My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “There it is! Just the thing!”

  He had always intended to try his hand at medicine: at healing.

  ALSO, ABRAHAM COULDN’T shake off a feeling of having been contaminated by his many months in Washington, amid that carnival recklessness, and things-spinning-out-of-control; and daily contact with such crude persons as Harry Daugherty, Jess Smith and Gaston Bullock Means.

  In the end, in fact, Abraham had become frightened of his partner, who brandished his pistol too freely, and boasted, when drunk, or high on cocaine, of his ingenious plan to make a million dollars in a single deal (by quashing an indictment pending against U.S. Steel, perhaps); and to take Jess Smith’s favored position with the administration.

  “But how will you do that?” Abraham Licht asked uneasily. “No one is closer than Smith and Daugherty: you would have to kill Smith, I am afraid, to get rid of him.”

  Means sucked energetically at his cigar; and, pretending their conversation might be overheard, he winked, and said, in a voice heavy with innuendo, “Oh as to that—however might that be managed!” even as, with a crude swipe of his elbow, he indicated the gun strapped about his spreading middle.

  Abraham had reason to believe it was Means himself who’d sent death threats to the White House months before with the idea that, should the President request extraordinary security, he might be singled out for the task. But nothing had come of it; Harding had not taken the threats seriously, or had not cared a great deal about dying.

  (Abraham himself had been issued a Police Service revolver, and a smart leather shoulder holster in which to carry it; but his gentlemanly scruples were such, he really couldn’t bring himself to strap the foolish thing on. The revolver he kept locked in his desk at the Bureau, where it remained when he left in June of 1923.)

  AS IT HAPPENED, a few weeks following Means’s conversation with Abraham Licht, Jess Smith was found dead in his apartment, an apparent suicide: clad in pajamas and dressing gown, a bullet through his head, and a revolver on the floor close by his person. (Which revolver was to disappear during the police investigation.)

  Anxiously, with sweat beading his face, Means assured Abraham Licht that Smith’s death was but a coincidence—one of those odd, queer, fantastical things that seemed to be happening all the time now, in Washington—and that he had not a thing to do with it. “No more than Harry Daugherty himself,” as he said, with a ghastly grinning stare.

  At which Abraham Licht winced, and made no reply.

  And, within a week, resigned his position at the Bureau as the industrious “Gordon Jasper Hine,” fleeing the nation’s capital forever.

  10.

  Venus Aphrodite!—pray for me.

  For where Abraham Licht loves, he must be loved in return: where he would surrender his soul, he must be granted a soul in return: otherwise The Game is wicked indeed.

  And he will not be cheated again: not another time!

  And though his manly prowess has been restored to him he can’t deny that the years are flying by quickly now, and that, if he wants another son, or even another daughter, to continue his name, it must happen soon.

  Venus Aphrodite!—have mercy.

  IT IS KNOWN that one’s Wish guides one’s Destiny yet the patients at the Parris Clinic don’t always thrive: which is an embarrassment indeed, and necessitates a good deal of hurrying about, and telephone calls made, and tidying up.

  (Though it has become the usual procedure now, that, when a patient passes away, the body is kept in a sort of quarantine until after dark; at which time a special band of attendants, who can be trusted to keep their work confidential, loads it into a van and carries it to the county morgue twenty miles away, where, in the morning, the coroner—hardly a stranger to the Parris Clinic’s routine, by this time—makes a discreet examination; signs the death certificate; and releases the body for delivery to a nearby funeral home. Beyond this, matters pertaining to the body’s disposal rest with relatives of the deceased, though Doctors Bies and Liebknecht continue to be helpful, up to a point.)

  Patients don’t always thrive but business thrives: no doubt it has to do with the fact that prosperity, in 1926, is at an all-time high; yet will rise, and rise, and rise!—as a variation (as philosophers of the economy have speculated) of the Law of Evolution.

  Business thrives; and also disease.

  But Abraham Licht has become restless yet another time, for, despite the fact that the Clinic is making a fair amount of money, and his experimental investments in the stock market (in the most conservative of commodities) have yielded a healthy return, he finds that he can’t bear the company of “Felix Bies” (if indeed that is the man’s name); and, since he has fallen in love with Rosamund, he begins to think that he must leave . . . he must leave, and begin another life.

  For he quarrels too frequently with the charlatan Bies, whom he can no longer respect. Only a few years ago the man had struck him as clever, even rather brilliant in some of his notions; now alcohol has rotted his brain, and he has become as slovenly in his reasoning as in his person.

  For what does it profit a man to excel at The Game, when his heart is no longer in it; when, indeed, his heart shrinks in revulsion from all that lies about him?

  Venus Aphrodite, he thinks, excited as a young swain, and, like a young swain, confident that he will win his beloved—pray for me.

  11.

  And now. This dreamy autumnal morning. The enthralled lover Moses Liebknecht sees the woman standing as in a trance on the grassy shore of the pond; her eyes shut, her beautiful face framed by untidy blackly gleaming hair to her shoulders. She is wearing a gray smock of the kind women patients wear to their hydrotherapy sessions; her legs are bare, and very white; and her feet.

  Why has the woman led him here, out of sight of the Clinic?

  Why has the woman led him here, where no one but he, her lover, observes?

  As she steps into the pond he feels a quickening in his soul, as in his groin; he calls out her name, gently yet forcibly—“Rosamund!”—to awaken her, that she will at last surrender to the authority of his love.

  As she will, and does.

  For which Venus Aphrodite be praised.

  “THE LOST VILLAGE”

  1.

  A balmy evening in May 1928, and at Carnegie Recital Hall on Fifty-seventh Street, Manhattan, a small group of musicians and several singers, men and women in their twenties and looking very young, are presenting to a gathering of less than one hundred puzzled individuals a strange composition by the young composer Darian Licht—who happens also, with odd contortions and lurches of his lanky body, to be conducting. The title of the work is Esopus, the Lost Village. The printed program describes it as a “tone poem with variations” but to the trained and untrained ear alike it appears to consist of a bewildering number of movements—stops and starts, really—and a bewildering number of tempos, one or two of which frequently detach themselves from the predominant tempo and in the form of a flute, oboe, or soprano voice, or what sounds like (in fact is, as the program notes confirm) the grating of pebbles in a wooden box, veers off in a direction rhythmically and totally unpremeditated. How is it possible, a piece of music in which performers drift off into reverie-like solos, independent of the others?—so that the effect is one of random sound, or noise; to which at intervals the audience’s responses (restless coughing and murmuring, stifled laughter, expressions of incredulity, distaste and even anger) contribute yet another layer, or layers, of distraction?

  This, the boastful “world premiere” of a work by an instructor at the Westheath School of Music, Schenectady, New York: chimes; sighs and explosions; a hint of church bells; the intrusion of a too-hearty march as it might have been played, circa 1880, by a marching band; an intonation of water? rain? flood? deluge? so faint it can scarcely be heard; an abrupt caterwauling of a trombone, a clarinet and a single old-fashioned E-flat cornet; a hint of piety (an allusion to “Gott, der Herr, ist Sonn’ und Schild”) countered by t
he rattling of the box of pebbles; a suddenly beautiful, but short-lived Kyrie from the singers—three young women and two young men who, as they sing, stare out bravely beyond the audience. A beat, two beats; an instrument that appears to be a long-necked glass beaker of the kind used in chemistry laboratories is earnestly blown into by the trombonist: it produces a queer high-pitched cooing, both eerily beautiful and comical, that arouses muffled hilarity in the audience; another beat, and an intonation again of wind, rustling grasses, muffled voices; and, abruptly, silence.

  Silence! The most difficult music of all.

  Conductor and performers freeze, like sculpted works. As the silence in the recital hall is too silent . . . apart from murmurings and rustlings and the commotion of patrons rising from their seats to slip, or to stalk, out . . . forcing one to listen to silence and how arduous silence is, how fraught with terror if one isn’t accustomed to it. So earnest, so strained, so dazed and yet hopeful are the faces of the youthful performers and the conductor-composer Darian Licht, it seems evident that Esopus, the Lost Village is not meant to be a parody or a comical work, but a serious composition.

  Sympathetic well-wishers, very likely relatives and friends of the performers, begin to clap, tentatively—for surely the piece is over?—but conductor and performers remain frozen for several further beats, and then, with remarkable aplomb considering the mood of the audience, the young Licht, face covered in a film of perspiration, longish hair damply straggling into his eyes, gives a swipe of his baton and the musicians begin again: brazenly, it would seem, in the slipping, sliding, dissonant tone that marked the opening of the piece; yet reversed, or upside down, so that the melodic lines emerge as if glimpsed in a mirror or in the broken, rippled surface of a body of water.

  2.

  “What trash!”

  “How dare he!”

  “Who is this—‘Darian Licht’! And the ‘Westheath Ensemble’!”

  “Under the patronage of—can it be Joseph Frick’s wife?”

  “How dare they! Any of them!”

  Harsh angry laughter. Rude mutterings. A woman complained to a companion that the music “stung her ears.” Another patron, an elderly gentleman, spoke of being “nauseated.” By the end of the forty-five-minute composition entire rows had emptied out, though disgruntled patrons remained in the foyer wanting to share derisive opinions. There had been only polite, scattered applause; a few hisses and boos; overall, a nasty combative mood from which Darian Licht’s musical companions wished to shield him, even as they hurriedly left the stage themselves. But Darian, hurt, puzzled and beginning to be angry, stood at the edge of the stage, baton in hand, hair in his face, gazing past the lights. A man’s voice rose from the rear, “You ought to be ashamed! Desecrating music!” and Darian Licht said, stammering, “I—I should not be ashamed—you should be. You haven’t listened, and you haven’t heard. You—” Other voices rose in a kind of chorus, both male and female protesting they had heard, they’d heard more than they wanted, this was a desecration of music, hurtful and hateful to the ear; and Darian Licht protested in turn, “Why should I compose music that’s already been composed? Why do you want to hear again, and again, and yet again, only what you’ve already heard? Always Mozart, and Beethoven, and—” but they shouted him down, “D’you think you’re superior to Mozart? Beethoven? You? What a joke!”

  So it ended, the premiere of Esopus, the Lost Village: the début of Darian Licht, composer, at Carnegie Recital Hall, 23 May 1928.

  EXCEPT THERE REMAINED, after most of the audience had gone away, a tall fair-haired man of youthful middle age, with an equally tall, though starkly black-haired female companion, who applauded loudly in the silence of the now lighted hall. “Such strange music! Like nothing I’ve ever heard. Yet, y’know—I know so little of music—it seemed to me the very voice of Our Lord—so unpredictable, I mean.” This individual spoke so genially, in so frank and somehow tender a voice, Darian Licht stared at him in wonder. For wasn’t that voice familiar, and . . . that face?

  “Thurston?”

  “Darian!”

  Darian hurried down from the stage, and the tall fair-haired man came to embrace him heartily, as his companion, unmoving at the rear of the hall, looked on in silence.

  Darian stammered, “But—Thurston? Is it you? You’re—here?”

  “In truth I’m not ‘Thurston’—he’s been dead and gone since 1910. And I’m not truly here, in Manhattan I mean; Sister Beulah Rose and I are bound for Florida, and have not really time to linger. Yet I wanted to see you, brother; and to shake your hand, and bless you; for, being your father’s son, as I am, you will need the blessing of the Lord—the true Lord.”

  Much of this was lost on Darian, who stared at his brother, and at his brother’s face, in shock that he was so altered. Not so much time had altered Thurston, it seemed, as some violent act: his broad, open, still-handsome face looked as if it had been broken vertically from the left temple to the jaw, and healed only partially. His eyes were unevenly aligned and his bristly eyebrows were scarred like lace. His once-blond hair shone an eerie metallic silver and his asymmetrical smile showed broken teeth. Yet he continued to smile as he spoke, introducing himself as “Reverend Thurmond Blichtman of the New Church of the Nazarene” and shaking Darian’s hand so firmly, Darian feared his bones would crack. This was Thurston; yet not-Thurston; a youthful, vigorous, ebullient individual in cheaply smart clothes, whose entire being seemed to radiate a yearning to love and to be loved that was nearly overpowering. Yet, all the while, at the rear of the hall in the aisle stood the tall, Amazonian woman, with a face blunt and impassive as a trowel and eyes inexpressive as stones. “Sister Beulah Rose”—such stark, lustreless black hair, in a braid down her back, Darian was reminded of those Iroquois Indians who’d recently taken residence, under government coercion, on a reservation not far from Schenectady, in the rocky foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. Not a single word would Sister Beulah Rose utter, yet you could tell she had her own thoughts and passed her own judgment.

  No sooner had Thurston, that’s to say Reverend Blichtman, introduced himself to his astonished brother than he was explaining how he must leave, for there was an urgent ministry awaiting him in Miami, Florida—“Not in material form yet but in a vision. Sister Beulah Rose and I have had the identical dazzling vision, of a pink-stucco church with strange, striking roofs, a kind of undersea green; so we must make our pilgrimage southward, to realize it.” Already Thurston was striding up the aisle, and Darian hurried to accompany him. “But, Thurston—so soon? This is terrible! Can’t you—” In alarm Thurston smiled, pressed a forefinger against his lips, and with a gesture of his head indicating that Sister Beulah Rose didn’t perhaps know of “Thurston Licht” and should not know. “—‘Thur-mond,’” Darian said quickly, clutching at his brother’s elbow, “—can’t you stay for an hour? We have so much to learn from each other.” “Ah, I wish! I wish that was possible,” Thurston, or Thurmond, said with a look of pain. “You are—a music instructor? In Schenectady? Not married, I believe? And estranged, Millie has told me, from Father?—like others of us.” But already Darian’s eldest brother was detaching himself from Darian, as his silent, impassive female companion fell into step with him exiting the hall. Like the Reverend Blichtman, Sister Beulah Rose wore cheaply stylish, attractive clothes, loose-fitting trousers and a man’s jacket in a vivid fawn color; both wore white shirts open at the collar, workingman-style. Darian noted that both wore sleek, shiny black-polished boots of simulated leather. Ignoring Darian, Sister Beulah Rose shivered as a horse shivers, in anticipation of open spaces; clearly, she yearned to be gone from the airless recital hall. Her companion glanced smilingly at her and told her she might run ahead and fetch the truck and bring it around. Without a word, nor certainly a farewell glance at Darian, the handsome woman strode off and was gone. “Is she—‘Sister Beulah Rose’—your wife, Thurston? I mean—Thurmond?” Darian asked, and Thurston laughed and said, “Sister Beu
lah Rose is her own woman, and not any man’s.” Out on Fifty-seventh Street, where traffic was passing in a continuous stream, Thurston said, “Darian, farewell. Though I no more understand music than an ox, like any Christian I thrill to ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord’ and am happy that, in your own way, you have done so.” Like an anxious puppy, his face still gleaming with perspiration after the ordeal of his début, Darian followed his brother along the sidewalk, in the direction of Seventh Avenue. He stammered, “But, Thurston—Thurmond?—you are a minister? You are ordained? ‘The New Church of the Nazarene’—has it any connection to the church in Muirkirk?” His brother said, as if these words gave him pain, “Brother, I do believe! I believe in the truth of the Gospels as preserved for us in the Bible. I believe that Jesus Christ is my savior and the savior of mankind. Surely He saved me from death—not once but numerous times. And yet—” He was striding along the crowded sidewalk, crossing the wide, windy avenue as Darian hurried to keep up. “—and yet, Darian, at the same time I stand detached from my belief like a man observing his own hanging and I wonder if it isn’t as unlikely and ridiculous as any superstitious nonsense. Like the Fiji Islanders who worship their own ugly man-eating gods or the Eskimos—God knows!—a polar bear.” Thurston, or Thurmond, laughed suddenly and harshly.

  Darian shivered, staring at his brother’s handsome ruin of a face. That laughter so like mine, inhabiting my own heart.

  By this time an open-backed truck the size of a hay wagon, in poor repair but painted a luridly bright green, had made its rattling way along Fifty-seventh Street and was idling close by at the curb. Well-dressed pedestrians glanced at it, smiling, and at the tall figure of ambiguous sex behind the wheel. Preparing to climb into the truck, Reverend Blichtman hugged Darian with such zestful affection Darian winced, fearful his ribs had cracked. “Don’t let narrow-minded fools dictate to you how you should feel about your own music,” the elder man said passionately, “—so long as you know your vision, Darian, that will suffice. All is ordained for us—‘As above, so below.’ If you are a musical genius—or if you are not—who among mere earthly ears can judge? God be with you, brother; and may Jesus Christ dwell forever in your heart.” With these words, Reverend Blichtman, beaming, swung his large body up into the cab of the truck, managed to shut the door after two attempts, and raised his hand through the opened window in farewell. His lips quivered as if on the verge of a wide, maniacal grin (for perhaps Reverend Blichtman’s parting words echoed dubiously in his own ears) that was the final vision Darian had of his long-lost eldest brother, as, running after the truck for a half block, drawing the attention of pedestrians, he shouted, “Good-bye! Good-bye!” and frantically waved.