Mudwoman Page 16

  Initially, M.R.’s admirers had liked her outspokenness—that was a kind of professional naïveté. But now, months into the presidency, she was expected to behave more circumspectly.

  Even with her closest friends she’d become guarded. And Andre.

  She could not fully trust even him—her lover—not to repeat remarks she made, and distort them.

  It had been sheerly good luck, that M.R. hadn’t had an opportunity to deliver the fiery anti-war speech she’d planned at the Society of Learned Societies conference. Sheerly good luck, her rented car had skidded and overturned in a ditch in a desolate region of Beechum County.

  The talk, at which she’d labored for so long, had been laced with irony like a toxic filigree. Irony wasn’t M.R.’s characteristic mode of speech and not one recommended for a university president who depended upon the goodwill of the academic community to persevere. Leonard Lockhardt, who’d read M.R.’s speech after she’d failed to deliver it, had been surprised and disapproving. (And Lockhardt was himself an old-style liberal, who’d come of age politically in the era of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.) If she’d given that speech, and if it had been published, or made its way onto the Internet—what a blunder, for a president in her first year in office!

  Yes; better that M.R. had had her mysterious “accident” and disappeared from view for an interlude of more than twelve hours, never satisfactorily explained.

  “Has your staff gone home for the night? This place is enormous . . . It must be like living in a museum. . . .”

  Kroll spoke lightly, distractedly. It was clear that he was upset—his small squinty eyes glanced about, his mouth was fixed in a tight little smile.

  He didn’t seem to hear M.R.’s offer to take his coat—in fact, a suede jacket—streaked and darkened with melting snow—nor did M.R. repeat the offer.

  “No. I don’t ‘live’ here. I have a private apartment—you could call it an apartment—on the second floor.”

  Just to set Kroll straight. Private.

  She’d led her visitor along the dimly lighted front hall to the wood-paneled library at the rear of the house. Most of the house was darkened—in the large public rooms opening off the hall were antique furnishings, carpets, chandeliers just barely visible.

  In the library, there was a faint chill moonlit glisten to the dark-polished hardwood floor. Beyond latticed windows which by day overlooked a flagstone terrace, a landscaped English garden and a long sweep of lawn there was darkness, oblivion. M.R. switched on the overhead light—lights. A massive chandelier and smaller wall-lamps. Leather chairs, sofas, small tables were revealed in arrangements like giant chess pieces on the brink of being played.

  “Please sit down. Here.”

  She had not called him Oliver. Her throat shut against the name she could not bring herself to utter.

  They sat by a massive pale-marble fireplace inscribed with the stirring words MAGNA EST VERITAS ET PRAEVALET. The fireplace was at least five feet in height, six feet in width, with brass andirons, perfectly positioned birch logs and not a trace of ashes. M.R. could not recall a fire in this fireplace, nor had she ever sat like this, with any visitor, in front of the fireplace. Like so much else in the University the library was named for a wealthy donor and was lined floor-to-ceiling with books in handsome leather-bound editions at which no one ever glanced though there were rare first editions on the shelves.

  The thought came to her, a mocking sort of thought—If we’d been married. Where would we live? Here?

  Uncannily—as if he’d been reading her thoughts, or had sensed the drift of her thoughts—Kroll asked if M.R. still had her place on the lake.

  For a moment M.R. seemed not to know what Kroll meant, then she said no, she’d only rented the house.

  There was more to explain perhaps but M.R. had no wish to pursue a personal conversation with Oliver Kroll.

  “That was—is—a quite nice house.”

  Kroll’s tone was wistful, subdued. If Kroll expected M.R. to reply to this offhand remark, he was mistaken.

  M.R. was thinking of how she’d removed the Joshua Reynolds portrait from the wall, and disposed of it in the trash. The pale-blue hydrangea had died a natural death.

  Kroll had called her, left messages. M.R. hadn’t answered. He’d sent e-mails, which she’d deleted without reading. No more! She wasn’t so naïve she would give the man the opportunity to hurt her again.

  Abruptly then Kroll had ceased trying to contact her. Out of spite perhaps he’d cashed the check for $350 as out of spite—perhaps—he’d taken up so publicly the conservative cause he’d scorned years before. In rebuke of M. R. Neukirchen and other campus liberals whom he held in such contempt.

  Unless—this was more likely—M.R. had nothing to do with her former lover’s political pronouncements, as she’d had nothing to do with his life for the past decade.

  As if reluctantly—for there was no escaping the subject that had propelled him here—Kroll asked if M.R. had heard anything further from Alexander Stirk and M.R. said guardedly that if Kroll meant since the report of the assault, and since her meeting with him in her office, no she had not.

  “Alexander has asked me not to ‘make it public’—he’s going to do that himself. But I wanted to tell you tonight, I thought you should know.”

  “Know—what?”

  “It turns out he’d done something like this before—that is, he’d accused classmates of attacking him, at his prep school in Connecticut. The Griffith School—you didn’t know?”

  M.R. stammered no. Of course—she had not known.

  “Alexander is a very bright boy. But obviously he’s troubled. He’s had some sort of crisis since I’d known him—since he was my student two years ago. It’s related to his being ‘gay’—being ‘conservative’ on this campus—but also to his family, his father. He’d been sent to the Griffith School where his father had gone and he hadn’t been able to adjust, he said—he’d been ‘persecuted’ by other students, and his teachers hadn’t seemed to be sympathetic—so—he’d sent threatening e-mails to himself, he’d put a sign on the door of his room—‘Die Fag!’ He trashed his room, mangled his books. It sounds as if he had a nervous breakdown, by his account. Anyway, he was discovered to be fabricating the ‘persecution’—at least, its outward signs. He was suspended from Griffith and required to have psychotherapy before he was allowed back and when he applied here, all this was expunged from his record. He was very emotional confessing all this to me, tonight—he says he is ‘so ashamed’—his former roommates are ‘outing’ him online—‘exposing’ him to the media, since they’d found out about the alleged assault here.” Kroll spoke rapidly and flatly with an air of detachment—if he was upset, he didn’t want to reveal it.

  “But—does this mean he fabricated the assault, too?”

  “He claims no. He claims that the ‘assault’ really happened.”

  M.R. had been listening in astonishment. If the assault had been fabricated—as she’d suspected—was this good news? Good for the University, at least?

  “When Alexander came into my office hobbling on his damned crutch—just a few hours ago—he said, in this sick-guilty voice, ‘I have something to tell you, Professor Kroll’—and I said, ‘You made it up, didn’t you? The assault.’ He looked at me as if I’d kicked him—‘Noooo I didn’t make that up. They tried to kill me—that happened. But I did make up—something else.’ So he told me about the Griffith School, and his former roommates going online, he was crying, almost hysterical, but he swore that the assault the other night was ‘real’—he was worried now that no one would believe him. This news about Griffith just about knocked me out of my chair—I was stunned. Of course I didn’t tell Alexander—the township police have already been suspicious of his story. They were questioning me pretty frankly—‘Does this kid have a history of making false accusations?’ ‘How wel
l do you know this kid?’ Anything to do with ‘gay issues’—cops are suspicious and definitely not sympathetic. Alexander has been changing his account of what happened to him, evidently. The cops think that his injuries may be ‘self-inflicted’—they didn’t buy his story of witnesses walking away. And when he called me from the hospital, and I came over, there were things that didn’t make sense to me—but I didn’t want to seem suspicious of him, he did appear to have been hurt and obviously he was very upset. Now, I don’t know what to think. Or rather, I know what to think—but I don’t want to turn against him, he’ll have no one. His father is a wealthy businessman he claims is a friend of Jeb Bush. His friends here—he doesn’t have many—are going to feel betrayed. In the YAF, they’ll feel that he’s a traitor. They won’t be sympathetic with some fucked-up kid having a mental breakdown and going online with it.” Kroll laughed harshly. M.R. could see that he was deeply moved, and repelled; it was his sympathy for the stricken and now accursed Alexander Stirk that repelled him.

  In a grim sneering voice Kroll said that Stirk had asked him to write letters of recommendation for him, for law school—“Of course I did. And very ‘positive’ letters, too! Now, I feel like an utter asshole. And he’s fucked—or will be, if it comes out he’s lying—again.”

  M.R. passed a hand over her eyes. She should have felt relief but she registered only a dull shock as of gunfire muffled by distance. “But this is terrible—he’s unwell. He needs help. . . .”

  “He’s beyond help, if he’s lying about the ‘assault.’ You don’t fuck with the police—they’ll charge him with filing a false report.”

  Kroll spoke with grim satisfaction. M.R. saw that the man cared for his own position, his own reputation and pride, and not so much for the welfare of his student.

  “Now, no one will believe him—about anything. Anyone could hurt him.” Strange for M.R. to make such an observation, at such a time. But Kroll took no notice.

  “I asked the police about that—if it turns out he’s lying. Any kind of ‘gay’ issue to them—they said—‘raises flags.’ ”

  Raises flags. M.R. had a vision of flags tattered and weatherworn whipping in a hostile wind.

  She thought that Kroll might leave now: this was a natural time for Kroll to leave.

  Or, she might offer Kroll a drink, belatedly. She might invite the man to remove his suede jacket that must be unpleasantly damp, and heavy, and warm.

  Kroll was staring into the shadowy interior of the massive pale-marble fireplace. Beyond the gleaming brass andirons there was—nothing.

  Kroll began to speak, at times brokenly, of Alexander Stirk. He’d been drawn to the boy when Stirk was a sophomore enrolled in Kroll’s honors seminar in political theory—he’d been impressed by the boy’s passionately written essays and after-class discussions. Here was a purely—precociously—intellectual undergraduate of a kind rarely encountered even at the University, where admission requirements were famously high. That Alexander was so boyishly eager, so (evidently) sexless, or asexual, yet at the same time so (seemingly) “gay”—(a term Kroll found particularly offensive)—was just one aspect of his uniqueness; one facet of his woundedness and pain, and of his virtuoso manipulation of his woundedness and pain. Kroll thought it was courageous of Stirk to turn his “gayness” inside out, so to speak—to make of it part of his identity, not a part to be hidden. Among conservatives, of course “gayness”—“homosexuality”—is an issue—in the Catholic church, to which Stirk belonged, it was particularly an issue. “It’s as if Alexander chose to make gayness a weapon to bludgeon his enemies—his ‘liberal’ enemies—and also his father. Yet—the kid wants to impress his father, too. He was always inviting me to visit him—to meet his father. The political is always personal, in adolescents.”

  M.R. was thinking In a counter-world this boy is our son. Misbegotten and wayward, because we abandoned him.

  An utterly absurd thought! So swiftly it passed through M.R.’s brain like a short piece of string through the eye of a needle, and was lost.

  “Is there any truth to the rumor—the ugly rumor—Alexander hinted at in his newspaper column—that a woman student had had a very late-term abortion?”

  “Yes, of course. In everything Alexander has said there is a residue—some residue—of truth.”

  They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. To avoid looking at each other, they stared into the fireplace that contained no fire, nor even the memory of a fire.

  “If I hadn’t behaved so stupidly . . . ”

  Kroll’s voice trailed off. M.R. wasn’t going to finish his sentence for him.

  Was he thinking—they might be together, now? Might have been together, as a couple, for the past decade? Was this possible? Could this ever have been possible? And if possible, would M.R. be residing in this museum-mansion, with Professor Kroll as a husband?

  Not very likely. This was a counter-world impossible to imagine.

  M. R. Neukirchen had been—until just recently, at least—a highly successful administrator precisely because she hadn’t been married, hadn’t had a family to distract her, or a domestic life of any scale—loneliness had galvanized her, and a fierce unswerving wish to go forward as along a very narrow plank over a raging river.

  Maybe she’d fallen in love with Andre Litovik, as the unattainable male. Maybe, her (secret) lover was the prime mover of M.R.’s adult life.

  Remembering how, removing the portrait of Jane, Countess of Harrington from her wall in the rented house, removing the poster from the expensive frame, she’d crumpled and torn it, and felt a surge of relief and elation—then, suddenly, sorrow.

  Something had clawed at her chest. Had she loved Kroll despite all her resistance? Or had her feeling for him been, from the start, sheer desperation?

  “Of course, if that had been—you wouldn’t be here in this house, Meredith. Probably.”

  Kroll spoke dryly, with his TV air of bemusement. It was a tone cultivated to maintain the demeanor of control as the spiky-sharp beard was a disguise that both hid and protected the vulnerable face beneath.

  With a sound between a grunt and a sigh Kroll heaved himself to his feet. He’d gained weight, even his close-shaven head looked thicker, more solid. As if his back had stiffened, and was giving him pain, he stretched his arms, and yawned, somewhat boorishly—as if in mockery of their former intimacy.

  “Well! Tomorrow all this will be out, I hope. Or most of it.”

  M.R. was still sitting, rather stunned. She would be sleepless most of the night, considering what Kroll had been kind enough to tell her.

  For he’d come to her, and he’d informed her—he’d had her best interests in mind. That Professor Kroll was M.R.’s political adversary did not preclude his behaving gallantly toward her.

  “Oliver, thank you so much! This can’t have been easy for you.”

  It was M.R.’s presidential voice, warmly bright, earnest. If there was more to be said, this voice would not speak it.

  M.R. led her midnight visitor to the front door. Retracing their steps along the long somber hallway where underfoot was an Oriental-carpet runner and overhead lights that cast unflattering shadows downward onto their faces rendering them masklike with exaggerated eye sockets, brackets beside mouths. In the foyer a spectacular Irish-crystal chandelier was still on, as if for a festive occasion that had gone wrong. And the outside light, that M.R. had hurried to switch on just before Kroll drove up to park in the circular drive just beyond the front steps.

  “Well—Meredith. Good night.”

  “Good night! And again—thank you so much.”

  In the effort of opening the door, M.R. was spared having to look into the man’s face—his eyes. She held the door open for her departing visitor, a massive antique-oak door with a wrought-iron eagle knocker which all who entered Charters House paused to admire, though Kroll took no notice of it. He
had only to step outside and M.R. would shut and lock the door behind him.

  Kroll stepped outside. Snow fell thinly, wetly. There was a sharp fresh smell as of marrow spilled from bone, unexpectedly moist and cleansing and this seemed to M.R. the very smell of late-night, solitude and deserted streets and large stone houses emptied of all inhabitants save one.

  M.R. didn’t watch Kroll stride to his car, drive away. She’d switched off the outside light even as he was switching on his car headlights.

  He could still come back. A pretext of more to say, or . . .

  Upstairs in her private quarters preparing for bed—at last—M.R. would wonder suddenly—did he still drive that low-slung sleek luxury car—what was it called—Jaguar? She had not noticed.