she became very difficult indeed. “All that was sweet in my little girl curdled; all that was soft and yielding turned hard, cunning and stubborn; she gave the impression of being stalled—caught up in the maladies and malaises I’ve told you about from which, as she said, striking terror into the hearts of her mother and me, ‘Only Death could release her.’” Following this, Rosamund was never well. She often threatened to do injury to herself, setting afire her beautiful black hair or raking her skin with her nails or, like Ophelia, who was one of her morbid heroines, drowning herself in a stream. She wasn’t loved by anyone, she charged; or she was loved too much, and didn’t deserve it. She despaired of God and of being “saved”; then, abruptly, declared the idea of God “supremely silly” and announced herself content to be the descendant of African apes. After her mother’s death, when Rosamund was, in her own words, an old maid of twenty-four, she took to her bed and slept in a fevered state for as long as eighteen hours at a time; she ceased speaking except in sibylline utterances—“Where tragedy would ennoble, farce intervenes”—“Eternity despises the productions of Time”—which puzzled and angered her grieving father. Mr. Grille took her to specialist after specialist, admitted her to clinic after clinic, begged her, and commanded her, to behave in a manner suitable for a young woman of her rank and family background; and all without success.

  For she was ill, beneath her hysteria and histrionics—seriously ill.

  Following the advice of a Wall Street associate, Arthur Grille made the decision to commit Rosamund to the care of Doctors Bies and Liebknecht, before sailing for Europe on his honeymoon. (In despair of his life, Mr. Grille had suddenly fallen in love with a young woman twenty years his junior, whose soldier husband had died in France.) Dozens of physicians had failed with her; perhaps they would succeed; in any case, he told them somberly, since his daughter was more troubled now at the age of twenty-seven than she’d been before in her life, they could hardly do her harm. “If I were a superstitious person, which I am not,” Mr. Grille told the doctors, “I might almost believe that a . . . demon of some kind inhabited my poor girl.”

  “A DEMON! WHAT a laugh. Rather more, the absence of a demon. There’s the loss.”

  Rosamund Grille was a willowy, fine-boned, alarmingly
thin young woman who looked more seventeen than twenty-seven. She had damp green gemlike eyes narrowed in playfulness one moment and mistrust the next; an aquiline nose with a charming little bump—where it had been broken, as she explained, in a speakeasy raid; a sullen, but very pretty mouth; and a grainy skin that looked as if it were rarely exposed to the sun. The insides of both her forearms were scarred with tiny nicks and scratches—“Hieroglyphics,” as she called them. “Signifying nothing.” Her hair was fine and filmy, a smoky-black threaded with dead-white hairs; at the time of her admission to the Parris Clinic she’d carelessly bobbed it with a scissors, and refused to go to a hairdresser to repair the damage. Her manner was both skittish and lethargic, sometimes within the space of a few minutes. As Dr. Bies examined her (though he placed little emphasis upon the physical being, he knew it was necessary to consult it) she held herself stiff as a rod, resisting her impulse to recoil from a stranger’s, or a man’s, touch. Her elegant head high, her greeny eyes partly closed, Rosamund Grille gave no evidence of hearing the questions Dr. Bies asked, and no more cooperated with the physician than a dressmaker’s dummy would have done. Dr. Liebknecht, looking on sympathetically, his pince-nez pressed against the bridge of his nose, asked the young woman questions of his own, “Do you comprehend, Miss Grille, that it’s your own Wish turned against you that has made you ‘ill’?”—and appeared more annoyed than Dr. Bies when she ignored him. A stubborn creature, as her father warned. Not to be easily cured, if cured at all.