Mudwoman (49 page)

She glanced around, and there he stood—the man in the white shirt.

She’d forgotten him. She had not given him a second thought since he and his elderly companion had stepped into the elevator what seemed a very long time ago.

And now, he was approaching her, alone—staring at her quizzically, eagerly. The elderly woman was nowhere in sight. In these drab surroundings the long-sleeved white shirt caught the eye like a daub of glimmering white paint.

M.R. had the impression that he’d been watching her, from across the lobby. When she’d hurried into the first-floor restroom, in distress.

(A bout of diarrhea, a swirl of nausea, and a tentative recovery, she thought. Running tepid water at the splotched sink and splashing it onto her face that was flushed, yet not unattractive, oddly—as usual, M.R. could imagine that no one was likely to guess her misery.)

“You do remember me, I hope?—You were one of my star math students at Carthage High in the late 1970s.”

Hans Schneider! M.R. had not seen the man nor scarcely recalled him in more than twenty years.

“Oh yes—of course—‘Mr. Schneider.’ ”

“And you are—‘Meredith’?”

“Yes. ‘Meredith Neukirchen.’ ”

“I thought that I’d seen you earlier today in the foyer, Meredith—I mean, I saw you but wasn’t altogether certain that—it was
you.
After so many years . . .”

Clumsily Schneider extended his hand to M.R—she wasn’t sure if he meant to clasp her hand, or to shake it; instead, he gripped it between both his hands, pulling her off balance so that she nearly stumbled into him.

“Oh, excuse me—”

“Excuse
me
—”

They were staring at each other, astonished. M.R. could not believe how her former high school teacher stood before her, and so altered—in middle age Hans Schneider looked more youthful than he’d looked as a young man. His face she’d recalled as narrow and unattractive had filled out—his forehead was less severely creased—his nose less prominent—though his eyes fixed upon her face were no less intense. His manner that had been so aggressive had softened. His smile that had been a sneer had vanished. And why had she ever thought he’d resembled a
crow
?

Through the prism of derisive adolescent eyes the math teacher had been dismissed as
Freaky, ugly.
M.R. felt the injustice, in which she’d unthinkingly participated.

Though it did seem clear, her former teacher was ill-accustomed to sudden gestures of intimacy. Perhaps to any kind of intimacy.

“You aren’t—married? Or—?”

How bluntly, blunderingly Hans Schneider spoke. His gaze dropped to M.R.’s left hand—her ringless fingers. She felt the absurdity of her predicament: she was in love with a man who was almost entirely absent from her life.

“No. I’m not married.”

“And I also—not married. Not now.”

M.R. understood the murmured qualification—
Now.

M.R. understood the intensity in her former teacher’s face. She had not forgotten the bizarre proposal he’d made to her when she’d been a girl of sixteen and he’d been an adult man of twenty-nine.
Contract. You could wait for me. We have an understanding.

How shocked she’d been at the time! Yet, in her innermost heart, how deeply moved, flattered.

“You changed my life, Mr. Schneider. You made my life possible.”

“Did I!”

“You encouraged me to apply to Cornell and not just to teachers’ colleges. ‘Somewhere distinguished’—you said. And so I did apply, and Cornell gave me a scholarship. . . .” M.R. heard the plaintive boastfulness in her voice. She hoped that Hans Schneider wouldn’t ask her what she’d done after Cornell, where her career had brought her: for she’d have had no idea how to reply.

He smiled, uncertainly. As if he too were calculating what he might ask her, and what he had better not ask her. Some instinct urged him to step back, to return to the deeper past of Carthage High School which was their shared history.

“I seem to remember that you were ill, Meredith? In the spring of your senior year?”

M.R. was taken aback by the question, and by the undisguised tenderness with which it was framed.

“No. Certainly not.”

“You had to stay out of school for several weeks. . . .”

M.R. laughed, protesting: “No! I wasn’t ever ill, and I was certainly never out of school for several weeks. I graduated with my class—’79. In fact, I was class valedictorian.”

Again, this plaintive boastfulness. Flea bites ringing M.R.’s ankles and feet were making her want to scratch violently.

As if trying to recall this extraordinary bit of information Hans Schneider frowned thoughtfully. But of course he couldn’t recall Meredith Neukirchen as valedictorian because by the spring of 1979 he’d vanished from Carthage.

By the spring of 1979 he’d been presumed dead.

“Well. I must be thinking of someone else. . . .”

Schneider spoke apologetically yet with an air of just perceptible stubbornness as if he believed M.R. mistaken, but wasn’t going to press the issue.

M.R. wondered if it was possible—Hans Schneider didn’t remember what had happened to him in Carthage? His “breakdown”—“physical and mental collapse”—so like her own recent breakdown.

“Well! I do remember, Meredith, you were an excellent math student.”

“Actually you told me, Mr. Schneider, that I was only just a ‘good’ student—I hadn’t any ‘natural gift for math.’ ”

A hot flush rose into M.R.’s face as if she were sixteen years old again and vulnerable to the man’s judgment.

Schneider protested: “Surely not! I’m sure that—I didn’t say
that.
”

“You did. And of course you were right, Mr. Schneider. I was capable of high school math including elementary calculus but—I had no ‘natural gift for math.’ ” M.R. had intended her previous remark to be a rebuke but the mood between her and Schneider was edgy, giddy; their words were a kind of magical banter; she felt her heart beating with an absurd anticipation and childlike wonder—
Can this be happening? After twenty years—this?

Schneider protested: “Please don’t call me ‘Mister,’ Meredith—my name is ‘Hans.’ ”

Hans! M.R. pressed the knuckles of her hand against her mouth, trying not to laugh.

“But—what is so funny?”

“I—I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

“It’s a kind of—miracle—or maybe that’s too strong a word: coincidence? Though not a coincidence, either. I mean, our meeting each other like this, in this terrible place. . . . I did think of you from time to time, Meredith, after I left Carthage, but—I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to contact you. And then, as time passed—I suppose I ‘forgot’ you. I mean—another life intervened.”

You fell in love again. More appropriately. Of course.

M.R. spoke more soberly now. She had to resist an impulse to touch Hans Schneider’s wrist.

“What I remember about our math class was how you taught me to ‘teach’—Hans. You sent me to the blackboard to work out problems in front of the class. I was very shy—at first . . . I felt so clumsy and self-conscious! But you gave me faith in myself. You forced me to see that I could do something I would never have imagined I could do, and that I could enjoy it.”

“Well—did I! Really! I suppose . . . I’d hoped it might have that effect. You seemed somehow to require ‘affirmation’—some sort of infusion of strength. Did you become a teacher? Are you a teacher now?”

Schneider was smiling at M.R. as if he hoped his question wasn’t intrusive. That he hadn’t blundered in asking it. M.R. murmured
yes
in a way to forestall further questioning.

That she had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard was not information she wanted to provide Hans Schneider, just yet. Her history at the University she did not want to provide Hans Schneider just yet.

Though she was relieved—though also somewhat hurt—that Hans Schneider seemed totally oblivious of the public career of M. R. Neukirchen, its small triumphs and small disasters.

Maybe later. If I see him again. Inevitably, then.

“Where are you living now, Meredith?”

Hesitantly Schneider asked. As if sensing that something unfortunate had happened to M.R., painful to reveal.

“Now? Right now—for much of the summer—I’ve been living in Carthage, with my father.”

“Carthage! Somehow I wouldn’t have thought . . .” Schneider paused, as if the possibility of Carthage, the very sound of the word, was somehow incomprehensible. At close quarters, M.R. could see that the man’s white cotton shirt wasn’t so fresh any longer, damp with perspiration beneath the arms. A smell of his body—anxiety mixed with hope—mixed with the faintly urinous/disinfectant smell of the hospital, that was without hope. “I—I left Carthage—as maybe you know—and never returned . . . I broke off all contact with my ‘colleagues. . . .’ Secondary school teaching isn’t for the fainthearted! I went back to graduate school at Boston University and got a Ph.D. in math—expanding on work I’d done for my M.A.—a year as a post-doc at Penn—then I taught at the SUNY branch at Potsdam—then to St. Lawrence, in Canton, where I’ve been for seventeen years—still an associate professor and still toiling away at my ‘original’ research, that I’d begun as a master’s candidate in the early 1970s! (That has turned out to be a dead end, I’m afraid. But who could have predicted, when I’d begun? Not even my adviser, long since emeritus and deceased.) Sometimes I feel—especially here in this hospital—(to which I’ve been bringing a neighbor, a widow, to see her son since the poor woman hasn’t anyone else to drive her to Herkimer)—that my life hasn’t yet—really—
begun.
As if somehow my life had careened off course—taken a wrong turn—a detour—and any day now, if I am attentive and alert, and don’t succumb to despair, it will revert to what it might have been.” Schneider had been speaking ever more rapidly in a voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used, in such a way, in some time; he paused now, wiping at his face with a handkerchief. (M.R. took note: not a tissue to be tossed away but a cotton handkerchief.) (Oh, what did this mean about Hans Schneider? That he wasn’t a careless throw-away sort of individual, but one inclined to permanence? Or that he was a fussy middle-aged bachelor fixed in insurmountable habits, unnavigable as a vehicle arthritic with rust?) Now he spoke earnestly, stepping so close that M.R. instinctively stepped back:

“I wonder, Meredith—could I call you? Maybe we could—if you’re in Carthage—see each other sometime? I would drive down of course. . . .”

“I think—I don’t think . . .”

“We have so much to say to each other! After so many years it can’t be just a ‘coincidence’—I mean, meeting here, today—even if it’s this place of misery.”

“Yes. I mean, no—”

M.R.’s ankles itched violently. Yet she could not stoop to scratch them, while Hans Schneider spoke so passionately. And she’d been distracted seeing Konrad observing them from across the lobby. Her father had emerged from the men’s restroom but had stopped short sighting his daughter in what appeared to be an intense conversation with a stranger—or possibly not a stranger; canny Konrad, at times so blustery and intrusive, at other times so sensitive to the subterranean intricacies of situations.

“I’ll give you my number, and you can call me, Meredith, if you wish. It will be your choice, if you call.”

Graciously Hans Schneider spoke. His smile had become forced, fixed. Perspiration glimmered on his face highlighting the ghost-rivulets in his forehead, those odd vertical frown-lines descending from his hairline that had seemed to have faded but were now reappearing. M.R. was deeply moved, tears stung her eyes. She felt an impulse to clutch at her old teacher’s hand, to kiss the knuckles in gratitude.

“I hope—I do hope—we can see each other again? Sooner than another twenty years? Yes?”

He gave her the little scrap of paper upon which he’d neatly printed crucial information. M.R. folded it and put it into her pocket quickly in the hope that her sharp-eyed father would not see.

“Yes! Thank you.”

Blindly M.R. turned away. She had a dread of Hans Schneider clutching at her in a clumsy embrace—and how would she have responded, if he had?

C
rossing the heat-sweltering parking lot to their car, Konrad observed to M.R.: “A suitor in Birkenstocks sandals is every dad’s dream for his daughter. Even with socks, in August.”

It was Konrad’s provocatively terse wit calculated to surprise. For one naturally expected Konrad to be anything but terse.

M.R. laughed. A wild sort of laughter. Wiping at her eyes, and not daring to look at her father’s face.

R
idiculous! You have already invested your adult life in one man.

Too late! Too late! Too late for another folly.

N
ext morning M.R. telephoned the University president’s office.

Next morning M.R. spoke with the acting president for nearly ninety minutes.

By the end of which without being more than half-conscious of what she was doing M.R. had savagely scratched the damned flea bites ringing her ankles, bare feet and legs to the knee, so that she was bleeding from a dozen tiny wounds.

Mudwoman: Moons beyond Rings of Saturn.

August 2003

U
nexpectedly he called.

Saying calmly, bemused as one reporting a fact in a Universe of facts and no fact of more profundity or significance than the infinity of others
She has kicked me out at last. She has asked me to leave.

And he said
I’m sick, Meredith darling. I’m damaged goods.

She didn’t ask what her astronomer-lover meant. She didn’t ask if this sickness would be fatal, and how soon; she didn’t ask if he was in pain, or even if he needed her; without hesitation she said
I’ll come to you.

And he said
No, darling. It will be better if I come to you, in some way we can reasonably work out, for now.

Mudwoman Not Struck by Lightning.

Mudwoman Saved from Nightmare.

August 2003

“M
eredith! Come look.”

Reluctantly she came. She’d always been fearful of lightning storms—cautious, rather. Thinking how ironic to be struck by lightning out of curiosity, how needless a death.

When fiercely you so want to live, how ironic such a death.

And so reluctantly she came to the rear porch, where Konrad stood just barely sheltered from warm pelting rain lashing against the porch roof, the porch-posts, what was visible of the backyard grass and Agatha’s tangled garden. Her father rapt as a child riskily peering up into the night sky where miles away above the Adirondacks rain clouds were illuminated by lightning-flashes like severed nerves.

Sheets of rain and a noise as of shaken tin and M.R. winced at the deafening thunder-claps, and the silence that rushed in its wake like a stilled heart.

For some of the lightning-flashes weren’t miles away it seemed, some were closer, in Carthage, in the hills above the Black Snake River.

No need to see the river which was less than a half-mile from where they stood to know that, after a day of rain and now in the exigency of this torrential downpour, the river was rapidly rising.

A smell of sulphur in the air, like struck matches! And a smell of autumn, that made M.R.’s heart beat in apprehension.

She had not told Konrad about Andre’s late-night call, of the night before.

She had told him—of course—of the lengthy conversation she’d had with her provost, who’d been acting as president of the University through the summer; and of another conversation with Leonard Lockhardt that had followed.

“Meredith, we’re perfectly safe here! The lightning is miles away—mostly. And how beautiful, like Northern Lights . . .”

Beautiful! M.R. supposed yes, if you liked that sort of thing.

Manic detonations in the sky, pulsing arteries, raw nerves, neurons—shut your eyes and it’s a brain aneurysm, such a display of light.

Sensibly, Solomon was hiding inside the house. Cowering somewhere, very likely in the basement.

“I don’t recall you being frightened of electric storms, as a girl,” Konrad said. “That isn’t a recollection of mine.”

M.R. tried to think: this wasn’t a recollection of hers either.

“Nightmares, now. You did have nightmares.”

A fissure erupted in the sky just directly above them, scarcely beyond the treeline at the end of their property. M.R. gave a little cry and leapt back toward the opened door even as deafening thunder rolled over them, almost immediately; Konrad blinked and stared and held his ground.

She hadn’t had time to count. Scant seconds between the eruption of lightning and the aftermath of ear-splitting sound.

She felt Agatha’s distress—when Konrad behaved in some way brash, risky, dangerous—“self-destructive” and (Agatha’s reiterated charge) “immature.” How disapproving Agatha would be seeing Konrad on the porch steps in such weather. His bare feet, his trouser-legs and his lower body were riddled with damp, he scarcely seemed to notice.

M.R. said: “Daddy, remember Agatha’s librarian-friend Crystal—Crystal’s husband—I think it was her husband—was watching a lightning storm from their back porch like this and lightning struck one of the porch posts a few inches from him and sent wood-slivers into his face. . . .”

Absorbed in the display of lightning in the sky, the illumination of gigantic cumulus clouds like frigates, Konrad paid no heed.

“Daddy, at least stand back by the door here! Some of these lightning-flashes are less than a mile away . . . Crystal’s husband was badly injured, and might have been killed . . .”

“Oh, that never happened, I’m sure.”

“What never happened, Daddy? Why do you say that?”

“Agatha’s friends always exaggerated. And especially her librarian-friends. Their lives are over-quiet—‘repressed’—and they’re surrounded by books—‘stories’—they begin to invent their own.”

It was near midnight. The storm grew fiercer, louder. Gusts of wind whipped leaves from trees—old cedars, sycamores, birches that badly needed pruning, that M.R. had meant to prune. A good-sized tree limb fell heavily onto the roof and down the shingled roof rain ran overflowing gutters choked with leaves. It was so, you did feel a fascination with the rampaging storm—almost, an expectation that chaos was about to be discharged, into the human sphere. Shattering the roof, the house—the human habitation and its carefully named things. And of course, there were myriad leaks inside, upstairs. Already Konrad and M.R. had set out pans into which globules of water dropped noisily as flung pebbles.

Earlier that day—at the Carthage Vets Co-op fund-raiser picnic, that Konrad and M.R. had organized, in Friendship Park—the temperature had risen into the mid-nineties Fahrenheit, now it had plummeted thirty-five degrees.

For all the effort of the Neukirchens, father and daughter—organizing the fund-raiser, working with veterans’ wives, widows, families and volunteers—the sort of “leadership” effort M.R. did so well—the co-op had netted less than five hundred dollars which was less than M.R. herself had contributed to the organization on her father’s behalf.

Still, the fund-raiser picnic had been worth it! Konrad insisted, and M.R. wished to think so.

The end of August. End of summer. Between M.R. and her father it was tacitly understood: she would soon be leaving Carthage.

“W
hen you return to your home, remember: you have been placed in this world for a distinct purpose, and at the University, you have found that purpose.”

M.R. smiled wanly. M.R. was not going to contradict her beloved father.

“And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your
self.
”

Still M.R. smiled, silent. She was thinking that she could not bear to leave Carthage after all—she could not leave her father who was her newfound friend.

Yet of course, she must leave. She would leave.

Don’t risk it! Not again.

The next time you break, you will not heal.

She would invite Konrad to visit her, to stay with her. She would insist.

Easier for you both to remain in Carthage. This is your home, you are not at risk here.

In Carthage she’d regained sleep. She’d regained some portion of her frayed soul. Quite frankly she was concerned—she was terrified—that, returning to the University, she would return to the madness she had so narrowly escaped.

It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It is very hard to prevail in any case but without this love, it is close to impossible.

Yet—
I will do it! I must.

M.R. would not tell her father these doubts. She would not tell her father about the sudden turn in Andre Litovik’s life suggesting that now, his life would be bound up more tightly with hers.

Astonishing that Konrad, echoing a notion of Agatha’s, had seemed to foretell such a turn . . .

With maddening inquisitiveness Konrad had asked her about the man he’d seen her speaking with “earnestly”—“at length”—in the Herkimer hospital—“the mystery man in the Birkenstocks”—but M.R. answered with embarrassed evasiveness: “Oh Daddy! It was nothing really. Just a former high school teacher who thought he remembered me.”

“
Thought
he remembered you? Or—
remembered
you?”

M.R. laughed. Though Konrad’s teasing could be like nettles, or flea bites, rankling one’s skin.

“Was that the teacher who’d had a nervous breakdown, your math teacher? The rumor was, the poor bastard killed himself?”

“Oh Daddy! No.”

“What was his name?—‘Steiner’—‘Schneider.’ ”

How canny Konrad was—what a good memory! M.R. was rather shaken, her father remembered Hans Schneider’s name.

“I—I’m not sure. I don’t remember.”

“Don’t
remember
?
How many math teachers were there at Carthage who tried to kill themselves? Some kind of crazy-wild place, was it? Hive of decadents?”

M.R. laughed but said nothing more. You could never win by responding to Konrad’s teasing—to respond at all was analogous to stroking an aggressive porcupine, to soothe it. She reasoned that Konrad need never know about Hans Schneider: she had no intention of telephoning the man as he’d requested.

She wasn’t certain that she had the telephone number, still. Possibly crumpled in a pocket of her khaki shorts.

Konrad reverted to the subject of Meredith’s health. Now he was serious, somber. One did not need to be a Quaker to know that “holding in the light” was essential to survival, he told her.

“Remember, Meredith: you pushed yourself too hard even as a child. In elementary school! You ground your teeth in your sleep—you gave yourself nightmares—you were always anxious about being
tested.
You were anxious about crossing bridges, getting lost, missing school and ‘falling behind’ . . . You had nightmares for years.”

“I had nightmares? I don’t remember.”

“Agatha, a far lighter sleeper than I, heard you crying out in your sleep, and woke me, and we hurried into your room and woke you—sometimes your eyes were wide open but you didn’t seem to be seeing anything. You were very frightened, shivering—you couldn’t speak. But we hugged you, and told you little stories, and told you that we loved you and nothing would ever, ever happen to you because we loved you, and finally you settled down again, and slept.”

“I don’t remember. . . .”

“Well, better not to remember, dear Meredith! That’s what growing up means.”

I
n the morning, Konrad helped her pack her car for the drive back to New Jersey.