My Heart Laid Bare Part 40

Dares not confront her. Or them. Though keenly aware of her small swelling b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 results. 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt 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.

In addition, unknown even to the household, adulterous spies, Abraham has acquired a second firearm: a .38-caliber handgun, Smith & Wesson, nickel-plated with a handsome mother-of-pearl handle, surprisingly heavy, purchased in a sporting goods store in Innisfail, in a back room. A "debt collector" the storekeeper called it. This, too, Abraham keeps loaded at all times; and since it's small enough, no problem to slip it into his coat pocket when he leaves the house.

Once an enemy is dead, however, he's dead; and nothing can be collected from him. A principle of British common law.

He'd had a law practice once. A flouris.h.i.+ng practice. In Philadelphia. The Shrikesdale woman had been his client, seeking her lost son. And though he'd found her son for her, the woman had repudiated him. "And now all is lost. Ridiculous!"

He wonders: if his enemies are dead, who is spying on him from the outside, as surely they are; ransacking his doc.u.ments, perusing his journal so he's obliged now to write exclusively in code.

Starlings, grackles, red-winged blackbirds calling excitedly to one another in the old Nazarene graveyard. A flocking of birds-how like a flocking of men. And old Katrina disguised as one of the birds, wide wings flapping close to his (shade-drawn) window. It's those closest to us in blood-kins.h.i.+p who return to haunt us. Most urgent then their corpses must be buried deep!

HE HAS YET to experiment with either the handgun or the shotgun.

He fears their explosive power. Once detonated, set loose upon the (guilt-ridden) world.

Frankly he confronts Rosamund and in astonishment she denies she's pregnant. As she'd denied she has Arthur Grille's money secreted away in an account in Vanderpoel Trust.

(It's Rosamund's claim that Abraham invested all her money years ago and that it was lost with his.) Yet she's his wife. "Lawful wedded."

"In sickness and in health."

"Till death do us part."

If she carries another's b.a.s.t.a.r.d in her belly, this child will be Abraham Licht's under the law. Does she know that?

Denies it. Denies it.

. . . Approximately $2 million in securities and property out on Long Island, Abraham is certain, moving the kerosene lamp so that he can see his wife's tense face more clearly. (Perhaps to spite him, who so dotes upon female beauty, Rosamund has allowed her hair to become shapeless, a wavy mop of silvery-brown; she now wears schoolgirl wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, with the excuse that she's nearsighted.) I remember our joint surprise, that your father hadn't disinherited you after all.

But you invested it, Abraham. I signed it over to you that day. Father's lawyers were witnesses don't you remember. Please remember. You invested it, it was lost with everything else.

The woman lies, lies. Yet not at all as Millicent lied, for she lacks Millicent's dramatic talent as she lacks Millicent's cla.s.sic beauty. A country-wife slattern, in men's rubber boots clucking as she scatters kernels of corn for the chickens, a noisy brood of red hens lacking a rooster; and a bad influence upon the little girl in thrown-together clothes and bobbed hair showing the tips of her ears, allowed to play with neighbors' brats up the Pike where talk is of Abraham Licht brought low, Abraham Licht a ruined man. In the sacred privacy of the marital bed there must never be lies, Abraham warns the woman. Tell me where the vault is, where you've hidden the money, a wife's property is her husband's property under the law. Tell me. Why you no longer love me.

"Abraham, no! Please!"-hiding her guilty face, beginning to weep.

Now when she disrobes she'll have something to show her lover: a kidney-shaped bruise on her upper arm, a peach of a bruise beneath her eye, and those ugly wire gla.s.ses bent. Don't tempt me farther Abraham whispers.

At dusk of a November day there comes Abraham Licht to his son's window, in a jocular mood; thin cheeks overgrown with stubble, eyes playful, a grimy green cap found on the road pulled down low on his forehead; raps on the pane, and is admitted by the makes.h.i.+ft door to declare, "My boy, you're making a fool of yourself in the world's eyes. I know what people are saying, though I scorn gossip. You should marry before it's too late. You can't know what joy it is to have a wife and a child of your own."

A not-subtle emphasis upon the words "of your own."

Darian, just returned from an eight-hour stint at Muirkirk High School (where this half year he's a full-time teacher of something called social studies and music and helps out with boys' gym), stares at his father without comprehending. Decides to make a joke of it-"True, Father. I don't know. But life isn't so easily arranged."

Glaring about the cluttered room, at the madman pianos and other instruments, stringed, of gla.s.s, bamboo, G.o.d knows what-tin cans, baling wire-Abraham says sneering, "Life is never arranged 'easily,' Darian. It's arranged by force."

As if I had never been.

Licht-extinguished!

(For where one can pun, like Shakespeare's Falstaff, in fact one hasn't yet gone out.) THOUGH BY DEGREES he's swinging away from Time. Its wearying cycle of caprices. Who has just captured the Presidency of the United States with the ridiculous promise of a New Deal; who is lost and consigned to oblivion.

That marshy oblivion in which enemies, like lovers, like one's own children, are swallowed up.

Mere bubbles on the sc.u.mmy surface. Silence, once the birds' shrieking ceases.

He's lucid. He's calm. He's in excellent physical condition.

His eyes . . . his eyesight. A wavy, wavering brightness. Sunspots. Cataracts? He's explaining to Deerfield, a fattish young man with thick-lensed gla.s.ses, that he wouldn't trust Vanderpoel General Hospital to operate on an ingrown toenail of his let alone his eyes. Telling Deerfield he doesn't wish to be examined with a stethoscope thank you. His heart, lungs, inner organs listened to. No thank you.

(Deerfield had driven out to the house under the pretext, an absurdly transparent pretext, of having been called by Rosamund to examine Melanie. Abraham just laughed, his wife and his son were so crude in their connivance.) Much of the daytime he must surrender to his enemies. But the night remains his, the night has always been his. If only Melanie will understand . . . .Why does she shrink from her father when he wants only to reveal to her certain precious secrets: where Past, Present and Future are one, in the Heavens. "Melanie, darling, it's all for you. These charts, these graphs, these constellations cracked open like nuts . . . how bright-glowing Sirius affects our happiness, how the dance of the Pleiades is our own, the moons of Jupiter that float in our dreams, the bright star of Aries that rises in our blood with the claim of honor."

But the child shrinks from his whiskery embrace, and runs to her mother.

I will kill the old man!

Seeing that Rosamund's eyes are swollen, her mouth soft and hurt and trembling. Knowing the old man has struck her, surely he's threatened her, though Rosamund refuses to speak. "What is it? He's jealous? He's angry? Why? At you? At me? When there's nothing between us?" Darian asks. "What should I do, Rosamund? Tell me. Don't turn from me. What should I do?"

Rosamund pushes past him, out of the room; her eyes averted, her expression stubborn and fixed. Hiding her bruises, her soft battered flesh as if these were signs of grace. So Darian calls after her, "Then go to h.e.l.l! Both of you."

Having heard the m.u.f.fled voices in the night. The thumping sounds, the thud! thud! thud! as of a body being slammed against a wall or the headboard of a bed. Having run from his own bed to knock on the door and twist the (locked) doork.n.o.b demanding What is it? What's wrong? Father? Rosamund? Open this door, please. But Darian hasn't the right to make such demands as Abraham Licht, panting on the other side of the door, allows him to know. Nothing. No one. Go away. You know nothing.

Impulsively Darian follows her. The old man has driven off in the Packard and left them alone; Melanie is napping beneath a feather comforter; even the mailman has come and gone along the solitary Muirkirk Pike; Darian pulls gently at Rosamund, then more forcibly; grips her face in his hands and kisses her; a raw angry yearning kiss, denied for too long.

Don't, Rosamund whispers.

Darian I can't.

Darian . . .

IN THE LAST month of Abraham Licht's life, his wife and his son become lovers.

And Darian, dazed, exulting, tries to console himself. It's just love. People do this all the time.

(Like all lovers whispering, conspiring. When did you first know, Rosamund asks, and Darian confesses it was the first night he saw her, in his hotel room, the Empire State, remember?-Abraham brought you, in your purple velvet gown, you'd missed my recital, remember? and Rosamund laughs, Rosamund wipes her eyes saying but that woman wasn't me truly, not me as I am now; and Darian says, Yes but the man was me: always it's been me, in regard to you. Their surprise, which is the surprise of all lovers, is with what ease their bodies at last join, the urgency, yet the grace, as if these many months, these years, they'd been celibate yearning for only each other; miserable, yet elated; knowing it must happen someday; and so they'd been lovers without needing to touch. Darian isn't the man he'd been only a few hours ago. Darian the lover, lanky long-limbed Darian now a woman's lover, vowing he'll love her always, he'll love her and Melanie always, he'd kill for her if necessary, it's right, it's just, it's Nature, it's necessary, it's what people do. He will save her and Melanie both, he will protect them from all harm.

Some days later confiding in her, lying in each other's naked arms, a strand of her wavy hair across his face, their breaths and their heartbeats synchronized as if they were two fine-tuned musical instruments, he tells her he's heard (from Aaron Deerfield) that in town it's been believed that they've been lovers for years and that he, and not Abraham Licht, is Melanie's father; and Rosamund says sighing, I know, I've guessed.)

Short-tempered as a hornet, eyes bright with antagonism, he dismisses this "miraculous" election: the triumph of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the defeat of Herbert Hoover, the New Deal for the Forgotten Man. "Fools and knaves. Speak to me not of the 'glib and oily art' of politics."

But, Darian argues, Roosevelt is different.

Yes, Rosamund agrees, daring to oppose him, Roosevelt is different.

With dignity he rises from his chair; with dignity, manages to maintain his balance; his thin cheeks, hawklike features, the stain of old ivory, a fleeting elderly beauty . . . now his heart's laid bare, for greedy daws to peck at.

STUMBLING IN THE marsh where they'll find me, but he isn't hurt, nor even short of breath; refuses to allow them to drive him into Muirkirk so that Deerfield can check him over. No no no. I am the custodian of these bones and will not consent. Though his eyesight has deteriorated. Cataracts, and maybe glaucoma. Though there's a warty growth on his throat just below the left ear. Though his old-man's p.i.s.s emerges in sullen dribbles, sometimes trickling down his leg. And his head, his brain, aswirl, abuzz, a flood of stars winking in Canis Major have bored through his castle wall and farewell king! farewell.

Yet he will not consent.

Saying coldly, even as they half carry him back to the house, "Abraham Licht is in perfect health for his years, his circ.u.mstances and his suffering."

DO YOU THINK he knows? the guilty lovers whisper to each other as all guilty lovers whisper, frightened and yet exulting in their adultery. Do you think he . . . senses? Poor Abraham! Kissing, tongueing each other, wis.h.i.+ng only to press together so there's no separation between them; not even the separation of thought. Knowing they're in danger should the old man guess their adultery yet unable to resist loving, their bliss, their greed, what are they to do, what is the right thing to do, the decent thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing, the pragmatic thing, for they must make love for they love each other so, it's anguish to be denied their love, their bodies' urgency, after so many years of denial, they no longer think of Abraham Licht except to torment themselves Do you think he knows? And, if he does . . . !

What must happen, must happen.

Prowling the leafless forest and marsh, at least the outer edges of the marsh where the earth is frozen; crusts of ice like broken teeth beneath his booted feet; his nostrils like a stallion's flaring steam-"Who's that? Who?" The woman singing to him; humming; combing her long pale hair in the mist, he doesn't hear, he ignores her, like Odysseus he'll stop his ears and will not hear, it isn't time; the heavy shotgun slung beneath an arm for Abraham Licht, Esquire, is a country gentleman, a gentleman-farmer, a hunter, seeking in the idle diversion of sport some replication of The Game, for The Game is both hunter and prey, prey and hunter; in herringbone tweed trousers baggy at the knees, a stained cashmere topcoat, rakish old homburg propped on his head like Jimmy Walker. In the three-way mirror in the dressing room at Lyle's Gentlemen's Clothiers, Lexington Avenue, Abraham Licht modeled to perfection this coat, fitting his broad shoulders snugly yet comfortably, $740 was not too high a price for such style and beauty, $7,400 might as easily have been tossed down for he was a millionaire in those halcyon days. AT&T up. Standard Oil, up. Cole Motors, up. Westinghouse, up. And Liebknecht, Inc., steadily rising.

Still the woman sings, teasing and seductive. If his eyes were better he'd see her . . . but maybe he doesn't want to see her. He stalks away, swinging the shotgun at his side. It's loaded but he hasn't yet wished to test its power; he knows the detonation will be deafening; Darian will hear, and make a fuss; Rosamund will hear, and make a worse fuss. Ice veins have formed in the creases of his face, like burning wires.

SOME DAYS, CLEAR-FROST days, Melanie begs to come with him.

"Daddy, can I? Daddy please!" Smiling up at him, the pink knitted cap already on her head though crookedly since she'd pulled it on herself. "Momma won't know."

"Yes, darlin'. If you hurry."

But Momma does know, Momma always knows and calls her back.

For the shotgun terrifies Momma. "Abraham, for G.o.d's sake. Don't."

"It isn't loaded, Mrs. Licht. What's to fear from an unloaded gun?" he teases. "If your conscience is clear."

The child is his child after all. That, he knows.

Clambering outside, calling as if it doesn't matter to him in the slightest, "Coming with your Dadda, puss? Or no?" and Melanie laughs, and dashes after him; and her mother calls sharply, "Melanie, no," and the child is rooted to the spot, already her little nose is running, laughing she'll run to Dadda's side, no she'll turn and hurry back into the house, he relents, he forgives her, he understands, it isn't yet time, go back to the house darlin' and comfort your momma, running like a frightened cat back to the opened door where, breath steaming, winter sunlight flas.h.i.+ng in her eyegla.s.ses like flame, her mother calls her name.

"Melanie. Melanie!"

THIRTY-THREE YEARS OLD and it's the first great pa.s.sion of his life, and will be the only great pa.s.sion of his life for he'll marry the woman after his father's death, let all of Muirkirk buzz with scandal. Never has Darian been so inspired; never so crazed; even away from his studio he's composing music, even in his sleep, wild ecstatic music of love fulfilled, of love so ravenous it can't be fulfilled; forbidden love; guilty love; the love of sister and brother; transcendent love; ordinary love, what people do all the time. He's on fire with ideas! Can't transcribe them quickly enough, his fingers are aching! A symphony for voices . . . a trio for flute, cello and echo-chamber piano . . . wordless oratorios . . . a sonata in which aleatory sounds complement the piano . . . a four-hour piece for chamber orchestra, special instruments and chorus to be t.i.tled Robin, the Miller's Son: A Tale of Destiny . . . which will eventually be performed when the composer is forty-two years old, as irony would have it on 10 May 1942, at Carnegie Hall, by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, such a long time to wait! the composer's admirers marvel but Darian Licht isn't a bitter man, Darian Licht's a man perpetually on fire, perpetually in love.

Or so his music proclaims.