My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  THIS, THE FINAL year of what the vulgar world would call my “life.”

  Shouting!—panicked!—an enormous bird is trapped in the parlor, flying from window to window, striking the glass, recoiling, frantic pumping wings, death throes in midair, it must have blundered down through the chimney, only a starling but it seems to Abraham Licht the size of a vulture, with a vulture’s jabbing beak, of course it’s Katrina playing another of her cruel jests, he’s striking his hands together Out! out! out! Back to hell where you belong you evil old woman! Stomping so hard he breaks several of the weakened floorboards, his handsome ruin of a face distorted in fear and anger and Rosamund tries to reason with him, it’s only a bird, a frightened bird, maybe we can capture it in a pillowcase, but Abraham turns on her blind, shoving at her, where’s his shotgun? where has she hidden his shotgun? and Rosamund rushes into the kitchen to snatch up Melanie and run with her outside, out onto the Muirkirk Pike where by lucky chance it’s Darian who comes bicycling along and not a neighbor—“Help me! Help us! Oh God anything, to get her away from him.”

  It’s the first time that Rosamund has so spoken. It’s the first time that Darian has held her tight as she holds him—tight, tight!

  The poor trapped starling dies of a broken neck. Its limp, black-feathered body lying harmless as one of Melanie’s rag dolls on the carpet. No need therefore for the hefty 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun Abraham Licht has oiled and primed for emergency use, hidden away in his locked study.

  “And if Father had used it . . . ?” Darian thinks, sick with worry. “And if I hadn’t been there . . . ?”

  IN SECRET DARIAN discusses his father with Dr. Aaron Deerfield, who tells him to bring Abraham in for an examination, but of course Darian can’t convince his father to come with him, nor can he convince the suspicious old man to allow Deerfield to visit him at home. “Why, Deerfield the sawbones must be one hundred years old by now,” Abraham says scathingly. “The man was ever incompetent in his lifetime, now in the boneyard he must be non compos mentis indeed.” Darian explains that Aaron Deerfield is Dr. Deerfield’s son, Darian’s own age, but Abraham stalks off chuckling as if it’s all a joke, but a joke that’s gone far enough.

  Rosamund cautions We can’t hurt him. Not even his pride.

  Rosamund, weeping, says We can’t provoke him into hurting us.

  And: He did save my life, Darian. I can’t betray him.

  IN TOWN, AFTER choir rehearsal at the Lutheran church, Darian drops by Aaron Deerfield’s house for a drink, and counsel. “It’s the aftermath of the stroke, probably. Or maybe he’s had another mild stroke. And there’s what is called ‘senility.’ . . . I’m sorry, Darian.” Darian can’t think of any reply. He is sorry, too; yet feeling sorry isn’t quite enough; he’s heard of elderly and not-so-elderly men in the Chautauqua Valley who’ve gone on rampages with sledgehammers, ice picks, rakes, axes, you don’t need a 12-gauge shotgun for slaughter.

  It’s this evening that Aaron casually asks Darian how his sister Esther is; and Darian says so far as he knows Esther is fine . . . well, Esther is a busy, energetic woman, to be truthful Esther has been involved in picketing, protests, demonstrations and she’s been in jail . . . crusading in western New York, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois with the National Birth Control League, Margaret Sanger’s people; she’s a friend of Sanger’s, a trusted aide; mostly women, though a few men, who’ve pledged themselves to what they call direct action (meaning angry, dangerous mobs, arrests and police brutality, jail sentences, lurid publicity in all the papers) in violating state laws that forbid the dissemination of any and all birth control information.

  Aaron Deerfield refills his guest’s glass with ale, and his own. He sighs. He’s still unmarried, in his early thirties: he’d been engaged to a local girl, and is now unengaged; Darian knows some of his friend’s personal history, but not much. One of only a few general practitioners in Muirkirk and vicinity, Dr. Deerfield is a busy man; a tired man; an affable man; a lonely man; prematurely balding, with thick-lensed glasses (so like his father, now dead, to see him in the street is to see his father, an unnerving apparition); a man accustomed to telling others what’s wrong with them, and how to remedy it; yet now baffled, staring at his clean, short-clipped fingernails. “I’d always thought, y’know, Darian, that Esther and I . . . might marry,” Aaron says. “She would be my nurse, at least until children came.” Darian, embarrassed, wants to ask, Yes but did you love her? did you ask her to marry you? but only murmurs that might’ve been a good thing. (Though thinking, why? His sister a doctor’s wife, and not an independent woman? Confined to Muirkirk for life?) “I can’t comprehend how Esther who was always so sweet . . . could behave so recklessly. With that female Sanger. The lot of them, y’know, are Communist atheists who would tear down the very fabric of society, don’t you think?” Aaron asks anxiously; and Darian, draining his glass, says with a neutral smile, “My friend, I’m just a musician, what’s it matter what I think?”

  11.

  Dares not confront her. Or them. Though keenly aware of her small swelling breasts, her hard swelling belly with its bluish pallor, sin pulled tight as a drum’s.

  Spying on them, the lovers. Though they must be aware of him for how innocently they behave: never so much as touching, not even fingertips, while he’s a witness.

  To Darian’s astonishment, and the surprise of the Lutheran congregation, Abraham Licht turns up one Sunday for the ten o’clock service in snappy red suspenders, a yellow scarf knotted about his old-man wattled throat, in handsome if soiled homburg and those fine hand-sewn leather shoes promised to last a lifetime (as they will); to hear the twenty-member choir sing choruses and arias from Handel’s Messiah, with creditable results. Abraham, aficionado of grand opera, a musical elitist, finds himself moved by this country-church choir and has to suppose that, yes, his son has had something to do with the beauty of their combined, thrilling voices. Yet abruptly he slips away before the service ends for a pulse has begun beating in his head Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing. An unmistakable message for the elderly husband of a young wife pregnant with another’s seed.

  A PROLONGED RAINY-WINDY October. Shall we never survive October. The insult of the banker Carr (Vanderpoel Trust) still fresh in Abraham’s memory, refusing to lend him $1,200: a mere fraction of $12,000. Nothing is but what is not Abraham writes in a careful hand across the top of a clean sheet of stationery.

  The well water, always so clear, and so delicious, now has a flat metallic taste. Its purity lost, contaminated by toxins. Yet when Abraham slyly invites Darian to sample it in his presence, Darian drinks a full glass of the stuff; and calmly denies to his father that there’s anything wrong with it.

  Abraham bursts into laughter. “My boy, you should have gone onto the stage, not me. How brave, how reckless—to drink that poison down without flinching.”

  “Father, there’s nothing wrong with our water. I’m sure.”

  And, “Abraham, there’s nothing wrong with our water. I’m sure.”

  (Mrs. Licht, hair tied back in a rag of a scarf, in a much-laundered old white bag of a shirt and a pair of formerly glamorous wool-silk slacks, must contribute her two cents worth from a corner of the kitchen. Her forced, anxious smile. Those eyes glazed with guilt.)

  Abraham, chuckling, drifts away. Checking the Winchester in his study closet: well oiled, but beginning to pick up minuscule bits of grit and dust. He stares into the twin sockets of the barrels. Eyeless. If an emergency comes, old Katrina flying down the chimney another time, or government agents crawling through the marsh in their ingenious rubber suits (he’d been issued one, involved in surveillance for the Bureau), he won’t have time to load the shotgun and so must keep it loaded. A gentleman does not soil his gloves.

  In addition, unknown even to the household, adulterous spies, Abraham has acquired a second firearm: a .38-caliber han
dgun, Smith & Wesson, nickel-plated with a handsome mother-of-pearl handle, surprisingly heavy, purchased in a sporting goods store in Innisfail, in a back room. A “debt collector” the storekeeper called it. This, too, Abraham keeps loaded at all times; and since it’s small enough, no problem to slip it into his coat pocket when he leaves the house.

  Once an enemy is dead, however, he’s dead; and nothing can be collected from him. A principle of British common law.

  He’d had a law practice once. A flourishing practice. In Philadelphia. The Shrikesdale woman had been his client, seeking her lost son. And though he’d found her son for her, the woman had repudiated him. “And now all is lost. Ridiculous!”

  He wonders: if his enemies are dead, who is spying on him from the outside, as surely they are; ransacking his documents, perusing his journal so he’s obliged now to write exclusively in code.

  Starlings, grackles, red-winged blackbirds calling excitedly to one another in the old Nazarene graveyard. A flocking of birds—how like a flocking of men. And old Katrina disguised as one of the birds, wide wings flapping close to his (shade-drawn) window. It’s those closest to us in blood-kinship who return to haunt us. Most urgent then their corpses must be buried deep!

  HE HAS YET to experiment with either the handgun or the shotgun.

  He fears their explosive power. Once detonated, set loose upon the (guilt-ridden) world.

  Frankly he confronts Rosamund and in astonishment she denies she’s pregnant. As she’d denied she has Arthur Grille’s money secreted away in an account in Vanderpoel Trust.

  (It’s Rosamund’s claim that Abraham invested all her money years ago and that it was lost with his.)

  Yet she’s his wife. “Lawful wedded.”

  “In sickness and in health.”

  “Till death do us part.”

  If she carries another’s bastard in her belly, this child will be Abraham Licht’s under the law. Does she know that?

  Denies it. Denies it.

  . . . Approximately $2 million in securities and property out on Long Island, Abraham is certain, moving the kerosene lamp so that he can see his wife’s tense face more clearly. (Perhaps to spite him, who so dotes upon female beauty, Rosamund has allowed her hair to become shapeless, a wavy mop of silvery-brown; she now wears schoolgirl wire-rimmed glasses, with the excuse that she’s nearsighted.) I remember our joint surprise, that your father hadn’t disinherited you after all.

  But you invested it, Abraham. I signed it over to you that day. Father’s lawyers were witnesses don’t you remember. Please remember. You invested it, it was lost with everything else.

  The woman lies, lies. Yet not at all as Millicent lied, for she lacks Millicent’s dramatic talent as she lacks Millicent’s classic beauty. A country-wife slattern, in men’s rubber boots clucking as she scatters kernels of corn for the chickens, a noisy brood of red hens lacking a rooster; and a bad influence upon the little girl in thrown-together clothes and bobbed hair showing the tips of her ears, allowed to play with neighbors’ brats up the Pike where talk is of Abraham Licht brought low, Abraham Licht a ruined man. In the sacred privacy of the marital bed there must never be lies, Abraham warns the woman. Tell me where the vault is, where you’ve hidden the money, a wife’s property is her husband’s property under the law. Tell me. Why you no longer love me.

  “Abraham, no! Please!“—hiding her guilty face, beginning to weep.

  Now when she disrobes she’ll have something to show her lover: a kidney-shaped bruise on her upper arm, a peach of a bruise beneath her eye, and those ugly wire glasses bent. Don’t tempt me farther Abraham whispers.

  12.

  At dusk of a November day there comes Abraham Licht to his son’s window, in a jocular mood; thin cheeks overgrown with stubble, eyes playful, a grimy green cap found on the road pulled down low on his forehead; raps on the pane, and is admitted by the makeshift door to declare, “My boy, you’re making a fool of yourself in the world’s eyes. I know what people are saying, though I scorn gossip. You should marry before it’s too late. You can’t know what joy it is to have a wife and a child of your own.”

  A not-subtle emphasis upon the words “of your own.”

  Darian, just returned from an eight-hour stint at Muirkirk High School (where this half year he’s a full-time teacher of something called social studies and music and helps out with boys’ gym), stares at his father without comprehending. Decides to make a joke of it—“True, Father. I don’t know. But life isn’t so easily arranged.”

  Glaring about the cluttered room, at the madman pianos and other instruments, stringed, of glass, bamboo, God knows what—tin cans, baling wire—Abraham says sneering, “Life is never arranged ‘easily,’ Darian. It’s arranged by force.”

  13.

  As if I had never been.

  Licht—extinguished!

  (For where one can pun, like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, in fact one hasn’t yet gone out.)

  THOUGH BY DEGREES he’s swinging away from Time. Its wearying cycle of caprices. Who has just captured the Presidency of the United States with the ridiculous promise of a New Deal; who is lost and consigned to oblivion.

  That marshy oblivion in which enemies, like lovers, like one’s own children, are swallowed up.

  Mere bubbles on the scummy surface. Silence, once the birds’ shrieking ceases.

  He’s lucid. He’s calm. He’s in excellent physical condition.

  His eyes . . . his eyesight. A wavy, wavering brightness. Sunspots. Cataracts? He’s explaining to Deerfield, a fattish young man with thick-lensed glasses, that he wouldn’t trust Vanderpoel General Hospital to operate on an ingrown toenail of his let alone his eyes. Telling Deerfield he doesn’t wish to be examined with a stethoscope thank you. His heart, lungs, inner organs listened to. No thank you.

  (Deerfield had driven out to the house under the pretext, an absurdly transparent pretext, of having been called by Rosamund to examine Melanie. Abraham just laughed, his wife and his son were so crude in their connivance.)

  Much of the daytime he must surrender to his enemies. But the night remains his, the night has always been his. If only Melanie will understand . . . .Why does she shrink from her father when he wants only to reveal to her certain precious secrets: where Past, Present and Future are one, in the Heavens. “Melanie, darling, it’s all for you. These charts, these graphs, these constellations cracked open like nuts . . . how bright-glowing Sirius affects our happiness, how the dance of the Pleiades is our own, the moons of Jupiter that float in our dreams, the bright star of Aries that rises in our blood with the claim of honor.”

  But the child shrinks from his whiskery embrace, and runs to her mother.

  14.

  I will kill the old man!

  Seeing that Rosamund’s eyes are swollen, her mouth soft and hurt and trembling. Knowing the old man has struck her, surely he’s threatened her, though Rosamund refuses to speak. “What is it? He’s jealous? He’s angry? Why? At you? At me? When there’s nothing between us?” Darian asks. “What should I do, Rosamund? Tell me. Don’t turn from me. What should I do?”

  Rosamund pushes past him, out of the room; her eyes averted, her expression stubborn and fixed. Hiding her bruises, her soft battered flesh as if these were signs of grace. So Darian calls after her, “Then go to hell! Both of you.”

  Having heard the muffled voices in the night. The thumping sounds, the thud! thud! thud! as of a body being slammed against a wall or the headboard of a bed. Having run from his own bed to knock on the door and twist the (locked) doorknob demanding What is it? What’s wrong? Father? Rosamund? Open this door, please. But Darian hasn’t the right to make such demands as Abraham Licht, panting on the other side of the door, allows him to know. Nothing. No one. Go away. You know nothing.

  Impulsively Darian follows her. The old man has driven off in the Packard and left them alone; Melanie is napping beneath a feather comforter; even the mailman has come and gone along the solitary Muirkirk Pike; Daria
n pulls gently at Rosamund, then more forcibly; grips her face in his hands and kisses her; a raw angry yearning kiss, denied for too long.

  Don’t, Rosamund whispers.

  Darian I can’t.

  Darian . . .

  IN THE LAST month of Abraham Licht’s life, his wife and his son become lovers.

  And Darian, dazed, exulting, tries to console himself. It’s just love. People do this all the time.

  15.

  (Like all lovers whispering, conspiring. When did you first know, Rosamund asks, and Darian confesses it was the first night he saw her, in his hotel room, the Empire State, remember?—Abraham brought you, in your purple velvet gown, you’d missed my recital, remember? and Rosamund laughs, Rosamund wipes her eyes saying but that woman wasn’t me truly, not me as I am now; and Darian says, Yes but the man was me: always it’s been me, in regard to you. Their surprise, which is the surprise of all lovers, is with what ease their bodies at last join, the urgency, yet the grace, as if these many months, these years, they’d been celibate yearning for only each other; miserable, yet elated; knowing it must happen someday; and so they’d been lovers without needing to touch. Darian isn’t the man he’d been only a few hours ago. Darian the lover, lanky long-limbed Darian now a woman’s lover, vowing he’ll love her always, he’ll love her and Melanie always, he’d kill for her if necessary, it’s right, it’s just, it’s Nature, it’s necessary, it’s what people do. He will save her and Melanie both, he will protect them from all harm.