Mudwoman
Joyce Carol Oates

Dedication

For Charlie Gross,

my husband and

first reader

Epigraph

What is man? A ball of snakes.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,

Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,

And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

WALT WHITMAN,

“Here the Frailest Leaves of Me”

Time is a way of preventing all things from happening at once.

ANDRE LITOVIK,

“The Evolving Universe: Origin, Age & Fate”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Mudgirl in the Land of Moriah.

Mudwoman’s Journey. The Black River Café.

Mudgirl Saved by the King of the Crows.

Mudwoman Confronts an Enemy. Mudwoman’s Triumph.

Mudgirl Reclaimed. Mudgirl Renamed.

Mudwoman Fallen. Mudwoman Arisen. Mudwoman in the Days of Shock and Awe.

Mudgirl in “Foster Care.” Mudgirl Receives a Gift.

Mudwoman Makes a Promise. And Mudwoman Makes a Discovery.

Mudgirl Has a New Home. Mudgirl Has a New Name.

Mudwoman Mated.

Mudgirl, Cherished.

Mudwoman, Bereft.

Mudgirl, Desired.

Mudwoman, Challenged.

Mudgirl: Betrayal.

Mudwoman in Extremis.

Mudwoman Ex Officio.

Mudwoman Amid the Nebulae.

Mudwoman Flung to Earth.

Mudwoman Bride.

Mudwoman Finds a Home.

Mudwoman Encounters a Lost Love.

Mudwoman: Moons beyond Rings of Saturn.

Mudwoman Not Struck by Lightning. Mudwoman Saved from Nightmare.

Mudwoman at Star Lake. Mudwoman at Lookout Point.

About the Author

Other Books by the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Mudgirl in the Land of Moriah.

April 1965

You must be readied, the woman said.

Readied was not a word the child comprehended. In the woman’s voice readied was a word of calm and stillness like water glittering in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River the child would think were the scales of a giant snake if you were so close to the snake you could not actually see it.

For this was the land of Moriah, the woman was saying. This place they had come to in the night that was the place promised to them where their enemies had no dominion over them and where no one knew them or had even glimpsed them.

The woman spoke in the voice of calm still flat glittering water and her words were evenly enunciated as if the speaker were translating blindly as she spoke and the words from which she translated were oddly shaped and fitted haphazardly into her larynx: they would give her pain, but she was no stranger to pain, and had learned to find a secret happiness in pain, too wonderful to risk by acknowledging it.

He is saying to us, to trust Him. In all that is done, to trust Him.

Out of the canvas bag in which, these several days and nights on the meandering road north out of Star Lake she’d carried what was needed to bring them into the land of Moriah safely, the woman took the shears.

In her exhausted sleep the child had been hearing the cries of crows like scissors snipping the air in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River.

In sleep smelling the sharp brackish odor of still water and of rich dark earth and broken and rotted things in the earth.

A day and a night on the road beside the old canal and another day and this night that wasn’t yet dawn at the edge of the mudflats.

Trust Him. This is in His hands.

And the woman’s voice that was not the woman’s familiar hoarse and strained voice but this voice of detachment and wonder in the face of something that has gone well when it was not expected, or was not expected quite so soon.

If it is wrong for any of this to be done, He will send an angel of the Lord as He sent to Abraham to spare his son Isaac and also to Hagar, that her son was given back his life in the wilderness of Beersheba.

In her stubby fingers that were chafed and bled easily after three months of the gritty-green lye-soap that was the only soap available in the county detention facility the woman wielded the large tarnished seamstress’s shears to cut the child’s badly matted hair. And with these stubby fingers tugging at the hair, in sticky clumps and snarls the child’s fine fawn-colored hair that had become “nasty” and “smelly” and “crawling with lice.”

Be still! Be good! You are being readied for the Lord.

For our enemies will take you from me, if you are not readied.

For God has guided us to the land of Moriah. His promise is no one will take any child from her lawful mother in this place.

And the giant shears clipped and snipped and clattered merrily. You could tell that the giant shears took pride in shearing off the child’s befouled hair that was disgusting in the sight of God. Teasingly close to the girl’s tender ears the giant shears came, and the child shuddered, and squirmed, and whimpered, and wept; and the woman had no choice but to slap the child’s face, not hard, but hard enough to calm her, as often the woman did; hard enough to make the child go very still the way even a baby rabbit will go still in the cunning of terror; and then, when the child’s hair lay in wan spent curls on the mud-stained floor, the woman drew a razor blade over the child’s head—a blade clutched between her fingers, tightly—causing the blade to scrape against the child’s hair-stubbled scalp and now the child flinched and whimpered louder and began to struggle—and with a curse the woman dropped the razor blade which was badly tarnished and covered with hairs and the woman kicked it aside with a harsh startled laugh as if in wishing to rid the child of her snarly dirty hair that was shameful in the eyes of God the woman had gone too far, and had been made to recognize her error.

For it was wrong of her to curse—God damn!

To take the name of the Lord in vain—God damn!

For in the Herkimer County detention facility the woman had taken a vow of silence in defiance of her enemies and she had taken a vow of utter obedience to the Lord God and these several weeks following her release, until now she had not betrayed this vow.

Not even in the Herkimer County family court. Not even when the judge spoke sharply to her, to speak—to make a plea of guilty, not guilty.

Not even when the threat was that the children would be taken forcibly from her. The children—the sisters—who were five and three—would be wards of the county and would be placed with a foster family and not even then would the woman speak for God suffused her with His strength in the very face of her enemies.

And so the woman took up a smaller scissors, out of the canvas bag, to clip the child’s fingernails so short the tender flesh beneath the nails began to bleed. Though the child was frightened she managed to hold herself still except for shivering as the baby rabbit will hold itself still in the desperate hope that is most powerful in living creatures, our deepest expectation in the face of all evidence refuting it, that the terrible danger will pass.

For—maybe—this was a game? What the spike-haired man called a game? Secret from the woman was the little cherry pie—sweet cherry pie in a wax-paper package small enough to fit into the palm of the spike-haired man’s hand—so delicious, the child devoured it greedily and quickly before it might be shared by another. There was splash-splash which was bathing the child in the claw-footed tub while the woman slept in the next room on the bare mattress on the floor her limbs sprawled as if she’d fallen from a height onto her back moaning in her sleep and waking in a paroxysm of coughing as if she were coughing out her very guts. Bathing the child who had not been bathed in many days and mixed with the bathing was the game of tickle. So carefully!—as if she were a breakable porcelain doll and not a tough durable rubber doll like Dolly you’d just bang around, let fall onto the floor and kick out of your way if she was in your way—and so quietly!—the spike-haired man carried the child into the bathroom and to the claw-footed tub that was the size of a trough for animals to drink from and in the bathroom with the door shut—forcibly—for the door was warped and the bolt could not be slid in place—the spike-haired man stripped the child’s soiled pajamas from her and set her—again so carefully!—a forefinger pressed to his lips to indicate how carefully and without noise this must be—set her into the tub—into the water that sprang from the faucet tinged with rust and was only lukewarm and there were few soap bubbles except when the spike-haired man rubbed his hands vigorously together with the bar of nice-smelling Ivory soap between his palms and lathered the suds on the child’s squirmy little pale body like something soft prized out of its shell in what was the game of tickle—the secret game of tickle; and amid the splashing soon the water cooled and had to be replenished from the faucet—but the faucet made a groaning sound as if in protest and the spike-haired man pressed his forefinger against his lips pursed like a TV clown’s lips and his raggedy eyebrows lifted to make the child laugh—or, if not laugh, to make the child cease squirming, struggling—for the game of tickle was very ticklish!—the spike-haired man laughed a near-soundless hissing laugh and soon after lapsed into an open-mouthed doze having lost the energy that rippled through him like electricity through a coil and the child waited until the spike-haired man was snoring half-sitting half-lying on the puddled floor of the bathroom with his back against the wall and water-droplets glistening in the dense wiry steel-colored hairs on his chest and on the soft flaccid folds of his belly and groin and when finally in the early evening when the spike-haired man awakened—and when the woman sprawled on the mattress in the adjacent room awakened—the child had climbed out of the tub naked and shivering and her skin puckered and white like the skin of a defeathered chicken and for a long time the woman and the spike-haired man searched for her until she was discovered clutching at her ugly bareheaded rubber doll curled up like a stepped-on little worm in skeins of cobweb and dustballs beneath the cellar stairs.

Hide-and-seek! Hide-and-seek and the spike-haired man was the one to find her!

For what were the actions of adults except games, and variants of games. The child was given to know that a game would come to an end unlike other actions that were not-games and could not be ended but sprawled on and on like a highway or a railroad track or the river rushing beneath the loose-fitting planks of the bridge near the house in which she and the woman had lived with the spike-haired man before the trouble.

This is not hurting you! You will defame God if you make such a fuss.

The woman’s voice was not so calm now but raw-sounding like something that has been broken and gives pain. And the woman’s fingers on the child were harder, and the broken and uneven nails were sharp as a cat’s claws digging into the child’s flesh.

The child’s tender scalp was bleeding. The hairs remaining were stubbled. Amid the remaining sticky strands of hair haphazardly cut and partly shaved were tiny frantic lice. By this time the child’s soiled clothes had been removed, wadded into a ball and kicked aside. It was a tar paper cabin the woman had discovered in the underbrush between the road and the towpath. The sign from God directing her to this abandoned place had been a weatherworn toppled-over cross at the roadside that was in fact a mileage marker so faded you could not make out the words or the numerals but the woman had seen M O R I A H.

In this foul place where they had slept wrapped in the woman’s rumpled and stained coat there was no possibility of bathing the child. Nor would there have been time to bathe the child, for God was growing impatient now it was dawn which was why the woman’s hands fumbled and her lips moved in prayer. The sky was growing lighter like a great eye opening and in most of the sky that you could see were clouds massed and dense like chunks of concrete.

Except at the tree line on the farther side of the mudflats where the sun rose.

Except if you stared hard enough you could see that the concrete clouds were melting away and the sky was layered in translucent faint-red clouds like veins in a great translucent heart that was the awakening of God to the new dawn in the land of Moriah.

In the car the woman had said I will know when I see. My trust is in the Lord.

The woman said Except for the Lord, everything is finished.

The woman was not speaking to the child for it was not her practice to speak to the child even when they were alone. And when they were in the presence of others, the woman had ceased speaking at all and it was the impression of those others who had no prior knowledge of the woman that she was both mute and deaf and very likely had been born so.

In the presence of others the woman had learned to shrink inside her clothing that hung loosely on her for at the time of her pregnancies she had been ashamed and fearful of the eyes of strangers moving on her like X-rays and so she had acquired men’s clothing that hid her body—though around her neck in a loose knot, for her throat was often painful, and she feared strep throat, was a scarf of some shiny crinkly purple material she had found discarded.

The child was naked inside the paper nightgown. The child was bleeding from her razor-lacerated scalp in a dozen tiny wounds and shivering and naked inside the pale green paper nightgown faintly stamped HERKIMER CO. DETENTION that had been cut by the giant shears to reduce its length if not its width so that the paper nightgown came to just the child’s skinny ankles.

A paper gown to be tracked to the Herkimer County medical unit attached to the women’s detention home.

In the rear seat of the rattling rusted Plymouth which was the spike-haired man’s sole legacy was the child’s rubber doll. Dolly was the name of the doll that had been her sister’s and was now hers. Dolly’s face was soiled and her eyes had ceased to see. Dolly’s small mouth was a pucker in the grim rubber flesh. And Dolly too was near-bald, only patches of curly fair hair remaining where you could see how the sad feathery fawn-colored hairs had been glued to the rubber scalp.

Seventy miles north of Star Lake as remote to the woman and the child as the farther, eclipsed half of the moon, the shadowed mudflats beside the river.

So meandering and twisting were the mountain roads, a journey of merely seventy miles had required days, for the woman feared to drive the rattling automobile at any speed beyond thirty. And urgent to her too, that her obedience to God was manifest in this slowness and in this deliberateness like one who can only read by drawing his forefinger beneath each letter of each word to be enunciated aloud.

The child did not fret. But the woman believed, in her heart the child did fret for both the children were rebellious. No comb could be forced through such snarled hair.

In harsh jeering cries the crows reviled God.

Jeering demanding to know as the (female, middle-aged) judge had demanded to know why these children have been found filthy and partly clothed pawing through a Dumpster behind the Shop-Rite scavenging for food like stray dogs or wild creatures shrinking in the beam of a flashlight. And the elder of the sisters clutching at the hand of the younger and would not let go.

And how does the mother explain and how does the mother plead.

Proudly the woman stood and her chin uplifted and eyes shut against the Whore of Babylon there in black robes but a lurid lipstick-mouth and plucked eyebrows like arched insect wings. No more would the woman plead than fall to her knees before this whorish vision.

The children had been taken from her and placed in temporary custody of the county. But the will of God was such, all that was rightfully the woman’s was restored to her, in time.

In all those weeks, months—the woman had never weakened in her faith that all that was hers, would be restored to her.

And now at dawn the sky in the east was ever-shifting, expanding. The gray concrete-sky that is the world-bereft-of-God was retreating. Almost you could see angels of wrath in these broken clouds. Glittering light in the stagnant strips of water of the mudflats of the hue of watery blood. Less than a half mile from the Black Snake River in a desolate area of northeastern Beechum County in the foothills of the Adirondacks, where the hand of God had guided her. Here were the remains of an abandoned mill, an unpaved road and rotted debris amid tall snakelike marsh grasses that shivered and whispered in the wind. Exposed roots of trees and collapsed and rotting tree trunks bearing the whorled and affrighted faces of the damned. And what beauty in such forlorn places, Mudgirl would cherish through her life. For we most cherish those places to which we have been brought to die but have not died. No smells more pungent than the sharp muck-smell of the mudflats where the brackish river water seeps and is trapped and stagnant with algae the bright vivid green of Crayola. Vast unfathomable acres of mudflats amid cattails, jimsonweed and scattered litter of old tires, boots, torn clothing, broken umbrellas and rotted newspapers, abandoned stoves, refrigerators with doors flung open like empty arms. Seeing a small squat refrigerator tossed on its side in the mud the child thought She will put us inside that one.

But something was wrong with this. The thought came a second time, to correct—She has put us inside that one. She has shut the door.

There came a frenzy of crows, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, as if the child had spoken aloud and said a forbidden thing.

The woman cried shaking her fist at the birds, God will curse you!

The raucous accusing cries grew louder. More black-feathered birds appeared, spreading their great wings. They settled in the skeletal trees fierce and clattering. The woman cried, cursed and spat and yet the bird-shrieks continued and the child was given to know that the birds had come for her.

These were sent by Satan, the woman said.

It was time, the woman said. A day and a night and another day and now the night had become dawn of the new day and it was time and so despite the shrieking birds the woman half-walked half-carried the child in the torn paper nightgown in the direction of the ruined mill. Pulling at the child so that the child’s thin pale arm felt as if it were about to be wrenched out of its socket.

The woman made her way beyond the ruined mill which smelled richly of something sweetly rancid and fermented and into an area of broken bricks and rotted lumber fallen amid rich dark muddy soil and spiky weeds grown to the height of children. In her haste she startled a long black snake sleeping in the rotted lumber but the snake refused to crawl away rapidly instead moving slowly and sinuously out of sight in defiance of the intruder. At first the woman paused—the woman stared—for the woman was awaiting an angel of God to appear to her—but the sinuous black-glittering snake was no angel of God and in a fury of hurt, disappointment and determination the woman cried, Satan go back to hell where you came from but already in insolent triumph the snake had vanished into the underbrush.

The child had ceased whimpering, for the woman had forbade her. The child barefoot and naked inside the rumpled and torn pale green paper gown faintly stamped HERKIMER CO. DETENTION. The child’s legs were very thin and stippled with insect bites and of these bites many were bleeding, or had only recently ceased bleeding. The child’s head near-bald, stubbled and bleeding and the eyes dazed, uncomprehending. At the end of a lane leading to the canal towpath was a spit of land gleaming with mud the hue of baby shit and tinged with a sulfurous yellow: and the smell was the smell of baby shit for here were many things rotted and gone. Faint mists rose from the interior of the marsh like the exhaled breaths of dying things. The child began to cry helplessly. As the woman hauled her along the land-spit the child began to struggle but could not prevail. The child was weak from malnutrition yet still the child could not have prevailed for the woman was strong and the strength of God flowed through her being like a bright blinding beacon. Light flared off the woman’s face, she had never been so certain of herself and so joyous in certainty as now. For knowing now that the angel of God would not appear to her as the angel of God had appeared to both Abraham and Hagar who had borne Abraham’s child and had been cast into the wilderness by Abraham with the child to die of thirst.

And this was not the first time the angel of God had been withheld from her. But it would be the last time.

With a bitter laugh the woman said, Here, I am returning her to You. As You have bade me, so I am returning her to You.

First, Dolly: the woman pried Dolly from the child’s fingers and tossed Dolly out into the mud.

Here! Here is the first of them.

The woman spoke happily, harshly. The rubber doll lay astonished in the mud below.

Next, the child: the woman seized the child in her arms to push her off the spit of land and into the mud—the child clutched at her only now daring to cry Momma! Momma!—the woman pried the child’s fingers loose and pushed, shoved, kicked the child down the steep incline into the flat glistening mud below close by the ugly rubber doll and there the child flailed her thin naked limbs, on her belly now and her small astonished face in the mud so the cry Momma was muffled and on the bank above the woman fumbled for something—a broken tree limb—to swing at the child for God is a merciful God and would not wish the child to suffer but the woman could not reach the child and so in frustration threw the limb down at the child for all the woman’s calmness had vanished and she was now panting, breathless and half-sobbing and by this time though the ugly rubber doll remained where it had fallen on the surface of the mud the agitated child was being sucked down into the mud, a chilly bubbly mud that would warm but grudgingly with the sun, a mud that filled the child’s mouth, and a mud that filled the child’s eyes, and a mud that filled the child’s ears, until at last there was no one on the spit of land above the mudflat to observe her struggle and no sound but the cries of the affronted crows.

Mudwoman’s Journey. The Black River Café.

October 2002

Readied. She believed yes, she was.

She was not one to be taken by surprise.

“Carlos, stop! Please. Let me out here.”

In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes moved onto her, startled.

“Ma’am? Here?”

“I mean—Carlos—I’d like to stop for just a minute. Stretch my legs.”

This was so awkwardly phrased, and so seemingly fraudulent—stretch my legs!

Politely the driver protested: “Ma’am—it’s less than an hour to Ithaca.”

He was regarding her with a look of mild alarm in the rearview mirror. Very much, she disliked being observed in that mirror.

“Please just park on the shoulder of the road, Carlos. I won’t be a minute.”

Now she did speak sharply.

Though continuing to smile of course. For it was unavoidable, in this new phase of her life she was being observed.

The bridge!

She had never seen the bridge before, she was sure. And yet—how familiar it was to her.

It was not a distinguished or even an unusual bridge but an old-style truss bridge of the 1930s, with a single span: wrought-iron girders marked with elaborate encrustations of rust like ancient and unreadable hieroglyphics. Already M.R. knew, without needing to see, that the bridge was bare planking and would rattle beneath crossing vehicles; all of the bridge would vibrate finely, like a great tuning fork.

Like the bridges of M.R.’s memory, this bridge had been built high above the stream below, which was a small river, or a creek, that flooded its banks after rainstorms. To cross the bridge you had to ascend a steep paved ramp. Both the bridge and the ramp were narrower by several inches than the two-lane state highway that led to the bridge and so in its approach to the bridge the road conspicuously narrowed and the shoulder was sharply attenuated. All this happened without warning—you had to know the bridge, not to blunder onto it when a large vehicle like a van or a truck was crossing.

There was no shoulder here upon which to park safely, at least not a vehicle the size of the Lincoln Town Car, but canny Carlos had discovered an unpaved service lane at the foot of the bridge ramp, that led to the bank of the stream. The lane was rutted, muddy. In a swath of underbrush the limousine came to a jolting stop only a few yards from rushing water.

Some subtle way in which the driver both obeyed his impulsive employer, and resisted her, made M.R.’s heart quicken in opposition to him. Clearly Carlos understood that this was an imprudent stop to have made, within an hour of their destination; the very alacrity with which he’d driven the shiny black limousine off the road and into underbrush was a rebuke to her, who had issued a command to him.

“Carlos, thank you. I won’t be a—a minute …”

Won’t be a minute. Like stretch my legs this phrase sounded in her ears forced and alien to her, as if another spoke through her mouth, and M.R. was the ventriloquist’s dummy.

Quickly before Carlos could climb out of the car to open the door for her, M.R. opened the door for herself. She couldn’t seem to accustom herself to being treated with such deference and formality!—it wasn’t M.R.’s nature.

M.R., whom excessive attention and even moderate flattery embarrassed terribly; as if, by instinct, she understood the mockery that underscores formality.

“I’ll be right back! I promise.”

She spoke cheerily, gaily. M.R. couldn’t bear for any employee—any member of her staff—to feel uncomfortable in her presence.

As, teaching, when she’d approach a seminar room hearing the voices and laughter of the students inside, she’d hesitate to intrude—to evoke an abrupt and too-respectful silence.

Her power over others was that they liked her. Such liking could only be volitional, free choice.

She was walking along the embankment thinking these thoughts. By degrees the rushing water drowned out her thoughts—hypnotic, just slightly edgy. There is always a gravitational pull toward water: to rushing water. One is drawn forward, one is drawn in.

Now. Here. Come. It is time….

She smiled hearing voices in the water. The illusion of voices in the water.

But here was an impediment: the bank was tangled with briars, vines. An agonized twisting of something resembling guts. It wasn’t a good idea for M.R. to be walking in her charcoal-gray woolen trousers and her pinching-new Italian shoes.

Yet if you looked closely, with a child’s eye, you could discern a faint trail amid the underbrush. Children, fishermen. Obviously, people made their way along the stream, sometimes.

A nameless stream—creek, or river. Seemingly shallow, yet wide. A sprawl of boulders, flat shale-like rock. Froth of the hue and seeming substance of the most nouveau of haute cuisine—foam-food, pureed and juiced, all substance leached from it, terrible food! Tasteless and unsatisfying and yet M.R. had been several times obliged to admire it, dining at the Manhattan homes of one or another of the University’s wealthy trustees, who kept in their employ full-time chefs.

The creek, or river, was much smaller than the Black Snake River that flowed south and west out of the southern Adirondacks, traversing Beechum County at a diagonal—the river of M.R.’s childhood. Yet—here was the identical river-smell. If M.R. shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, she was there.

Here was an odor of something brackish and just slightly sour—rancid/rotted—decaying leaves—rich damp dark earth that sank beneath her heels as she made her way along the bank, shading her eyes against the watery glitter like tinfoil.

Mingled with the river-smell was an odor of something burning, like rubber. Smoldering tires, garbage. A wet-feather smell. But faint enough that it wasn’t unpleasant.

All that M.R. could see—on the farther bank of the stream—was a wall of dark-brick buildings with only a few windows on each floor; and beyond the windows, nothing visible. High on the sides of the buildings were advertisements—product names and pictures of—faces? human figures?—eroded by time and now indecipherable, lost to all meaning.

“‘Mohawk Meats and Poultry.’”

The words came to her. The memory was random, and fleeting.

“‘Boudreau Women’s Gloves and Hosiery.’”

But that had been Carthage, long ago. These ghost-signs, M.R. could not read at all.

Carlos was surely correct, they weren’t far from the small city of Ithaca—which meant the vast sprawling spectacular campus of Cornell University where M.R. had been an undergraduate twenty years before and had graduated summa cum laude, in another lifetime. Yet she had no idea of the name of this small town or where exactly they were except south and west of Ithaca in the glacier-ravaged countryside of Tompkins County.

It was a bright chilly October day. It was a day splotched with sumac like bursts of flame.

The not-very-prosperous small town of faded-brick storefronts and cracked sidewalks reminded M.R. of the small city in which she’d grown up in Beechum County in the foothills of the southern Adirondacks. Vaguely she was thinking I should have planned to visit them. It has been so long.

Her father lived there still—in Carthage.

She had not told Konrad Neukirchen that she would be spending three nights within a hundred miles of Carthage since virtually every minute of the conference would be filled with appointments, engagements, panels, talks—and yet more people would request time with M.R., once the conference began. She had not wanted to disappoint her father, who’d always been so proud of her.

Her father, and also her mother of course. Both the Neukirchens: Konrad and Agatha.

How painful it was to M.R., to disappoint others! Her elders, who’d invested so much in her. Their love for her was a heavy cloak upon her shoulders, like one of those lead-shield cloaks laid upon you in the dentist’s office to shield you from X-rays—you were grateful for the cloak but more grateful when it was removed.

Far rather would M.R. be disappointed by others, than to be the agent of disappointment herself. For M.R. could forgive—readily; she was very good at forgiveness.

She was very good at forgetting, also. To forget is the very principle of forgiveness.

Perhaps it was a Quaker principle, or ought to have been, which she’d inherited from her parents: forget, forgive.

Boldly now she walked on the bank of the nameless river amid broken things. An observer on the bridge some distance away would have been surprised to see her: a well-dressed woman, alone, in this place so impractical for walking, amid a slovenly sort of quasi-wilderness. M.R. was a tall woman whom an erect backbone and held-high head made taller—a woman of youthful middle-age with an appealingly girlish face—fleshy, flush-cheeked. Her eyes were both shy and quick-darting, assessing. In fact the eyes were a falcon’s eyes, in a girl’s face.

How strange she felt in this place! The glittery light—lights—reflected in the swift-running water seemed to suffuse her heart. She felt both exhilarated and apprehensive, as if she were approaching danger. Not a visible danger perhaps. Yet she must go forward.

This was a common feeling of course. Common to all who inhabit a “public” role. She would be addressing an audience in which there was sure to be some opposition to her prepared words.

Her keynote address, upon which she’d worked intermittently, for weeks, was only to be twenty minutes long: “The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism.’” This was the first time that M. R. Neukirchen had been invited to address the National Conference of the prestigious American Association of Learned Societies. There would be hostile questions put to her at the conclusion of her talk, she supposed. At her own University where the faculty so supported her liberal position, yet there were dissenting voices from the right. But overwhelmingly her audience that evening would support her, she was sure.

It would be thrilling—to speak to this distinguished group, and to make an impression on them. Somehow it had happened, the shy schoolgirl had become, with the passage of not so many years, an impassioned and effective public speaker—a Valkyrie of a figure—fiercely articulate, intense. You could see that she cared so much—almost, at moments, M.R. quivered with feeling, as if about to stammer.

Audiences were transfixed by her, in the narrow and rarified academic world in which she dwelt.

I am baring my soul to you. I care so deeply!

Often she felt faint, beforehand. A turmoil in her stomach as if she might be physically ill.

The way an actor might feel, stepping into a magisterial role. The way an athlete might feel, on the cusp of a great triumph—or loss.

Her (secret) lover had once assured her It isn’t panic you feel, Meredith. It isn’t even fear. It’s excitement: anticipation.

Her (secret) lover was a brilliant but not entirely reliable man, an astronomer/cosmologist happiest in the depths of the Universe. Andre Litovik’s travels took him into extragalactic space far from M.R. yet he, too, was proud of her, and did love her in his way. So she wished to believe.

They saw each other infrequently. They did not even communicate often, for Andre was negligent about answering e-mail. Yet, they thought of each other continuously—or so M.R. wished to believe.

Possibly unwisely, given the dense underbrush here, M.R. was approaching the bridge from beneath. She’d been correct: the floor was planking—you could see sunlight through the cracks—as vehicles passed, the plank floor rattled. A pickup truck, several cars—the bridge was so narrow, traffic slowed to five miles an hour.

She’d learned to drive over such a bridge. Long ago.

She felt the old frisson of dread—a visceral unease she experienced now mainly when flying in turbulent weather—Return to your seats please, fasten your seat belts please, the captain has requested you return to your seats please.

At such times the terrible thought came to her: To die among strangers! To die in flaming wreckage.

Such curious, uncharacteristic thoughts M. R. Neukirchen hid from those who knew her intimately. But there was no one really, who knew M. R. Neukirchen intimately.

In a way it was strange to her, this curious fact: she had not (yet) died.

As the pre-Socratics pondered Why is there something and not rather nothing?—so M.R. pondered Why am I here, and not rather—nowhere?

A purely intellectual speculation, this was. M.R.’s professional philosophizing wasn’t tainted by the merely personal.

Yet, these questions were strange, and wonderful. Not an hour of her life when she did not give thanks.

M.R. had been an only child. An entire psychology has been devised involving the only child, a variant of the first-born.

The only child is not inevitably the first-born, however. The only child may be the survivor.

The only child is more likely to be gifted than a child with numerous siblings. Obviously, the only child is likely to be lonely.

Self-reliant, self-sufficient. “Creative.”

Did M.R. believe in such theories? Or did she believe, for this was closer to her personal experience, that personalities are distinct, individual and unique, and unfathomable—in terms of influences and causality, inexplicable?

She’d been trained as a philosopher, she had a Ph.D. in European philosophy from one of the great philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. Yet she’d taken graduate courses in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, international law. She’d participated in bioethics colloquia. She’d published a frequently anthologized essay titled “How Do You Know What You ‘Know’: Skepticism as Moral Imperative.” As the president of a distinguished research university in which theories of every sort were devised, debated, maintained, and defended—an abundance like a spring field blooming and buzzing with a profusion of life—M.R. wasn’t obliged to believe but she was obliged to take seriously, to respect.

My dream is to be—of service! I want to do good.

She was quite serious. She was wholly without irony.

The Convent Street bridge, in Carthage. Of course, that was the bridge she was trying to recall.

And other bridges, other waterways, streams—M.R. couldn’t quite recall.

In a kind of trance she was staring, smiling. As a child, she’d learned quickly. Of all human reflexes, the most valuable.

The river was a fast shallow stream on which boulders emerged like bleached bone. Fallen tree limbs lay in the water sunken and rotted and on these mud turtles basked in the October sun, motionless as creatures carved of stone. M.R. knew from her rural childhood that if you approached these turtles, even at a distance they would arouse themselves, waken and slip into the water; seemingly asleep, in reptilian stillness, they were yet highly alert, vigilant.

A memory came to her of boys who’d caught a mud turtle, shouting and flinging the poor creature down onto the rocks, dropping rocks on it, cracking its shell….

Why would you do such a thing? Why kill …?

It was a question no one asked. You would not ask. You would be ridiculed, if you asked.

She had failed to defend the poor turtle against the boys. She’d been too young—very young. The boys had been older. Always there were too many of them—the enemy.

These small failures, long ago. No one knew now. No one who knew her now. If she’d tried to tell them they would stare at her, uncomprehending. Are you serious? You can’t be serious.

Certainly she was serious: a serious woman. The first female president of the University.

Not that femaleness was an issue, it was not.

Without hesitation M.R. would claim, and in interviews would elaborate, that not once in her professional career, nor in her years as a student, had she been discriminated against, as a woman.

It was the truth, as M.R. knew it. She was not one to lodge complaints or to speak in disdain, hurt, or reproach.

What was that—something moving upstream? A child wading? But the air was too cold for wading and the figure too white: a snowy egret.

Beautiful long-legged bird searching for fish in the swift shallow water. M.R. watched it for several seconds—such stillness! Such patience.

At last, as if uneasy with M.R.’s presence, the egret seemed to shake itself, lifted its wide wings, and flew away.

Nearby but invisible were birds—jays, crows. Raucous cries of crows.

Quickly M.R. turned away. The harsh-clawing sound of a crow’s cry was disturbing to her.

“Oh!”—in her eagerness to leave this place she’d turned her ankle, or nearly.

She should not have stopped to walk here, Carlos was right to disapprove. Now her heels sank in the soft mucky earth. So clumsy!

As a young athlete M.R. had been quick on her feet for a girl of her height and (“Amazonian”) body-type but soon after her teens she’d begun to lose this reflexive speed, the hand-eye coordination an athlete takes for granted until it begins to abandon her.

“Ma’am? Let me help you.”

Ma’am. What a rebuke to her foolishness!

Carlos had approached to stand just a few feet away. M.R. didn’t want to think that her driver had been watching her, protectively, all along.

“I’m all right, Carlos, thank you. I think….”

But M.R. was limping, in pain. It was a quick stabbing pain she hoped would fade within a few minutes but she hadn’t much choice except to lean on Carlos’s arm as they made their way back to the car, along the faint path through the underbrush.

Her heart was beating rapidly, strangely. The birds’ cries—the crows’ cries—were both jeering and beautiful: strange wild cries of yearning, summons.

But what was this?—something stuck to the bottom of one of her shoes. The newly purchased Italian black-leather shoes she’d felt obliged to buy, several times more expensive than any other shoes M.R. had ever purchased.

And on her trouser cuffs—briars, burrs.

And what was in her hair?—she hoped it wasn’t bird droppings from the underside of that damned bridge.

“Excuse me, ma’am …”

“Thanks, Carlos! I’m fine.”

“Ma’am, wait …”

Gallant Carlos stooped to detach whatever it was stuck to M.R.’s shoe. M.R. had been trying to kick it free without exactly seeing it, and without allowing Carlos to see it; yet of course, Carlos had seen. How ridiculous this was! She was chagrined, embarrassed. The last thing she wanted was her uniformed Hispanic driver stooping at her feet but of course Carlos insisted upon doing just this, deftly he detached whatever had been stuck to the sole of her shoe and flicked it into the underbrush and when M.R. asked what it was he said quietly not meeting her eye:

“Nothing, ma’am. It’s gone.”

It was October 2002. In the U.S. capital, war was being readied.

If objects pass into the space “neglected” after brain damage, they disappear. If the right brain is injured, the deficit will manifest itself in the left visual field.

The paradox is: how do we know what we can’t know when it does not appear to us.

How do we know what we have failed to see because we have failed to see it, thus cannot know that we have failed to see it.

Unless—the shadow of what-is-not-seen can be seen by us.

A wide-winged shadow swiftly passing across the surface of Earth.

In the late night—her brain too excited for sleep—she’d been working on a philosophy paper—a problem in epistemology. How do we know what we cannot know: what are the perimeters of “knowing”…

As a university president she’d vowed she would keep up with her field—after this first, inaugural year as president she would resume teaching a graduate seminar in philosophy/ethics each semester. All problems of philosophy seemed to her essentially problems of epistemology. But of course these were problems in perception: neuropsychology.

The leap from a problem in epistemology/neuropsychology to politics—this was risky.

For had not Nietzsche observed—Madness in individuals is rare but in nations, common.

Yet she would make this leap, she thought—for this evening was her great opportunity. Her audience at the conference would be approximately fifteen hundred individuals—professors, scholars, archivists, research scientists, university and college administrators, journalists, editors of learned journals and university presses. A writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education was scheduled to interview M. R. Neukirchen the following morning, and a reporter for the New York Times Education Supplement was eager to meet with her. A shortened version of “The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism’” would be published as an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. M. R. Neukirchen was a new president of an “historic” university that had not even admitted women until the 1970s and so boldly in her keynote address she would speak of the unspeakable: the cynical plot being contrived in the U.S. capital to authorize the president to employ “military force” against a Middle Eastern country demonized as an “enemy”—an “enemy of democracy.” She would find a way to speak of such things in her presentation—it would not be difficult—in addressing the issue of the Patriot Act, the need for vigilance against government surveillance, detention of “terrorist suspects”—the terrible example of Vietnam.

But this was too emotional—was it? Yet she could not speak coolly, she dared not speak ironically. In her radiant Valkyrie mode, irony was not possible.

She would call her lover in Cambridge, Massachusetts—to ask of him Should I? Dare I? Or is this a mistake?

For she had not made any mistakes, yet. She had not made any mistakes of significance, in her role as higher educator.

She should call him, or perhaps another friend—though it was difficult for M.R., to betray weaknesses to her friends who looked to her for—uplift, encouragement, good cheer, optimism….

She should not behave rashly, she should not give an impression of being political, partisan. Her original intention for the address was to consider John Dewey’s classic Democracy and Education in twenty-first-century terms.

She was an idealist. She could not take seriously any principle of moral behavior that was not a principle for all—universally. She could not believe that “relativism” was any sort of morality except the morality of expediency. But of course as an educator, she was sometimes obliged to be pragmatic: expedient.

Education floats upon the economy, and the goodwill of the people.

Even private institutions are hostages to the economy, and the good—enlightened—will of the people.

She would call her (secret) lover when she arrived at the conference center hotel. Just to ask What do you advise? Do you think I am risking too much?

Just to ask Do you love me? Do you even think of me? Do you remember me—when I am not with you?

It was M.R.’s practice to start a project early—in this case, months early—when she’d first been invited to give the keynote address at the conference, back in April—and to write, rewrite, revise and rewrite through a succession of drafts until her words were finely honed and shimmering—invincible as a shield. A twenty-minute presentation, brilliant in concision and emphasis, would be far more effective than a fifty-minute presentation. And it would be M.R.’s strategy, too, to end early—just slightly early. She would aim for eighteen minutes. To take her audience off guard, to end on a dramatic note …

Madness in individuals is rare but in nations, common.

Unless: this was too dire, too smugly “prophetic”? Unless: this would strike a wrong note?

“Carlos! Please put the radio on, will you? I think the dial is set—NPR.”

It was noon: news. But not good news.

In the backseat of the limousine M.R. listened. How credulous the media had become since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, how uncritical the reporting—it made her ill, it made her want to weep in frustration and anger, the callow voice of the defense secretary of the United States warning of weapons of mass destruction believed to be stored in readiness for attack by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein … Biological warfare, nuclear warfare, threat to U.S. democracy, global catastrophe.

“What do you think, Carlos? Is this ridiculous? ‘Fanning the flames’…”

“Don’t know, ma’am. It’s a bad thing.”

Guardedly Carlos replied. What Carlos felt in his heart, Carlos was not likely to reveal.

“I think you said—you served in Vietnam….”

Fanning the flames. Served in Vietnam. How clumsy her stock phrases, like ill-fitting prostheses.

It hadn’t been Carlos, but one of her assistants who’d mentioned to M.R. that Carlos had been in the Vietnam War and had “some sort of medal—‘Purple Heart’”—of which he never spoke. And reluctantly now Carlos responded:

“Ma’am, yes.”

In the rearview mirror she saw his forehead crease. He was a handsome man, or had been—olive-dark skin, a swath of silver hair at his forehead. His lips moved but all she could really hear was ma’am.

She was feeling edgy, agitated. They were nearing Ithaca—at last.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘ma’am,’ Carlos! It makes me feel—like a spinster of a bygone era.”

She’d meant to change the subject and to change the tone of their exchange but the humor in her remark seemed to be lost as often, when she spoke to Carlos, and others on her staff, the good humor for which M. R. Neukirchen was known among her colleagues seemed to be lost and she drew blank expressions from them.

“Sorry, ma’am.”

Carlos stiffened, realizing what he’d said. Surely his face went hot with embarrassment.

Yet—she knew!—it wasn’t reasonable for M.R. to expect her driver to address her in some other way—as President Neukirchen for instance. If he did he stumbled over the awkward words—Pres’dent New-kirtch-n.

She’d asked Carlos to call her “M.R.”—as most of her University colleagues did—but he had not, ever. Nor had anyone on her staff. This was strange to her, disconcerting, for M.R. prided herself on her lack of pretension, her friendliness.

Her predecessor had insisted that everyone call him by his first name—“Leander.” He’d been an enormously popular president though not, in his final years, a very productive or even a very attentive president; like a grandfather clock winding down, M.R. had thought. He’d spent most of his time away from campus and among wealthy donors—as house guest, traveling companion, speaker to alumni groups. As a once-noted historian he’d seen his prize territory—Civil War and Reconstruction—so transformed by the inroads of feminist, African American studies, and Marxist scholarship as to be unrecognizable to him, and impossible for him to re-enter, like a door that has locked behind you, once you have stepped through. An individual of such absolute vanity, he wished to be perceived as totally without vanity—just a “common man.” Though Leander Huddle had accumulated a small fortune—reputedly, somewhere near ten million dollars—by way of his University salary and its perquisites and investments in his trustee-friends’ businesses.

M.R.’s presidency would be very different!

Of course, M.R. was not going to invest money in any businesses owned by trustees. M.R. was not going to accumulate a small fortune through her University connections. M.R. would establish a scholarship financed—(secretly)—by her own salary….

It will be change—radical change!—that works through me.

Neukirchen will be but the agent. Invisible!

She did have radical ideas for the University. She did want to reform its “historic” (i.e., Caucasian-patriarchal/hierarchical) structure and she did want to hire more women and minority faculty, and above all, she wanted to implement a new tuition/scholarship policy that would transform the student body within a few years. At the present time an uncomfortably high percentage of undergraduates were the sons and daughters of the most wealthy economic class, as well as University “legacies”—(that is, the children of alumni); there were scholarships for “poor” students, that constituted a small percentage; but the children of middle-income parents constituted a precarious 5 percent of admissions … M.R. intended to increase these, considerably.

For M. R. Neukirchen was herself the daughter of “middle-income” parents, who could never have afforded to send her to this Ivy League university.

Of course, M. R. Neukirchen would not appear radical, but rather sensible, pragmatic and timely.

She’d assembled an excellent team of assistants and aides. And an excellent staff. Immediately when she’d been named president, she’d begun recruiting the very best people she could; she’d kept on only a few key individuals on Leander’s staff.

At all public occasions, in all her public pronouncements, M. R. Neukirchen stressed that the presidency of the University was a “team effort”—publicly she thanked her team, and she thanked individuals. She was the most generous of presidents—she would take blame for mistakes but share credit for successes. (Of course, no mistakes of any consequence had yet been made since M.R. had taken over the office.) To all whom she met in her official capacity she appealed in her eager earnest somewhat breathless manner that masked her intelligence—as it masked her willfulness; sometimes, in an excess of feeling, this new president of the University was known to clasp hands in hers, that were unusually large strong warm hands.

It was the influence of her mother Agatha. As Agatha had also influenced M.R. to keep a cheerful heart, and keep busy.

As both Agatha and Konrad were likely to say, as Quakers—I hope.

For it was Quaker custom to say, not I think or I know or This is the way it must be but more provisionally, and more tenderly—I hope.

“Yes. I hope.”

In the front seat the radio voice was loud enough to obscure whatever it was M.R. had said. And Carlos was just slightly hard of hearing.

“You can turn off the radio, please, Carlos. Thanks.”

Since the incident at the bridge there was a palpable stiffness between them. No one has more of a sense of propriety than an older staffer, or a servant—one who has been in the employ of a predecessor, and can’t help but compare his present employer with this predecessor. And M.R. was only just acquiring a way of talking to subordinates that wasn’t formal yet wasn’t inappropriately informal; a way of giving orders that didn’t sound aggressive, coercive. Even the word Please felt coercive to her. When you said Please to those who, like Carlos, had no option but to obey, what were you really saying?

And she wondered was the driver thinking now It isn’t the same, driving for a woman. Not this woman.

She wondered was he thinking She is alone too much. You begin to behave strangely when you are alone too much—your brain never clicks off.

The desk clerk frowned into the computer.

“‘M. R. Neukirchen’”—the name sounded, on his lips, faintly improbable, comical—“yesss—we have your reservation, Mz. Neukirchen—for two nights. But I’m afraid—the suite isn’t quite ready. The maid is just finishing up….”

Even after the unscheduled stop, she’d arrived early!

She hadn’t even instructed Carlos to drive past her old residence Balch Hall—for which she felt a stab of nostalgia.

Not for the naïve girl she’d been as an undergraduate, nor even for the several quite nice roommates she’d had—(like herself, scholarship girls)—but for the thrilling experience of discovering, for the first time, the livingness of the intellectual enterprise, that had been, to her, the daughter of bookish parents, previously confined to books.

M.R. told the desk clerk that that was fine. She could wait. Of course. There was no problem.

“… no more than ten or fifteen minutes, Mz. Neukirchen. You can check in now, and wait in our library-lounge, and I will call you.”

“Thank you! This is ideal.”

Smile! Win more flies with honey than with vinegar Agatha would advise though this was not why, in fact, Agatha smiled so frequently, and so genuinely. And there was Konrad’s dry rebuttal, with a wink of the eye for their young impressionable daughter.

Sure thing! If it’s flies you want.

The library-lounge was an attractive wood-paneled room where M.R. could spread her things out on an oak table and continue to work.

Always it is a good thing: to arrive early.

The impulsive stop in the nameless little town by the nameless little creek or river hadn’t been a blunder after all—only just a curious episode in M.R.’s (private) life, to be forgotten.

Arrive early. Bring work.

She’d begun to acquire a reputation for being the most astonishing zealot of work.

It was known, M.R. was very bright—very earnest, idealistic—but it had not been quite known, how hard M.R. was willing to work.

For this brief trip, she’d brought along enough work for several days. And, of course, she would be in constant communication with Salvager Hall—the president’s team of aides, assistants, secretarial staff. In a constant stream e-mail messages came to her as president of the University, and these she dealt with both expeditiously and with an air of schoolgirl pleasure so it was known, and it would become more widely known, that M.R. never failed to include personal queries and remarks in her e-mail messages, she was irrepressibly friendly.

For we love our work. No more potent narcotic than work!

And M.R.’s administrative work was very different from her work as a writer/philosopher—administration is the skillful organizing of others, its center of gravity is exterior; all that matters, all that is significant, urgent—profound—is exterior.

“I want to be ‘of service.’ I do not want to be ‘served.’”

This too was a legacy of the Neukirchens. For the Quaker, the commonweal outweighs the merely personal.

Critically now M.R. was re-examining her address—“The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism’”—even as she found herself distracted by a memory of the bridge and the sharp water-smells—the mysterious faded lettering on the dark-brick building on the farther bank.

In the lobby, uplifted voices. Her fellow conferees were arriving.

She felt a stirring of apprehension, excitement. For soon, her anonymity would vanish.

The desk clerk had no idea who she was—(this was a relief!)—but others would know her, recognize her. This past year M. R. Neukirchen had become renowned in academic circles. She could not but think her elevation very unnerving, and very strange—accidental, really.

God has chosen you, dear Merry! God is a principle in the universe for good, and God has chosen you to implement His work.

In emotional moments her mother spoke like this—warmly, earnestly. It was something of a small shock to M.R. to realize that Agatha probably did believe in such a personal destiny for her daughter.

Another time M.R. leafed through the conference program—to check her name, to see if it was really there.

The program was a large glossy-white booklet with gilt letters on its cover: Fiftieth Annual National Conference of the American Association of Learned Societies. October 11–13, 2002. The conference was scheduled to begin with a 5:30 P.M. reception at which M.R. and other speakers were to be honored. Dinner was at 7 P.M. and at 8 P.M. the keynote speaker was listed—M. R. Neukirchen.

She’d given many talks, of course. Many lectures, speeches—presentations—but mostly in her academic field, philosophy. It was an honor for her to have been invited to speak to this organization, not the largest but the most distinguished of American intellectual/academic societies, for membership was limited and selective.

M.R. had herself been inducted into the organization young—not yet thirty, and an associate professor of philosophy at the University.

“Oh! Damn.”

She’d discovered mud on the cuffs of her trousers, and in the creases of her shoes. Irritably she brushed at the stains, that were still damp.

She touched her hair discovering something cobwebby-sticky in her hair, that must have sifted down from the wrought-iron bridge.

Fortunately, she’d brought other clothes to the conference. She would wash her face—check her hair—change quickly once she was given her room.

She had good clothes to wear, this evening. Since she’d become president of the University her female staffers had seen to it that M.R. looked “stylish”—her assistant Audrey Myles had insisted upon taking M.R. to New York City to shop and they’d come back with a chic Chanel-imitation Champagne-colored wool suit—with a skirt—by an American designer. And Audrey had convinced M.R. to buy handsome new shoes as well, with a one-inch heel—bringing M.R.’s height to a teetering five feet ten and a half inches.

At such a height, you could not hide. You had best imagine yourself as a prow on a ship—a brave Amazon girl-warrior with breastplates, spear uplifted in her right hand.

Her astronomer-lover, when he’d first sighted her on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, years before, had described her in his way. He’d claimed to have fallen in love with her, in this first sighting. And her hair in a tight-woven braid hanging down between her shoulder blades like a glittery bronze-brown snake.

Since she’d risen in administration at the University, M.R. had long since gotten rid of the girl-scholar braid. As she’d tried to rid herself of a naive sentimentality about the sort of love her astronomer-lover could provide her. Now her hair was cropped short, trimmed and styled by a New York City hairdresser, at Audrey’s insistence: it was dense, springy, no longer golden brown but the ambiguous hue of a winter-ravaged field threaded with metallic-gray hairs that glittered like filaments.

In official biographies, M. R. Neukirchen was forty-one years old in September 2002. And looking much younger.

As a little girl she’d seen her birth certificate. Her parents had shown her. A document stamped with the heraldic New York State gold seal stating her birth date, her name—her names.

Our secret you need to tell no one.

Our secret, God has blessed our family.

She was “Merry” then—“Meredith Ruth Neukirchen.” Her birthday was September 21. A very nice time of year, the Neukirchens believed: a prelude to the beautiful season of autumn. Which was why they’d chosen it for her.

Which was why she often forgot her birthday, and was surprised when others reminded her.

She hadn’t minded not being beautiful, as a girl in Carthage, New York. She’d learned to be objective about such matters. There were those who liked her well enough—who loved her, in a way—for her fierce wide smile that resembled a grimace of pain, and her stoicism in the face of actual pain or discomfort; she’d had to laugh seeing her picture in local papers, the expression of longing in her face that was so scrubbed-looking plain it might have been a boy’s face and not that of a young woman of eighteen:

MEREDITH RUTH NEUKIRCHEN, CLASS OF ’79 VALEDICTORIAN CARTHAGE HIGH SCHOOL.

It had been the kind of upstate New York, small-city school in which, as in a drain, the least-qualified and -inspired teachers wound up, bemused and stoical and resigned; there had been several teachers who’d seen in Meredith something promising, even exciting—but only one who had inspired her, though not to emulate him personally. And when poor Meredith—“Merry”—hadn’t even been asked to the senior prom, though she’d been not only valedictorian of her graduating class but also its vice president, one of the women teachers had consoled her—“You’ll just have to make your way somehow else, Meredith”—with fumbling directness though meaning to be kind.

Not as a woman, and not sexual.

Somehow else.

Soon after the senior prom to which M.R. had not been invited, M.R.’s prettiest girl-classmates were married, and pregnant; pregnant, and married. Some were soon divorced, and became “single mothers”—a very different domestic destiny from the one they’d envisioned for themselves.

Very few of M.R.’s classmates, female or male, went on to college. Very few achieved what one might call careers. Of her graduating class of 118 students very few left Carthage or Beechum County or the southern Adirondacks, where the economy had been severely depressed for decades.

One of those regions in America, M.R. had said, trying to describe her background to her astronomer-lover who traveled more frequently to Europe than to the rural interior of the United States, where poverty has become a natural resource: social workers, welfare workers, community-medical workers, public defenders, prison and psychiatric hospital staffers, family court officials—all thrived in such barren soil. Only fleetingly had M.R. considered returning, as an educator—once she’d left, she had scarcely looked back.

Don’t forget us, Meredith! Come visit, stay a while …

We love our Merry.

M.R. had pushed her laptop aside and was examining road maps, laid out on a table in the library-lounge for hotel guests.

Particularly M.R. was intrigued by a detailed map of Tompkins County. She hoped to determine where she’d asked Carlos to stop. South and west of Ithaca were small towns—Edensville, Burnt Ridge, Shedd—but none appeared to be the town M.R. was looking for. With her forefinger M.R. traced a thin curvy blue stream—this must be the river, or the creek—south of Ithaca; but there was only a tiny dot on that stream as of a settlement too minuscule to be named, or extinct.

“Why is this important? It is not important.”

She whispered aloud. She was puzzled by her disappointment.

Abruptly the map ended at the northern border of Tompkins County but there were maps of adjoining New York State counties; there was a road map of New York State that M.R. eagerly unfolded, with no hope that she could fold it neatly back up again. Some crucial genetic component was missing in M.R., she could never fold road maps neatly back up again once she unfolded them….

In the Neukirchen household, Konrad had been the one to carefully, painstakingly re-fold maps. Agatha had been totally incapable, vexed and anxious.

It feels like some kind of trick. It can’t be done!

M.R. saw: to the north and east of Tompkins County was Cortland County—beyond Cortland, Madison—then Herkimer, so curiously elongated among other, chunkier counties; beyond Herkimer, in the Adirondacks, the largest and least populated county in New York State, Beechum.

At the northwestern edge of Beechum County, the city of Carthage.

How many miles was it? How far could she drive, on a whim? It looked like less than two hundred miles, to the southernmost curve of the Black Snake River in Beechum County. Which computed to about three hours if she drove at sixty miles an hour. Of course, she wouldn’t have to drive as far as Carthage; she could simply drive, with no particular destination, see how far she got after two hours—then turn, and drive back.

How quickly her heart was beating!

M.R. calculated: it was just 1:08 P.M. She’d been waiting for her hotel room for nearly twenty minutes. Surely in another few minutes, the desk clerk would summon her, and she could check into the room?

The reception began at 5:30 P.M.—but no one would be on time. And then, at about 6 P.M., everyone would arrive at once, the room would be crammed with people, no one would notice if M.R. arrived late. Dinner was more essential of course since M.R. was seated at the speakers’ table—that wasn’t until 7 P.M. And of course, the keynote address at 8 P.M….

There was time—or was there? Her brain balked at calculations like a faulty machine.

“Absurd. No. Just stop.”

The spell was broken by the cell phone ringing at M.R.’s elbow. The first stirring notes of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

M.R. saw that the caller ID was UNIVERSITY—meaning the president’s office. Of course, they were waiting to hear from her there.

“Yes, I’ve arrived. Everything is fine. In a few minutes I’ll be checked in. And Carlos is on his way back home.”

It was a fact: Carlos had departed. M.R. had thanked him and dismissed him. Late in the afternoon of the third day of the conference Carlos would return, to drive M.R. back to the University.

Of course, M.R. had suggested that Carlos stay the night—this night—at the hotel—at the University’s expense—to avoid the strain of driving a second five-hour stretch in a single day. But Carlos politely demurred: Carlos didn’t seem to care much for this well-intentioned suggestion.

It was a relief Carlos had left, M.R. thought. The driver had lingered in the lobby for a while as if uncertain whether to leave his distinguished passenger before she’d actually been summoned to her hotel room; he’d insisted upon carrying her suitcase into the hotel for her—this lightweight roller-suitcase M.R. could handle for herself and in fact preferred to handle herself, for she rested her heavy handbag on it as she rolled it along; but Carlos couldn’t bear the possibility of being observed—by other drivers?—in the mildest dereliction of his duty.

“Ma’am? Should I wait with you?”

“Carlos, thank you! But no. Of course not.”

“But if you need …”

“Carlos, really! The hotel has my reservation, obviously. It will be just another few minutes, I’m sure.”

Still he’d hesitated. M.R. couldn’t determine if it was professional courtesy or whether this dignified gentleman in his early sixties was truly concerned for her—perhaps it was both; he told her please call him on her cell phone if she needed anything, he would return to Ithaca as quickly as possible. But finally he’d left.

M.R. thought Of course. His life is elsewhere. His life is not driving a car for me.

Questioned afterward Carlos Lopes would say I asked her if I should stay—her room wasn’t ready yet in the hotel—she said no, I should leave—she was working in a room off the lobby—I said maybe she would need me like if they didn’t have a room for her and I could drive her to some other hotel and she laughed and said no Carlos! That is very kind of you but no—of course there will be a room.

As the desk clerk would say Her room was ready for her at about 1:15 P.M. She was gracious about waiting, she said it was no trouble. But then a few minutes later she called the front desk—I spoke with her—she asked about a car rental recommendation. Sometime after that she must have left the hotel. Nobody would’ve seen her, the lobby was so crowded. Her room was empty at 8:30 P.M. when some people from the conference asked us to open it. There was no DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. The lights were off. Her suitcase was on the bed opened but mostly unpacked and her laptop was on the bed, not opened. There weren’t any signs of anybody breaking into the room or anything disturbed and there was no note left behind.

By 2 P.M. she was in the rental car driving north of Ithaca.

Her lungs swelled with—relief? Exultation?

She’d told no one where she was going or even that she was going—somewhere.

Of course, M.R. was paying for the compact Toyota with her personal credit card.

Of course, M.R. knew that her behavior was impulsive but reasoned that since she’d arrived early at the conference, in fact hours before the conference officially began, this interlude—before 6 P.M., or 6:30 P.M.—was a sort of free fall, like gravity-less space.

Once she’d asked her (secret) lover how an astronomer can bear the silence and vastness of the sky which is unbroken/unending/unfathomable and which yields nothing remotely human in fact rather makes a mockery of human and he’d said—But darling! That is what draws the astronomer to his subject: silence, vastness.

Driving north to Beechum County she was driving into what felt like silence. For she’d left the radio off, and the wind whining and whistling at all the windows drained away all sound as in a vacuum leaving her brain blank.

Ancient time her lover called the sky without end predating every civilization on Earth that believed it was the be-all and end-all of Earth.

She’d resolved to drive for just an hour and a half in one direction. Three hours away would return her to the hotel by 5 P.M. and well in time to change and prepare for the reception.

Except the driving was wind-buffeted. She’d rented a small car.

Not so very practical for driving at a relatively high speed on the interstate flanked and overtaken by tractor-trailers.

In high school driver’s education class, M.R. had been an exemplary student. Aged sixteen she’d learned to parallel park with such skill, her teacher used her as a model for other students. Approvingly he’d said of her Meredith handles a car like a man.

Remembering how when she’d first begun driving she’d felt dizzy with excitement, happiness. That thrill of sheer power in the way the vehicle leaps when you press down on the gas pedal, turns when you turn the steering wheel, slows and stops when you brake.

Remembering how she’d thought This is something men know. A girl has to discover.

“‘Just to stretch my legs.’ No other reason.”

She laughed. Her laughter was hopeful. A thin dew of fever-dreams on her forehead, oily and prickling in her armpits. And some sort of snarl in her hair. As if in the night she’d been dreaming of—something like this.

She would have time to shower before the reception—wouldn’t she? Change into her chic presidential clothes.

As a girl—a big husky girl—a girl-athlete—M.R. had sweated like any boy, sweat-rivulets running down her sides, a torment at the nape of her neck beneath the bushy-springy hair. And in her crotch—a snaggle of even denser hair, exerting a sort of appalled fascination to the bearer—who was “Meredith”—in dread of this snaggle of hair being somehow known by others; as there were years—middle school, high school—of anxiety that her body would smell in such a way to be detected by others.

Of course, it had. Many times probably. For what could a husky girl do? Warm airless classroom-hours, sturdy thighs sticking/slapping together if you were not very careful.

As on certain days of the month, anxiety rose like the red column of mercury in a thermometer, in heat.

Having her period. Poor Meredith!

Everything shows in her face. Funny!

Early that morning before Carlos arrived—for M.R. had slept only intermittently through the night—she’d showered, of course, shampooed her hair. So long ago, seemed like another day.

And so another shower, back at the hotel. When she returned.

On the interstate M.R. was making good time in the compact little vehicle. Her speed held steady at just above sixty miles an hour which was a safe speed, even a cautious speed amid so many larger vehicles hurtling past her in the left lane as if with snorts of derision.

But—the beauty of this landscape! It required going away, and returning, to truly see it.

Farmland, hills. Wide swaths of farmland—cornfields, wheat—now harvested—rising in hills to the horizon. She caught her breath—those flame-flashes of sumac dark-red, fiery-orange by the roadside—amid darker evergreens, deciduous trees whose leaves hadn’t—yet—begun to die.

Already she was beyond Bone Plain Road, Frozen Ocean State Park. Passing signs for Boontown, Forestport, Poland and Cold Brook—names not yet familiar to her from her girlhood in Beechum County.

These precious hours! If her parents knew, they’d have wanted to see her—they’d have been willing to drive to Ithaca for the evening.

They’d have wanted to hear her keynote address. For they were so very proud of her. And they loved her. And saw so little of her since she’d left Carthage on that remarkable scholarship to Cornell, it must have perplexed them.

“I should have. Why didn’t I!”

It was as if M.R. had not thought of the possibility at all. As if a part of her brain had ceased functioning.

That peculiar sort of blindness/amnesia in which objects simply vanish as they pass into the area monitored by the damaged brain. Not that one forgets but that experience itself has been blocked.

Now that M.R. had assistants, it was no trouble to make such arrangements. At the hotel, for instance. Or, if the conference hotel was booked solid, at another local hotel. Audrey would have been delighted to book a room for M.R.’s parents.

M.R.’s lover had heard her speak in public several times. He’d been surprised—impressed—by her ease before a large audience, when M.R. was so frequently uneasy in his company.

Well, not uneasy—excited. M.R. was frequently so excited in his company.

She couldn’t bring herself to confess to her (secret) lover that intimacy with him was so precious to her, it was a strain to which she hadn’t yet become accustomed. She’d said with a smile No speaker makes eye contact with his audience. The larger the audience, the easier. That is the secret.

Her lover imagined her a far more composed and self-reliant individual than she was. It had long been a fiction of their relationship, that M.R. didn’t “need” a man in her life; she was of a newer, more liberated generation—for her lover was her senior by fourteen years, and often remarked upon this fact as if to absolve himself of any candidacy as the husband of a girl “so young.” Also, Andre was enmeshed in a painful marriage he liked to describe as resembling Laocoön and sons in the coils of the terrible sea-serpents.

M.R. laughed aloud. For Andre Litovik was so very funny, you might forget that his humor frequently masked a truth or a motive not-so-funny.

“Oh—God …”

Powerful air-suction from a passing/speeding trailer-truck made M.R.’s compact vehicle shudder. The trucker must have been driving at eighty miles an hour. M.R. braked her car, alarmed and frightened.

She’d been daydreaming, and not concentrating on her driving. She’d felt her mind drift.

Better to exit the interstate onto a state highway. This was safer, if slower. Through acres of steeply hilly farmland she drove into Cortland County, and she drove into Madison County, and she drove into Herkimer County and into the foothills of the Adirondacks and at last into Beechum County where mountain peaks covered in evergreens stretched hazy and sawtoothed to the horizon like receding and diminishing dreams.

She’d planned to drive north for only an hour and a half before turning around but decided now that a few minutes more—a few miles more—would do no harm.

Wherever she found herself at—4:30 P.M.?—she would stop at once, turn her car around and head back to Ithaca.

This was likely the first time in months that no one on M.R.’s staff knew where she was, at such an hour of a weekday. No friends knew, no colleagues. M.R. had passed into the blind side of the brain, she’d become invisible.

Was this a good thing, or—not so good? Both her parents had praised her as a girl for her maturity, her sense of “responsibility.” But this was something different, a mere interlude.

This was something different: no one would ever know.

She’d turned off her cell phone. More practical to take messages and answer them in sequence.

And what relief, to have left her laptop behind on the hotel bed! She was attached to the thing like a colostomy bag. Her senses reacted in panic if it appeared to be malfunctioning for just a few minutes. A flurry of e-mails buzzing in her wake like angry bees.

Belatedly M.R. remembered—she was supposed to meet with a prominent educator now chairing a national committee on bioethics who’d been asked to invite M.R. to join the committee. This was a committee M.R. wanted to join—nothing seemed to her more crucial than establishing guidelines on bioethics—yet somehow, she’d forgotten. In her haste to rent a car and drive up into Beechum County, she’d forgotten. And M.R. had scheduled their meeting-time herself—just before the reception, at 5 P.M.

She might have called the man to postpone their meeting to the next day but she didn’t have his cell phone number. Nor did she want to call her assistant Audrey to place the call for her for Audrey would naturally inquire where M.R. was and M.R. could not possibly tell her—“Just crossing the Black Snake River, up in Beechum County.”

Audrey would have been speechless. Audrey would have thought that M.R. must be joking.

Now in Beechum County M.R. switched on the car radio. She hoped to tune in to a Watertown station—WWTX. Once an NPR affiliate but now M.R. couldn’t locate it on the dial only just deafening patches of rock music and advertisements—the detritus of America.

On one FM station there appeared to be news—news from Washington—but static swept it away like ribald laughter.

News from Washington—but the U.S. Congress wouldn’t yet be voting on the war resolution, would it? This was too soon. There had to be days yet of debate.

M.R. couldn’t quite believe that legislators in Washington would authorize the bellicose Republican president to wage war against Iraq—this would be madness! The U.S. hadn’t entirely recovered from the debacle of the Vietnam War of which little ambiguity remained—the war had been a terrible mistake. Still, excited war rumors in the media—even the more liberal media like the New York Times—flared and rippled like wildfire in dried brush. There was a terrible thrillingness to the possibility of war.

It was astonishing how effectively the administration had lied to convince the majority of the American public that there was a direct link between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. For since that catastrophic episode a near-palpable toxic-cloud was accumulating over the country, a gradual darkening of logic—an impatience with logic.

Madness! M.R. could not think of it without beginning to tremble.

She was an ethicist: a professional. It was criminal, it was self-destructive, it was cruel, stupid, quixotic—unethical: waging war on such flimsy pretexts.

What was the appeal of war?—the appeal of a paroxysm of sustained and collective violence repeated endlessly, from the earliest prehistory until the present time? It was not enough to say Men are bred to war, men are warriors—men must perform their role as warriors. It was not enough to say Humankind is self-destructive, damned. Of all the species, damned.

As a liberal, as an educator, M.R. did not believe in such primitive determinism. She did not believe in genetic determinism at all.

Very likely she had young relatives scattered through Beechum County who were in the National Guard or in a branch of the armed services. Some might even now be stationed in the Middle East awaiting deployment to battle, as in the Gulf War of some years ago. Like the more southern Appalachian region Beechum County was the sort of economically depressed rural-America that provided fodder for the military machine.

M.R.’s immediate family—Agatha and Konrad—were Quakers, if not “active” in the nearest Friends’ congregation, which was some distance from Carthage. (“Too lazy to drive,” Konrad said. “You can ‘Quaker’ at any time and any place.”) None of the other Neukirchens were Quakers and certainly none were pacifists like Konrad who’d been granted the status of conscientious objector during the Korean War and instead of being incarcerated in a federal prison was allowed to work in a VA hospital in Baltimore.

Konrad was a kindly man, short and squat as a fireplug and fierce in declaring that if somehow he’d found himself in the army—in combat—he could never fire at any “enemy.” He could not even hold a gun, point a gun at anyone.

M.R. smiled, recalling her father. She was recalling Konrad not as he was at the present time—an aging ailing man—but as he’d been in her earliest memories, in the mid-and late 1960s.

The one thing they can’t make you do is kill another person. They can’t even make you hate another person.

There was a sign—CARTHAGE 78 MILES. But M.R. could not drive to Carthage today.

Uneasily she was thinking—is it time to turn back? Some instinct kept her from checking the time….

How strange she was feeling! This sensation she’d felt as a girl inching out—with other, older children—onto the frozen river; so darkly swift-flowing a river, like a black snake with glittering scales, that water froze only at shore and continued to rush along at the center of the stream.

Unmistakably, there was a thrill to this. Daring and reckless the older boys crept out onto the ice, toward the unfrozen center. Younger children stayed behind out of timidity.

You must not let them entice you, Meredith! If you are injured they will run away and abandon you for that is their kind—they are cruel, can’t help themselves for their God is a God of conquest and wrath and not a God of love.

There was a dislike, a resentment of Meredith’s parents—not to their faces but behind their backs—for Konrad’s unmanly pacifism. For Beechum County was a gun culture. Hunters, warriors.

M.R. felt a mild headache coming on. She hadn’t eaten since early that morning and then at her desk at home, answering e-mails.

Solitary mealtimes are not very pleasurable. Solitary mealtimes are best avoided.

The deficiency of philosophy is that it has no stomach, no guts. In all of classic philosophy not a single pulsebeat of feeling.

Oh why hadn’t she invited Agatha and Konrad to Ithaca for this evening! It would have been so easy to have done, and would have meant so much to them.

M.R. loved her parents but often seemed to forget them. Like clouds sailing overhead, they were—snowy-white clouds of surpassing and unearthly beauty at which no one thinks to look.

“I will do better. I will try harder. I hope they will forget me.”

She meant forgive of course. Not forget.

In fact she was—just now—crossing the Black Snake River. The wrought-iron truss bridge vibrated beneath the lightweight Toyota. The river was thirty or more feet below the bridge, rushing like something demented. Wheels—spirals—of light—like defects in the eye. You could imagine a giant serpent in that molten liquid—lifting its head, tawny eyes and fanged jaws.

Look again, the serpent has vanished beneath the water’s surface.

Farther to the west, at Carthage, in layers of crusted shale there were fossils M.R. had searched for, as a girl. Ancient crustaceans, long-extinct fish. Her biology teacher had sent her out: he’d identified the fossils for her. M.R. had drawn them in her notebook, with particular care.

A string of A-pluses attached to Meredith Neukirchen like a comet’s long tail.

Here the river’s shore was less rocky, more marshy. The river did not appear to be the river of her girlhood and yet—it was strangely familiar to her, like the serpent’s head.

Off the bridge ramp was a sign for RAPIDS—5 MILES. SLABTOWN—11 MILES. RIVIERE-DU-LOUP—18 MILES. In the near distance Mount Moriah—one of the highest peaks in the southern Adirondacks—and beyond, shadowy peaks whose names M.R. couldn’t recall with certainty: Mount Provenance, Mount Hammer? Mount Marcy? It was geology—nineteenth-century geology—that had first shaken the Christian creation-myth so deeply entrenched in Europe, and in the blood-steeped soil of Europe, you would never think it might be extirpated like rotted roots; eruptions of human certainty like eruptions of volcanic lava scouring everything in its path. For what was the earth but a mass of roiling lava—not a “created” thing at all.

Within a few decades, the old faith was shaken utterly. All was devastation.

Except, as Nietzsche so shrewdly observed, the devastation was ignored. Denied. Knowledge of Earth’s position in the universe had entered the blind-visual field of neglect.

She would not be a party to such denial, such blindness. She, empowered as the first woman president of a great university, would speak the truth as she saw it.

For in her vanity she wished to align herself with the great truth-tellers—not with those who spoke to placate.

In high school M.R. had been drawn to geology as to other sciences but in subsequent years her passion for the abstract—for philosophy—“ethics”—had driven out the hard concrete names like irreducible ores—igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic.

Science is another name for God-seeking, the Neukirchens had assured her. Their Quaker faith was so very wide, vast, all-encompassing—a Sargasso Sea without boundaries and without a Savior.

M.R. dared not glance at the dashboard clock. It was time for her to turn back, she knew.

She was passing trailer villages, small asphalt-sided houses, semi-abandoned farmhouses and barns. She was passing the Old Dutch Road—was this familiar?—and the Sandusky Road. The narrow Black River Road curved dangerously close to the river. On that side, the shoulder had been eaten away by erosion. On the farther shore was a curious steep step-ladder-like hill or small mountain near-bare of vegetation from which gigantic boulders seem to have loosed and fallen into the river. There was the look of an ancient landscape shaken, broken. Yet a powerful beauty in these broken shapes.

A sharp pain struck between her shoulder blades like a stinging insect for she’d been tensing up, driving. Leaning forward gripping the steering wheel in both hands as if fearing the wheel might get away from her.

He’d said to her—her (secret) lover—Eternity hasn’t a damn thing to do with time—but he’d been joking, he had not meant to be cruel or mocking and she had kissed his mouth, daring to kiss his mouth that was only just barely hers to kiss.

More mysteriously he’d said Earth-time is a way of preventing everything happening at once.

Did he mean—what? M.R. wasn’t sure.

Telling a story, you must lay out “events”—in a chronological sequence. Or rather, you must establish a chronological sequence, so that you know what your story is, and can “tell” it.

Only in time, calendar-time and clock-time, is there chronology. Otherwise—an entire life is but a nanosecond, as swiftly ended as it began, and everything has happened at once.

Possibly, this was what Andre meant. His field was galaxy evolution and star formation in galaxies—his boyhood obsession had been a hope of “mapping” the Universe.

M.R. had had few lovers—very few. For men were not naturally—she supposed, sexually—attracted to her. Her weakness was for men of exceptional intellect—at least, intelligence greater than her own. So that she would not be required to mask her own.

The sorrow was, such men seemed to have been, through her life, invariably older than she. And some of them cynical. And some worn like old gloves, scuffed boots. Most were married and some twice-or even thrice-married.

She did want to be married! One day.

She did want to marry Andre Litovik.

He’d tried to discourage her from accepting the presidency of the University. She’d had a sense that he was fearing his girl-Amazon might drift from him after all.

If truly he loved her—he’d have been hopeful for her, proud of her.

Or maybe: even an exceptional man has difficulty feeling pride in an exceptional woman.

M.R. tried to determine where she was. Ever more uneasily she was conscious of time passing.

Ready you must be readied. It is time.

A sign for SPRAGG 7 MILES. SLABTOWN 13 MILES. A sign for Star Lake, in the opposite direction—66 MILES.

Spragg—Slabtown—Star Lake. M.R. had heard of Star Lake, she thought—but not the others, so oddly named.

Abruptly then she came to a barrier in the road.

DETOUR

ROAD OUT NEXT 3 MILES

You could see how beyond the barrier a stretch of road had collapsed into the Black Snake River. Quickly M.R. braked the Toyota to a stop—the earth-slide was shocking to see, like a physical deformity.

“Oh! Damn.”

She was disappointed—this would slow her down.

She was thinking how swiftly it must have happened: the road caving in beneath a moving vehicle, a car, a truck—a school bus?—plunging into the river, trapped and terrified and no one to witness the horror. Not likely that the road had simply collapsed beneath its own weight.

Death by (sheer) accident. Surely this was the most merciful of deaths!

Death at the hands of another: the cruelest.

Death by the hands of another who is known to you, close as a heartbeat: the very cruelest.

By the look of the fallen-away road, vines and briars growing in cracks, a tangle of sumac and stunted trees, the river road had not collapsed recently. Beechum County had no money for the repair of so remote a road: the detour had become perpetual.

Like a curious child—for one is always drawn to DETOUR as to NO TRESPASSING: DANGER—M.R. turned her car onto a narrow side road: Mill Run. Though of course, the sensible thing would be to turn back.

Was Mill Run even paved? Or covered in gravel, that had long since worn away? The single-lane road led into the countryside that appeared to be low-lying, marshy; no farmland here but a sort of no-man’s-land, uninhabited.

At a careful speed M.R. drove along the rutted road. She was a good driver—intent upon avoiding potholes. She knew how a tire can be torn by a sudden sharp declivity; she could not risk a flat tire at this time.

M.R. was one who’d learned to change tires, as a girl. There was the sense that M.R. had better learn to fend for herself.

In fact there had been inhabitants along the Mill Run Road, and not too long ago—an abandoned house, set back in a field like a gaunt and etiolated elder; a Sunoco station amid a junked-car lot, that appeared to be closed; and an adjoining café where a faded sign rattled in the wind—BLACK RIVER CAFÉ.

Both the Sunoco station and the café were boarded up. Just outside the café was a pickup truck shorn of wheels. M.R. might have turned into the parking lot here but—so strangely—found herself continuing forward as if drawn by an irresistible momentum.

She was smiling—was she? Her brain, ordinarily so active, hyper-active as a hive of shaken hornets, was struck blank in anticipation.

In hilly countryside, foothills and densely wooded mountains, you can see the sky only in patches—M.R. had glimpses of a vague blurred blue and twists of cloud like soiled bandages. She was driving in odd rushes and jolts pressing her foot on the gas pedal and releasing it—she was hoping not to be surprised by whatever lay ahead and yet, she was surprised—shocked: “Oh God!”

For there was a child lying at the side of the road—a small figure lying at the side of the road broken, discarded. The Toyota veered, plunged off the road into a ditch.

Unthinking M.R. turned the wheel to avoid the child. There came a sickening thud, the jolt of the vehicle at a sharp angle in the ditch—the front left wheel and the rear left wheel.

So quickly it had happened! M.R.’s heart lurched in her chest. She fumbled to open the door, and to extract herself from the seat belt. The car engine was still on—a violent peeping had begun. She’d thought it had been a child at the roadside but of course—she saw now—it was a doll.

Mill Run Road. Once, there must have been a mill of some sort in this vicinity. Now, all was wilderness. Or had reverted to wilderness. The road was a sort of open landfill used for dumping—in the ditch was a mangled and filthy mattress, a refrigerator with a door agape like a mouth, broken plastic toys, a man’s boot.

Grunting with effort M.R. managed to climb—to crawl—out of the Toyota. Then she had to lean back inside, to turn off the ignition—a wild thought came to her, the car might explode. Her fingers fumbled the keys—the keys fell onto the car floor.

She saw—it wasn’t a doll either at the roadside, only just a child’s clothing stiff with filth. A faded-pink sweater and on its front tiny embroidered roses.

And a child’s sneaker. So small!

Tangled with the child’s sweater was something white, cotton—underpants?—stiff with mud, stained. And socks, white cotton socks. And in the underbrush nearby the remains of a kitchen table with a simulated-maple Formica top. Rural America, filling up with trash.

An entire household dumped out on the Mill Run Road! Not a happy story.

M.R. stooped to inspect the refrigerator. Of course it was empty—the shelves were rusted, badly battered. There was a smell. A sensation of such unease—oppression—came over her, she had to turn away.

“And now—what?”

She could call AAA—her cell phone was in the car. But probably she could maneuver the Toyota out of the ditch herself for the ditch wasn’t very deep.

Except—what time was it?

Staring at her watch. Trying to calculate. Was it already past 4:30 P.M.—nearly 5 P.M.? This was unexpectedly late! Mid-October and the sun slanting in the sky and dusk coming on.

This side of the Black Snake River were stretches of marshland, mudflats. She’d been smelling mud. You could see that the river often overran its banks here. There was a harsh brackish smell as of rancid water and rotted things.

Staring at her watch which was a small elegant gold watch inscribed with the name and heraldic insignia of a New England liberal arts college for women. It had been given to M.R. to commemorate her having received from the college an honorary doctorate in humane letters and shortly thereafter, an invitation to interview for its presidency. She’d been thirty-six at the time. She’d been dean of the faculty at the University at the time. Graciously she’d declined. She did not say I am so grateful but no—it isn’t likely that I would accept a position at a women’s college.

Or—It isn’t likely that I would accept a position at any university other than a major research university. That is not M. R. Neukirchen’s plan.

Amid the cast-off household litter was a strip of rotted tarpaulin.

M.R. pulled it loose, dragged it to the Toyota to place beneath the wheels on the driver’s side, that were mired in mud. This was good! This was good luck! Awkwardly then she crawled back into the badly tilted car, located the keys on the floor mat, and managed to start the engine—eased the car forward a few inches, let it rock back; eased it again forward, and let it rock back; at first the wheels spun, then began to take hold. The car moved, jerked spasmodically; in another minute or two she would have eased the Toyota back up onto the road except—the rotted tarpaulin must have given way, the wheels spun frantically.

“God damn.”

M.R. reached for the cell phone, that had fallen to the floor. Tried to call AAA but the phone was unreceptive.

If only she’d thought to call her assistant a half hour ago—the cell phone might have worked then. Just to allow the (anxious?) young woman to know I may be late for the reception. A few minutes late. But I will not be late for the dinner. I will not be late for my talk of course.

She would have spoken to Audrey in her usual bright brisk manner that did not invite interruptions. It was a bright brisk manner that did not invite murmurs of commiseration. She would have said, if Audrey had expressed concern for her, Of course, I’m fine! Good-bye for now.

She was hiking along the road with the cell phone in her hand. Repeatedly she tried to activate it but the damned thing remained dead.

Useless plastic, dead!

If she ascended to higher ground? Would the phone be more likely to work? Or—was this a ridiculous notion, desperate?

“I am not desperate. Not yet.”

Amid the mudflats was a sort of peninsula, a spit of land raised about three feet, very likely man-made, like a dam; M.R. climbed up onto it. She was a strong woman, her legs and thighs were hard with muscle beneath the soft, just slightly flabby female flesh; she made an effort to swim, hike, run, walk—she “worked out” in the University gym; still, she quickly became breathless, panting. For there was something very oppressive about this place—the acres of mudflats, the smell. Even on raised ground she was walking in mud—her nice shoes, mud-splattered. Her feet were wet.

She thought I must turn back. As soon as I can.

She thought I will know what to do—this can be made right.

Staring at her watch trying to calculate but her mind wasn’t working with its usual efficiency. And her eyes—was something wrong with her eyes?

The reception would begin at—was it 6 P.M.? But M.R. wouldn’t need to arrive promptly at 6 P.M. M.R. wouldn’t have to attend the reception at all. Such events were hardly crucial. And the dinner—was the dinner at 7:30 P.M.? She would hurry to the table which would be the head table in the enormous banquet room—she would murmur an apology—she could explain that she’d had to drive somewhere, unavoidably—her car had broken down returning.

Stress, overwork the doctor had told her. Hours at the computer and when she glanced up her vision was distorted and she had to blink, squint to bring the world into some sort of focus.

How faraway that world—there could be no direct route to that world, from the Mill Run Road.

A crouched figure. Bearded face, astonished eyes. Slung over his shoulder a half-dozen animal traps. With a gloved hand prodding at—whatever it was in the mud.

“Hello? Is someone …?”

She was making her way along the edge of a makeshift dam. It was a dam comprised of boulders and rocks and it had acquired over the years a sort of mortar of broken and rotted tree limbs and even animal carcasses and skeletons. Everywhere the mudflats stretched, everywhere cattails and rushes grew in profusion. There were trees choked with vines. Dead trees, hollow tree-trunks. The pond was covered in algae bright-green as neon that looked as if it were quivering with microscopic life and where the water was clear the pebble-sky was reflected like darting eyes. She was staring at the farther shore where she’d seen something move—she thought she’d seen something move. A flurry of dragonflies, flash of birds’ wings. Bursts of autumn foliage like strokes of paint and deciduous trees looking flat as cutouts. She waited and saw nothing. And in the mudflats stretching on all sides nothing except cattails, rushes stirred by the wind.

She was thinking of something her (secret) lover had once said—There is no truth except perspective. There are no truths except relations. She had seemed to know what he’d meant at the time—he’d meant something matter-of-fact yet intimate, even sexual; she was quick to agree with whatever her lover said in the hope that someday, sometime she would see how self-evident it was and how crucial for her to have agreed at the time.

Thinking There is a position, a perspective here. This spit of land upon which I can walk, stand; from which I can see that I am already returned to my other life, I have not been harmed and will have begun to forget.

Thinking This is all past, in some future time. I will look back, I will have walked right out of it. I will have begun to forget.

The spit of land—a kind of raised peninsula—the ruin of an old mill. In the tall spiky weeds remnants of lumber. Shattered concrete blocks. She was limping—she’d turned her ankle. She was very tired. She had not slept for a very long time. In the president’s house she was so lonely! Her (secret) lover had not come to visit her. Her (secret) lover had not come to visit her since she’d moved into the president’s house and there was no plan for him to visit—yet.

In the president’s house which was an historic landmark dating to Colonial times M.R. had her own private quarters on the second floor. Still, the bed in which she slept in the president’s house was an antique four-poster bed of the 1870s and it was not a bed M.R. would have chosen for herself though it was not so uncomfortable a bed that M.R. wished to have it moved out and another bed moved in.

For his back, Andre required a hard mattress. At least, the mattress in M.R.’s bed was that.

At the end of the peninsula there was—nothing. Mudflats, desiccated trees. In the Adirondacks, acid rain had been falling for years—parts of the vast forest were dying.

“Hello?”

Strange to be calling out when clearly no one was there to hear. M.R.’s uplifted hand in a ghost-greeting.

He’d been a trapper—the bearded man. Hauling cruel-jawed iron traps over his shoulder. Muskrats, rabbits. Squirrels. His prey was small furry creatures. Hideous deaths in the iron traps, you did not want to think about it.

Hey! Little girl—?

She turned back. Nothing lay ahead.

Retracing her steps. Her footprints in the mud. Like a drunken person, unsteady on her feet. She was feeling oddly excited. Despite her tiredness, excited.

She returned to the littered roadway—there, the child’s clothing she’d mistaken so foolishly for a doll, or a child. There, the Toyota at its sharp tilt in the ditch. Within minutes a tow truck could haul it out, if she could contact a garage—so far as she could see the vehicle hadn’t been seriously damaged.

Possibly, M.R. wouldn’t need to report the accident to the rental company. For it had not been an “accident” really—no other vehicle had been involved.

She walked on, not certain where she was headed. The sky was darkening to dusk. Shadows lifted from the earth. She saw lights ahead—lights?—the gas station, the café—to her surprise and relief, these appeared to be open.

There was a crunch of gravel. A vehicle was just departing, in the other direction. Other vehicles were parked in the lot. In the café were lights, voices.

M.R. couldn’t believe her good luck! She would have liked to cry with sheer relief. Yet a part of her brain thinking calmly Of course. This has happened before. You will know what to do.

At a gas pump stood an attendant in soiled bib overalls, shirtless, watching her approach. He was a fattish man with snarled hair, a sly fox-face, watching her approach. Uneasily M.R. wondered—would the attendant speak to her, or would she speak to him, first? She was trying not to limp. Her leather shoes were hurting her feet. She didn’t want a stranger’s sympathy, still less a stranger’s curiosity.

“Ma’am! Somethin’ happen to ya car?”

There was a smirking sort of sympathy here. M.R. felt her face heat with blood.

She explained that her car had broken down about a mile away. That is—her car was partway in a ditch. Apologetically she said: “I could almost get it out by myself—the ditch isn’t deep. But …”

How pathetic this sounded! No wonder the attendant stared at her rudely.

“Ma’am—you look familiar. You’re from around here?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Yes, I know you, ma’am. Your face.”

M.R. laughed, annoyed. “I don’t think so. No.”

Now came the sly fox-smile. “You’re from right around here, ma’am, eh? Hey sure—I know you.”

“What do you mean? You know—me? My name?”

“Kraeck. That your name?”

“‘Kraeck.’ I don’t think so.”

“You look like her.”

M.R. didn’t care for this exchange. The attendant was a large burly man of late middle age. His manner was both familiar and threatening. He was approaching M.R. as if to get a better look at her and M.R. instinctively stepped back and there came to her a sensation of alarm, arousal—she steeled herself for the man’s touch—he would grip her face in his roughened hands, to peer at her.

“You sure do look like someone I know. I mean—used to know.”

M.R. smiled. M.R. was annoyed but M.R. knew to smile. Reasonably she said: “I don’t think so, really. I live hundreds of miles away.”

“Kraeck was her name. You look like her—them.”

“Yes—you said. But …”

Kraeck. She had never heard it before. What a singularly ugly name!

M.R. might have told the man that she’d been born in Carthage, in fact—maybe somehow he’d known her, he’d seen her, in Carthage. Maybe that was an explanation. There was a considerable difference between the small city of Carthage and this desolate part of the Adirondacks. But M.R. was reluctant to speak with this disagreeable individual any more than she had to speak with him for she could see that he was listening keenly to her voice, he’d detected her upstate New York accent M.R. had hoped she’d overcome, that so resembled his own.

“Excuse me …”

Badly M.R. had to use a restroom. She left the fox-faced attendant staring rudely at her and climbed the steps to the café.

It was wonderful how the sign that had appeared so faded, derelict, was now lighted: BLACK RIVER CAFÉ.

Inside was a long counter, or a bar—several men standing at the bar—a number of tables of which less than half were occupied—winking lights: neon advertisements for beer, ale. The air was hazy with smoke. A TV above the bar, quick-darting images like fish. M.R. wiped at her eyes for there was a blurred look to the interior of the Black River Café as if it had been hastily assembled. Windows with glass that appeared to be opaque. Pictures, glossy magazine cutouts on the walls that were in fact blank. From the TV came a high-pitched percussive sort of music like wind chimes, amplified. M.R. was smelling something rich, yeasty, wonderful—baking bread? Pie? Homemade pie? Her mouth flooded with saliva, she was weak with hunger.

“Ma’am! Come in here. You look cold. Hungry.”

Out of the kitchen came a heavyset woman with a large round muffin-face creased in a smile. She wore a man’s red-plaid flannel shirt and brown corduroy slacks and over this a stained gingham apron. She was holding the kitchen door open, for M.R. to join her.

“Ma’am—mind if I say—you lookin’ like you had some kind a shock. You better come here.”

M.R. smiled, uncertainly. With a touch of her warm hand the heavyset woman drew M.R. forward as the men at the bar stared frankly.

Maybe—they liked what they saw. They approved of the girl-Amazon in city clothes, disheveled.

The woman was as tall as M.R.—in fact taller. Her hair was knotted and coiled about her head—a wan, faded gold like retreating sunshine. Her wide-set eyes were lighted like coins. And that wide, wet smile.

“Good you got here, ma’am. Out on that road after dark—you’d get lost fast.”

“Oh yes! Thank you.”

M.R. was dazed with gratitude. She felt like a drowning swimmer who has been hauled ashore.

In the kitchen, M.R. was given a chair to sit in. It was a familiar chair, this was comforting. The paint worn in a certain pattern on the back—the wicker seat beginning to buckle. And just in time for her knees had become weak.

Another comfort, the smell of baked goods. Simmering food, some kind of stew, on the stove. Like a sudden flame a frantic hunger was released in M.R.

“Hel-lo! Wel-come!”

“Ma’am! Wel-come.”

There were others in the kitchen, warmly greeting M.R. She could not see their faces clearly but believed that they were relatives of the older woman.

There came a bowl of dark glistening soup, placed steaming before M.R. She supposed it was some kind of beef soup, or lamb—mutton?—globules of grease on the surface but M.R. was too hungry to be repelled. Her lips were soon coated with grease, there was no napkin with which she might wipe her face. She’d become so civilized, it was awkward for her to eat without a napkin in her lap—but there were no napkins here.

“Good, eh? More?”

Yes, it was good. Yes, M.R. would have more.

She was seated at a familiar table—Formica-topped, simulated maple, with battered legs. The air in the kitchen was warm, close, humid. On the gas-burner stove were many pots and pans. On another table were fresh-baked muffins, whole grain bread, pies. These were pies with thick crusts and sugary-gluey insides. Apple pies, cherry pies.

A bottle of beer. Bottles of beer. A hand lifted the bottle, poured the foaming dark liquid into a glass. M.R. drank.

So thirsty! So hungry! Her eyes welled with tears of childish gratitude.

The heavyset woman served her. The heavyset woman had enormous breasts to her waist. The heavyset woman had a coarse flushed skin and sympathetic eyes. Her crown of braids made her appear regal yet you knew—you could not coerce this woman.

When others—men, boys—tried to push into the kitchen to peer at M.R. in her rumpled and mud-stained clothes, the heavyset woman shooed them away. Laughing saying, Yall go away get the hell out noner your business here.

M.R. was eating so greedily, soup spilled onto the front of her jacket.

Her hands shook. Beer in her nostrils making her cough, choke.

She’d had too much to drink, and to eat. Too quickly. Laughing became coughing and coughing became choking and the heavyset woman thumped her between the shoulder blades with a fist.

It was the TV—or, a jukebox—loud percussive music. She could not hear the music, so loud. Something was entering her—lights?—like glinting blades. She wasn’t drunk but a wild drunken elation swept over her, she was so very grateful trying to explain to the heavyset woman that she had never tasted food so wonderful.

Thinking I have never been so happy.

For it was revealed to M.R. that there were such places—(secret) places—to which she could retreat. (Secret) places not known even to her that would comfort her in times of danger. A sudden expansion of being as if something had gotten inside her tight-braided brain and pumped air and light into it—fire, wind—laughter—music.

Hel-lo. Hel-lo. Hel-lo!

Don’t I know you?

Hey sure—sure I do. And you know me.

Feeling so very relieved. So very happy. A warmth spread in her heart. Clumsily M.R. tried to stand, to step into the embrace of the heavyset woman—press her face against the woman’s large warm spongy breasts and hide inside the warm spongy fleshy arms.

You know—you are safe here.

Waiting for you—here.

Jewell!—Jedina. We are waiting for you—here.

Yet there was something wrong for the heavyset woman hadn’t embraced her as M.R. had expected—instead the heavyset woman pushed M.R. away as you might push away an importunate child not in anger or annoyance or even impatience but simply because at that moment the importunate child isn’t wanted. There was a rebuke here, M.R. did not want to consider. She was thinking I must pay. I must leave a tip. None of this can be free. She was fumbling with her wallet—she’d misplaced her leather handbag but somehow, she had her wallet. And she was trying to see her watch. The numerals were blurred. In fact there were no hands on the watch-face to indicate the time. Let me see that, ma’am. Deftly the watch was removed from her wrist—she wanted to protest but could not. And her wallet—her wallet was taken from her. In its place she was given something to drink that was burning-hot. Was it whiskey? Not beer but whiskey? Her throat burned, her eyes smarted with tears. That’ll speak to you, ma’am, eh?—a man’s voice, bemused. There was laughter in the café—the laughter of men, boys—not mocking laughter—(she wanted to think)—but genial laughter—for they’d pushed into the kitchen after all.

Ma’am where’re you from?—for her voice so resembles theirs. Ma’am where’re you going?—for despite her clothes she’s one of them, their staring eyes can see.

Her heavy head is resting on her crossed arms. And the side of her face against the sticky tabletop. So strange that her breasts hang loose to be crushed against the tabletop. The rude laughter has faded. So tired! Her eyes are shut, she is sinking, falling. There’s a scraping of chair legs against the floor that sound unfriendly. A hand, or a fist, lightly taps her shoulder.

“Ma’am. We’re closing now.”

Mudgirl Saved by the King of the Crows.

April 1965

In Beechum County it would be told—told and retold—how Mudgirl was saved by the King of the Crows.

How in the vast mudflats beside the Black Snake River in that desolate region of the southern Adirondacks there were a thousand crows and of these thousand crows the largest and fiercest and most sleek-black-feathered was the King of the Crows.

How the King of the Crows had observed the cruel behavior of the woman half-dragging half-carrying a weeping child out into the mudflats to be thrown down into the mud soft-sinking as quicksand and left the child alone there to die in that terrible place.

And the King of the Crows flew overhead in vehement protest flapping his wide wings and shrieking at the retreating woman now shielding her face with her arms against the wrath of the King of the Crows in pursuit of her like some ancient heraldic bird-beast in the service of a savage God.

How in the mists of dawn less than a mile from the place where the child had been abandoned to die there was a trapper making the rounds of his traps along the Black Snake River and it was this trapper whom the King of the Crows summoned to save the child lying stunned in shock and barely breathing in the mudflat like discarded trash.

Come! S’ttisss!

Suttis Coldham making the rounds of the Coldham traps as near to dawn as he could before predators—coyotes, black bears, bobcats—tore their prey from the jaws of the traps and devoured them alive weakened and unable to defend themselves.

Beaver, muskrat, mink, fox and lynx and raccoons the Coldhams trapped in all seasons. What was legal or not-legal—what was listed as endangered—did not count much with the Coldhams. For in this desolate region of Beechum County in the craggy foothills of the Adirondacks there were likely to be fewer human beings per acre than there were bobcats—the bobcat being the shyest and most solitary of Adirondack creatures.

The Coldhams were an old family in Beechum County having settled in pre-Revolutionary times in the area of Rockfield in the Black Snake River but scattered now as far south as Star Lake, and beyond. In Suttis’s immediate family there were five sons and of these sons Suttis was the youngest and the most bad-luck-prone of the generally luckless Coldham family as Suttis was the one for whom Amos Coldham the father had the least hope. As if there hadn’t been enough brains left for poor Suttis, by the time Suttis came along.

Saying with a sour look in his face—Like you’re shake-shake-shaking brains out of some damn bottle—like a ketchup bottle—and by the time it came to Suttis’s turn there just ain’t enough brains left in the bottle.

Saying—Wallop the fuckin’ bottle with your hand won’t do no fuckin’ good—the brains is all used up.

So it would be told that the solitary trapper who rescued Mudgirl from her imminent death in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River had but the mind of a child of eleven or twelve and nowhere near the mind of an adult man of twenty-nine which was Suttis’s age on this April morning in 1965.

So it would be told, where another trapper would have ignored the shrieking of the King of the Crows or worse yet taken shots with a .22 rifle to bring down the King of the Crows, Suttis Coldham knew at once that he was being summoned by the King of the Crows for some special purpose.

For several times in his life it had happened to Suttis when Suttis was alone and apart from the scrutiny of others that creatures singled him out to address him.

The first—a screech owl out behind the back pasture when Suttis had been a young boy. Spoke his name SSSuttisss all hissing syllables so the soft hairs on his neck stood on end and staring up—upward—up to the very top of the ruin of a dead oak trunk where the owl was perched utterly motionless except for its feathers rippling in the wind and its eyes glaring like gasoline flame seeing how the owl knew him—a spindly-limbed boy twenty feet below gaping and grimacing and struck dumb hearing SSSuttisss and seeing that look in the owl’s eyes of such significance, it could not have been named except the knowledge was imparted—You are Suttis, and you are known.

Not until years later came another creature to address Suttis and this a deer—a doe—while Suttis was hunting with his father and brothers and Suttis was left behind stumbling and uncertain and out of nowhere amid the pine woods there appeared the doe about fifty feet away—a doe with two just-born fawns—pausing to stare at Suttis wide-eyed not in fright but with a sort of surprised recognition even as Suttis lifted his rifle to fire with a rapidly beating heart and a very dry mouth—Suttis! SuttisSuttisSuttis!—words sounding inside his own head like a radio switched on so Suttis was given to know that it was the doe’s thoughts sent to him in some way like vibrations in water and he’d understood that he was not to fire his rifle, and he did not fire his rifle.

And most recent in January 1965 making early-morning rounds of the traps, God damn Suttis’s brothers sending Suttis out on a morning when none of them would have gone outdoors to freeze his ass but there’s Suttis stumbling in thigh-high snow, shuddering in fuckin’ freezing wind and half the traps covered in snow and inaccessible and finally he’d located one—one!—a mile or more from home—not what he’d expected in this frozen-over wet-land place which was muskrat or beaver or maybe raccoon but instead it was a bobcat—a thin whistle through the gap in Suttis’s front teeth for Suttis had not ever trapped a bobcat before in his life for bobcats are too elusive—too cunning—but here a captive young one looked to be a six-to-eight-months-old kitten its left rear leg caught in a long spring trap panicked and panting licking at the wet-blooded trapped leg with frantic motions of its pink tongue and pausing now to stare up at Suttis in a look both pleading and reproachful, accusatory—it was a female cat, Suttis seemed to know—beautiful tawny eyes with black vertical slits fixed upon Suttis Coldham who was marveling he’d never seen such a creature in his life, silver-tipped fur, stripes and spots in the fur of the hue of burnished mahogany, tufted ears, long tremulous whiskers, and those tawny eyes fixed upon him as Suttis stood crouched a few feet away hearing in the bobcat’s quick-panting breath what sounded like Suttis! Suttis don’t you know who I am and drawn closer risking the bobcat’s talon-claws and astonished now seeing that these were the eyes of his Coldham grandmother who’d died at Christmas in her eighty-ninth year but now the grandmother was a young girl as Suttis had never known her and somehow—Suttis could have no idea how—gazing at him out of the bobcat’s eyes and even as the bobcat’s teeth were bared in a panicked snarl clearly Suttis was made to hear his girl-grandmother’s chiding voice Suttis! O Suttis you know who I am—you know you do!

Not for an instant did Suttis doubt that the bobcat was his Coldham grandmother, or his Coldham grandmother had become the bobcat—or was using the bobcat to communicate with Suttis knowing that Suttis was headed in this direction—no more could Suttis have explained these bizarre and improbable circumstances than he could have explained the “algebra equations” the teacher had chalked on the blackboard of the one-room school he’d attended sporadically for eight mostly futile years even as he had not the slightest doubt that the “algebra equations” were real enough, or real in some way that excluded Suttis Coldham; and so Suttis stooped hurriedly to pry open the spring-trap fumbling to release the injured left rear leg of the bobcat kitten murmuring to placate the spirit of his girl-grandmother who both was and was not the elderly woman he’d known and called Gran’maw and the bobcat bared her teeth, snarled and hissed and squirmed and clawed at his hands in leather gloves shredding the gloves but leaving Suttis’s hands mostly unscathed and raking his face only thinly across his right cheek and in the next instant the bobcat kitten was running—limping, but running—on three swift legs disappearing into the snow-laden larch woods with no more sound than a startled indrawn breath and leaving behind nothing but a scattering of cat feces and patches of blood-splattered silver-tipped fur in the ugly serrated jaws of the trap and a sibilant murmur S’ttus! God bless.

And now it was the King of the Crows summoning Suttis Coldham unmistakably—SSS’ttissss! SSS’ttiss!

Suttis froze in his tracks. Suttis stood like one impaled. Suttis could not hide his eyes and refuse to see. Suttis could not press his hands over his ears and refuse to hear.

SSS’ttisss come here! Here!

The King of the Crows was the largest crow Suttis had ever seen. His feathers were the sleekest and blackest and his wingspread as wide as any hawk’s and his yellow eyes glared in urgency and indignation. Like a hunted creature Suttis made his way along the riverbank, as the King of the Crows shrieked in his wake, flying from tree to tree behind him as if in pursuit. For it would not be true as Suttis would claim that he had followed the King of the Crows to the child abandoned to die in the mudflat but rather that the King of the Crows had driven Suttis as a dog might drive cattle. Suttis could not hide, could not escape from the King of the Crows for he knew that the King of the Crows would pursue him back to the Coldham farm and would never cease harassing and berating him for having disobeyed him.

Suttis stumbled and staggered along a three-foot-high embankment that jutted out into the vast mudflat. Not long ago the last of the winter snows had melted and the mudflat was puddled with water, as the Black Snake River was swollen and muddy and swift-rushing south out of the mountains. Everywhere was a buzzing-thrumming-teeming of new life, and the rapacity of new life: blackflies, wasps, gnats. Suttis swatted at the air about his head, a cloud of new-hatched mosquitoes. Underfoot was the ruin of a road. Ahead was the ruin of a mill. Suttis knew the mudflats—the Coldhams hunted and trapped here—but Suttis had no clear idea what the purpose of the mill might have been at one time, or who might have owned it. His grandfather would know, or his father. His older brothers maybe. The ways of adults seemed to him remote and inaccessible and so their names were blurred and of little consequence to him as to any child.

Come here! Come here S’ttis come here!

SSS’ttisss! Here!

On the narrowing embankment Suttis moved with caution. The King of the Crows had so distracted him, he’d left his trapping gear behind—the burlap sack which bore the limp broken bloodied bodies of several dead creatures—but still he had his knife, sheathed in his jacket which was Amos Coldham’s Army-issue jacket of a long-ago wartime, badly stained and frayed at the cuffs. On his head he wore a knit cap, pulled down onto his narrow forehead; on his lower body, khaki workpants; on his feet, rubber boots from Sears, Roebuck. Passing now the part-collapsed mill with its roof covered in moss that made him uneasy to see—any building, however in ruins, Suttis Coldham was inclined to think that something might be hiding inside, observing him.

In the mountains, you might be observed by a man with a rifle, at some distance. You would never know how you were viewed in a stranger’s rifle-scope even as the stranger pulled the trigger and for what reason?—as the Coldhams liked to say For the hell of it.

Suttis cringed, worried that he was being observed and not by just the King of the Crows. Entering now into a force field of some other consciousness that drew him irresistibly.

Broken things in the winter-ravaged grasses, rotted planks, chunks of concrete, a man’s single boot. A shredded tractor tire, strips of plastic. In the vast mudflat tracks ran in all directions with a look of frenzied determination—animal tracks, bird tracks—and on the embankment, what Suttis identified as human-being footprints.

Suttis’s eye that gazed upon so much without recognition, still less interest, for instance all printed materials, seized at once upon the human-being footprints on the embankment which Suttis knew to be, without taking time to think, not the footprints of his brothers or any other trapper or hunter but female footprints.

Suttis knew, just knew: female. Not even the boot-prints of a young boy. Just female boot-prints.

There were other prints, too—mixed with the female. Possibly a child. Suttis knew without calculating, with just-seeing.

Not that these tracks were clear—they were not clear. But Suttis understood that they were fresh for no other tracks covered them.

What was this! Suttis whistled through the gap in his front teeth.

A piece of cloth—a scarf—of some crinkly purple material, Suttis snatched up and quickly shoved into his pocket.

SSS’ttisss! Here!

Atop a skeletal larch the King of the Crows spread his wings. The King of the Crows did not like it that Suttis had paused to pick up the crinkly-purple scarf. For the King of the Crows had flown ahead of Suttis, to bade him to hurry to that point, to see.

And now Suttis saw—about twelve feet from the base of the embankment, amid a tangle of rushes—a doll?

A child’s rubber doll, badly battered, hairless, unclothed and its coloring mostly flaked off—too light to sink in the mud and so it was floating on the surface in a way to cause Suttis’s heart to trip even as he told himself Damn thing’s only a doll.

Was he being mocked? Had the King of the Crows led him so far, to rescue a mere doll?

Suttis drew nearer and now—he saw the second figure, a few yards from the first. And this, too, had to be a doll—though larger than an ordinary doll—discarded in this desolate place like garbage or trash.

Pulses beat in his head like spoons against some wooden vessel. A doll! A doll! This had to be a doll, like the other.

As so much was tossed away into the Black Snake mudflats that were an inland sea of cast-off human things of all kinds. Here you could find articles of clothing, boots and shoes, broken crockery, plastic toys, even shower curtains opaque and stained as polyurethane shrouds. Once, Suttis had found a pair of jaws in the mud—plastic teeth—he’d thought were dentures but had had to have been Hallowe’en teeth and another time the wheel-less chassis of a baby buggy filled with mud like a gaping mouth. Mostly these cast-off things accumulated at the edge of the mudflat where borne by flooding water they caught in exposed roots amid the debris of winter storms, the skeletons of small drowned creatures and the mummified fur-remnants with blind pecked-out eyes like gargoyles fallen from unknown and unnameable cathedrals while farther out in the mudflats such objects were likely to sink and be submerged in mud.

Lurid tales were told in Beechum County of all that was “lost”—discarded and buried and forgotten—in the mudflats.

Bodies of the hated and reviled. Bodies of “enemies.”

Humped outlines of dead logs in the mudflat like drowsing crocodiles.

Cries of smaller birds silenced by the furious shrieking of crows.

Was this a doll, so large? It looked to be the size of a small child—Suttis had no clear idea how old—two years? Three?

Weak-kneed Suttis approached the very edge of the bank.

The King of the Crows shook his wings, jeering, impatient.

SSS’ttisss! Here!

The King of the Crows was very near to speaking, now. Human speech the great bird could utter, that Suttis could not stop his ears from hearing.

As the wide black-feathered wings of the King of the Crows fluttered wind and shadows across Suttis’s slow-blinking eyes.

“Jesus!”

A little girl, Suttis thought, but—dead?

Her head was bare as if shaved—so small! So sad!

Nothing so sad as a child’s bare head when the head has been shaved for lice or the poor thin hair has fallen out from sickness and it seemed to Suttis, this had happened to him, too. Many years ago when he’d been a small child.

Lice, they’d said. Shaved his head and cut his scalp with the razor cursing him as if the lice were Suttis’s fault and then they swabbed the cuts with kerosene, like flames too excruciating to be registered or gauged or even recalled except now obliquely, dimly.

Poor little girl! Suttis had no doubt, she was dead.

Maybe it was lice, they’d punished her for. Suttis could understand that. The small face was bruised, the mouth and eyes swollen and darkened. Blood-splotches on the face like tears and what was black on them, a buzzing blackness, was flies.

Only the head and torso were clearly visible, the lower body had sunk into the mud, and the legs. One of the arms was near-visible. Suttis stared and stared and Suttis moved his lips in a numbed and affrighted prayer not knowing what he was saying but only as he’d been taught Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name bless us O Lord for these our gifts and help us all the days of our lives O Lord thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven! Amen.

Suttis had seen many dead things and was not uncomfortable with a dead thing for then you know, it is dead and cannot hurt you. Only a fool would lay his bare hand upon a “dead” raccoon or possum and that fool would likely lose his hand in a frantic rake of sharp curved claws and a slash of razor-teeth.

A dead thing is a safe thing and only bad if it has started to rot.

The poor little girl in the mudflat had started to rot—had she? For something smelled so very bad, Suttis’s nostrils shut tight.

It was a wild extravagant prayer of Suttis Coldham, he’d never have believed he could utter:

God don’t let her be dead. God help her be alive.

For cunning Suttis knew: a dead child could mean that Suttis would be in trouble. As an older boy he’d been beaten for staring at children in a wrong way, or a way deemed wrong by others, by the children’s mothers for instance who were likely to be his Coldham relatives—sisters, cousins, young aunts. Staring at his baby nieces and nephews when they were being bathed in the very presence of their young mothers and such a look in Suttis’s face, of tenderness mixed with brute yearning, Suttis had somehow done wrong in utter innocence and been slapped and kicked-at and run out of the house and in his wake the cry Nasty thing! Pre-vert! Get to hell out nasty pre-vert Sut-tis shame!

And so now if this little girl is naked Suttis will turn and run—but it looks as if on what he can see of the little body is a nightgown—torn and grimy but a nightgown—isn’t it?—for which Suttis is damned grateful.

The King of the Crows has been screaming for Suttis to bring the little girl to shore. In a crouch half-shutting his eyes groping for something—a long stick, a pole—a piece of lumber—with which to prod the body loose.

Suttis has it!—a part-rotted plank, about five feet long. When he leans out to poke at the doll-figure in the mud he sees—thinks he sees—one of the swollen eyelids flutter—the little fish-mouth gasping for breath—and he’s stricken, paralyzed—The little girl is alive!

A terrifying sight, a living child—part-sunken in mud, a glint of iridescent insects about her face—has to be flies—suddenly Suttis is panicked, scrabbling on hands and knees to escape this terrible vision, moaning, gibbering as the King of the Crows berates him from a perch overhead and like a frenzied calf Suttis blunders into a maze of vines, a noose of vines catches him around the neck and near-garrots him the shock of it bringing him to his senses so chastened like a calf swatted with a stiff hunk of rope he turns to crawl back to the edge of the embankment. There is no escaping the fact that Suttis will have to wade into the mudflat to rescue the girl as he has been bidden.

At least, the sharp stink of the mud has abated, in Suttis’s nostrils. The most readily adapted of all senses, smell: almost, Suttis will find the mud-stink pleasurable, by the time he has dislodged and lifted the mud-child in his arms to haul back to shore.

Suttis slip-slides down the bank, into the mud. Makes his way to the mud-child lifting his booted feet as high as he can as the mud suck-suck-sucks at him as in a mockery of wet kisses. Above the mud-child is a cloud, a haze of insects—flies, mosquitoes. Suttis brushes them away with a curse. He’s shy about touching her—at first. He tugs at her arm. Her exposed shoulder, her left arm. She’s a very little girl—the age of his youngest niece Suttis thinks except the little nieces and nephews grow so quickly, he can’t keep them straight—can’t keep their names straight. Lifting this one from the mud requires strength.

Crouched over her, grunting. He’s in mud nearly to his knees—steadily sinking. Rushes slap against his face, thinly scratching his cheeks. Mosquitoes buzz in his ears. A wild sensation as of elation sweeps over him—You are in the right place at the right time and no other place and no other time will ever be so right for you again in your life.

“Hey! Gotcha now. Gonna be okay.”

Suttis’s voice is raw as a voice unused for years. As it is rare for Suttis to be addressed with anything other than impatience, contempt, or anger so it is rare for Suttis to speak, and yet more rare for Suttis to speak so excitedly.

The part-conscious child tries to open her eyes. The right eye is swollen shut but the left eye opens—just barely—there’s a flutter of eyelashes—and the little fish-mouth is pursed to breathe, to breathe and to whimper as if wakening to life as Suttis carries her to shore stumbling and grunting and at the embankment lays her carefully down and climbs up out of the mud and removes his khaki jacket to wrap her in, clumsily; seeing that she is near-naked, in what appears to be the remnants of a torn paper nightgown all matted with mud, slick and glistening with mud and there is mud caked on the child’s shaved head amid sores, scabs, bruises and so little evidence of hair, no one could have said what color the child’s hair is.

“Hey! You’re gonna be okay. S’ttis’s got you now.”

Such pity mixed with hope Suttis feels, he has rarely felt in his life. Carrying the whimpering mud-child wrapped in his jacket, in his arms back along the embankment and to the road and along the road three miles to the small riverside town called Rapids murmuring to the shivering mud-child in the tone of one of his young-mother sisters or cousins—not actual words which Suttis can’t recall but the tone of the words—soothing, comforting—for in his heart it will seem a certainty that the King of the Crows had chosen Suttis Coldham to rescue the mud-child not because Suttis Coldham happened to be close by but because of all men, Suttis Coldham was singled out for the task.

He was the chosen one. Suttis Coldham, that nobody gave a God damn for, before. Without him, the child would not be rescued.

Somewhere between the mudflats and the small town called Rapids, the King of the Crows has vanished.

The sign is RAPIDS POP. 370. Suttis sees this, every time Suttis thinks there’s too many people here he couldn’t count by name. Nor any of the Coldhams could. Not by a long shot.

First he’s seen here is by a farmer in a pickup truck braking to a stop and in the truck-bed a loud-barking dog. And out of the Gulf gas station several men—he thinks he maybe knows, or should know their faces, or their names—come running astonished and appalled.

Suttis Coldham, Amos Coldham’s son. Never grew up right in his mind, poor bastard.

Now more of them come running to Suttis in the road. Suttis carrying the little mudgirl wrapped in a muddied jacket in his arms, in the road.

A little girl utterly unknown to them, the child of strangers—so young!—covered in mud?

Amid the excitement Suttis backs off dazed, confused. Trying to explain—stammering—the King of the Crows that called to him when he was checking his traps on the river … First he’d seen a doll, old rubber doll in the mudflat—then he’d looked up and seen …

Quickly the barely breathing mud-child is removed from Suttis’s arms. There are women now—women’s voices shrill and indignant. The child is borne to the nearest house to be undressed, examined, gently bathed and dressed in clean clothing and in the roadway Suttis feels the loss—the mud-child was his. And now—the mud-child has been taken from him.

Harshly Suttis is being asked where did he find the child? Who is the child? Where are her parents? Her mother? What has happened to her?

So hard Suttis is trying to speak, the words come out choked and stammering.

Soon, a Beechum County sheriff’s vehicle arrives braking to a stop.

In the roadway Suttis Coldham stands shivering in shirtsleeves, trousers muddied to the thighs and mud-splotches on his arms, face. Suttis has a narrow weasel-face like something pinched in a vise and a melted-away chin exposing front teeth and the gap between teeth near-wide enough to be a missing tooth and Suttis is dazed and excited and trembling and talking—never in his life has Suttis been so important—never drawn so much attention—like someone on TV. So many people surrounding him, so suddenly!—and so many questions …

Rare for Suttis to speak more than a few words and these quick-mumbled words to a family member and so Suttis has no way of measuring speech—a cascade of words spills from his lips—but Suttis knows very few words and so must repeat his words nor does Suttis know how to stop talking, once he has begun—like running-sliding down a steep incline, once you start you can’t stop. Lucky for Suttis one of the onlookers is a Coldham cousin who identifies him—insists that if Suttis says he found the child in the mudflat, that is where Suttis found the child—for Suttis isn’t one who would take a child—Suttis is simple and honest as a child himself and would never do harm, not ever to anyone—Suttis always tells the truth.

In a Beechum County sheriff’s vehicle the nameless little girl is taken to the hospital sixty miles away in Carthage where it is determined that she is suffering from pneumonia, malnutrition, lacerations and bruising, shock. For some weeks it isn’t certain that the little girl will survive and during these weeks, and for some time to follow, the little girl is mute as if her vocal cords have been severed to render her speechless.

Beaver, muskrat, mink, fox and lynx and raccoons he trapped in all seasons. How many beautiful furred creatures wounded, mangled and killed in the Coldham traps, and their pelts sold by Suttis’s father. And it is the child in the mudflat Suttis Coldham will recall and cherish through his life.

In bed in his twitchy sleep cherishing the crinkly-purple scarf he’d found on the embankment, still bearing a residue of dirt though he’d washed it with care and smoothed it with the edge of his hand to place beneath the flat sweat-soaked pillow, in secret.

Mudwoman Confronts an Enemy.
Mudwoman’s Triumph.

March 2003

Must ready yourself. Hurry!

But there was no way she could ready herself for this.

“I don’t wish to accuse anyone.”

His name was Alexander Stirk. He was twenty years old. Formally and bravely he spoke. For his small prim child’s mouth had been kicked, torn and bloodied. His remaining good eye—the other was swollen shut, grotesquely bruised like a rotted fruit—was fixed on M.R. with hypnotic intensity as if daring her to look away.

“Though I have, as you know, President Neukirchen—numerous enemies here on campus.”

President Neukirchen. With such exaggerated respect this name was uttered, M.R. felt a tinge of unease—Is he mocking me?

M.R. decided no, that wasn’t possible. Alexander Stirk could not mistake M.R.’s attentiveness to him for anything other than sympathy.

His head was partly bandaged, with the look of a turban gone askew. His wire-rimmed glasses were crooked on his nose because of the bandage and the left lens had a hairline crack. In the thin reproachful voice of one accusing an elder of an obscure hurt he spoke calmly, deliberately. For he had a genuine grievance, he’d been martyred for his beliefs. He’d hobbled into the president’s office using a single aluminum crutch that was leaning now against the front corner of the president’s desk in a pose of nonchalance.

M.R.’s heart went out to Stirk—he was so small.

“That is—President Neukirchen—there are many individuals among both the undergraduate and the graduate student body—and faculty members as well—who have defined themselves as ‘enemies’ specifically of Alexander Stirk as well as ‘enemies’ of the conservative movement on campus. You know their names by now, or should—Professor Kroll has seen to that, I think.”

Kroll. M.R. smiled just a little harder, feeling blood rush into her face.

“Of these self-defined ‘enemies’ I’m not able to judge how many would actually wish ‘Alexander Stirk’ harm, apart from the usual verbal abuse. And how many, among these, would be actively involved in actually harming me.”

Stirk smiled with disarming candor. Or seeming candor. M.R. smiled more painfully.

She’d invited Stirk to her office, to speak with her in private. She wanted the young man to know how concerned she was for him, and how outraged on his behalf. She wanted the young man to know that, as the president of the University, she was on his side.

The assault had taken place on the University campus just two nights before, at approximately 11:40 P.M. Returning—alone—for Alexander Stirk was frequently alone—to his Harrow Hall residence, Stirk had been accosted on a dimly lit walkway beside the chapel by several individuals—seemingly fellow undergraduates; in his confusion and terror he hadn’t seen their faces clearly—not clearly enough to identify—but he’d heard crude jeering voices—“fag”—“Fascist-fag”—as he was being clumsily shoved and slammed against the brick wall of the chapel—nose bloodied, right eye socket cracked, lacerations to his mouth, left ankle sprained when he was thrown to the ground. So forcibly was Stirk’s backpack wrenched from his shoulders, his left shoulder had been nearly dislocated, and was badly bruised; the backpack’s contents were dumped on the ground—leaflets bearing the heraldic fierce-eyed American eagle of the YAF—(Young Americans for Freedom)—to be scattered and blown about across the snow-stubbled chapel green.

Evidently, campus security hadn’t been aware of the fracas. No one seemed to have come to Stirk’s aid even after he’d been left semiconscious on the ground. M.R. found this difficult to believe, or to comprehend—but Stirk insisted. And it was wisest at this point not to challenge him.

For already, Stirk had been interviewed by the campus newspaper in a florid front-page story. Bitterly he’d complained of “unconscionable treatment”—that several witnesses to the attack, in the vicinity of the chapel, had ignored his cries for help as if knowing that the victim was him.

Alexander Stirk had a certain reputation at the University, for his outspoken conservative views. He had a weekly half-hour program on the campus radio station—Headshots—and a biweekly opinion column in the campus newspaper—“Stirk Strikes.” He was a senior majoring in politics and social psychology, from Jacksonville, Florida; he was an honors student, an officer in the local chapter of the YAF and an activist member of the University’s Religious Life Council. When high-profile liberal speakers like Noam Chomsky spoke at the University, Stirk and a boisterous band of confederates were invariably seen picketing the lecture hall before the lecture and, during the lecture, interrupting the speaker with heckling questions. Stirk’s particular concern seemed to be, oddly for a young man, abortion: he was resolutely opposed to abortion in any and all forms and particularly opposed to any government funding of abortion.

But he was also opposed to free condoms, contraception, “sex education” in public schools.

It was so, evidently—Stirk had roused angry opposition on the campus including a barrage of “threatening” e-mails, of which he’d turned over some to authorities. He’d been, by his account, “insulted”—“called names”—told to “shut the fuck up”; but until the other evening he’d never been physically assaulted. Now, he said, he was “seriously frightened” for his life.

At this, Stirk’s voice quavered. Beneath the supercilious pose—the posturing of a very bright undergraduate whose command of language was indeed impressive—there did seem to be a frightened boy.

Warmly M.R. assured Alexander Stirk—he had nothing to fear!

University proctors had been assigned to his floor in Harrow Hall and would escort him to classes if he wished. Whenever he wanted to go anywhere after dark—a proctor would accompany him.

And whoever had assaulted him would be apprehended and expelled from the University—“This, I promise.”

“President Neukirchen, thank you! I would like to believe you.”

Stirk spoke with the mildest of smiles—unless it was a smirk. M.R. had the uneasy sensation that the young man who’d limped into her office was addressing an audience not visibly present, like a highly self-conscious actor in a film. There came—and went—and again came—that sly smirk of a smile, too fleeting to be clearly identified. For his meeting with President Neukirchen Stirk wore a dark green corduroy sport coat with leather buttons, that appeared to be a size or two too large; he wore a white cotton shirt buttoned to the throat, and flannel trousers with a distinct crease. Except for the luridly swollen eye and mouth, Stirk gave the appearance of a pert, bright, precocious child, long the favorite of his elders. Almost, you would think that his feet—small prim feet, in white ankle-high sneakers—didn’t quite touch the floor.

How strange Stirk seemed to M.R.! Not so much in himself as in her intense feeling for him, that was quite unlike any sensation she’d ever experienced, she was sure, in this high-ceilinged office with its dark walnut wainscoting, dour hardwood floors and somber lighting grudgingly emitted from a half-dozen tall narrow windows. The president’s office on the first floor of “historic” Salvager Hall—old, elegantly heavy black-leather furnishings, massive eighteenth-century cherrywood desk, Travertine marble fireplace and shining brass andirons and built-in shelves floor-to-ceiling with books—rare books—books long unread, untouched—behind shining glass doors—had the air of a museum-room, perfectly preserved. Visitors to this office were suitably impressed, even wealthy graduates, donors—the portrait over the fireplace mantel, of a soberly frowning if just slightly rubefacient bewigged eighteenth-century gentleman bore so close a resemblance to Benjamin Franklin that visitors invariably inquired, and M.R. was obliged to explain that Ezechiel Charters, the founder of the University—that is, the Presbyterian minister founder of the seminary, in 1761, that would one day be the University—had been in fact a contemporary of Franklin’s, but hardly a friend.

Reverend Ezechiel Charters had been something of a Tory, in the tumultuous years preceding the Revolution. His fate at the hands of a mob of local patriots would have been lethal except for a “divine intervention” as it was believed to be—the noose meant to strangle him broke—and so Reverend Charters lived to become a Federalist, like so many of his Tory countrymen.

A Federalist and something of a “liberal”—so the founding-legend of the University would have it.

But twenty-year-old Alexander Stirk hadn’t been impressed by all this history. Brashly he’d limped into the president’s office on his single, clattering crutch, lowered himself with conspicuous care into the chair facing the president’s desk, glanced about squinting and smirking as if the anemic light from the high windows hurt his battered eyes, and murmured:

“Well! This is an unexpected honor, President Neukirchen.” If he’d been speaking ironically, President Neukirchen, in the way of those elders who surround the just-slightly-insolent young, hadn’t seemed to register the irony.

For M.R. was strangely—powerfully—struck by the boy. There was something pious and stunted and yet poignant about him, even the near-insolence of his face, as if, unwitting, he was the bearer of an undiagnosed illness.

“The police were asking—could I identify my assailants?—and I told them I didn’t think so, I was jumped from behind and didn’t see faces clearly. I heard voices—but….”

M.R. had questions to ask of Stirk, but did not interrupt as he continued his account of the assault. She was thinking that most of the individuals who came to her office to sit in the heavy black leather chair facing her desk wanted something of her—wanted something from her—or had a grievance to make to her—or of her—as president of the University; most of them, M.R. would have to disappoint in some way, but in no way that might be interpreted as indifferent. Uncaring. For it was M. R. Neukirchen’s (possible) weakness as an administrator—she did care.

She was not a Quaker. Not a practicing Quaker. But the benign Quaker selflessness—the concern for “clearness”—and for the commonweal above the individual—had long ago suffused her soul.

All that matters—really matters—is to do well by others. At the very least, to do no harm.

And so, M.R. didn’t want to question the injured boy too closely, nor even to interview him as the police had done in the ER; she didn’t see her role, at this critical time, as anything other than supportive, consoling.

Almost as soon as the news had been released, bulletin e-mails sent to all University faculty and staff, there’d been, among the more skeptical left-wing faculty, some doubt of Stirk’s veracity. And among students who knew Stirk, who weren’t sympathetic with his politics, there was more than just some doubt.

But M.R. who was known on campus as the students’ friend did not align herself with these.

And it was so—seeing Stirk up close, the boy’s very real and obviously painful injuries including a broken eye socket, M.R. wasn’t inclined to be skeptical.

Or, rather—she’d learned such a technique, from her first years as an administrator—her skepticism was lightly repelled, suspended, like a balloon that has been given a tap, to propel it into a farther corner of the room.

“Of course, the University is going to investigate the assault. I’ve named an emergency committee, and I will be ex officio. Whoever did this terrible thing to you will be apprehended and expelled, I promise.”

Stirk laughed. The wounded little mouth twisted into a kind of polite sneer.

“Better yet, President Neukirchen, the township police will investigate. Whoever attacked me committed a felony, not a campus misdemeanor. There will be arrests—not mere expulsions.” The thin boyish voice deepened again, with a kind of suppressed exaltation. “There will be lawsuits.”

Lawsuits was uttered in a way to make an administrator shudder. But President Neukirchen did not overtly react.

M.R. had been vaguely aware, before the assault, of the controversial undergraduate—at least, the name “Stirk.” In recent months she’d been made aware of the conservative movement on campus, that had been gathering strength and influence since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the very eve, in early March, of a “military action” against Iraq, expected to be ordered by the president of the United States within a few days.

It couldn’t be an accident, Alexander Stirk had declared himself passionately in favor of war against Iraq, as against all “enemies of Christian democracy.” A wish to wage war as a religious crusade was a part of the conservative campaign for a stricter personal morality.

Before every war in American history there’d been a similar campaign in the public press—often, demonic and degrading political cartoons depicting the “enemy” as subhuman, bestial. The campaign against Saddam Hussein had been relentlessly waged since October, mounting to a fever pitch on twenty-four-hour cable news programs in recent weeks—Fox, CNN. It was a farcical sort of tragedy that the murder-minded Republican administration led by Cheney and Rumsfeld had its ideal foil in the murder-minded Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Except that hundreds of thousands of innocent individuals might die, these deranged adversaries deserved one another.

Disturbing to realize that the conservative student movement was steadily gaining ground on American campuses in these early years of the twenty-first century. Even at older, more historically distinguished private universities like this one, that were traditionally liberal-minded.

In the hostile vocabulary of Alexander Stirk and his compatriots—leftist-leaning.

“I told the township officers, and I will go on record telling you, President Neukirchen—I don’t feel that I should try to identify my assailants even if I have some idea who some of them are.” Stirk paused to remove a handkerchief from his coat pocket which he unfolded and dabbed against his injured eye, in which lustrous tears welled. He spoke with exaggerated care as if not wanting to be misunderstood.

It was clear to M.R.—unmistakably!—that Stirk was speaking with an air of adolescent sarcasm, perhaps hoping to provoke her.

It hadn’t happened often, in M.R.’s university career, that students had spoken disrespectfully to her. Perhaps in fact no student ever had—until now. And so she wasn’t accustomed to the experience—wasn’t sure how to react, or whether to react. In her chest she felt a sharp little pang of—was it hurt? disappointment? chagrin? Was it anger? That Alexander Stirk whom she’d hoped to befriend was not so very charmed by President Neukirchen.

Yet more daringly—provocatively—Stirk was saying: “Frankly I can tell you—as I am sure you would hardly repeat it—President Neukirchen—when I was attacked, I had blurred impressions of faces—and maybe—an impression of just one face—or more than one—belonging to a light-skinned ‘person of color.’” Stirk paused to let this riposte sink in, with a look both grave and reproachful. Then as if he and President Neukirchen were in complete agreement on some issue of surpassing delicacy he continued, piously: “But—as a Christian—a Catholic—and a libertarian—on principle I don’t believe that it is just—as in justice—to risk accusing an innocent individual even if it means letting the guilty go free. That isn’t a principle that makes sense to pro-abortion people—who grant no value whatever to nascent human life—but it’s a principle greatly cherished by the YAF.”

Pro-abortion? Nascent human life? What this had to do with Stirk being assaulted, M.R. didn’t quite know. But she knew enough not to rise to this bait.

“Well. After I’d been knocked to the ground, kicked and humiliated and threatened—‘You don’t shut the fuck up, you’re dead meat, fag’”—Stirk’s boyish voice assumed a deeper and coarser tone, reiterating these crude words—“still no one came to my aid. Within seconds all witnesses fled the scene—laughing—I could hear them laughing—and by the time some Good Samaritan alerted a campus security cop in the office behind Salvager Hall, I’d managed to get to my feet and stagger out to the street—off campus—a passing motorist saw me, and took pity on me.”

Passing motorist. The phrase struck M.R. oddly.

Like one who has told a story many times, though in fact Stirk could not have told this story many times, the bruised and battered undergraduate related how he’d been helped into the vehicle of the passing motorist and driven to the local hospital ER—“This citizen didn’t worry about the inside of his car getting bloodied, thank God”—where he was X-rayed and treated for his injuries and township police officers were called—“Since this wasn’t an accident, but a vicious attack”—and came to interview him; when he was feeling a little stronger Stirk called Professor Kroll, his politics adviser, also faculty adviser for the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, at whose house Stirk had been before the assault.

Strange, M.R. thought, that Stirk hadn’t called his family in Jacksonville. Stirk had been adamant, the dean of students was not to contact them without his permission.

Where once the university was legally held to be in loco parentis, now the university was forbidden to assume any sort of parental responsibility not specifically granted by the individual student.

Where once the university was likely to be sued for failure to behave like a protective parent, now the university was likely to be sued for behaving like a protective parent, against even the wishes of an eighteen-year-old freshman.

“Y’know what Professor Kroll’s first words were to me, President Neukirchen?—‘So it’s started, then. Our war.’”

Our war! How like Oliver Kroll this was—to make of the private something political. To make of the painfully specific something emblematic, impersonal. For our war meant a division of campus and nationalist loyalties as it meant our war soon to be launched in Iraq.

Somehow, campus politics had become embroiled with such issues as abortion, sexual promiscuity and drunkenness on campus; patriotism was measured by the fervor with which one argued for “closed borders”—“War on Terror”—the need for “military action” in the Middle East. M.R. had followed relatively little of this at the University for she’d been busy with other, seemingly more pressing matters.

Proudly Stirk was telling President Neukirchen that, though it was after midnight by the time he’d called him, Oliver Kroll came at once to the ER. There, Professor Kroll had been “astonished” to see Stirk’s injuries—“disgusted”—“furious.” Professor Kroll had insisted upon speaking with township police officers, informing them of threats he’d personally seen that Stirk had received from “radical-left sources” at the University, in protest of Stirk’s outspoken views on politics and morality. More specifically, in the week prior to the assault, Stirk had addressed in both his radio program and in his newspaper column a “truly despicable, unspeakable” situation that had transpired at the University—the “open secret” that an undergraduate girl had had a third-trimester abortion in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia. Stirk had slyly—dangerously—come very close to “naming names, placing blame”—and for this, he’d received a fresh barrage of “hate mail” and “threats.”

M.R. had been dismayed when one of her staff members brought the student newspaper to her, to show her Stirk’s column rife with innuendos and accusations like a tabloid gossip column. Though the student paper was overall a politically liberal publication, yet its editors believed in “diversity of expression”—“controversy.” There had not been any attempt to censor or even to influence student publications at the University for at least fifty years—such publications were self-determined by students. M.R., like most faculty members, had only a vague awareness of the politically conservative/born-again Christian coalition at the University, that sought converts for its cause. The coalition was a minority of students, probably less than 5 percent of the student body, yet it had become a highly vocal and impassioned minority at odds with the predominant liberal atmosphere, and it didn’t help the situation that certain of the Christian students, like Alexander Stirk, seemed to be courting martyrdom—at least, the public attention accruing to martyrdom.

Especially, M.R. had been disturbed by the bluntness of the column “Stirk Strikes” with its provocative title “Free (For Who?) Choice” and, in boldface type, the mocking rhyme in the first paragraph:

FREE CHOICE IS A LIE!

NOBODY’S BABY WANTS TO DIE!

Unbidden the thought came to M.R.—My mother wanted me to die.

But how ugly this was, and in the student newspaper! No wonder Stirk had drawn what he claimed to be hate e-mail. No wonder there were undergraduates who resented him, mocked him. If Stirk were gay—as it appeared to be Stirk was—this “gayness” had nothing to do with his conservative beliefs, in fact would seem to be in opposition to conventional conservatism—which would have made of Alexander Stirk an unusual individual, perhaps, and a brave one. But in these issues which roused emotion like a dust storm, there was no time for nuance or subtleties; no time to consider paradoxes of personality.

Distressing to M.R. and her (liberal-minded) colleagues, that campus conservatives, in mimicry of conservatives through America since the triumphant Reagan years, were inclined to forgo subtleties. Their strategies of opposition were adversarial, confrontational—ugly. Their strategies were, as they put it, to go for the jugular.

When M.R. had first known Oliver Kroll, when she’d first come to teach moral philosophy at the University, Kroll had been less passionately involved in the conservative movement; M.R. had read Kroll’s essays on the history of American libertarianism, published in such prestigious journals as American Political Philosophy, and been impressed. For here was a perspective very different from her own, intelligently if not persuasively argued. M.R. had never felt comfortable with Kroll—for both political and personal reasons—but she’d admired his work and, to a degree, painful now to recall, they’d been friends—or more than friends, for a brief while; since that time, Kroll had become a (well-paid) consultant for the Republican administration in Washington and had become closely aligned with the University’s most famous—or notorious—conservative spokesman, G. Leddy Heidemann, an authority on “fundamentalist Islam” who was rumored to be intimately involved with (secret) preparations for the Iraqi invasion, a confidant of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both Kroll and Heidemann were much disliked at the University by a majority of their colleagues but they had a following among a number of students, primarily undergraduates.

M.R. found all this disturbing, and distasteful—like any administrator she feared for her authority even as she believed herself the very sort of administrator who cared little for “authority”—it was M. R. Neukirchen’s specialness that made her an effective president, an air of open-minded friendliness to all.

Yet it was upsetting to her that in growing quarters in the public media as on her very campus, the word liberal had become a sort of comic obscenity, not to be murmured without a smirk.

Like “pointy-headed intellectual”—the crude, coarse smear-phrase that had been used to discredit Adlai Stevenson in the ill-fated 1956 presidential election. How to defend oneself against such a—charge? Even to attempt to refute it was to be sullied by it, an object of ridicule.

“So, President Neukirchen—”

In his mock-reproachful pious-accusing voice Stirk continued his account of the assault and its aftermath. For twenty minutes he’d been speaking virtually nonstop as if declaiming his plight to a vast TV audience among which M.R. was a single listener. With remarkable brazenness—as if he understood how he was intimidating the president of the University—he paused to touch a forefinger to his lips.

“I wonder, President Neukirchen—have you ever listened to my radio broadcast—Headshots?”

“I’m afraid I have not.”

“But I think—I hope—you’ve seen my column in the campus paper—‘Stirk Strikes’?”

“Yes. I’ve seen that.”

“The columns are posted online, too. So my ‘kingdom’ is not just of this campus.”

Stirk was speaking in his radio voice, M.R. supposed—a forced-baritone that belied the small-boned and seemingly muscleless body. How small. How easily he could be hurt.

Stirk’s bandaged head—the markedly narrow forehead that looked as if it had been pinched together in a vise, and the weak, melted-away chin … The eyes were Stirk’s most attractive feature despite being blackened and bruised and M.R. saw in them both insolence and yearning, desperation.

Love me! Love me and help me please God.

The plea that would never be voiced.

Without his pose of arrogance, as without his clothes, how defenseless Stirk would be! A sexless little figure, utterly vulnerable. M.R. imagined him as a young adolescent, or as a child—intimidated by bigger boys, made to feel inferior, contemptible. In the world in which she’d grown up, in upstate New York south of the Adirondacks, a boy like Alexander Stirk wouldn’t have had a chance.

It seemed touching to her, a gesture of sheer courage, or bravado—to have proclaimed himself so openly “gay.” Except Stirk’s “gayness” seemed also a kind of guise, or ruse; a provocation and a mask to hide behind.

Stirk was revealing now to M.R. that he had a list of names which he hadn’t yet given to the police—a list that Professor Kroll had helped him prepare—“Not just students but faculty, too. Some surprising names.” He intended to give this list to the University committee investigating the assault—but he wasn’t sure “just yet” about giving the list to the police.

What was wonderful about the assault—ironically!—was that he’d been receiving so much support from people “all over the country”—“an outpouring of sympathy and outrage.” Within the past day or so he’d had offers from “world-class” attorneys offering to represent him in lawsuits against his assailants and against the University for having failed to protect him…. The Washington Times, the Young America Foundation, the cable Fox News had contacted him requesting interviews….

M.R. winced to hear this. Of course—the conservative media would leap at the opportunity to interview one of their martyred own.

Sobering to consider how an incident on the University campus so very quickly made its way into a global consciousness—“cyberspace”—to be replicated—amplified—thousands of times! M.R. was beginning to feel faint. For this was shaping up to be the sort of campus controversy, swirling out of control like sewage rising in a flash flood, M.R. knew she must avoid; M.R. had assumed she could, with goodwill, common sense, hard work and sincerity avoid. Hadn’t she assumed that, if she met with the stricken boy personally, and alone—that would make a difference?

Leonard Lockhardt and other staffers had strongly suggested to M.R. that she not meet with Alexander Stirk alone—but M.R. had insisted: she wasn’t the sort of university president to distance herself from individual students, she was precisely the sort of administrator known to care for individuals. She’d expected that speaking with Stirk calmly, in private, she could reach out to him, and understand him; she could—oh, was this mere vanity?—naïveté?—impress him with her sincerity, and win his trust.

Make her his friend.

The call had come late the other night—very late—2 A.M.—when M.R. had only just gone to bed and lay sleepless amid the thrumming of her brain like a hive of bees—sleepless alone in the president’s bed in the president’s bedroom in the president’s house which was an “historic” building in the older, “historic” part of the University campus—she had only just left her home office, only just shut down her computer for the night and hoped to sleep a few hours at least before waking at 7 A.M. for a long day—all weekdays were long days—to be navigated with zest, with optimism, with hope—like a ski slope, a very long ski slope, the bottom of which wasn’t in sight from the top.

Nothing so beautiful and so thrilling as downhill skiing—if you have the skill.

The ringing phone, at 2 A.M.—precisely, 2:04 A.M.—and M.R. had answered it with apprehension, for of course it could be only bad news at such an hour—a call to the president’s unlisted, private line—a number which few individuals knew—the urgent voice of the University’s head of security informing her of this shocking news….

Oh God! Is he—how badly is he hurt?

Is it known who attacked him? Were they—students?

It would seem to M.R. that a bright, blinding light had suffused the room, and the nighttime landscape outside the window. Immediately she’d been wide awake—hyper-awake. She would be on, or near, the phone for hours.

Thinking What folly this is! I am not prepared for this.

Yet she would persevere. She would do what she could. Vastly relieved that the boy wasn’t critically—seriously—injured; impulsively deciding to drive to the hospital, to see him, at 6:20 A.M. in a wet wind-driven snow.

The hospital was a little more than a mile away from the president’s house. The last time M.R. had driven there, she’d visited an older colleague, a woman who’d had breast cancer surgery.

Before that, a male colleague, not older, who’d had prostate cancer surgery.

Both individuals had recovered, or so M.R. was given to believe.

She would tell no one at the University about this reckless pre-dawn act—no one on her staff, no confidante or friend. Certainly not the University counsel who urged caution in all matters that might involve publicity. And certainly not her (secret) lover for whom the entire adventure of M.R.’s University presidency was an improbable phantasmagoria, tinged with folly, vanity, naïveté.

Why this was, M.R. wasn’t so sure. Maybe because the presidency, beyond even M. R. Neukirchen’s brilliant academic career, was so very alien to him and so excluded him.

In a haze of excitement fueled by the insomniac stress of the past several hours M.R. drove to the hospital and parked at the brightly lighted emergency room at the rear and hurried inside breathless and apprehensive—a tall anxious-eyed woman asking if a young University student named Alexander Stirk was still there, and could she see him …

By this time, Stirk had been discharged. He’d left the hospital in the company of an individual M.R. had to assume was Oliver Kroll.

“Oh, I see! And is he—how is he?”

A young Indian doctor regarded M.R. with quizzical eyes. Who was this woman? What relationship to Stirk?

M.R. introduced herself. Seeing in the doctor’s startled gaze that yes, it was something of an incident in itself, something to be remarked upon, spoken of, that the president of the University had hurried to the ER before dawn to see the badly beaten undergraduate.

With a polite smile the doctor told M.R. that Alexander Stirk had been considered well enough to leave the ER and he would tell her what he wanted her to know of his medical condition—best to inquire of him.

M.R. went away rebuked. M.R. went away relieved.

For it had been a rash act, to drive to the hospital. She wondered if it had been a foolish act.

The University counsel Leonard Lockhardt would have disapproved. This canny individual whom President Neukirchen had inherited from her canny predecessor and whose general advice to the new University president was caution.

These are litigious times, keep in mind! And this University is known to be very wealthy.

But Leonard Lockhardt would never know that M.R. had driven to the hospital before dawn. No one would ever know, including Alexander Stirk.

Naturally Lockhardt advised M.R. not to meet with the excitable young man in private. M.R. insisted she would meet with Stirk in private. Lockhardt had cautioned M.R. not to “seem to be taking sides—prematurely”—and M.R. said that of course she would be very careful about what she said. Most of all she wanted simply to speak to the boy, to console him. For he’d suffered a terrible shock—whether his account of the assault was entirely true, he had been injured. It was M.R.’s wish to console him and she believed it was her duty to console him—as a University student, Stirk was her student.

And so M.R. took care not to suggest that she didn’t believe Stirk’s story or that in any way she wished to defend the University that had, by his account, failed to protect him.

Grimly Stirk was saying that his enemies would be accusing him of fabricating the very attack they’d made on him. They’d threatened him, with worse harm.

“—think that they can intimidate me—silence me. But they will be very surprised when—”

M.R. perceived a deep hurt in the stricken boy—a woundedness like spiritual anguish. For he’d been insulted, and the insult wasn’t recent.

Difficult to believe that this was a twenty-year-old and not a boy of fifteen, or younger; seen from a short distance, Stirk more resembled a girl than a boy. He could have been no more than five feet two inches tall and could not have weighed more than 110 pounds. How painful to have made his way in school, being so very bright—aggressively bright—and in so undersized a body; how painful his early years must have been, in grade school, and middle school. Even at the University, with its rigorous academic standards, sports were a passion in some quarters; the old eating clubs and “secret societies” still dominated undergraduate social life…. And there was the sexual element: in adolescence, the predominant element.

Though it hadn’t been in M. R. Neukirchen at that age! And so perhaps sexual longing was not so predominant in this boy, either.

Sexual feeling—“desire”—had not seemed nearly so natural in M.R. as in an adolescent, as other sorts of desire.

It did seem that Stirk’s grievances against the University were long-standing—since his arrival as a freshman. What had “come to a head” the other night had been “long building, like an abscess”—the “hostility, hatred” of his enemies—their “jealousy” of his position on campus and “leftist-liberal resentment” of the conservative coalition on campus, which was gaining in numbers steadily. M.R. was determined to listen to Stirk without interrupting him or challenging him but was having a difficult time following his reasoning, or his charges—the connection between the undergraduate woman who’d (allegedly) arranged for a late-term abortion and other (alleged) incidents at the University and the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom—and Alexander Stirk—wasn’t clear; very likely, there were relationships among certain of these undergraduates of which no one had spoken yet, that hadn’t only to do with their contrasting politics.

Stirk said he was seriously considering “granting” interviews, and of course he intended to write about the incident, not just for the campus newspaper but also on the Internet and elsewhere—even against the advice of Professor Kroll. It seemed crucial to him—before it was “too late” and “something worse” happened to him—to “expose to the media” the “hostile leftist environment” of the University….

Now M.R. did interrupt. Though she tried to speak evenly.

Saying she didn’t think it was a very good idea to go to the media so quickly, while the assault was being investigated by the police and the University committee—

“Are you threatening to censor me, President Neukirchen? Shut me up?—so that I don’t embarrass you?”

Eagerly Stirk spoke, as if he’d been waiting for M.R.’s objection. His good eye shone with a sort of sick, thrilled elation and his knees trembled and quaked in sideways movements like those of a hyperkinetic child who has been sitting restrained for too long.

“Alexander, of course not. You are free to write about this—to write about anything—of course—but—”

“But—what?”

Calmly M.R. continued. Calmly if a bit tightly she smiled. In the Quaker Meeting the ideal is clearness—clarity—out of confusion and dissension an infusion of the Light will prevail. Without ever having quite examined her beliefs M.R. seemed to believe this, or wished to believe it.

Not in her analytical/skeptical mode as an academic philosopher but in her mode as professor/president, she wished to believe in a vision of humankind as evolving toward light, truth, compassion like a gigantic flower opening—otherwise, one’s compassion, like one’s naïveté, was an embarrassment.

“—for the present time, while the investigations are going on—isn’t it wiser just to wait? It really isn’t a good idea, as you must know—to write something prematurely. Especially if you don’t want to tell your family—they would surely discover it, and be upset….”

Stirk shifted excitedly in his chair. As if M.R. had tossed a lighted match onto flammable material, immediately Stirk began speaking in a rapid stammer. “So this meeting is about—censorship! Censoring me! Threatening me with telling my family—worrying my family! Like—like this is—blackmail! Trying to censor the voice of the conservative movement on this campus! Already the leftist-liberals control the media—already you control the majority of universities—now, you are putting pressure to silence—censor—a victim—Trying to censor me—with the pretense of ‘helping’ me….”

“Alexander, please! There’s no need to raise your voice. I am just pointing out that—”

“‘Pointing out that’—vicious, immoral behavior is condoned on this campus—sexual promiscuity, drunkenness—infanticide—but revealing to the media what has happened to me—is ‘not a good idea’?”

Stirk’s voice was raised. Stirk was both incensed and gloating. M.R. was stunned by the sudden outburst.

“Are you—recording this? Our conversation? Is that what you are doing?” Suddenly M.R. knew this must be so.

But Stirk shook his head quickly—no. As if M.R. had leaned across the desk to touch him—to touch him improperly—he recoiled in his seat with a look of childish guilt, insolence. “No, I am not. I am—not—‘recording’—our conversation, President Neukirchen. Maybe you’d like to—frisk me? Call in your security cops—maybe a—strip search?”

Laughing Stirk lurched to his feet. In the commotion the aluminum crutch clattered to the floor and Stirk snatched it up as if in fear it might be taken from him. Astonished and mortified M.R. understood that, of course, this devious young man had been recording their conversation. Some sort of recording device was in a pocket of that bulky corduroy jacket.

Probably, Oliver Kroll had encouraged him. For this was our war, an early skirmish.

M.R.’s face flushed with heat. She hoped she had not spoken recklessly—said something incriminating—during the course of their conversation. In a mild panic she wondered—could her remarks to Alexander Stirk be broadcast, posted on the Web? Without her permission? Weren’t there laws regulating unauthorized tapings of private conversations? Was this in fact a private conversation? Had the University president a reasonable expectation of privacy, in such an exchange with a student? Her heart was beating painfully and her face throbbed with heat as if she’d been slapped.

Stirk said impudently, “And what if it is being recorded, President Neukirchen? I’m only trying to protect myself—no one can expect fair treatment—‘justice’—from their enemies. I will have to build my case using the weapons I can.”

M.R. was on her feet behind the massive presidential desk. M.R. who had never been known to raise her voice, to betray upset or agitation, still less anger or dislike, staring at the smirking boy as if she’d have liked now to hit him.

“You weren’t really ‘attacked’—were you? You’ve fabricated the entire incident—you injured yourself—filed a false report to the police—”

Hotly Stirk protested: “I did not. How dare you—insult me—slander me! How dare you accuse me of—‘fabricating’—”

“Well—did you? You did.”

Never once in this austere presidential office—not once in her months—years—at the University—had M. R. Neukirchen spoken in so uncalculated a voice, with such vehemence; never once had her face betrayed any emotion so extreme as annoyance, still less dislike, repugnance. The effect upon Stirk was immediate—his pinched little boy’s face contorted with rage and in a sudden tantrum he overturned the chair in which he’d been sitting.

M.R. cried angrily, “Stop! Stop that! You aren’t a child!”

M.R. cringed as Stirk lifted the crutch to strike at the desk, or at her—he swept a stack of documents onto the floor—a small ceramic bowl containing pens, paper clips—M.R. tried to grab the crutch, to wrench it from Stirk’s fingers—Stirk gave a loud yelp as if she’d struck him—a yelp as of surprised pain—“Hey! Jesus! What’re you doing—that hurts”—for the benefit of the recording device in his corduroy jacket.

“But I didn’t—I didn’t—”

“Didn’t what, President Neukirchen? Hit me? You didn’t—hit me?”

As M.R. stared in astonishment the gloating boy stuck his tongue out at her. His tongue! Within these swift and irretrievable seconds the conversation M.R. had believed so forthright had shifted to farce, and President Neukirchen was the butt of the farce. Quivering with mischief Stirk fitted the crutch into his armpit and turned to limp out of the office just as the door was being opened by the president’s secretary whom he pushed aside with the crutch, laughing—“Here’s a witness! Another female! Expect a subpoena, lady!”

Limping noisily and conspicuously through the president’s outer office Alexander Stirk departed historic Salvager Hall like a sequence of mallet strokes against a just barely unyielding hardwood floor.

So it would be shortly charged: not only had M. R. Neukirchen tried to “censor” Alexander Stirk, the woman had actually—in some sort of “scuffle” in the president’s office—struck him.

In some versions of the lurid story, she’d struck him with the injured undergraduate’s very crutch.

Should have known. Hadn’t she been warned.

This is a war. There are enemies.

Her heart beat in her ears. Barely she could hear the man addressing her, in an air of scarcely concealed exasperation.

Lockhardt had been chief counsel for the University for more than thirty years. Presidents of the University had inherited him as they’d inherited the presidential office itself—its austere furnishings and leather-bound books, the portrait of grim Reverend Charters above the fireplace mantel. Lockhardt’s manner was unapologetically patrician—he had virtually no presence in the consciousness of the University faculty but his presence was essential to the board of trustees who looked to him as the president’s key adviser, beside whom the president could seem but a temporary and expedient hireling.

Before taking office M.R. had imagined that she might encourage Leonard Lockhardt to retire and in his place she’d hire a younger attorney of her own generation and liberal convictions but as soon as she’d become president M.R. had known how she needed the man, his experience, his influence with trustees and “major” donors. He’d graduated from the University with a degree in classics in 1955 and he’d gone to Harvard Law and like most graduates of his generation he’d been opposed to the appointment of a female president at the University, though M.R. wasn’t supposed to know this.

He was a bachelor. His long lean cheeks were clean-shaven and he exuded an airy sexless good cheer in all weathers. He wore suits tailored for him in Bond Street, London, long-sleeved linen and cotton shirts, bow ties. Can’t trust a man who wears a bow tie M.R.’s father Konrad Neukirchen used to say but M.R. had no choice, she had to trust her chief legal counsel whose thinning silvery hair was styled in swirls like wings rising from his high forehead. In the lapel of Leonard Lockhardt’s pinstriped suit was the small gold coiled-snake insignia of the University’s most selective eating club, to which he’d belonged as an undergraduate and which had barred from membership all categories of individuals except heterosexual Caucasian-Christian males from “good” families until, begrudgingly, the mid–1980s.

M.R. had hoped to become so friendly with Lockhardt, she could suggest to him in the most casual of ways that it wasn’t a good idea to continue to wear that particular eating-club pin at the University and Lockhardt would understand and cease to wear it at such times. But this intimacy hadn’t yet happened and by late winter of 2003 M.R. had come to understand that very likely, it would not happen.

Gradually and in his gentlemanly manner Lockhardt had become adjusted to the female president. He was not the sort of civic-minded individual who bears grudges—as soon as M. R. Neukirchen had been chosen by a majority of the trustees as the most exemplary of all candidates for the presidency despite her relative inexperience, Lockhardt was committed to her. He had come to like her as a person, whom he called “Meredith”—for “M.R.” seemed silly and pretentious to him, inappropriate for a female—and to admire her style of leadership which was perilously close to no style at all—just the woman’s unfettered personality. Neukirchen was guileless, zealous, far more intelligent and sharp-witted than she appeared. Shrewdly he’d sized her up as an indefatigable workhorse—one to be exploited. That the University had inaugurated its first female president in nearly 250 years was a glorious banner unfurled and flapping in the wind for all to behold.

And so Leonard Lockhardt was anxious on Neukirchen’s behalf, and on behalf of the University, which he loved. When M.R. had had her “accident” in October—en route to deliver a keynote address at a convening of the American Association of Learned Societies at Cornell University—when she’d failed to show up at the banquet hall, and had gone missing overnight, to the great alarm of her colleagues, friends, and the conference organizers—it had been Leonard Lockhardt who’d explained the situation to the trustees and assured them that M.R. hadn’t behaved in a way at all irresponsible or eccentric, whatever he’d privately thought.

To M.R. he’d been politely solicitous. He had not asked her, as others had not, why she’d been driving—alone—in a rented car—in rural Beechum County so far from Ithaca, New York—and not even near Carthage, which was her hometown; why she’d departed the Cornell hotel without informing anyone, even her assistant who’d been desperate—frantic—for hours when M.R.’s whereabouts were unknown. He hadn’t told her as perhaps he might have that she’d behaved not only irresponsibly and in an eccentric fashion but dangerously. You might have died there. Disappeared. Who would have known?

Instead Lockhardt had told M.R. that she had been “very lucky” not to have been seriously injured “in such a remote setting”—and that in the future, should she decide to drive somewhere alone, she should leave word with her staff.

M.R. replied that she believed she had left word with her assistant—a phone call, or an e-mail. She was sure.

Of that afternoon in October in Beechum County M.R. had a confused recollection. All that had happened she both recalled with painful exactitude and yet could not grasp that it had happened to her.

Or maybe—she couldn’t remember. Waking with a pounding head, a bloodied face, near-smothered by the exploded air bag and near-strangled by the safety harness—a stranger stooping above the car overturned in a ditch calling to her Hello? Hello? Hello? Are you—alive?

Lockhardt hadn’t pressed the issue of October 2002. Whatever he thought of M.R.’s utterly inexplicable behavior, whatever trustees of the University thought, or M.R.’s staff, or those faculty members who knew of her failure to deliver the keynote address at the conference in Ithaca—that period of some eighteen hours when M. R. Neukirchen seemed to have vanished—Leonard Lockhardt had not elaborated. His manner was discreet, diplomatic; he did not question motives, or even curious behavior, except as these threatened to erupt into public matters involving the University.

Now, regarding the alleged assault of the undergraduate Alexander Stirk, Lockhardt most dreaded a highly publicized lawsuit in which his superior skills would not prevail. For it was a new era, this era of “diversity”—it was not Leonard Lockhardt’s era. The University was no longer his University. The lawsuit was coming, he knew—or some similar disaster.

“Yes, you warned me, Leonard. But—I had to try, you know.”

“Had to try! Try what?”

“To communicate with Alexander Stirk. To show him that he could trust me.”

“Of course he could trust you. But you couldn’t trust him.”

Of all of her staff it was Leonard Lockhardt who could speak most forcibly to M.R. and it was Leonard Lockhardt whose good opinion M.R. craved. Sensing how Lockhardt would have preferred her predecessor in her place, who’d been a consummate politician, and no naïve female idealist to be manipulated by an undergraduate.

“Oh, Leonard. Do you think I’ve made a terrible—irrevocable—mistake?”

And she had not told Lockhardt—she would tell no one, for pride would not allow this—how, on the way out of her office, the smirking little bastard had stuck his tongue out at her.

Andre. I have to speak with you. I know that this is a difficult time for you—I’d hoped to have heard from you by now—but—something has happened here, at the University—I will explain…. I need to know—have I made a terrible—irrevocable—mistake…. Will you call me back Andre please.

Pausing before adding, with a breathless little laugh Love you so much dear Andre!

For it was possible for M.R. to utter such words at such a time. At the very end of a brief phone message, in a voice of girlish exuberance—a kind of giddy drunkenness—what could not be bluntly, unequivocally stated

Love you Andre so much. You must know.

And never with the mildest hint of reproach, or hurt—or desperation—Love you so much Andre do you love me?

Still less would M.R. dare to leave a message of unfettered emotion, yearning—Andre, when will you come see me again? Why don’t you call me? What is happening in your life? I feel so distant from you … I am so utterly lonely here….

Between them from the first—M.R. had been twenty-three, Andre Litovik thirty-seven—this had been the (unstated) agreement, the bond. M.R. would love Andre Litovik more than he loved her because M.R.’s capacity for love was greater than his as M.R.’s capacity for sympathy, patience, generosity and civility was far greater than his. I can love enough for us both. I will! M.R. had thought in the early years of their (secret) relationship but now she wasn’t so certain she could continue to retain the strength of her old loyalty.

Loyalty: naïveté.

And yet: loyalty.

But as soon as Alexander Stirk departed, and M.R. was alone again in her office stunned, humiliated, hurt—the adrenaline rush of anger had quickly subsided—she called her lover in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on her cell phone.

A (secret) call. No one among the president’s staff must know.

M. R. Neukirchen’s (secret) life. M. R. Neukirchen’s (unacknowledged) life.

No one knew, among her wide circle of friends, acquaintances, colleagues—that M.R. had been involved with a man, a married man, since graduate school in Cambridge. So many years! And so faithful to this man, who had—very likely—not been altogether faithful to her.

As long as I know that I am the one he loves. To the extent to which he can love anyone.

As no one knew how lonely M.R. was. Amid the busyness of her professional life like a sequence of blinding lights rudely shone into her eyes this loneliness persisted.

She could confide in no one, of course. In this exalted position so many of her colleagues envied.

In the president’s house, in which she was a perpetual guest. As in the four-poster brass bed to which Andre Litovik had come not once in the months since her inauguration, to sleep with her.

In fact Andre had visited the University twice in those months. He’d come for M.R.’s inauguration in April and in November he’d returned to give a lecture for the astronomy/astrophysics department and at that time M.R. had hosted a dinner in his honor at the president’s house. But he hadn’t wanted to stay overnight in this house though it was understood—it seemed to be understood—that M.R. and Andre Litovik were “old friends” from her Cambridge days.

M.R. had invited him of course—but she hadn’t pressed him.

There are guest rooms here. We have at least one guest a week, often more. You would not be—it would not seem….

She’d meant, it would not have seemed suspicious.

He’d told her no. He’d been adamant, not very gracious. He had seemed almost to dislike her, so emphatically he spoke declining her invitation.

Still, they’d managed to spend some time alone together on that occasion—but not in the president’s house, and not in the president’s bed.

M.R. understood—of course. It would be folly, it would be the most careless of blunders, to arouse suspicion. At least at this time while M.R. was president of the University and Andre Litovik was—still—married.

Look, darling: I’m so proud of you. Don’t risk your reputation. Someday—soon—we’ll work this out. But not—not just yet.

He’d gripped her hands in his, tightly. He had appealed to her to believe him and so she had believed him.

Yet, he’d been eager to return home. For always—at home—there was a family crisis—which Andre must mediate.

Of all men of her acquaintance M.R. had never known anyone so personally persuasive as Andre Litovik—whether the public man, or the private man. Waking from sleep he was, in an instant, fully awake—warm, suffused with energy, thrumming like a hive of bees.

And the big fist of a heart quick-beating inside the barrel-chest yet calm, Olympian and bemused.

If a heart can be Olympian and bemused, Andre Litovik’s was that heart.

“Please call me. Please—I need to speak to you….”

The most piteous appeals are those we make in utter solitude, no one to hear. The objects of our appeals distant, oblivious.

It seemed to be so—Andre was proud of her, now. He admired successful women—in particular, academic and intellectual women—he’d married a brilliant young Russian-born translator and Slavic studies post-doc at Harvard and very likely he’d been involved with a number of other women before meeting M.R.—(and after?).

He hadn’t wanted her to become president of the University. He’d been frankly astonished that among several very strong candidates, M.R. had been chosen.

M.R. had not said to him You could dissuade me, if you wanted to. If you wanted to badly enough.

For maybe this wasn’t true. Maybe—M.R. contemplated the possibility—she did prefer the public position, the opportunity to serve, to lead, to hold in the Light—to a more private life.

At any rate, she’d accepted the offer of the board of trustees of the University. Leonard Lockhardt had drawn up her contract. The faculty of the University overwhelmingly approved of Neukirchen for the presidency—this had been crucial to M.R.’s acceptance. Never had she felt so—vindicated.

Almost, you might say—loved.

For this was the high point of Mudwoman’s life—to be admired, loved.

The phone rang: 9:09 P.M.

Not the president’s phone but M.R.’s cell phone for which very few people had the number.

She saw—the caller ID wasn’t LITOVIK.

She pushed the little phone away, she had no desire to answer it.

She’d fallen asleep at her desk. The massive cherrywood desk with its numerous deep drawers. Folded her arms on the desktop and laid her head on her arms and drifted into an exhausted sleep. For the day—this ignominious day!—had begun so long before, in the dark preceding dawn.

FREE CHOICE IS A LIE!

NOBODY’S BABY WANTS TO DIE!

Salvager Hall was empty and darkened except for the president’s office where a single desk lamp was lighted. Three floors deserted as a stage set from which actors have departed. The new female president had a plucky-loyal staff to work closely with her and to defend her against her critics and detractors while conferring worriedly among themselves Is something wrong with M.R.? Is she—ill? She seems to be making mistakes—misjudgments…. Since the accident in October …

“No. I can make things right again.”

The cell phone had ceased ringing. Then, within seconds it rang again—the opening bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

M.R.’s (secret) lover had bought her the cell phone. So that she could call him, and he could call her. That had been years before in an earlier and more idyllic phase of their friendship.

It was not Andre. In the caller ID window was KROLL.

She was appalled, that Oliver Kroll would be calling her at such a time. And on her cell phone, not the president’s phone. She wouldn’t have thought that Kroll had her number or that he would dare to call her, after what had happened that afternoon.

For M.R. had no doubt, Oliver Kroll had conspired with Stirk to record their conversation. This is war. Our war has begun.

They would gloat together. They would play the tape, and laugh at her.

And now—Kroll was calling her.

M.R. felt a swirl of nausea. She was not so strong as people thought—even Leonard Lockhardt who’d come to know her painfully well misjudged her as a stronger woman than she was.

Remarkable woman. Such enthusiasm!

A natural-born leader.

She’d been in hiding. She’d been eating at her desk. The remains of M.R.’s supper on a greasy paper napkin: dry pita bread, strips of lettuce like confetti, “grilled” vegetables dry and tasteless as wood chips and a can of Diet Coke.

She’d canceled her dinner for that evening—she’d needed to be alone. As president of the University M. R. Neukirchen was scheduled for luncheons, receptions, dinners through the semester virtually day following day.

And such a friendly—accessible—person … So sympathetic, and so informed …

Such energy!

What comfort in being alone—at last. No one to observe the wounded “leader.”

The little phone ceased ringing. After a brief wait M.R. checked her messages hoping that Kroll hadn’t left a message but that—somehow—Andre had left a message instead.

Thinking Love is a sickness for which the only cure is love.

Of course—there was Kroll’s unmistakable voice. M.R. steeled herself for irony/mockery which was the politics professor’s usual style but this was very different.

“Hello? It’s Oliver—Kroll….” Haltingly Kroll spoke like one uncertain of his way. M.R. could hear his breath close against the mouthpiece. “I’m calling to say—to explain—I hope you don’t think that I had anything to do with … I don’t know what Alexander told you or hinted at but—it wasn’t—it isn’t—so … I did not have anything to do with him recording your conversation…. If I’d known what the hell he’d intended, I would have tried to dissuade him.” Kroll’s voice was strained, urgent. This was hardly a message M.R. might have expected from Oliver Kroll and so she listened surprised and fascinated. “He’s a—an—excitable young man … He’s brilliant but—obviously troubled. … Some things have come to light, Meredith, he’s told me about—just tonight—that will have to be revealed tomorrow, to the township police, to the security office, and to you…. Could you call me? Regardless of how late it is, call me? It would be better if we could talk, before. … Please call me at—” Hurriedly Kroll gave his number, and repeated it, though he’d have known that M.R. already had the number in her cell phone memory. He was breathing—panting—as if about to say more but broke the connection instead.

Meredith he’d called her. Beyond that, M.R. scarcely heard.

How they’d met, M.R. could not clearly recall. How they’d parted, M.R. hoped to forget.

It had been a time when M.R.’s (secret) lover had abandoned her.

Sent her into exile she’d joked. Sadly joked.

Somewhere in the hinterland of north central New Jersey he’d sent her—this prestigious Ivy League university floating like an improbable island of academic excellence amid vestiges of quaint-Colonial American history and a hilly-rolling ultra-affluent rural/suburban landscape which, until M.R. was invited to be interviewed for a position in the philosophy department, she had not visited and had not envisioned. Reporting back to her lover This can’t be a real place! It is too perfect.

She hadn’t quite been willing to think that Andre Litovik wanted her—hoped her to be—gone.

Not permanently gone—only just a respectable distance from Cambridge, Massachusetts. From his house on Tremont Street, and his household. From his family.

Nor had she been willing to think that really it was a good idea—a very good idea—for M.R. to leave the force field of her lover, a gravitational pull roughly equivalent to that of the planet Jupiter. With her instinct for self-effacement M.R. had planned to seek a teaching position in the Boston area, to be near Andre, at one or another far less distinguished university or college, which would have fatally sabotaged her career at the start; with her Harvard Ph.D. and early, much-admired publications in moral philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, M. R. Neukirchen had been an extremely attractive candidate, and female.

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