My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates
Next, even as Abraham spent long insomniac nights, with Elisha, poring over plans of the fortresslike prison, and a map of the city of Trenton, and consulted dozens of firsthand accounts going back to medieval times of successful prison escapes, he was arranging through an intermediary for meetings with prison officials: the underwarden, the resident physician, several guards, the Mercer County sheriff and deputies, even the county coroner. In addition, as Abraham lacked solid contacts in the New Jersey underworld, he was obliged to go in person, that’s to say as Timothy St. Goar, a Manhattan businessman, to speak with several high-ranking criminals. His plan, increasingly desperate, was to apply for help both outside the prison and in, in the matter of freeing Thurston from his fate.
How friendly these gentlemen! To a man. Accepting “preliminary moneys” from me—in cash. Yet vague about future meetings. For, as the sheriff himself confided to Abraham, the prospect of freeing a man from both a sentence of death and “The Wall”—as the Trenton prison was known—was a daunting one. Not only had it never been done in the more than one hundred years of the prison’s existence, it had never been attempted.
The Chautauqua earnings reaped by Abraham and Elisha were now nearly depleted. So much money, so quickly! “I can hardly believe it, Father,” Elisha said, blinking tears from his eyes, “—we had more than four hundred thousand dollars. It was ours.” Abraham tried to console him, pointing out that no amount of mere money, in the hope of saving Thurston, was wasted. He did resent, though, being fleeced by enforcers of the law—“Hypocrites! Trading on a father’s grief.” Elisha said passionately, “We must get more money, then, Father. Tell me what to do, and I will do it.”
BUT ABRAHAM LICHT wondered: Could he ever again risk one of his children in any desperate plan? At Chautauqua, he’d arranged for Elisha to carry a pistol; for purposes of practicality, the pistol had been loaded. What if—? Another person, or a police officer, had intervened with a gun—?
Abraham shuddered, as if he’d witnessed his beloved ’Lisha, his precious Little Moses, drifting, as in a dream, near the precipice of death.
TORMENTED BY VISIONS. The massive fifteen-foot wall, made of coarse stone and mortar. The labyrinth of inner walls and passageways. The gatehouse. The bare expanse of the yard. Sentry stations, guard boxes, turrets. Hidden rifles on all sides, at all heights. The broad central chimney from which thick black smoke rises. Cellblocks A, B, C, D. The dismal row of cells of the condemned: distinguished from other cells by a certain rank, brackish odor that was said to waft about, all but visible in the air. Beyond were the warden’s private quarters, a cheerless four-room apartment. And there was the kitchen, and the laundry room, and the infirmary. And the morgue.
How like a riddle, this labyrinth. How to break it, master it?
Escape by way of—what?—a tunnel. Yes, a tunnel. The most plausible would be from the outer wall to the infirmary, a distance, according to one of the maps, of about fifty yards.
The gallows platform, said to be a weatherworn grim structure, was even closer to the wall, probably less than twenty feet.
In a dream calling my son’s name. As, wrists shackled, he ascends to the gallows. But when the fair blond young man turns to me it isn’t Thurston but a stranger. Christopher Schoenlicht. Fixing me with a dead man’s stare.
2.
It is mid-April, it is the final week of April, suddenly it is 29 April; and nothing has been accomplished.
A great deal of money has been spent; and nothing has been accomplished.
Night after night, locked away in his room at the rear of the house, Abraham Licht and Elisha study the plans of the prison . . . the maps of the surrounding area . . . the pencil sketches that Abraham has made, of the prison and of the gallows.
(If Elisha has a secret of his own, a secret worry mounting to obsession, he hides his thoughts from his father. For his love for Abraham Licht and for his brother Thurston is such, his emotions count for very little at the present time.)
One night Abraham moans almost inaudibly, “It cannot be done. He cannot be saved.” A pencil slips from his fingers and rolls across the floor and a moment later, pricked by a sudden thought, Abraham snatches up the pencil again and says, to Elisha’s relief, “Unless . . . ”
THE ENGLISH REFORMER IN AMERICA
In early May of 1910 there came to the States the celebrated Englishman Lord Harburton Shaw, president of the Commonwealth Prison Reform Society, and author of numerous controversial books, monographs, and articles on the subject of penal reform. (Lord Shaw’s zealous five-part series on inequities in the law and the “barbarism” of capital punishment, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1908, stirred considerable debate in the British Parliament, and earned him both enemies and fervent supporters; of the several books of his which were published in the States, Criminal Justice and Criminal Injustice, of 1903, aroused the most controversy, and gained Lord Shaw a substantial following among like-minded American reformers.) It was Lord Shaw’s hope that he might be allowed, during his brief three-week visit to the States, to speak with prison officials and prisoners alike, at a number of representative American prisons—among them, the New York Tombs, Blackwell’s Island, Sing Sing, Rahway, Trenton, and Cherry Hill (in Philadelphia). While the famous reformer could not expect to travel incognito, he had requested that news of his arrival be kept from the papers, so far as it was possible, for he feared, with justification, being besieged by well-intentioned admirers, and having no time for the primary purpose of his journey.
Lord Shaw impressed his American hosts, including the flamboyant reform mayor of New York City, William Jay Gaynor, as an agreeably modest, soft-spoken gentleman; well into his sixties, yet fired with youthful vigor; white-haired, clean-shaven, somewhat hard of hearing in one ear; like many Englishmen, even of wealth and family, given to careless, or in any case indifferent, habits of grooming—as if, set beside the idealism of the inner man, such matters as fresh linen, well-scrubbed fingernails, the relations between gray Donegal tweed and brown gabardine, etc., were of little account. The ladies thought Lord Shaw “droll” and “a character—though charming.” As Mayor Gaynor’s guest at dinner the Englishman ate sparingly, and drank not at all; declined to be baited by opponents; never spoke intemperately despite his strong-held opinions; and comported himself, as even the Hearst papers acknowledged, like a true English gentleman—and not a public-minded American in whom zealous virtue might be confused with noisy egoism.
Though Lord Shaw was rumored to be extremely wealthy, he chose to travel with but a single servant, an Indian secretary-valet of no more than twenty-five years of age (a gracious young man from Calcutta, educated at Cambridge at Lord Shaw’s expense), whom he treated rather more like a companion than a hireling; and he declared his preference, early on, for hotels of “modest” pretension, and not the palatial hotels in which his hosts wished to book him. In Manhattan, during his first several days, he quite won the hearts of those men who had resented his arrival, by discussing in detail his new philosophy of reform: this, to begin at the top and the bottom simultaneously, the conditions of jails and prisons being radically improved, capital punishment abolished, etc., and the salaries, living arrangement, bonuses, sick leaves, pensions, etc., for prison officials, being scaled upward as well. “For it has long been a disgrace,” Lord Shaw told his avid listeners, “that the very persons who give their energies—indeed, very often their lives—to prison work, should be taken for granted by society, and carelessly classed with the prisoners whom they ‘serve.’”
It was Lord Shaw’s contention too (an item that particularly struck the ear of Mayor Gaynor and his aides) that elected and appointed officials both be granted salaries proportionate to the highest-paid men in business: for by this measure they would be encouraged to remain in politics, serving the commonweal, and not deserting to more lucrative pastures; and, most importantly, they would be immune to bribery and corruption—long the scourge (“in England if not, perhaps
Asked where such munificent salaries would derive from, Lord Shaw replied without hesitation, taxes.
The United States was the wealthiest nation on earth, after all; and here the rich were extravagantly rich. Had Lord Shaw not chanced to read, to his disgust, that there was an enormous estate in Philadelphia, staffed by ninety servants, where the silver plate alone was valued at five million dollars; and were not the objets d’art in the Fifth Avenue mansion of the Vanderbilts worth an estimated one hundred million dollars? The wealthy citizens of America would have to be severely taxed, and soon, if the nation was to avoid a complete overthrow of its government; and the taxes would have to be distributed to those men who had distinguished themselves as public servants. “Take from the rich and give to the politicians, as they and they alone have the nation’s welfare at heart,” Lord Shaw said, his British accent becoming steadily more clipped and pronounced, and a faint blush of indignation rising to his cheeks.
Was it any wonder, then, that this English gentleman was praised at once by his hosts; declared a true aristocrat, in his scorn for material self-interest; heralded as a saint; and invited to visit any prison or house of detention he might wish, during his three-week stay in the country?
Lord Shaw’s schedule was gratifyingly crowded.
On Blackwell’s Island he and his young Indian servant were allowed to visit the lunatics’ wing of the prison hospital, and to interview those inmates whom it was possible to interview without running the risk of personal injury; at the experimental Cherry Hill prison they were privileged to interview several long-term prisoners in their solitary cells, with no guard or bailiff in attendance. At “The Wall” in Trenton, by general consent the grimmest of the state penitentiaries, they were treated with unusual courtesy by the warden, who, having heard of Lord Shaw’s radical ideas for reform, insisted upon inviting both him and his secretary-valet to dinner to discuss the matter in greater intimacy. (For by this time, in mid-May, it was known that Lord Shaw planned to write a series of articles on his American visit, singling out prisons and prison officials most deserving of financial largesse.)
At Trenton, where executions were routinely held, Lord Shaw was made welcome to visit with the public executioner, the prison physician, the attending clergyman, etc.; to examine the gallows; and to spend as many hours as he wished among the condemned, interviewing the unhappy men sequestered there . . . at this time seven convicts ranging in age from approximately twenty-five to sixty-two. The next execution, Lord Shaw was told, would be on 29 May: one “Christopher Schoenlicht,” convicted for the murder of his mistress, was scheduled then to be hanged.
Several of the condemned men, as it turned out, were clearly insane; a state of affairs Lord Shaw vigorously protested, as it was a sign of barbarism to put a madman to death. Yet, the warden’s answer was a simple one: the men had not been insane at the time of sentencing—only after.
Of young Christopher Schoenlicht Lord Shaw hesitantly inquired, “Does the lad show remorse for his crime?” and the warden said, “Not in the slightest, sir—nor remorse for what lies ahead, at the end of the noose.” “But does he seem in full possession of his faculties?” Lord Shaw worriedly asked, peering in at the haggard prisoner through the bars of his cell; and the warden replied, with a cruelly hearty laugh, not minding if the condemned man heard, “As full a possession as he will need, sir, in twelve days’ time.”
IT WAS SCHOENLICHT, of the seven condemned prisoners, whom Lord Shaw decided he would like to interview.
Did the prisoner object?
He did not.
Did the prisoner seem to care?
He did not.
So, with little ceremony, Lord Harburton Shaw and his Indian servant were escorted into the young man’s dank cell, and the heavy door locked behind them; and, so very suddenly, so easily, they were alone at last . . . Thurston Licht and his father Abraham and his brother Elisha . . . standing for a long moment in silence, as the guard’s footsteps slowly retreated.
The cells in this part of the prison were in four tiers, one above the other; ceilings were formed by two large, heavy stone slabs, which were of course floors of the cells above; communication between one cell to the next would be difficult indeed, except perhaps by way of the “soil” pipe that ran along the wall through the cells—yet, even so, Abraham Licht lifted a warning finger and whispered, “Thurston: say not a word; make not a move.”
How astonished Thurston was, staring from the snowy-haired Lord Shaw to the turbanned Elijii, and back to Shaw again, like a man in a dream struggling to wake.
Poor Thurston had grown gaunt and stooped since being incarcerated; his skin had a jaundiced cast, and his hair, once so thick, had become thin and matted with filth, a dull pewter-gray; and his eyes!—not those of a youth in his mid-twenties but the narrowed, sunken, damp eyes of a man of twice that age.
Trying to speak, his lips moving numbly, inaudibly.
Could it be possible, he saw what he believed he was seeing?
Or were these dream figures: Abraham Licht in the guise of an elder Englishman, with built-up putty cheeks and a subtle realignment of ivory-white, bushy eyebrows; and Elisha with eyes outlined in black, his skin tinted a warm olive-magenta-brown and a dazzling white turban wrapped about his head . . . he, too, lifting a warning finger to his lips, that Thurston say not a word.
Thurston stared. Stood paralyzed. Perhaps his instinct was to rush moaning into his father’s arms—or to shrink back against the damp windowless wall, in terror of such apparitions. The elder Englishman Shaw was addressing him in a clipped, formal voice, extending his almost-steady hand that Thurston, the condemned prisoner, might shake it, saying, “Mr. Schoenlicht, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. We have come to speak with you on a matter of extreme urgency, son—life, and death. Yours.”
THE CONDEMNED MAN
1.
Neither Abraham Licht nor Elisha can bring himself to consider Have they arrived too late to save him? Is he lost, his mind shattered? For more than an hour in the squalid, dim-lighted cell, trying to communicate with Thurston, Thurston-no-longer-Thurston, as a domesticated dog, injured, or terrified out of its senses, is no longer dog but a feral creature, its brain altered, even its eyes altered, like Thurston’s eyes strangely dilated, the iris near-black. Thurston, or is it Schoenlicht, a man condemned to death, and a man reconciled to death, scratching frenzied at lice visibly crawling on his neck and arms, scratching with blackened, broken nails, his breath fetid, his unwashed body giving off a stench as strong as the diarrhetic waste clogging the soil pipe.
Patiently the snowy-haired Englishman asks, Do you understand, son?
Do you understand?
And will you follow the plan?
I command you, son: to follow the plan.
(A fleet, furry creature with bristling whiskers scuttles along the edge of the oozing wall.)
(One of the lunatics in the cellblock begins to howl.)
. . . The potion, Katrina’s medicine, “enchanter’s nightshade” it’s called . . . here in this vial: take it, son! . . . to be hidden away (in this crevice in the wall, in the shadows) and taken on the morning of 29 May . . . precisely a half hour before the execution is scheduled. Yes? Do you hear? Do you comprehend? Nod your head, son, if you comprehend. You will take this vial, hidden here, see where I’ve hidden it, and on the morning of the execution you will swallow its contents a half hour before . . . before it is scheduled to occur . . . so it will seem, as they march you into the yard, and you come into sight of the gallows, you will be struck down into a comalike state, and beyond into a mimicry of death . . . your breath and heartbeat too faint to be detected . . . your blood pressure so low, all your bodily warmth will be secreted deep inside you . . . your fingers and toes stiff and icy-cold . . . your skin giving off the clammy radiance of death.
And our enemies will believe you have been frightened to death.
And disappointed to
For the attending physician, an old fool, pompous but affable, with whom “Elijii” and I have become acquainted, will pronounce you dead, of cardiac arrest. For we will require his unwitting cooperation in our plan.
For now you are no longer alone—a “condemned” man.
For now it is us, your family, against them, our mortal enemies.
For now it is the strategy of The Game: our stakes are your life: we will triumph!
Do you doubt, children? You must never doubt.
UNKNOWN TO ABRAHAM Licht and Elisha, the prison chaplain, an impassioned, excitable, garrulous elder man not unlike Abraham Licht in the power of his person, has been “ministering unto,” as he calls it, the condemned sinner Christopher Schoenlicht, for weeks; leading the youth in tearful, groaning prayers and verses out of Jeremiah vehement in their confusion, and seductive: A noise shall come even to the ends of the earth, for the LORD hath a controversy with the nations, he will plead with all flesh; he will give them that are wicked to the sword, saith the LORD. And beyond that, the rhapsodic prophesies of Saint John the Divine in which madness and poetry conjoin yet more seductively.
For it is given.
For it is just.
To die as God bids.
To die as God and the State of New Jersey bid.
Mute, his brain numbed by terror, exhaustion, sleepless nights and inedible food, food crawling minutely with maggots, his body torn by explosive bouts of diarrhea, vomiting, fever and convulsive chills, that he is, or was, a Licht, has become remote to him as a rapidly fading dream, for is all of life not a dream? a hallucination? a vision arrayed before us by Satan, God’s perpetual enemy through time? So the sinner murders, but it is sin that murders. So the soul ravages itself, but it is in the service of salvation. For the meek shall inherit the earth. For the first shall be last, and the last first. Verily I say unto you.