My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And if he doesn’t live to fulfill the task, then Melanie, blood of his blood, spirit of spirit, must take over.

  An ambitious project, a major work of economic theory. Yet there are others.

  For his brain is buzzing these days, and these nights, with ideas.

  While his young wife sleeps a thin, disturbed sleep in the next room. A door locked between them, for all in this room is secret as he’s tried to explain to her. Abraham Licht seated at his noble ruin of a rolltop desk calculating the return he’d realized by 1935 if he invests $12,000 in the Paie-des-Sables cider mill (for though Prohibition has been repealed there’s still a fortune to be made in such enterprises provided shipping and distribution are in one’s own control, and not that of organized crime) compared with the return he might realize if he invests in the beautiful derelict Manitowick ranch. And of course, there’s Liebknecht’s Formula which is perhaps the most promising of the ventures provided the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t throw up obstacles. (For America has changed so much since the days of Abraham Licht’s boyhood and youth, how many decades ago, such a grid now of absurd confining punitive laws, regulations, “standards,” requirements!) Abraham calculates too the amount of money at 3 percent interest since 1 November 1929 owed him by his enemies Whitney, Mitchell, Rockefeller, Morgan, et al. and drafts letters, petitions, briefs in which he sets forth his claims as succinctly and irrefutably as possible.

  Copies of these, he will very likely send off to J. Edgar Hoover as well. “The man will remember me, I hope. I will sign myself ‘Abraham Licht, formerly Hine.’”

  Control, control and yet again control. For otherwise we are but beasts of the field.

  THROUGH THE RAINY spring and into the abruptly hot, damp and insect-ridden days of summer Abraham Licht, sleepless much of the night, is aware of Katrina hovering close by. That woman the villagers whispered was his mother yet who was not his mother yet plagues him from the grave behaving as if she is.

  “Woman, let me be! Mercy, please.”

  He’d been stunned, and deeply mortified, to bring his beautiful young bride and their year-old daughter to such a place. From their elegant residence on Fifth Avenue to this shabby domicile in Muirkirk at the edge of a marsh; this building part church and part house out of whose rotted raingutters foot-high saplings and lichen were growing. Inside, the ceilings were splotched with raindrops like tears and the floors were tilted as if, close beneath, rocks and wild vegetations were pushing up. “My darling, this will be only temporary,” Abraham promised Rosamund; and Rosamund said, with a surprising, robust laugh, “Why, Abraham—all life is temporary. Let’s be happy while we can.” As at the Parris Clinic she’d been most resilient when at her most despairing.

  In the midst of his calculations Abraham pauses, hearing a screeching close outside the window; the flutter of feathery wings; he catches a glimpse of red-glaring eyes, a sharp beak, scaly legs and talons . . . .Perhaps he’s been asleep: he forces his eyes open wider, thrashes his stiffened legs and to his chagrin wakes the woman sleeping beside him; for he isn’t at his rolltop desk (is he?) but in the big old brass bed; one of his wives (but which wife?) startled beside him. “Abraham? What is it? You’ve been having a nightmare.” There’s a child fretting in a crib, kicking at its blanket. Which child this is, his firstborn Thurston, or tough little Harwood, or angel-Millie, or . . . is it Darian? Esther? the newest, youngest baby whose name he’s never been told? Why, Abraham. All life is temporary. You must have known.

  “DO I ‘MIND,’ Father? Of course not. A little manual work is good for me, I think.”

  Darian, the breadwinner of the Licht family. With his scattering of jobs in Muirkirk and vicinity: he isn’t just choirmaster of the Lutheran church, piano instructor to a dozen talentless pupils, substitute teacher at the high school, he’s a seasonal employee at the canning factory and, on weekends in summer, an orchard picker. Bronze-tanned and his fair hair bleached in streaks by the sun, his eyes light in his genial face; this tall lanky son who’d once been so anxious and uncertain, Abraham had gazed upon him with annoyed pity.

  Darian, Rosamund and little Melanie laughing together in the kitchen. Fooling with one of Darian’s absurd musical instruments. Falling silent as Abraham pushes into the room, their eyes glancing guiltily in his direction.

  “An unusual position for me. Bringing no income into my household.”

  Darian even pays for the gasoline in Abraham’s 1927 Packard touring car which, fortunately, Abraham doesn’t drive very often any longer. There’s an ominous rattling in the engine and he’s fearful of being marooned somewhere in the countryside miles from home.

  Darian himself walks into town, or rides his bicycle. He and Rosamund on bicycles speeding like truant schoolchildren along the Muirkirk Pike.

  Moreover, Abraham is fast losing patience with Darian’s musical compositions. His ridiculous experiments. That clanging, plucking, thumping, ka-booming in the young man’s so-called studio. (Which addition Darian built himself with unfinished pieces of lumber, strips of insulation and beaverboard nailed in panels in front of which he’d cleverly hung the most attractive curtains, drapes and tapestries out of Abraham’s store of “antiques.” The roof is a mad amalgam of lumber, hammered tin and pieces of slate—“Almost one hundred percent waterproof,” Darian boasts.) Abraham complains to Rosamund of how, when Darian was a young child, his health—“His heart condition”—ruled out a career as a musical prodigy; he’d had the talent, but talent alone isn’t enough. Now when money is needed so badly for Abraham to purchase the cider mill, or the horse ranch, or equipment to manufacture Liebknecht’s Formula, it’s maddening that Darian squanders his time writing music no one will ever hear let alone applaud or pay for. “If Darian wants to squander his time,” Rosamund says, “—surely it’s his time to squander.”

  Abraham tries to reason with Darian. Pointing out that there’s a fortune to be made in popular song writing. “Why can’t you apply your skill to writing tunes like ‘Home Sweet Home,’ ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ ‘Look for the Silver Lining’? Even today when no one has any money people will buy sheet music; hundreds of thousands of people with simple, childlike tastes. The more inane and repetitive the ditties—‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ for instance—‘Tea for Two’—‘My Blue Heaven’—the more popular. Why can’t you, Darian, my son, compose songs as catchy and idiotic as these?” To which Darian coolly replies, “My idiocy isn’t of the moneymaking sort, Father.” Worse yet, Darian is continually inventing musical instruments: the “icicle”; “glass-winds” of old bottles, goblets, Venetian wineglasses; a thirty-string lyre that sounds like a cat in heat; a woodblock marimba with bamboo resonators; various sorts of drums and percussive instruments; a miniature violin; an “echo-chamber” piano; and a quarter-tone piano . . . so that, as Darian has excitedly explained, he can play microtones and actually hear the music he’s been composing for the forty-three-interval scale. (“And you’ll be the only person who will hear it, probably,” Abraham remarked.)

  Rosamund warns he’ll be driving Darian away from Muirkirk if he isn’t careful. Abraham says hotly the fool is his son, to drive away if he pleases.

  5.

  Gradually it comes to light that someone is spying on Abraham Licht.

  His enemies, the Wall Street manipulators. That’s to say the professional agents, very likely Pinkerton’s detectives, in their employ.

  Footprints are discovered one morning in the rain-softened earth close by the rear of the house. And strangers’ voices, murmurous, derisive, are frequently heard in the distance, borne by the caprices of the wind. One night Abraham is astonished to discover that his cosmological notations are missing; there’s a hairline crack in the lens of his telescope. Another night he’s terrified by a ghostly face at the bedroom window as Rosamund in her nightgown is turning down the bed; which hellish vision vanishes when Abraham shouts and throws one of his shoes through the window.

  Another night, in
the humid heat of midsummer, as Abraham, Rosamund and Darian are sitting at dinner, with Melanie in her baby chair, there’s a crackling noise outside as if someone or something is crashing through the underbrush. “That is not Katrina,” Abraham says ominously, chewing his food. “That is a stranger.”

  In his journal (kept locked in his rolltop desk) Abraham notes in a steady hand I have scorch’d the snake not killed it. Though he can’t comprehend how Rockefeller, Mellon, Morgan and the rest learned of his secret plans to bring them to justice since he hadn’t yet written to J. Edgar Hoover nor had he ever spoken of his plans to Rosamund. Unless . . . their Pinkerton spies have broken into this room, read the most recent pages in the journal, and reported to their employers. Unless . . . in Muirkirk chatting with someone, Darian unwittingly let drop information.

  Until the last breath is drawn the last blow has not been dealt.

  SO IT HAPPENS that Abraham returns from one of his mysterious journeys with a double-barreled 12-gauge Winchester shotgun with silver trim, and several boxes of shells. Rosamund, never having seen such a weapon before at such close quarters, is frightened; and Darian simply blinks and stares in silence. “You needn’t worry,” Abraham tells them in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “—I haven’t spent a penny of Darian’s precious earnings. This gun came to me honestly in a game of stud poker over at Paie-des-Sables.”

  6.

  Locally it’s begun to be whispered, as Darian learns from his friend Aaron Deerfield, that Abraham Licht has “millions of dollars” buried somewhere on his property. That, before the banks closed, he’d managed to withdraw his fortune.

  “His ‘fortune’!” Darian laughed sadly. “Well. Father would be proud of such tales, if he knew.”

  7.

  When the market initially began to drop on 24 October 1929, that infamous day later to be known as Black Thursday, Abraham Licht in the company of four other investors from Manhattan was in Miami contemplating investment properties on the ocean and on Biscayne Bay. He and the others flew back north immediately in their privately chartered Cessna to find that things weren’t nearly so bad as news bulletins had indicated . . . since a sizable sum of money, $240 million it was afterward confirmed, had been pooled by Wall Street’s wealthiest men, meeting secretly in the House of Morgan, to keep stocks afloat. The next day, only half as many shares were traded; the general mood was less grim, if not wholly optimistic; Abraham Licht counseled himself not to worry, though each of his stocks was down: AT&T by eighteen points, Bethlehem Steel by twenty-three, Kennecott Copper by thirty. His most recent acquisition, Electro-Vision, an electronics research company located in Rutherford, New Jersey, which was rapidly developing a brilliant new form of broadcasting to conjoin radio and visual images, as on a movie screen, “one day to be beamed into every American household for enormous profits to shareholders,” had tragically plummeted and would disappear within weeks, causing the suicide of its visionary executive; but Liebknecht’s Formula, on the market as simply Liebknecht, Inc., had held its own. “If I refuse to panic as a coward would, and sell short, if I wait for the market to rally and rise, as it’s sure to do, I will be untouched.” Already it was being announced in the newspapers that the crisis was past. The federal government had issued a statement that there had been in fact no crisis, only a “hysteria” of selling provoked by an unknown cause. And fools with no financial expertise were the ones rushing to banks to withdraw their savings . . . .

  A day, and another day, of reassuring calm in Wall Street; cautious optimism; Abraham’s stocks were holding steady or, as in the case of Standard Oil, rallying. The secretary of the treasury declared that “the economy had never been in healthier condition” . . . John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and his son were pictured busily buying common stock . . . Abraham’s Manhattan business acquaintances, by this time fortified by whiskey, declared they were all “holding fast.”

  And then came Sunday: a vast relief throughout the city, as the damned market was closed.

  But then, unfortunately, Monday morning . . . when Abraham Licht, having decided to sell three million dollars of his holdings, found himself in a stampede with virtually everyone else in the country: nine million shares sold on the Exchange, four million on the Curb, losses of more than ten billion.

  Ten billion—!

  “It can’t be,” Abraham Licht repeatedly said, to his anxious young wife and alone, to his ghastly mirrored reflection. “It can’t be.”

  Like many another investor, Abraham had frequently daydreamt of a financial catastrophe in which he and a small number of shrewd thinkers walked away unscathed, with more profits than ever; he had never daydreamt of a catastrophe in which he was but one of hundreds of thousands, swept away by a demonic flood.

  And the following morning, Abraham’s worst fears came true: there was pandemonium, outright terror; a true Panic—searing the eyeballs, coating the tongue with slime, loosening the bowels; the most extraordinary of all waves of selling in the history of the world: sixteen million shares on the Exchange, seven million on the Curb, thirty billion dollars lost within a few hours. Kennecott Copper disappeared. Cole Motors fell off sixty points, seventy points, ninety points. Westinghouse, in which Abraham had invested only the month before, dropped to one-third of its former value. And AT&T and Bethlehem Steel, Mexican Seaboard Certificates, Fleischmann’s Yeast, Pan American Western, Liebknecht, Inc . . . .“‘Licht’ is extinguished,” Abraham laughingly declared, making his way like a somnambulist through a throng of yelling, jeering, perspiring, weeping strangers on the floor of the stock exchange. “It’s as if ‘Licht’ had never been.”

  YET HE WAS spared the indignity of collapsing in the street like so many others.

  And when he did collapse, early in the morning of the following day, it was in his wife’s arms; and Rosamund, like one steeled in disaster from a previous lifetime, as a woman to whom Death had frequently, seductively beckoned, telephoned for an ambulance at once to take the stricken, ashen-faced man, the father of her infant daughter, to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

  9.

  Midsummer. Abraham Licht in smart oyster-white linen suit and Panama hat makes a day’s journey to Manitowick, $800 in his pocket to show his good faith, his firm resolve to raise more, but, when he arrives, he learns to his horror that the horses are all dead! . . . burned alive, all nine of them, in a fire that took place a few nights before, when lightning struck the stable. (In Manitowick, the fire is considered “suspicious in origin,” since the horses were heavily insured.) But Abraham Licht is appalled. The horses are dead? Nine beautiful English Thoroughbreds, dead? . . . And not one was rescued or survived? . . .

  When he returns to Muirkirk he shrinks from the embrace of his young wife, for the sickening smell of burnt animal flesh, burnt animal hair, the terrible smell of animal agony, has seeped into his clothing.

  The $800 he returns to his son with trembling fingers.

  “Too late, Darian! I came too late to save them!”

  MIDSUMMER.

  Which is Eternity.

  Mist rising in slow tendrils over the swamp. The random joyous shrieks of unknown birds. Heat that begins at dawn, heavy, damp, hypnotic . . . Shall we go hunting? Shall we shoot us a pretty-feathered bird? Or an ugly scrawny bird with a bald head?

  In knee-high rubber boots, in an old candy-striped shirt, now collarless, stuffed into trousers that hang from his wasted frame, the soiled Panama hat set jauntily on his head, shotgun under one arm, little Melanie, shivering in delight, perched high on his shoulder, Shall we go hunting, dear? My sweet precious dear? My only pretty one?

  But Rosamund, spying from the kitchen garden, calls out sharply. No. No. No.

  LATE SUMMER.

  That heavy sulfurous season rife with secrets.

  For though they would steal away his notations (now carefully codified), or hide them amid the many thousands of pages of his memoir, or scatter them beneath the desk where they can scarcely be retrieved, they cannot penetrate
his thoughts; his powerful thoughts; his private cosmology.

  For though their hired agents would peer at him through their telescopes, and record every one of his movements, every one of his words, it is only by day they dare approach; the night is his.

  The night: which is rife with secrets.

  Soon, very soon, when she is asleep, he will take his daughter to show her how the sky is a great living ocean . . . black yet translucent, lightless yet pricked with light . . . stars beyond counting and beyond all imagination save Abraham Licht’s.

  For the sky, dear Melanie, is a navigable sea upon whose earthy shore we stand upside down; on our heads. The sky is a sea in which fools drown, lacking the proper maps.

  A bone-bright Moon, making shadows.

  Vague red Mars, hovering over the tallest peak of the church’s roof.

  The Big Dipper, with its confused message; great Taurus, with a warning (is it a warning? or a command?); the Pleiades clustered and winking, oh, the sky is rife with secrets, like the night, like the long marsh summer which is Eternity.

  10.

  Suspecting that his wife is pregnant but daring not to confront her—“Did you imagine I could be deceived, the child is mine?”

  But no, it’s a scene he knows beforehand he can’t play except mawkishly, most amateurishly.

  Barely able to sit still on the back porch, in the late-summer twilight, as Darian plays “Melanie Is Four”—a song for Melanie’s fourth birthday—on marimba, “icicle” and miniature violin; and, a surprise for Abraham, who’s after all this child’s father, Melanie herself sings . . . For she, Rosamund and Darian have planned this, evidently. “D’you like my song, Dad-dy? Uncle Darian wrote it for me.” Abraham smiles, kisses the child, perhaps she’s his child and perhaps she isn’t, how like Millie’s sweet wavering soprano at that age, but perhaps Millie wasn’t his child, either. “No, my dear. I don’t like your birthday song. But who am I, to matter?” Abraham mildly inquires, rising, with mock-elderly dignity, to make his exit as Darian, Rosamund and the astonished child stare after him.