Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He would pass judgment on her spiritual condition, shining a pencil-thin beam of light into her eyes.

  If the pupil of her eye did not respond—there was neurological damage.

  Spiritual damage would be more difficult to detect.

  She was certain she hadn’t been concussed. That was crucial.

  The boy—Stirk—had been concussed. That is, he’d lost consciousness from a blow or blows to the head. And that was crucial.

  Of course you’re all right, Meredith! Count to sixty and then—get up! As if nothing has happened.

  So Agatha advised. Agatha who had little patience for self-pity, whining, and evil.

  M.R. began counting. But soon the counting became confused with the more erratic beating of her heart and the blood-pulse in her ears that frightened her, for it meant that the pressure of her blood was high, a pounding against a thin membrane that might burst.

  She must see a doctor, soon. She’d been so very busy, she had several times postponed her yearly examination.

  The physical ignominy and discomfort of the pelvic exam—during which M.R. was determined to carry on a bright brisk stoic conversation with the very nice (woman) gynecologist.

  No time! No time! No time for her meager self.

  No one loves a weak, needy child. No one loves a weak, needy, homely child.

  In the Skedds’ house, she had known: who could possibly love Mudgirl? Only an Angel of the Lord could save her.

  About her on the steps the soup was still dripping! What had smelled delicious in the kitchen now just smelled—badly.

  She’d been so very hungry, now all hunger had vanished. Her body was livened with adrenaline like an electric current. So stupid of her to have grasped a bowl scalding-hot from the microwave, thinking to carry it all the way upstairs without adequate protection for her fingers—now, Mildred would discover the stained carpet.

  Canny Mildred would deduce something of what had happened in the night. Without her staffs—household, administrative—M. R. Neukirchen was helpless as a child.

  But here was a new surprise, a shock—blood.

  Was she—bleeding?

  In amazement M.R. touched her throbbing face and her fingers came away bloodied—why this was so unexpected, she could not have said. Yet it seemed to her a fresh rebuke, a threat to her precarious well-being. For it seemed that M.R. was bleeding not just from her mouth, where her teeth had pierced the soft inside of her lips, but from a cut in her forehead as well.

  Head wounds can bleed copiously. Capillaries close beneath the surface of the (thin, vulnerable) skin. Oh, Mildred would see this evidence!

  Stand! Get up! A towel to stop the bleeding—paper towels. No one will know.

  M.R. was chiding herself for she was so very disgusted with herself.

  She was chiding him.

  He’d tried to hang himself—had he? Tried, and failed.

  After the fraudulent claim of being assaulted, who would believe him?

  Desperate measures propel desperate people. She was not desperate, she had never wished to harm herself.

  Where others wish to harm us, we have little need to harm ourselves.

  Maybe it was her sickness-with-guilt that had caused her after all to harm herself. For the boy was her responsibility, or had been. And she had failed.

  “It can’t be my fault. He is not my—fault.”

  Yet her voice wavered, uncertain.

  It had to be so: the boy had parents, a father. It had come to light that the father had spoken harshly with the son in a series of telephone calls in the wake of the alleged assault. For, from the first, Mr. Stirk had not given much credence to his troubled son’s most recent accusation of having been harassed, threatened and attacked.

  Mr. Stirk had not been nearly so sympathetic as the University president, in fact.

  Or so the rumor was. M.R. was loathe to listen to rumors. You found yourself wanting to believe the worst, to alleviate your responsibility.

  Trembling with the strain of lifting her suddenly-heavy body graceless as a bag of peat moss yet M.R. managed to haul herself erect, panting. A premonition of age—old age—this terrible heaviness of being.

  “Oh! Oh God.”

  She was whimpering with pain, and ignominy. She’d forgotten that her face was bleeding, here was fresh blood smeared on her fingers. Something about the basement door—another time, it had been left ajar. She could not think that it was left ajar to annoy her, this was an absurd reasoning.

  Her sweatshirt, jeans, even her woolen socks smelled of soup—stank of soup. How nauseating, the odor! Never again could she bear the smell of chicken-lentil soup, the very thought of it made her want to gag.

  Strange that her face was still bleeding. More seriously than she’d wished to believe. Not the mouth-wound, on the inside of her (swelling) lip, but the head-wound. Oh God—if she needed stitches!

  Andre would know what to do. Andre Litovik, master of emergencies.

  Especially, Andre was skilled in dealing with emergencies which he himself provoked.

  In daily life Andre prevaricated and drifted like a man in a canoe who has neglected to bring a paddle with him. In the accelerations of daily life, Andre became suddenly aroused, capable.

  It was not the fault of daily life, Andre conceded, that it lacked sufficient coherence and predictability for one of Andre Litovik’s scientific temperament, still he’d fled from the daily-ness of life into the chill of interstellar space.

  He would console M.R: Don’t catastrophize!

  Many times he had consoled M.R. Often, he’d consoled her for the harm he had done her, always inadvertently.

  He would point out an advantage of living alone: no one knows of the diminished and ludicrous individuals we are, when we are alone.

  No one knows of our desperation. When we are alone.

  From a distance, we all appear poised. Where our appearance has intervened in the face of our being.

  Yet: if M.R. had been seriously injured, her skull fractured for instance, no one would have known until morning.

  If she’d broken her neck. Her back. If—just maybe—she had died.

  And then, what a commotion! What an alarm!

  If she’d been seriously hurt and needed help she’d have had to crawl—to drag herself—back downstairs to the kitchen, to call 911.

  In the kitchen, reaching for the phone that was on the wall. How many seconds of excruciating pain, reaching for the plastic phone on the wall. And if she’d managed to contact 911—an ambulance would have rushed up the drive of “historic” Charters House in a flurry of swirling red lights, siren alerting everyone within earshot—what shame!

  She fell on the stairs? Neukirchen? Drunk?

  No—worse.

  Worse how?

  She’s losing it.

  M.R. was standing, leaning heavily onto the railing that seemed to her now rather loose, wobbly. The bleeding from her forehead continued, she’d been wiping it on the sleeve of her University sweatshirt. Her ribs hurt, her right ankle was numb with pain, her head, her jaws, her mouth—blood beat frantically in her ears—her heartbeat was still rapid and arrhythmic—the kite thrashing in the wind, tangled in tree limbs. Yet she would retake control, like seizing a steering wheel that has begun to spin—You have been spared this time. You will survive!

  At the foot of the spiral stairs, still gripping the railing M.R. took a deep—cautious—breath preparatory to making her way back into the kitchen where she would press paper towels against her bleeding face—she would try to wash at the sink—cold water might staunch the bleeding and countermand the swelling—for already her mouth felt as if she’d been bitten by an adder. Determined as Agatha insisting that if one holds in the Light one will prevail against confusion, ignorance, evil Of course you are all right. You would not have
been spared otherwise even as a giddy black mist rose before her as if taunting her and in horror she saw the boy—as vividly as if he stood before her, as he’d stood before her leaning on his crutch in her office—the boy with the doomed eyes—the boy with the moist pink tongue aimed at M.R.’s heart.

  Didn’t what, President Neukirchen? Hit me?

  He wasn’t dead. Though he had tried to die.

  A terrible death, he had tried to die.

  Out of despair, shame—spite. Out of spite this wish to confound his enemies. And his own family, perhaps.

  In the crazed week following his claim of being assaulted on the University campus by a gang of fellow students Alexander Stirk had been interviewed on cable news programs—the “Stirk case” had flashed about the Internet like something radioactive—each issue of the University newspaper had devoted a sizable portion of the front page to developments in the “Stirk case” with the barely restrained hysteria of a tabloid publication. The admission that Stirk had lied about having been harassed at his prep school several years before—an admission Stirk made to township police on the third day after the claim of the attack, for he’d had no alternative by this time—had been greeted with dismay by Stirk’s supporters, and gratification by his detractors; police officers refused to discuss the case with the media yet it quickly became known that the police investigation had become an investigation largely of Stirk himself.

  Abruptly then most of the conservative commentators who’d supported Alexander Stirk in the interests of excoriating the liberal University publicly repudiated him; his undergraduate friends in the YAF were quoted in the University newspaper as feeling “betrayed” by him and “disgusted” by him; his professors, among them Oliver Kroll, could not be reached for comment or could only say tersely that they were “reserving judgment” until the case was resolved.

  Through this, stubbornly and defiantly Alexander Stirk continued to insist that he had been assaulted, exactly as he’d claimed; though it was true that he’d lied about the previous harassment, he was not lying now. It was a new claim of Stirk’s, reported to M.R. by one of her assistants, that the male undergraduates who’d attacked him had known about the incident at Stirk’s prep school, and had acted with the cynical assumption that they could do “anything” to him—“with impunity”—since he wouldn’t be believed when he accused them.

  Now anyone could hurt him. It was an observation M.R. had had herself.

  In making the claim, however, Alexander Stirk was behaving recklessly—defiantly. Yet, you had almost to admire his brashness.

  For the twenty-year-old understood, as M.R. in her early forties couldn’t allow herself to even consider, that in this era of the Internet, in this season in which the use of deadly force against a quasi-“enemy” was presented to the credulous public as a media event titled, like the newest multi-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster film, Shock and Awe—it didn’t seem to matter much what had truly happened but what might be believed to have happened by a sizable number of people.

  In polls, American citizens debated the merits of the exciting new war in Iraq, and the older, less-exciting war in Afghanistan. In polls, it seemed to be determined that the United States was fighting the terrorist forces—the very individuals—who’d brought about the catastrophe of 9/11. Whether this was historical fact was not so relevant, if the majority of American citizens believed it.

  Stirk had lied to her—he’d looked her in the eye, and lied. And she’d wanted to believe. For it was a belief in her own powers of persuasion—a vindication of the light-within which was M.R.’s deepest self—in which she’d wanted to believe.

  Alexander Stirk’s on-campus case fell under the commingled jurisdiction of the dean of undergraduate students, the director of campus security and public safety, the director of counseling and psychological services, and the University’s legal counsel. All of these parties had reported to M.R. their strong conviction that Alexander Stirk should withdraw from the University for an indeterminate amount of time pending the outcome of the investigation—his presence in Harrow Hall was a distraction to the other students, and a continual burden to the University, that was obliged to provide “security” for him when he ventured out of his room; he’d ceased attending classes; he didn’t appear to have recovered from his injuries, but refused to seek any further medical treatment. Stirk, however, refused to “retreat”—refused to be “banished”—in interviews he spoke of remaining in “the very bastion of the enemy, to fight for justice.”

  After the embarrassment of their confrontation in M.R.’s office in Salvager Hall—(selected details of which had been spilled out into cyberspace like malignant spores)—M.R. knew to maintain a dignified reserve about the Stirk case. The University president was stoic, uncomplaining; even privately she refrained from commenting on it, still less publicly; she didn’t need to be cautioned by the University’s legal counsel to say nothing. Even to Leonard Lockhardt in the privacy of her office she was reticent, circumspect; even to Leonard who believed, as nearly everyone did now, that the assault was a hoax, and Stirk a shameless liar, M.R. said—“Yes, but we can’t assume that we know. Even now. We must wait until the investigation is concluded.”

  This was on a Wednesday evening. Abruptly then the next morning it was revealed—by Alexander Stirk, in one of several interviews with the township police, that yes, he had “exaggerated” the attack, a little.

  What had really happened, Stirk confessed, was that he’d been “verbally—maliciously—assaulted” by fellow students, many times during the past year but each time more “threateningly”—until, the other evening, when “homophobe enemies of the YAF” had cornered him on campus and said such things to him as “Die, fag!”—he’d run from them, and they’d laughed at him, and when he was alone “something snapped”—without knowing what he was doing Stirk began to strike his head against a wall, repeatedly—he’d injured himself as in their hearts his enemies had wanted to injure him. . . . With this admission, Stirk withdrew the charge he’d made to the police, but with this admission, Stirk had made himself vulnerable to arrest by the police for having filed a false criminal complaint; now, too, the University ruled that his case would be considered by the University disciplinary committee, and in the interim, he was being asked to leave campus—he was now “suspended.” His parents flew up to meet with him, in preparation for bringing him back home to Jacksonville, Florida, for at last Stirk had agreed that he would vacate his room; he would leave the University; but after his parents met with him in Harrow Hall for several hours, and returned to a local inn for the night, Stirk tried to strangle himself in haste, and naïvely—he flung a nylon cord over a closet door, secured one end around the doorknob and fashioned a noose of the other end, but he’d miscalculated the length of the rope and the distance he was to fall with the noose tightening around his neck; once he’d kicked away a chair, he didn’t fall heavily enough or far enough to break his neck, or even to strangle himself, for the tips of his toes had touched the floor, horribly; it was estimated that Stirk must have suffered excruciatingly for many minutes until he lost consciousness. On his CD player, Beethoven’s stridently ecstatic “Ode to Joy” played repeatedly through the night.

  By the time the boy was discovered early the next morning—his distraught parents had insisted that security officers remove the door to his room when he failed to open it for them—Stirk’s brain had been so deprived of oxygen, and for so long, he’d suffered irreversible brain damage.

  His final e-mail, sent to a vast contingent of recipients, consisted of just two terse lines:

  VENGEANCE IS MINE SAITH THE LORD

  JUSTICE WILL PREVAILL

  Of course she was all right. She would persevere.

  The boy—Stirk—was on life-support system at the University of Pennsylvania medical school hospital. His condition could not change except to deteriorate by slow or quick degrees. />
  There would be a lawsuit—inevitably. The University had been forewarned.

  It was days later, now—nearly two weeks. Since news of Stirk’s attempted suicide had come to M.R., an early-morning call from the University director of security.

  Tried to kill himself! Hang himself! And his parents had discovered him . . .

  M.R. had been stunned to hear the news. How desperate Alexander Stirk must have been, beneath his bravado! And how he must have suffered.

  And his parents, now. The suffering would not soon end.

  Soon then, Leonard Lockhardt came to meet with M.R. in the privacy of the president’s office. Already an onslaught of ringing phones, demands of the media for interviews, the president’s staff under duress, grim-faced and uncertain. The University attorney appeared to have dressed in haste—and to have shaved in haste—stubble glittered on the underside of the long jaw. Lockhardt was trembling with indignation over the latest outrage committed by the “God-damned miserable boy”—the nightmare of “ugly publicity” that would follow—“To think he tried to hang himself in Harrow House! Nothing like this has ever happened in Harrow House.”

  John Harrow, for which the “historic” stone residence was named, had been a fellow patriot and trusted aide of General George Washington in the Revolutionary War. M.R. waited for Lockhardt to mention this fact—but instead, Lockhardt continued, incensed, “The University’s worst scandal in more than two hundred years.”

  “It isn’t a ‘scandal,’ Leonard—it’s a tragedy.”

  “A tragedy for who? The boy? His parents? Us?”

  Lockhardt spoke harshly. The patrician face was stiff with dislike—M.R. had to wonder if it was dislike of her which gentlemanly Lockhardt wasn’t troubling any longer to disguise.

  “This is the fault of Admissions! How did this disturbed, sick, conniving young person ever slip through! We should sue his prep school—they expunged that incident from their records. And his letters of recommendation—lies! I tried to warn you, Meredith—we should have done all we could to get rid of Stirk as soon as he confessed he’d made up his story to the police. We should have expelled him immediately before he did harm to himself or some innocent person—in fact, he could have attacked you, in this very room.”