Free My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates

father’s death) and she is shortly to be freed of her marital bond to the dyspeptic old tyrant Wallace Peck (who visited upon his young bride two miscarriages, one stillbirth, and a nameless infection eventually cured by way of hydrotherapy and mercury treatments).
    But why should Love hide its face?
    Why should she hide her face? . . . coldly explaining to cousins, to friends, to skeptical Manhattan acquaintances, that she and young Christopher love each other, she and young Christopher honor each other, it matters not at all that, yes, he is nearly twenty years her junior, that he is from a modest rural background in upstate New York, that, apart from a year at theMount Chattaroy Bible Institute, he has had very little formal education; it matters not at all—this said with an angry flaring-up—that the world professes doubt as to the charity of Mrs. Peck’s behavior in taking up with, or taking advantage of, a sweet but somewhat simpleminded farm boy.
    WHENCE COMES, WITH such force, the conviction that she is mad with love for the boy, that she would die for the boy, that though he is not the first, nor the second, nor even the third, of her “enthusiasms,” he has replaced them all in her heart—in truth, obliterated their memories altogether? Whence comes this defiance, so uncharacteristic of the Ingrams, or of anyone, female particularly, in their circle, that she is not ashamed and she will have her way . . . though discreet enough here in Atlantic City, where of course she is known, to have taken two rooms, a suite for her and an adjoining room for him, to forestall wagging tongues, and the censure of the Saint-Léon management? Whence this delirium of desire? . . . an intoxication of brawny sprawling limbs, hard-muscled limbs, limbs covered in fuzzy blond hair . . . a slow shy crooked smile . . . a deep flush rising from the throat to the cheeks when Eloise, slightly tipsy Eloise, admires him too ecstatically, or caresses him with too-eager clumsy hands: dear boy! dear innocent boy!— do you love me above all the world?
2.
    The talk in fashionable Atlantic City in the summer of ’09 was of nothing but scandal: scandal in politics, scandal in horse racing, scandal in the behavior of Wallace Peck’s “estranged” wife.
    Was there ever a woman of good family who behaved, in public, with such defiance?—glimpsed on the boardwalk, on the beach, in one or another dining room or salon or restaurant, in the company of the lanky rawboned youth she called her fiancé: a boy young enough to be her son, as the ladies angrily observed.
    And her elderly husband back home in Manhattan, said to be in ill health . . . (It had come to the point, as the gentlemen whispered among themselves, that the expression Wallace Peck’d was beginning to be heard, bandied cruelly about in clubs and drawing rooms: for to be Wallace Peck’d was to be most conspicuously and shamefully cuckolded. ) A divorce was in progress, it was known, and Peck had allegedly washed his hands of her, but still!—what scandal!—Eloise Peck in her costly designer clothes (favoring, this season, the controversial Parisian Poiret, who preached the abolition of the corset), her chestnut-red hair too fiercely hennaed, her face powder and kohl too much in evidence, and didn’t she make a spectacle of herself, smiling and simpering at everyone in sight, as if she imagined they might wish her well?
    Eloise Peck, married off at twenty, had grown into a plump coquettish woman with startled eyes and a busy, bustling, rather too sunny nature, quicker to smile than was absolutely necessary, and given to distracting peals of laughter . . . as if (as her detractors said jeeringly) she found much in the world to cheer her. Until recent years, when her slender waist began to thicken, and the flesh about her jowls and throat slackened, most of the gentlemen in her circle found her charming enough; the ladies