My Heart Laid Bare (8 page)

Though clearly not a youth of sophistication or exceptional intelligence, Christopher Schoenlicht was sensitive enough to know very well how people talked; how eyes fastened covertly upon him and the glamorously dressed Mrs. Peck, in public; how whispers and innuendos were exchanged sub rosa. At such times, he blushed fiercely and tightened his jaws, enduring in silence what Eloise Peck, if she knew of it, would have remarked upon with her sharp, shrill laughter. The young man was in his mid-twenties, though still boyish; about six feet two inches, with broad shoulders, a frank strong-boned face, and the sort of rapidly growing beard that requires shaving twice daily. (“At the State Fair at Syracuse, such a specimen would win a blue ribbon,” one of Wallace Peck's friends dryly observed.) Christopher's hair was white-blond, like his eyelashes and brows; his eyes were a pale bluish-gray; he carried himself with an awkward sort of grace, rather like (as a columnist for the
New York Post
slyly commented, alluding to the “Bird out of her Gilded Cage with her new companion”) a bear walking on his hind legs.

Mrs. Peck, who'd never had children, dressed her young friend with flair, yet with taste: in tailored blazers, white flannels, ascot ties, narrow-pleated silk shirts, smart Panama hats of the kind made stylish by Broadway's George M. Cohan; yet it couldn't be said that the young man wore them with ease, and more than one observer, introduced to young Schoenlicht, noted that his nails were ridged with dirt and his linen, though presumably fresh that morning, was fresh no longer. Whether in shyness or
in shame, his gaze was often downcast; he had the guarded manner of one who, in childhood, has been the butt of cruel jokes.

Even so, Christopher Schoenlicht wasn't so backward as Mrs. Peck's critics wished to believe. He could exert surprising authority when sent about town as her emissary: speaking firmly with shopkeepers, tradesmen, hotel employees and the like, when the situation required. Mrs. Diggett, the admiral's widow, reported having seen him smoking a cigar on the beach while walking the twin Pomeranians, at dusk; and reported too that the young man spoke harshly to the dogs, when their yapping grew frenzied and their leashes became wound around his ankles. “He is no fool, it seems, when he's alone.” Mrs. Amos Sellick, a young Manhattan matron, reported that Christopher was “kindly” and “gentlemanly” in her presence; when Mrs. Peck was elsewhere, Christopher took time to set up a beach umbrella for the Sellick children and to play with them for hours, splashing in the surf, carrying them on his strong shoulders, building elaborate sand castles. Within a few days of their acquaintance, Christopher was like a big brother to the Sellick children; a decent, sweet-tempered, honest Christian youth and hardly an immoral gigolo living openly with a woman old enough to be his mother. “He is her victim—the shameless seductress!” Mrs. Sellick whispered. “And what a pity, he seems not to have any family to rescue him from her.”

Christopher! . . . are you listening?

. . . Yes ma'am.

Yes Eloise.

Yes
Eloise.

Are you listening, dear, or daydreaming? . . . I swear your mind was miles away!

Not at all Eloise.

Are you bored here in Atlantic City . . .
Are
you happy? . . . Is it time for us to move on?

Whatever you wish, Eloise.

. . . time for us to wed, surely!

Yes surely.

And you
do
love your Eloise, above all the world?

Oh yes.

And you have no worry of the future . . . of the world's cruel censure?

Oh no.

And you don't regret your lost vocation? . . . Please tell me, dear, that you
don't
; for it would be very wrong of me to come between you and God's wishes for you.

God's wishes for me?

That you were meant to be a man of the cloth . . .

But God's wishes for me, ma'am, must be that I would
not
be a man of the cloth . . . since He caused my father to die, and my studies to come to an end.

Oh yes dear! . . . I suppose you are correct, dear.

And it can't be that you, ma'am, could come between me and God's wishes for me . . . for God has told me you
are
His wishes for me. If not, I couldn't be here in such a place.

Yes sweet Christopher: I suppose you are correct.

But how, ma'am, could I be anything other than correct, if God has sent me to you? . . . if all that we do or say or think or wish is prescribed by Him?

IT'S TRUE: SOMETIMES
Christopher frightens Eloise. Just a little.

Makes her shiver. The fine hairs stirring at the nape of her neck.

When he speaks so matter-of-factly of God, and God's wishes.

As if he believes!
Eloise confides in a divorcée she has casually befriended.
As if what to others is mere prattle, to him is God's very word.

MID MORNING IN
the hotel suite sharply fragrant with yesterday's flowers, and a commingled scent of stale champagne, liver pâté and scattered crumbs of Gorgonzola cheese. Yet: a delirium of satin sheets, and lace-edged pillowcases smeared with Eloise's makeup, and gilded mirrors holding no reflections, and in the near distance, rooms away, the petulant whimpering of Princess and San Souci mad with jealousy of their mistress's new love. A delirium of brawny sprawling limbs, hard-muscled limbs, limbs covered in fuzzy pale-blond hair . . . patches of darker hair, wiry, kinky, at armpits, belly, groin. No matter that there is a patina of grime between Christopher's toes, no matter that his fingernails are permanently ridged with black, no matter that the ignorant world cries Fool! . . . and Harlot! . . . and Adulteress! . . . and Seductress!

For Eloise Peck would fling in their teeth just one word:
Love.

DOES SHE DARE
, now that he sleeps? . . . now that his breath has become a rasping snore, and his body gives off a warm rank damp heat? Does she dare, now that she has drained the bottle of champagne, and the world is a-tilt, to kiss her lover in that most forbidden and delicious of places?

A secret kiss; yet, at the touch of her swooning lips, the blood-warmed flesh at Christopher's groin begins to stir like a very snake roused from sleep.

Father has taught: The Game is never to be played as if it were but a game.

And the spoils we reap, but spoils.

So Christopher sleeps truly, exhausted from love; and, when he wakes, wakes truly; and “loves” truly . . . for it would be cruel of him to come between Mrs. Peck and God's wishes for that improvident lady.

Except: on the evening of 23 June 1909, in the space of a quarter hour, the lovers' plans are as completely devastated as if an earthquake had struck Atlantic City, and the elegant Saint-Léon razed to the ground.

And what glorious plans the lovers had had: to be married in the eyes of God, as soon as the divorce decree from old Mr. Peck was finalized; more immediately, to dine early on the twenty-third, and to attend a musical evening (the much acclaimed operetta
The Fortune Teller
) at the new Gaiety Theatre.

Grown fatigued by an afternoon of indolence on the beach, Mrs. Peck lay down in the sumptuous four-poster bed for a brief nap; slept fitfully; woke, and slept again, and woke, or seemed to . . . disturbed by raised voices in the adjacent room. “Christopher? Is that you?” she whispered. The voices ebbed, and she lay for a while in a pleasurable trance not knowing if she'd heard accurately or had been dreaming; lazily calculating whether it was too early for her to summon a maid, to draw her bathwater. The evening at the Gaiety would be festive and public, covert eyes moving upon her and Christopher, and so her toilette must be impeccable.

Again the voices were raised: masculine voices. One of them was Christopher's, unmistakably. But whose was the other?

“My dear boy, in an argument of some sort? Can it be?”

Excited, thrilled, Eloise quickly wrapped herself in her new emerald-green crêpe de Chine robe; powdered her unfortunately puffy face; made an attempt to smooth down her matted hair. No time! no time! At the door she paused to listen, for Christopher did sound angry, as she'd never before heard him; and who could it be who dared to answer him in such a provocative tone? Not a hotel servant, surely?

Eloise listened. Christopher was being threatened?

Or, no: Christopher was threatening another person.

. . . Another young voice, whining, childish, slurred with drink, a bullying intimacy; a brotherly tone alternating with one of crude malice.

Money, evidently, was the issue.

Someone was demanding money of her Christopher.

And Christopher was saying in a lowered voice that there was no money to be had, damn it.
No money to be had—yet.

The other, unknown party laughed harshly, saying he didn't intend to leave this damned hotel without some cash; no less than two hundred dollars. He was flat broke, his Baltimore plans had gone bust, he'd been lucky to have escaped with just a beating! . . .

Eloise was shocked to hear how Christopher cursed his companion, and commanded him to leave at once
before the woman overheard, and everything would be ruined.

. . . two hundred did I say, shit three hundred's what I meant.

Christopher stammered
there was no money to be had yet! . . . no money of any significance.

The old bitch's got jewels, don't she? Come on. Before I lose my fuckin' sand-frawd.

In this way, recklessly, the two young men quarreled with an old, heated intimacy; even Christopher seemed to have forgotten where he was; and, on the other side of the door, Eloise Peck stood paralyzed, her pretty crêpe de Chine wrapper fallen open to reveal her sad, slack figure, and her eyes filling with tears in one of those intervals of horror that mimic, and sometimes augur, the termination of a life.

Here is how the catastrophe occurred.

Christopher, as he was known to Mrs. Peck, had gone swimming, alone, in the late afternoon, along a stretch of windy deserted beach a quarter mile from the Saint-Léon; returned to the hotel suite, and since Mrs. Peck was asleep, enjoyed a cigar, and one or two small glasses of Swiss chocolate almond liqueur, out on the balcony overlooking the frothy, winking surf; was roused from his reverie by a surreptitious knocking at the
door, at 5:25
P.M.
, and giving no thought who it might be, suspecting it was one or another flunky of the Saint-Léon bringing Mrs. Peck some trifle she had ordered, went to open it; and saw to his astonishment
his younger brother Harwood,
in a disheveled state.

Before Christopher could speak, Harwood pushed his way inside, and, seeing they were alone, began to demand money from him. He was in a bad way, Harwood said; his life was in danger; he needed money, and he needed it immediately;
and Thurston must provide it.

Christopher was so rattled at the sight of this brother of his, of whom he'd never been fond, whom he'd never trusted, in this place where his brother should not have been, he could only stammer that there must be some mistake: he wasn't Thurston, but Christopher—“My name is Christopher Schoenlicht.”

Harwood said contemptuously he didn't give a damn what Thurston's name was or wasn't; he needed money; and it was obvious that, here, money was to be had. He knew all about Thurston's liaison with some wealthy old female and he wanted his share. “My luck has temporarily run out,” he said, “—and now, ‘Christopher,' I want some of yours.”

Still Christopher stammered that there must be some mistake: he wasn't Thurston, but Christopher: and unless Harwood left at once, he would be forced to eject him.

“‘Eject' me, eh! Will you! Oh will you!—just try it, fancy boy!” Harwood laughed, lowering his head like a bulldog about to leap to the attack, and clenching his fists. “Dare to touch me, and see what happens.”

In the course of his precocious career, the young man who currently called himself “Christopher Schoenlicht” had encountered a number of upsetting situations, and calculated his way out of several tight spots; even at panicked moments he recalled a favorite epigram of his father's—“‘The worst is not so long as we can say,
This is the worst
'”—though he couldn't have named its source, whether the Bible, or Shakespeare, Homer or Mark Twain. Yet, his drunken brother Harwood standing belligerently before
him in a place and at a time where Harwood was, by all the rules of The Game,
not to be
, these words ran rapidly through his head—“This is the worst!—
this.
”

For it had never happened before, that any of the Lichts had put another so at risk.

Brothers by blood are brothers by the soul.

Control, and control, and again control: and what prize will not be ours?

Christopher, or Thurston, had last spoken with Harwood several months ago at the old country place, as the family called it, in Muirkirk, in the Chautauqua Valley of upstate New York, around the time of Harwood's twenty-second birthday. Afterward, as usual, the brothers had gone in separate directions, for they had quite separate destinations: Harwood to Baltimore, to attach himself to a relation of some sort, a “cousin” of their father's, with whom he was to organize a racing lottery, and Christopher, or Thurston, with his very different gifts, to return to Manhattan and to his quick-blooming romance with the wealthy Mrs. Peck. When he was apart from his brothers and sisters, Thurston rarely gave them much thought, for how could thinking along sentimental, familial lines be productive?—as Father might say. He did allow himself moments now and then of reverie, smoking a cigar, sipping a rare liqueur, as he'd been doing on the balcony of the hotel suite just now; at such times he contemplated the Muirkirk home as one might contemplate a place of refuge; he might indulge himself in a mental colloquy with his father, whose spiritual presence he required to get him through knotty times. (Like “making love” with Mrs. Eloise Peck.)