Mudwoman (30 page)

So easy to read, if you didn’t try! If you just let the words come into your head.

Bedtime reading had to end at a certain time. In the first year she’d come to live with the Neukirchens, at 8:30
P.M.

In the downstairs hall beneath the child’s room with the bunny-wallpaper and the bed with the white headboard was the tall beautiful old grandfather clock which Mr. Neukirchen described as a
Stickley clock.

When she couldn’t sleep Meredith lay listening to the calm ticking of this clock and to its chimes which were sweet and clear and soothing—the clock struck not just the hour but the quarter hour—(with a single chime)—which was beautiful to hear but scary too—sometimes—for the chimes came so often, and could not be stopped.

Here was a test: you heard the clock begin its chimes and counted with it—
one, two, three, four
—trying to guess when the chimes would stop—and often the chimes would continue—
five, six—seven, eight
—in rebuke.

In fascination Meredith examined the clock: the long brass pendulum swung slowly and languidly and once in a while slowed and ceased of its own volition. Mr. Neukirchen knew how to fix the clock, Mrs. Neukirchen professed utter ignorance of it, and would never touch it.

At the Skedds’, such a big beautiful clock would have been broken within days. The workings so visible, almost taunting—you would naturally be drawn to jam your fingers into them. You would naturally be drawn to stopping the God-damn ticking/chiming.

But the Neukirchens loved the old grandfather clock—“It’s like the ticktocking heart of this house,” Agatha said, and Konrad said, with a wink to Meredith, “This clock is a genuine antique. It has come down through our family. And it makes me remember—even if I’d like to forget—that we Neukirchens have a secret weakness, that not a one of us has been spared.”

Meredith smiled uneasily. Meredith clenched her hands together out of sight of her father’s sharp eyes and smiled uneasily but did not ask what the
secret weakness
was; which seemed to surprise Konrad for he said, with the hint of a frown, “Hmm? Aren’t you going to ask your dad, what the ‘secret weakness’ of the Neukirchens is?”

Meredith shook her head,
no.

Meredith laughed at the look in Konrad’s face.

“Really? You aren’t going to ask?”

Again Meredith shook her head,
no.

“My dear daughter is the only person, ever, to whom I’ve mentioned this secret, who hasn’t asked about it! Amazing.”

But Konrad would not let the subject go, and returned to it a short while later: “But why aren’t you going to ask, Meredith? Aren’t you the least bit curious about the secret weakness of the Neukirchens?”

Meredith shook her head,
no.

“But”—Konrad was pretending to be exasperated now, plucking at his whiskery jaws—“why aren’t you curious?”

“Because—it wouldn’t be a secret, if it was told.”

Konrad stared at the child. For a moment he was struck speechless.

“Why, then—of course—my dear daughter—you are correct.”

Never again did Konrad bring up the subject to Meredith.

I
t was the morning after one of these nights—when Meredith was in third grade, and eight years old (if you counted her birthday as September 21, 1961)—spent listening to the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall wondering if her mother was alive and where if alive her mother was and if her mother could find her in this new place—that the terrible news was revealed, which Meredith was never to be told.

There are two kinds of news in a child’s life: the news that is told, and the news that is not-told.

Yet somehow, Meredith would come to know.

It was the week of the Convent Elementary School spelling bee, June 1969. Though she was three years younger than a number of the “star spellers” competing in the spelling bee, Meredith Ruth Neukirchen became champion speller of the school with a correct spelling of
unicorn.
During this very week, news came of what newspapers and TV called a
grisly discovery
—the wizened and mummified corpse of a small child, a very young girl discovered in a junked refrigerator at the edge of a landfill, eleven miles west of Star Lake.

On local TV news came this ugly bulletin. In the Carthage newspaper.

Of course, the Neukirchens shielded their daughter from such an ugly story.

Yet somehow, Meredith knew.

. . . mummified remains believed to be those of three-year-old Jedina Kraeck, who disappeared in April 1965 from the Star Lake residence where she had lived with her mother Marit Kraeck and older sister Jewell.

Warrants had been issued for the arrest of Marit Kraeck in April 1965 on charges of child neglect, child abuse, and attempted homicide but these warrants had never been served.

A resident of Star Lake and his son fishing on the Black Snake River discovered the “mummified remains” in the refrigerator and reported the discovery to the Beechum County sheriff’s department.

Detectives with the sheriff’s department report that their investigation into the disappearance of Marit Kraeck is “ongoing.”

A
nother time, several years later.

When Meredith Ruth Neukirchen was named “outstanding girl” in her seventh grade class at Carthage Middle School.

For often it happened in those years, Meredith made her adoptive parents proud of her, and happy for her.

Not that it was difficult to make the Neukirchens happy.

Never did they urge their daughter to study hard—never did they coerce her into behaving in any way other than the way she wished to behave. It was marvelous to them yet somehow not so very surprising for the miracle of their lives was that “Merry” had been returned to them—this was the profound miracle, beside which the child’s high grades and sweet disposition were a secondary matter.

Very smart, and very sweet! From Konrad she seemed to have acquired a sharply inquisitive mind, if not a propensity to speak at length; from Agatha, a slight propensity for physical clumsiness. She was a quiet girl, everyone agreed—an “inward” sort of girl—“mature” for her age.

She did not want to hurt or offend her parents who so doted on her and so she never shut the door to her room quite all the way—but nearly so—spending time alone at the child-sized desk which within a few years she outgrew as she outgrew the child-bed with the white headboard and the handsewn clothes Agatha sewed for her with the cycle of seasons. There entered into her life at unpredictable times fugues of forgetfulness and entrancement when she appeared to be, to her adoptive parents, a mysterious being in their household as a fairy elf or luminescent light might appear in the most ordinary setting inviting you to touch it—to pass your hand through it. “She is God’s gift to us, we have not deserved,” Agatha said, with a shiver; provoking Konrad to say in reproach, “If God has given us this daughter, you can be sure we deserve her. God has never yet made a mistake—as Einstein noted: ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ ”

What seemed most fascinating to Meredith were books: printed pages: words. These were not mere school-texts or pastimes but might have been doorways into unknown regions. As the child seemed to have learned to read precociously with little conscious effort so she seemed to memorize with no effort—entire pages, long passages of texts were retained in her brain, vividly, thrillingly.

She was a good athlete, too—or usually; once she learned to mimic others. She hadn’t a natural athlete’s talent for improvisation nor had she a natural athlete’s zest for competition, for
winning;
but she was a good team player, reliable, dogged, and uncomplaining. Though she was alert and attentive in school, in classes, at other times she seemed slightly disconnected, as if her own thoughts captivated her to the exclusion of the exterior world; casual conversations made little impression on her, and the names and faces of certain individuals whom she encountered numerous times—Agatha’s bevy of women friends, and her less interesting school classmates. “Our daughter doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” Konrad said, “for which, though I can’t claim genetic credit, I hope I can claim
influential credit.
”

“Oh but—Merry doesn’t want to
insult
people—does she? Not remembering their faces, or names—”

“ ‘Insult’ is in the eye of the beholder. Our daughter is cast in a higher mold.”

What was important was the wisdom of the ages, the Neukirchens believed, and this wisdom was preserved in books. When you read, the book enters your soul, and you are inside the book; the book inside the soul is an aspect of the inner light, which is God.

The other, the vast sprawling cacophonous world—that would elude their daughter, they believed. Meredith would become a teacher, probably—and if she taught high school, how wonderful it would be, if she returned to Carthage to teach!

“Or she might become a librarian, you know. She loves books.”

“Yes. But no. Our Meredith loves books, but she loves even better thinking about them. Librarians, bless them, are the salt of the earth but, you know, they don’t
think
—in the way I mean.”

And so, how thrilled the Neukirchens were when Meredith was named “outstanding girl” in her seventh grade class. In the spring assembly at Carthage Middle School where, to her parents’ delight,
Meredith Ruth Neukirchen
was summoned to the stage to be given a framed certificate and an illustrated gift-edition of
Little Women;
with other award-winning classmates her picture appeared in the Carthage newspaper the next morning.

Below the photograph on page six was the headline:
CARTHAGE MIDDLE SCHOOL HONORS OUTSTANDING STUDENTS.
And on the facing page seven another headline:
BEAR MT. ROAD ARSON INVESTIGATION CONTINUES.

This was not new news. This was news of the previous week.

Meredith had not seen the original article. Very likely, that article had been hidden from her.

Nor would Meredith read this article in its entirety, seemingly.

A swift glance at the column of type, a skimming gaze as fast as a finger scrolling downward without a pause.

. . . home of Olivia and Floyd Skedd of Bear Mountain Road, burnt to the ground killing eight residents of the house in a nighttime flash-fire believed to have been arson. Mr. and Mrs. Skedd, forty-one and thirty-nine respectively, were foster parents “held in high regard” by Beechum County Family Services. Of the eight dead, four were foster children in the Skedds’ care between the ages of three and thirteen. Two were the Skedds’ children, aged eleven and fourteen. Traces of lighter fluid were found among the smoldering ruins of the ground floor. The only survivor of the blaze which drew fire trucks from three Beechum County districts is the Skedds’ sixteen-year-old daughter Lizbeth, at the present time held in custody in Beechum County juvenile detention.

Though Meredith had time to scarcely run her eyes through this paragraph of newsprint—even as Agatha pulled the paper from her with a nervous little laugh, that she might show Konrad the wonderful picture on page six—yet the words were perfectly preserved in Meredith’s memory. She would have no need to see the newspaper again.

That night, the Neukirchens celebrated their daughter’s award with a special dinner: Agatha’s Mexicali meat loaf with spicy ketchup baked on top, scalloped potatoes, and Agatha’s pumpkin pie with whipped cream. They did not speak of the arson-article, or of the arson-news—the Neukirchens did not speak of such distressing matters, in any case. Their God was a God of light and not a God of darkness and of darkness, what is there to say?

When she’d been called to the stage that afternoon Meredith had been stricken with shyness, yet with pleasure; she’d been happy to have received the award, and all the happier that her parents were in the audience to applaud with the others. But she seemed embarrassed of the award and didn’t really want to talk about it afterward; she hid away the framed certificate somewhere in her room.
Little Women
she’d already read, of course—she’d read it in fifth grade.

At the celebration-dinner the Neukirchens chattered happily while Meredith sat quietly between them; with her fork she made faint indentations in the sunflower-splotched tablecloth. There was no one to whom she might have said whatever it might have been she’d have had to say, if there’d been anyone to whom she might have spoken.

Her young life was beginning, had already begun. She would soar far from Carthage, from even this household in which, as in the most astonishing of fairy tales, she was beloved—whoever she was in this household, she was beloved. That she was Meredith Ruth—“Merry”—she would never want for love.

A very lucky girl, Jew-ell. Hope you know that!

She did. She knew.

The King of the Crows had departed from her life, she realized.

Badly she missed the King of the Crows. Mornings when she woke early it was not to the raw-yearning cries of crows somewhere beyond the walls and roof of a house but to the methodical ticking of Mr. Neukirchen’s old grandfather clock, its steely-silvery chimes.

Mudwoman Mated.

April 2003

R
eadied she must be readied.

On this morning when they came for her without warning except such warning as even in her blindness she’d had to have known inescapably.

M
ust have fallen asleep, the heavy book fell from her hands and wakened her with a jolt.

Quickly she stood: what time was it? Where was she?

. . . in the library downstairs in Charters House. In the president’s residence barefoot and shivering in a nightgown in one of the first-floor rooms and in leaded-glass windows a few yards away her ghost-figure hovered uncertainly faceless and bereft of identity as a dressmaker’s dummy.

Without glancing at the cover of the awkward-sized book hurriedly she shelved it. One of the old rare-edition children’s books from the nineteenth century perhaps, from out of the glass-front case—the Dikes Collection.

So many books in the president’s house, and so rarely glanced-into!

Truly this was a museum/mausoleum. Not shelves of mummified and calcified dead, bundles of brittle old bones as in an ancient catacomb but hundreds of books and each with a proud title, a proud author’s name stamped on the spine.

What was M.R. doing here, and at such a time! Barely clothed, barefoot!

Amid gleaming hardwood floors, crystalline chandeliers, faded Chinese carpets.

She’d long had an irrational fear—not a strong but a mild fear—a trivial fear—of which (of course) she’d joked—of nocturnal prowlers peering in the ground-floor windows of the elegant old mansion built at the top of a steep hill in a farther corner of the University campus.

Until 1919, the University president had lived in a Colonial residence near the chapel at the center of campus. Carousing undergraduates had long trespassed onto the president’s private grounds and boldly peered in the windows and frightened residents until at last, after a scandalous incident, the presidential house had been moved a quarter mile away to Charters House.

Protected by a twelve-foot wrought-iron fence and (in theory at least, since it was never closed) a gate at the foot of the drive, Charters House was far less accessible than the previous residence.

Of course M.R. was perfectly safe here. No undergraduates had the slightest interest in trespassing here. The hill was densely wooded with conifers. The main house, carriage house, five-car garage were protected by surveillance cameras. There were motion detectors on the grounds monitored by campus security.

Still, it made her uneasy to be wandering about the first-floor rooms not fully clothed.

Why she’d come downstairs an hour or two earlier, she couldn’t recall.

Insomnia is a shattering of the brain. Glittering puddles like slivers of broken glass in vast mudflats to the horizon.

“There—”

On a library shelf a few feet away, what appeared to be a folded note. M.R. snatched it up—but it wasn’t a note, just another cocktail napkin smudged with cocktail sauce the household staff had carelessly overlooked.

A clock chimed the hour in the darkened front corridor—3
A.M.

U
pstairs she tried to sleep until at last at 5:10
A.M.
she gave up for the night. Throwing off bedclothes and hurriedly dressing and again returning downstairs and outside into the chill damp air with its fragrance of pine needles and moist earth that was a balm to what obscure hurt, what apprehension she could not have named.

Several times a week she swam at the University pool. More intensely, and more often in days of stress and always early so that she might be alone.

To be known, to be identified—how disagreeable this was to her, at such a time.

At this hour preceding dawn the campus was deserted. There were few lights and these blurred ghost-lights behind drawn shades or blinds. It was a quarter mile hike to the University gym and to the pool that opened at 5
A.M.
and by the time she reached the building that housed the pool it was 5:25
A.M.

Initially she’d gone to the pool at 7
A.M.
Most mornings she swam for forty-five minutes. But by the time she’d left there were a number of other swimmers in the pool and of these most would have recognized M. R. Neukirchen though few would have spoken to her without her having spoken to them first. Twice there had been Oliver Kroll just arriving at the pool as M.R. was leaving and his eyes moving onto her in a muted sort of surprise and so she’d arranged to arrive at the pool a half hour earlier. And a third time there had been Oliver Kroll arriving at the pool as M.R. was leaving and so she’d arranged to arrive at the pool another half hour earlier and since that time she hadn’t seen Kroll.

Now at 5:30
A.M.
there was no one in the pool. Within fifteen minutes a lone broad-shouldered boy would arrive, a solitary swimmer with sleek black hair whom M.R. saw often at this hour, but did not know nor did the boy, very likely an undergraduate, appear to recognize her in swimsuit, rubber swim cap. And another swimmer would arrive, and another as the hour of 6
A.M.
approached and after 6
A.M.
a steady succession of swimmers until the pool was no longer a desirable place for one who wished to be alone.

Now, it was still early. In her dark light-wool single-piece swimsuit and white rubber swim cap M.R. slipped into the water and began to swim laps in her customary lane to the far left of the pool facing the deep end, not fast, but steadily, feeling the pleasurable ache of arm-muscles and a tightness across her shoulders begin to relax. As a girl she’d thought it magical—the unexpected buoyancy of water, the ease with which her body that seemed heavy to her on land, and ungainly, could be propelled through water through an action of her arms and legs. And in the water too, she’d felt cloaked in invisibility.

Muffled echoes in the high-ceilinged room as of voices just out of earshot. High above were mosaics of sea-clouds. Swimming, M.R. half-shut her eyes. What a relief to be here, away from Charters House and her sleepless nights!

Almost, M.R. could think
Maybe I don’t require sleep. Whatever it is inside me is so white-hot, incandescent.

She would swim for forty-five minutes and she would return to the house and shower there and at 7:30
A.M.
Evander would arrive to drive her to Philadelphia for a meeting with a prospective corporate donor.

One of the older and more powerful University trustees had arranged for the meeting. President Neukirchen had no choice but to comply at least initially to speaking with corporate representatives though all that she knew of the corporation—which was the third-largest natural gas supplier in the world—filled her with dismay and revulsion.

Was money from a (possibly) tainted source, tainted money?

Were those who received (possibly) tainted money, tainted themselves?

The prospective endowment might be as high as thirty-five million dollars, the University trustee had told M.R., in confidence.

Thirty-five million! Even for the University with its eighteen-billion-dollar endowment, this was considerable. Such an endowment alone would provide full tuition for all students who were admitted to the University, independent of their family’s ability to pay.

Whether to pursue the endowment personally, or to assign it to her vice president for development, M.R. wasn’t sure, as M.R. wasn’t sure whether the endowment should be pursued at all.

It had been something of a scandal that the University was discovered to have had investments in South African companies during the era of apartheid, though the University lauded itself on being ultra-liberal in racial issues and a forerunner among Ivy League universities in implementing “affirmative action” in the 1960s; yet more of a scandal when a young historian on the faculty uncovered evidence that the University, that lauded itself on having been a stop on the Underground Railway in the 1850s and 1860s, had once profited, in the late 1700s, from the West African slave trade.

These minor scandals, heatedly debated at the University, had boiled over into the media, particularly into the pages of the
New York Times
.

These were legitimate ethical issues, M.R. believed. Though as a University administrator she was obliged to consider the matter of the natural-gas supplier an economic issue, too.

Months ago, M.R. would have felt anxiety about the upcoming meeting in Philadelphia: now, so very oddly, she felt a twinge of anticipation, excitement—the thrill of dropping a lighted match into a ravine for instance.

To see what flares up. To experiment.

Swimming was wakening her, ever more fully!

The 7:30
A.M.
pickup at Charters House was not unusual. Often M.R. had breakfast meetings as well as luncheon and dinner meetings. Very often, the president’s weekday was filled with meetings through the entire day as well as social events in the evening that were often, in effect, meetings as well, a kind of diplomacy by other means. Weekends, too, might be taken up with attending conferences, travel. If M.R. remained at home, invariably she was booked for dinner parties.

A tightly scheduled day was a day that redeemed itself. Where there were lacunae like patches of empty sky M.R. had come to feel herself unused, unmoored and adrift.

Once, new to administration, she’d yearned for more free time—to think, to ponder philosophical questions, to compose her meticulously organized, thoughtfully argued philosophical essays for which she’d been praised by her (mostly male) colleagues who were not otherwise lavish with praise. Now, the prospect of
free time
was not so inviting.

Agatha had not liked
free time
either. Even when she was reading, or watching TV, Agatha’s plump hands moved with surprising swiftness knitting, crocheting, quilt-sewing.

Konrad was quite different.
I loaf and invite my soul—
Konrad had so many times uttered, it was a surprise to Meredith to discover, in high school, that the arresting line wasn’t his but Walt Whitman’s.

Her wonderful, loving parents! In interviews, M.R. praised them lavishly.

It was a mystery to M.R. why, as soon as she’d left Carthage—(first to attend Cornell, then graduate school at Harvard)—she’d seemed to forget the Neukirchens. Always she was meaning to telephone them, or to write; in those years before e-mail when letter-writing could be something of a pleasurable task. As if a mist were gathering at the back of her brain, chill and insidious.

And beyond these
wonderful Quaker parents
as she spoke of them in interviews, in the years preceding the dark-brick house on Mt. Laurel Street where she’d been so happy, and so beloved, the mist was yet more insidious, implacable. What was enveloped in it, what was lost to memory, M.R. had no idea.

Of those years, M.R. never spoke in interviews.

Forgetting! M.R. thought of the phenomenon as rather concentrating on the present, the headlong plunge of the present. As, shining a flashlight into the dark, your eyes follow the trajectory of the light, and ignore the penumbra beyond.

What was essential to her body, like, for instance, swimming—she wasn’t likely to forget.

Often discovering when she searched among her papers—notes and sketches and early drafts of essays—that she didn’t actually remember what she’d been working on, or why it had meant so much to her at one time.

Even her handwriting seemed to be changing for she so rarely wrote by hand any longer.

In our family there is a secret weakness. Not a one of us has been spared.

She’d never learned what Konrad’s family secret was. Though, now she was an adult, she could guess.

Oh just some—riddle! Some brainteaser of your father’s you know how that man is.

Laughing her quick breathless laugh. A glint of fear in Agatha’s large limpid warm-brown eyes that the next moment dispelled.

“Ma’am?”

He was no one she knew: the sleek-black-haired young man, wide-shouldered, with dark twists of hair on his chest, shoulders, arms, legs, crudely squatting at the edge of the pool as M.R. was hauling herself out. His eyes lifted with her, as she stepped onto the wet tile floor streaming water down her legs in a way that made her feel intensely female suddenly, and intensely self-conscious.

The solitary swimmer she’d seen frequently in the pool—was this the same person? He didn’t appear to be a University undergraduate after all.

Nor anyone in the University community.

“Yes? Are you talking to me?”

“Yes, ma’am. You.”

He’d risen to his full height—inches taller than M.R. He, too, had only just emerged from the pool—his compactly-muscled body glittered with beads of water. He was older than M.R. had thought, in his mid- or late twenties, with a blunt coarse face, a head that resembled a seal’s head, and dark shiny eyes like an animal’s eyes; his sneering smile, teeth partly bared, reminded M.R. of a photograph, or a drawing—the head of a snarling dog from Charles Darwin’s
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

M.R. was taken by surprise, in this University setting! That a stranger—an intruder—should speak to
her.

And what an insult it was, that this stranger had no idea who she was.

M.R. was about to turn away annoyed when the young man gripped her arm at the elbow. “This way, ma’am.”

She was too astonished to resist. So quickly he’d taken hold of her, in this quasi-public place, in this University setting in which she’d felt at home, she had no way of resisting but clumsily stumbled beside her abductor as briskly and without ceremony he force-walked her along the edge of the pool in the direction of the exit; he addressed her in a low muttering voice that was both soothing and coercive as one might address an animal being led into restraint—how tractable the mesmerized animal, in the clutch of terror! M.R. drew breath to protest, to scream—could not utter a sound—as in the vast pool with its gorgeous blue mosaics and overhead drifting sea-clouds the several swimmers continued to swim laps in their individual lanes like automatons oblivious of M. R. Neukirchen abducted from the pool area as they’d been oblivious of M. R. Neukirchen when she’d been swimming laps beside them.