Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ