Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

impulsive stop in the nameless little town by the nameless little creek or river hadn’t been a blunder after all—only just a curious episode in M.R.’s (private) life, to be forgotten.

      Arrive early. Bring work.

      She’d begun to acquire a reputation for being the most astonishing zealot of work.

      It was known, M.R. was very bright—very earnest, idealistic—but it had not been quite known, how hard M.R. was willing to work.

      For this brief trip, she’d brought along enough work for several days. And, of course, she would be in constant communication with Salvager Hall—the president’s team of aides, assistants, secretarial staff. In a constant stream e-mail messages came to her as president of the University, and these she dealt with both expeditiously and with an air of schoolgirl pleasure so it was known, and it would become more widely known, that M.R. never failed to include personal queries and remarks in her e-mail messages, she was irrepressibly friendly.

      For we love our work. No more potent narcotic than work!

      And M.R.’s administrative work was very different from her work as a writer/philosopher—administration is the skillful organizing of others, its center of gravity is exterior; all that matters, all that is significant, urgent—profound—is exterior.

      “I want to be ‘of service.’ I do not want to be ‘served.’”

      This too was a legacy of the Neukirchens. For the Quaker, the commonweal outweighs the merely personal.

      Critically now M.R. was re-examining her address—“The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism’”—even as she found herself distracted by a memory of the bridge and the sharp water-smells—the mysterious faded lettering on the dark-brick building on the farther bank.

      In the lobby, uplifted voices. Her fellow conferees were arriving.

      She felt a stirring of apprehension, excitement. For soon, her anonymity would vanish.

      The desk clerk had no idea who she was—(this was a relief!)—but others would know her, recognize her. This past year M. R. Neukirchen had become renowned in academic circles. She could not but think her elevation very unnerving, and very strange—accidental, really.

      God has chosen you, dear Merry! God is a principle in the universe for good, and God has chosen you to implement His work.

      In emotional moments her mother spoke like this—warmly, earnestly. It was something of a small shock to M.R. to realize that Agatha probably did believe in such a personal destiny for her daughter.

      Another time M.R. leafed through the conference program—to check her name, to see if it was really there.

      The program was a large glossy-white booklet with gilt letters on its cover: Fiftieth Annual National Conference of the American Association of Learned Societies. October 11–13, 2002. The conference was scheduled to begin with a 5:30 P.M. reception at which M.R. and other speakers were to be honored. Dinner was at 7 P.M. and at 8 P.M. the keynote speaker was listed—M. R. Neukirchen.

      She’d given many talks, of course. Many lectures, speeches—presentations—but mostly in her academic field, philosophy. It was an honor for her to have been invited to speak to this organization, not the largest but the most distinguished of American intellectual/academic societies, for membership was limited and selective.

      M.R. had herself been inducted into the organization young—not yet thirty, and an associate professor of philosophy at the University.

      “Oh! Damn.”

      She’d discovered mud on the cuffs of her trousers, and in the creases of her shoes. Irritably she brushed at the stains, that were still damp.

      She touched her hair discovering something cobwebby-sticky in her hair, that must have sifted down from the wrought-iron bridge.

      Fortunately, she’d brought other clothes to the conference. She would wash her face—check her hair—change quickly once she was given her room.

      She had good clothes to wear, this evening. Since she’d become president of the University her female staffers had seen to it that M.R. looked “stylish”—her assistant Audrey Myles had insisted upon taking M.R. to New York City to shop and they’d come back with a chic Chanel-imitation Champagne-colored wool suit—with a skirt—by an American designer. And Audrey had convinced M.R. to buy handsome new shoes as well, with a one-inch heel—bringing M.R.’s height to a teetering five feet ten and a half inches.

      At such a height, you could not hide. You had best imagine yourself as a prow on a ship—a brave Amazon girl-warrior with breastplates, spear uplifted in her right hand.

      Her astronomer-lover, when he’d first sighted her on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, years before, had described her in his way. He’d claimed to have fallen in love with her, in this first sighting. And her hair in a tight-woven braid hanging down between her shoulder blades like a glittery bronze-brown snake.

      Since she’d risen in administration at the University, M.R. had long since gotten rid of the girl-scholar braid. As she’d tried to rid herself of a naive sentimentality about the sort of love her astronomer-lover could provide her. Now her hair was cropped short, trimmed and styled by a New York City hairdresser, at Audrey’s insistence: it was dense, springy, no longer golden brown but the ambiguous hue of a winter-ravaged field threaded with metallic-gray hairs that glittered like filaments.

      In official biographies, M. R. Neukirchen was forty-one years old in September 2002. And looking much younger.

      As a little girl she’d seen her birth certificate. Her parents had shown her. A document stamped with the heraldic New York State gold seal stating her birth date, her name—her names.

      Our secret you need to tell no one.

      Our secret, God has blessed our family.

      She was “Merry” then—“Meredith Ruth Neukirchen.” Her birthday was September 21. A very nice time of year, the Neukirchens believed: a prelude to the beautiful season of autumn. Which was why they’d chosen it for her.

      Which was why she often forgot her birthday, and was surprised when others reminded her.

      She hadn’t minded not being beautiful, as a girl in Carthage, New York. She’d learned to be objective about such matters. There were those who liked her well enough—who loved her, in a way—for her fierce wide smile that resembled a grimace of pain, and her stoicism in the face of actual pain or discomfort; she’d had to laugh seeing her picture in local papers, the expression of longing in her face that was so scrubbed-looking plain it might have been a boy’s face and not that of a young woman of eighteen:

      MEREDITH RUTH NEUKIRCHEN, CLASS OF ’79 VALEDICTORIAN CARTHAGE HIGH SCHOOL.

      It had been the kind of upstate New York, small-city school in which, as in a drain, the least-qualified and -inspired teachers wound up, bemused and stoical and resigned; there had been several teachers who’d seen in Meredith something promising, even exciting—but only one who had inspired her, though not to emulate him personally. And when poor Meredith—“Merry”—hadn’t even been asked to the senior prom, though she’d been not only valedictorian of her graduating class but also its vice president, one of the women teachers had consoled her—“You’ll just have to make your way somehow else, Meredith”—with fumbling directness though meaning to be kind.

      Not as a woman, and not sexual.

      Somehow else.

      Soon after the senior prom to which M.R. had not been invited, M.R.’s prettiest girl-classmates were married, and pregnant; pregnant, and married. Some were soon divorced, and became “single mothers”—a very different domestic destiny from the one they’d envisioned for themselves.

      Very few of M.R.’s classmates, female or male, went on to college. Very few achieved what one might call careers. Of her graduating class of 118 students very few left Carthage or Beechum County or the southern Adirondacks, where