M.R. stared at the woman. Five foot three, heavyset and muscular, with enormous breasts, a pushed-in Kewpie-doll sort of middle-aged face—was this Diane, Irene’s daughter? The girl who’d gone with Meredith and Agatha and Agatha’s women friends, visiting elderly women on a “good-neighbor” mission?
“Diane! Yes, I do know you. I’m Meredith Neukirchen—Agatha’s daughter.”
“ ‘Meredith Neukirchen.’ ‘Agatha’s daughter.’ ” Slowly Di Plaksa turned these words in her mouth, like pebbles. A dim sort of recognition came into her eyes. “Ohhh yes. I think so—yessss. ‘Merry’ they called you—my mom’s friends. My mom is Irene Plaksa.”
“Yes,” M.R. said. “I remember her, and I remember you.”
Yet, what a transformation in Di Plaksa! Hadn’t she been the girl to speak with such contempt of doing good, helping the helpless—at the age of twelve, so hard-hearted she’d taken Meredith’s breath away. And now, an attendant at Herkimer Psychiatric Hospital.
Who can understand such things, M.R. thought. Her life had been a cultivation of the intellect, the analytical mind—yet, she was constantly being confounded.
“Well—‘Merry’! Or did you say—‘Mer-deth.’ It’s real nice to see you after all these years. Weird how people are always meeting here, it happens all the time. You’re looking real good—I guess you don’t live here now, eh? You’re some kind of teacher? I heard?” Di Plaksa peered at her, still very friendly, but with an air now of admiration. “I moved out of Carthage, I live in Herkimer Falls now. But that ain’t far. None of us Plaksas go very far.”
Di Plaksa followed M.R. to the front door where impulsively she hugged her, as if they were old friends after all.
“Hey—good to see you, Mer’deth! Y’come back again, will you? Maybe the visit will go better.”
Like one stumbling on stilts M.R. escaped to her car, drove back to Carthage and fell onto her bed exhausted and slept for nine hours into the late evening and this time neither Konrad nor Solomon disturbed her sleep as if knowing exactly where she’d been.
That night this memory came to her.
When she’d been newly inaugurated: early June 2002.
When she hadn’t yet taken residence in Charters House.
Though of course she’d begun working in the president’s office in Salvager Hall.
When she’d been almost unbearably happy—hopeful . . .
And anxious. And grateful.
And very very busy. Never so busy in her life except she had a small team of assistants and she would learn—must learn—(so Leander Huddle advised, she would learn sooner or later and far better sooner)—to delegate authority.
Otherwise, Leander warned, she’d be eaten alive.
Invited to a gathering of what Leonard Lockhardt called well-to-do activist alums held on the fifty-foot yacht owned by the most wealthy of the alums, a balmy sundown cruise in the romantic-choppy waters off Montauk Point. And smiling M.R. was introduced to the wife of the yachtsman, a beautiful woman in her early sixties who like her husband was renowned for philanthropy, who’d stared at M.R. with none of the warmth and admiration of the others saying suspiciously, “You? Who are you? I want to meet the new president of the University.”
The woman’s eyes were glassy, glazed. A terrible vacuity in those eyes. And the lipstick-mouth baring teeth in an expression of hostile uncertainty.
Fortunately, M.R. had been alerted beforehand—by Leonard Lockhardt, her escort for the evening—that Mrs. Huston had been recently diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. And what a tragedy it was, for Mrs. Huston was so young still, and had always been so vivacious, so warm and generous and lovely. And so M.R. wasn’t altogether surprised, or shocked by the confrontation—but she couldn’t help feeling just slightly hurt.
And others were listening, and were uneasy on her account.
And so she recovered her composure and said, as graciously as she could manage, though inwardly (in fact) she was shaking, like any imposter who has been publicly exposed: “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Huston! But I am the new president of the University, and I’m delighted to be your guest on this beautiful yacht.”
Next day—again without telling Konrad where she was going—M.R. drove to Bear Mountain Road on the outer edge of the city of Carthage. From this hilly prospect you could look down toward the city, and the snaky river—it was a surprise to M.R. how she hadn’t known this, as a child.
Her perspective had been so truncated, so child-sized, she had not known that the Skedds lived on a hill!
But the Skedds’ house was long-ago. After the fire no house had been rebuilt on the rubble-strewn property. It seemed as if no one owned it, or no one wanted it; to own it, one would have to pay taxes on it, and maybe that was the dilemma.
Or maybe it was believed, in Carthage, among those who knew of the terrible blaze that killed eight people, that there was a curse on the property.
Lizbeth had confessed, she’d set fire to the house. She’d hated them all she said.
Sixteen years old. But she’d been tried as an adult. Sent away to prison and not once had M.R. thought of her in the intervening years for there are some thoughts you need not think, as there are the most terrible poisons you need not taste.
M.R. pressed the palms of both hands against her eyes, and against her forehead. To calm herself. To still the pulses beating in her brain.
A long-ago time. And the pain, the shock and suffering—long-ago.
Remains of the asphalt-sided house that had seemed to her as a child so stocky-solid, like Floyd Skedd, were collapsed in ruins, scarcely recognizable. Boards and shingles burnt, rotted. And everywhere tall grasses, shrubs and trees had grown over it. M.R. stood in the tall grass brushing away insects. Her head was still ringing from the visit at Herkimer. Her head was still ringing from the sound of her mother’s voice that was not a human voice but an animal whimper of alarm, rising rage. Now she shut her eyes seeing again Mrs. Skedd sharp-elbowed and frantic, swiping at one of the older children with a closed fist, screaming Bastids! Nobody’d take you in in their right mind except dumb-ass us, and now look! Ingrates.
M.R. smiled. So clearly she heard the woman’s voice and the quaint surprising term ingrates.
And Mr. Skedd’s nasal teasing. Mr. Skedd had had nicknames for them all but Jewell had not ever heard his name for her.
Mudgirl ain’t she sad. That’s Mudgirl that one.
See? That one. Sucking at her fingers.
And both Skedds would say Don’t let the bastids get your goat. In the Skedd household this was considered a cheery sentiment.
She remembered how Mrs. Skedd had run after her, in the front yard, to grab her away from Agatha Neukirchen. For just a moment, to hug her—tight. God damn I’m not going to cry this is a God-damn happy time.
In hot July sunshine M.R. stumbled in the ruins of the burnt-down house searching for evidence that she’d ever lived in this place. That the child who had lived here, as a foster child housed with Floyd and Livvie Skedd, had been her. Amid the burnt and rotted wood were chunks of broken cement, and these were sharp, and dangerous if you tripped on them.
Shattered glass, a badly burnt Formica-topped table, metal objects so rusted they were unidentifiable—the remains of a bed, bedsprings. At the edge of the rubble-littered property was a ravine and beyond the ravine a marshy area where denuded tree trunks emerged out of the algae-choked viscous liquid like a child’s crayon drawings of trees—straight, featureless, lacking limbs and leaves. Acid rain that had plagued the Adirondacks for years had killed the trees.
In the marsh were isolated bird cries, unrecognizable. The King of the Crows had dwelt there once, but no longer.
She was deeply moved. But she would tell no one.
She thought And here too Mudgirl was loved.
Mudwoman Encounters a Lost Love.
Augus
t 2003
In the bleak foyer of the Herkimer VA Hospital she first sighted him not knowing who he was. The startling-white shirt caught her eye, like floating wings.
A pristine white shirt—whiteness itself—seemed out of place here. The uniforms of the hospital staff were a grayish-soiled sort of white and the very air seemed tinged with melancholy dimness like a prevailing bad odor.
The man in the white shirt—no one M.R. had ever seen before, she was sure—was a visitor like Konrad and M.R., in the company of a fretful elderly woman who clutched at his arm as they moved with painstaking slowness toward the elevators. And was the man wearing a necktie with the long-sleeved white cotton dress shirt?—yes. And decent-looking trousers with a crease. And, like Konrad, he wore Birkenstock sandals, but with black socks. On this hot, humid day in late August! M.R. saw that the white-shirted man walked beside the elderly woman with a quirky sort of deliberation like one compensating for a mild impairment of motor coordination, or poor vision; he wore glasses with black plastic frames too large and too emphatic for his narrow face. He was lanky, and tall; his shoulders were sloped; he might have been any age between forty and sixty, with wispy-thin hair like spent dandelion seed, and a painstakingly courteous manner that nonetheless suggested just barely concealed impatience. Teacher, professor—M.R. thought. Accustomed to authority if but a petty and inconsequential authority.
M.R. hesitated, not wanting to take the elevator into which the man in the white shirt and the elderly woman were stepping. She was hoping that Konrad hadn’t sighted the Birkenstocks—the sandals were enough for Konrad to strike up one of his animated conversations with strangers that for all their warmth sometimes lasted just a little too long and rang just slightly too cheery.
But Konrad held back, too. For he and M.R. were carrying clumsy-sized cardboard boxes filled with “donations” for veterans on the fifth floor, and the elevator, which was the single elevator out of three in the lobby that appeared to be in operation, was crowded.
Konrad was in good spirits this morning, despite the depressing atmosphere of the veterans’ hospital, or because of it—“The challenge is to rise above circumstances,” Konrad liked to say. “The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.”
Happy! M.R. guessed her exuberant father must have been exaggerating.
He’d warned M.R. before her first visit that the long-term care VA hospital in the impoverished southern Adirondacks was clearly a dumping-ground for permanently disabled veterans whose families didn’t want them or couldn’t care for them, or who had no one. It was run-down, under-staffed and poorly staffed, notorious in the region, like the Herkimer State Psychiatric Facility just three miles away; yet, all the more need for volunteers to visit, and to bring cast-off clothing, shoes, toiletries, books and CDs and electronic equipment that ran the range of possibly-usable if ancient computers, cell phones, portable CD players and earphones. All the more need for meaningful interaction with the veteran-patients. “I know—there is something disagreeable about ‘volunteerism.’ Any sort of charitable act or contribution has an air of self-congratulation if not masochism. But—Agatha would like us to be here. I’m sure that—if she could see us—Agatha would be very happy for us to be here—I feel her spirit here—I mean, with us. In the car with us driving here to Herkimer—‘I look at life from both sides now’—whoever that woman singer is—I’ve kept Agatha’s CDs in the car as you’ve probably noticed.”
M.R. was touched by such remarks but made uneasy as well. It was her wish to believe that really, Konrad wasn’t serious when he said such things but was speaking, as he described it, “poetically—with a grain of salt.”
When Agatha was alive, Konrad had teased her mercilessly about her taste in music—“Is it soft-rock? How is it possible, rock can be soft?” Konrad’s musical tastes were classical-heroic: blustering nineteenth-century symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler. And Shostakovich. Volume turned up, the very air tremulous with masculine drama, bravado. Konrad seemed truly to believe that there was no restrained way to suggest what was “profound” in life.
“Unfortunately, the shelf-life of ‘volunteerism’ is about the shelf life of clotted cream—finite. I’ve been coming here for almost two years—and hope that I can continue for a long time more—but in that short period I’ve seen the most enthusiastic volunteers, female and male, appear and—abruptly, without explanation—disappear. The effort of service can be wearing. ‘Good deeds are a needle in the heart.’ ”
“Who said that, Daddy?”
“I did.”
M.R. laughed. The damned cardboard box was slipping from her grasp, a sharp edge nudging the soft skin below her waist.
And her ankles and feet were itching—from flea bites. Poor Solomon had had an unlucky encounter with a clumsily amorous husky in Friendship Park though both dogs were male, and both large—the result was an infestation of fleas. Over-zealous in treating him with a ghastly white powder, Konrad and M.R. had succeeded in ridding Solomon of fleas that had leapt from his fur onto their bare, lower legs and feet. What a nightmare of itching bites! Repeatedly they’d rubbed an anti-itch gel into their skin but its potency, like the shelf life of volunteerism, was very finite.
M.R. grasped the cardboard box in her arms more firmly. Fresh-laundered secondhand clothes neatly folded—flannel shirts, polyester trousers, frayed sweaters, tent-sized pajamas, underwear and socks. A jumble of mismatched socks. And always at least one pair of unaccountably new and shiny men’s dress shoes as if whoever had purchased the shoes had keeled over dead before he’d had a chance to scuff them.
In the airless elevator they ascended to the fifth floor—Neurology.
Along with Burn Unit, Neurology contained the most devastated individuals. If the brain is injured, scrambled—the body’s parts lack coordination like a puppet without strings.
Of course, there are happy endings—there was successful neurosurgery. But successful patients weren’t hospitalized, still less were they hospitalized in Herkimer, New York.
M.R. steeled herself for meeting—remeeting—the dozen or so veterans who were able to communicate with visitors, or at least to respond to visitors; the men ranged in age from mid-twenties to somewhere beyond seventy. Most were in wheelchairs with permanent injuries—“deficits”—that might be visible or invisible, and a few, victims of unspeakable violence to their bodies, were missing limbs, or were disfigured.
Some were blind, deaf. Some were mute. Some were partly paralyzed. All had grown ashen-skinned in the hospital’s relentless fluorescent lighting and all appeared older than their ages.
M.R. had to resolve not to betray the uneasiness she felt. How sick with shame and guilt, she who had never gone to war.
It seemed astonishing to her, that ex-soldiers could forgive those who’d been spared suffering as they had suffered. That they could smile at their able-bodied visitors with unscarred faces, unshattered spines.
For so many of them, their youth had been consumed by the military, if not by war. Their precious life’s blood drained from them, to what obscure, cynical, and short-lived political end, they could not grasp nor in the circumstances of their suffering could not wish to grasp.
Konrad had cautioned M.R. not to bring up the subject of politics—not ever.
Not to bring up the subject of the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—not ever.
“They need to believe that their ruined lives make some sense. We are here to minister to them, not to our own political convictions.”
Yes, M.R. murmured. Yes, of course.
She was accustomed to her father’s admonitions that eased over her sensitive, smarting skin like warm water.
“In the VA hospital, ‘politics’ are too late.”
Konrad continued, in a lowered voice: “Unfortunately, most of what we
know comes too late. It was Goethe who said—‘The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.’ ”
In fact, Hegel, M.R. thought. But she wouldn’t dream of correcting her father.
This was her fourth visit to the VA hospital. The first time had been arduous, draining—yet exhilarating, to a degree. The second time had been less arduous and draining—yet less exhilarating too. The third time had given her a terrible pounding headache, that near-unbearable sensation of a heightened pulsebeat in her ears.
This visit, she’d been dreading. No appetite for breakfast that morning for already she’d been smelling the hospital-odor that was in part a rancid food-smell, yeasty and garbagey.
Agatha would be so proud.
Agatha always spoke of how you’d driven her and her women-friends when you were in high school.
The clear light within. God in our hearts and our hearts one with God.
Each visit to the hospital M.R. worried might be her last visit, and Konrad would be disappointed. (Agatha would be disappointed!) For M.R. would be leaving Carthage to return to the University at the end of August—would she?—or, less admirably, M.R. would decline to return to the hospital out of a loss of resolve, courage.
Tacitly it had worked out, M.R. drove herself and her father to Herkimer, and Konrad drove them home again. After an hour and a half in the Neurology ward M.R. was too exhausted to drive and was inclined to fall asleep in the passenger’s seat even as Agatha’s soft-rock CDs played and replayed.
Konrad must have been tired, too—he was over seventy years old. But Konrad was too gallant to betray any weakness that would impact upon others.
At the start she’d been eager to accompany Konrad to Herkimer, as she’d been eager to work with him at the Carthage Vets Co-op. Like one who has been starved for human companionship she would have accompanied her father virtually anywhere—she’d discovered since her collapse and hospitalization that she dreaded being alone.
A true Quaker is never alone. God abides in our hearts.
Still, her father’s house was almost unbearably empty when Konrad was out.
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