My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

Christopher could speak, Harwood pushed his way inside, and, seeing they were alone, began to demand money from him. He was in a bad way, Harwood said; his life was in danger; he needed money, and he needed it immediately; and Thurston must provide it.
    Christopher was so rattled at the sight of this brother of his, of whom he’d never been fond, whom he’d never trusted, in this place where his brother should not have been, he could only stammer that there must be some mistake: he wasn’t Thurston, but Christopher—“My name is Christopher Schoenlicht.”
    Harwood said contemptuously he didn’t give a damn what Thurston’s name was or wasn’t; he needed money; and it was obvious that, here, money was to be had. He knew all about Thurston’s liaison with some wealthy old female and he wanted his share. “My luck has temporarily run out,” he said, “—and now, ‘Christopher,’ I want some of yours.”
    Still Christopher stammered that there must be some mistake: he wasn’t Thurston, but Christopher: and unless Harwood left at once, he would be forced to eject him.
    â€œâ€˜Eject’ me, eh! Will you! Oh will you!—just try it, fancy boy!” Harwood laughed, lowering his head like a bulldog about to leap to the attack, and clenching his fists. “Dare to touch me, and see what happens.”
    In the course of his precocious career, the young man who currently called himself “Christopher Schoenlicht” had encountered a number of upsetting situations, and calculated his way out of several tight spots; even at panicked moments he recalled a favorite epigram of his father’s—“‘The worst is not so long as we can say, This is the worst ’”—though he couldn’t have named its source, whether the Bible, or Shakespeare, Homer or Mark Twain. Yet, his drunken brother Harwood standing belligerently beforehim in a place and at a time where Harwood was, by all the rules of The Game, not to be , these words ran rapidly through his head—“This is the worst!— this. ”
    For it had never happened before, that any of the Lichts had put another so at risk.
    Brothers by blood are brothers by the soul.
    Control, and control, and again control: and what prize will not be ours?
    Christopher, or Thurston, had last spoken with Harwood several months ago at the old country place, as the family called it, in Muirkirk, in the Chautauqua Valley of upstate New York, around the time of Harwood’s twenty-second birthday. Afterward, as usual, the brothers had gone in separate directions, for they had quite separate destinations: Harwood to Baltimore, to attach himself to a relation of some sort, a “cousin” of their father’s, with whom he was to organize a racing lottery, and Christopher, or Thurston, with his very different gifts, to return to Manhattan and to his quick-blooming romance with the wealthy Mrs. Peck. When he was apart from his brothers and sisters, Thurston rarely gave them much thought, for how could thinking along sentimental, familial lines be productive?—as Father might say. He did allow himself moments now and then of reverie, smoking a cigar, sipping a rare liqueur, as he’d been doing on the balcony of the hotel suite just now; at such times he contemplated the Muirkirk home as one might contemplate a place of refuge; he might indulge himself in a mental colloquy with his father, whose spiritual presence he required to get him through knotty times. (Like “making love” with Mrs. Eloise Peck.)
    As Mr. Licht had instructed his children, it was always wisest to say How would Father deal with this? —not How should I deal with this? —when they were faced with difficult situations.
    But how would Father deal with this ?—Christopher, or Thurston, asked himself, as his unwanted brother Harwood prowled about the luxurious room, sniffing doglike at vases