Carthage

  He guessed that she’d been ill. Juliet’s mother.

  The thin, wispy-graying hair—female relatives of his had looked like this—had to be cancer, chemotherapy and the hair growing back but not as it had been.

  He could not ask her. He could not ask her a single question about herself.

  You can call me Mom—soon!

  She’d joked with him. Part of the joke was, Arlette Mayfield was so very young, funny and playful as a girl, quicker to joke than Juliet in fact.

  Calling Mrs. Mayfield Mom. Brett had laughed.

  His own mother was no Mom. That was part of the joke.

  But he had to acknowledge: Arlette was not Mom.

  Never his mother-in-law. Rather, the mother of the girl he’d murdered.

  (Strange: he rarely recalled that girl’s name. An eccentric name, he’d never heard the name before, possibly he’d resented her for this, for such “special” qualities, her air of knowing herself “special” in the very presence of her older sister whom everyone adored as they did not adore her. And what right had she, this plain, fierce sister, making a claim upon him!)

  (Though they’d been friends, initially. There’d been an understanding between them. A secret, he’d helped her when she’d had a bicycle accident on Waterman Street by the river. Just a girl at the time—so young.)

  Feelings rushed through him leaving him sick, stunned.

  As if it weren’t enough that he had killed the girl, and thrown her body into the river to destroy the evidence of his crime. Not enough, but that he must hate her also.

  Arlette leaned forward. On this wintry-autumn day she was wearing a cable-knit sweater-coat of the hue of burnt leaves. Her wrist bones were knobby, too thin. Brett had a sudden sensation of such terrible loss, he felt faint.

  “Brett? It isn’t so bad—is it?”

  Arlette was smiling. A wistful sort of joke.

  Seeing the mother of the girl you’d murdered—it isn’t so very bad is it? How brave you are!

  “I think it must be something very simple—God wants us to be together, like this. No other purpose than to be together.”

  Arlette spoke softly, matter-of-factly. It was difficult to hear her amid the noise of the visitors’ room.

  The corporal had not often been in the visitors’ room for during the years of his incarceration the lawyers who’d come to see him had met with him in small, private rooms without the presence of guards.

  The Kincaid case. Manslaughter conviction on the basis of confession, circumstantial evidence. Victim’s body never found.

  “It had come to me after—you’d been taken away . . . That we were still a family and it didn’t matter if something had happened to make a rupture in our family. It came to me as long ago as then but I—I didn’t understand at the time. I was—wasn’t—so strong, then.”

  Arlette spoke slowly. Lifting her right hand to press the palm against the Plexiglas barrier in a gesture of appeal.

  A small hand, thin fingers. With a pang Brett saw that there were no rings on Arlette’s fingers.

  “If Jesus is with us, He is with us all. Those who are living and those who are—not living.”

  Voices lifted in another part of the visitors’ room. At once a guard stepped forward speaking sharply Quiet there! Stay seated.

  Brett steeled himself for louder shouts, for an earsplitting alarm.

  Here was a place of hallucinations. Myriad anonymous dreams mixed together crudely, jeeringly.

  Lifting his hand he placed it shyly against Arlette’s hand on the other side of the barrier: a larger hand, a man’s hand, the fingernails blunt and stubbed.

  “She is with us. She is happier now, knowing we love her.”

  In this way wordless and obscurely comforted they remained together until a bell rang rudely awakening them and signaling the termination of the visit.

  EVERY SEVERAL MONTHS Arlette returned.

  She stayed overnight in a motel in Dannemora, visited the prison early and drove back to Carthage alone.

  Rarely did she speak of Zeno, or of Juliet. Rarely even of Carthage.

  Their visits together were primarily silence. Seeing them in the visiting area you might have thought they were mother and son bound by a singular grief.

  The silence between them was deeply comforting to Brett, in retrospect. Like a medication so powerful it can’t be absorbed into the bloodstream at once but must be released slowly over a period of hours, days.

  Now he ceased hating himself, so virulently.

  Now he thought I have a friend. Two friends.

  He thought If I am a shit that is not all that I am. I am—something more.

  Inside the sixty-foot-high encircling wall the corporal’s damaged reputation gradually healed. By default Kincaid was a favorite of the COs who saw in him a person like themselves: his personality, his intelligence, integrity, sanity.

  He volunteered to help teach literacy classes in the facility. Again as an orderly in the prison infirmary, and in the mental unit of the hospice. Though he wasn’t a Catholic and didn’t take communion at mass yet he was Father Kranach’s most diligent assistant in the maintenance of the Church of the Good Thief: sweeping, mopping, polishing the Appalachian red oak pews, repairing broken steps, washing the stained glass windows and keeping clean the sculpted figure of Saint Dismas crucified.

  Enter my soul and my soul shall be healed.

  He began to assist Father Kranach at the priest’s group-therapy sessions that met several times a week in the church. (Father Fred Kranach, the most popular therapist/counselor in the prison, had a degree in clinical psychology from Notre Dame, in addition to his seminary degree.) He passed out materials, he helped Father Kranach counsel the men. It was thrilling to him when others looked at him with gratitude and not with suspicion; that he could encourage others if not himself.

  Father Kranach spoke of a “career” for Brett Kincaid, in social work, counseling, when he was released.

  Released! The term seemed strange to him, mocking. If he served his full sentence he wouldn’t be released until sometime in 2027; he’d be forty-six years old.

  IN THE SIXTH YEAR of his incarceration in mid-March 2012 there came a summons for the corporal.

  Father Kranach had been dispatched to bring Brett Kincaid to the warden’s office.

  “I think this is good news, Brett. I believe it is. You must prepare yourself.”

  There was a strange agitation in the priest’s face. Brett had not ever seen his friend so—intense.

  Good news. It would not be his mother, then—his mother’s death.

  In Warden Heike’s office he was told several times to sit down.

  Never in the warden’s office were inmates invited to sit down.

  FIFTEEN

  The Father

  March 2012

  HE KNEW: she was alive.

  He knew: if he persevered, if he did not despair, he would find her.

  She was his younger child. She was the difficult child. She was the one to break his heart.

  THIS WAS HIS SICKNESS, he must keep hidden close to his heart like a poker hand so wonderful, its cards are ablaze and blinding.

  SIX YEARS, EIGHT MONTHS. And this day, March 27.

  A call from Juliet on his cell—Daddy? Call me back when you can.

  Didn’t say Daddy it’s urgent. For that wasn’t Juliet’s way, to stir apprehension. Yet he sensed it, urgent.

  Fumbling to call his daughter back.

  SHE, THE ELDER DAUGHTER, poor Juliet had been driven away from Carthage. Could not bear to revisit Carthage. Even to recall Carthage, too painful for her.

  Moved away, married. A man older than she was by nearly twenty years.

  See, Daddy! I have grown up, I am an adult. I am not your little girl any longer and would not fall in love with a silly soldier-boy to break our hearts.

  SO HE’D LOST his other daughter, too. As if the corporal had murdered both daughters.

  Juliet was the
“surviving” sister: a tabloid heroine, or hapless fool, whose younger sister had been “brutally murdered” by her “war hero” fiancé.

  Weeks, months. The coverage had been relentless.

  Juliet had to quit her teaching job which she’d loved. Her volunteer work at Home Front she’d loved. Graduate school for an advanced degree in public education she’d postponed, indefinitely.

  At first, she’d stayed at friends’ houses avoiding the family house since reporters and TV crews awaited her on Cumberland Avenue like predator birds. Forbidden by law to trespass on private property the news-media people were spread across the front of the Mayfields’ front lawn on the public sidewalk and in the public street; if you wanted to turn into the Mayfields’ driveway, you had to plead with them to let you through amid a barrage of camera-flashes.

  Finally, Juliet had moved away from Carthage to live somewhere “anonymously”—even her parents weren’t always sure where she was living.

  None of the Mayfields had guessed at the toxic after-life of a violent crime. The shimmering-sick phosphorescence of scandal accrued to a name: Mayfield.

  The mild notoriety Zeno Mayfield had known as a controversial mayor of Carthage faded to nothing, beside this virulent and protracted attention.

  It was illogical, since Mayfields were the victims. The murderer was Kincaid.

  Somehow it was the sister-sister rivalry, so-perceived, or mis-perceived, that had excited the media interest. A lurid rivalry for the love of Corporal Kincaid, the two Mayfield sisters bitter enemies.

  In blogs, it was suggested that Juliet, the fiancée, was pregnant: that she’d had a miscarriage, or an abortion; or, depending upon the blog, she’d had Corporal Kincaid’s (premature, doomed) baby.

  His younger daughter he’d been powerless to save. And now the older.

  Beautiful Juliet Mayfield hounded and harried like the Unicorn of medieval Christian legend. Obsessively Zeno was moved to think of this peculiar and incongruous image: the elegant white Unicorn memorialized in the fifteenth-century French tapestries, the cruel and barbarous hunters, the imprisonment, the bright blood of innocence.

  In the Cloisters Museum in New York City he and Arlette had been fascinated by the tapestries even as they’d been repelled by them. A fastidious sadism in such beauty, the apotheosis of Christian martyrdom.

  And yet, in the final tapestry—the Unicorn is miraculously restored to life, though imprisoned like any barnyard creature in a small pen.

  A WOMAN HAD COME into his life to drink with him.

  A woman not one of his women. Not one who’d known him.

  His old, lost Zeno-self. She hadn’t known.

  Though probably she’d known of. Everyone in Carthage seemed to know of Zeno Mayfield.

  Like an old Roman general, he was. A Roman of antiquity. He’d fought many wars against the Goths and lost his numerous sons in the effort of decades and now he’d survived into another era in which only his name was “known”—except not why, and whether with merit.

  Her name was Genevieve. A classy name and she was a classy woman or had been, not long ago: with wide-set hazel eyes, a soft mouth that looked as if it had been bruised, thick brunette hair to her shoulders. She’d lost a husband, an eighteen-year-old son: the one to divorce, the other to drugs. She’d had to sell at a loss her house in the Cumberland section of Carthage and lived now, coincidentally, though in such accounts there are really no coincidences, in the Cedar Hill condominium complex in which, since the dissolution of his marriage, Zeno Mayfield also lived, in squalid bachelor quarters in a two-bedroom apartment on the seventh, penthouse floor.

  Genevieve had come into Zeno Mayfield’s life after Arlette had departed. Just to make that clear.

  “Please tell people, Zeno. Tell them the chronology.”

  “Why? Why does it matter?”

  “Because of course it matters.”

  “But—why? At our age?”

  “All the more at our age.”

  Genevieve knew that all of Zeno’s friends who’d been Arlette’s friends would resent her. For Arlette Mayfield was a woman whom other women liked very much and would have liked to protect from harm.

  Especially, since the loss of her daughter.

  Since the so very public loss of her daughter.

  Zeno was amused by Genevieve’s sense of propriety. Though he was touched by the woman, too—so badly she wanted things to be correct, proper between them.

  Though she was forty-seven years old and a divorced woman and by her own account she’d had “relationships” with men since her divorce.

  They were eager and clumsy in intimacy like actors—middle-aged, yet inexperienced actors—playing roles for which they were unprepared. Scripts they hadn’t memorized nor come close to understanding. So long married and accustomed to a woman living with him without particularly seeing him, Zeno was chagrined to realize that this new woman would see his dissolute physical self in a way that had to be unsparing; on his part, he was inclined to view her, in the affable confusion of bedclothes and nightwear, with gallant part-shut eyes.

  In fact Genevieve had known Arlette first, before she’d met Zeno. She’d been a volunteer at the Carthage H.E.L.P. Center Wig Boutique which was patronized predominately by women needing hair replacement in the aftermath of chemotherapy; she’d consulted with Arlette on the matter of customizing some sort of wig, synthetic or human hair, or a blend of the two, following the loss of Arlette’s hair during six months of post-surgery breast cancer treatment.

  (Arlette’s breast cancer had been diagnosed relatively early, at Stage II. Zeno had been more terrified than Arlette, it had seemed. As, with months of grueling chemotherapy, and radiation to follow, Arlette had grown ever more thin, ethereal-thin, “radiant” and “spiritual” as Zeno had grown more distracted and slovenly and his drinking had veered as it’s said in AA circles out of control.)

  Unlike Arlette whose idea of reckless shopping was to spend beyond twenty-five dollars at Second Time ’Round Consignments, Genevieve dressed with care, and style; where Arlette wore much-laundered jeans, patchy pullovers and nylon parkas, Genevieve wore designer jeans, cashmere pullovers and chic faux-fur coats; Genevieve spent more money on shoes and boots in a season than Arlette had spent through the entirety of her marriage with Zeno.

  In his more casual way Zeno too had been a careful dresser, when active in public life. He’d known the value of a boldly colored necktie. He’d known the value of stylish but not extravagant clothes, which Arlette had helped him choose—the politician should inspire confidence, not envy or resentment. It had been a stubborn fetish of Zeno’s, ridiculed by his family of pragmatic-minded females, that he refused to wear a hat and often an overcoat in even the arctic winter of upstate New York.

  Now semi-retired, demi-semi-alive, whatever this condition of anxious ennui was, Zeno wore his familiar old clothes, tweed jackets, sweaters out at the elbow, torn jeans, remnants of J. Press suits that had come to fit his sagging body like a glove, without much attentiveness or interest; he’d stopped wearing neckties entirely, and rarely the crisply-laundered white cotton dress shirt that had been the mayor’s signature. His old habit of showering every morning, shampooing his thick-graying-frazzled hair, he retained out of a sense that, if he missed even one morning, it would be the beginning of the fabled end.

  Initially he’d been flattered by Genevieve’s gifts. Touched and grateful, this attractive woman should think of him. Then by quick degrees it had come to seem that the gifts she gave him which were nearly always clothes—Italian designer shirts, cashmere sweaters, leather belts, gloves—were a rebuke to his taste, or his absence of taste. And Genevieve made presents to him of her small Fauve-floral oil paintings and ceramics, which she positioned in strategic places in his apartment, to “enliven” the atmosphere.

  Also she brought him fancy wine—wines. Genevieve was an adventuress in wine—New Zealand, Moroccan, Brazilian, among the more dependable Italian, French, and Cali
fornian. Their pleasure in each other’s company had much to do with wine as well as whiskey, gin, vodka, brandy, and distinctive sorts of beer and ale, of which Zeno was the adventurer.

  Gallantry wasn’t required when you were affably/happily drunk but came quite naturally.

  As high-pitched girlish laughter, spontaneous-sounding and utterly delighted laughter came quite naturally to Genevieve in this state.

  “It’s good to laugh again, Zeno. Thank you for that.”

  And he hadn’t known what to say. He’d been struck dumb.

  For it was a script they hadn’t memorized, yet. A clumsy hopeful script, in the making.

  Examining Genevieve’s little square-cut paintings, not one of which was larger than eight by eight inches and all of which exuded a lush, sensuous, giddily exuberant life, Zeno thought How different from Cressida.

  Meaning How different from Cressida’s art.

  Zeno had shown Genevieve some of his daughter’s ink drawings. He’d been surprised to see how large they were, and how complex in execution; how particular the vision of the artist, and difficult of access.

  The paintings of Genevieve and her women-artist friends, whose work Zeno saw frequently at gallery exhibits in Carthage, to which Genevieve took him, lay almost exclusively on the surface like gaily colored lilies in a pond; Cressida’s finicky, fussy art was a matter of depths.

  You were instinctively drawn to the boldly colored art, that celebrated life. Yet it was the other more complex art, that provoked and disturbed, that captivated your attention.

  “How strange, for a girl! How—unusual . . .”

  Zeno winced inwardly hearing this inane remark. He could imagine Cressida’s reaction.

  “And you say she was—how old? Still in high school?”

  Zeno said he thought so, yes.

  In fact, the drawing of vertiginously interconnected bridges, a fantasy of M. C. Escher superimposed upon the distinctive six bridges of Carthage, New York, had probably been done when Cressida was younger, since there were traces of color in the bridges’ “shadows.”