Mudwoman Read online

  “What is ‘Rotunda,’ Daddy? I’m just curious.”

  “Rotunda! You will see, Friday night, if you are still here. Summertime concerts in Friendship Park, in the ‘rotunda.’ I only give them about one hundred dollars a summer, the concerts are free and sometimes not bad.”

  As if a dangerous path had been avoided they returned home by way of the parallel street—Hill Street—another, slightly newer bridge.

  “ ‘I loaf and invite my soul.’ ”

  “You do? Really?”

  “Daddy, it’s a line from a poem—Whitman.”

  “Is it?”

  “Daddy, you’ve quoted it yourself.”

  “I did? Well, that was clever of me.”

  Still she was sleeping through the night. Sleep like the most exquisite blanketing of snow—powder-snow, feather-snow, Milky Way stardust-snow. Sleep that was soundless, speechless. Sleep of the kind she’d so envied in her astronomer-lover, the few times they had slept together through a night.

  Even when he’d been stirred and disturbed by dreams, Andre never waked.

  And in the morning, Andre never remembered.

  Ten hours or more, she slept. Especially if rain drummed against the roof and the windows—the most blissful sleep. Sometimes it was the red-setter “rescue dog” who nudged the door of her bedroom open, trotting to her as she slept her heavy stuporous sleep and touching his chill damp nose against her face to wake her, concerned that she might not be able to wake otherwise.

  “How lazy I’m becoming! I scarcely know myself.”

  For it was so, like one in an oarless and rudderless boat borne by a gentle current downstream, M.R. had entered a new region of the soul, scarcely contiguous with her old life, where her heartbeat seemed slower, and more measured; where she found herself, for minutes at a time, gazing into space—unlike her astronomer-lover who was searching restlessly for something in the Universe, M.R. had no object for scrutiny; where she could remain seated for minutes at a time without being active, and without even thinking much except in the most immediately expedient of ways: which vegetables—eggplant, broccoli, zucchini—to prepare for dinner while Konrad grilled hamburgers on the rear, brick terrace; whether to take Konrad’s car to the garage for the soon-due state inspection, or assume that Konrad would do this himself, eventually; what to take as an appropriate gift—(“Wine is out of the question, don’t even ask”)—when she and Konrad went to visit one of Konrad’s several widow-friends who’d invited them to dinner.

  M.R. had learned that her bachelor-father was a very popular man in Carthage. From his years at the county courthouse he’d made seemingly hundreds of friends, there were neighbors eager to invite him to outdoor barbecues, there was a small persistent band of Agatha’s women-friends eager to feed him, clean house for him, enlist him as an escort—(“Marry me! That’s what they all want, poor girls. But Agatha would be so terribly hurt”). And there was the Carthage Vets Co-op where he was rapidly becoming an essential figure, instead of a once-weekly volunteer who picked up curbside donations in his car to bring to the co-op store, or sorted and labeled, in the company of other retirees of whom most were widows of Vietnam vets, every sort of article of clothing, household items and plain junk. And there was—this, M.R. was particularly surprised to discover, for Konrad hadn’t mentioned it previously—his trips to the Herkimer VA Hospital where he was a volunteer-helper as well.

  These activities were new, M.R. thought. Since Agatha had passed away.

  “You’re looking puzzled, dear Meredith! But Agatha is the spirit behind all this effort, you know. She had a truly charitable heart—I’d always been too lazy. But now—I am living for us both, I suppose.”

  Konrad paused, smiling. “You might come with me one day, Meredith. This very nice if hopelessly garrulous woman who runs the volunteers—the widow of a classmate of mine, who died in that very hospital a few years ago, a Korean War vet—is always looking for, as she says, ‘fresh blood.’ ”

  “I have a friend . . .”

  So casually M.R. began, it might have been the recounting of a droll and entertaining story.

  “ . . . he and his wife have a ‘mentally disabled’ son. Their lives revolve around this son, they are obsessed with him. Of course, my friend—he’s an astronomer, a quite distinguished astronomer, at Harvard—doesn’t use the term ‘obsessed’—he doesn’t use the term ‘mentally disabled.’ I’d met the son—Mikhal—just once, when he was eleven—he hadn’t seemed so very strange to me, then—just distracted, dreamy. . . . That was nineteen years ago. Now he’s in his early thirties—‘an accursed Peter Pan’ my friend—his father—calls him. He has violent temper tantrums, migraine headaches. Except Mikhal is very gifted—a virtuoso musician—pianist, violinist. He can’t read music but plays by ear. He’s a remarkable composer, too. The music he writes is staccato and dissonant but acoustic—supposedly, everything he writes has some reference to Bach. Mikhal could never work with any music teacher, though my friend and his wife tried to find a teacher for him for years. He can only listen, obsessively, hour after hour, to CDs on his headphones, saturating himself with the musical techniques of others. Mikhal’s mother is a Russian-born translator of classic texts who has devoted herself to the son—much of it, trying to find a niche for the son in the music world in Boston. And my astronomer-friend seems to know that this is probably hopeless but at the same time he has hope—he can’t not have hope—that Mikhal will improve, that some new drug or therapy will be discovered, and the beautiful boy—did I say that he was beautiful?—like his mother?—of course.”

  M.R. had been speaking slowly, even calmly. Again, she was like one who turns a heavy chunk of mineral in her fingers, trying to discern the precious streaks, or whether there are any precious streaks. Konrad, flicking a stick for panting Solomon to fetch, only just murmured to indicate that yes, he was listening.

  “If Andre—that’s my astronomer-friend’s name: Andre—is traveling, and he’s often away, at observatories, he has to speak with Mikhal every day. If Andre fails to speak with his son every day, Mikhal becomes very difficult to control. If Mikhal senses that Andre is drifting out of the range of the mother and son, some crisis will occur—a relapse in the son, a suicide attempt, admission to an emergency room; or the wife, who seems to be extremely manipulative, while also quite legitimately ‘unwell,’ might collapse and wind up in the emergency room, too. When Andre received a distinguished award from the National Society of Astronomers, in Washington, D.C., the wife—Erika is the wife’s name: I’ve never met her—had to be hospitalized with some sort of tachycardia seizure.”

  Konrad listened quietly, stroking his beard. He did not look at M.R. as she spoke in her determined calm manner and he did not look at her when her voice trailed off in a way both bemused and plaintive.

  “Andre is a—an unusual man. He has enemies, I think. But he has many friends. He’s the kind of man—it occurs to me that you, Daddy, somewhat resemble him—I’d never thought of this until now—you never truly complain, even when you’re ‘complaining’—you’re being funny. And you see the absurdity of things, like a gift for seeing cubes where other people see just flat squares. He has a kind of—well, maybe this isn’t you, Daddy, exactly—kingly manner. You imagine gold coins spilling from his pockets—he wouldn’t notice. There’s a high-energy feel about him, you want always to please him, so he’s something of a dictator—a benign dictator, I mean.” She laughed. She wiped at her eyes, laughing. More and more rapidly she was speaking, out of control like a truck careening down a steep grade; more pointedly, Konrad did not look at her but continued tossing the now wet and gnawed stick for the red-setter rescue dog to fetch.

  She’d spoken to Konrad far too openly. She felt a pang of regret, she could not retract her heedless words.

  Konrad said, not looking at her, but with a pained smile, “Well! Your astronomer-friend is very special,
I can see. But you, too, are very special, Meredith—don’t forget. And don’t forget, the future doesn’t have to be a repetition of the past. Even in the cosmos, there is nothing merely clockwork or predictable. A comet plunges out of its orbit, a meteorite plunges to Earth. Knowing what this man’s life has been, you can’t know what his life will be.” So strangely then, as M.R. would recall afterward, he added: “When a man gets older, his health isn’t so very predictable, in fact. Unhappy wives take their revenge then. The ‘difficult’ wife—the estranged wife—may not continue to love your astronomer-friend then. If, as you said, she’s younger than he is—”

  “Did I say that?”

  “I think you did, yes.”

  M.R. didn’t think so. Though it was true, Erika was younger than Andre but not nearly so much younger than Andre as M.R.

  “—she may tire of him. She may rid herself of him. He may find himself suddenly adrift in the cosmos, and needing a friend. These things can happen.”

  M.R. was astonished. What was her father saying?—suggesting?

  And how did he come by such occult knowledge, like a sage in a children’s fairy tale?

  “These insights, dear, aren’t mine—they are Agatha’s. Based upon her close observation of certain marriages here in Carthage—the ‘wandering’ husband, the ‘betrayed’ wife—the revenge such wives will take when they can.”

  “Andre Litovik isn’t ill. So far as I know, he’s—he is not ill.”

  This wasn’t true of course. Andre had numerous ailments, very likely more than M.R. knew. High blood pressure, for which he was medicated; stabbing back-pains, and muscle seizures; he was unusually susceptible to respiratory infections, and he’d injured both his knees mountain climbing and would soon need knee replacements, a surgical procedure the anticipation of which filled him with terror yet of which he spoke slightingly, laughingly.

  M.R. bit her lower lip. Already she had said more than she’d meant to say—she had not meant to speak so unguardedly.

  Konrad said: “All that I mean, my dear sweet daughter, is that things change. And we change with them. And sometimes that works for the best, though we can’t think so ahead of time.”

  Later M.R. would recall that her kindly father had not asked her what Andre Litovik meant to her, that she knew so much about the man, and seemed to care so very much.

  Don’t want to give you up, darling.

  But you can—you should—give me up.

  (In her hospital bed M.R. had heard these words of Andre’s, spoken with unusual sobriety. Of course, she’d heard. And the genuine solicitude beneath the words. As if even the predator male felt obliged to caution the female, sometimes. And the female smiling, unheeding. In the deepest sense, unhearing.)

  (Recalling that morning almost two years ago when the phone had rung in M.R.’s house on Echo Lake. Early-mid-morning and she’d been preparing a brief introduction for a visiting philosophy colleague who would be speaking at a colloquium that afternoon. And so unexpectedly, it was Andre. But Andre urgent and harried as M.R. had rarely heard him—“Turn on your TV, Meredith. Now!” And M.R. had walked without hesitation carrying the portable phone into the other room, to switch on the TV, plaintively asking, “But which channel, Andre?” and impatiently Andre had said, “Any channel! Hurry!” And M.R. had stared at the screen seeing a news footage of some kind, tall buildings issuing smoke, the twin towers of the World Trade Center afire, she was shocked, stunned, confused having no idea what she was watching and Andre had no time to fill her in—“Just know that there has been a major terrorist attack. And there will probably be more. And along with a planeful of other luckless bastards I am stranded in the airport at fucking Cleveland and have no idea when we’ll be cleared to fly back to Logan. G’bye!”

  “Andre, wait—”

  But the line had gone dead.

  And so alone in the house on Echo Lake for the next twelve hours riveted to the TV set M.R. had scarcely moved from her chair staring and trying to comprehend what she was seeing—its horror, magnitude, and meaning—even as her eyes spilled tears for what had to be the unspeakable suffering of others as much as her own sorrow and self-pity.)

  Konrad’s specialty was breakfast: oatmeal with brown sugar, raisins, and skim milk—“The prime meal of the day.”

  M.R.’s specialty was dinner: lightly steamed vegetables of all kinds, in every kind of combination and with rice, pasta, or couscous.

  Except for breakfast M.R. did most of the cooking. Konrad did most of the kitchen cleanup.

  They bought groceries together at Shop-Rite. M.R. was fresh produce and dairy, Konrad was all the rest. Invariably, Konrad was the first at the checkout counter where he waited skimming People.

  In the evenings they read, and watched TV. Sometimes they read while they watched TV—their favorite channel was the classic-movie channel where they saw Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Greer Garson, Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. . . . “Agatha used to say, ‘It’s reassuring to see that they are all with us, still,’ ” Konrad said.

  As if by mutual consent they did not watch TV news. They did not follow the news of carnage in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. They did not study the inch-high “Faces of the Fallen” published at intervals in the New York Times—sixteen photos vertically, sixteen photos horizontally—an entire newspaper page allotted to the mostly young, heartrendingly young and virtually all-male U.S. military dead.

  (The New York Times was M.R.’s sole concession to the life she’d left behind in north central New Jersey: she could not buy the newspaper in Carthage, nor could the paper be delivered to her father’s house except by U.S. mail, days late. She read it daily, online.)

  At first, the many books crammed into the Neukirchens’ bookcases had filled M.R. with a terrible unease. For she felt that her preoccupation with books—with a life driven by words—must have begun here, in this place where books were both revered and treated with the casual familiarity and affection of old friends.

  On the shelves, the very same books in the very same order she recalled from her girlhood. Nothing was out of place, and little seemed to have been added. How many books, had Konrad boasted? Eleven thousand six hundred seventy-seven and one half!—of course, Konrad had been joking. At the time, the child Meredith had had no conception of what joking meant.

  There, the books of her childhood, scarcely altered. How like the library at Charters House—except these books were not rare, and most were not in very good condition. And so many paperbacks, dog-eared, yellowed. Their collective significance confounded her. She pulled out a volume and opened to read—

  One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. It was happy in a new sense of freedom. . . .

  How strange, the pronoun it in reference to a child! The story was by Ambrose Bierce, whom M.R. had never read—“Chickamauga.” The title was in reference, a footnote indicated, to the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga Creek (Tennessee) in 1863: thirty-four thousand casualties, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

  She was filled with a childlike yearning to know more—to read the story, and the entire volume of stories by Bierce. But she returned the book to the shelf, for now.

  A pile of books beside Agatha’s chair was touching to see. These were Agatha’s usual novels by women writers, gardening books, and a slender volume—Ariel, poems by Sylvia Plath.

  She understood Konrad’s reluctance to put these books away.

  She wondered: was the full-to-bursting album MY LIFE AS A BABY still in the bureau drawer? But she made no effort to find it.

  “Come with me, dear! I am going to visit Agatha.”

  She went with him. She knew that Agatha’s grave would be beside the lost child’s grave in Friendship Cemetery and so was prepared.

  M.R. had to remem
ber, little MEREDITH RUTH NEUKIRCHEN—“MERRY”—SEPTEMBER 21, 1957–FEBRUARY 3, 1961 had not been her.

  Thinking of Konrad’s paradoxes. How he’d teased and perplexed her as a little girl speculating about time travel—as if, as a child, she could have known what time travel meant. He’d joked about returning in time to confront a younger twin—how strange that would be!

  She wondered if her beloved father had been the source of her fascination with philosophy—its riddles, its pretense of wisdom and its perennial hope.

  In Friendship Cemetery Konrad was unusually quiet. This was a relief—or was it? Even Solomon, trotting and sniffing between rows of grave markers, lifting his leg to urinate, seemed less exuberant, doggy. When Konrad snapped his fingers at him, the setter shrank back abashed.

  “Solomon, bad manners! That is not what we do in a cemetery.”

  It was a windy day in midsummer. Bright patches of sunshine were blown about in the sky, and from the direction of Lake Ontario, in the west, a flotilla of storm-clouds approached. M.R. stared at the little grave marker beside the larger grave marker—AGATHA RUTH NEUKIRCHEN APRIL 7, 1934—NOVEMBER 19, 2001. CHERISHED WIFE AND MOTHER. Both markers were made of the same pale pink limestone.

  Konrad busied himself tidying the graves. Konrad kept his face turned from M.R., that she would not see his tears.

  M.R. helped him, pulling at weeds. How fast-growing weeds are, and some of them so prickly! At both the graves were clay pots that held, or had once held, living flowers, as well as ceramic pots containing artificial flowers. Konrad had stopped at a florist’s to buy flowers—a pot of live, bright yellow day lilies—which he and M.R. set now between the two graves, steadying it amid tufts of grass. And, in the florist’s, M.R. had purchased a curious artificial grapevine adorned with clusters of purple, dark-red, and green-streaked grapes, the very sort of thing that would have caught Agatha’s eye, which she now twined about both the grave markers.