My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Initially, however, he felt extreme excitement, and a renewal of his old powers. How good for the soul, to be immersed in the world of men again, steeped in Time!—and to be here, in Washington, D.C., at the very heart of the nation, where his talents might at last come to fruition. Moreover, it quite dazed him that Gaston Bullock Means, with whom he’d never been close in the past, welcomed him so openly and genially; even slung an arm around his shoulders, and gave him a manly sort of hug, repeating several times that he was most relieved to see Abraham Licht in the flesh, here, and now.

  “FOR NOW AT last we are coming into our rightful inheritance,” Gaston Bullock Means said expansively, signaling the black waiter for two more whiskeys, “—and no one is to stop us, ever again. Wait and see, brother, if you doubt.”

  The two men were seated comfortably in a leather-cushioned booth, in the dim-lit gentlemen’s bar of the Shoreham Hotel, to which Means had brought Abraham Licht, direct from the railroad station. (Abraham’s temporary residence was to be the elegant Shoreham, until such time as he might find adequate lodgings in the city, preferably close by the Burns Detective Agency. He was gratified to learn that, in the meantime, the United States Justice Department would underwrite all his expenses.) For several hours, over whiskey and cigars, Means outlined Abraham Licht’s general prospects as a special consultant or secret agent in the employ of the Burns Agency; and spoke, in a voice alternately lowered and exuberant, of his own remarkable adventures in the hire of the U.S. Government, and his plans for the future. “There has never been a time like this,” Means said, hunching his big shoulders over the table, and fixing his gaze firmly to Abraham Licht’s, “—for, you know, life, and liberty, and the pursuit of one’s fortune.”

  Abraham Licht’s initial confusion about who his employer actually was, and of what his duties would consist, was quickly laid to rest: for though his workplace would be the Burns Detective Agency on Wisconsin Avenue, his employer would be the United States Bureau of Investigation, under the aegis of the Justice Department. Like Means, he would be a confidential agent; his title, Special Employee of the Department of Justice. He was already on the payroll and in the morning, when he dropped by the office—10:30 A.M. was early enough: the detectives kept late hours—he would be sworn into his duties and equipped with a badge, telephone, official stationery, secretarial service and the like. “I’ve advised that you be issued a firearm,” Means said, dropping his voice dramatically, and opening his coat so that Abraham could glimpse inside the polished handle of a pistol, snug in what appeared to be a gleaming leather holster. “For the Bolsheviks are sly sons of bitches,” Means said, laughing, “—once they know you are onto their game.”

  “The Bolsheviks—?” Abraham Licht asked.

  Abraham was aware, wasn’t he, Means inquired, lowering his voice yet more dramatically, that thousands of enemies of the State had been arrested, and jailed, during the War? The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 had netted quite a catch, in all: German-Americans (who could be counted on to be pro-German); pacifists of various persuasions (who were either in the hire of the German war machine, or its dupes); Socialists, Anarchists, and Black Nationalists (Eugene Debs, “Prince” Elihu of Harlem, etc.); critics of the War, or of Woodrow Wilson’s policies, or, indeed, of Woodrow Wilson and his administration in general. Yes, quite a hodgepodge of felons!—and some of them put away for a long, long time. Neither President Wilson nor his Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, was likely to forget a political insult, or forgive an enemy; and the sentiment in Washington among both Democrats and Republicans was that the Armistice should not encourage a relaxation of vigilance at home, against subversives, would-be traitors, Socialists, radicals, union agitators, etc. The fight, Means said, sighing in pleasure, and rubbing his immense hands briskly together, was only now beginning.

  “For we are secretly launching an undercover campaign,” Means said, “to identify, and round up, every single dissenter in the country: very likely by the end of the year, if Mr. Palmer’s scheme holds. Which is one of the reasons that you have been hired; though I have other plans for the two of us, as well. But first things first! Waiter!”

  So secluded a life had Abraham Licht led during his convalescence in Muirkirk, he’d followed only vaguely the progress of the War, and knew even less of the home-front war: mass arrests of striking pickets, radical speechmakers, German-born subversives, and the like. He asked carefully about the arrests of Eugene Debs and “Prince” Elihu of Harlem, and was told by Means, indifferently, that so far as he knew, both men—“the Socialist and the nigger”—had been sentenced to ten- or fifteen-year terms in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Since the Armistice, the administration had had to release hundreds, possibly thousands of “subversive” prisoners; but it was Woodrow Wilson’s vow that so long as he remained in office, neither Debs nor Elihu would be pardoned.

  “The President is a tough old buzzard, for being a schoolmaster from Princeton,” Means said, grimacing and shaking his head in admiration. “I would not want to mix with him.”

  Abraham’s vision misted over. He felt an ache of profound sadness and loneliness. Little Moses!—poor child! To think of him locked away in a federal penitentiary in Georgia, a nigger among niggers, and all because of his betrayal of Abraham Licht’s fatherly love . . .

  “Is anything known of this ‘Elihu’ at the present time?” Abraham asked Means. “He had a sizable following among the Negroes of Harlem and elsewhere, didn’t he? You’d think Wilson wouldn’t want to offend them.”

  “Offend niggers?” Means asked, staring at his companion. “How d’you mean?”

  “Why, in the usual way. ‘Offend.’”

  “A nigger?”

  “Well—a ‘nigger’ is human, isn’t he?”

  Again Means stared. Then he began to laugh, as if seeing that Abraham was joking. “Hell, the coons have forgotten him by now,” he said, when he could draw breath again. “They forget easily, and forgive. They’re nothing like us.”

  The conversation then shifted to other topics: Means’s wartime service (he had, he said mysteriously, operated as “German Agent E-13” in the Washington–Baltimore–New York City region); Means’s current affairs (he was involved in negotiations with a certain millionaire “cereal king” who’d made a tidy profit during the War by cheating the government in bulk cereal sales, and was now bargaining with Means about the purchase price of the files pertaining to him in the Bureau of Investigation); and Means’s vague but rhapsodic plans for the future (with the imminence of Prohibition, and the inevitability of a clandestine market for alcohol, what might not be at hand?).

  “A new era, Abraham, a new dawn,” Means said, his voice catching as he gripped his companion’s arm tight. “And you have arrived only just in time.”

  Abraham Licht agreed; but thought it queer that he failed to feel as much exhilaration and zest as he should. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t eaten a meal for many hours, and, under Means’s influence, had had too much to drink. (In Muirkirk, away from the company of other men, Abraham had lost interest in drink altogether.) Moreover, Gaston Bullock Means’s company was more overbearing than he recalled: for Means was in the habit of talking virtually nonstop, interrupting himself with little wheezing asides and spasms of mirth, in a manner now blustering, now deferential, now sly, now merry, now rather brutal—a sudden startling reminder of the man’s past, in which, as a convicted confidence-man, swindler, and outright thief, many years ago in Albany, he had assuredly not worn white costumes of the cut of his Palm Beach suit, nor entertained a friend in the luxurious twilight, aglimmer with tall bottles, glasses, and mirrors, of a gentlemen’s bar like the Shoreham. He had newly acquired a habit of dropping his voice low, as if he had reason to believe he was overheard; then, when his companion leaned forward, cupping his hand to his ear, he was likely to explode in a guffaw, and finish his remarks in a boisterous near-shout.

  Though in height and coloring Means
resembled Abraham Licht, he was a few years younger; forty pounds heavier; with an unusually round head, shaggy gray-brown hair, and a dimpled, even cherubic smile. His close-set eyes flashed and beamed with masculine good humor; he was the sort to immediately inspire confidence, Abraham Licht conceded—feeling in that instant suddenly old, and not prepared to return to The Game.

  Means, however, took not the slightest notice of his companion’s change of mood, but, briskly ordered another round of drinks, continued to chat of his contacts in the Justice Department, and in the Senate, and in the House; and of confidential investigative work he was doing, without Burns’s knowledge, for the Bureau of Special Reports, or was it the Alien Custodian Bureau, or the Bureau of Internal Revenue, or the Secret Service, or the Bureau of the Budget . . . .

  At the end of the long evening, Means slung his heavy arm around Abraham Licht’s shoulders again, and leaned his head close, and winked, saying: “What is it about? What is it about? Honor, I say: honor! And again—honor. D’you understand, my friend? You understand, my friend, don’t you!”

  (Yet wasn’t there something about Gaston Bullock Means that Abraham Licht should remember?—that, in the privacy of his sumptuous hotel suite, he half-remembered?—having to do, perhaps, with the unspeakable disaster in Philadelphia. But no: he was convinced that Means hadn’t recognized him then, or poor Harwood; or, if he had, surely he wouldn’t have revealed their identities. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for the man to be so friendly and forthright with me now,” Abraham thought, undressing with slow leaden motions for bed.)

  6.

  The Great Red Raid, as it was afterward called, opened with commendable dramatic effect on 1 January 1920, when two hundred suspected subversives, cited by the “Fighting Quaker” Attorney General Palmer as being in violation of the Sedition Act, were seized in their homes by government agents in several American cities, and thrown into jail. And, before the enormity of the event could be fully grasped by patriotic Americans, there followed, on 6 January, the arrest of two thousand subversives, in thirty-three cities!

  “That’s odd,” Abraham Licht observed to Gaston Bullock Means, as in the privacy of Means’s office at the Burns Detective Agency, the two men were glancing through newspapers, “—where did Palmer come up with the extra names? I don’t remember there having been more than eight hundred on our list.”

  For a moment Means too looked puzzled, though as he readily confessed he himself had added a few names taken from the telephone directories of such cities as Chicago, Boston and New York (notorious hotbeds of Anarchist and union agitation, owing to their large immigrant populations); then the obvious explanation occurred to him—since the administration took the stand that anyone who protests the arrest of a Red and visits him in jail is naturally a Red himself, the logical step for law enforcement officers is to arrest him or her too, with no delay. “It’s a matter of security,” Means said. “And very practical. For within twenty-four hours our Attorney General has doubled his list of subversives, and it is most impressive, isn’t it? Palmer may well run for President himself. Such headlines! Such publicity!” Means smiled in admiration.

  “Yet—where will it end?” Abraham mused. “For if friends and relatives come to visit these additional people, they’ll be arrested too, and within a few days our jails will be overflowing. A Malthusian predicament!” He tossed down a newspaper and picked up another which displayed on its front page a blurred photograph of a dozen stunned-looking men and one or two women being herded by uniformed police into a van. (One of the men, tall, broad-shouldered, husky, fair-haired, grimacing as a stream of blood ran down his face from a head wound, looked very like . . . but Abraham did not wish to acknowledge My firstborn, my lost son; and so would not think of Thurston who had broken his heart, from whom and of whom he hadn’t heard since that tragic farce in Trenton, New Jersey, long ago. Ridiculous!) Saying, cynically, “Though I suppose there’s no problem: any armory, warehouse or cattle pen could be commandeered.”

  As it turned out, Gaston Bullock Means and “Gordon Jasper Hine” (Abraham’s assigned name) were hardly the only investigators working in strictest confidence on plans for the raids. Yet it seemed to Attorney General Palmer that we two were the most ambitious of the agents, and the most enthusiastic; he commended us in private and apologized for the fact that, due to the secrecy of the Burns connection with the federal government, he and President Wilson couldn’t offer us public citations. “And what will be the fate of the ‘Reds’?” Abraham asked Palmer, out of curiosity, perhaps; and Palmer surprised him by saying with simple gentlemanly frankness, “Of course some of us would like to hang the leaders, like Debs and the Harlem rabble-rouser—hang ’em high for all the world to see. But there are obstacles to that, Mr. Wilson concedes, at least under our present Constitution.”

  AS SPECIAL EMPLOYEES of the Justice Department, Abraham Licht and Gaston Bullock Means had spent months traveling about the country; usually by Pullman car, though sometimes in a chauffeur-driven limousine. They stayed in the finest hotels, dined superbly, yet as it happened they did work hard—for in some cities they were confronted with a scarcity of Reds, and in others, a fertility that seemed doubtful. So, the list for New Orleans had to be improvisationally expanded; the list for Detroit, judiciously edited. Virtually no old-fashioned detection work was required, however, to Abraham Licht’s relief, for as it turned out, his partner was blessed with contacts everywhere—reliable police informers, editors of Republican newspapers, conservative politicians, members of the organized underworld, veterans of the War—who were eager to provide them with names for little payment, or none. “It is impressive isn’t it,” Means more than once exclaimed, “—the degree of voluntary patriotism in America!” So there was never any fear of Means and “Hine” returning to Washington without a bulging caseload of evidence.

  Acting upon whim or perversity or my knowledge that all men were my enemies but particularly Woodrow Wilson and his administration, Abraham Licht began to amuse himself by idly crossing out some names and, like his mentor Means, copying others from the telephone directory. He thought it incumbent in any case to gratify the Attorney General with a few surprises—men with upstanding Anglo-Saxon surnames, members of the Protestant clergy. Who was not after all a traitor to his country in posse?—confronted with the torturer’s rack, for instance; or the right amount of cash.

  WITH THE PASSAGE of months, however, the campaign against the Bolshies widened to include an alarming diversity of citizens. Newspapers were shut down, and their editors charged with sedition; the Justice Department arranged, with a great deal of publicity, to deport two hundred forty-nine immigrant undesirables to Russia; strikers in Chicago, West Virginia, Indiana, and California were beaten and wounded by police; zealous War veterans smashed Socialist offices, and even, out in the State of Washington, lynched and castrated a member of the I.W.W. So it was, both Abraham Licht and Gaston Bullock Means were relieved when the Democrats were thrown out of office, and Harding and his Republican pals from Ohio arrived in a cheerfully disorderly sort of triumph. Farewell to Wilson, and memories of War, and the ill-fated League of Nations! Welcome to Warren Harding and “normalcy”!

  An unprecedented victory for the common man? Abraham Licht was moved rather to amazement than envy; for it was never any secret among Republicans and Democrats alike that Warren Harding had no qualifications for the office of President other than a dauntless bonhomie, and a genuine enthusiasm for speechmaking.

  Yet more important, the new Attorney General was a political hack from Ohio, Harry Daugherty, who’d been Harding’s wily campaign manager. He had none of Palmer’s crusading zeal or patriotic pretensions; he had no ideas at all; he wasn’t cruel, and he wasn’t kind (except to his friends); he slipped into his new office as an undersized man slips into clothes too large for him, yet comfortable nonetheless. To the victors go the spoils.

  At the clamorous inaugural reception in the White House, to which both men w
ere invited, Abraham Licht and Gaston Bullock Means exchanged a glance of recognition after having shaken Daugherty’s hand: “He is one of us.”

  7.

  Yet the Harding years, from 1921 to summer 1923, proved keenly disappointing as I could not have anticipated.

  For Abraham Licht, even as Gordon Jasper Hine, began to feel an aesthetic revulsion for thievery so gross and undisciplined it resembled a “shark feed” in the ocean; or, indeed, hogs grunting about a common trough. Where was the subtlety, the ingenuity, the sport? The Game had become mere plunder! It was true that as Gordon Jasper Hine he made a good deal of money, both from his salary as a government agent (for he and Means were immediately hired full-time by Harry Daugherty) and from various fees, gifts, loans and so forth provided by uneasy citizens who were being investigated by the Bureau, or threatened with that possibility. Like Means, “Hine” was nearly always on expense account, had a chauffeur-driven Packard limousine at his disposal and a suite of six rooms in Chilchester House, K Street (an elegant English-style hotel with high tea in the afternoons, the finest-quality bootleg liquor and handsome brass spittoons). His vanity was flattered that the Harding circle sometimes included him in their boisterous poker evenings, whether upstairs at the White House or at the Little House on H Street, as Daugherty’s residence became known. (Yet how noisy and slapdash the poker evenings were!—Abraham lost nearly as much money as he won, and came away with violent headaches as a consequence of the heavy cigar smoke and the clumsy shouted repartee of Harding and his companions.)