Free Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

engagement ring (of which Juliet had been so proud) missing from Juliet’s finger.
    In fact Juliet’s slender fingers were ring-less, as if in mourning.
    At the dinner table, three couples and the daughter. Three middle-aged couples, a twenty-two-year-old daughter.
    And the daughter so beautiful. And heartbroken.
    Of course, no one had asked Juliet about Brett. No one had brought up the subject of Brett Kincaid at all. As if Corporal Kincaid didn’t exist, and he and Juliet had never been planning to be married.
    It’s God-damned sad. But not our fault for Christ’s sake.
    What did we do? Not a fucking thing.
    He’d been drunk, muttering. Sitting heavily on the bed so the box springs creaked. Kicking a shoe halfway across the carpet.
    Juliet should talk to us about it. We’re her God-damn parents!
    When he was in one of his moods Arlette knew to leave him alone. She would not humor him, or placate him. She would leave him to steep in whatever mood rose in him like bile.
    It was an asshole decision, to enlist in the army. “Serve his country”—see where it got him.
    Anyway he won’t pull our daughter down with him.
    Arlette didn’t stoop to retrieve the shoe. But she nudged it out of the way with her foot so that neither of them would stumble over it in the night, should one of them rise to go to the bathroom.
    Immediately his head was lowered on the pillow, Zeno fell asleep.
    A harsh serrated breathing, as if briars were caught in his throat.
    The air-conditioning was on. A thin cool air moved through the bedroom. Arlette pulled a sheet up over her sleeping husband’s shoulders. At such moments she was overcome with a sensation of love for the man, commingled with fear, the sight of his thick-muscled shoulders, his upper arms covered in wiry hairs, the slack flesh of his jaws when he lay on his side. Inside the middle-aged man, the brash youthful Zeno Mayfield with whom Arlette had fallen in love yet resided.
    In a man’s sleep, his mortality is most evident.
    They were of an age now, and moving into a more emphatic age, when women began to lose their husbands—to become “widows.” Arlette could not allow herself to think in this way.
    Remembering later, of that night: their concern had been for Juliet, and for Brett Kincaid whom possibly they would not ever see again.
    Their thoughts were almost exclusively of Juliet. As it had been in the Mayfield household since Corporal Kincaid had returned in his disabled state.
    Cressida passing like a wraith in their midst. On her way out for the evening to visit with a friend from high school who lived so close, Cressida could walk instead of driving. At about 6 P.M. she must have called out a casual good-bye—in the kitchen Arlette and Juliet would scarcely have taken note.
    Bye! See you-all later.
    Possibly, they hadn’t heard. Cressida hadn’t troubled to come to the kitchen doorway, to announce that she was going.
    Zeno hadn’t been home. Out at the liquor store, choosing wine with the fussy particularity of a man who doesn’t know anything about wine really but would like to give the impression that he does.
    It shouldn’t have been anything other than an ordinary evening though it was a Saturday night in midsummer.
    In upstate New York in the Adirondack region, the population trebled in summer.
    Summer people. Campers, pickup trucks. Bikers’ gangs. In the night, on even a quiet residential street like Cumberland, you could hear the sneering roar of motorcycles in the distance.
    At the lakes—Wolf’s Head, Echo, Wild Forest—there were “incidents” each summer. Fights, assaults, break-ins, vandalism, arson, rapes, murders. Small local police departments with only a few officers had to call in the New York State Police, at desperate times.
    When Zeno had been mayor of Carthage, several Hells Angels gangs had congregated in Palisade Park. After a day and part of a night of drunken and increasingly destructive festivities local residents had so