Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates
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