My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates

trifle, I’m sure.”
    Awkwardly, Fanny and Tyler carried the stricken girl to a sofa where by slow degrees she revived, though it was nearly an hour before she came sufficiently to her senses to recognize her surroundings and to recall who the Stirlings were, and why she had come. With numbed lips she whispered she was sorry, so sorry, so frightened, she knew she must leave but she had nowhere to go, how could she return home to Innisfail, or even to her aunt’s house, she had hidden her condition from her aunt but could not hide it much longer, Maynard had promised her he would assist her, what a good man Maynard was, how wicked of God to have taken him away!—so that Fanny was obliged to interrupt, with the alarmed caution with which she might have spoken to one of her own children, “My dear, no!—never say such things. We must believe that God is good. ”
    â€œBut God is not good ,” Mina Raumlicht wept, writhing on the horsehair sofa, her plaited hair coming undone, her small, distended body exuding a damp disagreeable heat. “—God has hurt us all, so cruelly.”
    Tyler went to fetch a glass of brandy for the girl, but she lapsed into a sudden sleep, or trance; her reddened eyes only partly closed; her mouth, that looked hurt, slack as an infant’s. The Stirlings stood over her, uncertain what to do. Tyler, who knew far more of the world’s ways than did his sister-in-law, was yet stymied; in his soul, deeply shocked, and angered, by his late brother’s behavior—what a hypocrite, that Presbyterian deacon! How incensed Maynard had been, in public at least, two decades ago when the Democratic candidate for president Grover Cleveland had been exposed in the public press for having sired an illegitimate child—as if such creatures were not being sired daily, by so-called gentlemen like Maynard Stirling and Grover Cleveland.
    â€œShe is correct,” Fanny Stirling said wearily. “God has hurt us all cruelly.”
    â€œBut God will show us a way out, Fanny. Never doubt Him.”
7.
    Tyler Stirling, too, was trained in the law; lacking his older brother’s reputation, forever in the shadow of the formidable Maynard, yet not without gifts of his own. During the brief hour that Mina Raumlicht slept deeply, Tyler conferred with his sister-in-law in a far corner of the study, deciding what must be done. “The remarkable thing is, the girl makes no accusations. She makes no demands. She seems almost not to know her advantage. She leaves it to us, it appears. Almost, one could take pity on her,” Tyler murmured; and Fanny said vehemently, “I do take pity on her, and on us. It’s Maynard I cannot forgive.” “Possibly, the girl is lying,” Tyler ventured uncertainly, “—or there is another man involved. If Maynard were here to—” “But Maynard is not here ,” Fanny said, with surprising feeling. “And if he were, you see, we would not have met Miss Raumlicht; we would know nothing of Miss Raumlicht; it would have been very quietly, very discreetly settled. Ah, I am beginning to see how such things work out, in the world of men!” Tyler and Fanny were sipping brandy to steady their nerves; Fanny, unaccustomed to strong drink, and at such an hour of the day, refilled her own glass, and raised it to her trembling lips. The fierce, astringent fumes cleared her head wonderfully. The effect was like a windowpane long dimmed with dirt, wiped clean. Almost, she felt exhilarated: freed! For truly, had she loved Maynard Stirling at all?—except as she’d been, by law, his wife? Dimly she was recalling the hurts and slights of long ago, following the birth of Warren, when Fanny was yet a relatively young woman, and her husband had ceased to “approach” her in their bedroom as once he’d been in the habit of doing; not that Fanny, being a decent Presbyterian woman, had not been