Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Oh God! Don’t let there be anything broken. . . .

  And she was alone in the darkened house: she’d sent her housekeeper home early.

  Of course, she hadn’t wanted her very nice housekeeper/cook to prepare a meal for her when M.R. could so easily prepare a meal for herself, if she’d wished.

  “A night alone!”—she’d felt almost giddy.

  Returning from Chicago late, and after dark. For flying east out of daylight, you are flying into night. And how swiftly night comes on, like an eclipse.

  As soon as she’d left Chicago—as soon as she’d left the University Club and her marvelous hosts—as soon as she’d slumped into the limousine in which she was driven to the airport, she’d felt exhausted. Now her smile could be shut off, like a high-wattage lightbulb. Now her manikin-posture could relax, like a sock puppet minus fingers. Crudely she thought—or, rather, the crude thought came to her—How much money did we make today in Chicago? Might it be—millions?

  She’d connected with what-was-his-name—Ainscott. He’d liked her, she’d seen with relief—those frank blue eyes, hair trimmed short as a Marine’s and it was said of Ainscott that the man was worth more than one hundred million dollars he’d made in—was it junk bonds?—hedge funds?—he’d graduated from the University in 1959—and if he’d been opposed to a woman for the University presidency, he’d been gentlemanly enough to support M. R. Neukirchen as soon as she’d taken office.

  A flood of protest mail had come to the University alumni magazine, when M.R.’s name was first released to the media. And some of these letters were cruel, cutting, unapologetically sexist. M.R. had insisted upon seeing them—all of them—and M.R. had replied personally to each of the letters, by hand.

  Her staff had been astonished. Never had any president of the University taken on such a task but M.R. was conscious—(was this M.R.’s vanity?)—that her presidency was significant in the history of the University and that it was her privilege to define herself to her detractors, whom she could not bear to on their own terms as enemies.

  It was her Quaker instinct. Silence, stillness. At the core of the storm, stillness. To strike a blow even in defense of oneself is to provoke another blow, and yet another. The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction of an entire people. She would be a Child of the Light, if she was worthy.

  But returning from Chicago she’d made the error of not going immediately to bed. Or, at least to undress, to lie in bed and watch TV—(for M.R. did sometimes watch late-night TV—the parody-news programs that were her students’ favorite programs, reruns of PBS documentaries, classic films, foreign films—she would watch for a while until her eyes glazed over and sleep came to her quick and lovely like a great lapping tongue). Instead, she’d gone to her desk, and to her computer—always there was a phalanx of e-mail messages for her to answer and now in the aftermath of Alexander Stirk. . . .

  To her housekeeper she’d insisted she wasn’t hungry. But nearing 1 A.M., she’d become ravenously hungry.

  Since becoming University president, M.R. rarely ate an evening meal alone; yet more rarely was she able to retire to her upstairs apartment in Charters House by 9 P.M. She might have scheduled an engagement for that evening—for there were numerous obligations for the University president, awaiting her—but her assistant had told her sharply No!—the luncheon in Chicago was enough for that day.

  They were concerned for her, she knew. Her staffers—her loyal supporters. There was a fierce protective loyalty among M. R. Neukirchen’s assistants in Salvager Hall.

  Poor M.R.! She’s taking this so personally.

  What d’you mean? She hasn’t stumbled yet.

  They were shielding her—were they? There must have been many telephone calls—e-mails to the Office of the President of the University—which M.R. would never receive. And the “media”—Internet, cyberspace—cesspoolspace—swirling with news of Alexander Stirk.

  At 12:50 A.M. after a very long day there came M.R. in wool socks, jeans and a University sweatshirt descending the narrow circular staircase at the rear of the house, to which she’d become so accustomed after nine months that she could have navigated it in the dark. And in the high-ceilinged and cheerless kitchen she’d rummaged through cupboards to find a can of Campbell’s chicken-lentil soup which she’d poured into a bowl, mixed with water and set in the microwave oven for four minutes. And in the massive refrigerator that smelled just slightly of rancid butter she located several hunks of cheese, expensive imported cheeses left over from a recent reception, and there was a quarter-loaf of just slightly stale French bread. And in another cupboard, a box of just slightly stale crackers. And there was a quart bottle of seltzer water, just slightly flat. These M.R. placed on a tray to carry upstairs to her bedroom on the second floor, while the soup was rotating in the microwave. She could not have said why she hadn’t waited for the damned soup, maybe in fact—yes, probably—she’d forgotten the soup; her brain was always thrumming, like a machine that has been left on while its master has gone away, and so becomes overheated in the futility of mere effort; but it wasn’t here and now of which M.R. was thinking but there and then: a stray memory of an evening with her (secret) lover years ago in Cambridge when he’d dropped in to see her—late—and they’d made love—more accurately, given the degree of energy, enthusiasm, and physical prowess Andre Litovik brought to such endeavors, he’d made love to M.R.—and afterward dazed with hunger they’d staggered about M.R.’s cramped little kitchen and Andre flung together a midnight meal—coarse scrambled eggs, pita bread—a bottle of red wine he’d brought with him for rarely did Andre Litovik venture into M. R. Neukirchen’s little flat without bringing his favorite red wine with him. . . .

  M.R. smiled, recalling. And Andre’s way of saying good-bye that roused her from melancholy—Hey. I’m only going away so I can come back.

  This was true. And then, it was less true.

  M.R. had not quite realized how, as University president, she would be traveling quite so much. Going away so I can come back.

  But there was so little for her to come back to—here. A temporary residence—if she were president of the University for ten years, still the residence would be temporary; even her private quarters, comfortably messy, were not hers.

  At the end of her term as president, then. She would acquire a more permanent residence. She and Andre, perhaps.

  For a moment she had to think—where had she been that day? Of course—Chicago. An early flight out of Philadelphia, and home in the early evening. The visit had “gone well” yet had left her so drained of energy, it seemed now to have occurred several days before, on the farther side of an abyss.

  Her next alumni visit was Atlanta—she would fly out on Monday morning.

  And then Gainesville, and Miami.

  A tinge of alarm: Florida was the Stirks’ home state.

  Jacksonville, where Alexander’s parents lived.

  “Oh why didn’t he—like me! I was his friend.”

  In the room that was M.R.’s bedroom she’d set down the tray on a table. There were piles of books on the table, papers and documents and her laptop computer. In transit the quart bottle of seltzer had toppled over, and was leaking all over the tray, and now onto the table, and the floor; clumsily M.R. soaked up the spillage with the single paper napkin she’d brought with her upstairs. Such random incidents of physical clumsiness had come to characterize M.R.’s life ever more frequently in recent years. Where as a gangling-tall adolescent she’d been a quite surprisingly well-coordinated athlete—basketball, volleyball, field hockey—now in her early forties she seemed always to be spilling things, or dropping things, or colliding with things—at a semi-formal dinner the previous year while reaching over the table to shake hands with another guest in her impulsive-friendly manner somehow M.R. had nearly set her hair afire by leaning too close to a lighted candle�
��what a flurry of excitement!—another guest had quickly slapped her hair between his hands, to put out the sparks; M.R.’s hair had actually been singed, and emitted a smell of scorch; it was so ridiculous and embarrassing an episode, M.R. had laughed; but others had been concerned for her—“It isn’t funny really, you might have been badly burnt”—as for an overgrown child that has injured herself unwittingly.

  This too would pass into legend, M.R. supposed. In those rarified quarters in which M. R. Neukirchen was known.

  When she was alone M.R. retreated to this room. It wasn’t a very good idea to eat meals here—she hadn’t gotten around to bringing in the sort of table at which she might eat comfortably, or at least not awkwardly; for everything seemed temporary to her, here; and all that was merely personal seemed petty. In her zeal to appear—to be—selfless, M.R. took a sort of childish vanity in the fact—for yes, it was a fact—reflected in the eyes of her admiring staffers—that she not only didn’t care much for her personal comfort, but she was also scarcely aware of her personal comfort.

  Though M.R. resided in one of the most beautiful of “historic” private houses in all of New Jersey, she hadn’t the slightest interest in eating in the massive dining room alone, or in the sepulchral kitchen; less frequently than she’d planned, she did invite close friends among the faculty to have dinner with her—an “early evening” as M.R. called it—meaning that her guests should leave at about 9:30 P.M.; if she’d had a more luxuriant imagination, and cared more for such things, she might light a fire in the pale-marble fireplace in the library, and eat there, if only from a tray; she might read while she ate; it was an old pleasure now nearly lost to her, to read while she ate; her (secret) lover was always reading while he ate, even when she’d been with him, sometimes; he’d claimed that he and his wife Erika rarely ate meals together any longer, and if they did, Erika usually switched on the TV; but when M.R. ate her hurried meals alone, she often ate, or tried to eat, while working at her computer, looking through papers, taking notes.

  This terrible thing that had happened to Stirk. That Stirk had done to himself.

  He would never recover. He was in a coma, paralyzed. The ugly term—“brain-dead.”

  He could not breathe for himself—a machine would breathe for him, in perpetuity. For his parents were devout Catholics, never would they direct Alexander Stirk’s doctors to cease treatment.

  Something to be grateful for, Leonard Lockhardt had said with a pained smile—“If he dies, that ratchets it up. From ‘criminal negligence’ to ‘wrongful death.’ ”

  Not good to think such thoughts! M.R. felt faint, from hunger, anxiety—“I should eat.”

  She’d left something behind—down in the kitchen—what was it?—yes, in the microwave—a bowl of soup.

  Quickly descending the back staircase in her slippery wool socks, for she’d kicked off her tight shoes as soon as she’d arrived home, and put on these socks which were in fact hiking socks Andre had purchased for her from L.L. Bean in the days when they’d hiked together—not often, but a few times. And in the kitchen—oh! this depressing kitchen!—a place of pure utility like the kitchen of a hotel with a magnetized overhead rack of large, razor-sharp and mean-looking chef’s knives and a massive Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer and a steel stove with a dozen burners—space geared for the preparation and serving of large quantities of food—here there was the microwave, that had switched itself off. A smell of hot soup—hot chicken-lentil soup—made M.R. faint with hunger.

  Except: there was something wrong—was there?

  To her annoyance M.R. saw—at the far end of the hallway beyond the butler’s pantry, that opened off the kitchen, the door to the basement appeared to be ajar, again.

  One of the household staff must have left it ajar. M.R. went to shut it, firmly.

  A faint odor of chill, damp—unmistakable.

  M.R. had only once ventured into the basement of Charters House and had no wish to return. She’d descended into a nether region of dank smells, gritty concrete floors, melancholy exiled furniture draped in shroudlike sheets and at the rear of the laundry room a deep, ancient sink with corroded faucets like something in a slaughterhouse, that smelled, if but faintly, of its original function. A moment of horror had come over her—sympathy for the Charters House staff that, through centuries, as in an endless procession of Hades, had had to toil in such conditions, for niggardly wages.

  In this vast old house there were rooms on the third floor—“guest rooms” as they were vaguely called—which M.R. had not yet seen, and had little interest in seeing.

  As a child, perhaps—she’d have been curious. Prowling about in adult habitations: the Skedd house—“foster home”—where little Jewell had had a bed, or rather a cot, in a row of three cots for three little girls on the second floor.

  But Jewell had never gone into the basement. “Cellar”—it was called.

  She didn’t think so. Some of the other children, the older children—maybe. But not Jewell.

  Thorns in her throat, the child must have swallowed. Just the broken bits of thorns, that scratched the inside of her throat. And mud—black mud. She’d choked on mud. This would prevent Jewell from crying for help if ever she needed to cry for help so Jewell was not likely to venture into forbidden parts of the Skedd house voluntarily.

  And here, in Charters House, M.R. had presented herself to the housekeeper Mildred as having no interest in venturing into the cellar—as if she hadn’t already visited it; and Mildred had mildly objected that the basement wasn’t such a bad place once you were used to it, laundry was done there, sorting clothes and ironing, apart from the furnaces and water heaters there were mostly stored things, old furniture, china, boxes and crates that hadn’t been open in decades—or longer.

  “Not for me—I hate basements!” M.R. said with a shudder.

  So much of what M.R. uttered, in this phase of her life, had an exclamatory air, and was accompanied by a smile, as if when she wasn’t M. R. Neukirchen speaking seriously and profoundly she was an actress in a musical comedy—one who evoked indulgent smiles, like Ethel Merman.

  Mildred laughed, as if M.R. had indeed meant to be amusing.

  “Well—there’s some of us can’t avoid basements, Mz. Neukirchen.”

  If this was a rebuke, it was a very tactful rebuke.

  For M.R. was not living in a house but residing in a residence—the distinction should have been clear.

  It was now, M.R. made a tactical error.

  Distracted by such thoughts, M.R. made a near-fatal error.

  Afterward she would be unable to comprehend why she’d behaved as irrationally as she had—why, removing the very hot soup bowl from the microwave, she hadn’t simply placed it on another tray, to carry upstairs. For there were many trays at her disposal, in the kitchen. And it would not have seemed frivolous for M.R. to take a second tray—there was no one to observe!

  Yet somehow—her hands now shaking, for she was ravenously hungry—M.R. chose to carry the very hot soup bowl upstairs without a tray, gripping it—she’d thought, firmly—not with the thicker pot holders, which had seemed to her too thick, and clumsy—but with the thinner pot holders; though almost immediately realizing that the bowl was too hot, the pot holders not thick enough to prevent her fingers from being burnt, yet—stubbornly—M.R. did not turn back—(for she wasn’t one to make a fuss! in any gathering you could count on her not to make a fuss like other children)—and ascending the stairs holding the very hot soup bowl between her (barely protected) hands she gave a little cry of dismay, self-disgust, surprise, pain as the bowl slipped from her grip—her fingers were being burnt, she’d had no choice but to let the bowl go—Oh oh oh oh—once the cry erupted from her throat like the cry of a small bird that is being crushed to death, that has but one instant to cry before it is crushed to death, M.R. could not speak—her throat seemed to shut—in astonished
silence she missed a step, she fell, very hard she fell, clumsily and stupidly and in a paroxysm of sudden sharp pain—pains—for she’d struck her head a numbing blow against the rungs of the railing, and her mouth—the underside of her jaw and her soft opened mouth striking the steps—several steps in rapid succession—and now there came scalding liquid onto her fingers, her wrists—a sharp blow like a kick in her ribs and her suddenly useless legs twisted beneath her so that she continued to fall, to slip-slide down the steps, and to fall—helplessly, absurdly—sprawling on the staircase that twisted like a corkscrew unable to speak aloud, unable to call for help—desperately telling herself I am all right, I am not—seriously injured.

  When you are struck down so suddenly—there is an air, almost a conviction, of disbelief.

  That which has happened, could not have happened.

  As the child had lain helpless in the mud. Mudgirl, tossed away into the mud like the naked and battered little mud-doll.

  That which has happened, could not have not-happened.

  In philosophy, there have arisen counter-worlds, to accommodate the imagined-but-unlived possibilities of this world.

  She had written of these worlds. Her colleagues had written of these worlds. Not a one of them believed in these worlds that were “real” but not “actual”—or “actual” but not “real.”

  There are subjects that philosophy cannot approach. There are subjects so bared, so exposed—the antic beating heart, which no words can encase.

  She lay without daring to move, sprawled on the steps. Trying to recover her breath. Her heart that was a kite blown high into the treetops, fluttering and thrashing. And her bones—her legs, arms—were any of her bones broken? Her head had been struck—hard—against the rungs of the railing.

  “I didn’t ‘lose consciousness.’ I’m sure I did not.”

  She was explaining to someone: a doctor. His face was young and unclear as if incompletely formed. This supercilious stranger would pass judgment on her neurological condition, shining a pencil-thin beam of light into her defenseless eyes.