Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
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