My Heart Laid Bare (38 page)

Even as their train entered central Philadelphia, and the Pullman men prepared for them to disembark, Roland told Bagot yet again in a craven voice that he didn't know if he was the man Bagot assured him he was; and Bagot, impatient after so many days of confinement in Roland's company, said curtly, “Then who do you imagine you
are
—?”

To which the agitated youth could give no reply.

The legendary reunion of Anna Emery Shrikesdale and her son Roland at Castlewood Hall, after Roland's absence of one hundred eighty-five days, was as ecstatic as newspapers throughout the nation proclaimed; for Mrs. Shrikesdale, though in poor health and handicapped with blurred eyesight, hadn't the slightest doubt that the sickly young man restored to her was her Roland—“For which God be praised.”

How ardently she'd prayed for his safe return!—pleaded and bargained with her God! Even before it was self-evident that Roland had fallen into a misadventure out West, Anna Emery had been canny enough to donate $140,000 to a charity home for unwed mothers in the city; by the end of the summer she'd given equal sums to a foundlings' hospital, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the International Red Cross, and, not least, the Episcopalian Church. Anna Emery's sense was of Roland—pale, plump, shivering, paralyzed with terror—held hostage by God Himself, that God and Anna Emery might come to terms satisfactory to both.

So, when Montgomery Bagot at last cabled her with the news that the man believed to be Roland was indeed Roland, and that Roland was, apart from superficial alterations, very much himself, Anna Emery was so suffused with joy that she climbed out of her sickbed, to her nurse's astonishment, and, lowering herself to her knees, gave thanks to God for His kindness.

“I had never doubted You,” she declared.

ANNA EMERY SHRIKESDALE
, née Sewall (the granddaughter and daughter of governors of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania), was just five feet tall, with a small, round, compact figure, not exactly fat (except in her stomach and hips) but tight and rotund, like a fruit swollen nearly to bursting. At the age of sixty-nine she retained a vague girlish manner; was somewhat vain about her appearance—particularly her hair, which had grown too thin not to require the supplement of an elaborately coiffed pearly-gray wig; and suffered from such a variety of ailments, both female and general, her physician scarcely knew how to attend to her. Following Elias's mysterious death (the distraught widow was told only that he had died of heart failure; in truth he'd died of a syphilitic infection of the spine), her nerves had so deteriorated that she started like an infant at ordinary sounds and movements; suffered frequently from hypertension headaches and fainting spells; and could not always control the palsied trembling of her hands. “Ah, you frightened me—!” Anna Emery would exclaim, laughing breathlessly, and pressing her hand to her bosom, when her companion had done no more than make an innocuous remark or gesture, or drawn breath to speak.

It was believed by some Philadelphians that Anna Emery began to lose her health after the ordeal of Roland's birth (Roland being the Shrikesdales' sole surviving child, born when Anna Emery was thirty-eight); by others, more intimately acquainted with the Sewall family, that she had always been a nervous and high-strung girl. She wept easily; laughed easily; feared company, yet pressed herself upon both men and women, chattering with an earnest sort of gaiety. At the age of fifteen she underwent a religious experience of some sort, never satisfactorily explained to her family, and pleaded with them to allow her to convert to Catholicism, and join a cloistered order of nuns; but of course the Sewalls, being a resolutely Protestant family, forbade their daughter to entertain such fantasies. At the age of twenty-four Anna Emery became engaged to a lively young bachelor-about-town who shortly thereafter threw her over for another,
prettier, young heiress; and, after a period of intense shame and humiliation, when she scarcely dared show her face in society, she consented to marry the fifty-two-year-old Elias Shrikesdale—a wealthy widower known for his financial coups in the railroad, grain, and asbestos markets, but not otherwise admired in Philadelphia society. Anna Emery suffered several miscarriages—gave birth to a baby girl, who subsequently died at the age of eight months—and finally, after years of barrenness, gave birth to Roland, whom she adored immediately as the redeeming fact of her life. “Now I see why God has made me suffer!” the radiant mother exclaimed, hugging her baby hungrily to her bosom. “Now I see
all.
”

Following this, though Anna Emery's health was never stable, she hardly minded; for she had her son, who loved her nearly as much as she loved him.

Within months of Roland's birth Elias Shrikesdale began to travel more frequently on business. It seemed he was rarely at Castlewood though, as observers noted, he might be glimpsed at one or another of his Philadelphia clubs, or at the racetrack, or in Manhattan, often in the company of an attractive young singer or actress whom he made no effort to introduce to acquaintances. He explained to Anna Emery and the Sewalls that he was simply too busy with his own affairs, financial and political, to concern himself with domestic matters. If Anna Emery and little Roland spent the summer in Newport, Elias might visit a weekend or two; if they went abroad for six months, he might decline to accompany them at all. A man's life, Elias said, couldn't be shared with a woman; at least not the sort of women one found in Philadelphia society.

“We must go, after all, where life quickens us,” he declared.

Observers marveled at Anna Emery's allegiance to her husband, no matter his infidelities, his public rudenesses and questionable business practices. She may have believed, like most women of her class and era, that moneymaking was a man's vocation that had no relationship to ethics or even to the law. She refused to hear any criticism of Elias even from
her own family; refused to read any newspaper, including the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, that chided him for ungentlemanly behavior in the public sphere. (The most serious charges were brought against the Shrikesdales at the time of the 1902 strike of the newly organized United Mine Workers in eastern Pennsylvania, when Elias and his brother Stafford hired a small army of mercenaries to break the strike. A number of miners were killed, many more were injured and several of their houses burnt to the ground in mysterious blazes. Following the breaking of the strike, however, the Shrikesdales enjoyed their most profitable years, and stock in the company rose to new heights.) After President Teddy Roosevelt forced negotiations on the anthracite mine owners in Pennsylvania who'd refused to discuss contracts with the union, or to listen to union requests at all, Elias and Stafford jested angrily of ways in which Roosevelt might be “cut down”: there being the recent excellent example of Mark Hanna's flunkey McKinley shot in the fat belly as he reached out complacently to shake his assassin's hand, and the example of Old Abe, or Old Ape, shot in the back of the head in Ford's Theater—“Better late than never.” As the Shrikesdale brothers retained a powerful security force, such jests were perhaps half serious. Certainly they spoke of possible stratagems for “the perfect assassination—to be credited to Bolshevik terrorists” in the presence of others, even at formal dinner parties at Castlewood; yet, oddly, Anna Emery took no note of them, retaining the dignity of her station as a Philadelphia grande dame for whom the ways of men are inscrutable and not to be questioned, still less challenged.

After Elias's death, however, Anna Emery rarely spoke of him. As if, dying at the advanced age of eighty-four, he'd cruelly abandoned her and was to be blamed for her financial predicament, as she called it, though as Montgomery Bagot and other advisors insisted, Anna Emery Shrikesdale was one of the richest women in the Northeast. Still it was her nervous complaint, made to relatives and friends, that she and Roland were “at the mercy of fortune—unless God intervenes.”

This, despite the fact that, at the time Roland disappeared into the West, and reappeared as a battered amnesiac, Anna Emery was earning by way of Shrikesdale holdings, investments and income more than $7,000 an hour.

ECCENTRIC AS ANNA
Emery Shrikesdale became in her seventh decade, she wasn't unlike a number of Philadelphia dowagers of her circle who worried obsessively about money, no matter the size of their fortunes. They were fully capable of giving away enormous sums to charity, or, upon impulse, paying as much as $400,000 for a painting promoted by Joseph Duveen; then they reacted by cutting their household budgets to the bone, or going without buying a single new item of clothing for a full season. Anna Emery took a sort of grim pride in the very dowdiness of her attire; she refused to heat many of the rooms in Castlewood Hall (including the servants' quarters); guests at her infrequent dinner parties were dismayed to confront fish, butter, sauces, and linen of less than the highest degree of freshness. Young Roland, his mother's son to his fingertips, behaved in much the same way—dressing unfashionably, procuring the cheapest seats at the theater, showing a prim sort of disdain for the usual diversions and sports of his class, like polo, yachting, and horse racing—but in Roland such parsimony had philosophical underpinnings. If spending money could add a cubit to a man's height, he said severely, we would be surrounded by giants and not, as we are, by pygmies.

Had Roland allowed it, Anna Emery would gladly have spent a good deal of money on him. But he cared only for books, evenings at the theater and concert hall, and occasional retreats, as he called them, to “lonely and unexpected” parts of the world where his name and face were unknown. So, the ill-considered trip to Colorado in the spring of 1914, made, as Roland declared, for the sake of his physical and spiritual salvation.

“If you leave me now, Roland, I am afraid we will never see each
other again on this earth,” Anna Emery said; and Roland, hardening himself against her tears, said, “If I do not leave now, Mother, I will not be able to tolerate
myself
on this earth.”

No expense was spared in Anna Emery's effort to locate her missing son, whether she paid out extraordinary sums for the design and printing of the soon-famous poster, and its distribution everywhere in the West; or allowed her private detectives unlimited expense accounts. (One of the detectives dared submit a tally sheet for $11,000 in expenses alone, for the single month of July; which sum Anna Emery promptly paid.) Bagot, whom Anna Emery believed an old friend, as well as one of the shrewdest lawyers in Philadelphia, was paid $8,000 simply to go out to Fort Sumner, make the crucial identification, and bring poor Roland home.

And of course it
was
Roland—as Anna Emery saw at once when Bagot led him into the room, though her poor heart was pounding, and her eyes had misted over in tears.

Her Roland, after so many days away!—her boy!—one side of his face grotesquely bandaged, and his hair darker and coarser than she recalled; his lips less moistly pink and soft; his very figure thickened, and given a fearful simian cast by all he'd endured. Anna Emery had been warned that Roland suffered from a temporary amnesia, could not recall his name or anything pertaining to his circumstances, etc., yet it amazed her to see for a brief flickering moment how he stared at her, eyes narrowed in that old squinting habit, yet luminous, with dread, exaltation, and wonder.

“Mother—?”

In the next instant he was crouched beside her bedside, weeping in her embrace. “My darling Roland, my baby, God has sent you back to me,” Anna Emery cried. And so it was.

Sharp-eyed old Stafford Shrikesdale saw within seconds of their meeting that this “amnesiac nephew” of his, talked of obsessively through Philadel
phia, and heralded in the national press, was an imposter. Yet so stunned was he, so thrown off balance by the audacity of the man's game, Stafford could do no more than stare at him and stammer a faint, faltering greeting and, to his subsequent chagrin,
shake the bastard's hand.

Which was cool, moist and clammy yet momentarily hard in its grip as never in the past, that Roland's uncle could recall.

And the squinting flash of the imposter's eyes, nothing like Roland's watery gaze.

Yet: there was poor Anna Emery, radiant and quivering with joy, clinging to her boy's arm and clutching at Stafford's as if to bring the two into an unlikely embrace. It was as everyone said: Anna Emery was convinced that this man was her lost son Roland, and who would wish to quarrel with her, at least at such a time? She was urging the stranger, “Roland, dear, try to remember your uncle Stafford, please! Your late father's brother.
Do try.
” The thick-bodied young brute gave every appearance of trying, staring at Stafford Shrikesdale with narrowed eyes, his mouth working mutely as if . . .
as if he were genuine.
And when he did at last speak,
it was in Roland's very voice.
“Y-Yes, Mother. I will
try.
If but God will help me.”

So sharp-eyed old Stafford Shrikesdale went away from his first encounter with his “amnesiac nephew” both knowing that the man was an imposter and shaken in his conviction.
For what if? . . . Couldn't an ordeal in the Southwest, great physical hardship have altered Roland Shrikesdale?

STAFFORD'S SONS, WHO
were Roland's cousins, and never very close to the pampered, petted sickly creature, found themselves, as usual, in sharp disagreement. For each saw what was
obvious
; and was filled with contempt for anyone who disagreed.

Said Bertram, “He isn't Roland. Any fool can see.”

Said Lyle, “But he must be Roland—how could he deceive so many people, and Aunt Anna Emery most of all?”

Said Willard in his ironic, lawyerly voice, “The man's way of speaking, the nervous little inflections and his squinting smiles and sighs, the way he wriggles his shoulders and buttocks like a female, and carries himself, and
is
—it's Roland, God damn him. Yet at the same time if one looks carefully, as I've done, studying him from the rear, and the side, from a distance and at close range—it seems to be our cousin in the form somehow of another man, a stranger a few years older than he, or as we remember him.”