But rather thinking With him in the world somewhere, I can be happy.
It seemed to her not so very surprising, that Juliet would bring Brett Kincaid home. That Brett Kincaid would marry into the Mayfield family—this was good!
In this way Cressida and Brett would become related. It was thrilling to Cressida to think she would be acquiring a brother, at last.
She’d had enough of just herself and her sister. How boring it seemed to her, she’d actually brought up the subject to her startled parents, that they’d stopped at just daughters.
“Most parts of the world, everyone wants sons. Like China, and now India, where the ‘live births’ of girls is plummeting. But you, you stopped with just girls. Why?”
It was a preposterous remark to make to one’s parents. Yet in all innocence Cressida spoke, for truly she wanted to know.
Arlette said, awkwardly, “Why, honey—that’s a—a kind of a private matter, you know?—between your father and me. I’m not sure how to answer it.”
Zeno said, “Are you asking, Cressie, why we stopped with ‘just girls’? Or are you asking why we stopped at all?”
Cressida wasn’t sure of the distinction here. Zeno fired such queries at her the way that he’d shot Ping-Pong balls at her in those years when they’d played Ping-Pong in the basement; when she’d begun to shoot the little balls back at Zeno, and to win a game now and then, Zeno had been less avid to play.
“We ‘stopped’ because we realized we were very happy, as we were. We were perfect—as we were.” Zeno smiled slyly so you knew he was about to say something clever. “If we’d had another baby, it might have been a daughter. And another—a daughter. These things happen. There isn’t any necessary probability that the next child would be a son, or the next. And who needs a son? I’ve been spared little Oedipus eyeing me out of the shadows. My two darling daughters are the answers to all my prayers.”
YET SOMETIMES she was lonely. And sometimes, embittered.
Though Brett Kincaid was in the world, somewhere—“deployed” in Iraq—how could this be a solace to Cressida?
At St. Lawrence University she was so very unhappy. Far more unhappy than she’d been living at home, and attending Carthage High School where she knew everyone, or consoled herself that she knew everyone—their (shallow) depths, their (unsurprising) particularities.
In savage repudiation of their ordinariness she’d drawn her contemporaries as stunted stick-figures climbing stairs, to infinity. Her drawings were her revenge even as her drawings were a consolation. For she could look at these curious works of art—with a cold, objective eye—and see that they were strikingly rendered, unsettling and “profound” in a way that little else in her life could be.
But that was high school, in Carthage. And now she was away at college, in the small city of Canton, New York. At a university that hadn’t been one of her first choices but which, with her erratic grades, she’d had to settle for.
Almost now, Cressida regretted her impulsive behavior, so frequent in high school. Her angry hurt feelings against a teacher—Mr. Rickard was but one example—that resulted in her failing to hand in crucial assignments, failing to study for a final exam, sabotaging her own efforts. It was not uncommon for Cressida to ruin an A average in such ways and so instead of graduating as valedictorian of the Carthage High School Class of ’04 she’d managed to graduate with a grade point average lower than that of her sister Juliet, who’d graduated in the class of 2000.
And so—was the smart one really so smart, after all?
Of course Cressida hadn’t been admitted to her first-choice universities—Cornell, Syracuse, Middlebury, Wesleyan. She hadn’t received offers of scholarships even to second-tier schools. She’d been humbled, disgraced. Her pretensions to being superior had been rebuked. Obscurely she felt that in punishing herself she was punishing her parents and anyone else who’d predicted academic success for her—for how bitterly she resented such facile predictions!
Cressida is really so very—original. Her mind isn’t like any other child’s mind we’ve ever encountered. If only Cressida were less unpredictable—more cooperative in the matter of her own good.
Her parents had pleaded with her since tenth grade, and the upset with Mr. Rickard, which had nearly resulted in Cressida failing geometry, that she was sabotaging her own career with such impulsive behavior—but of course, Cressida hadn’t listened.
Like running the sharp points of a nail scissors against her skin. Against the tantalizing pale-blue veins on the inside of her wrist. Or brushing her fingers against the gas-flame on the stove. Pain? What is pain? A shadow in the brain, to be conquered.
Even teachers who admired Cressida Mayfield had been obliged, surely, to write qualified letters of recommendation for her. They could not in all conscience write the sort of glowing letters they wrote for their best students.
Your own worst enemy, Cressida. Why?
But Zeno had a new idea: if Cressida excelled in her freshman year at St. Lawrence, she could transfer to another university for the following year. “ ‘There are second acts in American lives’—if you seize them.”
Still pressure put upon her! Sometimes Cressida felt it as an (invisible) vise tightening around her skull, squeezing her brain out of shape.
At St. Lawrence, she should have excelled. She knew, there was no reason for her not to excel. And at first, she worked in the way of a good, diligent student—the kind of girl-student whom professors reward with high grades; then, the old, self-sabotaging impulse set in, her wish to disobey, resist. Like a bratty child she resented being assigned anything—that was the crucial problem. A subject she might have zealously researched on her own became boring to her, when it was assigned. Like a leash around her neck.
And it was strange, discomforting, to be away from Carthage, where everyone knew her as the younger Mayfield daughter; she hadn’t quite realized how her father’s reputation defined and protected her, as water heavily saturated in salt buoys up the least skilled of swimmers, unwittingly. Even as she’d scorned her father’s political “reputation”—her family’s social “stature”—so she’d taken these for granted, all of her life. And now she was in Canton, New York, not so very far from Carthage, but far enough that no one knew the Mayfield name; or, having heard of it, was much impressed. And now she wasn’t living in her parents’ house, that had long sheltered and confined her, there was no one to notice, still less to care, if she skipped meals, skipped classes. If she rushed outside in freezing weather carelessly dressed and couldn’t be bothered to return to her residence to dress more sensibly.
No one to call chidingly to her Cressie honey! Of course you’re going to wear boots today, yes?
Or Come in here and sit down, Cressie. You are not leaving this house without eating breakfast!
She found it distressing to accept that Brett Kincaid had enlisted in the U.S. Army—the young man who’d been so kind to her, and had made such a powerful impression upon her; with the declaration of war against Iraq, in March 2003, Private First Class Kincaid had been among the first American servicemen shipped to Iraq, to an area called Salah ad Din—she’d tried to locate on maps. Brett Kincaid, her (secret) friend!
Her sister’s fiancé and beloved of all the Mayfields including even Zeno who was edgy and funny and awkward in the young man’s presence never seeming to know the appropriate tone in which to address him—handsome in his dress uniform as an heraldic figure in an ancient frieze. Always Cressida would recall how Brett had gripped her hands in farewell, how he’d smiled at everyone who’d come to see him off at the airport in a way they were never to see him smile again. For hadn’t Brett said, his father had “served” in the Gulf: though he hadn’t seen (Sergeant) Graham Kincaid in years yet he seemed to believe that his father would know about his enlisting, and be proud.
Cressida was shocked that Juliet’s fiancé would behave so—ordinarily. Since the terrorist bombings of 9/11 the media had been filled with
propaganda speeches by politicians, news of “weapons of mass destruction” hidden in Iraq, the horrific dictatorship of Saddam Hussein who’d seemed to be mocking his American enemies, daring them to declare war and invade. On TV Cressida had seen newsreel footage of President George W. Bush declaring to his American viewers that the terrorist enemy that had struck the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, was part of a vast fundamentalist-Muslim army determined to destroy our American way of life; gazing into the TV camera as if he were addressing very slow-witted and credulous individuals, the President said, deadpan: “They want to come into your home and kill you and your family.”
A pause. And then a slow studied repeat of the same words with the President’s gaze fixed upon the vast invisible TV audience.
“Is that guy serious? What does he take us for, total idiots?”—so Zeno had raged, ranted.
But it had soon become evident that it wasn’t just the bellicose conservative-Christian-Republican U.S. government that was campaigning for war in the aftermath of 9/11, but moderate and even liberal politicians in the Democratic party. Soon Zeno was predicting that “patriotic fever leads inevitably in one direction—to war.”
Cressida felt such distress, she had difficulty breathing.
Not contempt for the political propaganda fanned on all sides like deliberately set fires but fear—of what the new military invasion would lead to, beyond estimation.
And how petty their lives seemed now, “civilian” lives. In particular, her life as an undergraduate at St. Lawrence University in the small town of Canton, New York. Why have I come here! This is such a mistake.
IT CAME TO her then: the wars were monstrous, and made monsters of those who waged them.
The Iraq War, the Afghanistan War.
In time, civilians too would become monstrous, for this is the nature of war.
Even before Brett Kincaid had returned from Iraq disfigured and broken, Cressida had believed this.
That first year at St. Lawrence University she’d spent much of her time alone. Walking along the great wide rushing river—the St. Lawrence River. Alone with books, alone with her work. And in the near distance like cascading water the buzz and thrum of others’ voices, laughter.
She’d become deeply immersed in one of her courses—“Romantics & Revolutionaries.” It was like Cressida to focus on a single area of study to the neglect of others as it was like her to admire one of her instructors above the others, in this case a professor named Eddinger who lectured in a rapid voice that dazzled and intimidated even as he paced about at the front of the lecture hall like a raptor preparing to strike. He was a short slight-bodied man of her father’s approximate age. His face was weatherworn, ugly. Yet a face of such intense ugliness, Cressida was captivated.
And captivated too by Eddinger’s impassioned readings of excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and William Wordsworth’s Prelude; poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience that entered her imagination powerfully. Cressida had never before read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and chose to write her term paper for the course on this curious prose-parable that was so very different in both tone and substance from the myriad manifestations of “Frankenstein” in the popular imagination.
Soon, Frankenstein entered Cressida’s dreams. Not content with composing a conventional paper of about twenty-five pages Cressida felt obliged to present her material in an experimental form: a collage of texts by Mary Shelley and other “revolutionary” thinkers (Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka), illustrations of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster (including original drawings by Cressida herself), and a “deconstructed” argument about Frankenstein (by Cressida Mayfield). The more Cressida worked on the project, the more driven she was to work on it further; as she’d become obsessed with M. C. Escher in high school, so she became obsessed with the Frankenstein project in the spring term of her freshman year at St. Lawrence University. As usual in such circumstances she neglected her other courses; her awareness of her residence-hall suite mates was so slight, often she couldn’t recall their names, or their faces. Am I rude?—so sorry! But Cressida wasn’t sorry, and she never apologized.
Weeks passed. The May 1 deadline for term papers in “Romantics & Revolutionaries” passed. Vaguely Cressida was aware of the deadline yet with a part of her mind she seemed to have thought of herself as exempt from it since, unlike Professor Eddinger’s other students, she wasn’t involved in writing a mere term paper for a university course but in presenting the ultimate interpretation of Frankenstein in all its forms.
Yet each time Cressida believed the Frankenstein project was finished, she discovered yet another theme that had to be explored. And then it seemed to her necessary that the various texts, including her own “argument,” should be presented in appropriate fonts, and in some cases written by hand (by Cressida herself, in imitation of the original writers’ handwriting); it seemed necessary that the entire project be presented on double, oversized pages, with hand-bound covers; for in the Age of the Computer, what is more appropriate to an evocation of Mary Shelley’s (singular, fated) monster than a one-of-a-kind project that could not be replicated? Brilliantly, or so she believed, Cressida presented “Cressida Mayfield’s” term-paper argument in the distinctive font of a typewriter, to set it apart from computer-fonts. And then, she discovered H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, and felt obliged to consider it in her project, since Dr. Moreau was a debased type of Dr. Frankenstein; she felt obliged to include a deliberately crude comic strip to dramatize her thesis that mankind is destined to create monsters that, once created, turn against their creators. And she was inspired, very late one night, to include a dialogue between two individuals on the subject of the federal government’s “crusade against terror”: one of them a young soldier in the U.S. Army and the other an older man, a veteran of World War II. (These were, respectively, Brett Kincaid and Zeno Mayfield though of course Cressida’s father had never served in the military.) Girls in her residence hall were curious about Cressida’s project, which involved original and striking drawings, except—“Isn’t this too long? Aren’t you working too hard? When is the deadline?”
Cressida shrugged. Deadline?
How petty it seemed to her, how school-girlish, to worry about a deadline. When Professor Eddinger received her project, he would make an exception of her, she was certain.
A first draft of the completed project was fifty-two (thick, double) pages long; the fourth, final draft was seventy-six pages. Not a term paper but an outsized book measuring fourteen inches by six inches, with a beautiful hand-designed cover into which was set an original drawing (by Cressida Mayfield) of Frankenstein’s monster as an uncannily human-looking figure in a military uniform.
At last, near the end of the spring term, Cressida brought to Professor Eddinger’s departmental office a large box containing the Frankenstein project, leaving it with a (disapproving) secretary who promised to place it on the professor’s desk. She thought He will summon me! He will call me to come see him.
She was sure of this. She’d seen how, through the semester, Eddinger had often glanced in her direction, even when she hadn’t raised her hand to answer one of his provocative questions. He is aware of me. He knows me. Cressida had not missed a single class in “Romantics & Revolutionaries” nor had her grades in the course been lower than A.
And so, she wasn’t surprised when Eddinger sent her a terse but friendly email asking her to please come see him.
She wasn’t surprised when she entered his office, to see that he’d spread out the Frankenstein project on a table, and that he clearly admired it.
Standing beside Professor Eddinger, Cressida saw that he was a wiry-trim little man, just slightly taller than she was, with legs that appeared foreshortened, like a dwarf’s; though in no way was his body misshapen. He wore a checked shirt with short boxy sleeves to the elbow and trousers of so
me plain fabric, no necktie and on his feet, surprisingly, sandals with black socks which he had not worn during the semester, at least not while lecturing in their class. His hair was thin, a gray-buttery color; his face was fine-creased like something that has been left out in the sun. And his eyes were startling-bright, fixed upon her.
“Miss Mayfield! This is extraordinary work. I have never received anything remotely like it in thirty-six years of university teaching, here at St. Lawrence and previously at Williams.”
Cressida was stricken with shyness. Though she’d imagined words like these yet now she could not respond.
“Decoding Frankenstein as a cultural and ‘biological’ phenomenon is a wonderfully original approach, Miss Mayfield. And I feel quite the same way that you do, about our current wars—the ‘crusade against terror.’ Is it possible that you are just a—freshman?”
Cressida nodded, yes.
“It’s amazing, bold work. It must have required weeks of effort. I’m particularly struck by these brilliant line-drawings of the ‘monster’ as a boy-soldier who becomes a ‘military strategist’—his metamorphosis is entirely convincing. In fact I’m flattered, Miss Mayfield, you’ve handed in more than we would expect at this university for a senior honors thesis, and the assignment was just a term paper, to count for approximately forty percent of your grade in my course.”
Was she expected to speak? Cressida could not think of anything to say.
“The problem is, Miss Mayfield, which you must have considered—this ‘term paper’ is twelve days late. Even if I’d extended the deadline for you, that would have been over a weekend at the most—let’s say that you’ve handed it in nine days late.”
To this, Cressida had no excuse.
She’d rushed to Professor Eddinger’s office in tossed-on clothes—denim jacket, jeans. Her hair was a mad scribble about her small pale girl’s face. Vaguely she’d thought the day would be chilly and overcast with fog but now at near-noon it was brightly sunny, and warm. She could not think what to say to Professor Eddinger who spoke to her so reasonably, and with regret.