Carthage (53 page)

“You don’t know how Cressida would feel. You have no idea how Cressida would feel. There was a side of our daughter, we saw it when she volunteered for the math program, that wanted to connect with others—with the community. Cressida wasn’t a negative person, she was—complex.”

Zeno had come to note how the very word
negative
seemed often to be a concern of Arlette’s. How any suggestion that Cressida might have reacted to the maelstrom of attention focused upon her, since July 2005, scarcely abating since the confession of Corporal Kincaid in October of that year, with anything like Cressida’s usual skepticism, drew a sharp, unflattering crease between Arlette’s eyebrows. As if the mother Arlette, not the father Zeno, had become the missing daughter’s interpreter: the missing daughter’s surrogate.

He’d heard, after a death in the family there will be a seismic realignment among survivors. The old connections have been ruptured, new connections must be established, but how?—the absent party remains both absent and tantalizingly, teasingly present.

In their focus upon the missing daughter, Zeno knew that he and Arlette were now neglecting their surviving daughter. So long, Juliet had been the center of their parental attention, to Cressida’s disadvantage; now, all that had changed. And Juliet too had been wounded, irrevocably.

(Juliet’s way of coping with the loss of her sister was to say very little about it. Her way of coping with the loss of her fiancé was to say nothing about it.)

(Juliet’s way of coping with the wreckage of her Carthage-life was to depart from it—moving finally to Albany where she would enter the graduate school of public education at the State University at Albany and earn a master’s degree in English education; she would acquire a teaching position at the prestigious private Hedley Academy in suburban Albany and almost simultaneously a new fiancé whom her left-behind Carthage parents would scarcely know before the wedding.)

In the wake of Cressida’s disappearance from their lives Arlette undertook to commemorate their daughter in ways that were touching to Zeno initially, then discomforting; finally, disturbing. He sensed that Arlette was able to accept that their daughter was
deceased
in a way that somehow he could not; despite every effort of his rational being, every application of what might be called common sense, in some part of his brain Zeno still held out a measure of—skepticism?
Hope?

From undergraduate days he recalled the brainteaser-conundrum
Schrödinger’s cat.

A thought experiment of the 1930s. A paradox in which the (enboxed) cat is simultaneously alive/dead until one opens the box to see for oneself if the cat is alive/dead.

Zeno couldn’t recall if the observer, the one who opens the box, also controls the cat’s fate. Maybe opening the box precipitates the cat’s death? Zeno remembered something vague about radiation, poison pellets . . . No one considered that the thought experiment was “cruel to animals” for no one at the time, apart from a few eccentric antivivisectionists, gave a damn for the suffering and deaths of experimental animals; certainly, no one seemed to give a damn about Schrödinger’s famous cat.

Sleepless for years he lived, relived those early hours of the Search.

Those early hours of almost unbearable intensity, excitement—hope . . .

The search party in the Preserve. The professionalism of many of the searchers who knew how to look for hikers lost in the Adirondacks.

We’ll find her, Mr. Mayfield. If Cressida is here—we’ll find her.

And he’d believed. Wanted to believe.

The final exertion of his life as a physical being, a
man.

For despite his zealousness he’d failed. Despite his Eagle Scout skills he’d failed to find his daughter.

Failed more fundamentally—(though no one would have condemned him except himself)—as a fellow searcher in the wilderness Preserve for pain had felled him early on, after only a few hours. (Well, maybe it had been eight hours?) Zeno Mayfield who’d prided himself on his hiking skills, insisted upon Adirondack weekend retreats for his mayoral staff and associates, now forced to acknowledge how out of condition he was, how inadequate. Now years later unless he drank himself into oblivion he was prone to the cheerless habit of wounding himself anew recalling the particular humiliation of collapsing in a paroxysm of pain, sinking to his knees as a younger man came bounding to his rescue.

Mr. Mayfield! Zeno! I got you.

WON’T TELL GENEVIEVE
this background. Pathetic etiology.

Let her discover for herself that Zeno Mayfield isn’t any longer what he’d been rumored to be in certain quarters of Carthage (in fact erroneously—he’d loved it):
sexy, sexual, irresistible to women and a lover of women.

PARENTS OF MISSING
Girl, 19.

Grieving Parents of Murdered Girl, 19.

Arlette had dealt with their daughter’s disappearance in a way no one could have anticipated. She’d made of mourning a kind of celebration, relentlessly public. Soon after Corporal Kincaid had confessed, was convicted and incarcerated at Dannemora and it had seemed that the search for the
missing girl
had come to an end she’d helped organize the exhibit in the Carthage Public Library and she’d been active in local fund-raisers for battered women’s shelters; she’d been a guest on an afternoon talk show, on a CBS-TV affiliate in Watertown; she’d arranged for other art exhibits in local galleries and at Home Front Alliance; she’d donated one of Cressida’s larger drawings for the annual Home Front auction, where it had brought in a considerable price—two thousand dollars. (Zeno had been furious, Arlette had given away their daughter’s
Descending and Ascending
without consulting him. And she’d been shocked at his anger.) She’d made donations to the Math Literacy Squad with such enthusiastic public commentary, you’d have thought that Cressida had had a brilliantly successful experience with the volunteer program and not, as her family knew, a disappointing one.

More ambitiously, with the help of sympathetic women-friends Arlette established a hiking trail and “memorial garden” in Friendship Park, that ran along a bluff above the Black River for several miles, in commemoration of their lost daughter; a beautifully crafted cedar bench overlooked the river, with a little brass plaque—
CRESSIDA MAYFIELD 1986–2005
—which Zeno so resented, he’d shouted at Arlette that it was perverse, it was wrong, it was obscene: “Can’t we just have her name? Why do we need those dates? Why does everything have to be dated, finalized?”

Another time Arlette was stung by her husband’s anger. She had expected Zeno to be deeply moved, as she was, and others had been; she said, in a hurt, puzzled voice, “I don’t know, Zeno. Why? You’re the intellectual in the family.
Why
do things come to an end?”

It might have been at the reception that inaugurated the memorial in Friendship Park, in a gazebo above the river, or in another, similar reception in Carnegie House, that Zeno had conspicuously too much to drink, where previously he’d only just had too much to drink; his drinking was beginning to be noted by others, outside his family and close friends. For Zeno was unhappy, and it wasn’t in Zeno Mayfield’s nature to be unhappy alone. He was a public man ill suited to the discretions of private life. Yet in the midst of the chattering crowd he felt ungainly, exposed. He’d always taken refuge in social life, in the peculiar thrill of a social event, in which Zeno Mayfield was one of those who shone with an indomitable luster, yet now he felt out of place. Lines from Shakespeare’s
King Lear
were running through his mind, the despairing words of the elderly Lear to his murdered daughter Cordelia whom he’d stupidly misjudged and wronged—“ ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / and thou no breath at all?’ ”

This was the profound question, to which there was no answer.

He drank too much wine, out of small plastic cups. You are supposed to sip white wine sparingly, while conversing with others who are sipping wine; you are not supposed to
drink
the wine as Zeno
drank
the wine, in thirsty gulps. You are not supposed to wipe your mouth with the back of your hand.

And then Zeno’s crude fingers misjudged the strength of the plastic cup, squeezed too hard and cracked it and white wine splattered onto his clothes.

“Fuck.”

“Oh Daddy.” Juliet was staring at him in dismay.

She’d been about to dab at him with a paper napkin but now hesitated, the fierce look in Zeno’s face.

Soon it would be said
Poor Zeno. The drinking is getting out of hand, even Zeno can’t hide it.

And soon it would be said
Poor Arlette! How long can she endure it?

HE LOVED HER.
His little family, he’d loved.

Hadn’t had a son, who’d have challenged him in ways other than the ways in which his daughters had challenged him. And so maybe, Zeno had to concede, he was incomplete, immature: he’d always been the adored husband, adored Daddy.

But he’d loved them, to desperation. Each of his daughters had seemed to him a miraculous birth. And his wife Arlette he’d come to love ever more deeply.

Yet, he’d come also to resent her, after Cressida’s disappearance.

After the acknowledgment of
death,
and the need to
memorialize, celebrate.

At first they’d mourned together. They’d even been drinking together.

Then by degrees it had seemed that Arlette was detaching herself from him. Like one in a comforting embrace that had turned smothering.

Bitterly he’d resented her, what he saw as her Christian
acceptance
of their loss. While in a part of Zeno’s brain, it may have been his most primitive brain, he continued to believe that their daughter might be alive simply because they had no proof of her death.

In his confused and anarchic dreams, Cressida was certainly alive.

Not his daughter as he remembered her but as a wrathful though silent female figure, a daughter out of mythology. The alcohol-fueled dreams were mixed with alcohol-fueled memories of the Nautauga Preserve and the nightmare search that had come to nothing. And yet at the time it had seemed to the deluded father quite natural, the daughter had not been found.
Of course. She is nowhere near. She has vanished. But she is alive.

Folly to think this way. Not-healthy, morbid and neurotic.

Yet after a few bottles of beer, a few glasses of wine, whiskey-and-ice, it became the natural, the logical, the inevitable and even the
commonsensical
thing to think.

Vanished. But still alive.

Zeno wanted to rage: no one understood who didn’t drink. Drinking makes all of history present-tense. The past is lost, the future is inaccessible, all that is, is now.

He’d smiled, such solace! Pouring another drink.

“IT’S AGAINST NATURE
to stop time. To try to stop time. You used to say—the fallacy in Plato is that he believed you could ‘stop’ time—that nothing that changes can be good. But change is our lives, Zeno—God would not wish us to remain unchanged. It is part of God’s plan that our daughter should vanish from our lives.”

In such ways Arlette began to speak. Not while drinking with Zeno but in the aftermath of drinking with Zeno.

Zeno listened in astonishment. As if another individual, a stranger to him, stood in Arlette’s place.

His wife!
His
wife.

“What Brett did—he hadn’t meant to do. It was brave of him to confess such a terrible thing. He can’t bring Cressida back but our anger at him can’t bring her back, either.” Arlette paused, choosing her words with care as if knowing how each would stick in Zeno, irremediably.

Then, plunging head-on: “He’s sick—he’s a victim, too. Both their young lives—destroyed. We must try to forgive him.”

Arlette’s brave voice cracked just perceptibly with
forgive.

Zeno muttered something inaudible.

“Zeno, what? What are you saying?”

“I said fuck that! Fuck ‘forgive.’ ”

He’d blundered out of the room. A wounded bear on its hind legs baited and blinded beyond endurance, desperate to escape but where to escape?—in his own household, where the woman with whom he shared the house naturally followed him through all the rooms and if he locked a door, locked himself inside a bathroom for instance, she had every right to rattle the doorknob alarmed and anxious and straining to keep her voice level in the way of a responsible wife-mother.

“You are only wounding yourself, Zeno. We have to forgive. Cressida is beyond harm now.”

IT WASN’T CLEAR
that Arlette was moving away. As it was painfully clear, Juliet had moved away.

Was
it Zeno’s fault? That the tightrope-walk of sobriety, each day, unfailingly each day, the dull-ghastly horror of sobriety, the
banality
of sobriety, was too much for him?

That, descending a flight of stairs, there began to be times when he gripped—
grasped—
the railing to keep from pitching forward headfirst? Or that, seeing awkward smiles before him, at a dinner party for instance, he’d have to laugh, embarrassed, and confess—“What was I saying? Sorry.”

It had long been a custom in the Mayfield family that, in any vehicle in which Zeno Mayfield was riding, Zeno Mayfield was the designated driver. (With the exception of those periods of time when his daughters were taking driver’s education and had driver’s permits.)

Now it began to be the custom that Zeno drove to a social event at which there was alcohol, and Arlette drove them back; then, it began to be a custom that Arlette drove both to the event and back home.

Then, it began to be a custom that Arlette declined such invitations. With or without consulting Zeno.

Social drinker.

Not so bad as a solitary drinker!