My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  How does he do it, is a question far more commonly asked than why, for the answers are relatively straightforward. Shipwreck makes no secret of his use of a well-cushioned seat tightly strapped to the flagpole ball (the seat is examined beforehand by local authorities, its photograph published in the newspaper); he has trained himself, as he says, to sleep with his thumbs anchored into holes bored into the seat and his ankles firmly clasped about the pole. During his vigil in the air he eats only fluids (broth, milk, fruit juice, and “gallons of black coffee, to keep awake”) hoisted aloft by a pully; his bodily wastes are lowered by way of the same pully, in a discreet tin bucket. (Shipwreck, being a gentleman for all his vanity and clownishness, takes care to relieve himself only at night or when he is reasonably certain that no one is watching.)

  When it rains and storms, even when lightning flashes, why then poor Shipwreck must endure it: for such is the price of his profession, and his coast-to-coast fame. On mild days (like today) he sits bareheaded, softly playing his harmonica (is the tune “Peg o’ My Heart”?—the breeze blows much of it away into the sky), his legs jauntily crossed. Seen through a pair of binoculars (which Millicent has brought along, as much for her own use as her son’s) he appears in high spirits, quite darkly tanned. As he plays the harmonica his eyebrows wriggle and his eyelids droop with a sort of languid pleasure, comically inappropriate to his perch in the sky. Peering through the binoculars’ lenses Millicent realizes she is half awaiting the impossible: that the “luckiest fool alive” will suddenly chance to see her.

  Millicent offers to pay 50¢ so that she and little Maynard might climb to the roof of the Rialto, in a long straggling line of sight-seers, for a closer look at Shipwreck Kelly; but, to her surprise and annoyance, the child refuses to go. “What if the man falls, Momma,” Maynard says, in the hurt whining tone Millicent particularly dislikes, “—what if he falls and hurts himself, I don’t want to see!”

  Millicent says, “He isn’t going to fall, don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t want to see!” the boy whimpers.

  “And even if he fell,” Millicent continues, angry, inspired, “he wouldn’t hurt himself, like you or me. Or Daddy.”

  But little Maynard is clearly frightened and now wants only to be taken home, though, for many days, he begged Millicent to be taken downtown: all his friends had seen the flagpole sitter, only he was left out. Warren had no interest, naturally, in journeying downtown on so supremely childish an outing (he has to conserve his strength, in any case); and six-year-old Betsey’s nerves are such, her mother would never consider bringing her along. (“She’s too much like myself,” Millicent thinks uneasily. “‘Myself,’—at that frightening age.”)

  So the little excursion on a mid-May afternoon comes to an abrupt end. Millicent is rather bored, herself. Around her on the sidewalk, necks craned, eyes shielded from the sun, a number of men and women stand peering at Shipwreck Kelly so prodigiously high above them, waving frantically, shaking little flags and banners, calling out loud cheery greetings (“How’s it goin’, Shipwreck!” “How’s the weather up there!” “You ain’t goin to fall, are you!”), and laughing with an edgy, pointless gaiety, for after all Shipwreck might slip to his death virtually at any moment . . . he might, the wind being right, fall at their very feet.

  Millicent leads the trembling little boy away without a backward glance. Flagpole sitting is after all a lowlife activity, to put it mildly; as Warren warned, she’d likely run into white trash, mainly, if she took their boy to see it.

  Still, the daring!—the foolish bravado!

  So mad a display of self-esteem!

  So reckless a Game, played out in the very sky!

  AND WILL I come to him, humble myself before him? I will not, I dare not, I am a wife and a mother . . . a white woman.

  That night her sleep is agitated; she dreams not once, but repeatedly, shamelessly, of her lost lover; waking with the decision that, yes, she will arrange to travel to New York, and soon; she will, at last, after these many years, arrange to meet with ’Lisha whom she still loves. (“For there is only one first love. As, they say, there is but one first death.”)

  This decision made, Millicent feels enormous relief. As, they say, the decision to die can release long-withheld sensations of joy.

  2.

  Beautiful Millicent Stirling breaks hearts, but can it be her fault?—she doesn’t force men and women, even an occasional mooncalf college boy, to adore her, or even to take her seriously. As there is no Game there must be numberless games, of varying degrees of intensity, for golf and tennis and mahjong and bridge and dancing and amateur theatrics and light opera cannot absorb all of Mrs. Warren Stirling’s nervous energy . . . any more than being a wife to an ailing aging husband, and a mother to two beautiful children, and the mistress of a splendid house overlooking the Richmond Country Club golf course can absorb the ferocity of her concentration.

  By now Millicent Stirling has acquired detractors amid the “youngish older” country club set to which she and Warren belong, disillusioned admirers primarily, and of course those (all women) who are jealous of her conquests: yet detractors as well as friends commonly report themselves dazzled by her . . . even perplexed by her . . . for how has she time, let alone the physical strength, to do all the things she does, and to do them, for the most part, so well? Acting, and singing, and even a bit of spirited dancing in such productions of the Richmond Players as A Trip to Chinatown, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Sunshine Girl, Watch Your Step, The Mikado; chairwoman of committees of the Women’s Auxilary of Grace Episcopal Church, the Friends of the Richmond City Orchestra; the local branch of the Virginia Historical Society; one of the most popular hostesses in the city; and a highly competitive, if somewhat temperamental and uneven, player of bridge and mahjong. Depending upon her mood Millicent Stirling is even rather good at golf, for a woman who seems to have come late to the game.

  And how striking a vision on the club’s tennis courts, in her stylish white costume with the short pleated skirt, her hair tied back by a vivid red scarf—though the ferocity with which she plays, the way she slams the ball out of bounds or into the net or directly at a startled opponent has cost her friends.

  “Darling, it’s only a game,” Warren says, concerned that she becomes so emotional so easily. “Why be upset?” And Millicent says calmly, with her sweetest smile, “Because it is only a game, and not worth the effort I give it.”

  THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD . . . thirty-five . . . at last an unimagined thirty-eight. And I, Father’s fairy-daughter. Destined for what prince? Millie must concede with a shrug that she’s no longer the youngest, prettiest and most fashionable woman in any gathering; she’s the mother of two growing children; the wife of a good, decent, distinctly middle-aged (and aging) man whom she loves . . . or in any case respects. “Warren is so much better than I deserve,” she thinks, almost bitterly. “To give him up would be a mistake. And yet . . . ”

  Never once has Millicent Stirling succumbed to one of her romantic friendships or allowed herself to be persuaded by a passionate admirer that they should consummate their love, let alone elope together. In this giddy Jazz Age in which it suddenly seems everyone is getting divorced (from “Peaches” and Daddy Browning of the tabloids to millionaire Rockefellers and McCormicks), Millicent Stirling is terrified of the very thought of divorce . . . though it’s an open secret in the social circle to which she and Warren belong that she’s bored with him. (Since Betsey’s birth six years ago the Stirlings have slept in separate bedrooms and Millicent quite enjoys her independence as a virginal wife. Certainly, Mrs. Stirling isn’t the only virginal wife in Richmond.) Her challenge is simply to keep Warren believing that she loves him as he loves her . . . she adores him as he adores her . . . no matter that by degrees their marriage has become increasingly formal. Seeing him sometimes gazing at me with that look of boyish yearning seeing in me another person a young girl perhaps, a stranger. And Millicent envies her husband for to love is s
o much more joyous than to be loved.

  Thinking then, indifferently, “But what does it matter? I’m sure love is only a species of game, in any case.”

  (But has Elisha ever married? Millie thinks not. She subscribes to New York papers where she reads greedily of Prince Elihu and never once has his name been linked with that of any woman.)

  3.

  Thirty-eight years old. Yet in her innermost heart no more than seventeen.

  When first he’d dared touch her not as a brother but as a lover.

  Not this anxious woman with the skin so thin, dry, bleached of healthy color; white creases by her mouth; hollows beneath her eyes; a woman who must labor now at beauty where once she scarcely played and who has become cautious, this past year, of which of the household mirrors she looks into.

  Would he recognize me now? Love me . . . now?

  Of course. He has promised!

  He would die for me he said.

  The Game! What pleasure in it, if there’s no one with whom to share the smallest victory?

  Millicent Stirling has become an artist of the lie-not-precisely-a-lie. You might call it “inventing”—“romancing.” With wide-eyed innocence she concocts misunderstandings among her friends and admirers, her Stirling relatives, the members of her Episcopal congregation (in which Warren is a much-respected deacon) and even her household . . . her staff of devoted Negro servants. Discreetly not blaming Tabitha for something that Roslene has done; expressing hurt that Rodwell has failed to complete a task as he’d seemed to promise, or had it been Jebb who’d promised; or had they all promised their elegant Mrs. Stirling and had they all disappointed her? It stirs her icy heart to hear a Negro woman sob for a Negro woman knows how to sob; to hear a Negro man curse, imagining no white folks near, for a Negro man knows how to curse. On a whim, she “lets go” one of the girls; on a whim, she hires her back the following Monday. She’s sharp-eyed noting which of the women is gaining weight in the hips and breasts . . . which of the men is swaggering, the sexual glisten in his face and his body so alive she feels faint that she might accidentally brush against him . . . how easy that would be! And irrevocable.

  Yet knowing, to the black servants she’s merely the white lady. She’s Mr. Stirling’s wife. Even if she fires them and breaks their hearts their hearts will quickly mend, they will be hired elsewhere by another white lady. Sometimes she imagines she’s the only white person in Richmond to know a secret: that the many Negroes in their midst are not in fact “Negro” but . . . what?

  FATHER SAYS OUR skins are neither white nor black.

  As “white” and “black” are ignorantly understood.

  Father says we stand outside the “white” race . . . and the “black.” For all men are our enemies.

  Yet it’s Elisha’s dark skin she loves, she cannot help loving, for Elisha’s skin is Elisha; as his brown eyes are him, his lanky restless body, his long slender fingers and toes. She’d kissed the inside of his hands: so pale! pale as her own skin! They’d laughed at such markings. For in young love, there’s much laughter.

  In these fever dreams of her thirty-ninth year Millie is herself yet subtly altered. Naked, and sprawled in a stranger’s bed. In a sexual delirium as her lover comes to her, hot-dark-skinned, more forceful and blunt than he’d been in Muirkirk. There, he’d been a shy, trembling, reckless lover; here, he’s impatient. ’Lisha? she whispers, ’Lisha? she begs but the mouth is hard and greedy against hers, sucking her breath away. The act of love is swift, impersonal. Her arms close desperately about him, her face is buried against his neck, for this time she must not lose him, she must not surrender him; waking in shuddering, voluptuous waves of sensation, sobbing, frightened. For long minutes she lies exhausted unable to grasp where she is—what room is this, so prettily decorated? smelling of fresh-cut flowers, and her own sweet perfume?

  “Why do you hurt me, ’Lisha? When you know that I have never stopped loving you. And if you are ‘black’—and if I am ‘white’—what is that to us? What is Father’s curse to us?”

  4.

  Since the Philadelphia days as St. Goar’s beautiful, mysterious daughter, Millie has been aware of the career of Prince Elihu, the radical Negro revolutionary of whom it was predicted he wouldn’t live for more than a year—how many years ago. Her father refused to discuss Prince Elihu with her, as he’d refused to discuss poor Thurston, but Millie hadn’t needed Abraham Licht to confirm what was clear to her through studying newspaper and magazine photographs minutely. “There couldn’t be two young men like ’Lisha. So like ’Lisha. Impossible!”

  And what of this teaching of his, that the entire white race is damned and only the colored races of the world will be redeemed?

  Millie believes it an artful variation of Father’s grand scheme: the Society for the Reclamation & Restoration of E. Auguste Napoléon Bonaparte. Here, the scheme is the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, boasting more than one hundred thousand members, whose plan it is to emigrate back to Africa by the year 1935. Elisha can’t be serious, it must be a scheme. A brilliant game, though dangerous.

  Yet it seems that many people, white as well as Negro, do take Prince Elihu seriously, whether as a savior or a madman; or a traitor to his country. Millie had read with astonishment of how Prince Elihu voluntarily returned from Central America to surrender to federal authorities in San Francisco, to answer to absurd charges of “wartime sedition” and to receive a harsh sentence of twelve years in prison with no possibility, as Attorney General Palmer insisted, of parole. (Though in fact President Harding pardoned Elihu anyway—to the consternation of Millie’s Stirling in-laws who are, like most Richmond whites, genteel Christian racists.)

  How could this be? Millie wondered. Had ’Lisha failed to heed Father’s admonition not to be seduced by The Game?

  Millie has long worried that something may have happened to ’Lisha in the intervening years. A blow to the head, severe illnesses . . . (She’d read, greatly upset, of his three-month tour of Africa during which time he’d been dangerously ill.) For it’s impossible to comprehend how the ’Lisha she knew so intimately, closer than any brother, could believe such cruel nonsense—that Caucasians are fallen, diseased and doomed; but a degenerate subspecies of the original Homo sapiens who were Negro. Quite apart from the doubtful science of this belief, which Millie has seen refuted in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, it’s a fact, isn’t it, that Millie, whom ’Lisha had vowed to love forever, is white? “How can he then believe that ‘whites’ are inferior to ‘blacks’? In love, we were equal. He knows that.”

  Going squirrelly is one of the colorful catchphrases of this colorful era, prevalent in popular songs, comic strips and jokes. Millie laughs, to think that going squirrelly may be à la mode, and Prince Elihu is riding the crest of the mode. The more absurd the lie, the more easily it might be believed.

  “But I would be more desirable to him,” she tells herself, “than any Negro woman, as I am white.”

  Yet: would Millie leave her children behind? Yes she would leave them if ’Lisha insists. Or—might she bring them along? “If we eloped to Europe, for instance. He is said to be a wealthy man, and I have saved money of my own. The children could come . . . if they wished. For a while.” She paces through the upstairs of the gracious old house plotting, rehearsing. What she will say to Warren. What she will say to ’Lisha. What she will say to her children.

  Yes she will go to New York. But no—“Ridiculous! I would not drive across Richmond to throw myself at any man’s feet.”

  Then one morning in early summer idly skimming the Richmond Sunday paper, the decision is made for her as if she’d rolled dice: on page 2 there is an article headlined HARLEM LEADER ELIHU TO SPEAK AT RALLY, and on page 19 there is an article headlined MIAMI EVANGELIST PLEDGES MILLION-DOLLAR MINISTRY. Millie reads these seemingly unrelated articles in tandem, with mounting excitement. The first reports that Prince Elihu will preside over the First Annual Universal Negro Confraternity Rally
in Madison Square Garden, Manhattan, on 19 June 1929; over one hundred thousand participants are expected. The second reports that Reverend Thurmond Blichtman of the New Church of the Nazarene, Miami, Florida, has received more than $1 million in donations as a result of an intensive tour through Florida earlier in the year, and that he’d had a vision from God of exactly the church he would cause to be built on a “sacred piece of property” on Biscayne Boulevard overlooking the bay. The focus of the slightly scandalous article is Reverend Blichtman’s newly emergent fame, or notoriety, in Florida; evidently the man is a mesmerizing preacher who recites the Gospels in an impassioned voice that provokes men and women to break down in tears and rush forward to be “saved.” Rival preachers and ministers complain bitterly that this “Northern carpet-bagger” has been stealing their congregations from them—“That man knows no shame,” a Baptist leader has charged. A prominent Methodist minister has accused Blichtman of “satanic powers of seduction.” Blichtman refuses to reply to his critics except to say he prays for them; in the meantime he’s amassed an undisclosed amount of money from donations for the construction of a New Church of the Nazarene in Miami. Millie is initially drawn to the article by the accompanying photograph of a strongly built man of middle age, fair-haired, handsome, with something damaged about his face. He’s kneeling on the ground, hands clasped at midchest in prayer. Thurston! Millie thinks.

  Peering through the magnifying glass Warren uses for close reading, she studies the grainy photo, breathless with excitement. Reverend Thurmond Blichtman. New Church of the Nazarene. My lost brother. Can it be?