My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

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 MinaRaumlicht 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.
5.
    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.”
6.
    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 itshorror, 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,