Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“ ‘For once’? Like for twice, three damn times . . . Every God-damn time, I could count on both hands.”
Meredith couldn’t make sense of this, exactly. But she supposed she understood. It was both shocking to her, and amusing, that the twelve-year-old lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, like an adult; she had not offered a cigarette to Meredith, as girls at the high school, who smoked, often did, as if slyly hoping to inveigle the good-girl Meredith into smoking, too.
Meredith thought
Why do I want her to like me? Why should Mudgirl give a damn, too?
It was a prevailing mystery: what Mudgirl
gave a damn for.
At the house, Irene leaned out the front door to call to the girls.
Diane yelled
Yah yah we’re coming.
To Meredith she said, like one imparting confidential wisdom, “My mother is some kind of Christian-nut. She really gets off on this bullshit. Fuck being ‘good.’ Everybody take care of himself.”
Meredith laughed, startled. This was so crudely phrased, so cruel—“But the weak, those who need our help like this poor woman . . .”
“So what? ‘Need’ isn’t ‘want.’ You see her glaring at us? Your silly mother trying to ‘interview’ her—what’s she think she is, somebody on TV? People got a right to live how they want. So they live in garbage and dead crap, so what? It’s the U. S. of A.”
“But—she’s mentally ill. She’s probably physically ill. . . .”
“So what? Who gives a fuck?”
Meredith smiled, uncertainly. She wanted to think that Diane was joking—had to be joking. But there was Diane exhaling smoke through her nostrils, in turn regarding Meredith, who loomed over her, as if she didn’t know what to make of her.
“Yah, your mom is pretty nice. She’s O.K.” Diane spoke grudgingly: Meredith understood that this was, to a girl like Diane, a very friendly gesture.
“My mom, Jesus! That bitch is always after me. Nothing I do is ever good enough, so fuck her.”
Fuck her!
Meredith was shocked.
Fuck her! Good
. Meredith laughed.
In the Skedds’ household, this was how you talked, sensibly. You did not
put on airs,
you did not pretend to be
something you were not.
And in the long-ago house in—was it Star Lake?—where she’d lived with the woman who was said to be her mother—in the ramshackle house behind the gas station—(crosses on the walls! Meredith had not thought of these crosses in years)—memories like thunder at the horizon, ominous, not yet fully audible. She thought
But I am not Mudgirl, not now. This is proof.
For Mudgirl had not been a “good” girl—Mudgirl would be contemptuous as Diane to think
You must help others. There is happiness only in helping others.
Irene was calling from the door, louder—“Girls! Please come in here—we need you.” Seeing that Diane was smoking she cried, “Put that out! That cigarette—damn you, put it out! Now!”
Yah yah fuck you
Diane muttered under her breath, nudging Meredith in the ribs, a sister-accomplice.
M
eredith thought
But I hate this, too! Except I have no choice.
I
t was shortly after this, on Thanksgiving eve, that Meredith observed Agatha slowly turning the pages of an album—it appeared to be a photo album, with a gaily-colored cover like a quilt—while sitting in her easy chair, in the living room. Since the visit to the shrunken little woman—which had been the least rewarding of any of the “good-neighbor” visits, and was in fact to be the last of the visits—Agatha had been preoccupied, weepy. She had thrown herself into preparations for a “festive Thanksgiving”—in addition to the Neukirchen family, there would be nine others at the big old table in the dining room, most of them single, unattached—what Konrad called “odd-ducks.” (Which was exactly what he would be, Konrad said, if he hadn’t met his dear Agatha, and their dear little Meredith had not come into their lives just in time—“the quintessential odd-duck.”) But on the night before the festive day, there was Agatha in her comfortable old chair, that fitted the contours of her body like a mold, turning album pages, biting her lower lip as if on the verge of tears, entranced.
From time to time, Meredith had seen her mother looking through this album. Always in so intense and preoccupied a way, Meredith had sensed that her mother didn’t want to be interrupted. For always when Agatha wanted Meredith to see a book she would call to her, excitedly—“Merry! Merry! Come look—oh, this is wonderful.”
This evening, sensing Meredith’s presence, if at a distance, Agatha didn’t glance up but shut the album casually, and put it away beneath a pile of books on her table. And later, the album had vanished.
Though Meredith had never been the willful sort of child to behave, unobserved, in any way other than the “good” way she’d have behaved if adults were observing, yet that night, after the Neukirchens had gone to bed, and the house was darkened by 11
P.M.
, Meredith crept back downstairs to search for the album, which she located in a bureau drawer at the farther end of the living room. Breathlessly she lifted it out, and examined it by lamplight.
***MY LIFE AS A BABY***
Merry Neukirchen
Inside, the first page was shell-pink as the interior of a baby’s tender ear. Beneath a photo of a red-flushed infant with black Eskimo-hair and flat features, mouth opened in a distended wail, were block letters lovingly printed in a wide-tipped black felt pen:
MEREDITH RUTH NEUKIRCHEN
“MERRY”
8 LBS. 3 OUNCES
BORN SEPTEMBER 21, 1957
CARTHAGE GENERAL HOSPITAL
CARTHAGE, NEW YORK
USA
PROUD PARENTS
AGATHA RUTH HINDLE
KONRAD ERNEST NEUKIRCHEN
In stunned silence Meredith turned the stiff pages of the bulging album. For here were not only dozens—hundreds—of snapshots of the infant girl but snapshots of a much-younger Agatha with braided brown-burnished hair, sweetly shy smile, and lovely large eyes; and there was handsome Konrad, without a beard—Konrad, younger than you could imagine he’d ever been! Sometimes a beaming Agatha held Baby Merry, sometimes a beaming Konrad held Baby Merry, and sometimes both Agatha and Konrad held Baby Merry, arms around each other’s waist. But Baby Merry was in all the photographs without fail.
And how happy the proud parents were! Meredith felt that sliver of ice pierce her heart, she’d felt in Friendship Park. That sense of loss, isolation, aloneness.
No pictures of Mudgirl! Not one.
So many snapshots had been taken of the infant, you had to suppose the parents were tracking her day to day; but gradually the red-faced infant metamorphosed into a plump dimpled baby, and then a plump dimpled toddler, then a pretty child of three, or four—the flat Eskimo features vanished, replaced by a rosy-skinned snub-nosed face that was a likeness of Agatha’s face with something in the quizzical slant of the eyes and eyebrows that replicated Konrad; the black hair vanished, replaced by fair, brown hair with a slight curl, very like Agatha’s hair. There were birthday celebrations:
First Month—First Six Months—First Year—Second Year—Third Year—Fourth . . .
Birthday cakes, Christmas trees, gaily wrapped gifts—stuffed toys, dolls, tricycle, wagon—black patent leather shoes, little white socks—snowsuits, mittens, fuzzy caps—pajamas, slippers—fair-brown wavy hair in braids, like Meredith’s when she’d first come to live with the Neukirchens, and tied with the identical pink velvet bow. And there were the storybooks from which beaming Agatha was reading to the rapt-listening little Merry:
Tales of Mother Goose, The Wind in the Willows, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Heidi . . .
Meredith closed the album, carefully. Not a single loose snapshot fell out.
In the bureau drawer she replaced the album exactly as it had been so no one would ever, ever know that this book with its precious mementos had been disturbed by any intruder.
S
omewhere distinguished, like Cornell.
In secret she prepared her escape.
Preparing college applications Meredith would spend a minimum amount of time on the forms for the State University branches—Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton—which trained teachers of the sort the Neukirchens believed their daughter would be, one day; most of the time she spent on the application for Cornell, that loomed large in her imagination like the Alps in a child’s picturebook, more wonderful even than actual photographs of the campus she’d studied in a brochure in the high school guidance counsellor’s office.
Not the teachers’ colleges. Not you. Somewhere distinguished, like . . .
The Neukirchens had told Meredith—somewhat vaguely—that tuition to private universities was “too high”—and certainly the Cornell tuition was many times more than tuition at the state-run schools; in this way the Neukirchens had discouraged any discussion of Cornell, for Meredith would hardly have dared to oppose her loving parents. Now, applying in secret to Cornell, she instructed herself not to be disappointed, not to be hurt even as she urged herself to believe, to hope—
Maybe it will happen! A scholarship.
She had taken the State Regents’ exam. She didn’t yet know her scores and had to hope that they were high enough to offset the poor reputation of the Carthage school.
Not even its administrators and faculty believed that Carthage High was a very good school. The most impressive teacher on the staff, Hans Schneider, had departed, hurriedly, and had been replaced by an affable middle-aged woman with a degree in “math education” from Buffalo State College; in her classes rowdier students were frequently out of control and A-students, like Meredith, sat coiled with embarrassment and boredom in their seats as the teacher stumbled through the more difficult math problems, squeaking chalk on the blackboard.
When the teacher was most desperate, Meredith raised her hand to help out—of course. But Meredith never came to the blackboard any longer—the new teacher had never once thought of asking her.
It was so—even the rowdy students missed Mr. Schneider. Even the poorer students who’d disliked him. Or so they allowed his bumbling substitute to know, out of adolescent cruelty.
Often now Meredith thought of Hans Schneider. He had vanished from Carthage, so far as she knew—none of the other teachers would comment when asked, or perhaps they didn’t know.
She did recall, Konrad had mentioned he’d been hospitalized in Watertown. But that was more than a year ago.
Meredith could not believe that Hans Schneider had died—that was one of the rumors. Or that he’d been sent to a
mental hospital.
Still less could she believe that he’d “fled to Germany”—this was another, ridiculous rumor.
In her most secret times alone in her room while downstairs her parents watched TV—she found it comforting to hear them laughing, Konrad’s robust laughter in particular, but she wasn’t drawn to joining them, any longer—vividly Meredith recalled the math teacher with his thin beaky face, his twitchy smile, his fierce gaze, fixed upon
her.
For it was rare, any man or boy fixed his gaze upon
her.
If she was very still she could summon back his voice—
You did not live a child’s life. You could wait for me. We—you and I—could have an agreement like a—contract.
At the time she’d been astonished, frightened. Now hearing the words she felt her bones turn molten, her breath come quickly. Now in solitude she tested the words
I love you Mr. Schneider.
Like tasting a rare spice, that would sting her mouth belatedly, after she’d swallowed.
I love you, too.
In secret she’d saved money from after-school jobs and the small allowance the Neukirchens gave her, to send a money order for twenty-five dollars, for the Cornell admission fee. Twenty-five dollars was not a trivial amount of money for her, she was gambling to win, reckless. A toss of the dice, reckless! Her reasoning was that the Neukirchens would never know how she was betraying them—“Unless I win a scholarship.”
May 2003
S
miling in the new, tight way she welcomed them into Charters House. She knew—
They are the enemy. But I can befriend them, perhaps I can persuade them.
Too late she would realize that he—the man who despised her, the man who was her
enemy
—must have organized this delegation of University colleagues, to hide himself among them. To be invited—“warmly welcomed”—to meet with the president of the University at this unorthodox hour—to discuss “urgent matters”—to “appeal, reason” with M. R. Neukirchen who had—allegedly—(for this was a rumor, solely)—declined even to discuss the possibility of accepting a contribution of
thirty-five million dollars!—
from a major American corporate sponsor—on
political grounds.
“Not political. Moral.”
More stridently she spoke than she’d intended. And more steely the stitched smile, that caused her (still somewhat bruised, swollen) lower face to pucker, not very becomingly.
Of course, they would point out that the moral is political. The political is moral. Every “major action” of M.R.’s presidency had been “steeped” in her political ideology that had become “increasingly non-negotiable, unilateral”—“dictatorial.”
Dictatorial!
M.R. laughed in surprise, of course this was a—joke.
Even for a conservative enemy—such an accusation had to be a joke.
The delegation of “concerned colleagues”—faces M.R. recognized of course—most of them—several were startling to her, she had not seen these friends in a very long time—(since her inauguration, possibly)—in such close quarters—wanted her to know that their appeal to her was “informal, improvised”—they were most eager for her to know this—as they wanted her to know that they were “concerned for her health, her well-being”—in the University community there were ever-proliferating rumors that M.R. was “overworked, exhausted”—“under enormous stress”—that she’d had “health issues”—which made M.R. laugh also, for it was such a cliché, and such a slander!
You would not approach a man in my position, would you. Only that I am a woman—you would dare to approach me, but not a man.
While a part of her sharp-flashing mind was registering, still, this mild shock—faces of individuals she’d believed to be her friends, friends among the faculty, supporters of M. R. Neukirchen, their presence among the others was upsetting to her, she did not want to think of it as
betrayal.
And there was Kroll. Of course, Kroll.
(Had it happened, M.R. had lost her friends? One by one, lost her friends? Like a sack of gold-dust, and there’s a small hole in the sack, and the gold-dust trails away, and is lost, at last and finally, terribly
lost.
)
M.R. was concerned: she hadn’t asked the University’s chief legal counsel if she should see these people. And now, too late!
Surely Lockhardt would have advised against this late-night meeting with its disarming air of ex officio. He’d have pointed out to M.R. that most of these self-styled “delegates” were the usual conservative faculty members of long standing and thus her opponents and not as they’d described themselves as
your loyal opposition
—to inveigle her into meeting with them, politely listening to them, and not rather telling them bluntly—as M. R. Neukirchen never would, of course—to
go away, to go to Hell.
At least, not one of them had brought up the issue of Alexander Stirk. M.R. wanted to think that it was beginning to be accepted, in the University community, that she had behaved responsibly and that it had not been her fault that the undergraduate had been more emotionally unstable than anyone had suspected.
But Leonard Lockhardt was no longer M.R.’s friend. Amid the vast University network of
trustees, billionaire donors, prestigious and influential alums
that constituted the true University, as distinct from the public’s awareness of the University, Lockhardt was conspiring against her—she knew.
He’d wanted to be president, himself! Of course.
Everyone must have known this. Except naïve “M.R.”
Whatever they were asking her—asking of her—whatever “appeal” making of her in this unconvincing display of collegiality—M.R. had no need to listen, as she’d blundered listening to, for instance, the undergraduate Stirk who’d come into her Salvager Hall office
wired.
Instigated by Heidemann, very likely. And Heidemann’s willing crony Kroll.
“You know—you can leave now. This insulting ‘confrontation’ is over.”
Delicious little poison toads, leaping from M.R.’s mouth! But M.R. had not uttered them really for her throat was too dry.
Or if she had, no one heard. No one would acknowledge.
“Well—thank you! All of you! It’s late, I have to get up early, you’ve made your point—points—thank you for your ‘concern’ for my ‘well-being’—but—”
Maybe these harsh-rasping words, M.R. was speaking aloud. And altogether reasonably for the hour was late: near midnight.
Several of her visitors were women and these women smiled at M.R.—wanting M.R. to know
Please listen! We are your friends Meredith.
And there was Kroll in their midst. Kroll who stalked and plagued M.R. with unwanted e-mails
You are making mistakes, Meredith! Please listen to me please may I see you, I am your friend.
She’d taken the measure of blocking Kroll’s e-mails. If his e-mail server registered such rebuffs, he would know.
She hated his politics. She was morally repelled by his politics.
Most of these “delegates” had political beliefs that were offensive to her—she’d gone beyond arguing with them as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were escalating—these defenders of the
war against terror
.
She wondered what cruel tales Kroll told of her, when she’d been emotionally vulnerable to him, foolishly involved with him in another lifetime it seemed—in M.R.’s youth.
Kroll and his older and yet more infamous colleague—Heidemann.
It was terrible, intolerable to her—G. Leddy Heidemann had entered her house. Beside Heidemann, Oliver Kroll was a
political centrist.
But where—where was Heidemann? M.R. looked for him, alarmed.
She was certain she’d seen Heidemann enter Charters House with the others. He would be the eldest amid the contingent, as he was the most “renowned.”
The University’s most conspicuous right-wing faculty member—the “architect”/“moral conscience” of the misbegotten wars against “terror”—adviser to the secretary of defense and, it was boasted, or anyway rumored, now an intimate friend of the vice president.
A burly barrel-chested man of over six feet, now in his late sixties beginning to collapse like a balloon that is slowly deflating, yet vigorous still, tireless; consumed by a taste for fame, M.R. thought must be akin to a taste for blood—once acquired, it becomes an obsession.
She thought
Heidemann will use me to catapult himself yet higher. He will persecute me, he will make a shambles of a great university.
And yet—was Heidemann here? With the others? Unless he was seated in such a way that M.R. couldn’t see him—and considering Heidemann’s heft, this was unlikely—he didn’t appear to be in the room.
Yet: she was sure she’d shaken the man’s big, bruising, somehow mocking hand—unavoidably.
“M.R.”! How very kind of you to invite us. How very—liberal-minded.
Her brain worked like flashing blades. But the flashing was dazzling, blinding. Even as she was remembering that Heidemann had come with the others, but was not now visible to her, she was forgetting that Heidemann had come with the others, but was not now visible to her.
“I think—you’ve all been very kind, thoughtful—except that you’re really not qualified to comment on these issues since they are confidential—only the board of trustees and a very few others—in the administration—are aware of . . . what you are suggesting. And so—I think—I think our meeting is over—thank you so very much.”
These coolly poised words M.R. did speak aloud. She was certain!
Webs of fiery itching across her midriff, her back—between her shoulder blades—she wanted so very badly to tear at with her nails, but could not. For the
loyal opposition
stared at her like an audience dumbly transfixed by a reckless high-wire performer.
Walking with them—you might almost say, herding them—in the direction of the front foyer, and the door.
“Good night! Good-bye!”
She did not slam the door behind them. Quietly and calmly she shut the door behind them, and turned the bolt.
Vast waves of relief flooding over her, she’d gotten rid of her unwanted visitors who had stared at her so rudely, and had insulted her with their ignorant remarks.
Belatedly realizing—she was only partly dressed, and she was
barefoot
!
H
ow silent the house was! The mausoleum—the
museum.
It is an error to live alone. And to travel through the nebulae, alone.
For the heart hardens, like volcanic ore. So hard, so brittle and dry, the merest breath will crumple it to dust.
She was breathing quickly. Her hair was in her face, her eyelashes stuck together like glue. And the itching, now her nails could scratch, scratch and scratch, and what relief—to draw blood.
Yet—was she alone? She had an uneasy sense that she was not alone in Charters House.
The instinct to survive is the most basic of instincts and so she was thinking
I am in danger—I think. Someone is here.
She’d counted twelve, thirteen people—at least. Uninvited and unwanted intruders of whom only eleven had left.
Heidemann had come with the others! G. Leddy Heidemann, she remembered now.
It seemed evident to M.R. that Heidemann had manipulated the others into forming this “delegation” to speak with her. In secret they had wanted to speak with M.R., in confidence, to “respect her privacy,” and so they had not made an appointment to see M.R. during her office hours at Salvager Hall.
No one so hateful as Heidemann! From the first he’d disliked M. R. Neukirchen for being, it seemed, a woman; a woman on the University faculty, with a Harvard Ph.D.; a woman whose lecture course in the history of philosophy became unexpectedly popular, and drew students who might otherwise—(so Heidemann believed)—have enrolled in his (notoriously flamboyant, “popular”) lecture course in the history of political philosophy. When Heidemann had been appointed to the University faculty in the early 1960s he’d been a liberal—an activist supporter of the Great Society—but after the tumultuous year 1968 he’d reacted against all civil disobedience, civil unrest—the “Greening of America.” Generations of University undergraduates had passed through Heidemann’s infamous lecture course extolling the wisdom of the “three Thomases”—Hobbes, Malthus, (Saint) Aquinas—as well as William Buckley and the late “martyred” senator Joseph McCarthy; for years he’d maintained an Internet site called
MYTHBREAKERS, INC.
with links to Holocaust-denial sites. Like a fat spider the man had sucked at the life’s-blood of the young and naïve and in the process he’d become a University “character”—perversely admired even by students who thought his politics were fascistic and his moral absolutism quaintly irrelevant.
Since the early 1970s Heidemann had opposed every effort of the University to hire women, minority faculty, gay faculty. He’d opposed any extension of “University government”—psychological counseling, student aid and loans, free birth control, summer internship programs. He’d opposed smoking bans in public places on campus, he’d opposed the (anti-rape) Take Back the Night rallies, he’d opposed day care centers, he’d opposed even handicapped parking in University lots, that was mandated by New Jersey state law. He refused to define himself as a conservative, still less a reactionary—he was a
civil libertarian.
Much of Heidemann’s public behavior, M.R. thought, was flamboyant and exhibitionist—he couldn’t believe most of the outlandish things he said, she was sure. In this, he resembled his alleged hero Joseph McCarthy. He had a wife—whom no one ever saw. He’d had children—who’d grown up, and moved away, and were rumored rarely to return. He was sixty-nine and had vowed never to retire—for, under federal law, there was no longer mandatory retirement at the University. In the chaotic and poisonous aftermath of 9/11 he’d leapt into the fray, with his Ivy League credentials, to publish Op-Ed pieces in the
New York Times
and articles in prominent journals arguing that the war against “Terrorist Islam” was a more urgent war than World War II had been because the Nazis were not in opposition to Christianity as the Muslims were. Heidemann’s vision of a “Christian-crusader-nation” had been immensely appealing to conservatives in the Republican Party. He’d made himself famous on right-wing cable channels by translating the most extreme terms of the Cold War to contemporary times—as the “demonic” Soviet Union had plotted to destroy the Free Christian World, so the “demonic” Muslim world plotted to destroy the Free Christian World, beginning with the United States.
Heidemann’s views on abortion, birth control, “sexual promiscuity” and the dangers of “secular progressivism” had surely had an injurious effect upon the impressionable Alexander Stirk.
M.R. thought
But I must not think of him. I must not make myself sick.
“B
ut I will.
I will do this.
”
Just before her unwanted visitors had come to the house, intermittently through much of that very busy day at Salvager Hall, M.R. had been revising “The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism.’ ”
This impassioned speech would be M.R.’s cri de coeur. She would not be prevented from giving it—she would not be
censored.
Two hundred years of tradition! The University president delivers the commencement address, not an invited speaker, certainly not a celebrity.