Carthage (42 page)

(Oh but what if Arlette had died! In a panic she recalled how her mother had been plagued with false-positive mammograms, cysts in her breasts that turned out to be “benign.” And once, Arlette had had a “benign” tumor, not small, removed from her large intestine. And Cressida had practically shut her bedroom door in Juliet’s frightened face, when Juliet had wanted to talk about Mommy, and Cressida had not wanted to talk about Mommy.
Go away leave me alone! I don’t want to talk about it OK!)

So Juliet was married! And had a child, or two children.

The pretty one
had prevailed. She, too, had left Carthage—the debris-littered landscape.

Had some sort of breakdown. Her fiancé—killed her sister.

Drowned in the Nautauga River but the body never recovered.

It was a (plain) sister’s revenge against her (beautiful) sister. Yet, Cressida had not ever thought of it in this way.

Like one who has been circling a devastated site seeing now the gaping wounds, ravaged and gouged earth, broken trees and exposed roots from another perspective she was beginning to realize: a catastrophe is not one individual—a single “victim.”

She had not given thought to the corporal, much. That he had shoved her from him, with such disgust for her—it had been a kind of murder.

A murder, and over.

Who she’d been, in his eyes—finished, gone.

She had not thought that he—the corporal: Brett Kincaid—might have had to account for her, after that episode.

That others might have believed he might have murdered her, too.

And if the corporal had murdered her, the younger sister of his (ex)-fiancé, he must have been punished for this murder?

She’d had to be very sick, mentally ill, these years as
Sabbath McSwain,
not to have realized this.

Not to have realized, and not to have cared.

From Drina had come a ghastly yet in its way comical tale told to her by her then-lover Opa Han of a sixty-year-old woman who’d come to the Miami-Dade County Hospital radiology department for X-rays with an enormously distended belly, so large the poor woman had to walk with a cane, for at least a year the woman had suffered this disability with the vague explanation that she’d thought she “might be pregnant”—and so, “it would come out by itself”—finally convinced by relatives to see a doctor who’d diagnosed a fibroid tumor that must be removed as soon as possible.

They’d laughed at this story, shaking their heads. But there was nothing funny about it. Rather, a horror story.

How we don’t “know” what is self-evident to others.

Don’t “see” what is before our eyes.

Or if the eyes “see,” the brain doesn’t interpret.

If she’d thought of Brett Kincaid it was to acknowledge all power to him—the power of rejection, the power of superior physical strength, the (male) power of (female) annihilation. She could not have thought of Brett Kincaid as in any way by her
hurt.

“Is he alive? Is he—in prison?”

Her battered laptop wasn’t functioning any longer. She had no access to the Internet. Though on this unexpectedly comfortable, modern, aggressively air-conditioned bus there were electrical outlets at each seat and so she might have dared to type into her computer the name
Brett Kincaid
to see what it might call up.

YOU KNOW HE
must have been punished.

His life wrecked—after that night.

Know but don’t know. Did not wish to know.

“Dead to me—all of them.”

Waking from a headache-ridden sleep on the bus headed north, crossing the state line into Georgia.

So cold from the relentless air-conditioning, she’d wrapped herself in all of the clothing she’d brought with her, huddled low in the seat, hiding her eyes, shivering, alone.

To know the Good is to wish to do Good.

To be in ignorance of the Good is to be less than fully human.

Ninth grade, she’d been reading Plato. Her father’s hefty water-stained college text
Collected Dialogues of Plato Including The Republic, Laws, Symposium
.

Riveting to her as a girl of fourteen to discover her father’s earnest schoolboy underlinings and annotations in this book, as in other college texts identified as the property of
Mayfield, Z.
on their inside covers.

Beside a passage in the
Meno
was written the query, in red ink:
Socrates serious?
The
Meno
was a dialogue between Socrates and a young man named Meno about virtue, and whether one knowingly can desire evil; it employs a slave boy’s seeming knowledge of elementary geometry though the boy had never been educated, to make the point that the “spontaneous recovery” of knowledge is recollection.

The lesson of the
Meno
is that we already know what the Good is. All inquiry and all learning is but recollection.

At mealtimes, when Zeno was home, and in his affable-argumentative mood and not distracted by thoughts of the day’s political/professional strife, Cressida liked nothing more than to engage him in animated conversation of a kind that, not so much deliberately as incidentally, though perhaps with an undercurrent of the deliberate, excluded Arlette and Juliet who claimed not to enjoy
arguing.

Especially,
arguing at mealtimes.

“Any kind of halfway serious, intelligent conversation you call ‘arguing,’ ” Cressida objected. “Which is why ‘family’ life is so
boring
.”

At fourteen Cressida was very young. Not just she looked younger than her age but in most respects she was younger—immature, childish.

Being intelligent as she was, and quick-witted, her father described her as “wielding a whip.”

“Take care with your whip, my dear daughter. It can lash back into your own face, you know.”

Cressida knew. At school, she had few friends. Scornfully she’d have said she wanted few friends.

Certain of her teachers seemed to like her. But only cautiously, guardedly.

For no teacher ever knew when Cressida Mayfield might turn on him or her. In the classroom, with an audience, she could be sharp-tongued, sarcastic. Many a friendly teacher had been stung by Cressida, having hoped to co-opt the girl’s unpredictable nature.

“Daddy! If ‘to know the Good’ is ‘to wish to do Good’ ”—so Cressida challenged her father, at the outset of dinner—“why is there so much evil in the world? And stupidity?”

Briskly Zeno rubbed his hands over his face. You could see that Zeno was shaping the Daddy-face, essentially a benign, bemused, and yet not complacent face, out of the Zeno Mayfield–face that was his public identity in Carthage, New York.

“You’ve been reading—Plato? Socrates? Sounds like Socrates.”

“Yes. But why is Socrates so important?”

“Because—before Socrates philosophers thought of many of the things Socrates thought of, but not so thoroughly and systematically; and not with such personal involvement. Socrates chose to die rather than repudiate his beliefs or even go into exile. He lived and died for philosophy.”

Zeno spoke enthusiastically. Socrates had a long life, a public life in the
agora;
he’d challenged the conventional pieties of the day; he’d been impetuous, outspoken, unwise, reckless. He’d taken on the role of the
eiron,
the one who knows only that he knows nothing: thus knows more than all of Athens.

Cressida could see by the particular way in which her father spoke, his usually sardonic voice quavering with a kind of suppressed tenderness, that Zeno Mayfield thought highly of Socrates. Sharply she objected: “If Socrates was so special, why was he arrested and sentenced to death?” and Zeno said, with a wink to his listeners, “Thus with us all! The more special, the more despised. Where is my hemlock?”—groping for his glass of foam-topped beer, to make his little audience laugh.

“Socrates didn’t even write the
Dialogues
. Plato did. How do we know that Plato didn’t make everything up, including Socrates?”

And so while their food grew cold, Zeno lectured on Socrates—the “heritage of Socrates”—the political situation of Socrates’ time, the so-called Golden Age after the victory of Athens and Sparta against the common enemy, the Persians; and before the slow, terrible, irrevocable decline and collapse of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, with the former ally Sparta. “Imagine our Vietnam War tragedy multiplied many times. That was the Peloponnesian War. Not only did Athens lose, in a military sense, but in a moral sense—defeated utterly. And in this, a man of independent spirit like Socrates, a man who believed in a singular, invisible ‘Good’—‘God’—was perceived as a rebel.”

It was thrilling to Cressida, to hear her father speak in this way.

She’d heard Zeno Mayfield speak in public: he was a politician, and very gifted as an orator, with a sense of humor, a (slightly feigned) air of personal modesty, even reticence. But such remarks, uttered at mealtimes, in the privacy of their home, they were for no purpose other than the moment. The way Daddy spoke to
her.

Arlette and Juliet looked on, of course. Both listened, and both asked questions, sometimes. But Daddy was addressing Cressida for it was Cressida’s intelligence that was most like his own, and that most engaged him.

“The terrible irony is that the ‘Golden Age’ of Athens was based upon military victories, originally. The flowering of philosophy, art, and culture was out of the dung-heap of war, acquisitions of Greek city-states, exploitation of conquered people. The quasi-democracy of Athens was for only a privileged few. And at the height of Athens’s splendor, already the civilization was in decline, for their leader Pericles, like our bellicose American presidents, was pushing for conquests, ever more conquests, with disastrous results. There is a parallel between the death of Socrates and the death of Athens—as there always is, between the exemplary spiritual leader of an era, and the era itself.”

Cressida wondered at this. Cressida was struck by this.

“Why didn’t Socrates go into exile? I hated it, when he just—when he just stayed in jail, and drank poison.”

Cressida had read the
Phaedo,
with Zeno’s numerous annotations and exclamations.

Zeno said, “Exile was equivalent to death to the Athenians. Exile wasn’t the way it would be perceived today, as a kind of pastoral escape.”

Cressida persisted: “I
hated it
that he died. I think I
hated him
—for being so stubborn.”

Startled then that her family laughed at her, spontaneously—Zeno, Arlette, Juliet.

But why, why was this funny? Was
she
funny?

Stubborn?

Cressida didn’t quite get it. And she didn’t laugh.

SHE’D THOUGHT,
each day she would do something Good.

Deliberately, consciously—without telling anyone, she would embody the Good.

Not as Juliet was “good”—as a Christian. She, Cressida, would emulate the Good as the ancient Greeks had taught.

Soon then, the opportunity came: volunteers were requested for the newly founded Math Literacy Squad, to tutor inner-city middle school students who were having trouble with math.

Only ninth-grade A-students at Church Street Middle School were invited to volunteer. Cressida liked this—being singled out for an elite venture.

Overcoming her shyness to sign up for the Squad with her homeroom teacher who looked at her, Cressida thought, with some surprise. “Why, Cressida! Good.”

So rare it was for Cressida Mayfield to volunteer for anything.

Still rarer, for Cressida Mayfield to consent to be on a
team.

Taken then by school bus on a Friday afternoon with ten other ninth grade volunteers and brought to downtown Carthage, into the South River Street section and to dingy-looking Booker T. Washington Middle School. The Squad leader was a high school senior named Mitch Kazteb who’d passed out to the volunteers several photocopied pages of the first day’s lesson plan and instructed them to “just help, any way you can”—since the students were “mathematically illiterate” and any small improvement would be “great.”

On the bus, Cressida sat with a girl from her algebra class named Rhonda. The two would cling together at Booker T. Washington, nervous and excited. Rhonda wasn’t a close friend but a nice girl, one of the nicer girls in ninth grade, who didn’t avoid Cressida Mayfield for her fierce, frowning looks and sarcastic remarks.

Everyone on the Math Squad was given a shiny yellow smiley-face button to wear:
MATH LITERACY SQUAD.

The surprise was, almost immediately Cressida liked “tutoring.”

She liked her young students—the majority were girls, between the ages of ten and twelve—who looked to her for help so openly. Even the boys were somber and serious-seeming.

The math problems were really just simple arithmetic. Adding long columns of numbers, subtracting, multiplying, dividing—patiently the Math Squad tutors from Church Street Middle School went through the steps of instruction, using sheets of yellow paper, with the backup of pocket calculators to “double-check” answers. Rapidly Cressida sketched out little cartoon-narratives to illustrate the math problems—her fingers flew, gripping a pencil, surprising her as much as her observers.