Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mudwoman Saved from Nightmare.

  August 2003

  “Meredith! Come look.”

  Reluctantly she came. She’d always been fearful of lightning storms—cautious, rather. Thinking how ironic to be struck by lightning out of curiosity, how needless a death.

  When fiercely you so want to live, how ironic such a death.

  And so reluctantly she came to the rear porch, where Konrad stood just barely sheltered from warm pelting rain lashing against the porch roof, the porch-posts, what was visible of the backyard grass and Agatha’s tangled garden. Her father rapt as a child riskily peering up into the night sky where miles away above the Adirondacks rain clouds were illuminated by lightning-flashes like severed nerves.

  Sheets of rain and a noise as of shaken tin and M.R. winced at the deafening thunder-claps, and the silence that rushed in its wake like a stilled heart.

  For some of the lightning-flashes weren’t miles away it seemed, some were closer, in Carthage, in the hills above the Black Snake River.

  No need to see the river which was less than a half-mile from where they stood to know that, after a day of rain and now in the exigency of this torrential downpour, the river was rapidly rising.

  A smell of sulphur in the air, like struck matches! And a smell of autumn, that made M.R.’s heart beat in apprehension.

  She had not told Konrad about Andre’s late-night call, of the night before.

  She had told him—of course—of the lengthy conversation she’d had with her provost, who’d been acting as president of the University through the summer; and of another conversation with Leonard Lockhardt that had followed.

  “Meredith, we’re perfectly safe here! The lightning is miles away—mostly. And how beautiful, like Northern Lights . . .”

  Beautiful! M.R. supposed yes, if you liked that sort of thing.

  Manic detonations in the sky, pulsing arteries, raw nerves, neurons—shut your eyes and it’s a brain aneurysm, such a display of light.

  Sensibly, Solomon was hiding inside the house. Cowering somewhere, very likely in the basement.

  “I don’t recall you being frightened of electric storms, as a girl,” Konrad said. “That isn’t a recollection of mine.”

  M.R. tried to think: this wasn’t a recollection of hers either.

  “Nightmares, now. You did have nightmares.”

  A fissure erupted in the sky just directly above them, scarcely beyond the treeline at the end of their property. M.R. gave a little cry and leapt back toward the opened door even as deafening thunder rolled over them, almost immediately; Konrad blinked and stared and held his ground.

  She hadn’t had time to count. Scant seconds between the eruption of lightning and the aftermath of ear-splitting sound.

  She felt Agatha’s distress—when Konrad behaved in some way brash, risky, dangerous—“self-destructive” and (Agatha’s reiterated charge) “immature.” How disapproving Agatha would be seeing Konrad on the porch steps in such weather. His bare feet, his trouser-legs and his lower body were riddled with damp, he scarcely seemed to notice.

  M.R. said: “Daddy, remember Agatha’s librarian-friend Crystal—Crystal’s husband—I think it was her husband—was watching a lightning storm from their back porch like this and lightning struck one of the porch posts a few inches from him and sent wood-slivers into his face. . . .”

  Absorbed in the display of lightning in the sky, the illumination of gigantic cumulus clouds like frigates, Konrad paid no heed.

  “Daddy, at least stand back by the door here! Some of these lightning-flashes are less than a mile away . . . Crystal’s husband was badly injured, and might have been killed . . .”

  “Oh, that never happened, I’m sure.”

  “What never happened, Daddy? Why do you say that?”

  “Agatha’s friends always exaggerated. And especially her librarian-friends. Their lives are over-quiet—‘repressed’—and they’re surrounded by books—‘stories’—they begin to invent their own.”

  It was near midnight. The storm grew fiercer, louder. Gusts of wind whipped leaves from trees—old cedars, sycamores, birches that badly needed pruning, that M.R. had meant to prune. A good-sized tree limb fell heavily onto the roof and down the shingled roof rain ran overflowing gutters choked with leaves. It was so, you did feel a fascination with the rampaging storm—almost, an expectation that chaos was about to be discharged, into the human sphere. Shattering the roof, the house—the human habitation and its carefully named things. And of course, there were myriad leaks inside, upstairs. Already Konrad and M.R. had set out pans into which globules of water dropped noisily as flung pebbles.

  Earlier that day—at the Carthage Vets Co-op fund-raiser picnic, that Konrad and M.R. had organized, in Friendship Park—the temperature had risen into the mid-nineties Fahrenheit, now it had plummeted thirty-five degrees.

  For all the effort of the Neukirchens, father and daughter—organizing the fund-raiser, working with veterans’ wives, widows, families and volunteers—the sort of “leadership” effort M.R. did so well—the co-op had netted less than five hundred dollars which was less than M.R. herself had contributed to the organization on her father’s behalf.

  Still, the fund-raiser picnic had been worth it! Konrad insisted, and M.R. wished to think so.

  The end of August. End of summer. Between M.R. and her father it was tacitly understood: she would soon be leaving Carthage.

  “When you return to your home, remember: you have been placed in this world for a distinct purpose, and at the University, you have found that purpose.”

  M.R. smiled wanly. M.R. was not going to contradict her beloved father.

  “And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.”

  Still M.R. smiled, silent. She was thinking that she could not bear to leave Carthage after all—she could not leave her father who was her newfound friend.

  Yet of course, she must leave. She would leave.

  Don’t risk it! Not again.

  The next time you break, you will not heal.

  She would invite Konrad to visit her, to stay with her. She would insist.

  Easier for you both to remain in Carthage. This is your home, you are not at risk here.

  In Carthage she’d regained sleep. She’d regained some portion of her frayed soul. Quite frankly she was concerned—she was terrified—that, returning to the University, she would return to the madness she had so narrowly escaped.

  It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It is very hard to prevail in any case but without this love, it is close to impossible.

  Yet—I will do it! I must.

  M.R. would not tell her father these doubts. She would not tell her father about the sudden turn in Andre Litovik’s life suggesting that now, his life would be bound up more tightly with hers.

  Astonishing that Konrad, echoing a notion of Agatha’s, had seemed to foretell such a turn . . .

  With maddening inquisitiveness Konrad had asked her about the man he’d seen her speaking with “earnestly”—“at length”—in the Herkimer hospital—“the mystery man in the Birkenstocks”—but M.R. answered with embarrassed evasiveness: “Oh Daddy! It was nothing really. Just a former high school teacher who thought he remembered me.”

  “Thought he remembered you? Or—remembered you?”

  M.R. laughed. Though Konrad’s teasing could be like nettles, or flea bites, rankling one’s skin.

  “Was that the teacher who’d had a nervous breakdown, your math teacher? The rumor was, the poor bastard killed himself?”

  “Oh Daddy! No.”

  “What was his name?—‘Steiner’—‘Schneider.’ ”

 
How canny Konrad was—what a good memory! M.R. was rather shaken, her father remembered Hans Schneider’s name.

  “I—I’m not sure. I don’t remember.”

  “Don’t remember? How many math teachers were there at Carthage who tried to kill themselves? Some kind of crazy-wild place, was it? Hive of decadents?”

  M.R. laughed but said nothing more. You could never win by responding to Konrad’s teasing—to respond at all was analogous to stroking an aggressive porcupine, to soothe it. She reasoned that Konrad need never know about Hans Schneider: she had no intention of telephoning the man as he’d requested.

  She wasn’t certain that she had the telephone number, still. Possibly crumpled in a pocket of her khaki shorts.

  Konrad reverted to the subject of Meredith’s health. Now he was serious, somber. One did not need to be a Quaker to know that “holding in the light” was essential to survival, he told her.

  “Remember, Meredith: you pushed yourself too hard even as a child. In elementary school! You ground your teeth in your sleep—you gave yourself nightmares—you were always anxious about being tested. You were anxious about crossing bridges, getting lost, missing school and ‘falling behind’ . . . You had nightmares for years.”

  “I had nightmares? I don’t remember.”

  “Agatha, a far lighter sleeper than I, heard you crying out in your sleep, and woke me, and we hurried into your room and woke you—sometimes your eyes were wide open but you didn’t seem to be seeing anything. You were very frightened, shivering—you couldn’t speak. But we hugged you, and told you little stories, and told you that we loved you and nothing would ever, ever happen to you because we loved you, and finally you settled down again, and slept.”

  “I don’t remember. . . .”

  “Well, better not to remember, dear Meredith! That’s what growing up means.”

  In the morning, Konrad helped her pack her car for the drive back to New Jersey.

  Mudwoman at Star Lake.

  Mudwoman at Lookout Point.

  August 2003

  By midmorning she’d crossed into Herkimer County on the old state highway heading south and east along the Black Snake River. Traffic was drawn to the interstate several miles to the south, that ran parallel with Route 41, leaving the highway relatively deserted.

  In the aftermath of the previous night’s storm the air was glaring-bright. The sky a fierce cobalt blue that pained the eyes.

  And the river! Rampaging, spilling its banks, a churn of mad white froth and part-submerged storm debris like projectiles.

  Sunshine like broken-mirror glass on the river, winking of a thousand eyes.

  “Good-bye, darling! Love you.”

  And: “Drive carefully, promise? Give me a call when you get home.”

  These words Konrad had uttered in a tone of jovial ebullience masking what concern, what care, what melancholy, what paternal anxiety M.R. could not know.

  She’d laughed. She’d wiped at her eyes.

  “Daddy, of course. Love you.”

  She would not abandon her father another time, she vowed.

  For Konrad and Andre would like each other, very much—she was certain. What a great guy each would say of the other. Almost, M.R. could hear the men’s uplifted voices.

  Meredith darling! What a great guy . . .

  . . . wonderful to meet him.

  It had taken M.R. and Konrad scarcely twenty minutes to pack her car. For M.R. had brought very few things with her and had accumulated little during her stay in Carthage.

  With a fussy sort of tenderness Konrad had hung M.R.’s clothes on wire hangers on the little hooks in the rear, which clothes M.R. would likely have flung down onto the seat. He’d found a canvas tote bag of Agatha’s—CELEBRATE NATIONAL LIBRARY WEEK!—to fill with books M.R. was taking with her from the house, mostly from Agatha’s shelves.

  It seemed wrong, a flaw of character if not a tragic presentiment, that a woman of M.R.’s age had accumulated so little that was essential to her.

  “Life small enough to fit into a thimble! Well.”

  She’d spoken aloud. Breathlessly she laughed, the remark seemed to her not only astute but witty.

  In her mood of excited apprehension M.R. took care to drive at just the speed limit. Though traffic on Route 41 was sparse from time to time vehicles rushed past her—trucks, pickups, local cars. She would connect with the interstate eleven miles ahead and on I–81 she would drive most of the way home almost directly south, a drive of about seven hours.

  Next morning, her new life would begin.

  Her new life, that would be a transformation of her former life.

  For now she was stronger. Now she was prepared, readied.

  In the near distance were steep wooded hills. The Adirondack forest, that stretched to the horizon. As a girl M.R. had felt her heartbeat quicken at the sight of the mountains—dense-wooded slopes, the higher peaks shrouded in mist; massed evergreens with scattered veins of premature red, red-orange, bright dying deciduous leaves like red stars in a distant constellation. For the end of summer was abrupt in this region.

  On one of Konrad’s battered old road maps—(that Agatha had tried to re-fold, without success)—M.R. had located Canton, New York: surprised to see how small the town was, not a town but a village, and so far inland, nowhere near Lake Ontario as she’d imagined it was, or the spectacular St. Lawrence River; the nearest city was Ogdensburg, the size of Carthage.

  St. Lawrence County extended to the Canadian border. One hundred miles north of Carthage.

  Amid the distraction and upset of packing that morning she’d searched for the scrap of paper containing Hans Schneider’s phone number but hadn’t found it.

  Thinking If he wants to call Neukirchen, in Carthage, he will.

  Thinking It is out of my control. It is not my choice to make.

  She had not heard from Andre Litovik since his astonishing call of the other day. She wondered if he had actually moved out of the house on Tremont Street in which he’d lived for so long—how difficult it would be, for one who’d routinely traveled in extragalactic space, to make so literal, so physical a move! The Litoviks lived in an old dark-lavender Victorian house with lilac shutters and trim, in need of repainting and repair yet still, to the stunned eye of the young Meredith bicycling past, more than once risking being seen by her (secret) lover, a mesmerizing sight that left her shaken. Here was a family house, a home—with bay windows, steep-pitched roofs, ornate gables, and a front porch partly hidden by wisteria. Meredith, who’d rented a small single-bedroom apartment for what seemed to her an excessively high rent, could only guess what such a property would cost in stylish Cambridge near Harvard University. Yet Andre dared to speak of this spectacular period house in such vague and negligent terms, you might be led to think the man scarcely lived anywhere solid, or even visible; you might be led to think that the house was the province of the wife entirely.

  Material things don’t engage me. Sorry!

  The sort of cavalier remark, M.R. thought, made by those who never have to think of material things.

  For a moment, M.R. felt sympathy for the woman of that house. But only for a moment.

  Even more beguiling, there’d been a garden beside the house, hidden behind a six-foot fieldstone wall covered in tattered ivy; through a part-opened gate, you could glimpse inside—Meredith had seen a beautiful autumnal ruin of a garden.

  M.R. had never stepped inside the house on Tremont Street. Never stepped inside the garden. . . .

  She was thinking of Agatha’s garden. How moved she’d been to enter it, in the aftermath of the previous night’s storm—beaten-down as if with mallets and shovels and yet still vivid with flowers, clumps of crimson phlox, black-eyed Susans, and frayed roses. And sunflower stalks broken like snapped spines, big round affable sunflower-faces hanging crooke
d. Several of the older trees had been devastated and their splintered wood whitely raw as marrow and when M.R. had suggested to Konrad that she stay another day, another day or two, she would help him with the storm cleanup, Konrad had laughed saying Certainly not!

  Saying It’s time for you to leave. Take care! Love you.

  She hadn’t told Konrad about Andre’s call because she hadn’t wanted to talk to him further about Andre. Already she’d revealed too much to her father, she’d pained Konrad allowing him a glimpse of his daughter’s sexual vulnerability, naïveté.

  How love had entered her veins, a virulent fever. How she’d never built up an immunity.

  She wondered if Andre’s wife had really asked him to leave—“kicked him out.” She wondered how either Andre or the wife could break off their relationship of decades.

  The wife, the son. The damaged son.

  Obviously, Andre’s deepest feelings lay with his family. These were not, likely, happy feelings any longer—but they lay deep.

  For hadn’t he said, once, in one of his curious ruminative moods, in which irony contended with a raw sort of sincerity, that though love can “wear out” over time, a marriage of decades is like tangled tree-roots: the trees may appear separate and distinct above-ground, but are entwined below-ground. His implication had been—(so M.R. had thought)—that his relationship with her was superficial, shallow, set beside his relationship with his wife.

  They had virtually no roots grown together, no shared past.

  Their pasts did not overlap. M.R. really knew very little of her (secret) lover’s life, as he knew virtually nothing of hers.

  M.R. was frightened suddenly: Andre Litovik would never be her husband. What an idea!

  M.R. was frightened suddenly: the prospect of living with Andre Litovik!

  The intimacy between them had never been put to a serious test. For always there was the knowledge that their time together was limited, bracketed by their very different lives.

  Always the knowledge that each life was totally exclusive of the other—a place of refuge to which the other had no access.