My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates
Only consider: the refusal of Congress to pass a lynching law; the refusal of Congress to pass civil rights legislation; the refusal of Congress to honor the LAND AND INDEMNITY BILL sponsored by the only organization to pride itself upon being WHOLLY BLACK and WHOLLY DEVOTED TO THE RECLAMATION OF BLACK NOBILITY.
And the rise, in this past decade, of the KLAN.
The rise, my brothers and sisters, of THE WHITE CANNIBAL-DEVILS SWORN TO DESTROY US.
Five million Klansmen, thus ten or fifteen million Klansmen in spirit. Five million, ten and fifteen million, how many more million in the Kingdom of the Damned: eleven Klansmen governors . . . yet more senators . . . numberless congressmen, from every district . . . mayors . . . councilmen . . . sheriffs, policemen, federal agents . . . lawyers . . . millionaire businessmen . . . clergy of the so-called Christian faith . . . school-teachers . . . workingmen: LOYAL MEMBERS OF THE KLAN SWORN TO DESTROY US.
So it is my brothers and my sisters on this historic night of 19 June 1929 upon this great occasion of the FIRST ANNUAL UNIVERSAL NEGRO CONFRATERNITY RALLY sponsored by THE WORLD NEGRO BETTERMENT & LIBERATION UNION, I, Prince Elihu, declare to you that we must unite that THE NEGRO RACE BE SAVED; and AFRICA RECLAIMED; and COLONIAL DESPOTISM OVERTHROWN; and THE WHITE CANNIBAL-DEVIL DEFEATED.
For all that we HAVE BEEN, we WILL BE AGAIN.
For the FUTURE IS OURS.
FOR HONOR IS THE SUBJECT OF OUR STORY.
FOR I SAY TO YOU MY BROTHERS AND MY SISTERS: HONOR IS THE SUBJECT OF OUR STORY.
THUS, THE FIRST Annual Universal Negro Confraternity Rally of 19 June 1929, which would also be the last such rally; and at its conclusion past 11 P.M. Millicent Stirling is too exhausted and distraught to rise from her seat, she’s been crying silently for a long time, the front of her stylish silk dress is damp with tears, her black straw hat has fallen, or has been knocked, onto the floor; she has given herself up as years ago she’d given herself up to the nightmare of childbirth, a roaring in her ears, a roaring in all her veins, she’s given herself up to grief, to shame, to the anguish of love, her heart is broken, this throbbing boiling pain is her heart, she will give herself up henceforth to sorrow, to middle age and eventually old age and death, she’s scarcely aware of her surroundings, or even that Prince Elihu gleaming with perspiration like an oiled idol has left the stage, and the stage lights have been lowered, and the lights in the hall have been raised, she doesn’t notice how she’s being worriedly regarded by several of the neatly dressed young Negro ushers, for by this time most of the Garden has emptied out and Millie remains, a hunched broken figure in her seat—What’s wrong ma’am? What you cryin’ about ma’am? You need some help there ma’am?—but in her dove-gray silk dress and matching stockings, in her white eyelet gloves and her white, white skin, the pride of her white skin, its shame, its outrage, its horror from which there can be, so long as she lives, no salvation, she doesn’t hear.
IN OLD MUIRKIRK
1.
Am I defeated?—I am not.
Do I smell of mortality?—I do not.
Will I return to my former triumphs?—I will. I will.
AT LAST IN a fierce-howling March 1932 Katrina dies. If Abraham Licht could blame Katrina’s death on the infamous Wall Street Crash of some years previous he would, he would!
Katrina has died, and is buried in the village cemetery but Abraham Licht, an aging (yet not-old) man himself—ivory-pale filmy-floating hair grown past his ears, though papery-thin across the crown of his head, eyes sharp with suspicion and mouth quivering with irony—knows better. He knows the household will never be rid of the old woman.
“Listen. There she is, Katrina scolding me again,” Abraham says, cocking his head as wind, or winds, whistle in the chimney and tear along the eaves like shrieking bats. Abraham shakes his head in disgust. “Katrina, dear: do leave us alone! We must get on with our lives, you know.” Is Abraham joking, or serious, often it isn’t clear; as, now, it isn’t at all clear; for Rosamund pauses to regard her husband with fond, worried eyes; and little Melanie, playing on the floor with a rag-lynx that Katrina sewed for her, stares blinking and smiling up at her father, perplexed. Darian, entering the kitchen, feels he’s entering a scene that has all but played itself out and he doesn’t know his lines or what is expected of him. Then, hearing the wind, the perpetual wind of Muirkirk, and seeing the expression on his father’s face that is both mock-grave and genuinely alarmed, he supposes it’s Katrina again, or in any case the subject of Katrina. “Y’hear, Darian?” Abraham asks, a forefinger upraised. “That old woman scolding. Laughing. At us. At me.”
They hadn’t parted on the most civil of terms, it seems. For Katrina hadn’t approved of Abraham Licht marrying a “girl younger than Millie” and she certainly hadn’t approved of Abraham Licht fathering “a daughter who should be a granddaughter” and most of all she hadn’t approved of Abraham Licht’s most recent bankruptcy—no matter that, as he’d explained dozens of times, it was not his fault but the fault of certain wealthy manipulators of the stock market.
Darian, like Rosamund, chooses to interpret Abraham’s jesting about Katrina as simply that, jesting. Sometimes the cry is clearly the wind, sometimes it’s the cry of a hawk, an owl, a wild creature in the marsh, sometimes it resembles a baby’s cry and sometimes, yes, you might say it resembles Katrina’s voice lifted in annoyance, but at the moment the sound is obviously the wind—isn’t it? At any rate, it’s growing fainter.
“She’s retreating for now, back into the swamp,” Abraham says thoughtfully. “But we’ll never be rid of her—never.”
2.
A chill windy evening in April 1932 and Darian is experimenting with his “echo-chamber piano,” an instrument of his own invention, in his high-ceilinged music studio at the rear of the old Church of the Nazarene, and he hears a light footfall behind him; not the child’s, for Melanie always runs head-on into “Uncle” Darian’s studio no matter how many times she’s been reprimanded; and surely not Abraham Licht’s—for Abraham would have made it a point to knock formally on the door, in ironic acknowledgment that, patriarch of the family as he is, and owner of the property, he might not be welcome in his eccentric composer-son’s studio.
Not Melanie, and not Abraham. Darian turns, calmly. “Yes?—oh, hello.”
Darian speaks calmly. A calm smile. Though so nervous he has botched an intricate passage of crossed triads he’s been playing, fortunately this composition for echo-chamber piano isn’t the sort of music one can easily judge is botched or played with perfect command, and it’s natural for him to lift his eyes to his father’s wife’s face, and smile. Though this is the first time (rapidly he’s calculating) since he came here to live eighteen months, three and a half weeks ago, that Rosamund has entered his studio alone or uninvited.
Strange how, even now that Katrina has died, and the house is relatively empty, Darian and Rosamund are rarely alone together. And, alone together, rarely do they speak.
Now the woman’s image floats in a cloudy mirror propped against one of the pews Darian dragged into the room, and Darian at his keyboard observes it calmly. Rosamund facing him, yet in the mirror in profile. His fingers return to the keys, plucking out delicate, subtle notes, less strident now, for these notes are being struck like harp strings, even the strings’ vibrations are music; even Darian’s slightly faltering, thrown-off playing is part of the composition, the instrument, the music itself. Notation: music may be interrupted at this point. An air of calm surprise! Rosamund stands motionless for a beat or two, listening. Darian wonders what she hears. He knows what he hears, but what does another person hear? As all composers must wonder.
Darian’s father’s wife. A city-bred woman, a woman born to affluence, yet a woman, as Darian has learned, not to be swiftly summed up, or understood. Now she’s a country wife, a Muirkirk wife, the mother of a three-year-old, she lets her smoke-colored hair loose to her shoulders, sometimes tied back by a scarf; she wears men’s trousers, wide-le
Calmly regarding each other across a space of approximately six feet, now that the echo-chamber strings have ceased their vibrating, in exquisite silence.
3.
All defeat not extinction Abraham Licht records in his journal is but temporary.
His journal, his voluminous memoir. A ledger whose pages have been covered in handwriting and in coded hieroglyphics, into which loose sheets of paper have been inserted. Once the victim identifies his enemies he is no longer a victim. For revenge is the final act.
TRUE, ABRAHAM LICHT has retired “into the country” but he has not retired from business. In his seventy-second year he’s never felt more vigorous, more energetic; his brain swirling ceaselessly with plans, plots, bold new ventures.
“Once I regain some of what I’ve lost, I will begin again.”
Abraham needs to regain only a fraction of what he has lost, and he tells himself this is crucial. The merest 1/2000 of those lost millions, which would give him more than $12,000 to purchase a partnership in a cider mill in Paie-des-Sables (“apple cider” being but the mill’s official, legal product) or an investment in a Thoroughbred horse ranch in Manitowick or laboratory equipment that would allow him to manufacture Liebknecht’s Formula himself—which, given its tranquilizing effect, would prove hugely popular in this troubled, anxiety-ridden nation. If only the elixir could be manufactured in sufficient quantity, distributed, marketed, advertised, sold . . . he’d be a millionaire again, many times over! Of course, the small pharmaceutical company in Easton, Pennsylvania, that had been selling the elixir went bankrupt shortly after 29 October 1929, without having paid Abraham Licht more than $75,000 owed him.
“If I had but that $75,000 . . . like Archimedes with a lever, what might I accomplish!”
Brooding these ever-lengthening spring days upon a new business enterprise . . . a legitimate variation of The Game; legitimate in the sense of not being illegal. For since marrying Rosamund whom he loves beyond his own life, and since the birth of beautiful little Melanie, Abraham can’t hear the thought of even the possibility of being sent away to prison or indicted to stand trial. (How close he’d come, back in ’28! On the very eve of his wedding to Rosamund, in fact; when the Parris Clinic was under investigation by the New York State attorney general, and that fool Bies reluctant to pay the proper “fine.”) This new invention, however, as he’s tried to explain to Rosamund in their bed at night (for some reason, Abraham prefers to speak to Rosamund about such matters when they’re lying peacefully in the dark and when the sharp-eyed woman can’t see his face), would involve the manufacture not of a mere “product” but of the idea of a product; the fleeting, glistening, inviolable image of a product; to be sold to businessmen and politicians for their private use, who might then broadcast it to the American consumer who would then purchase, or vote for, not the product itself but the idea. “For why not systematically and scientifically manufacture those idiosyncratic notions fools have in their heads?—why allow them to remain haphazard or but partly controlled?” Abraham mused grandly. Rosamund murmured she didn’t understand, could he please explain more clearly? Abraham told her that the germ of the venture first came to him during his stint as a government agent in Washington when it came to be cheerfully known that Warren Harding had been elected President of the United States only because, by the merest comical (or cynical) chance, the man had the appearance of a “Roman senator”!—not that the American voter had the slightest idea of what a Roman senator might have looked like.
“The essence is, public opinion can be manipulated at will,” Abraham said, “provided of course there’s enough money to invest in advertising, in the right quarters.”
Rosamund laughed, or may have sighed. “But where is the satisfaction, Abraham, in that sort of thing? How could one take pride in accomplishing something ‘unreal’—and under such circumstances—making money, being elected to public office—”
Abraham cut her off impatiently. Rosamund was an intelligent woman, yet often not a very smart woman. “Pride, my dear,” he said, “is in our technique.”
UNTIL THE LAST breath is drawn, Abraham Licht writes, the last blow has not been dealt.
In his memoir he’s making a list of enemies: the men whom one day he will boldly and publicly name as the manipulators of the so-called Crash of 1929, in which billions of investors’ dollars were lost. He, Abraham Licht, will compile a dossier against them and file a complaint with the Justice Department! (Though he’s learned to his surprise that an old rival of his and Gaston Bullock Means’s is now director of the Bureau of Investigation—J. Edgar Hoover.) These men are Richard F. Whitney of the Banker’s Pool; Charles E. Mitchell of the National City Bank; the officers of the House of Morgan; the directors of the Federal Reserve Bank; John D. Rockefeller, Sr.; the “Aluminum King” Andrew Mellon, Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury; and the Republican President Hoover himself, who maintains three years after the catastrophe, that nothing serious has happened to the economy.
Abraham confides in Rosamund, and more recently in Darian who has come to live with them following the bankruptcy of the Westheath School of Music, that he will not be silenced, and will not be bought off or bribed; nor will he slink away in defeat—“Or blow out my brains like so many of my brother victims.”
For indeed, a number of Abraham Licht’s Manhattan associates have killed themselves. Or sunk into such dissolute habits of drinking bootleg liquor, it has come to the same thing.
AM I DEFEATED?—I am not.
Do I smell of mortality?—I do not.
Will I return to my former triumphs?—I will. I will.
IN HIS SECRET mirror, of which even Katrina knew nothing: a noble countenance from which, through suffering, all excess flesh has burned away . . . a forehead stark, ridged with bone beneath the papery skin . . . skin drawn tight across the cheekbones (not creased and flabby, repulsive, like that of others his age) . . . the eyes shrewd and ever-watchful, clear as washed glass. And, framing the face, a floating halo of hair suddenly white, purely white, very fine, very thin, diaphanous as milkweed pollen. Why, he has passed through the Fire; he has passed through; and the “fainting-spell” (or brain seizure, or stroke) he suffered in 1929 hasn’t touched him at all.
“Fate, do your worst! I am no craven coward.”
4.
I thought you called me.
Not I. My music.
Yet your music is you.
Impulsively he’d seized her hand, a warm rather grubby-floury hand, and would have pulled her to him, to kiss her, or to try to kiss her; but, with a childlike squeal, as if this were but a game and not achingly, heartrendingly real, his father’s young wife managed to turn, an elbow in his ribs, it’s an accident, they’re panting and laughing and little Melanie rushes into the studio laughing, shrieking—“Uncle Dar-yn! Play for us like you were! Don’t stop!”
Darling I will never stop. My music for you, and for your mother, never will I stop.
HIS ELDERLY FATHER’S wife. His elderly father’s daughter.
Can I? Dare I? Must I?
“Like this, Melanie!—no, sweetheart, not so hard! Like this.”
Rosamund stands barefoot beside the kitchen table, little Melanie in the crook of one strong arm, balanced on her hip, mother and daughter absorbed in the proper playing of the “icicle” D
Look at me. I love you.
I won’t look! Melanie and I are making music.
Darian laughs, and shrugs, and walks out of the kitchen. Abandoning them to the icicle. Listening from the threshold of his studio to the chiming, rippling notes, a music in code? But whose code? And what does it mean?
ON ONE OF his mysterious journeys Abraham Licht acquires a second-hand telescope with which, as he says, he will study the stars.
For long ago in another lifetime he knew a good deal about the constellations: how the conjunction of certain stars, planets, moons, influences human life, both on the level of the individual and in the aggregate. Now, unfortunately, he’s forgotten nearly everything.
In time, when she’s old enough to comprehend, he will teach his daughter (his only remaining daughter) the wisdom of the Heavens. That, in turn, she may teach her children.
For now that Time begins to accelerate there’s suddenly so much to know, and to do.
THE CHALLENGE IS to calibrate precisely the positioning of all the Heavenly bodies on the morning of 3 September 1929, when the market (and Abraham Licht’s fortune) was at an all-time high; and to calibrate their positioning on 24 October, when the Crash, as it was afterward to be called, began.