Читать книгу Mudwoman - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 9

March 2003

Must ready yourself. Hurry!

But there was no way she could ready herself for this.

“I don’t wish to accuse anyone.”

His name was Alexander Stirk. He was twenty years old. Formally and bravely he spoke. For his small prim child’s mouth had been kicked, torn and bloodied. His remaining good eye—the other was swollen shut, grotesquely bruised like a rotted fruit—was fixed on M.R. with hypnotic intensity as if daring her to look away.

“Though I have, as you know, President Neukirchen—numerous enemies here on campus.”

President Neukirchen. With such exaggerated respect this name was uttered, M.R. felt a tinge of unease—Is he mocking me?

M.R. decided no, that wasn’t possible. Alexander Stirk could not mistake M.R.’s attentiveness to him for anything other than sympathy.

His head was partly bandaged, with the look of a turban gone askew. His wire-rimmed glasses were crooked on his nose because of the bandage and the left lens had a hairline crack. In the thin reproachful voice of one accusing an elder of an obscure hurt he spoke calmly, deliberately. For he had a genuine grievance, he’d been martyred for his beliefs. He’d hobbled into the president’s office using a single aluminum crutch that was leaning now against the front corner of the president’s desk in a pose of nonchalance.

M.R.’s heart went out to Stirk—he was so small.

“That is—President Neukirchen—there are many individuals among both the undergraduate and the graduate student body—and faculty members as well—who have defined themselves as ‘enemies’ specifically of Alexander Stirk as well as ‘enemies’ of the conservative movement on campus. You know their names by now, or should—Professor Kroll has seen to that, I think.”

Kroll. M.R. smiled just a little harder, feeling blood rush into her face.

“Of these self-defined ‘enemies’ I’m not able to judge how many would actually wish ‘Alexander Stirk’ harm, apart from the usual verbal abuse. And how many, among these, would be actively involved in actually harming me.”

Stirk smiled with disarming candor. Or seeming candor. M.R. smiled more painfully.

She’d invited Stirk to her office, to speak with her in private. She wanted the young man to know how concerned she was for him, and how outraged on his behalf. She wanted the young man to know that, as the president of the University, she was on his side.

The assault had taken place on the University campus just two nights before, at approximately 11:40 P.M. Returning—alone—for Alexander Stirk was frequently alone—to his Harrow Hall residence, Stirk had been accosted on a dimly lit walkway beside the chapel by several individuals—seemingly fellow undergraduates; in his confusion and terror he hadn’t seen their faces clearly—not clearly enough to identify—but he’d heard crude jeering voices—“fag”—“Fascist-fag”—as he was being clumsily shoved and slammed against the brick wall of the chapel—nose bloodied, right eye socket cracked, lacerations to his mouth, left ankle sprained when he was thrown to the ground. So forcibly was Stirk’s backpack wrenched from his shoulders, his left shoulder had been nearly dislocated, and was badly bruised; the backpack’s contents were dumped on the ground—leaflets bearing the heraldic fierce-eyed American eagle of the YAF—(Young Americans for Freedom)—to be scattered and blown about across the snow-stubbled chapel green.

Evidently, campus security hadn’t been aware of the fracas. No one seemed to have come to Stirk’s aid even after he’d been left semiconscious on the ground. M.R. found this difficult to believe, or to comprehend—but Stirk insisted. And it was wisest at this point not to challenge him.

For already, Stirk had been interviewed by the campus newspaper in a florid front-page story. Bitterly he’d complained of “unconscionable treatment”—that several witnesses to the attack, in the vicinity of the chapel, had ignored his cries for help as if knowing that the victim was him.

Alexander Stirk had a certain reputation at the University, for his outspoken conservative views. He had a weekly half-hour program on the campus radio station—Headshots—and a biweekly opinion column in the campus newspaper—“Stirk Strikes.” He was a senior majoring in politics and social psychology, from Jacksonville, Florida; he was an honors student, an officer in the local chapter of the YAF and an activist member of the University’s Religious Life Council. When high-profile liberal speakers like Noam Chomsky spoke at the University, Stirk and a boisterous band of confederates were invariably seen picketing the lecture hall before the lecture and, during the lecture, interrupting the speaker with heckling questions. Stirk’s particular concern seemed to be, oddly for a young man, abortion: he was resolutely opposed to abortion in any and all forms and particularly opposed to any government funding of abortion.

But he was also opposed to free condoms, contraception, “sex education” in public schools.

It was so, evidently—Stirk had roused angry opposition on the campus including a barrage of “threatening” e-mails, of which he’d turned over some to authorities. He’d been, by his account, “insulted”—“called names”—told to “shut the fuck up”; but until the other evening he’d never been physically assaulted. Now, he said, he was “seriously frightened” for his life.

At this, Stirk’s voice quavered. Beneath the supercilious pose—the posturing of a very bright undergraduate whose command of language was indeed impressive—there did seem to be a frightened boy.

Warmly M.R. assured Alexander Stirk—he had nothing to fear!

University proctors had been assigned to his floor in Harrow Hall and would escort him to classes if he wished. Whenever he wanted to go anywhere after dark—a proctor would accompany him.

And whoever had assaulted him would be apprehended and expelled from the University—“This, I promise.”

“President Neukirchen, thank you! I would like to believe you.”

Stirk spoke with the mildest of smiles—unless it was a smirk. M.R. had the uneasy sensation that the young man who’d limped into her office was addressing an audience not visibly present, like a highly self-conscious actor in a film. There came—and went—and again came—that sly smirk of a smile, too fleeting to be clearly identified. For his meeting with President Neukirchen Stirk wore a dark green corduroy sport coat with leather buttons, that appeared to be a size or two too large; he wore a white cotton shirt buttoned to the throat, and flannel trousers with a distinct crease. Except for the luridly swollen eye and mouth, Stirk gave the appearance of a pert, bright, precocious child, long the favorite of his elders. Almost, you would think that his feet—small prim feet, in white ankle-high sneakers—didn’t quite touch the floor.

How strange Stirk seemed to M.R.! Not so much in himself as in her intense feeling for him, that was quite unlike any sensation she’d ever experienced, she was sure, in this high-ceilinged office with its dark walnut wainscoting, dour hardwood floors and somber lighting grudgingly emitted from a half-dozen tall narrow windows. The president’s office on the first floor of “historic” Salvager Hall—old, elegantly heavy black-leather furnishings, massive eighteenth-century cherrywood desk, Travertine marble fireplace and shining brass andirons and built-in shelves floor-to-ceiling with books—rare books—books long unread, untouched—behind shining glass doors—had the air of a museum-room, perfectly preserved. Visitors to this office were suitably impressed, even wealthy graduates, donors—the portrait over the fireplace mantel, of a soberly frowning if just slightly rubefacient bewigged eighteenth-century gentleman bore so close a resemblance to Benjamin Franklin that visitors invariably inquired, and M.R. was obliged to explain that Ezechiel Charters, the founder of the University—that is, the Presbyterian minister founder of the seminary, in 1761, that would one day be the University—had been in fact a contemporary of Franklin’s, but hardly a friend.

Reverend Ezechiel Charters had been something of a Tory, in the tumultuous years preceding the Revolution. His fate at the hands of a mob of local patriots would have been lethal except for a “divine intervention” as it was believed to be—the noose meant to strangle him broke—and so Reverend Charters lived to become a Federalist, like so many of his Tory countrymen.

A Federalist and something of a “liberal”—so the founding-legend of the University would have it.

But twenty-year-old Alexander Stirk hadn’t been impressed by all this history. Brashly he’d limped into the president’s office on his single, clattering crutch, lowered himself with conspicuous care into the chair facing the president’s desk, glanced about squinting and smirking as if the anemic light from the high windows hurt his battered eyes, and murmured:

“Well! This is an unexpected honor, President Neukirchen.” If he’d been speaking ironically, President Neukirchen, in the way of those elders who surround the just-slightly-insolent young, hadn’t seemed to register the irony.

For M.R. was strangely—powerfully—struck by the boy. There was something pious and stunted and yet poignant about him, even the near-insolence of his face, as if, unwitting, he was the bearer of an undiagnosed illness.

“The police were asking—could I identify my assailants?—and I told them I didn’t think so, I was jumped from behind and didn’t see faces clearly. I heard voices—but….”

M.R. had questions to ask of Stirk, but did not interrupt as he continued his account of the assault. She was thinking that most of the individuals who came to her office to sit in the heavy black leather chair facing her desk wanted something of her—wanted something from her—or had a grievance to make to her—or of her—as president of the University; most of them, M.R. would have to disappoint in some way, but in no way that might be interpreted as indifferent. Uncaring. For it was M. R. Neukirchen’s (possible) weakness as an administrator—she did care.

She was not a Quaker. Not a practicing Quaker. But the benign Quaker selflessness—the concern for “clearness”—and for the commonweal above the individual—had long ago suffused her soul.

All that matters—really matters—is to do well by others. At the very least, to do no harm.

And so, M.R. didn’t want to question the injured boy too closely, nor even to interview him as the police had done in the ER; she didn’t see her role, at this critical time, as anything other than supportive, consoling.

Almost as soon as the news had been released, bulletin e-mails sent to all University faculty and staff, there’d been, among the more skeptical left-wing faculty, some doubt of Stirk’s veracity. And among students who knew Stirk, who weren’t sympathetic with his politics, there was more than just some doubt.

But M.R. who was known on campus as the students’ friend did not align herself with these.

And it was so—seeing Stirk up close, the boy’s very real and obviously painful injuries including a broken eye socket, M.R. wasn’t inclined to be skeptical.

Or, rather—she’d learned such a technique, from her first years as an administrator—her skepticism was lightly repelled, suspended, like a balloon that has been given a tap, to propel it into a farther corner of the room.

“Of course, the University is going to investigate the assault. I’ve named an emergency committee, and I will be ex officio. Whoever did this terrible thing to you will be apprehended and expelled, I promise.”

Stirk laughed. The wounded little mouth twisted into a kind of polite sneer.

“Better yet, President Neukirchen, the township police will investigate. Whoever attacked me committed a felony, not a campus misdemeanor. There will be arrests—not mere expulsions.” The thin boyish voice deepened again, with a kind of suppressed exaltation. “There will be lawsuits.”

Lawsuits was uttered in a way to make an administrator shudder. But President Neukirchen did not overtly react.

M.R. had been vaguely aware, before the assault, of the controversial undergraduate—at least, the name “Stirk.” In recent months she’d been made aware of the conservative movement on campus, that had been gathering strength and influence since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the very eve, in early March, of a “military action” against Iraq, expected to be ordered by the president of the United States within a few days.

It couldn’t be an accident, Alexander Stirk had declared himself passionately in favor of war against Iraq, as against all “enemies of Christian democracy.” A wish to wage war as a religious crusade was a part of the conservative campaign for a stricter personal morality.

Before every war in American history there’d been a similar campaign in the public press—often, demonic and degrading political cartoons depicting the “enemy” as subhuman, bestial. The campaign against Saddam Hussein had been relentlessly waged since October, mounting to a fever pitch on twenty-four-hour cable news programs in recent weeks—Fox, CNN. It was a farcical sort of tragedy that the murder-minded Republican administration led by Cheney and Rumsfeld had its ideal foil in the murder-minded Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Except that hundreds of thousands of innocent individuals might die, these deranged adversaries deserved one another.

Disturbing to realize that the conservative student movement was steadily gaining ground on American campuses in these early years of the twenty-first century. Even at older, more historically distinguished private universities like this one, that were traditionally liberal-minded.

In the hostile vocabulary of Alexander Stirk and his compatriots—leftist-leaning.

“I told the township officers, and I will go on record telling you, President Neukirchen—I don’t feel that I should try to identify my assailants even if I have some idea who some of them are.” Stirk paused to remove a handkerchief from his coat pocket which he unfolded and dabbed against his injured eye, in which lustrous tears welled. He spoke with exaggerated care as if not wanting to be misunderstood.

It was clear to M.R.—unmistakably!—that Stirk was speaking with an air of adolescent sarcasm, perhaps hoping to provoke her.

It hadn’t happened often, in M.R.’s university career, that students had spoken disrespectfully to her. Perhaps in fact no student ever had—until now. And so she wasn’t accustomed to the experience—wasn’t sure how to react, or whether to react. In her chest she felt a sharp little pang of—was it hurt? disappointment? chagrin? Was it anger? That Alexander Stirk whom she’d hoped to befriend was not so very charmed by President Neukirchen.

Yet more daringly—provocatively—Stirk was saying: “Frankly I can tell you—as I am sure you would hardly repeat it—President Neukirchen—when I was attacked, I had blurred impressions of faces—and maybe—an impression of just one face—or more than one—belonging to a light-skinned ‘person of color.’” Stirk paused to let this riposte sink in, with a look both grave and reproachful. Then as if he and President Neukirchen were in complete agreement on some issue of surpassing delicacy he continued, piously: “But—as a Christian—a Catholic—and a libertarian—on principle I don’t believe that it is just—as in justice—to risk accusing an innocent individual even if it means letting the guilty go free. That isn’t a principle that makes sense to pro-abortion people—who grant no value whatever to nascent human life—but it’s a principle greatly cherished by the YAF.”

Pro-abortion? Nascent human life? What this had to do with Stirk being assaulted, M.R. didn’t quite know. But she knew enough not to rise to this bait.

“Well. After I’d been knocked to the ground, kicked and humiliated and threatened—‘You don’t shut the fuck up, you’re dead meat, fag’”—Stirk’s boyish voice assumed a deeper and coarser tone, reiterating these crude words—“still no one came to my aid. Within seconds all witnesses fled the scene—laughing—I could hear them laughing—and by the time some Good Samaritan alerted a campus security cop in the office behind Salvager Hall, I’d managed to get to my feet and stagger out to the street—off campus—a passing motorist saw me, and took pity on me.”

Passing motorist. The phrase struck M.R. oddly.

Like one who has told a story many times, though in fact Stirk could not have told this story many times, the bruised and battered undergraduate related how he’d been helped into the vehicle of the passing motorist and driven to the local hospital ER—“This citizen didn’t worry about the inside of his car getting bloodied, thank God”—where he was X-rayed and treated for his injuries and township police officers were called—“Since this wasn’t an accident, but a vicious attack”—and came to interview him; when he was feeling a little stronger Stirk called Professor Kroll, his politics adviser, also faculty adviser for the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, at whose house Stirk had been before the assault.

Strange, M.R. thought, that Stirk hadn’t called his family in Jacksonville. Stirk had been adamant, the dean of students was not to contact them without his permission.

Where once the university was legally held to be in loco parentis, now the university was forbidden to assume any sort of parental responsibility not specifically granted by the individual student.

Where once the university was likely to be sued for failure to behave like a protective parent, now the university was likely to be sued for behaving like a protective parent, against even the wishes of an eighteen-year-old freshman.

“Y’know what Professor Kroll’s first words were to me, President Neukirchen?—‘So it’s started, then. Our war.’”

Our war! How like Oliver Kroll this was—to make of the private something political. To make of the painfully specific something emblematic, impersonal. For our war meant a division of campus and nationalist loyalties as it meant our war soon to be launched in Iraq.

Somehow, campus politics had become embroiled with such issues as abortion, sexual promiscuity and drunkenness on campus; patriotism was measured by the fervor with which one argued for “closed borders”—“War on Terror”—the need for “military action” in the Middle East. M.R. had followed relatively little of this at the University for she’d been busy with other, seemingly more pressing matters.

Proudly Stirk was telling President Neukirchen that, though it was after midnight by the time he’d called him, Oliver Kroll came at once to the ER. There, Professor Kroll had been “astonished” to see Stirk’s injuries—“disgusted”—“furious.” Professor Kroll had insisted upon speaking with township police officers, informing them of threats he’d personally seen that Stirk had received from “radical-left sources” at the University, in protest of Stirk’s outspoken views on politics and morality. More specifically, in the week prior to the assault, Stirk had addressed in both his radio program and in his newspaper column a “truly despicable, unspeakable” situation that had transpired at the University—the “open secret” that an undergraduate girl had had a third-trimester abortion in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia. Stirk had slyly—dangerously—come very close to “naming names, placing blame”—and for this, he’d received a fresh barrage of “hate mail” and “threats.”

M.R. had been dismayed when one of her staff members brought the student newspaper to her, to show her Stirk’s column rife with innuendos and accusations like a tabloid gossip column. Though the student paper was overall a politically liberal publication, yet its editors believed in “diversity of expression”—“controversy.” There had not been any attempt to censor or even to influence student publications at the University for at least fifty years—such publications were self-determined by students. M.R., like most faculty members, had only a vague awareness of the politically conservative/born-again Christian coalition at the University, that sought converts for its cause. The coalition was a minority of students, probably less than 5 percent of the student body, yet it had become a highly vocal and impassioned minority at odds with the predominant liberal atmosphere, and it didn’t help the situation that certain of the Christian students, like Alexander Stirk, seemed to be courting martyrdom—at least, the public attention accruing to martyrdom.

Especially, M.R. had been disturbed by the bluntness of the column “Stirk Strikes” with its provocative title “Free (For Who?) Choice” and, in boldface type, the mocking rhyme in the first paragraph:

FREE CHOICE IS A LIE!

NOBODY’S BABY WANTS TO DIE!

Unbidden the thought came to M.R.—My mother wanted me to die.

But how ugly this was, and in the student newspaper! No wonder Stirk had drawn what he claimed to be hate e-mail. No wonder there were undergraduates who resented him, mocked him. If Stirk were gay—as it appeared to be Stirk was—this “gayness” had nothing to do with his conservative beliefs, in fact would seem to be in opposition to conventional conservatism—which would have made of Alexander Stirk an unusual individual, perhaps, and a brave one. But in these issues which roused emotion like a dust storm, there was no time for nuance or subtleties; no time to consider paradoxes of personality.

Distressing to M.R. and her (liberal-minded) colleagues, that campus conservatives, in mimicry of conservatives through America since the triumphant Reagan years, were inclined to forgo subtleties. Their strategies of opposition were adversarial, confrontational—ugly. Their strategies were, as they put it, to go for the jugular.

When M.R. had first known Oliver Kroll, when she’d first come to teach moral philosophy at the University, Kroll had been less passionately involved in the conservative movement; M.R. had read Kroll’s essays on the history of American libertarianism, published in such prestigious journals as American Political Philosophy, and been impressed. For here was a perspective very different from her own, intelligently if not persuasively argued. M.R. had never felt comfortable with Kroll—for both political and personal reasons—but she’d admired his work and, to a degree, painful now to recall, they’d been friends—or more than friends, for a brief while; since that time, Kroll had become a (well-paid) consultant for the Republican administration in Washington and had become closely aligned with the University’s most famous—or notorious—conservative spokesman, G. Leddy Heidemann, an authority on “fundamentalist Islam” who was rumored to be intimately involved with (secret) preparations for the Iraqi invasion, a confidant of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both Kroll and Heidemann were much disliked at the University by a majority of their colleagues but they had a following among a number of students, primarily undergraduates.

M.R. found all this disturbing, and distasteful—like any administrator she feared for her authority even as she believed herself the very sort of administrator who cared little for “authority”—it was M. R. Neukirchen’s specialness that made her an effective president, an air of open-minded friendliness to all.

Yet it was upsetting to her that in growing quarters in the public media as on her very campus, the word liberal had become a sort of comic obscenity, not to be murmured without a smirk.

Like “pointy-headed intellectual”—the crude, coarse smear-phrase that had been used to discredit Adlai Stevenson in the ill-fated 1956 presidential election. How to defend oneself against such a—charge? Even to attempt to refute it was to be sullied by it, an object of ridicule.

“So, President Neukirchen—”

In his mock-reproachful pious-accusing voice Stirk continued his account of the assault and its aftermath. For twenty minutes he’d been speaking virtually nonstop as if declaiming his plight to a vast TV audience among which M.R. was a single listener. With remarkable brazenness—as if he understood how he was intimidating the president of the University—he paused to touch a forefinger to his lips.

“I wonder, President Neukirchen—have you ever listened to my radio broadcast—Headshots?”

“I’m afraid I have not.”

“But I think—I hope—you’ve seen my column in the campus paper—‘Stirk Strikes’?”

“Yes. I’ve seen that.”

“The columns are posted online, too. So my ‘kingdom’ is not just of this campus.”

Stirk was speaking in his radio voice, M.R. supposed—a forced-baritone that belied the small-boned and seemingly muscleless body. How small. How easily he could be hurt.

Stirk’s bandaged head—the markedly narrow forehead that looked as if it had been pinched together in a vise, and the weak, melted-away chin … The eyes were Stirk’s most attractive feature despite being blackened and bruised and M.R. saw in them both insolence and yearning, desperation.

Love me! Love me and help me please God.

The plea that would never be voiced.

Without his pose of arrogance, as without his clothes, how defenseless Stirk would be! A sexless little figure, utterly vulnerable. M.R. imagined him as a young adolescent, or as a child—intimidated by bigger boys, made to feel inferior, contemptible. In the world in which she’d grown up, in upstate New York south of the Adirondacks, a boy like Alexander Stirk wouldn’t have had a chance.

It seemed touching to her, a gesture of sheer courage, or bravado—to have proclaimed himself so openly “gay.” Except Stirk’s “gayness” seemed also a kind of guise, or ruse; a provocation and a mask to hide behind.

Stirk was revealing now to M.R. that he had a list of names which he hadn’t yet given to the police—a list that Professor Kroll had helped him prepare—“Not just students but faculty, too. Some surprising names.” He intended to give this list to the University committee investigating the assault—but he wasn’t sure “just yet” about giving the list to the police.

What was wonderful about the assault—ironically!—was that he’d been receiving so much support from people “all over the country”—“an outpouring of sympathy and outrage.” Within the past day or so he’d had offers from “world-class” attorneys offering to represent him in lawsuits against his assailants and against the University for having failed to protect him…. The Washington Times, the Young America Foundation, the cable Fox News had contacted him requesting interviews….

M.R. winced to hear this. Of course—the conservative media would leap at the opportunity to interview one of their martyred own.

Sobering to consider how an incident on the University campus so very quickly made its way into a global consciousness—“cyberspace”—to be replicated—amplified—thousands of times! M.R. was beginning to feel faint. For this was shaping up to be the sort of campus controversy, swirling out of control like sewage rising in a flash flood, M.R. knew she must avoid; M.R. had assumed she could, with goodwill, common sense, hard work and sincerity avoid. Hadn’t she assumed that, if she met with the stricken boy personally, and alone—that would make a difference?

Leonard Lockhardt and other staffers had strongly suggested to M.R. that she not meet with Alexander Stirk alone—but M.R. had insisted: she wasn’t the sort of university president to distance herself from individual students, she was precisely the sort of administrator known to care for individuals. She’d expected that speaking with Stirk calmly, in private, she could reach out to him, and understand him; she could—oh, was this mere vanity?—naïveté?—impress him with her sincerity, and win his trust.

Make her his friend.

The call had come late the other night—very late—2 A.M.—when M.R. had only just gone to bed and lay sleepless amid the thrumming of her brain like a hive of bees—sleepless alone in the president’s bed in the president’s bedroom in the president’s house which was an “historic” building in the older, “historic” part of the University campus—she had only just left her home office, only just shut down her computer for the night and hoped to sleep a few hours at least before waking at 7 A.M. for a long day—all weekdays were long days—to be navigated with zest, with optimism, with hope—like a ski slope, a very long ski slope, the bottom of which wasn’t in sight from the top.

Nothing so beautiful and so thrilling as downhill skiing—if you have the skill.

The ringing phone, at 2 A.M.—precisely, 2:04 A.M.—and M.R. had answered it with apprehension, for of course it could be only bad news at such an hour—a call to the president’s unlisted, private line—a number which few individuals knew—the urgent voice of the University’s head of security informing her of this shocking news….

Oh God! Is he—how badly is he hurt?

Is it known who attacked him? Were they—students?

It would seem to M.R. that a bright, blinding light had suffused the room, and the nighttime landscape outside the window. Immediately she’d been wide awake—hyper-awake. She would be on, or near, the phone for hours.

Thinking What folly this is! I am not prepared for this.

Yet she would persevere. She would do what she could. Vastly relieved that the boy wasn’t critically—seriously—injured; impulsively deciding to drive to the hospital, to see him, at 6:20 A.M. in a wet wind-driven snow.

The hospital was a little more than a mile away from the president’s house. The last time M.R. had driven there, she’d visited an older colleague, a woman who’d had breast cancer surgery.

Before that, a male colleague, not older, who’d had prostate cancer surgery.

Both individuals had recovered, or so M.R. was given to believe.

She would tell no one at the University about this reckless pre-dawn act—no one on her staff, no confidante or friend. Certainly not the University counsel who urged caution in all matters that might involve publicity. And certainly not her (secret) lover for whom the entire adventure of M.R.’s University presidency was an improbable phantasmagoria, tinged with folly, vanity, naïveté.

Why this was, M.R. wasn’t so sure. Maybe because the presidency, beyond even M. R. Neukirchen’s brilliant academic career, was so very alien to him and so excluded him.

In a haze of excitement fueled by the insomniac stress of the past several hours M.R. drove to the hospital and parked at the brightly lighted emergency room at the rear and hurried inside breathless and apprehensive—a tall anxious-eyed woman asking if a young University student named Alexander Stirk was still there, and could she see him …

By this time, Stirk had been discharged. He’d left the hospital in the company of an individual M.R. had to assume was Oliver Kroll.

“Oh, I see! And is he—how is he?”

A young Indian doctor regarded M.R. with quizzical eyes. Who was this woman? What relationship to Stirk?

M.R. introduced herself. Seeing in the doctor’s startled gaze that yes, it was something of an incident in itself, something to be remarked upon, spoken of, that the president of the University had hurried to the ER before dawn to see the badly beaten undergraduate.

With a polite smile the doctor told M.R. that Alexander Stirk had been considered well enough to leave the ER and he would tell her what he wanted her to know of his medical condition—best to inquire of him.

M.R. went away rebuked. M.R. went away relieved.

For it had been a rash act, to drive to the hospital. She wondered if it had been a foolish act.

The University counsel Leonard Lockhardt would have disapproved. This canny individual whom President Neukirchen had inherited from her canny predecessor and whose general advice to the new University president was caution.

These are litigious times, keep in mind! And this University is known to be very wealthy.

But Leonard Lockhardt would never know that M.R. had driven to the hospital before dawn. No one would ever know, including Alexander Stirk.

Naturally Lockhardt advised M.R. not to meet with the excitable young man in private. M.R. insisted she would meet with Stirk in private. Lockhardt had cautioned M.R. not to “seem to be taking sides—prematurely”—and M.R. said that of course she would be very careful about what she said. Most of all she wanted simply to speak to the boy, to console him. For he’d suffered a terrible shock—whether his account of the assault was entirely true, he had been injured. It was M.R.’s wish to console him and she believed it was her duty to console him—as a University student, Stirk was her student.

And so M.R. took care not to suggest that she didn’t believe Stirk’s story or that in any way she wished to defend the University that had, by his account, failed to protect him.

Grimly Stirk was saying that his enemies would be accusing him of fabricating the very attack they’d made on him. They’d threatened him, with worse harm.

“—think that they can intimidate me—silence me. But they will be very surprised when—”

M.R. perceived a deep hurt in the stricken boy—a woundedness like spiritual anguish. For he’d been insulted, and the insult wasn’t recent.

Difficult to believe that this was a twenty-year-old and not a boy of fifteen, or younger; seen from a short distance, Stirk more resembled a girl than a boy. He could have been no more than five feet two inches tall and could not have weighed more than 110 pounds. How painful to have made his way in school, being so very bright—aggressively bright—and in so undersized a body; how painful his early years must have been, in grade school, and middle school. Even at the University, with its rigorous academic standards, sports were a passion in some quarters; the old eating clubs and “secret societies” still dominated undergraduate social life…. And there was the sexual element: in adolescence, the predominant element.

Though it hadn’t been in M. R. Neukirchen at that age! And so perhaps sexual longing was not so predominant in this boy, either.

Sexual feeling—“desire”—had not seemed nearly so natural in M.R. as in an adolescent, as other sorts of desire.

It did seem that Stirk’s grievances against the University were long-standing—since his arrival as a freshman. What had “come to a head” the other night had been “long building, like an abscess”—the “hostility, hatred” of his enemies—their “jealousy” of his position on campus and “leftist-liberal resentment” of the conservative coalition on campus, which was gaining in numbers steadily. M.R. was determined to listen to Stirk without interrupting him or challenging him but was having a difficult time following his reasoning, or his charges—the connection between the undergraduate woman who’d (allegedly) arranged for a late-term abortion and other (alleged) incidents at the University and the local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom—and Alexander Stirk—wasn’t clear; very likely, there were relationships among certain of these undergraduates of which no one had spoken yet, that hadn’t only to do with their contrasting politics.

Stirk said he was seriously considering “granting” interviews, and of course he intended to write about the incident, not just for the campus newspaper but also on the Internet and elsewhere—even against the advice of Professor Kroll. It seemed crucial to him—before it was “too late” and “something worse” happened to him—to “expose to the media” the “hostile leftist environment” of the University….

Now M.R. did interrupt. Though she tried to speak evenly.

Saying she didn’t think it was a very good idea to go to the media so quickly, while the assault was being investigated by the police and the University committee—

“Are you threatening to censor me, President Neukirchen? Shut me up?—so that I don’t embarrass you?”

Eagerly Stirk spoke, as if he’d been waiting for M.R.’s objection. His good eye shone with a sort of sick, thrilled elation and his knees trembled and quaked in sideways movements like those of a hyperkinetic child who has been sitting restrained for too long.

“Alexander, of course not. You are free to write about this—to write about anything—of course—but—”

“But—what?”

Calmly M.R. continued. Calmly if a bit tightly she smiled. In the Quaker Meeting the ideal is clearness—clarity—out of confusion and dissension an infusion of the Light will prevail. Without ever having quite examined her beliefs M.R. seemed to believe this, or wished to believe it.

Not in her analytical/skeptical mode as an academic philosopher but in her mode as professor/president, she wished to believe in a vision of humankind as evolving toward light, truth, compassion like a gigantic flower opening—otherwise, one’s compassion, like one’s naïveté, was an embarrassment.

“—for the present time, while the investigations are going on—isn’t it wiser just to wait? It really isn’t a good idea, as you must know—to write something prematurely. Especially if you don’t want to tell your family—they would surely discover it, and be upset….”

Stirk shifted excitedly in his chair. As if M.R. had tossed a lighted match onto flammable material, immediately Stirk began speaking in a rapid stammer. “So this meeting is about—censorship! Censoring me! Threatening me with telling my family—worrying my family! Like—like this is—blackmail! Trying to censor the voice of the conservative movement on this campus! Already the leftist-liberals control the media—already you control the majority of universities—now, you are putting pressure to silence—censor—a victim—Trying to censor me—with the pretense of ‘helping’ me….”

“Alexander, please! There’s no need to raise your voice. I am just pointing out that—”

“‘Pointing out that’—vicious, immoral behavior is condoned on this campus—sexual promiscuity, drunkenness—infanticide—but revealing to the media what has happened to me—is ‘not a good idea’?”

Stirk’s voice was raised. Stirk was both incensed and gloating. M.R. was stunned by the sudden outburst.

“Are you—recording this? Our conversation? Is that what you are doing?” Suddenly M.R. knew this must be so.

But Stirk shook his head quickly—no. As if M.R. had leaned across the desk to touch him—to touch him improperly—he recoiled in his seat with a look of childish guilt, insolence. “No, I am not. I am—not—‘recording’—our conversation, President Neukirchen. Maybe you’d like to—frisk me? Call in your security cops—maybe a—strip search?”

Laughing Stirk lurched to his feet. In the commotion the aluminum crutch clattered to the floor and Stirk snatched it up as if in fear it might be taken from him. Astonished and mortified M.R. understood that, of course, this devious young man had been recording their conversation. Some sort of recording device was in a pocket of that bulky corduroy jacket.

Probably, Oliver Kroll had encouraged him. For this was our war, an early skirmish.

M.R.’s face flushed with heat. She hoped she had not spoken recklessly—said something incriminating—during the course of their conversation. In a mild panic she wondered—could her remarks to Alexander Stirk be broadcast, posted on the Web? Without her permission? Weren’t there laws regulating unauthorized tapings of private conversations? Was this in fact a private conversation? Had the University president a reasonable expectation of privacy, in such an exchange with a student? Her heart was beating painfully and her face throbbed with heat as if she’d been slapped.

Stirk said impudently, “And what if it is being recorded, President Neukirchen? I’m only trying to protect myself—no one can expect fair treatment—‘justice’—from their enemies. I will have to build my case using the weapons I can.”

M.R. was on her feet behind the massive presidential desk. M.R. who had never been known to raise her voice, to betray upset or agitation, still less anger or dislike, staring at the smirking boy as if she’d have liked now to hit him.

“You weren’t really ‘attacked’—were you? You’ve fabricated the entire incident—you injured yourself—filed a false report to the police—”

Hotly Stirk protested: “I did not. How dare you—insult me—slander me! How dare you accuse me of—‘fabricating’—”

“Well—did you? You did.”

Never once in this austere presidential office—not once in her months—years—at the University—had M. R. Neukirchen spoken in so uncalculated a voice, with such vehemence; never once had her face betrayed any emotion so extreme as annoyance, still less dislike, repugnance. The effect upon Stirk was immediate—his pinched little boy’s face contorted with rage and in a sudden tantrum he overturned the chair in which he’d been sitting.

M.R. cried angrily, “Stop! Stop that! You aren’t a child!”

M.R. cringed as Stirk lifted the crutch to strike at the desk, or at her—he swept a stack of documents onto the floor—a small ceramic bowl containing pens, paper clips—M.R. tried to grab the crutch, to wrench it from Stirk’s fingers—Stirk gave a loud yelp as if she’d struck him—a yelp as of surprised pain—“Hey! Jesus! What’re you doing—that hurts”—for the benefit of the recording device in his corduroy jacket.

“But I didn’t—I didn’t—”

“Didn’t what, President Neukirchen? Hit me? You didn’t—hit me?”

As M.R. stared in astonishment the gloating boy stuck his tongue out at her. His tongue! Within these swift and irretrievable seconds the conversation M.R. had believed so forthright had shifted to farce, and President Neukirchen was the butt of the farce. Quivering with mischief Stirk fitted the crutch into his armpit and turned to limp out of the office just as the door was being opened by the president’s secretary whom he pushed aside with the crutch, laughing—“Here’s a witness! Another female! Expect a subpoena, lady!”

Limping noisily and conspicuously through the president’s outer office Alexander Stirk departed historic Salvager Hall like a sequence of mallet strokes against a just barely unyielding hardwood floor.

So it would be shortly charged: not only had M. R. Neukirchen tried to “censor” Alexander Stirk, the woman had actually—in some sort of “scuffle” in the president’s office—struck him.

In some versions of the lurid story, she’d struck him with the injured undergraduate’s very crutch.

Should have known. Hadn’t she been warned.

This is a war. There are enemies.

Her heart beat in her ears. Barely she could hear the man addressing her, in an air of scarcely concealed exasperation.

Lockhardt had been chief counsel for the University for more than thirty years. Presidents of the University had inherited him as they’d inherited the presidential office itself—its austere furnishings and leather-bound books, the portrait of grim Reverend Charters above the fireplace mantel. Lockhardt’s manner was unapologetically patrician—he had virtually no presence in the consciousness of the University faculty but his presence was essential to the board of trustees who looked to him as the president’s key adviser, beside whom the president could seem but a temporary and expedient hireling.

Before taking office M.R. had imagined that she might encourage Leonard Lockhardt to retire and in his place she’d hire a younger attorney of her own generation and liberal convictions but as soon as she’d become president M.R. had known how she needed the man, his experience, his influence with trustees and “major” donors. He’d graduated from the University with a degree in classics in 1955 and he’d gone to Harvard Law and like most graduates of his generation he’d been opposed to the appointment of a female president at the University, though M.R. wasn’t supposed to know this.

He was a bachelor. His long lean cheeks were clean-shaven and he exuded an airy sexless good cheer in all weathers. He wore suits tailored for him in Bond Street, London, long-sleeved linen and cotton shirts, bow ties. Can’t trust a man who wears a bow tie M.R.’s father Konrad Neukirchen used to say but M.R. had no choice, she had to trust her chief legal counsel whose thinning silvery hair was styled in swirls like wings rising from his high forehead. In the lapel of Leonard Lockhardt’s pinstriped suit was the small gold coiled-snake insignia of the University’s most selective eating club, to which he’d belonged as an undergraduate and which had barred from membership all categories of individuals except heterosexual Caucasian-Christian males from “good” families until, begrudgingly, the mid–1980s.

M.R. had hoped to become so friendly with Lockhardt, she could suggest to him in the most casual of ways that it wasn’t a good idea to continue to wear that particular eating-club pin at the University and Lockhardt would understand and cease to wear it at such times. But this intimacy hadn’t yet happened and by late winter of 2003 M.R. had come to understand that very likely, it would not happen.

Gradually and in his gentlemanly manner Lockhardt had become adjusted to the female president. He was not the sort of civic-minded individual who bears grudges—as soon as M. R. Neukirchen had been chosen by a majority of the trustees as the most exemplary of all candidates for the presidency despite her relative inexperience, Lockhardt was committed to her. He had come to like her as a person, whom he called “Meredith”—for “M.R.” seemed silly and pretentious to him, inappropriate for a female—and to admire her style of leadership which was perilously close to no style at all—just the woman’s unfettered personality. Neukirchen was guileless, zealous, far more intelligent and sharp-witted than she appeared. Shrewdly he’d sized her up as an indefatigable workhorse—one to be exploited. That the University had inaugurated its first female president in nearly 250 years was a glorious banner unfurled and flapping in the wind for all to behold.

And so Leonard Lockhardt was anxious on Neukirchen’s behalf, and on behalf of the University, which he loved. When M.R. had had her “accident” in October—en route to deliver a keynote address at a convening of the American Association of Learned Societies at Cornell University—when she’d failed to show up at the banquet hall, and had gone missing overnight, to the great alarm of her colleagues, friends, and the conference organizers—it had been Leonard Lockhardt who’d explained the situation to the trustees and assured them that M.R. hadn’t behaved in a way at all irresponsible or eccentric, whatever he’d privately thought.

To M.R. he’d been politely solicitous. He had not asked her, as others had not, why she’d been driving—alone—in a rented car—in rural Beechum County so far from Ithaca, New York—and not even near Carthage, which was her hometown; why she’d departed the Cornell hotel without informing anyone, even her assistant who’d been desperate—frantic—for hours when M.R.’s whereabouts were unknown. He hadn’t told her as perhaps he might have that she’d behaved not only irresponsibly and in an eccentric fashion but dangerously. You might have died there. Disappeared. Who would have known?

Instead Lockhardt had told M.R. that she had been “very lucky” not to have been seriously injured “in such a remote setting”—and that in the future, should she decide to drive somewhere alone, she should leave word with her staff.

M.R. replied that she believed she had left word with her assistant—a phone call, or an e-mail. She was sure.

Of that afternoon in October in Beechum County M.R. had a confused recollection. All that had happened she both recalled with painful exactitude and yet could not grasp that it had happened to her.

Or maybe—she couldn’t remember. Waking with a pounding head, a bloodied face, near-smothered by the exploded air bag and near-strangled by the safety harness—a stranger stooping above the car overturned in a ditch calling to her Hello? Hello? Hello? Are you—alive?

Lockhardt hadn’t pressed the issue of October 2002. Whatever he thought of M.R.’s utterly inexplicable behavior, whatever trustees of the University thought, or M.R.’s staff, or those faculty members who knew of her failure to deliver the keynote address at the conference in Ithaca—that period of some eighteen hours when M. R. Neukirchen seemed to have vanished—Leonard Lockhardt had not elaborated. His manner was discreet, diplomatic; he did not question motives, or even curious behavior, except as these threatened to erupt into public matters involving the University.

Now, regarding the alleged assault of the undergraduate Alexander Stirk, Lockhardt most dreaded a highly publicized lawsuit in which his superior skills would not prevail. For it was a new era, this era of “diversity”—it was not Leonard Lockhardt’s era. The University was no longer his University. The lawsuit was coming, he knew—or some similar disaster.

“Yes, you warned me, Leonard. But—I had to try, you know.”

“Had to try! Try what?”

“To communicate with Alexander Stirk. To show him that he could trust me.”

“Of course he could trust you. But you couldn’t trust him.”

Of all of her staff it was Leonard Lockhardt who could speak most forcibly to M.R. and it was Leonard Lockhardt whose good opinion M.R. craved. Sensing how Lockhardt would have preferred her predecessor in her place, who’d been a consummate politician, and no naïve female idealist to be manipulated by an undergraduate.

“Oh, Leonard. Do you think I’ve made a terrible—irrevocable—mistake?”

And she had not told Lockhardt—she would tell no one, for pride would not allow this—how, on the way out of her office, the smirking little bastard had stuck his tongue out at her.

Andre. I have to speak with you. I know that this is a difficult time for you—I’d hoped to have heard from you by now—but—something has happened here, at the University—I will explain…. I need to know—have I made a terrible—irrevocable—mistake…. Will you call me back Andre please.

Pausing before adding, with a breathless little laugh Love you so much dear Andre!

For it was possible for M.R. to utter such words at such a time. At the very end of a brief phone message, in a voice of girlish exuberance—a kind of giddy drunkenness—what could not be bluntly, unequivocally stated

Love you Andre so much. You must know.

And never with the mildest hint of reproach, or hurt—or desperation—Love you so much Andre do you love me?

Still less would M.R. dare to leave a message of unfettered emotion, yearning—Andre, when will you come see me again? Why don’t you call me? What is happening in your life? I feel so distant from you … I am so utterly lonely here….

Between them from the first—M.R. had been twenty-three, Andre Litovik thirty-seven—this had been the (unstated) agreement, the bond. M.R. would love Andre Litovik more than he loved her because M.R.’s capacity for love was greater than his as M.R.’s capacity for sympathy, patience, generosity and civility was far greater than his. I can love enough for us both. I will! M.R. had thought in the early years of their (secret) relationship but now she wasn’t so certain she could continue to retain the strength of her old loyalty.

Loyalty: naïveté.

And yet: loyalty.

But as soon as Alexander Stirk departed, and M.R. was alone again in her office stunned, humiliated, hurt—the adrenaline rush of anger had quickly subsided—she called her lover in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on her cell phone.

A (secret) call. No one among the president’s staff must know.

M. R. Neukirchen’s (secret) life. M. R. Neukirchen’s (unacknowledged) life.

No one knew, among her wide circle of friends, acquaintances, colleagues—that M.R. had been involved with a man, a married man, since graduate school in Cambridge. So many years! And so faithful to this man, who had—very likely—not been altogether faithful to her.

As long as I know that I am the one he loves. To the extent to which he can love anyone.

As no one knew how lonely M.R. was. Amid the busyness of her professional life like a sequence of blinding lights rudely shone into her eyes this loneliness persisted.

She could confide in no one, of course. In this exalted position so many of her colleagues envied.

In the president’s house, in which she was a perpetual guest. As in the four-poster brass bed to which Andre Litovik had come not once in the months since her inauguration, to sleep with her.

In fact Andre had visited the University twice in those months. He’d come for M.R.’s inauguration in April and in November he’d returned to give a lecture for the astronomy/astrophysics department and at that time M.R. had hosted a dinner in his honor at the president’s house. But he hadn’t wanted to stay overnight in this house though it was understood—it seemed to be understood—that M.R. and Andre Litovik were “old friends” from her Cambridge days.

M.R. had invited him of course—but she hadn’t pressed him.

There are guest rooms here. We have at least one guest a week, often more. You would not be—it would not seem….

She’d meant, it would not have seemed suspicious.

He’d told her no. He’d been adamant, not very gracious. He had seemed almost to dislike her, so emphatically he spoke declining her invitation.

Still, they’d managed to spend some time alone together on that occasion—but not in the president’s house, and not in the president’s bed.

M.R. understood—of course. It would be folly, it would be the most careless of blunders, to arouse suspicion. At least at this time while M.R. was president of the University and Andre Litovik was—still—married.

Look, darling: I’m so proud of you. Don’t risk your reputation. Someday—soon—we’ll work this out. But not—not just yet.

He’d gripped her hands in his, tightly. He had appealed to her to believe him and so she had believed him.

Yet, he’d been eager to return home. For always—at home—there was a family crisis—which Andre must mediate.

Of all men of her acquaintance M.R. had never known anyone so personally persuasive as Andre Litovik—whether the public man, or the private man. Waking from sleep he was, in an instant, fully awake—warm, suffused with energy, thrumming like a hive of bees.

And the big fist of a heart quick-beating inside the barrel-chest yet calm, Olympian and bemused.

If a heart can be Olympian and bemused, Andre Litovik’s was that heart.

“Please call me. Please—I need to speak to you….”

The most piteous appeals are those we make in utter solitude, no one to hear. The objects of our appeals distant, oblivious.

It seemed to be so—Andre was proud of her, now. He admired successful women—in particular, academic and intellectual women—he’d married a brilliant young Russian-born translator and Slavic studies post-doc at Harvard and very likely he’d been involved with a number of other women before meeting M.R.—(and after?).

He hadn’t wanted her to become president of the University. He’d been frankly astonished that among several very strong candidates, M.R. had been chosen.

M.R. had not said to him You could dissuade me, if you wanted to. If you wanted to badly enough.

For maybe this wasn’t true. Maybe—M.R. contemplated the possibility—she did prefer the public position, the opportunity to serve, to lead, to hold in the Light—to a more private life.

At any rate, she’d accepted the offer of the board of trustees of the University. Leonard Lockhardt had drawn up her contract. The faculty of the University overwhelmingly approved of Neukirchen for the presidency—this had been crucial to M.R.’s acceptance. Never had she felt so—vindicated.

Almost, you might say—loved.

For this was the high point of Mudwoman’s life—to be admired, loved.

The phone rang: 9:09 P.M.

Not the president’s phone but M.R.’s cell phone for which very few people had the number.

She saw—the caller ID wasn’t LITOVIK.

She pushed the little phone away, she had no desire to answer it.

She’d fallen asleep at her desk. The massive cherrywood desk with its numerous deep drawers. Folded her arms on the desktop and laid her head on her arms and drifted into an exhausted sleep. For the day—this ignominious day!—had begun so long before, in the dark preceding dawn.

FREE CHOICE IS A LIE!

NOBODY’S BABY WANTS TO DIE!

Salvager Hall was empty and darkened except for the president’s office where a single desk lamp was lighted. Three floors deserted as a stage set from which actors have departed. The new female president had a plucky-loyal staff to work closely with her and to defend her against her critics and detractors while conferring worriedly among themselves Is something wrong with M.R.? Is she—ill? She seems to be making mistakes—misjudgments…. Since the accident in October …

“No. I can make things right again.”

The cell phone had ceased ringing. Then, within seconds it rang again—the opening bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

M.R.’s (secret) lover had bought her the cell phone. So that she could call him, and he could call her. That had been years before in an earlier and more idyllic phase of their friendship.

It was not Andre. In the caller ID window was KROLL.

She was appalled, that Oliver Kroll would be calling her at such a time. And on her cell phone, not the president’s phone. She wouldn’t have thought that Kroll had her number or that he would dare to call her, after what had happened that afternoon.

For M.R. had no doubt, Oliver Kroll had conspired with Stirk to record their conversation. This is war. Our war has begun.

They would gloat together. They would play the tape, and laugh at her.

And now—Kroll was calling her.

M.R. felt a swirl of nausea. She was not so strong as people thought—even Leonard Lockhardt who’d come to know her painfully well misjudged her as a stronger woman than she was.

Remarkable woman. Such enthusiasm!

A natural-born leader.

She’d been in hiding. She’d been eating at her desk. The remains of M.R.’s supper on a greasy paper napkin: dry pita bread, strips of lettuce like confetti, “grilled” vegetables dry and tasteless as wood chips and a can of Diet Coke.

She’d canceled her dinner for that evening—she’d needed to be alone. As president of the University M. R. Neukirchen was scheduled for luncheons, receptions, dinners through the semester virtually day following day.

And such a friendly—accessible—person … So sympathetic, and so informed …

Such energy!

What comfort in being alone—at last. No one to observe the wounded “leader.”

The little phone ceased ringing. After a brief wait M.R. checked her messages hoping that Kroll hadn’t left a message but that—somehow—Andre had left a message instead.

Thinking Love is a sickness for which the only cure is love.

Of course—there was Kroll’s unmistakable voice. M.R. steeled herself for irony/mockery which was the politics professor’s usual style but this was very different.

“Hello? It’s Oliver—Kroll….” Haltingly Kroll spoke like one uncertain of his way. M.R. could hear his breath close against the mouthpiece. “I’m calling to say—to explain—I hope you don’t think that I had anything to do with … I don’t know what Alexander told you or hinted at but—it wasn’t—it isn’t—so … I did not have anything to do with him recording your conversation…. If I’d known what the hell he’d intended, I would have tried to dissuade him.” Kroll’s voice was strained, urgent. This was hardly a message M.R. might have expected from Oliver Kroll and so she listened surprised and fascinated. “He’s a—an—excitable young man … He’s brilliant but—obviously troubled. … Some things have come to light, Meredith, he’s told me about—just tonight—that will have to be revealed tomorrow, to the township police, to the security office, and to you…. Could you call me? Regardless of how late it is, call me? It would be better if we could talk, before. … Please call me at—” Hurriedly Kroll gave his number, and repeated it, though he’d have known that M.R. already had the number in her cell phone memory. He was breathing—panting—as if about to say more but broke the connection instead.

Meredith he’d called her. Beyond that, M.R. scarcely heard.

How they’d met, M.R. could not clearly recall. How they’d parted, M.R. hoped to forget.

It had been a time when M.R.’s (secret) lover had abandoned her.

Sent her into exile she’d joked. Sadly joked.

Somewhere in the hinterland of north central New Jersey he’d sent her—this prestigious Ivy League university floating like an improbable island of academic excellence amid vestiges of quaint-Colonial American history and a hilly-rolling ultra-affluent rural/suburban landscape which, until M.R. was invited to be interviewed for a position in the philosophy department, she had not visited and had not envisioned. Reporting back to her lover This can’t be a real place! It is too perfect.

She hadn’t quite been willing to think that Andre Litovik wanted her—hoped her to be—gone.

Not permanently gone—only just a respectable distance from Cambridge, Massachusetts. From his house on Tremont Street, and his household. From his family.

Nor had she been willing to think that really it was a good idea—a very good idea—for M.R. to leave the force field of her lover, a gravitational pull roughly equivalent to that of the planet Jupiter. With her instinct for self-effacement M.R. had planned to seek a teaching position in the Boston area, to be near Andre, at one or another far less distinguished university or college, which would have fatally sabotaged her career at the start; with her Harvard Ph.D. and early, much-admired publications in moral philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, M. R. Neukirchen had been an extremely attractive candidate, and female.