My Heart Laid Bare (35 page)

“Then how come you talkin' to me, brother?—how come you
here
, and sweatin' it?”

“Because I got to be some place.”

“Yes man, but how come you got to be
here
?”

“Because it has come to this,” Little Moses says, suddenly panicked. “Because—I don't know.”

“Now you tellin' us straight, you don't know no God-damn more than anybody else,” Smith shouts happily, clapping Little Moses' back so hard Little Moses begins to cough, “—because you is the same as anybody else inside and out. Because you is
me
, nigger, on the inside just as on the
out
side, should anybody investigate innards and guts and kinda stuff. Somebody do autopsy on
you
, my friend, and then on
me
, you think they gonna find much any different? What you think they gonna find?”

Little Moses is leaning against the bar, head lowered, watery eyes squinched up tight. His mouth feels as if somebody has kicked it. “Shit, man—I don't know.”

“Louder, man!”

But Little Moses shakes his head, sulky and insulted. If he could retreat somewhere, if he could have some peace and stillness he'd figure out how to reply; but these fools grinning at him, laughing and pointing—it's hopeless.

Smith persists, like a horse that can't stop trampling some poor broken-boned bastard under his hooves, “You think they goin' to find black guts in one, and no-color guts in the other? I
seen
nigger guts come spillin out and the sight ain't pretty, and I sure don't want to see it another time but I'd swear they ain't black any more'n a white man's guts is gonna be white; but maybe
you
got to see it, friend, like Thomas he got to poke his finger in Jesus' side before he get the point. Or you getting the point now?” Smith generously lays a hot, heavy hand on Little Moses' neck, a hand like a small furry animal. Little Moses shudders at the feel of it. “Say what,” says Smith, “we have ourself one more drink and forget that ‘meta-whatyoucallit-phys-cal' shit. That stuff, my man, only get in the
way.
”

NEXT EVENING HE'S
running out into the street cursing paying no heed to a woman shouting into his face, “Go back, they killin' folks out there!”—the night sky is awash with flames, policemen on horseback swinging billy
clubs, a girls' head streaming blood, about to fall beneath a horse's plunging hooves and he's shouting he's cursing not drunk but stone-cold sober making a grab at the policeman's reins, a grab at the man himself, trying to wrench him down from his saddle but a second policeman sidles his horse close and strikes him on the shoulder, on the side of the head, on the crown of the head as he falls, he's writhing on the cobblestone pavement trying to shield his bleeding head, his stomach, his groin, as the white-man billy clubs swing in wide arcs like clock-pendulums . . . and the horses whinny and froth in terror . . . bone-crushing hooves strike blindly . . . his right leg, his right arm, his backbone, his unprotected head cracked like a melon.

One of the unidentified bodies. Negro, male, casualty of Harlem uprising.

D
oes my hand tremble?—
it does not.
Do I doubt?—
I do not.
Am I an ordinary suitor, fearful of rejection?—
I am not.
”

Silver-haired Albert St. Goar, a gentleman in the prime of life (for who would guess that he is nearly fifty-five?—his skin so ruddy, so flushed with good health, and free of lines and creases) regards himself critically in his full-length bedroom mirror, in his apartment overlooking Rittenhouse Square; sees with relief that the disfiguring puffiness about his eyes seems to have vanished; notes with approval the new style in which his barber
fashions his hair, brushing it forward in seemingly lush little wings, rather than back, to expose an uncertain hairline; and experiments with several of his most successful smiles—the hesitant, the boyish, the amused, the half-frowning (as if overtaken by surprise), the “sly.”

And the lover's spontaneous smile of fateful recognition.

(For Albert St. Goar, despite the maturity of his years, and a certain worldliness in his manner, is in love; and, in the lady's presence, obliged to display the adoration he feels . . . otherwise the lady, being a person of high degree and, perhaps, as secretly vain as he, will mistakenly gauge his feeling as less than it is. “For here we have a case—and it has often been so with me—of being required to ‘assume a virtue' even when I have it,” St. Goar thinks.)

Slowly, with deliberation, he turns his head from left to right . . . from right to left . . . studying his profile (a just perceptible fleshiness about the jowls, and, yes, some puffiness about the eyes) while he hums Siegfried's joyous surprise at the discovery of Brünnhilde . . . Brünnhilde surrounded by her daunting tongues of flame.

“Am I like other men?—
I am not.
Need I fear, like other men?—
I need not.
Can she find the strength to resist me?—
she cannot.
”

Smartly he slaps his cheeks—adjusts yet again his starched collar, and his black silk four-in-hand—smiles his private Licht smile (rows of strong white clenched teeth)—and declares himself ready for his evening with the wealthy young widow Mrs. Eva Clement-Stoddard.

IN THE EARLY
autumn of 1915, at about the time when, in distant Europe, French and British troops were landing in Greece, and Bulgaria at last declared war on Serbia, all of Philadelphia society was abuzz: for it seemed a distinct possibility that Eva Clement-Stoddard and the cosmopolite Albert St. Goar (formerly of London and Nice, now residing in Rittenhouse Square with his lovely daughter Matilde) might soon announce their
engagement . . . and this despite the fact that Eva had vowed, years before, when her husband died, never to marry again; and despite the fact that the handsome St. Goar was more or less a stranger to Philadelphia.

Why otherwise would St. Goar be so unusually attentive to Mrs. Clement-Stoddard's every word, glance, sigh, and nuance of expression? Why would his frowning gaze invariably shift in
her
direction, despite the presence of women (married, unmarried, widowed) of equal or superior attractions, whose fortunes rivalled hers? These were women after all who made some effort to be agreeable to men, and were not by turns capricious and icy-cold, like the unpredictable Eva; nor were they rumored to be, like her, nearly impossible for any suitor to approach. (Perhaps, it was said, Eva simply did not like
men.
) With her much-lauded “amateur expert's” ear for classical music, and her taste for
haute cuisine
, and her eye for art, architecture, home furnishings, and the like, she took distinct pride in being an exacting hostess; and, as a guest in others' homes, didn't scruple to express her dissatisfaction when things failed to measure up to her standards. “Money cannot buy
taste
,” Eva was known to have said, “—any more than it can buy
genius.
”

As a consequence of the young widow's imperial, self-absorbed manner, Eva Clement-Stoddard impressed observers as taller than she was, and larger of frame; her natural reserve and shyness were mistaken for disdain. It had long been her custom to wear plainly styled (though costly) clothes of British design; and her lustreless brown hair in so simple a style it might be called “classical.” Some observers held her to be an uncommonly attractive woman, with vivid dark eyes, a small straight nose, and a finely sculpted mouth; others were harsh in their condemnation of her odd, angular, narrow face, her “ironic” eyes, her slightly faded skin, and, most of all her habit of seeming to smile
yet not smiling at all.

Her husband died when she was only twenty-nine, leaving her two trust funds (worth approximately $3 million, as Albert St. Goar has learned) and various properties in and about Philadelphia, including a
thirty-two-room mansion in Greek Revival style on the Main Line, and a cottage in Newport; she'd developed an enthusiasm for art of the Flemish Renaissance, and had begun to collect paintings under the tutelage of the redoubtable art dealer Duveen (a gentleman whom Albert St. Goar envied); she owned any number of extraordinary pieces of jewelry, including a famed Cartier necklace of twelve emeralds spaced along a rope of one thousand diamonds, worth, it was said, more than $1 million . . . though such vulgar displays of wealth, such conspicuous “icons,” as Eva called them, she naturally scorned to wear.

It was whispered by members of her husband's family that Eva's secret tragedy, of which she was too proud to speak, was simply the fact of her being childless; and knowing herself, for all her air of brittle self-assurance and superiority, not fully a
woman.
How else to account for her rapid shifts of mood, her obsessive interest in an infant niece or nephew, and then, so very suddenly, her contemptuous withdrawal of interest? Though she was only in her mid-thirties she was acquiring a reputation for eccentricity: she mourned her husband for a full week each year, on the anniversary of his death in early December; she attended a different church service each Sunday, contending that “all Gods are equal—equally true and equally false”; she spent a highly intense six months studying what she called Law, and another six months studying what she called Medicine; with a desperate sort of fervor she even took up spiritualism—pronouncing it, in the end, “far too
hopeful
to be plausible.” She commissioned portraits of the deceased Mr. Clement-Stoddard, but rejected them all; she commissioned original works of music, “symphonic poems” being her particular passion . . . but these too failed to please. Like most members of her circle, she and her husband journeyed to Europe each summer, but following his death, and her own “appointment with destiny” as she called it (Eva Clement-Stoddard had been booked to sail on the maiden voyage of the
Titanic
in April 1912, and cancelled her plans at the last minute because of illness), she grew fretfully superstitious, vowing she'd never
again leave the civilized perimeters of the United States, or even the environs of Philadelphia.

“For I had rather drown in boredom,” she laughingly declared, “than in the Atlantic.”

Yet more peculiar was Eva's habit of keeping to herself, like a religious recluse, for weeks at a time, in her Philadelphia house. Declining all invitations; refusing to invite visitors; neglecting her charity work, and her correspondence; steeping herself in material of an uplifting or “purgative” kind. Gibbon's great history of the Roman Empire, the rude rhapsodic lyrics of Walt Whitman, a plunging into the Upanishads one month, and into the Bhagavad Gita the next—how American women of the upper classes hunger for enlightenment! There was a season in which Eva attempted to master, under the tutelage of an Indian sage, the ancient, lost language of Sanskrit—with what success, no one knew. And Eva “kept up” with politics and war news, and loved to debate the men: with Anglophiles she argued that England had brought disaster on herself, and that the United States should not be drawn into fighting out of sentimental ties of loyalty; with the isolationists she argued yet more fiercely that President Wilson, to whom she was related, and whom she'd never liked, was endangering the honor of the United States by trying to keep from declaring war against Germany. “It's as Teddy Roosevelt has charged—the President is a coward. He isn't a
man.
”

When the gentleman known as Albert St. Goar, formerly of London, first set eyes upon Eva Clement-Stoddard, before even being introduced to her by Mrs. Shrikesdale at a benefit performance of
Così fan tutte
at the Philadelphia Opera House, in September 1915—he murmured aloud, “It's she!”

For he seemed to know the woman already, and to know that she knew him.

For not since the years of his early manhood when he'd been fatally
vulnerable to the authority of an image of Woman, had he been so struck by a woman's face and presence of being; and by his conviction that, in her, he would at last be fulfilled.

MY DREAM OF
a child, a son, to take the place of those who have betrayed me. Whose names I have expunged from my heart.

Yet his dream is primarily of Woman . . . a woman. Of such exceptional qualities, possessed of such powers, he'll be drawn out of himself; he will be obliterated, and resurrected in her. Above all the woman will allow him to forget the injuries inflicted upon him by women in the past. (Heartless women. Ill-deserving of Abraham Licht's love and devotion. There were Arabella, and Morna, and Sophie, who preferred death to her life with him. These were “wives” he'd never officially married and from whom consequently he can never be divorced.)

He will court this woman, overcoming her reluctance. He will marry her—this time. They will indeed have a child, an heir.

“I'm in the prime of life,” he tells himself eagerly. “I've scarcely begun my life! My greatest conquests lie ahead.”

FROM THE START
it's noted, not without jealousy in some quarters, that Eva Clement-Stoddard and the dashing Albert St. Goar are mysteriously attracted to each other. Their conversations are quick and elliptical, like the virtuoso sparring of fencers who challenge one another less with the intent of doing injury than for the purpose of happily demonstrating their skill. St. Goar chances to mention his romantic attachment to Kensington Gardens, for instance, in the very late afternoon of an autumn day; and Mrs. Clement-Stoddard challenges him at once as to
which
flowers and
which
shrubs on
which
paths—for it seems she shares his fondness for the park, which is bound up with her early girlhood, when her family spent six
weeks of every autumn in London. On another occasion, the lady quotes Tocqueville on the pernicious consequences of Equality (“in democratic ages that which is most fluctuating amid the fluctuation of all around is the heart of man”), and Albert St. Goar rejoins with a spirited dismissal of the bigoted French cynic, as he calls him, who did not understand the American soul; and slandered all Americans by his sweeping judgments, based, by necessity, on a false application of
his
principles to
our
condition. “How can we take seriously,” St. Goar says, addressing all of the room by way of his particular attentiveness to the embarrassed Mrs. Clement-Stoddard, “a man who so little understands our democracy as to say, and I quote, ‘The love of wealth is to be traced, either as a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do'—? It
is
a slander!—and indefensible.”

While others listen in resigned admiration, St. Goar and Eva archly discuss the politics of the day—the follies of recent history—the current ambiguous state of the arts; whether culture has fallen into a severe decline since the turn of the century; whether war with Germany is necessary, or merely, as St. Goar ominously says, “inevitable.” For weeks in Mrs. Clement-Stoddard's circle talk centers upon Henry Ford's much-publicized peace ship,
Oscar II
, which was being organized to set sail for Europe with $1 million in gold to be paid to anyone who could stop the war. (“Anyone,” St. Goar wittily observes, “—who speaks with a German accent.”) It is the wealthy automobile manufacturer's boast that
he
would bring the boys home for Christmas (for, by this time, a goodly number of American men had volunteered to fight for the Allied cause) where government leaders like Woodrow Wilson had failed. All of Christianity, Ford declares, must join to stop the useless slaughter. And it is fitting that he, the genius inventor of the Model A and the Model T Ford car, and the initiator of the controversial $5 daily wage, should negotiate peace. For if the first business of American businessmen is money, the second will be salvation—of others. Eva Clement-Stoddard declares she's sympathetic
with Henry Ford's cause, though she considers, as do others in her circle, the Detroit billionaire a crude and socially distasteful man; she's contributed several thousand dollars to the venture; and toyed for a few days with the possibility of joining the one hundred sixty select passengers in the Oscar II. Albert St. Goar, however, is unsparing in his ridicule of the project. “Has there ever been a human being so vain, so deluded with self-importance, as this ‘Ford' of yours!” St. Goar marvels. “If we didn't know the man's wealth, we would suspect that the
Oscar II
is nothing but a confidence game to play upon the charitable impulses of Christian ladies—of both sexes.” So eloquently and wittily does St. Goar speak, Henry Ford and the quest for peace are laughed out of the room, with Eva Clement-Stoddard among the heartiest laughers.

SAYING GOOD NIGHT
to her honored guest that evening, pleasantly warmed and emboldened by wine, Eva remarks, in a moment of rare girlish coquetry, “Not even a goddess of ancient times could ‘put anything over' on such a skeptic as
you
, Albert St. Goar!” Which so takes St. Goar by surprise, the gentleman stares at the lady, his expression for once tender, and undefined; and no witty rejoinder at hand.