My Heart Laid Bare (66 page)

Ten billion—!

“It can't be,” Abraham Licht repeatedly said, to his anxious young wife and alone, to his ghastly mirrored reflection.
“It can't be.”

Like many another investor, Abraham had frequently daydreamt of a financial catastrophe in which he and a small number of shrewd thinkers walked away unscathed, with more profits than ever; he had never daydreamt of a catastrophe in which he was but one of hundreds of thousands, swept away by a demonic flood.

And the following morning, Abraham's worst fears came true: there was pandemonium, outright terror; a true Panic—searing the eyeballs, coating the tongue with slime, loosening the bowels; the most extraordinary of all waves of selling in the history of the world: sixteen million shares on the Exchange, seven million on the Curb,
thirty billion dollars lost within a few hours.
Kennecott Copper disappeared. Cole Motors fell off sixty
points, seventy points, ninety points. Westinghouse, in which Abraham had invested only the month before, dropped to one-third of its former value. And AT&T and Bethlehem Steel, Mexican Seaboard Certificates, Fleischmann's Yeast, Pan American Western, Liebknecht, Inc . . . .“‘Licht' is extinguished,” Abraham laughingly declared, making his way like a somnambulist through a throng of yelling, jeering, perspiring, weeping strangers on the floor of the stock exchange.
“It's as if ‘Licht' had never been.”

YET HE WAS
spared the indignity of collapsing in the street like so many others.

And when he did collapse, early in the morning of the following day, it was in his wife's arms; and Rosamund, like one steeled in disaster from a previous lifetime, as a woman to whom Death had frequently, seductively beckoned, telephoned for an ambulance at once to take the stricken, ashen-faced man, the father of her infant daughter, to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Midsummer. Abraham Licht in smart oyster-white linen suit and Panama hat makes a day's journey to Manitowick, $800 in his pocket to show his good faith, his firm resolve to raise more, but, when he arrives, he learns to his horror that the horses are all dead! . . . burned alive, all nine of them, in a fire that took place a few nights before, when lightning struck the stable. (In Manitowick, the fire is considered “suspicious in origin,” since the horses were heavily insured.) But Abraham Licht is appalled. The horses are dead? Nine beautiful English Thoroughbreds, dead? . . . And not one was rescued or survived? . . .

When he returns to Muirkirk he shrinks from the embrace of his young wife, for the sickening smell of burnt animal flesh, burnt animal hair, the terrible smell of animal agony, has seeped into his clothing.

The $800 he returns to his son with trembling fingers.

“Too late, Darian! I came too late to save them!”

MIDSUMMER
.

Which is Eternity.

Mist rising in slow tendrils over the swamp. The random joyous shrieks of unknown birds. Heat that begins at dawn, heavy, damp, hypnotic . . . Shall we go hunting? Shall we shoot us a pretty-feathered bird? Or an ugly scrawny bird with a bald head?

In knee-high rubber boots, in an old candy-striped shirt, now collarless, stuffed into trousers that hang from his wasted frame, the soiled Panama hat set jauntily on his head, shotgun under one arm, little Melanie, shivering in delight, perched high on his shoulder, Shall we go hunting, dear? My sweet precious dear? My only pretty one?

But Rosamund, spying from the kitchen garden, calls out sharply. No. No.
No.

LATE SUMMER
.

That heavy sulfurous season rife with secrets.

For though they would steal away his notations (now carefully codified), or hide them amid the many thousands of pages of his memoir, or scatter them beneath the desk where they can scarcely be retrieved, they cannot penetrate his thoughts; his powerful thoughts; his private cosmology.

For though their hired agents would peer at him through their telescopes, and record every one of his movements, every one of his words, it is only by day they dare approach; the night is his.

The night: which is rife with secrets.

Soon, very soon, when
she
is asleep, he will take his daughter to show her how the sky is a great living ocean . . . black yet translucent, lightless yet pricked with light . . . stars beyond counting and beyond all imagination save Abraham Licht's.

For the sky, dear Melanie, is a navigable sea upon whose earthy shore we stand upside down; on our heads. The sky is a sea in which fools drown, lacking the proper maps.

A bone-bright Moon, making shadows.

Vague red Mars, hovering over the tallest peak of the church's roof.

The Big Dipper, with its confused message; great Taurus, with a warning (is it a warning? or a command?); the Pleiades clustered and winking, oh, the sky is rife with secrets, like the night, like the long marsh summer which is Eternity.

Suspecting that his wife is pregnant but daring not to confront her—“Did you imagine I could be deceived, the child is
mine
?”

But no, it's a scene he knows beforehand he can't play except mawkishly, most amateurishly.

Barely able to sit still on the back porch, in the late-summer twilight, as Darian plays “Melanie Is Four”—a song for Melanie's fourth birthday—on marimba, “icicle” and miniature violin; and, a surprise for Abraham, who's after all this child's father, Melanie herself sings . . . For she, Rosamund and Darian have planned this, evidently. “D'you like my song, Dad-dy? Uncle Darian wrote it for me.” Abraham smiles, kisses the child, perhaps she's his child and perhaps she isn't, how like Millie's sweet wavering soprano at that age, but perhaps Millie wasn't his child, either. “No, my dear. I don't like your birthday song. But who am I, to matter?” Abraham mildly inquires, rising, with mock-elderly dignity, to make his exit as Darian, Rosamund and the astonished child stare after him.

THIS, THE FINAL
year of what the vulgar world would call my “life.”

Shouting!—panicked!—an enormous bird is trapped in the parlor, flying from window to window, striking the glass, recoiling, frantic pumping wings, death throes in midair, it must have blundered down through the chimney, only a starling but it seems to Abraham Licht the size of a vulture, with a vulture's jabbing beak, of course it's Katrina playing another of her cruel jests, he's striking his hands together
Out! out! out! Back to hell where you belong you evil old woman!
Stomping so hard he breaks several of the weakened floorboards, his handsome ruin of a face distorted in fear and anger and Rosamund tries to reason with him, it's only a bird, a frightened bird, maybe we can capture it in a pillowcase, but Abraham turns on her blind, shoving at her, where's his shotgun? where has she hidden his shotgun? and Rosamund rushes into the kitchen to snatch up Melanie and run with her outside, out onto the Muirkirk Pike where by lucky chance it's Darian who comes bicycling along and not a neighbor—“Help me! Help us! Oh God anything, to get her away from
him.
”

It's the first time that Rosamund has so spoken. It's the first time that Darian has held her tight as she holds him—tight, tight!

The poor trapped starling dies of a broken neck. Its limp, black-feathered body lying harmless as one of Melanie's rag dolls on the carpet. No need therefore for the hefty 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun Abraham Licht has oiled and primed for emergency use, hidden away in his locked study.

“And if Father had used it . . . ?” Darian thinks, sick with worry. “And if I hadn't been there . . . ?”

IN SECRET DARIAN
discusses his father with Dr. Aaron Deerfield, who tells him to bring Abraham in for an examination, but of course Darian can't convince his father to come with him, nor can he convince the suspicious old man to allow Deerfield to visit him at home. “Why, Deerfield the
sawbones must be one hundred years old by now,” Abraham says scathingly. “The man was ever incompetent in his lifetime, now in the boneyard he must be non compos mentis indeed.” Darian explains that Aaron Deerfield is Dr. Deerfield's son, Darian's own age, but Abraham stalks off chuckling as if it's all a joke, but a joke that's gone far enough.

Rosamund cautions
We can't hurt him. Not even his pride.

Rosamund, weeping, says
We can't provoke him into hurting us.

And:
He did save my life, Darian. I can't betray him.

IN TOWN, AFTER
choir rehearsal at the Lutheran church, Darian drops by Aaron Deerfield's house for a drink, and counsel. “It's the aftermath of the stroke, probably. Or maybe he's had another mild stroke. And there's what is called ‘senility.' . . . I'm sorry, Darian.” Darian can't think of any reply.
He
is sorry, too; yet feeling sorry isn't quite enough; he's heard of elderly and not-so-elderly men in the Chautauqua Valley who've gone on rampages with sledgehammers, ice picks, rakes, axes, you don't need a 12-gauge shotgun for slaughter.

It's this evening that Aaron casually asks Darian how his sister Esther is; and Darian says so far as he knows Esther is fine . . . well, Esther is a busy, energetic woman, to be truthful Esther has been involved in picketing, protests, demonstrations and she's been in jail . . . crusading in western New York, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois with the National Birth Control League, Margaret Sanger's people; she's a friend of Sanger's, a trusted aide; mostly women, though a few men, who've pledged themselves to what they call direct action (meaning angry, dangerous mobs, arrests and police brutality, jail sentences, lurid publicity in all the papers) in violating state laws that forbid the dissemination of any and all birth control information.

Aaron Deerfield refills his guest's glass with ale, and his own. He sighs. He's still unmarried, in his early thirties: he'd been engaged to a local girl, and is now unengaged; Darian knows some of his friend's personal
history, but not much. One of only a few general practitioners in Muirkirk and vicinity, Dr. Deerfield is a busy man; a tired man; an affable man; a lonely man; prematurely balding, with thick-lensed glasses (so like his father, now dead, to see him in the street is to see his father, an unnerving apparition); a man accustomed to telling others what's wrong with them, and how to remedy it; yet now baffled, staring at his clean, short-clipped fingernails. “I'd always thought, y'know, Darian, that Esther and I . . . might marry,” Aaron says. “She would be my nurse, at least until children came.” Darian, embarrassed, wants to ask, Yes but did you love her? did you ask her to marry you? but only murmurs that might've been a good thing. (Though thinking, why? His sister a doctor's wife, and not an independent woman? Confined to Muirkirk for life?) “I can't comprehend how Esther who was always so sweet . . . could behave so recklessly. With that female Sanger. The lot of them, y'know, are Communist atheists who would tear down the very fabric of society, don't you think?” Aaron asks anxiously; and Darian, draining his glass, says with a neutral smile, “My friend, I'm just a musician, what's it matter what
I
think?”

Dares not confront her. Or them. Though keenly aware of her small swelling breasts, her hard swelling belly with its bluish pallor, sin pulled tight as a drum's.

Spying on them, the lovers. Though they must be aware of him for how innocently they behave: never so much as touching, not even fingertips, while he's a witness.

To Darian's astonishment, and the surprise of the Lutheran congregation, Abraham Licht turns up one Sunday for the ten o'clock service in snappy red suspenders, a yellow scarf knotted about his old-man wattled throat, in handsome if soiled homburg and those fine hand-sewn leather shoes promised to last a lifetime (as they will); to hear the twenty-member choir sing choruses and arias from Handel's
Messiah
, with creditable re
sults. Abraham, aficionado of grand opera, a musical elitist, finds himself moved by this country-church choir and has to suppose that, yes, his son has had something to do with the beauty of their combined, thrilling voices. Yet abruptly he slips away before the service ends for a pulse has begun beating in his head
Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.
An unmistakable message for the elderly husband of a young wife pregnant with another's seed.

A PROLONGED RAINY-WINDY
October. Shall we never survive October. The insult of the banker Carr (Vanderpoel Trust) still fresh in Abraham's memory, refusing to lend him $1,200: a mere fraction of $12,000.
Nothing is but what is not
Abraham writes in a careful hand across the top of a clean sheet of stationery.

The well water, always so clear, and so delicious, now has a flat metallic taste. Its purity lost, contaminated by toxins. Yet when Abraham slyly invites Darian to sample it in his presence, Darian drinks a full glass of the stuff; and calmly denies to his father that there's anything wrong with it.

Abraham bursts into laughter. “My boy,
you
should have gone onto the stage, not me. How brave, how reckless—to drink that poison down without flinching.”

“Father, there's nothing wrong with our water. I'm sure.”

And, “Abraham, there's nothing wrong with our water.
I'm
sure.”

(Mrs. Licht, hair tied back in a rag of a scarf, in a much-laundered old white bag of a shirt and a pair of formerly glamorous wool-silk slacks, must contribute her two cents worth from a corner of the kitchen. Her forced, anxious smile. Those eyes glazed with guilt.)

Abraham, chuckling, drifts away. Checking the Winchester in his study closet: well oiled, but beginning to pick up minuscule bits of grit and dust. He stares into the twin sockets of the barrels. Eyeless. If an emergency
comes, old Katrina flying down the chimney another time, or government agents crawling through the marsh in their ingenious rubber suits (he'd been issued one, involved in surveillance for the Bureau), he won't have time to load the shotgun and so must keep it loaded.
A gentleman does not soil his gloves.