Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

Proof that there is a life—singular, “historic.”

  Andre had once said to her how utterly boring it was to be in one place solely and M.R. had wanted to say to him how precious it would be, to be in one place solely.

  To be one person solely.

  Of course she hadn’t told him—of her life. If he’d asked—and he had not asked, much—she had replied with the quick bright evasiveness with which she’d learned to reply to interviewers’ questions.

  Her parents he believed to be the Neukirchens of Carthage, New York—whom he’d never met: her mother a librarian, her father a (non-elected) city government official.

  She had not told him that she’d been adopted. The word adopted was not in M. R. Neukirchen’s vocabulary.

  Slowly on Convent Street she drove. How familiar everything was, yet how strange to her, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope! Very little ever changed in Carthage, New York, where the economy had been “stagnant” for decades—preserving the past as in a kind of gaseous formaldehyde.

  And there was the little cobblestone branch library where Agatha had worked—(though you would not have called it “work”: Agatha had never called it “work”)—as a librarian. At the checkout desk, quick-smiling plump-girlish Agatha Neukirchen in her billowing long skirts, knitted vests and ruffled blouses, long sleeves splotched with ink from the little ink-pad with which she struck the stamp bearing the due date of a book.

  That was Agatha’s single, deft and practiced gesture, that bore with it a benign air of authority—stamping the due date on the little card at the back of the book.

  Oh—everyone knows Agatha. Such a friendly woman!

  Such a pity, about Agatha . . . So young.

  M.R. could not bring herself to park her car, and look into the library.

  Maybe later—if there was later . . .

  (Would anyone there have recognized her—“Meredith”—“Merry”? This was a possibility she didn’t want to consider.)

  (For, so many times Agatha had brought her little Merry to this library with her. All the librarians had known her—“Merry Neukirchen.”)

  And now, Mt. Laurel Street—where Konrad no longer lived, so far as M.R. knew; like Convent Street a neighborhood of small single-family dwellings, just slightly shabbier than M.R. recalled—very small front yards, narrow asphalt driveways close beside neighboring houses, at the curb stumps of the giant ghost-elms that had been razed in the wake of disease when Meredith had been a little girl.

  “Daddy! I’m sorry that I couldn’t—that I didn’t. . . .”

  She was thinking that she might have helped Konrad move out of the house when he’d sold it, the previous year. But the timing could not have been worse, in the week following her inauguration as president of the University. . . . And Konrad had insisted he didn’t need any assistance, he knew how very busy she was and it would distress him, if she took time to come to Carthage for such a “trifle.”

  She had been a disappointment to them of course. Though officially her parents were “proud” of their accomplished daughter—as how, reasonably, could they not have been “proud”—yet she knew, she had hurt them, particularly she had hurt Agatha by not only failing to be the daughter Agatha had wanted her to be but by failing to acknowledge her betrayal. And then she had not tried very hard to mend the estrangement between them.

  In interviews warmly exclaiming Such wonderful people—such good people—models of sanity, kindness, generosity, intelligence, love . . . My parents are Quakers—my father was a conscientious objector during the Korean War—in upstate New York where the U.S. army services are revered—he taught me courage, but also the value of “stillness”—“holding in the Light.” . . . My mother is a librarian who taught me a love of books . . . and my father a voracious reader. . . . It was always understood that I would go to college unlike most of my Carthage classmates.

  In fact it was the issue of college, going-away-to-college and not-returning-after-college, that had wounded Agatha, beyond all reason as M.R. had thought at the time.

  Konrad had been more understanding though in his oblique way just slightly reproachful—Of course our brainy daughter wants to associate with “brains”—there’s no Harvard in the Adirondacks, last I noticed.

  There, the old house: 18 Mt. Laurel Street.

  The dark-red-brick house was looking distinctly shabby, weatherworn. The sooty facade could have used a sandblasting to spruce it up and the black trim needed repainting; each of the shutters, facing the street, was crooked in its own way. In the front windows, venetian blinds hung lopsided. The new tenants, whoever they were, had kept the remains of Agatha’s eccentric gardening, that made 18 Mt. Laurel Street conspicuous among its more conventional neighbors, like a satin party dress amid a party of mourners: a tangle of living plants—black-eyed Susans, wild rose—and pots of artificial mums and geraniums.

  Who lived in this house now? In her old room, facing the street?

  Once, a cloying-cute girl’s room with candy-cane wallpaper, a fluffy white chenille bedspread. A lamp in the shape of a little white lamb. Maplewood dresser and bookcase filled with children’s books, gifts from Merry’s adoring parents.

  In high school, she’d changed the room, a bit. She’d replaced the children’s books with others. She’d outgrown the girl’s bed, her feet had pushed out over the edge of the mattress but she’d told herself she didn’t much mind—she would be leaving, soon.

  She hadn’t been equal to their love. It was that simple.

  Unlike the well-to-do suburban neighborhoods near the University, where no one but lawn crews and delivery men were ever seen, the Neukirchens’ old neighborhood was lived-in. Children on bicycles, young mothers pushing baby carriages, a man mowing his lawn—a man in baggy khaki shorts and a baseball cap walking with a cane, who resembled Konrad, but was too young to be Konrad, now seventy-two. And Konrad did not live in this neighborhood any longer.

  M.R. observed the man, who did look familiar. But he was trimmer than Konrad had ever been, in her memory; and his walk, despite the cane, was surprisingly jaunty. Behind him trotted a dog, a red-setter mix with a long tail and large feet, sniffing eagerly at front stoops, shrubs and trees, and pausing to lift his leg and to urinate, quickly; you could see that the man was chiding the dog, and the dog, even as he continued to sniff about and lift his leg, was listening attentively.

  “Solomon! Have you no shame!—stay at the curb.”

  As the man in the khaki shorts drew nearer, M.R. saw that his jaws were covered in bristling white whiskers—it was Konrad.

  “Daddy? Hello? Is it—you?”

  Through glasses the gentleman squinted at her. A wide startled smile softened the bewhiskered face.

  “And if it’s ‘Daddy’ then it’s ipso facto ‘Meredith’—yes?”

  In this season of disgrace she’d been thinking often of Konrad and Agatha and their exemplary lives, she had not been able to emulate.

  Of course, she understood: it had not been disgrace only just hubris, error, correction.

  Physically, she’d been broken, ill. But it was her soul that had been most lacerated.

  And her vanity—with which M. R. Neukirchen had not guessed she’d been so afflicted.

  Of course, Konrad knew about M.R.’s “breakdown” and the “medical leave” from the University—she’d called him, to forestall his calling her, and she’d asked him please not to come see her.

  “Not just yet.”

  For there was nowhere, that M.R. now was.

  The official word was traveling.

  The official description was between residences.

  Unofficially it was said Poor woman! She has crept away to hide.

  But no one quite knew, M.R. was homeless.

  Hurriedly after being discharged from the hospital she’d moved out of Charters House. She was living p
rovisionally in an apartment lent by a faculty friend, near the house on Echo Lake which had been sub-leased by other tenants and in which she’d left her furniture, and most of her possessions, in the care of others. For there was the assumption—(or pretense, or fiction)—that M.R. would be moving back into the president’s house in September, when she would resume the presidency.

  The trustees had not evicted her from Charters House—of course. But M.R. had insisted upon moving out.

  Must get out. Get away. I am suffocating here.

  In some sort of delirium she’d thought—half-thought—that maybe—at this juncture in her life—when (possibly) she might be leaving the University—or (possibly, in any case) leaving the presidency—Andre will want to be with me. Andre will take care of me.

  From the observatory at Kitt Peak he’d sent her photos—this was frequently Andre’s practice, when he was on-site at a telescope—for he’d become, in the service of mapping the Universe, an excellent amateur photographer. Nearly each day, with no message, an e-mail photo of astonishing beauty and mystery came to her as if out of the void: “Perseids storms”—“Kappa Crucis cluster”—“Medusa nebula”—“stellar nursery in the constellation Centaurus”—“moons beyond rings of Saturn”—the raging-molten-orange surface of Venus (“computer reconstruction”)—“star clouds”—“crepuscular rays”—“Milky Way shadows.” She understood that in these visions her lover was offering her his essential being, and that the other—the actual man, the man whose mouth she might kiss, and whose arms she might clutch at, whose laughter she might hear—was inessential.

  Why isn’t the beauty of the Universe enough for you, dear Meredith?

  It is enough for many of us. For me.

  Even philosophy was little solace to her. Words!

  She could not concentrate, reading. Even rereading works she’d loved, she could not concentrate. She felt the now-familiar tinge of panic, a kind of nausea, at the prospect of teaching a graduate seminar in the fall as she’d so ambitiously planned.

  Failed once, fail again. Never recover from a broken back.

  She threw belongings into the rear of her car. She left no word behind, where she might be going.

  Homeless but it felt good: appropriate.

  North along the Hudson River and into the Catskills and by mid-afternoon of the following day entering Herkimer County, and then Beechum County, and along the Black Snake River west to Carthage—a river-city near the eastern shore of Lake Ontario that had been losing population steadily since the 1970s.

  She’d returned two years before, for Agatha’s funeral. She’d returned seven months before that, at the time of Agatha’s first stroke.

  Neither visit had gone well. Neither visit had made M.R. eager to return.

  At the funeral, Konrad had been dazed and—so unlike Konrad!—near mute with grief, protected by a fierce band of Agatha’s women friends who’d absorbed from Agatha a disapproval of her “ungrateful daughter” impossible to be overcome, had M.R. the patience and time to try to overcome it. And at the visit with Agatha, after the stroke, M.R. had been astonished to encounter her once-genial mother so profoundly altered, there seemed little between them except the woman’s bizarre childish rancor at M.R.’s “ingratitude” and “selfishness.”

  Agatha had been sixty-seven at the time of the first stroke. In her circle of Carthage friends and neighbors, sixty-seven was considered still quite young.

  She’d suffered from high blood pressure for years. She was overweight by many pounds. Long she’d entertained others with recitations of her many failed diets—“grapefruit”—“water”—“Dr. Atkins”—“Eaters Anonymous 12-Step”—but really it wasn’t funny, as M.R. had known as a young girl, and so there should have been no great surprise at Agatha’s collapse, though Konrad seemed not to have anticipated it.

  “But, Daddy, how could you not?—she made appointments with doctors, she canceled. . . .”

  “Please don’t speak of your mother as ‘she’—you owe her that respect at least.”

  This cutting remark was so uncharacteristic of Konrad, M.R. was struck dumb.

  Agatha had fainted and fallen in the backyard amid a wild tangle of flowers and weeds, and had called to Konrad for help. But she had refused to see a doctor and a few days later she fainted again, and fell, this time on the stairs in the house, and had not recovered consciousness for twelve hours. The stroke was considered “mild”—but she’d lost sensation in her right leg, was more than ever dependent upon a cane, and even with a cane had difficulty walking. She became averse to reading—“nasty squiggly lines like spiders”—and even to watching TV with Konrad—“just flat pictures and people acting like fools.” Her hair turned white in streaks giving her a savage look, that quite shocked M.R. when she saw her. Where Agatha had been girlish and tender and her trilling laughter delightful now Agatha was harridanish and harsh and never laughed but made irascible grunting sounds in mocking mimicry of laughter.

  Konrad confided in M.R., it was his fault for not having forced Agatha to lose weight, and to keep her doctors’ appointments. He felt such terrible guilt, he couldn’t bear to think of it.

  Privately M.R. had thought yes, this was partly Konrad’s fault. The Neukirchens had drifted through the years and decades like infatuated honeymooners in a little boat lacking oars and a rudder.

  She’d said, “Daddy, it isn’t your fault. You know how stubborn she—Agatha—is.”

  But Konrad hadn’t been placated. With a little snort of derision he’d said, “ ‘Daddy’—you’re calling me? But you call your mother ‘Agatha.’ There is something wrong there.”

  M.R. had been speechless. Was her kindly Quaker father now turning against her, too?

  “Something very wrong, your mother sensed long before I did. Our ‘Merry’ was not the daughter we’d believed her to be.”

  “But—of course I am not ‘Merry.’ I was never ‘Merry.’ You know perfectly well that I—I am not your biological daughter. . . . You have no right to expect of me that. . . .”

  Articulate before large audiences, never at a loss for words in public, M.R. began to stammer in her father’s angry presence.

  The power of a parent to wound, to kill. The power of a parent is terrible.

  But it was Agatha who was most unreasonable of course. Agatha sprawled on the living room sofa splotch-faced and sullen, her eyes swallowed in the fatty ridges of her face. Her mouth that had always been so soft and warm now resembled a carp’s mouth. Her disapproval of M.R. had hardened into dislike.

  M.R. was frightened in the woman’s presence like a stepchild in a fairy tale that has unexpectedly turned malevolent.

  “You. I know why you’re here. Waiting for—I know what. S-s-s-so you can have your father all to your-s-s-self.”

  M.R. protested, she’d come to see her—Agatha. She’d heard that Agatha wasn’t feeling well and she’d come quickly. . . .

  “Heard I had a s-s-s-stroke. S-s-s-so you can have your father all to your-s-s-self.”

  Yet even before the stroke Agatha had grown ever more resentful of M.R.—whom she called, coolly, “Meredith”—for having deceived her and Konrad. “Promising you would return to Carthage to teach, after Cornell. And then—Harvard! Why wasn’t one of the state colleges good enough for you? That cost a fraction of that fancy tuition? Some worldly notion of yours—some blindness . . .”

  Notion was a Quaker term roughly synonymous with unfounded, illogical, delusional.

  “And you never made the slightest effort to get a job here—I know, I have friends at the high school. And you never told us your plans—your plotting.”

  “Of course I told you—I kept you informed. When I received a fellowship to Harvard—”

  “ ‘Received a fellowship to Harvard’—do you hear how you sound? How vain, how—hollow? And plain silly.”

  M.R. wan
ted to say hotly What is silly about Harvard?

  M.R. tried to point out that, apart from the state university at Plattsburgh, and St. Lawrence University in Canton, there were no colleges or universities within a reasonable distance of Carthage where she would have felt “comfortable”—an awkward way of saying that no college or university in the vicinity of Carthage was quite good enough for her Harvard Ph.D., or for her.

  M.R.’s voice faltered and failed. Maybe it was all—silly.

  The vanity of the intellectual life, or any kind of life at all—silly.

  “Your first duty is to your parents who brought you into this world. And kept you in this world. Who cared for you, and made a place for you in their hearts.”

  Duty! M.R. had wanted to protest, she thought of her life as a life of duty, in fact.

  “You’ve broken our hearts! I’m not even sure if you are our daughter! Still we will always love you. That is God’s wish and that is our vow.”

  Agatha glared at M.R. with a look of such contempt, M.R. had to turn away.

  She does see into my heart. She knows me. Mudwoman!

  “I had every intention of selling this house, Meredith! I signed the contract with McIntosh Realtor in full awareness of what I was doing, and that I would have to pay a penalty if I backed out. And then, at the closing—I backed out.”

  Konrad spoke with an air of disbelief as if this admission were scandalous to him, even now.

  “It isn’t in my character, you know. To ‘back out.’ ”

  They were in Agatha’s overgrown garden at the rear of the house. Konrad was sitting in a frayed lawn chair and M.R., too restless to sit still, in a flurry of emotion at being in such proximity to her father, was prowling about Agatha’s abandoned garden.

  Crimson peonies, purple phlox, pink cluster roses and stunted sunflowers amid a choking profusion of weeds.

  In the high grass, weatherworn concrete statuary—miniature pig, owl, cat, deer, leering gargoyle with hands pressed against its pointed ears.

  How strange, the gargoyle! M.R. remembered the animal statues—she thought—but not the gargoyle, which didn’t seem at all like Agatha’s taste.