Mudwoman by Oates Joyce Carol

Author:Oates, Joyce Carol [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Modern Classics, Novel
ISBN: 9780062095626
Publisher: Ecco / HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Mudwoman Mated.

April 2003

Readied 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.

Must 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.

Upstairs 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

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