My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates
Not having known how much I’d loved Thurston, till then. Till knowing there was no longer any Thurston, but only my memory. That ragged hole in the heart that music must fill—yet never fills.
The truck driven so capably by Sister Beulah Rose sped east on Fifty-seventh Street in the direction of fashionable Fifth Avenue, vibrating and rattling, exhaust spewing out its rear. Darian would have an impression afterward of words, Bible verses probably, in glaring red letters on its sides.
Its rear license plate, attached to the truck by wires, was caked in mud, unreadable.
3.
Yes I was brazen, and will remain so.
No I have no shame as you know shame. And want none.
So with the passage of time Darian Licht would tell himself. Yet on the evening of his disastrous début as a composer, he feels little such confidence. At the age of twenty-eight he is a very young man, virginal in most respects: his pride has been stung as by a swarm of angry hornets.
Worse yet, Darian will have to return to the Westheath School knowing that those senior faculty members who’d disappoved of his Carnegie Hall début, under the sponsorship of elderly Mrs. Frick, would believe their judgment vindicated. To his face, they’d wished him well; but made excuses for being unable to attend the recital in Manhattan. “Of course, it’s but the début,” they told Darian with seemingly sincere faces. “Your Lost Village will surely be played many times, in America at least!”
In his rented apartment in an old mansion in Schenectady there are numerous such compositions, several of greater ambition than Esopus; which Darian in despair that his vision (“If vision be the word, and not rather madness”) will ever be realized. Not even his two or three musical friends know how many pieces of music Darian Licht has attempted since early adolescence. More than twenty are formally complete, like Esopus, and await performance; dozens remain in sketchy form—sonatas, string quartets and quintets, miniature symphonies (“Silence: Dusk” is eight minutes long); elegies, marches, nocturnes, madrigals, cantatas; “letters”—“impressions”—“reveries.” The compositions are scored for all variety of musical instruments and many instruments (pebbles, glass beaker, crackling flame, washboard) not ordinarily considered musical. There is an opera for forty-eight voices, including the voices of children, animals and the dead, untitled and uncompleted after fifteen years, which would present the life of a village (like Muirkirk) for an intense twenty-four-hour period.
All that I’d lost was not lost. Wayward motions of the soul. Like wood smoke rising, our lives . . . our music.
AT THE TIME of his notorious Manhattan début, Darian Licht is in his third year as “visiting instructor” at the Westheath School of Music in Schenectady, a school of regional distinction and ambition under the aggressive directorship of a former musical prodigy and composer named Myrick Sheffield. Among his circle of friends and admirers, Sheffield is considered an American musical genius, unfairly unrecognized in New York City; his compositions are lavishly romantic, in the flamboyant style of his master Franz Liszt; as a pianist he’s a dynamo of keyboard virtuosity, ponderously sentimental, showy and imprecise. The very antithesis of Darian Licht: yet Sheffield hired Darian with the shrewd knowledge that for a low salary, and no contract from year to year, he could acquire a brilliantly talented young music teacher with little thought of academic achievement and financial security. “Attractive to women as he is, Licht is blind to his own attractions. His sex is all in his head: his music. He will never marry and will never need much money. He neither knows nor cares of his own worth. And I will be the judge of that worth, to Westheath”—so Sheffield has publicly boasted. Though he’s fond of the younger man, too; perceiving him as a rival, yet a worthy rival to be bested. (Sheffield would be more jealous of Darian Licht if he knew how the more advanced Westheath students have made a cult of Darian Licht and his musical theories which, while incomprehensible, and perhaps mad, have the force of being contrary to most of what is taught at the school.)
It’s true that Darian is blind to his own attractiveness, and therefore blind to the attractiveness of women. Where one can’t take seriously the objects of desire, desire itself has little force; or, if it has force, its potency has burrowed underground, like certain fires that burn undetected, beneath the surface of the earth, for years. And there is the model, the monster-model, of Abraham Licht the lover of women, pitiless and absurd seeker of Venus Aphrodite in mortal women; that voracious and insatiable appetite Darian can’t think of without a shudder. “Do I hate the man, still?” Darian asks himself, twisting his lower lip between thumb and forefinger hard enough to hurt. “But why should I, Darian, hate him now?—we’re nothing to each other, now.”
Darian keeps up his contact with Esther, of course; for Esther is an avid letter-writer, and devoted to him. Through Esther he has news of Millie (whom he last saw in 1921 when Millie and new husband Warren Stirling were visiting in Boston, at the time Darian was briefly hired to teach composition and piano at the New England Conservatory) and Katrina (who remains in Muirkirk, a keeper of the old church-residence, now empty of Lichts). Always he will remain estranged from Abraham Licht—he’s certain. And Abraham on his side has made no attempt to contact Darian since December 1916.
What’s past but the graveyard of future. And no place to dwell.
Yet sometimes, in those feverish insomniac states that make the writing of music so exhausting, if exhilarating, Darian lapses into a waking dream at the keyboard and sees Father approaching him, all smiles and stooped for an embrace; Darian is a child again, yearning and dreading Father’s rough, smothering hug; the heat of his hard kiss; the warmth of his tobacco-whiskey breath. Hearing Father’s ringing words that are a summons to his soul, the sweetest, most piercing music Where will ye fly little birdies, Old Sir Ebeneezer Snuff knows y’r name, Old Ebeneezer Snuff sees all in Heaven, and Earth, and the Darksome Regions Beneath with his one almighty eye.
4.
Since childhood he’d been told he had a weak heart but who had told him this but Father? He doubted it was true.
Though sometimes he was short of breath. A stranger’s chill hand, fingers spread, pressing against his chest.
Yet he was physically fit: not strong, not muscular but lean, lithe, hardy, stubborn. His best musical ideas came to him while hiking, for miles in the rock-strewn foothills; tramping through winter fields, freezing gusts of air whining about his bent head. After he’d quit the Vanderpoel Academy Darian had wandered for months . . . years. Northward, westward through New York State and looping around, in a southerly direction, below the Great Lakes; working variously as a Western Union messenger boy, a printer’s assistant, an icehouse employee (until his breathlessness forced him to quit), even as a handyman in a boardinghouse in Oxard, Ohio, in which he roomed for $7 a week. He offered himself as an itinerant music teacher, his speciality piano and organ; he was a choir director for a Presbyterian church in Flint, Indiana; he tried his hand at piano-tuning. He hitched rides with travelers headed west; risked injury riding the rails, in boxcars in the company of homeless, sometimes desperate men. In Needham, Minnesota, he remained for nearly a year, working in the post office and living in a cheap hotel near the train depot and giving much of his spare time to Colonel Harris’s Needham Silver Cornet Band under whose spell he’d fallen hearing the vigorous playing of these sixteen men one summer evening in the town green. What music is this? Who is calling to me? Back in the East he’d fallen temporarily under the spell, knowing it was a malevolent spell, of Arnold Schoenberg, whose Five Pieces for Orchestra had penetrated his soul; only hearing Colonel Harris’s band had cleansed his head, or so he would swear. Can one fall in love with a band? a music? a sound? This brass band was composed of men between the ages of twenty-two and eighty-one who played with an extraordinary degree of enthusiasm and energy such instruments as the E-flat cornet, the B-flat cornet, the alto, the tenor, the baritone, the tuba, the bass drum, the snare drum, the slide trombone and the mighty
The hardy little band marched as frequently as well-wishers and admirers would have them, or perhaps more frequently. They were a legend of sorts in Needham, a small city otherwise not known for musical ambition. Of course, the Colonel, long retired from the U.S. Army, was the driving force, the soul of the band; either you were an unquestioning instrument in his imagination, or you were not likely to remain long in the Silver Cornet Band. Military marches, quicksteps, polkas, schottisches, the national anthem, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” . . . ” All Quiet Along the Potomac” . . . “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” . . . the Colonel’s transcriptions of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “The Band Played On,” “Peg o’ My Heart” . . . even “Adieu! ’Tis Love’s Last Greeting,” “Gaily Through Life I Wander,” “The Angel’s Whisper.” Darian, marching with the men, banging on his drum until his arms and hands ached, felt a thrill previously unknown to him, that music might be performed in the open air; that music might be greeted with noisy, hearty applause, cheers and whistles, by men, women and children who would never have tolerated a concert of “serious” music. And most of all the music moved through both space and time: you didn’t sit, nor even stand, you marched.
And wasn’t Darian drawn to the band, and to the strong personality of Colonel Harris (brisk, stout, genial and quarrelsome by turns, with a drink-flushed face and white tobacco-stained drooping moustache) because here was a version, not wicked but benign, of Abraham Licht. Father not-Father.
In the end, though, Darian left Needham, Minnesota. For even happiness can wear out; even happiness is not the quest.
5.
“But you are happy?—you look happy,” Millicent said with a half-accusing ring to her honeyed voice. “You haven’t changed,” she said, smiling as she lied, “—nearly at all.”
Darian laughed. “I can’t believe that,” he said.
“That you’re happy—?”
“That I haven’t changed.”
“—When I have, so greatly, you mean to say!” Millicent brightly exclaimed.
And reached across the tea things to rap at his hand with her pretty lacquered fingernails. Darian caught, not for the first time since she’d removed her gloves, a flash of her rings.
This beautiful woman in the silver cloche hat, thirty years old, lips subtly colored, her steely-blue eyes fixed upon his with a disconcerting intensity—was she really Darian’s sister Millie whom he’d once adored?
Millie teased, asking him another time if she’d changed—“For the better, I hope?” All the while, her eyelids quivered as if she might be fighting back tears.
(Millie had already wept at their meeting, in Darian’s boardinghouse as her husband looked uneasily on. Darian, resisting emotion, had embraced his perfumed sister fondly, yet slightly stiffly. What is it we want from each other, what do we imagine we can give?)
Now that Millicent had made what appeared to be a very good marriage, and had moved away to live in Richmond, Virginia, she was, as Esther had warned him, a woman of the South; of superior breeding and culture; so assured of her background and her present social status she could afford the mild self-deprecatory airs Darian had noted in those classmates of his at Vanderpoel who were from the most legendary old families. (Though Millie’s husband Warren wasn’t a Virginian by birth, Darian gathered, but was in fact from upstate New York.) Edgy, chattering, alternately sipping tea and lighting up one of her cigarettes (her brand was Omar, a “Turkish” tobacco), she seemed, even as she asked Darian about himself, to be drawing back; maintaining a vigilance he’d assumed would disappear when they were alone together, out of Warren Stirling’s company. Almost wistfully she asked him another time if he was happy, so far from home, among strangers; and Darian said, annoyed, that there was no reason for him not to be happy. He wasn’t a child any longer: he was twenty-one years old.
“And aren’t we all, the Lichts, happiest among strangers?” Darian asked.
Millie stared; said nothing; after a moment stubbed out her cigarette, and reached into her beaded handbag for another.
Against a stately background of palm fronds, wicker and black marble and ceiling-high mirrors, Mrs. Warren Stirling’s blond enameled beauty shone to dramatic effect. She was wearing a fashionable smocklike dress in crimson jersey wool with a satin waistline dropped to the hips; the silver cloche hat, fitting her head tightly, seemed to be compressing it, into a stylish and hurtful sort of innocence. By contrast with his glamorous older sister Darian knew himself shabby in a mismatched jacket and trousers and a tieless shirt, open at the collar. While Millie who was Mrs. Millicent Stirling seemed fully at home in the elegant tearoom of the Hotel Ritz-Carlton, though the place was as new to her as to Darian, he felt ungainly and unwanted, like a homeless drifter who’d wandered into the wrong setting. He devoured too many of the tiny crustless sandwiches and slopped his English tea into his saucer. Saying, enigmatically, “Yet we are brother and sister, y’know, Millie—I mean, we have the same father. Or had.”
Millie stared at him, startled. “Why do you say that? Why say such a thing?”
Darian shrugged. What he meant, damned if he knew.
Millie pretended that nothing was wrong, that her reunion with her youngest brother was proceeding with the bright brisk animation of a reunion scene in a bittersweet melodrama; there was emotional strain, but all would turn out in the end. In her role as affluent older sister, a much-loved married woman with life brimming in the wings, she plied Darian with questions until he grew more and more taciturn. Why had he broken off relations with Father; how had he come to be on the staff at the New England Conservatory—“Which Warren’s aunt says is very prestigious”; did he visit Muirkirk; did he miss Muirkirk; did he approve of Esther’s nursing career; did he truly believe he might make a living in music—teaching, performing, composing? Thoughtfully she said, as if the words pained her, “Darian, what a precarious life! The world sees only ‘stars’ and knows nothing of the gifted, even inspired musicians, actors, artists who try, and try, and try—and fail. Because there are too many of us.” She laughed, exhaling bluish smoke. “I mean—of you.”
Darian shrugged, slopping more tea into his saucer. His heart pounded in dislike of his newfound sister.
As if there were too many Darian Lichts.
Next, Millie asked him if he’d ever been in love, or if there was anyone whom he loved now—“I mean, you know, in a romantic sense.” Her voice was conspicuously Southern by now. Again Darian shrugged, not liking so personal a question; and embarrassed, and resentful, not knowing how to reply. He hoped never to succumb to mere romance. He hoped he was superior to childish, primitive cravings. “Possibly,” he said. “If ever I become that bored.” Millie laughed, uncomfortably. Darian was recalling why he’d felt resentful of Millie, even as he’d missed her: he’d written several songs for soprano voice, for her, as a part of his Muirkirk opera cycle, and sent them to her by way of Esther, but she’d never responded. He’d known that she’d received them because she’d told Esther she had. Like Thurston, like Elisha—Millie had gone away, and forgotten him.
Like a magician Millie was extracting from her silver lamé purse a packet of photographs which she passed over to Darian. Most were of her baby—“Maynard Franklin Stirling. Your nephew, Darian.” Darian found himself moved by the baby’s sweet, quizzical face and startled expression. He didn’t want to think the baby resembled, ever so slightly, his mother’s father. Millie said defiantly, “He’s something!—he’s real.”
Darian acknowledged, yes it was so. Nothing more real than a baby created out of one’s mortal flesh. “You’re happy, then, Millie. You’ve crossed over.
“Yes.” Millie spoke with satisfaction, taking the photographs back from Darian and checking them, severely, as if she feared one might be missing, or in some way altered; then dropping them into her purse and snapping it shut. There. That’s that! Darian sensed how she’d been preparing to ask a question long contemplated, and now plunged into it, more nervously than she wished—“You’ve lost contact with Elisha, I suppose. You never hear of him or from him—I suppose.”
Darian shook his head, sadly.
There was an awkward pause. Darian, not looking at Millie, could hear her quickened breathing; he imagined her close to breaking into sobs. Her grief wouldn’t be pure but a grief of loss and anger.
Like a spoiled Virginia matron Millie called to the waiter to bring more hot water for their tea. Even with the tea cozy, their tea had become lukewarm.