Joyce Oates - Mudwoman

Probably, Oliver Kroll had encouraged him. For this was our war, an early skirmish.

M.R.’s face flushed with heat. She hoped she had not spoken recklessly—said something incriminating—during the course of their conversation. In a mild panic she wondered—could her remarks to Alexander Stirk be broadcast, posted on the Web? Without her permission? Weren’t there laws regulating unauthorized tapings of private conversations? Was this in fact a private conversation? Had the University president a reasonable expectation of privacy, in such an exchange with a student? Her heart was beating painfully and her face throbbed with heat as if she’d been slapped.

Stirk said impudently, “And what if it is being recorded, President Neukirchen? I’m only trying to protect myself—no one can expect fair treatment—‘justice’—from their enemies. I will have to build my case using the weapons I can.”

M.R. was on her feet behind the massive presidential desk. M.R. who had never been known to raise her voice, to betray upset or agitation, still less anger or dislike, staring at the smirking boy as if she’d have liked now to hit him.

“You weren’t really ‘attacked’—were you? You’ve fabricated the entire incident—you injured yourself—filed a false report to the police—”

Hotly Stirk protested: “I did not. How dare you—insult me—slander me! How dare you accuse me of—‘fabricating’—”

“Well—did you? You did.”

Never once in this austere presidential office—not once in her months—years—at the University—had M. R. Neukirchen spoken in so uncalculated a voice, with such vehemence; never once had her face betrayed any emotion so extreme as annoyance, still less dislike, repugnance. The effect upon Stirk was immediate—his pinched little boy’s face contorted with rage and in a sudden tantrum he overturned the chair in which he’d been sitting.

M.R. cried angrily, “Stop! Stop that! You aren’t a child!”

M.R. cringed as Stirk lifted the crutch to strike at the desk, or at her—he swept a stack of documents onto the floor—a small ceramic bowl containing pens, paper clips—M.R. tried to grab the crutch, to wrench it from Stirk’s fingers—Stirk gave a loud yelp as if she’d struck him—a yelp as of surprised pain—“Hey! Jesus! What’re you doing—that hurts”—for the benefit of the recording device in his corduroy jacket.

“But I didn’t—I didn’t—”

“Didn’t what, President Neukirchen? Hit me? You didn’t—hit me?”

As M.R. stared in astonishment the gloating boy stuck his tongue out at her. His tongue! Within these swift and irretrievable seconds the conversation M.R. had believed so forthright had shifted to farce, and President Neukirchen was the butt of the farce. Quivering with mischief Stirk fitted the crutch into his armpit and turned to limp out of the office just as the door was being opened by the president’s secretary whom he pushed aside with the crutch, laughing—“Here’s a witness! Another female! Expect a subpoena, lady!”

Limping noisily and conspicuously through the president’s outer office Alexander Stirk departed historic Salvager Hall like a sequence of mallet strokes against a just barely unyielding hardwood floor.

So it would be shortly charged: not only had M. R. Neukirchen tried to “censor” Alexander Stirk, the woman had actually—in some sort of “scuffle” in the president’s office—struck him.

In some versions of the lurid story, she’d struck him with the injured undergraduate’s very crutch.

Should have known. Hadn’t she been warned.

This is a war. There are enemies.

Her heart beat in her ears. Barely she could hear the man addressing her, in an air of scarcely concealed exasperation.

Lockhardt had been chief counsel for the University for more than thirty years. Presidents of the University had inherited him as they’d inherited the presidential office itself—its austere furnishings and leather-bound books, the portrait of grim Reverend Charters above the fireplace mantel. Lockhardt’s manner was unapologetically patrician—he had virtually no presence in the consciousness of the University faculty but his presence was essential to the board of trustees who looked to him as the president’s key adviser, beside whom the president could seem but a temporary and expedient hireling.

Before taking office M.R. had imagined that she might encourage Leonard Lockhardt to retire and in his place she’d hire a younger attorney of her own generation and liberal convictions but as soon as she’d become president M.R. had known how she needed the man, his experience, his influence with trustees and “major” donors. He’d graduated from the University with a degree in classics in 1955 and he’d gone to Harvard Law and like most graduates of his generation he’d been opposed to the appointment of a female president at the University, though M.R. wasn’t supposed to know this.

He was a bachelor. His long lean cheeks were clean-shaven and he exuded an airy sexless good cheer in all weathers. He wore suits tailored for him in Bond Street, London, long-sleeved linen and cotton shirts, bow ties. Can’t trust a man who wears a bow tie M.R.’s father Konrad Neukirchen used to say but M.R. had no choice, she had to trust her chief legal counsel whose thinning silvery hair was styled in 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?