Mudwoman (10 page)

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.