My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates
A few hours later, however, identification was tentatively made by a deputy marshal who brought with him the Shrikesdale poster, and all of Fort Sumner was aroused.
For surely this was the missing millionaire: being approximately thirty-three years of age; of medium height, and stocky—though at the present time his face was gaunt, as if he’d lost weight quickly; his hair was indeed brown, and might be said to be curly; his eyes too were brown, or nearly so (for in certain lights brown and silvery-gray resemble each other closely). If he didn’t look altogether like the smiling young man on the poster, being, after all, rather the worse for wear after his ordeal in the desert, it was remarked that his clothing, though badly torn and filthy, appeared to be of an uncommon cut; and it seemed clear that, even in his initial feverish state, when the only coherent word he could utter was Mother! he was an Easterner of genteel upbringing.
Surely it was he, and no one else!
And the reward would be divided up among the half dozen Fort Sumner residents who had found him!
A shame, some observers noted, that the millionaire’s handsome face would very likely be permanently scarred by an ugly wound running from his left temple to his jaw that had narrowly missed, it seemed, gouging out his left eye; deeply embedded with dirt and sand, and badly infected beneath its encrustation of coagulated blood. While the wound was being drained and treated by a Fort Sumner doctor, the injured man moaned in pain and terror, and spoke of a landslide—he and his companion trapped—thrown, along with their horses, over the edge of a cliff—pitched down a canyon wall amid a nightmare of rock, dirt, and sand—his friend (the name sounded like Herman, or Harmon) killed immediately—both horses crippled—only he surviving; yet barely alive; and unable to move for hours from where he’d fallen.
How many days ago the tragic accident had occurred, he had no idea; nor did he know where it had taken place. The very name New Mexico seemed to mean nothing to him.
Nor did the name Roland Shrikesdale mean anything.
(Although the doctor attending him believed that the injured man evinced some peculiar agitation, a distinct fluttering of the pulses, when the name was spoken close to his ear.)
Questioned the following day by local authorities, who were certain by now that this was the missing millionaire, he was incapable of collecting his thoughts well enough to answer. Within minutes he began to weep in hoarse gulping sobs; and so squirmed and writhed in his bed, he seemed on the verge of a convulsive fit. In a delirium he cried out “Mother!” And, less frequently, “Harmon!” and “God have mercy!”
Clearly he was a victim of amnesia, brought about by the injury to his head, or sunstroke, or a deadly combination of both; and it was thought purposeless to interrogate him at the present time.
So he was allowed to rest, passing in and out of consciousness, and waking to extreme confusion, as if he had not the slightest idea where he was, or that he was now safe.
(A MIRACLE, FORT Sumner thought, that a lone man, afoot, could have survived for more than a day or two in the blistering desert heat, let alone drag himself free of a landslide.
But of course miracles do happen, from time to time.
And bring with them distinct rewards, for the deserving.)
2.
The first Pinkerton detective to arrive at Fort Sumner made a cursory examination of the sick man, studying several likenesses of Roland Shrikesdale III he had on his person, and declared that this surely was Shrikesdale; for one had to allow after all for the man’s ravaged state.
The second Pinkerton detective, arriving early the next day, was less certain: for, in his opinion, the amnesiac’s eyes were not exactly brown . . . and, even allowing for his present condition, wasn’t his forehead rather broad and square, and his jaw strong, whereas Roland Shrikesdale’s face was represented as plump and innocently round? Yet, after a few hours’ deliberation, the man finally came to the conclusion that of course this must be Shrikesdale; for the odds against there being two lost men in this part of the world who so closely resembled each other were unthinkable.
The official identification of Roland Shrikesdale III was made the following week, by Anna Emery’s most trusted attorney, Montgomery Bagot, sent out to Fort Sumner to fetch poor Roland home.
And of course it was Roland, as Bagot saw at once.
He had known his client’s son, after all, since a very young age; and was confident that he could recognize him anywhere, in any state of health.
And it seemed clear to him that the sick man recognized him, though, weakened by fever, he could do no more than smile faintly, and extend a limp dry hand for Bagot to shake.
“My dear Roland,” Bagot said, deeply moved, “—your mother will be so happy when I cable her the good news!”
“YET I’M NOT altogether certain that I am ‘Roland Shrikesdale,’” the afflicted man told Bagot, fixing him with anxious eyes, and smiling that pale cringing smile Bagot remembered so well—which, in his opinion, now that he saw it once again, was one of Roland’s most typical mannerisms, of which Roland himself was surely unaware. “For, you see, Mr. Bagot, I can’t remember. I remember the roar of a landslide, and a sudden nightmare of rock, pebbles, dirt, sand—I remember the frenzied whinnying of horses—the sensation of falling—being thrown—amid great terror and helplessness—as if God in His wrath had reached down to destroy my companion and me, for what offense I can’t know. This horror I remember clearly, Mr. Bagot—but it has blotted out everything else.”
So the man Bagot knew to be Roland Shrikesdale repeated during their long railway trip east, speaking sometimes in a favored whisper from his invalid’s bed, and sometimes in the high-pitched reedy voice Bagot recognized unmistakably as Roland’s. When Roland’s physician declared him well enough to leave his bed, the two men sat together companionably by a window of their private Pullman car—which was very like a luxury suite in a hotel of the first rank, equipped with every modern convenience, beautifully furnished and staffed by as many as five expertly trained Pullman Negroes. Bagot scrutinized his young charge with lawyerly tact, noting that Roland’s eyes in direct sunshine weren’t exactly brown but a steely mica-gray; his hair appeared coarser and a shade or so darker; the distinct mole near his left eye was gone, as a consequence, perhaps, of his injury. Yet the man was Roland—without a doubt. For who else might he be?
Indeed, the self-effacing young heir had always doubted himself since early boyhood, Bagot recalled. He’d been intimidated by his father and babied by his mother and rendered unfit to hold his own in even childish games and competitions like croquet and badminton. The prospect of a debutante ball had more than once rendered him unable to walk, let alone dance. It had been a fear of the dictatorial Elias that Roland would never prove “man enough” to marry, let alone sire a son to continue the noble Shrikesdale lineage by way of him; shortly before his death in 1901 Elias had spoken of breaking up Roland’s inheritance and diverting much of it to his brother Stafford’s three strapping boys, who would surely marry in time, and would surely sire any number of Shrikesdale sons. Yet a minor contretemps over another issue arose between Elias and Stafford, and the matter of the inheritance was abruptly dropped; and at Elias’s death the immense fortune remained entire—weighing rather heavily, Bagot suspected, on the inadequate shoulders of both Anna Emery and Roland.
Even as their train entered central Philadelphia, and the Pullman men prepared for them to disembark, Roland told Bagot yet again in a craven voice that he didn’t know if he was the man Bagot assured him he was; and Bagot, impatient after so many days of confinement in Roland’s company, said curtly, “Then who do you imagine you are—?”
To which the agitated youth could give no reply.
3.
The legendary reunion of Anna Emery Shrikesdale and her son Roland at Castlewood Hall, after Roland’s absence of one hundred eighty-five days, was as ecstatic as newspapers throughout the nation proclaimed; for Mrs. Shrikesdale, though in poor health and handica
How ardently she’d prayed for his safe return!—pleaded and bargained with her God! Even before it was self-evident that Roland had fallen into a misadventure out West, Anna Emery had been canny enough to donate $140,000 to a charity home for unwed mothers in the city; by the end of the summer she’d given equal sums to a foundlings’ hospital, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the International Red Cross, and, not least, the Episcopalian Church. Anna Emery’s sense was of Roland—pale, plump, shivering, paralyzed with terror—held hostage by God Himself, that God and Anna Emery might come to terms satisfactory to both.
So, when Montgomery Bagot at last cabled her with the news that the man believed to be Roland was indeed Roland, and that Roland was, apart from superficial alterations, very much himself, Anna Emery was so suffused with joy that she climbed out of her sickbed, to her nurse’s astonishment, and, lowering herself to her knees, gave thanks to God for His kindness.
“I had never doubted You,” she declared.
ANNA EMERY SHRIKESDALE, née Sewall (the granddaughter and daughter of governors of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania), was just five feet tall, with a small, round, compact figure, not exactly fat (except in her stomach and hips) but tight and rotund, like a fruit swollen nearly to bursting. At the age of sixty-nine she retained a vague girlish manner; was somewhat vain about her appearance—particularly her hair, which had grown too thin not to require the supplement of an elaborately coiffed pearly-gray wig; and suffered from such a variety of ailments, both female and general, her physician scarcely knew how to attend to her. Following Elias’s mysterious death (the distraught widow was told only that he had died of heart failure; in truth he’d died of a syphilitic infection of the spine), her nerves had so deteriorated that she started like an infant at ordinary sounds and movements; suffered frequently from hypertension headaches and fainting spells; and could not always control the palsied trembling of her hands. “Ah, you frightened me—!” Anna Emery would exclaim, laughing breathlessly, and pressing her hand to her bosom, when her companion had done no more than make an innocuous remark or gesture, or drawn breath to speak.
It was believed by some Philadelphians that Anna Emery began to lose her health after the ordeal of Roland’s birth (Roland being the Shrikesdales’ sole surviving child, born when Anna Emery was thirty-eight); by others, more intimately acquainted with the Sewall family, that she had always been a nervous and high-strung girl. She wept easily; laughed easily; feared company, yet pressed herself upon both men and women, chattering with an earnest sort of gaiety. At the age of fifteen she underwent a religious experience of some sort, never satisfactorily explained to her family, and pleaded with them to allow her to convert to Catholicism, and join a cloistered order of nuns; but of course the Sewalls, being a resolutely Protestant family, forbade their daughter to entertain such fantasies. At the age of twenty-four Anna Emery became engaged to a lively young bachelor-about-town who shortly thereafter threw her over for another, prettier, young heiress; and, after a period of intense shame and humiliation, when she scarcely dared show her face in society, she consented to marry the fifty-two-year-old Elias Shrikesdale—a wealthy widower known for his financial coups in the railroad, grain, and asbestos markets, but not otherwise admired in Philadelphia society. Anna Emery suffered several miscarriages—gave birth to a baby girl, who subsequently died at the age of eight months—and finally, after years of barrenness, gave birth to Roland, whom she adored immediately as the redeeming fact of her life. “Now I see why God has made me suffer!” the radiant mother exclaimed, hugging her baby hungrily to her bosom. “Now I see all.”
Following this, though Anna Emery’s health was never stable, she hardly minded; for she had her son, who loved her nearly as much as she loved him.
Within months of Roland’s birth Elias Shrikesdale began to travel more frequently on business. It seemed he was rarely at Castlewood though, as observers noted, he might be glimpsed at one or another of his Philadelphia clubs, or at the racetrack, or in Manhattan, often in the company of an attractive young singer or actress whom he made no effort to introduce to acquaintances. He explained to Anna Emery and the Sewalls that he was simply too busy with his own affairs, financial and political, to concern himself with domestic matters. If Anna Emery and little Roland spent the summer in Newport, Elias might visit a weekend or two; if they went abroad for six months, he might decline to accompany them at all. A man’s life, Elias said, couldn’t be shared with a woman; at least not the sort of women one found in Philadelphia society.
“We must go, after all, where life quickens us,” he declared.
Observers marveled at Anna Emery’s allegiance to her husband, no matter his infidelities, his public rudenesses and questionable business practices. She may have believed, like most women of her class and era, that moneymaking was a man’s vocation that had no relationship to ethics or even to the law. She refused to hear any criticism of Elias even from her own family; refused to read any newspaper, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, that chided him for ungentlemanly behavior in the public sphere. (The most serious charges were brought against the Shrikesdales at the time of the 1902 strike of the newly organized United Mine Workers in eastern Pennsylvania, when Elias and his brother Stafford hired a small army of mercenaries to break the strike. A number of miners were killed, many more were injured and several of their houses burnt to the ground in mysterious blazes. Following the breaking of the strike, however, the Shrikesdales enjoyed their most profitable years, and stock in the company rose to new heights.) After President Teddy Roosevelt forced negotiations on the anthracite mine owners in Pennsylvania who’d refused to discuss contracts with the union, or to listen to union requests at all, Elias and Stafford jested angrily of ways in which Roosevelt might be “cut down”: there being the recent excellent example of Mark Hanna’s flunkey McKinley shot in the fat belly as he reached out complacently to shake his assassin’s hand, and the example of Old Abe, or Old Ape, shot in the back of the head in Ford’s Theater—“Better late than never.” As the Shrikesdale brothers retained a powerful security force, such jests were perhaps half serious. Certainly they spoke of possible stratagems for “the perfect assassination—to be credited to Bolshevik terrorists” in the presence of others, even at formal dinner parties at Castlewood; yet, oddly, Anna Emery took no note of them, retaining the dignity of her station as a Philadelphia grande dame for whom the ways of men are inscrutable and not to be questioned, still less challenged.
After Elias’s death, however, Anna Emery rarely spoke of him. As if, dying at the advanced age of eighty-four, he’d cruelly abandoned her and was to be blamed for her financial predicament, as she called it, though as Montgomery Bagot and other advisors insisted, Anna Emery Shrikesdale was one of the richest women in the Northeast. Still it was her nervous complaint, made to relatives and friends, that she and Roland were “at the mercy of fortune—unless God intervenes.”
This, despite the fact that, at the time Roland disappeared into the West, and reappeared as a battered amnesiac, Anna Emery was earning by way of Shrikesdale holdings, investments and income more than $7,000 an hour.
ECCENTRIC AS ANNA Emery Shrikesdale became in her seventh decade, she wasn’t unlike a number of Philadelphia dowagers of her circle who worried obsessively about money, no matter the size of their fortunes. They were fully capable of giving away enormous sums to charity, or, upon impulse, paying as much as $400,000 for a painting promoted by Joseph Duveen; then they reacted by cutting their household budgets to the bone, or going without buying a single new item of clothing for a full season. Anna Emery took a sort of grim pride in the very dowdiness of her attire; she refused to heat many of the rooms in Castlewood Hall (including the servants’ quarters); guests at her infrequent dinner parties were dismayed to confront fish, butter, sauces, and linen of less than the high
Had Roland allowed it, Anna Emery would gladly have spent a good deal of money on him. But he cared only for books, evenings at the theater and concert hall, and occasional retreats, as he called them, to “lonely and unexpected” parts of the world where his name and face were unknown. So, the ill-considered trip to Colorado in the spring of 1914, made, as Roland declared, for the sake of his physical and spiritual salvation.
“If you leave me now, Roland, I am afraid we will never see each other again on this earth,” Anna Emery said; and Roland, hardening himself against her tears, said, “If I do not leave now, Mother, I will not be able to tolerate myself on this earth.”