Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates
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 sp
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.
It had not occurred to her, how easy “fractions” were to understand, if you drew, for instance, a pumpkin, and divided it into sections. At least, the more elementary sort of fractions.
Seated at opposite ends of a small table, pupils between them, Cressida and Rhonda worked together companionably. It was a surprise to both girls, tutoring was fun.
Nine students, all dark-skinned, of whom six were girls, three boys. The boys were more restless than the girls, but laughed more readily at Cressida’s lighthearted little jokes. All of the students seemed serious—hopeful. Cressida was touched by their reaction when they were told that, at the conclusion of a problem, their answer was “correct.”
Close-up, the young students fascinated Cressida. They were just enough younger than she was to be physically smaller, and unmistakably childlike. (Though the largest of the boys, whose name was Kellard [?], was Cressida’s height.) Their skin colors were so various. Gradations of dark: smoky-dark, cocoa-dark, buttery-dark, eggplant-dark, dark-dark. Their hair, their eyes, their facial characteristics—fascinating to Cressida who had always seemed by instinct to recoil from her own kind, and to avoid eye-contact with them, as if fearing invasion.
It was a revelation to Cressida, tutoring her pupils for ninety minutes with scarcely a break, that working with others, in such a setting, could be so easy, and so pleasurable. Teaching—a way of life?
Zeno had always said that he wished he’d gone into teaching instead of law.
Except of course in the law, Zeno continued, you had a chance to direct public policy. Coming of age in the aftermath of the great revolutionary decade in twentieth-century American history—the 1960s—Zeno understood that if you wanted to lead reform, you had to take direct action; the life of a teacher is indirect.
Yet, the Math Squad seemed to Cressida an encounter with the Good. She’d liked working with Rhonda who was a quiet good-natured girl and while smart at math, not quite so smart, or so quick, as Cressida, so that Cressida was made to feel good about herself; she liked it that the young pupils clearly admired her, and were eager to learn from her. And even the other Math Squad students—her classmates at Church Street—who ordinarily would have annoyed her with their chatter and laughter on the bus, seemed likeable to her.
And Mitch Kazteb, more than just likeable.
“So, honey, how’d it go this afternoon? ‘Tutoring’ math?”
Cressida told Zeno she’d liked it very much.
At dinner, Cressida wore her shiny yellow smiley-face button. It was a joke—yet not exactly a joke.
As she told her family about the Math Squad session at Booker T. Washington she saw her parents exchange a glance, one of those enigmatic glances parents exchange at such times, in the presence of their children, and had to smile—she knew that, over the years, she’d been the daughter about whom it had been said that she had difficulty “relating” to others.
She supposed that they’d been concerned for her, surprised that she’d volunteered for a program of the sort Juliet was always volunteering for, and Zeno, in his mayoral role, was always trying to promote under the rubric community outreach.
The following Friday, the second session went well also. Though two volunteer-tutors from Church Street School were absent, and probably wouldn’t return; and the older boys in the program, including the boys at Cressida and Rhonda’s table, seemed to become more quickly restless after concentrating on a few problems, and were more easily discouraged than the girls. Yet, Cressida was able to win them over, she believed, with her clever cartoon drawings and her light, droll sense of humor, and praised them when they did something—(in fact, anything)—“correctly.”
It was mildly discouraging to the tutors, that the majority of their inner-city pupils seemed not to have retained the modest math-skills they’d learned the previous week. Mitch Kazteb said that was to be expected—“Math Squad just keeps plugging away, and helping whoever wants to be helped, and anything that’s an improvement is good. Got it?”
Cressida pointed out, Mitch was wearing his shiny yellow smiley-face button upside down.
Again Cressida was surprised at how relaxed she was, as a tutor; how well she got along with the other tutors, and particularly with Rhonda; several of the pupils she’d come to like very much, and was quite fascinated by them—their large, quick-darting eyes, dark-brown like her own; their way of smiling, shyly at first, then laughing, as if permission to laugh had to be granted by their tutors. And she’d memorized all their names, which were, to Cressida, exotic names—
Opal, Shirlena, Vander, Marletta, Junius, Satin, Vesta, Ronette, Kellard.
How different this experi
Again at Friday-evening dinner Cressida spoke warmly of the Math Squad session. This time there were dinner guests, old friends of her parents, who plied her with questions; this was a couple who’d known Zeno and Arlette before their daughters were born, and had not always felt quite comfortable in Cressida’s company. Clearly now, the Masseys were impressed with the smart one!
Then, the third Friday. Which was to be Cressida’s final Friday.
Abruptly the romance ended—as entering the school room with her fellow tutors Cressida saw at a little distance one of her boy-pupils nudging another boy, saw their covert but derisive expressions cast in her direction, and heard, unmistakably—You got the homely one has you?
Though she’d been listening to something Rhonda was saying yet Cressida heard this remark, shot like an arrow to her heart, and would have stopped dead in her tracks except the momentum of the situation carried her on, and forward—of course, she was too proud to acknowledge that she’d heard the childish insult, or that she’d been wounded by it.
In the next instant both boys had turned away, Kellard had ducked his head (guiltily?) giggling and slip-slid into his chair at their table with a clatter. With a guileless expression the boy would greet his white girl-tutors as if nothing were wrong.
Cressida’s head pounded with shame, mortification. She was reasonably certain that Rhonda hadn’t heard the boy’s remark but she had a sick, sinking sensation that Mitch Kazteb had heard.
(He hadn’t so much as glanced at her, since they’d entered the room. Of course, he was embarrassed for her. The lighthearted repartee between them would die, irrevocably.)
And so, the third and final session at Booker T. Washington. Bravely if resentfully Cressida managed to get through it.
Only just glancing at Kellard, and at the others. For it seemed to her now obvious, they all disliked her. A spiteful voice pounded in her head.