Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates
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return of our daughter Cressida Mayfield. Callers will be granted anonymity if they wish.”
IN CRESSIDA’S ROOM. Drifting upstairs in the large empty-echoing house as if drawn to that room.
Where, if she’d been home, and in the room, Cressida would have been surprised to see her parents and possibly not pleased.
Hey, Dad. Mom. What brings you here?
Not snooping—are you?
“Her bed wasn’t slept-in. That was the first thing I saw.”
Arlette spoke in a hoarse whisper. They might have been crouched in a mausoleum, the room was so dimly lighted, so stark and still.
In the center of the room Zeno stood, staring. It was quite possible, Arlette thought, that he hadn’t entered their daughter’s room in years.
Detectives had asked Arlette if anything was “missing” from the room. Arlette didn’t think so, but how could Arlette know: their daughter’s life was a very private life, only partially and, it sometimes seemed, grudgingly shared with her mother.
Detectives had searched the room, as Arlette and Zeno stood anxiously by. As soon as the detectives were finished with any part of the room—the closet, the old cherrywood chest of drawers Cressida had had since she was six years old—Arlette hurried to reclaim it, and re-establish order.
With latex-gloved hands they’d placed certain articles of clothing in plastic bags. They’d taken a not-very-clean hairbrush, a toothbrush, other intimate items for DNA purposes presumably.
Cressida’s laptop. They’d asked permission to open it, to examine it, and the Mayfields had said yes, of course.
Though reluctant even to open the laptop themselves. To peer into their daughter’s private life, how intrusive this was! How Cressida would resent it.
The detectives had taken it away with them, and left a receipt.
Almost Arlette thought I hope they return it before Cressida comes back.
Almost Arlette thought, unforgivably, I hope Cressida doesn’t come back before they return it.
Zeno said, falsely hearty: “It’s good that you woke up, Lettie. That something woke you. Thank God you came in here when you did.”
“Yes. Something woke me . . .”
That sensation of a part of the house missing. A part of her body missing. Phantom limb.
Arlette’s thought was, seeing the room through Zeno’s eyes, that it didn’t have the features of a girl’s room, as a man might imagine them.
Cressida’s clothes were all put away and out of sight—neatly folded in drawers, on shelves, hanging in closets. And her small stubby-looking shoes, neatly paired, on the floor of the closet.
One of the detectives, meaning to be kind, had remarked that his teenaged daughter’s room looked nothing like this one.
Zeno had tried to explain, their daughter had never been a teenager.
Years ago Cressida had cast away the soft bright colors and fuzzy fabrics of girlhood and replaced them with the stark black-and-white geometrical designs and slick surfaces of M. C. Escher, that so strangely entranced her. She had so little interest in colors—(her jeans were mostly black, her shirts, T-shirts, sweaters)—Arlette could wonder if she saw colors at all; or, seeing, thought them sentimental, softhearted.
Zeno was peering at the labyrinthine Descending and Ascending as if he’d never seen it before. As if it might provide a clue to his daughter’s disappearance.
Did he recognize himself in the drawing?—Arlette wondered. Or were the miniature humanoid-figures too distorted, caricatured?
Zeno’s eye was for the large, blatant, blinding. Zeno had not a shrewd eye for the miniature.
Arlette slid her arm through her husband’s. Since Sunday, she was always touching him, holding him. Very still Zeno would stand at such times, not exactly responding but not stiffening either. For he dared not give in to the rawest emotion, she knew. Not quite yet.
“Whatever happened, with Cressida’s math teacher, Zeno? Remember? When she was in tenth grade? She never told me . . .”
“ ‘Rickard.’ He was her geometry teacher.”
Arlette recalled days, it might have been weeks, of veiled exchanges between Zeno and Cressida, about something that had happened, or hadn’t happened in the right way, at school. It might have been that Cressida had brought a portfolio of drawings to school—beyond that, Arlette hadn’t known.
When she’d asked Cressida what was troubling her, Cressida had told her it was none of her business; when she’d asked Zeno, he’d told her, apologetically, that it was up to Cressida—“If she wants to tell you, she will.”
Their alliance was to each other, Arlette thought.
She’d hated them, then. In just that moment.
She’d asked Juliet, out of desperation. But Juliet who wasn’t living at home at the time—who was a freshman at the State University at Oneida—had soared so far beyond her tenth-grade sister, she’d had little interest in the sister’s emotional crises—“Some teacher who didn’t appreciate her enough, I think. You know Cressida!”
Arlette didn’t, though. That was the problem.
Zeno said hesitantly, as if even now he were reluctant to violate any confidence of their daughter’s, that when Cressida had first become so interested in M. C. Escher she’d created a portfolio of pen-and-ink drawings using numerals and geometrical figures, in imitation of Escher’s lithographs.
“This one—Metamorphoses”—Zeno indicated one of the pen-and-ink drawings displayed on Cressida’s wall—“was the first one I’d seen, I think. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, initially.” Arlette examined the drawing: it was smaller than Descending and Ascending and seemingly less ambitious: moving from left to right, human figures morphed into mannequins, then geometrical figures; then numerals, then abstract molecular designs; then back to human figures again. As the figures passed through the metamorphoses from left to right their “whiteness” shaded into “darkness”—like negatives; then, as negatives, as they passed through reverse stages of metamorphoses, they became “white” again. And some of the scenes were set on Carthage bridges, with reflections in the water that underwent metamorphoses, too.
“It’s based upon an Escher drawing of course. But how skillfully it’s executed! I remember looking at it, Metamorphoses, following with my eyes the changes in the figures, back and forth . . . It was the first time I realized, I think, that our daughter was so special. You can’t imagine Juliet doing anything like this.”
“Juliet wouldn’t want to do anything quite like this.”
“Of course. That’s my point.”
“Cressida’s drawings are like riddles. I’ve always thought it was too bad, her art is so ‘difficult.’ Remember when she was a little girl, not four years old, she drew such wonderful animals and birds with crayons. Everyone adored them. I’d always thought I might work with her, I’d thought we could create children’s books together. But . . .”
“Lettie, come on! Cressida isn’t interested in ‘children’s books’—not now, and not then. Her talent is for something more demanding.”
“But she seems to have quit doing art. There’s nothing new on the wall here, that I can see.”
“She didn’t take art courses at St. Lawrence. She said she didn’t respect the teachers. She didn’t think she could learn anything from them.”
How like Cressida! Yet she didn’t seem to have made her way otherwise.
Arlette asked what had happened with Mr. Rickard?
From time to time