Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

apprehensive, as if she were approaching danger. Not a visible danger perhaps. Yet she must go forward.

      This was a common feeling of course. Common to all who inhabit a “public” role. She would be addressing an audience in which there was sure to be some opposition to her prepared words.

      Her keynote address, upon which she’d worked intermittently, for weeks, was only to be twenty minutes long: “The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism.’” This was the first time that M. R. Neukirchen had been invited to address the National Conference of the prestigious American Association of Learned Societies. There would be hostile questions put to her at the conclusion of her talk, she supposed. At her own University where the faculty so supported her liberal position, yet there were dissenting voices from the right. But overwhelmingly her audience that evening would support her, she was sure.

      It would be thrilling—to speak to this distinguished group, and to make an impression on them. Somehow it had happened, the shy schoolgirl had become, with the passage of not so many years, an impassioned and effective public speaker—a Valkyrie of a figure—fiercely articulate, intense. You could see that she cared so much—almost, at moments, M.R. quivered with feeling, as if about to stammer.

      Audiences were transfixed by her, in the narrow and rarified academic world in which she dwelt.

      I am baring my soul to you. I care so deeply!

      Often she felt faint, beforehand. A turmoil in her stomach as if she might be physically ill.

      The way an actor might feel, stepping into a magisterial role. The way an athlete might feel, on the cusp of a great triumph—or loss.

      Her (secret) lover had once assured her It isn’t panic you feel, Meredith. It isn’t even fear. It’s excitement: anticipation.

      Her (secret) lover was a brilliant but not entirely reliable man, an astronomer/cosmologist happiest in the depths of the Universe. Andre Litovik’s travels took him into extragalactic space far from M.R. yet he, too, was proud of her, and did love her in his way. So she wished to believe.

      They saw each other infrequently. They did not even communicate often, for Andre was negligent about answering e-mail. Yet, they thought of each other continuously—or so M.R. wished to believe.

      Possibly unwisely, given the dense underbrush here, M.R. was approaching the bridge from beneath. She’d been correct: the floor was planking—you could see sunlight through the cracks—as vehicles passed, the plank floor rattled. A pickup truck, several cars—the bridge was so narrow, traffic slowed to five miles an hour.

      She’d learned to drive over such a bridge. Long ago.

      She felt the old frisson of dread—a visceral unease she experienced now mainly when flying in turbulent weather—Return to your seats please, fasten your seat belts please, the captain has requested you return to your seats please.

      At such times the terrible thought came to her: To die among strangers! To die in flaming wreckage.

      Such curious, uncharacteristic thoughts M. R. Neukirchen hid from those who knew her intimately. But there was no one really, who knew M. R. Neukirchen intimately.

      In a way it was strange to her, this curious fact: she had not (yet) died.

      As the pre-Socratics pondered Why is there something and not rather nothing?—so M.R. pondered Why am I here, and not rather—nowhere?

      A purely intellectual speculation, this was. M.R.’s professional philosophizing wasn’t tainted by the merely personal.

      Yet, these questions were strange, and wonderful. Not an hour of her life when she did not give thanks.

      M.R. had been an only child. An entire psychology has been devised involving the only child, a variant of the first-born.

      The only child is not inevitably the first-born, however. The only child may be the survivor.

      The only child is more likely to be gifted than a child with numerous siblings. Obviously, the only child is likely to be lonely.

      Self-reliant, self-sufficient. “Creative.”

      Did M.R. believe in such theories? Or did she believe, for this was closer to her personal experience, that personalities are distinct, individual and unique, and unfathomable—in terms of influences and causality, inexplicable?

      She’d been trained as a philosopher, she had a Ph.D. in European philosophy from one of the great philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. Yet she’d taken graduate courses in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, international law. She’d participated in bioethics colloquia. She’d published a frequently anthologized essay titled “How Do You Know What You ‘Know’: Skepticism as Moral Imperative.” As the president of a distinguished research university in which theories of every sort were devised, debated, maintained, and defended—an abundance like a spring field blooming and buzzing with a profusion of life—M.R. wasn’t obliged to believe but she was obliged to take seriously, to respect.

      My dream is to be—of service! I want to do good.

      She was quite serious. She was wholly without irony.

      The Convent Street bridge, in Carthage. Of course, that was the bridge she was trying to recall.

      And other bridges, other waterways, streams—M.R. couldn’t quite recall.

      In a kind of trance she was staring, smiling. As a child, she’d learned quickly. Of all human reflexes, the most valuable.

      The river was a fast shallow stream on which boulders emerged like bleached bone. Fallen tree limbs lay in the water sunken and rotted and on these mud turtles basked in the October sun, motionless as creatures carved of stone. M.R. knew from her rural childhood that if you approached these turtles, even at a distance they would arouse themselves, waken and slip into the water; seemingly asleep, in reptilian stillness, they were yet highly alert, vigilant.

      A memory came to her of boys who’d caught a mud turtle, shouting and flinging the poor creature down onto the rocks, dropping rocks on it, cracking its shell….

      Why would you do such a thing? Why kill …?

      It was a question no one asked. You would not ask. You would be ridiculed, if you asked.

      She had failed to defend the poor turtle against the boys. She’d been too young—very young. The boys had been older. Always there were too many of them—the enemy.

      These small failures, long ago. No one knew now. No one who knew her now. If she’d tried to tell them they would stare at her, uncomprehending. Are you serious? You can’t be serious.

      Certainly she was serious: a serious woman. The first female president of the University.

      Not that femaleness was an issue, it was not.

      Without hesitation M.R. would claim, and in interviews would elaborate, that not once in her professional career, nor in her years as a student, had she been discriminated against, as a woman.

      It was the truth, as M.R. knew it. She was not one to lodge complaints or to speak in disdain, hurt, or reproach.

      What was that—something moving upstream? A child wading? But the air was too cold for wading and the figure too white: a snowy egret.

      Beautiful long-legged bird searching for fish in the swift shallow water. M.R. watched it for several seconds—such stillness! Such patience.

      At last, as if uneasy with M.R.’s presence, the egret seemed to shake itself, lifted its wide wings, and flew away.

      Nearby but invisible were birds—jays, crows. Raucous cries of crows.

      Quickly M.R. turned away. The harsh-clawing sound of a crow’s cry was disturbing to her.

      “Oh!”—in her eagerness to leave this place she’d turned her ankle, or nearly.

      She should not have stopped to walk here, Carlos was right to disapprove.