Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ