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

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, desperatelysought, 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 tremblingfingers, 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