Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates
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