My Heart Laid Bare (56 page)

Darian shrugged, slopping more tea into his saucer. His heart pounded in dislike of his newfound sister.

As if there were too many Darian Lichts.

Next, Millie asked him if he'd ever been in love, or if there was anyone whom he loved now—“I mean, you know, in a romantic sense.” Her voice was conspicuously Southern by now. Again Darian shrugged, not liking so personal a question; and embarrassed, and resentful, not knowing how to reply. He hoped never to succumb to mere romance. He hoped he was superior to childish, primitive cravings. “Possibly,” he said. “If ever I become that bored.” Millie laughed, uncomfortably. Darian was recalling why he'd felt resentful of Millie, even as he'd missed her: he'd written several songs for soprano voice, for her, as a part of his Muirkirk opera cycle, and sent them to her by way of Esther, but she'd never responded. He'd
known that she'd received them because she'd told Esther she had. Like Thurston, like Elisha—Millie had gone away, and forgotten him.

Like a magician Millie was extracting from her silver lamé purse a packet of photographs which she passed over to Darian. Most were of her baby—“Maynard Franklin Stirling. Your nephew, Darian.” Darian found himself moved by the baby's sweet, quizzical face and startled expression. He didn't want to think the baby resembled, ever so slightly, his mother's father. Millie said defiantly, “
He's
something!—he's
real.
”

Darian acknowledged, yes it was so. Nothing more
real
than a baby created out of one's mortal flesh. “You're happy, then, Millie. You've crossed over.”

“Yes.” Millie spoke with satisfaction, taking the photographs back from Darian and checking them, severely, as if she feared one might be missing, or in some way altered; then dropping them into her purse and snapping it shut. There. That's that! Darian sensed how she'd been preparing to ask a question long contemplated, and now plunged into it, more nervously than she wished—“You've lost contact with Elisha, I suppose. You never hear of him or from him—I suppose.”

Darian shook his head, sadly.

There was an awkward pause. Darian, not looking at Millie, could hear her quickened breathing; he imagined her close to breaking into sobs. Her grief wouldn't be pure but a grief of loss and anger.

Like a spoiled Virginia matron Millie called to the waiter to bring more hot water for their tea. Even with the tea cozy, their tea had become lukewarm.

In a honeyed voice saying to him, as if this were an old quarrel, and Darian quite the crank for failing to come round to common sense, “I s'pose you haven't respect for composers like Verdi, Rossini, Bellini . . . and who was it wrote
The Bohemian Girl
. . . Gilbert and Sullivan? And Richard Wagner.” She pronounced the name with the precise German inflection, “Rick-ard,” as Abraham Licht had done.

“Wagner, certainly,” Darian said shortly.

“And the others are—old-fashioned? Too easy, too pleasurable to the ear?”

“Too boring, I would have said.”

“Well! Boring is in the ear of the beholder,
I
would have said.”

“And so you have. And very clearly.”

Millie's bee-stung, perfectly painted lips twitched in a smile. He knew she was feeling the sting of discovering her shy young brother not so young any longer, and not so shy. She said, pouring more tea for them both, with a frowning sort of concentration that marred her smooth forehead, “But you must, you know. Eventually. ‘Love'—‘fall in love.' You may scorn romance, but your music, without it, will be superficial.” When Darian refused to rise to this bait, Millie changed the subject, and asked after his finances. “Are you poor as your clothes, your haircut and that rooming house suggest, or are you, like the proverbial bohemian artist, indifferent to material things? The way you've devoured these little sandwiches! If you need money, Darian, I'll be happy to . . . lend you some. That is, Warren will. I know you're too proud to accept an outright gift. But—” She made a movement to open her silver lamé purse again, but was deterred by Darian's look of disdain.

“Millie, thank you. But I don't need your money.”

“Ah! I've offended you.”

“Not at all. I think I've offended
you.
”

Millie who was Mrs. Warren Stirling with her flashing rings and bright, knowing smile said accusingly, “Darian, you loved me once, in Muirkirk. When
he
was our father. Is that it? But now—everything has changed.
You
have changed, and I suppose that I have. And so you've ceased to love your ‘pretty'—‘doomed'—sister.”

“‘Doomed'? Why?”

Millie laughed. Adjusting the smart cloche hat on her head, with a small violent gesture. Darian saw her gaze fixed beyond his shoulder and,
following it, caught sight of his sister's floating oval face in a wall mirror a short distance away. And there was his own face, narrow and blurred as a face glimpsed from the window of a speeding train. Had Millie been watching herself all along, in a pretext of watching him? “Damned, maybe,” Millie said. Darian looked at her uncomprehending. “Your ‘pretty'—‘damned'—sister, I might have said.”

Soon it would be time to leave. Darian seemed to know beforehand how he would miss Millie; how he would rage at himself for letting this opportunity pass, without taking his sister's hands in his and telling her he loved her. He said, fumbling, “D'you ever hear of Thurston?” and Millie quickly shook her head, no. “He
is
alive, isn't he?” Darian asked, and again Millie shook her head, this time to indicate she didn't know. She shivered; she was warming her hands on the teapot, in a gesture Darian remembered from many years ago in Muirkirk, when tendrils of wind came whistling through cracks in the windows and skeins of frost glittered on the panes in blinding, yet freezing sunshine. Darian said stubbornly, “I believe that Thurston
is
alive. And that we'll see him again—someday.” Millie shrugged, and wiped at her eyes. In the doorway of the tearoom Warren Stirling stood hesitantly, looking in their direction. Millie had asked him to join them after twenty minutes or so and now, uncertainly smiling, he approached their table; a tall, slightly stocky man of youthful middle age. He'd served as an Army colonel in the Great War and had been wounded in northern France; he'd nearly died of exposure and later of infection; he'd told Millie that in a state of delirium he'd seen her face—that is, the face of the “Lass of Aviemore” he'd confused with hers. “As if I, Millie, who knew so little how to save her own life, could have saved his”—so Millie had confided in Darian, with an expression of half-shamed wonder.

Quickly, before Warren came within earshot, Millie seized Darian's hand, caressed the long, powerful pianist's fingers and murmured in a thrilled undertone, “Thurston
is
alive. Only no longer ‘Thurston.' He
came to visit Warren and me in Richmond, and gave us his blessing. But Harwood—is dead.”

“What?
Dead
—?”

It was a taut dramatic moment, precisely timed. For Darian's gentlemanly brother-in-law was pulling out a chair to sit at their lacquered table, and such confidential exchanges must cease. “May I join you? You're sure you don't mind?”—Warren Stirling smiled at Darian. A genial, kindly man, an ideal husband for Millie and an ideal father for her children, who no more knew her than he knew Darian. The expression in his warm mud-brown eyes as he gazed at beautiful Millicent in her cloche hat and pretty clothes told all: to be the object of another's adoration is to be blessed.

SO: HARWOOD WAS
dead! Cruel Harwood Licht.

When Darian's half brother had died; and how; and where; whether of natural or unnatural causes; whether deservedly, or undeservedly—Darian Licht in his innocence was never to know.

The twenty-third of May 1928. Near midnight. Darian Licht has returned alone to his room at the shabby Empire State Hotel on Eighth Avenue, where a number of his fellow Schenectady musicians are also staying, when there's a loud rap at the door; and Darian, in his shirt-sleeves, hurries to answer thinking it might be Thurston—though knowing it can't be Thurston, of course. “Yes? What?” Darian cries. He pauses to stare at himself in a scummy mirror; irritably brushes his hair out of his face, an alarmingly flushed, mottled, haggard young face, and makes a stab at adjusting his clothing. Since the nightmare recital and the shock of meeting Thurston, and at once losing Thurston, Darian has dropped by several taverns on the way back to the hotel and has had, for him, an inordinate amount to drink, if only beer. He hasn't eaten since breakfast that morning on the train; he
supposes he'll eat again in the morning on the train, returning to Schenectady with his musician friends. (He dreads seeing them. Their eyes. Their embarrassed smiles. At the Westheath School, none of his colleagues will speak to him of
Esopus, the Lost Village
except to assure Darian vaguely that his music is too difficult and unconventional for ordinary ears; none will speak to him of the critical notices that appeared in several New York papers, the kindest in the
Tribune
, beginning “A career other than musical composition is urgently advised for the youthful, earnest but painfully talentless Schenectady resident Darian Licht . . . .” Nor will Darian make any inquiries.) The loud rap is repeated, and Darian opens the door, and sees—who is it?—a couple in evening attire, so handsomely glittering they might have stepped out of the society pages of the Sunday rotogravure.

“Darian? Darian Licht? Is it you?”

“No. Yes. I'm not sure. Who are
you
?”

“You don't recognize me, son? Of course you do.”

A silvery-haired gentleman in his early sixties, it seems; in black tie, and carrying a silk top hat; a much younger woman at his side, in an ankle-length deep-purple velvet gown, staring at him with dark shining eyes he'll recall afterward as too intense. Who are these strangers? Well-wishers? Musical connoisseurs? In the very wake of defeat and humiliation Darian Licht is vain enough, or naive enough, to believe that, yes, someone took notice that evening of his genius.

The silvery-haired gentleman steps forward into the room, uninvited. His gloved hand extended. His smile somewhat forced, yet confident. “Of course you recognize me, son. Even after so many years. And here is my wife Rosamund . . . .”

Darian is deafened by a roaring in his ears like Niagara Falls. As in a distorting mirror he sees a familiar-unfamiliar face leering at him, and the mouth moving soundlessly. And the woman's face, no one he has ever glimpsed before, a hard chiseled beauty he seems nonetheless to recognize. “Father . . . ?” he manages to say. “Is it . . . ?”

Abraham Licht, hardly changed. Or if changed, in the shock of the moment Darian Licht hasn't the capacity to see.

“We're aggrieved, Rosamund and I, to have missed your concert,” Abraham Licht is saying, “—but we were held up at an impossibly long, dull cocktail reception at the Astors' over on Fifth Avenue—the usual thing at that house, I've been told; my error, for which I'm deeply apologetic and chagrined, and hope you'll forgive me. Son!” In Darian's hotel room which is scarcely larger than an old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub, the elegantly dressed smooth-shaven Abraham Licht and his new wife take up so much space, Darian is forced back against the iron bedstead, panting. A few hours previously there was Thurston; and now Father; is he on the verge of death, and his life flashing before his stunned eyes? He has all he can do to keep his balance. The new Mrs. Licht reaches out to steady him with a gloved hand and he shrinks, cat-like, from her touch.

A woman no older than Darian. With greeny-glistening eyes. Her fine wavy black hair, just perceptibly streaked with gray, brushed back from her angular face and fashioned into a sleek French twist. There's a charming little knob near the bridge of her nose and her lips are perfectly sculpted, darkened to crimson. Maybe Darian imagines it but isn't there, in the new Mrs. Licht's face, an expression of . . . startled recognition?

How could you do it, marry this man! You, so young and so beautiful, to marry a man old enough to be your father!

And her green eyes flash defiantly
Because I love him. Because he loves me. What right have you to judge us?

Darian hears himself stammering words he won't recall afterward, a fumbling faltering performance. It's like the aleatory moments in
Esopus
that so baffled and outraged the audience. Abraham Licht cuts Darian off, aggressively praising him though he didn't attend the recital and hasn't heard any music of Darian's in more than a decade, presenting him to the new Mrs. Licht as a “musical genius of a son”—a “musical prodigy”—a “will-o'-the-wisp” whose whereabouts are often unknown even to his fam
ily. Darian protests laughingly, “Father? What family?” but Abraham Licht takes no notice; nor does Rosamund seem to hear; as in a performance of a play in which not all the actors are equally familiar with the script or equally well rehearsed, Darian is confusedly aware that something is happening of which he hasn't any control yet can't resist; must not resist; there's a momentum of what might be called
audience expectation
. . . a sense that, beyond the blinding footlights, in a vast, undefined space beyond this room in the Empire State Hotel, a gathering of witnesses is waiting. With a part of his mind Darian would like to open the door and shove the beaming Abraham Licht out into the hall, with the new Mrs. Licht; yet he stands paralyzed, staring and smiling at his visitors like a fool. Abraham Licht is saying, in a voice of fond reproach, “You might, y'know, son, have notified your own father about your premiere. Here in Manhattan, at Carnegie Hall! Only imagine—a child of mine, making his début at Carnegie Hall! And yet I knew nothing of it until yesterday; it was my darling Rosamund who happened to see the item in the paper. Our name—‘Licht.'”