My Heart Laid Bare (5 page)

This mysterious and disturbing letter was delivered to the house in Greenley Square in the morning post, and opened by the distraught Mrs. Stirling in the late afternoon; read, and dazedly reread, if not fully comprehended, as she stood in her late husband's rosewood-panelled library in the handsome, black-laced mourning dress she had been wearing most of the day, her veiled black hat not yet removed. Seeing that his sister-in-law had suddenly stiffened, with an expression of baffled fright, Tyler Stirling, Maynard's younger brother, quickly approached her to inquire what the letter was; yet even as Fanny Stirling stammered anxiously that
she did not know what the letter was
, Tyler drew it discreetly from her trembling
fingers. With a rapid, practiced eye he scanned the offensive note, betraying no surprise or upset or incredulity; and, acting with the judicious calm for which the Stirling men were known, he folded the sheet of paper and slipped it into his inside coat pocket for safekeeping. (With similar composure Maynard Stirling had once received a note in court informing him of the birth of his son Warren, just as he was about to address a jury on behalf of his client, the plaintiff in a bitter lawsuit: betraying no hint of emotion, the attorney proceeded with his usual vigor and confidence, winning the case for his client.)

“What is the letter? Who is—‘Mina'? How dare a stranger speak with such intimacy, to—Maynard?” Fanny Stirling asked anxiously, and Tyler said, as if concluding an argument, “The letter was incorrectly addressed, and misdelivered. I suggest that you banish it from your thoughts, Fanny, at once.”

Yet what a riddle it was, and how it tormented her:
Y
^r
adoring Mina of Innisfail.

In the midst of her grief, Fanny Stirling's thoughts seized upon that childlike message, which Tyler had taken from her, and of which he would not speak. Nor did anyone else in the family know of it.
It is an omen. An evil omen. God help me!
The shock of Maynard's death had rendered Fanny nearly incapable of coherent thought and speech; her doctor had prescribed liberal dosages of “nerve medicine” which left her groggy and disoriented, as if struggling to retain consciousness in the midst of a dream; and what a battalion of Stirling in-laws, relatives, friends and social, business and political acquaintances the family had to contend with—! Even as her sons Warren and Felix believed they were comforting her, Fanny felt obliged to comfort them; this was the case with Maynard's elderly mother and aunts as well, who had adored him. The widow knew herself closely observed by female acquaintances in Contracoeur, and worried that she was being found wanting in certain particulars: the horror of Death had gradually become
obscured by the more immediate anxiety that Fanny was inadequate to the social demands of her position. Fanny Stirling was one of those well-to-do but insecure society women who agonize more about being
talked about
behind their back than about even illness or death.

Fanny Stirling, née Nederlander, a daughter of the barrel-manufacturing family of Buffalo, New York, was a girl of fifty at the time of her husband's unexpected death. Her personality was girlish, rather than womanly; her mannerisms—a way of ducking her head, a way of smiling, a way of fluttering her fingers in conversation—were meant to suggest girlhood, and not maturity; for the Stirling men had not admired, in women, forcefulness of manner or any suggestion of a restless, critical or speculative intelligence approaching their own. It had always amused Maynard, and made him love her the more, that she should try repeatedly to grasp the nature of his work, and repeatedly fail—“I swear, Fanny knows less about the law now than she did when we first met,” Maynard had liked to say with a smile. Nor was Fanny quite able to share Maynard's other interests—in billiards and golf, at which he excelled, and in the collecting of English and Scottish paintings, rare stamps, coins, and old manuscripts (in Latin and Old German primarily) pertaining to the law. As Maynard was large-bodied and assured, with a lawyerly habit of speaking slowly, yet with forceful logic, like a locomotive pulverizing anyone or anything who stood in its way, so Fanny Stirling was high-strung by temperament, both vain and self-effacing. She was very like her good-hearted but nervous mother, who had so dreaded exposing herself to the judgment of society, she'd died rather than acknowledge a malevolent growth in her “female anatomy,” fearing gossip, and, under the anesthetic, the possibility of unclean words issuing from her lips; for all good, decent Christian women feared such exposure.
If I am known for what I am, I cannot be loved. God help me!

So, on that May morning, eight days after Maynard's death, when the downstairs maid hurried to Fanny Stirling with a most peculiar expression on her pert little face, saying that a young woman named Mina
Raumlicht was asking to see Mr. Stirling, in fact demanding to see him, knowing nothing apparently of Mr. Stirling's death, Fanny shut her Bible at once and rose stiffly knowing only that, at all costs,
scandal must be avoided.

Here was a mild shock: as Fanny Stirling descended the stairs, her hand gripping the banister to guide her, she saw her son Warren standing in the hall just outside Maynard's study, staring at the visitor just inside.
How does he know of her? So quickly?
Fanny felt a stab of maternal panic. When Warren glanced up at her, his expression showed embarrassment, yet excitement. “Who is she, Mother?” he asked in an undertone. Fanny said, frowning, “This is not your concern, Warren. This has nothing to do with you.” Her brother-in-law Tyler approached, exchanged a glance with Fanny—how quickly the two understood each other—and slipped into the room without a word to Warren. “But, Mother—” the boy protested, as Fanny said, with more harshness than she intended, “She is no one we know, or wish to know,” and Warren said, “Then why is she
here
?—I saw her approach the house, she looks so frightened,” and Fanny said, her voice rising with a threat of hysteria, which never failed to intimidate the men of the family, “Warren, go away. I forbid you, in your late father's name, to speculate on matters that do not concern you.”

A seamstress's assistant. Seventeen years of age. Who had come to Contracoeur to work the previous year, and had taken lodgings with an elderly relative of her family, across town in East Contracoeur—“The far side of the Chautauqua & Buffalo tracks.”

Their initial interview lasted well into the afternoon. The three of them shut away in Maynard's rosewood-panelled study, the shutters partly shut against a too-bright, too-intrusive spring sunshine that hurt Fanny Stirling's swollen eyes. Within minutes the situation became clear, in its
horror, to the adults; the worst part of it being that the naive young girl was no less dangerous to the Stirling household and to Maynard's unblemished reputation for being, as it so painfully appeared, wholly
innocent.

Self-conscious, shrinking, out of her element, as out of her social class, in trying to converse with these imposing adults, Miss Mina Raumlicht seemed incapable of comprehending, at first, that Mr. Stirling had “passed away”—she seemed in fact not to hear, staring, blinking, smiling with a peculiar intensity at Tyler, who was obliged to repeat his words. As Fanny, in a haze of migraine and despair, tried to harden her heart against the intruder, a shy little wren of a country girl for whom, in other circumstances, Fanny would have felt Christian compassion. (For years, Fanny Stirling and certain of her women friends had been active, to a degree, in the founding and funding of the Presbyterian Home for Unwed Mothers in Contracoeur.) Mina Raumlicht had large deep-set bluish-gray eyes, threaded with blood and ringed with fatigue; there was a hectic flush to her cheeks, a symptom of fever—or worse; her small, doll-like features were pinched and sickly. Her hair was a fair silvery brown neatly plaited and worn about her head like a crown. Her cloak was well worn, over-large for her slender figure; made of some cheap velveteen material of a magenta hue so dark as to appear black, neatly hemmed, but beginning to fray. Beneath it, the girl wore a simple dark cotton frock with a square yoke, tight sleeves and a wristfrill that fell despondently to her somewhat raw-looking knuckles. The skirt was full and stiff and rustled unpleasantly, like muffled whispers; the jacket, drooping in the shoulders, tied rather than buttoned across the front. Sensing how ill-dressed she must appear in the eyes of a rich Greenley Square matron, Miss Raumlicht sat hunched in her chair, arms loosely folded across her waist, and fingers tightly clasped. It struck Fanny Stirling's eye that the girl did not wear gloves; her fingers were without rings, and her nails were painfully short as if bitten.
As once I bit my own nails, in terror of the male mystery that surrounds.

At last, Mina Raumlicht seemed to comprehend that Mr. Stirling, to whom she'd recently written, and whom she now so daringly, desperately
sought, was dead. “But—how could God allow it?” she whispered.
“At such a time—?”

With a warning glance at his sister-in-law, Tyler said, in a cooler voice than he might have wished, “I'm afraid, Miss Raumlicht, that God allows many things in His world, and in His time.”

There was a silence. At a near distance, the somber yet surpassingly beautiful bells of St. Mary Magdalen's Church began to toll the hour. As in a sick, sliding dissolve, as if on the verge of illness, Fanny Stirling was weeping unrestrainedly, and now Mina Raumlicht began to weep. The one haggard with grief and the other, so many years younger, with a child's gasping sobs, her beautiful eyes spilling with tears that glinted like acid and her hard little knuckles jammed against her mouth.

Tyler moved to comfort the women, with an air of both gallantry and vexation. How quickly a man tires of female weakness, especially female grief for another man! As he rose from his chair, the little seamstress's assistant seemed to shrink from him, as if fearing a blow; her eyes rolled upward in their sockets, her skin drained deathly white; she moaned, “Oh!—help me!” and fainted, falling heavily to the carpet before either of the Stirlings could prevent her, revealing, to their horrified eyes, the small but unmistakably rounded, swollen belly inside the shapeless clothing.

THE MORE GROTESQUE
for being
as Fanny Stirling would recall for the remainder of her unhappy life
so disproportionate to the child's body, only a fiend would have inflicted it upon her.

OF COURSE THEY
dared not summon a physician, or even one of the household servants, for fear of scandal.

Though Fanny Stirling, loosening the girl's tight bodice with trembling
fingers, and holding a small vial of spirits of ammonia beneath the girl's nose, worried aloud—“God help us if she dies!”

Tyler said, half-angrily, his lower jaw trembling, “
This
sort of female doesn't die for a trifle, I'm sure.”

Awkwardly, Fanny and Tyler carried the stricken girl to a sofa where by slow degrees she revived, though it was nearly an hour before she came sufficiently to her senses to recognize her surroundings and to recall who the Stirlings were, and why she had come. With numbed lips she whispered she was sorry, so sorry, so frightened, she knew she must leave but she had nowhere to go, how could she return home to Innisfail, or even to her aunt's house, she had hidden her condition from her aunt but could not hide it much longer, Maynard had promised her he would assist her, what a good man Maynard was, how wicked of God to have taken him away!—so that Fanny was obliged to interrupt, with the alarmed caution with which she might have spoken to one of her own children, “My dear, no!—never say such things. We must believe that God is
good.
”

“But God is
not good
,” Mina Raumlicht wept, writhing on the horsehair sofa, her plaited hair coming undone, her small, distended body exuding a damp disagreeable heat. “—God has hurt us all, so cruelly.”

Tyler went to fetch a glass of brandy for the girl, but she lapsed into a sudden sleep, or trance; her reddened eyes only partly closed; her mouth, that looked hurt, slack as an infant's. The Stirlings stood over her, uncertain what to do. Tyler, who knew far more of the world's ways than did his sister-in-law, was yet stymied; in his soul, deeply shocked, and angered, by his late brother's behavior—what a hypocrite, that Presbyterian deacon! How incensed Maynard had been, in public at least, two decades ago when the Democratic candidate for president Grover Cleveland had been exposed in the public press for having sired an illegitimate child—as if such creatures were not being sired daily, by so-called gentlemen like Maynard Stirling and Grover Cleveland.

“She is correct,” Fanny Stirling said wearily. “God has hurt us all cruelly.”

“But God will show us a way out, Fanny. Never doubt Him.”

Tyler Stirling, too, was trained in the law; lacking his older brother's reputation, forever in the shadow of the formidable Maynard, yet not without gifts of his own. During the brief hour that Mina Raumlicht slept deeply, Tyler conferred with his sister-in-law in a far corner of the study, deciding what must be done. “The remarkable thing is, the girl makes no accusations. She makes no demands. She seems almost not to know her advantage. She leaves it to us, it appears. Almost, one could take pity on her,” Tyler murmured; and Fanny said vehemently, “I do take pity on her, and on us. It's Maynard I cannot forgive.” “Possibly, the girl is lying,” Tyler ventured uncertainly, “—or there is another man involved. If Maynard were here to—” “But Maynard is
not here
,” Fanny said, with surprising feeling. “And if he were, you see, we would not have met Miss Raumlicht; we would know nothing of Miss Raumlicht; it would have been very quietly, very discreetly settled. Ah, I am beginning to see how such things work out, in the world of men!” Tyler and Fanny were sipping brandy to steady their nerves; Fanny, unaccustomed to strong drink, and at such an hour of the day, refilled her own glass, and raised it to her trembling lips. The fierce, astringent fumes cleared her head wonderfully. The effect was like a windowpane long dimmed with dirt, wiped clean. Almost, she felt exhilarated: freed! For truly, had she loved Maynard Stirling at all?—except as she'd been, by law, his wife? Dimly she was recalling the hurts and slights of long ago, following the birth of Warren, when Fanny was yet a relatively young woman, and her husband had ceased to “approach” her in their bedroom as once he'd been in the habit of doing; not that Fanny, being a decent Presbyterian woman, had not been relieved, for of course she had been, of course she'd even thanked God to be spared; yet at the
same time, hadn't she felt . . . slighted? rather hurt? resentful? Knowing her husband a man of vigorous physical appetites, she had even tormented herself that Maynard might have looked elsewhere for that balm to which such manuals as
The Wife's Medical Companion
referred to discreetly as “marital satisfaction.”