Sourland

There was no way to undo it, Momma acknowledged. Her voice quavered when she uttered Sonny’s name. Her eyes were swollen and reddened from weeping. When Georgia screamed at her in loathing, Momma could not defend herself. She spoke with the police. She spoke with the prosecutors and with the judge hearing Sonny’s case. She pleaded on Sonny’s behalf. She blamed herself for what he’d done. (She had not asked him to intervene with Mr. Herlihy, Momma insisted. Though she had allowed him to see her bruised face, her cut lip. She’d told him how frightened she was of Herlihy, the threats he’d made.) Momma testified that her nephew had acted out of emotion, to protect her; he’d had no personal motive for approaching Herlihy. He had never seen, never spoken with Herlihy before that evening. Sonny was a boy who’d grown up too fast, Momma said. He’d quit school to work and help support his family. He’d taken on the responsibilities of an adult man and so he’d acted to protect a member of his family, as an adult man would do. Others testified on Sonny’s behalf as well. Authorities were persuaded to believe that the killing was a “tragic accident” and Sonny was allowed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter as a minor, not as an adult, which meant incarceration in a youth facility and not in a nightmare maximum security prison like Attica.

Lucky bastard it was said of Sonny in some quarters. His tree service buddies seemed to feel he’d gotten off lightly: less than five years for breaking a man’s head with a tire iron when not so long ago in Chautauqua County, as in any county in New York State, the kid might’ve been sentenced to die in the electric chair.

At the Amherst Academy where I was one of a half-dozen scholarship students out of approximately three hundred girls, I would speak only guardedly of my family back in Ransomville. Now my mother had married, a man I scarcely knew. Now my aunt Georgia had sold the farmhouse and was living with one of her married daughters. In this place where talk was obsessively of boys I would not confess I’m in love with my cousin who is five years older than me. My cousin who killed a man when he was sixteen. Never would I break suddenly into tears to the astonishment of my friends I am so lonely here where I want to be happy, where I am meant to be happy because my life has been saved.

Three days of rain and the grounds of the Amherst Academy for Girls were sodden and treacherous underfoot as quicksand. Where there were paths across lawns and not paved walks hay had been strewn for us to tramp on. Soon most of the lovely-smelling hay became sodden too, and oozed mud of a hue and texture like diarrhea and this terrible muck we were scolded for tracking into buildings, classrooms. We were made to kick off our boots just inside the doors and in our stocking feet we skidded about on the polished floors like deranged children, squealing with laughter.

I was Mickey, skidding about. My laughter was shrill and breathless even when a husky girl athlete, a star on the field hockey team, collided with me hard enough to knock me down.

“Mickey, hey! Didn’t see you there.”

I had friends at the Amherst Academy, I could count on the fingers of both hands. Sometimes, in that hazy penumbra between sleep and wakefulness, in my bed in the residence hall, I named these friends as if defying Momma. See! I can live away from you. I can live different from you. Some of the girls at the Academy did not board in the residence hall but lived in the vicinity, in large, beautiful homes to which I was sometimes invited for dinner and to sleep over. And at Thanksgiving, even for a few days at Christmas. After my first year at the Academy, my grades were high enough for me to receive a tuition scholarship so now my aunt Agnes paid just my room, board, expenses. It was strange to me, that my aunt seemed to care for me. That my aunt came from Cleveland to Amherst to visit with me. That my aunt was eager to meet my roommates, my friends. That my aunt did not ask about Momma, or Lyle. My aunt did not ask about Georgia, or Sonny. Not a word about Sonny! You are the one I take pride in, Aimee. The only one.

Aunt Agnes was a slender quivery woman in her early forties. She did not much resemble her younger sisters in her appearance or in her manner of speaking. Her face was thin, heated, vivacious. Her teeth were small, like a child’s teeth, and looked crowded in her mouth that was always smiling, or about to smile. Where Momma would have been awkward and defensive meeting my teachers, having to say quickly that she “never was very good” at school, my aunt smiled and shook hands and was perfectly at ease.

At the Academy, it may have been assumed by girls who didn’t know me that Agnes was my mother.

Even those girls to whom I’d introduced my aunt seemed to hear me wrong and would speak afterward of “your mother”: “Your mother looks just like you, Mickey” — “Your mother is really nice.”

My mother is a beautiful woman, nothing like me. My mother is a slut.

My first few months at the Academy, I’d been homesick and angry and took the stairs to the dining hall two or three at a time slapping my hand against the wall for balance not giving a damn if I slipped, fell and broke my neck. I’d glowered, glared. I was so shy I’d have liked to shrivel into a ball like an inchworm in the hot sun yet there I was waving my fist of a hand, eager to be called upon.

I was Mickey not Aimee. Fuck Aimee!

I tried out for the track team but ran too fast, couldn’t hold back and so became winded, panting through my mouth. Staggering with sharp pains in my side. I helped other girls with their papers though such help was forbidden by the honor code we’d solemnly vowed to uphold. I said outrageous things, scandalizing my roommate Anne-Marie Krimble confiding in her that I didn’t have a father like everyone else: “I was conceived in a test tube.”

Anne-Marie’s mouth dropped softly. She stared at me in disbelief. “Mickey, you were not.”

“In vitro it’s called. My mother’s ‘egg’ was siphoned from her and mixed with sperm from a ‘donor male,’ shaken in a test tube the way you shake a cocktail.”

“Mickey, that did not happen! That is gross.”

Anne-Marie had taken a step back from me, uncertainly. I was laughing in the way my cousin Sonny Brandt used to laugh, once he’d gotten us to believe something far-fetched. “In vivo, that’s you: born in an actual body. But not me.”

Tales quickly spread of Mickey Stecke who said the most outrageous things. But mostly funny, to make her friends laugh.

“These are very serious charges, Aimee.”

Aimee. In the Dean’s flat, nasal voice, the pretentious name sounded like accusation.

Dean Chawdrey was peering at me over the tops of her rimless bifocal glasses. In her hand she held the neatly typed letter I’d sent to her the previous day. I was sitting in a chair facing her across the span of her desk, in my damp rumpled raincoat. I heard myself murmur almost inaudibly, “Yes ma’am.”

“You saw, you say, ‘someone cheating’ last week at midterms. Who is this ‘someone,’ Aimee? You will have to tell me.”

M. V. Chawdrey was a frowning woman in her early fifties, as solidly fleshy as my aunt Georgia but her skin wasn’t warmly rosy like my aunt’s skin but had a look of something drained, that would be cold to the touch. Her mouth was small, bite-sized. Her eyes were distrustful. It was rare that an adult allowed dislike to show so transparently in her face.

“Aimee? Their names.”

I sat miserable and mute. I could see the faces of the girls, some of whom were my friends, or would have believed themselves my friends as I would have liked to think of them as my friends. I could see even the expressions on their faces, but I could not name them.

Of course, I’d known beforehand that I could not. Yet I’d had to report them. It was the phenomenon of cheating I’d had to report, that was so upsetting.

At the Amherst Academy much was made of the tradition of the honor code. Every student signed a pledge to uphold this “sacred trust” — “priceless legacy.” The honor code was a distinction, we were repeatedly told, that set the Amherst Academy apart from most private schools and all public schools. On the final page of each exam and paper you were required to say I hereby confirm that this work submitted under my name is wholly and uniquely my own. You signed and dated this. But the honor code was more than only just not cheating, you were pledged also to report others’ cheating, and that was the dilemma.

Punishments for cheating ranged from probation, suspension from school, outright expulsion. Punishments for failing to report cheating were identical.