Carthage

  All Zeno had done, he’d protested, was defend a high school biology teacher who’d been suspended from his job for having taught Darwinian evolutionary theory to the exclusion of “creationism.”

  And when he’d been mayor of Carthage, an exhausting and quixotic venture into “public service” that had paid a token salary—(fifteen hundred annually!)—he’d pushed himself beyond what even his avid supporters might have expected of him and saw his popularity plummet nonetheless. The most controversial issue of Zeno’s mayoralty had been a campaign to install recycling in Carthage—yellow barrels for bottles and cans, green barrels for paper and cardboard. You’d have thought that Zeno Mayfield was a descendant of Trotsky! His daughters had asked plaintively Why do people hate Daddy? Don’t they know how funny and nice Daddy is?

  Arlette hadn’t lain down beside him. She hadn’t held him tight in her arms. But she’d laid a cloth over his face, dampened with cold water, and he’d pushed it off and clutched anxiously at her hand.

  “Lettie—d’you think—he did something to her? And now he’s ashamed, and can’t tell us? Lettie—d’you think—oh God, Lettie . . . ”

  YOUR MOTHER AND I chose our daughters’ names with particular care. Because we don’t think that either of you is ordinary. So an ordinary name isn’t appropriate.

  He was solemn and dogged trying to explain. She was younger than the age she was now and rudely she laughed.

  Bullshit, Daddy. That is such bullshit.

  It was like Cressida to laugh in your face. Squinch up her face like a wicked little monkey. Her laughter was high-pitched like a monkey’s chittering and her small shiny-black eyes were merry with derision.

  They were in someplace Zeno didn’t recognize. Not in the forest now but in a place meant to be this place—the Mayfield home.

  Why is it, when you dream about a place meant to be “home”—or any “familiar” place—it never looks like anything you’d ever seen before?

  He was trying to explain to her. She was making her silly-little-girl face rolling her eyes and batting away his words as she’d have batted away badminton birdies with both her balled-up fists.

  Saying Bullshit Daddy, except for her face Juliet is O-R-D-I-N-A-R-Y.

  Zeno took exception to this. Zeno was angered when his bright unruly younger daughter mocked his sweetly-serene and beautiful elder daughter.

  And anyway it wasn’t true. Or it was a partial truth. For Juliet’s beauty wasn’t exclusively her face.

  The exchange between the father and Cressida was a dream. Yet, the exchange had taken place more or less in this way, years before.

  The Mayfield girls were like the daughters of a fairy-tale king.

  Bitterly the younger daughter resented the fact—(if it was a fact, it was unprovable)—that the father loved the elder, more beautiful daughter more than he loved her, whose twisty little heart he couldn’t master.

  I love both our girls. I love them for different reasons. But equally.

  And Arlette said I hope you do. And if you don’t, or can’t—I hope you can disguise it.

  All parents know: there are children who are easy to love, and children who are a challenge to love.

  There are radiant children like Juliet Mayfield. Guileless, shadowless, happy.

  There are difficult children like Cressida. Steeped in the ink of irony as if in the womb.

  The bright happy children are grateful for your love. The dark twisty children must test your love.

  Maybe Cressida was “autistic”—in grade school, the possibility had been raised.

  Later, in high school the fancier epithet “Asperger’s” was suggested—with no more validation.

  If Cressida had known she’d have said, airily—Who cares? People are such idiots.

  Zeno supposed that in secret, Cressida cared very much.

  It was clear that Cressida resented how in Carthage, among people who knew the Mayfields, she was likely to be described as the smart one while her sister Juliet was the pretty one.

  How much would an adolescent girl rather be pretty, than smart!

  For of course, Cressida was invariably judged too smart.

  As in too smart for her own good.

  As in too smart for a girl her age.

  When she’d first started school, she’d complained: “Nobody else is named ‘Cressida.’ ”

  It was a difficult name to pronounce. It was a name that fitted awkwardly in the mouth.

  Her parents had said of course no one else was named “Cressida” because “Cressida” was her own special name.

  Cressida had considered this. She did think of herself as different from other children—more restless, more impatient, more easily vexed, smarter—(at least usually)—quicker to laugh and quicker to tears. But she wasn’t sure if having a special name was a good idea, for it allowed others to know what might be better kept secret.

  “I hate it when people laugh at me. I hate it if they call me ‘Cress’—‘Cressie.’ ”

  She was one of those individuals, less frequently female than male, whose names couldn’t be appropriated—like a Richard who refuses to be diminished to “Dick,” or a Robert who will not be “Bob.”

  When she was older and may have felt a little (secret) pride in her unusual name, still she sometimes complained that other people asked her about it; for other people, including teachers, were likely to be over-curious, or just rude: “ ‘Cressida’ makes me feel self-conscious, sometimes.”

  Or, with a downward tug of her mouth, as if an invisible hook had snagged her there, “ ‘Cressida’ makes me feel accursed.”

  Accursed! This was not so remarkable a word for Cressida, as a girl of twelve who loved to read in the adult section of the Carthage Public Library, particularly novels designated as dark fantasy, romance.

  Of course, Cressida had looked up her name online.

  Reporting to her parents, incensed: “ ‘Cressida’—or ‘Criseyde’—isn’t nice at all. She’s ‘faithless’—that’s how people thought of her in the Middle Ages. Chaucer wrote about her, and then Shakespeare. First she was in love with a soldier named Troilus—then she was in love with another man—and when that ended, she had no one. And no one loved her, or cared about her—that was Cressida’s fate.”

  “Oh, honey, come on. We don’t believe in ‘fate’ in the U.S. of A. in 1996—this ain’t the Middle Ages.”

  It was the father’s prerogative to make jokes. The daughter twisted her mouth in a wounded little smile.

  The previous fall when Cressida was a freshman at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, she reported back that one of her professors had remarked upon her name, saying she was the “first Cressida” he’d ever encountered. He’d seemed impressed, she said. He’d asked if she’d been named for the medieval Cressida and she’d said, “Oh you’ll have to ask my father, he’s the one in our family with delusions of grandeur.”

  Delusions of grandeur! Zeno had laughed but the remark carelessly flung out by his young daughter had stung.

  AND ALL THIS while his daughter is awaiting him.

  His daughter with black-shining eyes. His daughter who (he believes) adores him and would never deceive him.

  “Maybe she’s returned to Canton. Without telling us.”

  “Maybe she’s hiding in the Preserve. In one of her ‘moods’ . . .”

  “Maybe someone got her to drink—got her drunk. Maybe she’s ashamed . . .”

  “Maybe it’s a game they’re playing. Cressida and Brett.”

  “A game?”

  “ . . . to make Juliet jealous. To make Juliet regret she broke the engagement.”

  “Canton. What on earth are you saying?”

  They looked at each other in dismay. Madness swirled in the air between them palpable as the electricity before a storm.

  “Jesus. No. Of course she hasn’t ‘returned’ to Canton—she was deeply unhappy in Canton. She doesn’t have a residence in Canton. That’s insane.” Zeno wiped
his face with the damp cloth Arlette had brought him earlier, that he’d flung aside onto the bed.

  Arlette said: “And she and Brett wouldn’t be ‘playing a game’ together—that’s ridiculous. They scarcely know each other. And I don’t think that Juliet was the one to break the engagement.”

  Zeno stared at his wife. “You think it was Brett? He broke the engagement?”

  “If Juliet broke it, it wasn’t her choice. Not Juliet.”

  “Lettie, did she tell you this?”

  “She hasn’t told me anything.”

  “That son of a bitch! He broke the engagement—you think?”

  “He may have felt that Juliet wanted to end it. He may have felt—it was the right thing to do.”

  Arlette meant: the right thing to do considering that Kincaid was now a disabled person at twenty-six.

  Not so visibly disabled as some Iraq/Afghanistan war veterans in Carthage, except for the skin-grafts on his head and face. His brain had not been seriously injured—so it was believed. And Juliet had reported eagerly that doctors at the VA hospital in Watertown were saying that Brett’s prognosis, with rehab, was “good”—“very good.”

  Before dropping out impulsively, after 9/11, to enlist in the U.S. Army with several friends from high school, Brett had taken courses in finance, marketing, and business administration at the State University at Plattsburgh. Zeno had the idea that the kid hadn’t been highly motivated—as Kincaid’s prospective father-in-law, he had some interest in the practical side of his daughter’s romance, though he didn’t think he was a cynic: just a responsible dad.

  (Juliet would never forgive him if she’d known that Zeno had managed to see Brett Kincaid’s transcript for the single semester he’d completed at SUNY Plattsburgh: B’s, B+. Maybe it was unfair but Christ, Zeno Mayfield wanted for his beautiful daughter a man just slightly better than a B+ at Plattsburgh State.)

  He’d tried—hard!—not to think of Brett Kincaid making love to his daughter. His daughter.

  Arlette had chided him not to be ridiculous. Not to be proprietary.

  “Juliet isn’t ‘yours’ any more than she’s mine. Try to be grateful that she’s so happy—she’s in love.”

  But that was what disturbed the father—his firstborn daughter, his sweet honeybunch Juliet, was clearly in love.

  Not with Daddy but with a young rival. Good-looking and with the unconscious swagger of a high school athlete accustomed to success, applause. Accustomed to the adoration of his peers and to the admiration of adults.

  Accustomed to girls: sex. Zeno felt a wave of purely sexual jealousy. Nothing so upset him as glimpsing, by chance, his daughter and her tall handsome fiancé kissing, slipping their arms around each other’s waist, whispering, laughing together—so clearly intimate, and comfortable in their intimacy.

  That is, before Brett Kincaid had been shipped to Iraq.

  Initially Zeno had wanted to think that the kid had had too easy a time, cutting a swath through the Carthage high school world with an ease that couldn’t prepare him for the starker adult world to come. But that was unfair, maybe: Brett had worked at part-time jobs through high school—his mother was a divorcée, with a low-paying job in County Services at the Beechum County Courthouse—and he was, as Juliet claimed, a “serious, committed Christian.”

  It was hard to believe that any teenaged boys in Carthage were “Christians”—yet, this seemed to be the case. When Zeno had been active in the Carthage Chamber of Commerce he’d encountered kids like these, frequently. Girls like Juliet hadn’t surprised him—you expected girls to be religious. In a girl, religious can be sexy.

  In a boy like Brett Kincaid it seemed like something else. Zeno wasn’t sure what.

  Recalling how Brett had said, at the going-away party for him and his high school friends, each enlisted in the U.S. Army and each scheduled for basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, that he wanted to be the “best soldier” he knew how to be. (His own father had “served” in the first Gulf War.) Winter/spring 2002 had been an era of patriotic fervor, following the terrorist attack at the World Trade Center the previous September; it had not been an era in which individuals were thinking clearly, still less young men like Brett Kincaid who seemed truly to want to defend their country against its enemies. How earnestly Brett had spoken, and how handsome he’d been in his U.S. Army dress uniform! Zeno had stared at the boy, and at his dear daughter Juliet in the crook of the boy’s arm. His heart had clenched in disdain and dread as he’d thought Oh Jesus. Watch out for this poor sweet dumb kid.

  And now recalling that poignant moment, when everyone in the room had burst into applause, and Juliet’s face had shone with tears, Zeno thought Poor bastard. It’s a cruel price you pay for being stupid.

  Difficult for Zeno Mayfield who’d come of age in the late, cynical years of the Vietnam War to comprehend why any intelligent young person like Brett Kincaid would willingly enlist in the military. Why, when there was no draft! It was madness.

  Wanting to “serve” the country—whose country? Virtually no political leaders’ sons and daughters enlisted in the armed services. No college-educated young people. Already in 2002 you could figure that the war would be fought by an American underclass, overseen by the Defense Department.

  Yet Zeno hadn’t spoken with Brett on this subject. He knew that Juliet didn’t want him to “intrude”—Zeno had such ideas, such plans, for everyone in his orbit, he had to make it a principle to keep clear. And he hadn’t felt close enough to the boy—there was an awkwardness between them, a shyness in Brett Kincaid as he shook hands with Zeno Mayfield, his prospective father-in-law, he’d never quite overcome.

  Often, Brett had called him “Mr. Mayfield”—“sir.”

  And Zeno had said to call him “Zeno” please—“We’re not on the army base.”

  Zeno had laughed, made a joke of it. But it disturbed him, essentially. His prospective son-in-law was uneasy in his presence which meant he didn’t like Zeno.

  Or maybe, didn’t trust Zeno.

  In the matter of the military, for instance. Though Zeno hadn’t tried to talk him out of enlisting, Zeno hadn’t made a point of congratulating him, either, as everyone else was doing.

  Serve my country. Best soldier I can be.

  Like my dad . . .

  There was a father, evidently. An absent father. A soldier-father who’d disappeared from Carthage twenty years before.

  Brett had been brought up some kind of Protestant Christian—Methodist, maybe. He wasn’t critical, questioning. He wasn’t skeptical. He wanted to believe, and so he wanted to serve.

  Chain of command: you obeyed your superior officer’s orders as he obeyed his superior officer’s orders as he obeyed his superior officer’s orders and so to the very top: the Administration that had declared war on terror and beyond that Administration, the militant Christian God.

  None of this was questioned. Zeno wouldn’t have wished to stir doubt. He’d defended the high school biology teacher Cassidy who’d taught Darwinian evolutionary theory to the exclusion of “creationism”—more specifically, Cassidy had ridiculed “creationism” in the classroom and deeply offended some students—and their parents—who were evangelical Christians; Zeno had defended Cassidy against the Carthage school board, and had won his case, but it had been a Pyrrhic victory, for Cassidy had no professional future in Carthage and had been soundly disliked for his “arrogant, atheistic” stance. And Zeno Mayfield had suffered a good deal of abuse, too.

  Except that Brett Kincaid had become engaged to his daughter Juliet, Zeno had no wish to enlighten the boy. You had to learn to live with religion, if you had a public career. You had to know when to be quiet about your own skepticism.

  Juliet belonged to the Carthage Congregationalist Church: she’d made a decision to join when she was in high school, drawn to the church by a close friend; after she and Brett began seeing each other, Brett accompanied her to Sunday services. No one else in the Mayfield family a
ttended church. Arlette described herself as “a mild kind of Protestant-Christian-Democrat” and Zeno had learned to parlay questions about faith by saying he was a “Deist”—“In the hallowed tradition of our American Founding Fathers.” Zeno found serious talk of religion embarrassing: revealing what you “believed” was a kind of self-exposure not unlike stripping in public; you were likely to reveal far more than you wished. Cressida bluntly dismissed religion as a pastime for “weak-minded” people—she’d gone to church with her older sister for a few months when she’d been in middle school, and been bored silly.

  Strange how Cressida could be right about so much, and yet—(this was not a thought Zeno allowed himself to express aloud)—you resented her remarks, and were inclined to dislike her for making them.

  Juliet’s Christian faith had certainly been a great solace to her, since news had come of her fiancé’s injuries—a hurried and incoherent phone message from Brett’s mother had been the first they’d heard; she’d been grateful, and never ceased proclaiming her gratitude, that Brett hadn’t been killed; that God had “spared him.”

  The shock to Juliet had been so great, Zeno thought, she hadn’t altogether absorbed the fact that her fiancé was a terribly changed man—and the changes weren’t likely to be exclusively physical.

  Since Brett had returned to Carthage, and was living in his mother’s house about three miles from the Mayfields, Juliet had spent a good deal of time with him there; the elder Mayfields hadn’t seen much of him. When she could, Juliet accompanied Brett to the rehab clinic attached to the Carthage hospital; she attended some of his counseling sessions, as his fiancée; eagerly she reported back to her parents that as soon as he was better able to concentrate Brett intended to re-enroll at Plattsburgh and get a degree in business and that there was talk—(how substantial, Zeno didn’t know)—of Brett being hired by a Carthage businessman who made it a point to hire veterans.