Mudwoman (36 page)

“Into the cemetery! But why. . . .”

Now Konrad was walking with his head bowed. His jovial manner seemed to have left him totally, as if he were a partly deflated balloon.

In a newer and relatively empty part of Friendship Cemetery, Konrad left the graveled path and approached one of the graves. From where Meredith stood it appeared to be a small grave—the marker was small, hardly more than a horizontal plaque in stone. Somberly he unwrapped the plant—a poinsettia?—artificial?—bright, garish-red, with the conspicuous red bow—and placed it at the gravesite like an offering.

“Someone has died. But who . . .”

From behind the thick gnarled trunk of an old oak Meredith watched. Fortunately there was no one else in this part of Friendship Cemetery on this melancholy November day. Everywhere the gritty layering of metallic snow cast objects in a cold pure neutral light, shadowless. The kind of light that pierces the heart, it is so very cold, pure, neutral, clinical—there is nothing human in it.

Meredith would recall this moment. Waking in the night twenty-five years later to the terrible realization that she had very likely ruined her career as a university president—in the way of a drunk stumbling and flailing about, smashing things, oblivious to the damage he has caused—she would recall this moment in Friendship Cemetery, Carthage, New York—her realization as a girl that she did not know Konrad Neukirchen, truly.

This sense of utter implacable ruin—the cold pure neutral light that is shadowless, soulless.

“Oh Daddy! Please come back.”

By now Meredith was shaken, frightened. This was not a game—was it? She could see that there were numerous objects placed about the little grave—ceramic animals and birds, clay pots, desiccated floral displays, plastic bouquets. Most of the neighboring graves were adorned with far fewer objects and some had none at all.

This was not Meredith’s first visit to a cemetery. But until now, there had been no connection between her and the cemetery, however oblique it was in this case.

It had not ever occurred to her until this moment—her sister must be buried, somewhere.

Jedina. Jewell?

Somewhere.

With care Konrad set the poinsettia at the center of the little grave—it was the care the man took, setting a heavy casserole dish onto a surface, having removed it from the oven for Agatha; the care he took in inserting and adjusting the ribbon in Meredith’s manual typewriter, that had been a gift to her for a recent birthday.

For a long time he stood above the grave, staring down. His broad shoulders were hunched and his arms hung down apelike in a posture that could not have been comfortable. So rare was it that Konrad Neukirchen wasn’t in a cheery ebullient mood, Meredith was incapable of imagining what his facial expression might be.

After what must have been ten minutes—(in a rising wind off the river, Meredith had begun to shiver)—her father went to sit on a stone bench nearby. His walk was slow now, shuffling. His head was bowed. In the stillness of absolute contemplation as if he had turned to stone he remained on the bench as snowflakes swirled and fell on his shoulders, his hands, his bare bowed head.

From behind the gnarled tree, Meredith stared with stark open eyes. Thinking how like figures in a movie, they were. One of those late-night mystery movies of the 1940s, in black and white. With mounting apprehension you watched, knowing that something would happen to one of the figures, or both—but what?

If Meredith had called to Konrad, and run to him—a distance of no more than thirty feet—how would he have reacted? Would his face have creased into its usual broad smile or would he have stared at her in a very different way, unsmiling, as if he didn’t recognize her?

She realized that she was frightened of doing this: of his seeing her.

It might end, then. The masquerade.

Meredith retreated, to wait out her father’s vigil, which lasted another twenty minutes. When finally he left, she came to the grave—saw the small stone marker:

MEREDITH RUTH NEUKIRCHEN

September 21, 1957–February 3, 1961

Beloved Daughter

Cherished Always

She saw that the poinsettia was large, lavish, beautiful—vivid-red—but not artificial: it was a living plant that would not long withstand the freezing November air.

A
t 1
P.M.
they met as they’d planned in the library foyer.

Meredith saw that her father’s overcoat was still slightly damp from the light-falling snow in the cemetery but his thick-tufted graying-brown hair appeared to have dried.

Konrad, who’d been perusing the bulletin board, called Meredith’s attention to a flyer for free “Doberman-mix” puppies—“What d’you think your dear mother would say if we brought one or two of these home with us?”

Meredith laughed. He wasn’t serious of course.

“M
y daughter will come with us. She will drive!”

So sweetly—naïvely—Agatha boasted of her beloved gawky-goose daughter, not one friend could possibly take offense.

“She is not just a ‘passable’ driver—Mr. Nash at the high school praised Merry as the only girl he’d ever taught who ‘drives like a
man.
’ ”

And so to the unspeakably sad homes of the elderly, the reclusive, the mentally deranged in the ever-darkening days before Thanksgiving 1978.

For it had happened that an elderly woman who lived alone in Carthage had died and her body had gone undiscovered for a week in her trash-filled house hardly a mile from the proper brick houses of Mt. Laurel Street. In the Carthage newspaper there was a good deal of publicity—all of it lurid and recriminatory and upsetting. Agatha wept, seeing a photo of the deceased woman taken in 1934 when she’d been only just middle-aged, and had seemed healthy and happy; Konrad shook his head muttering—“Tragic! Very very sad”; Meredith stared in silence, feeling a thrill of something unnameable in her mouth—a taste as of cold oily muck.

And so Agatha gathered together several women friends, of whom one or two were Quakers, to visit the homes of individuals known to be solitary, reclusive, ailing, elderly—“at risk” in one way or another; and of course Meredith accompanied the women for Meredith too had been deeply moved by the news articles.

In all, the women visited a half-dozen homes: facades with peeling paint like psoriasis, cracked and carelessly mended windows, broken porches, broken roofs, broken steps, even broken floorboards. There were mangy dogs that barked hysterically; there were hissing cats that scrambled away underfoot; in one house, several filth-encrusted cages of bright-feathered canaries, too dispirited to sing. In each residence there lived a solitary woman, the eldest eighty-seven and the youngest just sixty-eight but clearly mentally impaired; it had to be just accidental—didn’t it?—that these solitary individuals were women, in varying stages of distraction, melancholia, and dementia. “God doesn’t want us to live alone!” Agatha said, shuddering. “It is just so
cruel,
these poor women have been
abandoned
. . . .”

In the midst of the nervous chattery visitors Meredith was a tall straight-backed girl with a quick sunny smile, quiet, unfailingly courteous, and
strong
—she could be depended upon to force open doors that had rotted into their frames, and she could be depended upon to pack trash and raw garbage festering in kitchens, to be hauled out to the curb; she did not shrink from scouring sinks, tubs, even toilets with steel wool, in filthy water, wearing rubber gloves that soon tore; there were mattresses so terribly stained, you could not have determined what color they’d originally been—these, to be uprighted, and turned over onto sagging bedsprings, revealing now the “clean” side; wielding a rake she cleared pathways in rooms heaped with trash as Agatha and her women friends followed timorously in her wake. When the women were at a loss for words, having gained entry into what were clearly hovels of madness, that no amount of well-intentioned Christian charity could exorcise, it was Meredith who spoke to the resident, or tried to speak—“Hello! We are your neighbors and we’ve come to say hello and to see if you would like us to—to help out a bit.”

It was not exactly true that they were
neighbors.
But they were fellow residents of Carthage, New York.

The women were Carrie, Phyllis, Irene, and Agatha. The girls were Meredith and Diane.

That is, Diane came on the “good-neighbor” excursion just once. Diane was Irene’s twelve-year-old daughter of whom Irene said with grim cheerfulness that she was “strong as a baby ox”—a thick-set girl with a low, broad forehead and glowering eyebrows whom Meredith tried, in her tentative smiling way, to befriend, but was rudely rebuffed as if with a wayward elbow.

Diane was sulky, resentful; she showed little enthusiasm for the “errand of mercy” on which her mother had brought her, to the home of the sixty-eight-year-old woman who opened the door to her ramshackle house only after Agatha bravely rang the doorbell repeatedly and who lived—it was shortly revealed—in a hovel reeking of raw garbage, cat excrement, and a miscellany of dead, decomposed creatures beneath detritus that had accumulated to a height of several inches. “Jesus! I’m going to puke!” Diane whimpered, as her mother reprimanded her with a hiss.

This visit did not go well from the start. The elderly recluse—who refused to give her name—seemed to have no idea what her visitors wanted of her, or from her, and clearly resented their presence. Her skull was covered in wan wisps of hair like withered mosses on a rock and her face had a puckish corkscrew twist out of which small suspicious eyes peered. She was small, as if shrunken—a housecoat stiff with dirt hung on her skeletal body and on her feet were demented house-slippers with a spangle of beads. “Who? What? What’re you saying?”—her voice was low, guttural. Only begrudgingly did she accept bags of groceries from her visitors, setting them on a filthy countertop; these were mostly canned goods, but also a selection of fresh vegetables—carrots with their long lacy-green leaves still attached, red-skin potatoes smooth as stones—and, appropriately for the season, a single frozen turkey-breast in a cellophane wrapper, and a box of turkey-stuffing mix. When Phyllis opened the refrigerator door, thinking to put away the perishable things, it was to such filth, and such stench, that she quickly shut it again.

“Oh. Oh, dear. I think that—maybe—a little housecleaning might be—something we could do. If . . .”

“ . . . should be a caseworker assigned to this poor woman! From the county.”

“ . . . we can report these conditions. The county must not know how serious this is.”

Meredith was stunned by all that she could see, and smell. And it was obvious, the shrunken little woman wanted her uninvited visitors gone—though deranged, she was not a passive victim of circumstances; her life in this squalor had its logic, however oblique and inaccessible to a stranger. “How long have you lived like this? How long—have you lived alone?”—earnestly Agatha tried to engage the woman in conversation but the woman replied only in grunts and shrugs.

“For reasons of health, you know—‘sanitary conditions’—it would be better if—if you would allow . . .”

Everywhere underfoot were discarded cartons, tin cans, plastic bags and bottles. Stacks of old newspapers, magazines. Rug-remnants like chewed tongues. It was evident that something had died—and decayed—on the premises. And on the walls—what you could see of the walls—were religious pictures—crucifixion, Blessed Virgin Mary—and plastic crosses, crooked.

Meredith was becoming light-headed holding her breath against the stench yet determined to “help”—if any sort of “help” was feasible here. “Christ sake!” Diane muttered. With the toe of her boot she poked at a pile of debris in a corner of the kitchen that had seemed to be quivering and out leapt a scrawny tiger cat panicked and hissing—as the women shrieked, the cat fled into the interior of the house. “This-here’s a damn
pighouse,
” Diane protested even as her mother sternly reprimanded her:
“Shhhh.”

“People who live like pigs die like pigs. So what!”

“Shhhh.
She can hear you.”

“She can’t! She’s God-damn
deaf and dumb.
”

Diane was one of those girls—not uncommon in the Carthage public schools—who had the look of stunted women: sizable breasts and hips, “mature” facial features, foreshortened legs and large feet. Her hair had been inexpertly but glamorously bleached—blond with streaks of red, pale orange, purple. Her mouth was fleshy and sullen and her smiles were mocking. She exuded an air of peevish self-assurance that was astonishing to Meredith for she could not have been in more than seventh grade. Though several inches shorter than tall straight-backed Meredith and several years younger Diane seemed indifferent to Meredith, disdainful.

“She isn’t well, Diane. These people we visit—to help—they need our help. They aren’t—‘well’—like us.”

Meredith spoke awkwardly. It had never been easy for her to address girls like Diane who reminded her of—of the girls who’d been sister-orphans, at the Skedds’.

Years ago, at the Skedds’! Meredith did not care to remember, just now.

Diane snorted, amused: “ ‘Like
us
’? Who the hell is
us
?”

Meredith stared at the stocky twelve-year-old in amazement. Why had Diane’s mother brought her along, when she was clearly so resentful of being here? The girl made only the most desultory gestures at “helping”—though strong, as strong as Meredith, she wasn’t at all motivated; when she and Meredith were charged with dragging trash cans out to the curb Diane exerted very little effort, unapologetically.

Outdoors, in the startlingly fresh air, the girls paused to draw deep breaths. From the outside, the shrunken woman’s house resembled a misshapen shoe, with a crumbling chimney, sagging gutters and rotted shingles. “ ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe—she had so many children she didn’t know what to do.’ ” Meredith spoke whimsically, but Diane scarcely heard. In a childish aggrieved voice she was saying, “My mother is always bitching at me—‘Di, watch your mouth’—‘Di, your mouth is too damn
smart
’—why I’m here today, it’s ‘discipline.’ ‘Di is learning some
Christian charity
for once.’ ” The girl shocked Meredith by reaching into the pocket of her purple-satin jacket and taking out a pack of cigarettes.