Mudwoman (18 page)

“Strange to be here. At this hour.”

Kroll might have added
And alone.

For very few people came to the president’s house individually. It was not the sort of residence—it had not the sort of
atmosphere
—to which individuals came, as friends. Oliver Kroll had in fact been a guest at Charters House more than once since M.R. had become president of the University, but always in the company of others: formal receptions, dinners for distinguished speakers.

Amid this company of others, he and M.R. were obliged to acknowledge each other only formally, politely.

She had never been able to forget that look of hatred in the man’s face. That loathing for
the woman,
as she saw it. In Oliver Kroll’s TV personality, the dry, droll, sarcastic wit, the caustic asides and sneering twist of his lips, the dismissive of
liberal, “left-wing”
as contemptible, if not traitorous—she felt it yet more powerfully, and she could not bear it.

Tonight, Kroll looked older, strained—the jaunty public manner was subdued. His beard was still trimmed to resemble a sharp-edged spade but it was threaded now with gray and there were bumps and shallows in the hairless scalp. M.R. wondered—was this the man who’d so intimidated her?—frightened her? At the University, Oliver Kroll was one of the enemy—a cadre of highly vocal conservative faculty members who voted in a block at meetings, in opposition to many of M. R. Neukirchen’s proposals. These faculty members were all male—all “white”—they were all above the rank of assistant professor. (Not that it mattered greatly—the liberal faculty at the University so outnumbered the conservatives in matters of voting.) M.R. was inclined to believe that, if Kroll hadn’t encouraged the undergraduate
Stirk
to tape their conversation, one of his conservative colleagues had.

In the decade since Kroll had departed M.R.’s life, he’d become a yet more controversial campus figure. Since the advent of the George W. Bush administration and the triumph of conservative politics in America, Kroll had joined his older colleague/mentor G. Leddy Heidemann as a White House consultant. Where Heidemann was noted in the press as the Middle East adviser to the secretary of defense—the “architect”/“moral conscience” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—Kroll’s influence was domestic, and more general. As a political theorist Oliver Kroll was frequently invited to appear on television—Sunday morning news commentary, CNN and Fox News. In the hectic days following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in the fall of 2001, both Kroll and Heidemann had appeared frequently on television. And now in March 2003 on the eve of the invasion of Iraq the pro-war propaganda had escalated—
This is a crusade. This is not “diplomacy by other means.” The time for diplomacy is past. There can be no “diplomacy” with evil.

Rarely did M.R. watch these political discussion programs, they so upset her. And hearing her University colleagues say such things—warmongering, pseudo-“patriotic,” shameful—she hurriedly switched off the TV.

As a successor to Heidemann, Oliver Kroll became faculty adviser for the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom. He campaigned for funds to bring to the campus controversial conservative speakers and activists; at a teach-in on the subject of potential war in the Middle East, organized by liberal faculty members, Kroll had led the opposition of conservative professors and students who’d picketed the event and asked heckling questions of the speakers. Since October, when the U.S. Congress had voted by a considerable majority to authorize the president to use “military force” against Iraq, there had come to be an increasingly fevered and divisive political atmosphere on campus, as throughout the country. As president of this distinguished university M.R. could not become involved in political arguments, which were often embittered, angry and intolerant; she’d stayed away from the teach-in, and wrote an editorial for the campus newspaper pleading for civility. It had been told to her—she’d been warned, by Leonard Lockhardt—that an educator of her stature was required to be above the “fracas.” There were conservative members of the University’s board of trustees and there were—of course—numerous conservative donors, who tracked the record of the University president in the media, closely. Even in small gatherings M.R. had learned to be reticent about her personal feelings—her predilection for liberal causes, on principle; she dared not joke, and she avoided all occasions for irony, which were occasions for ambiguity. Quickly she’d learned that a public position puts one in hostage: the first freedom you surrender is the freedom to speak impulsively, from the heart.

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 well 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.”