Sourland Read online

  Each time we saw him, he was less Sonny and more somebody else we didn’t know. In the orange jumpsuit printed in black CHAU CO DETENTION on the back, drooping from his shoulders and the trouser legs so long, he’d had to roll up the cuffs. The guards called him kid. There was a feeling, we’d wished to think, that people liked him, Sonny wasn’t any natural-born killer type, not a mean bone in that boy’s body my aunt Georgia pleaded to anyone who’d listen. If only Mr. Herlihy hadn’t died.

  I only just hate that man worse, God forgive me.

  Georgia made us come with her to church. Not Momma (you couldn’t get Momma to step inside that holy-roller Church of the Apostles, Momma proclaimed) but Lyle and me. Pray for your cousin Sonny, may Jesus spare us all.

  I wrote to Sonny, saying how I missed him. How we all missed him. We missed him so! But Sonny never answered, not once.

  Aunt Georgia said Sonny meant to answer, but was busy. You wouldn’t believe how they keep them busy at that damn place.

  Momma said maybe Sonny didn’t “write so good.” Maybe Sonny hadn’t paid much attention at school when writing was taught, maybe that was it. So he wouldn’t want to show how like a little kid he’d write, that other people might laugh at.

  Laugh at Sonny! I was shocked at such a thought. I could not believe that Momma would say such a thing.

  Still, I loved Sonny. My heart was broken like some cheap plastic thing, that cracks when you just drop it on the floor.

  2.

  “Aimée.”

  Mrs. Peale’s voice was low and urgent. My heart kicked in my chest. I saw a look in the woman’s eyes warning Take care! You are a very reckless girl. Later, more calmly I would realize that Mrs. Peale could not have been thinking such a thought for Mrs. Peale could not have known why the dean of students had asked her to pass along the pink slip to me, discreetly folded in two and pressed into my hand at the end of music class.

  My trembling hand. My guilty hand. My tomboy-with-bitten-finger nails-hand.

  It was a rainy afternoon in October 1986. I was sixteen, a junior at the Amherst Academy for Girls. I had been a student here, a boarder, since September 1984. Yet I did not feel “at home” here. I did not feel comfortable here. I had made a decision the previous day and this summons from the dean of students was in response to that decision I could not now revoke though possibly it was a mistake though I did not regret having made it, even if it would turn out to be a mistake. All day I’d dreaded this summons from the dean. In my fantasies of exposure and embarrassment I’d imagined that my name would be sounded over the school’s loudspeaker system in one of those jarring announcements made from time to time during the school day but in fact the summons, now that it had arrived, was handwritten, terse:

  Aimée Stecke

  Come promtly to my office end of 5th period.

  M. V. Chawdrey, Dean of Students

  This was funny! Promtly.

  My first instinct was to crumple the note in my hand and shove it into a pocket of my blazer before anyone saw it, but a bolder instinct caused me to laugh, and saunter toward the door with other girls as if nothing was wrong. I showed the note to Brooke Glover whom I always wanted to make laugh, or smile, or take notice of me in some distinctive way, but my bravado fell flat when Brooke, who’d wanted to leave the room with other friends, only frowned at the dean’s note with a look of baffled impatience, like one forced to contemplate an obscure cartoon. That Dean Chawdrey had misspelled promptly made no impression on Brooke for whom spelling was a casual matter. She’d misunderstood my motive in showing her the note, made a gesture of sympathy with her mouth, murmured, “Poor you,” and turned away.

  Now I did crumple the incriminating note and shove it into my pocket. My face pounded with blood. A terrible buzzing had begun in my head like the sound of flies cocooned inside a wall in winter. I left Mrs. Peale’s classroom hurriedly, looking at no one.

  Well, hell.

  To get you out of that environment. Away from those people, that way of life. My aunt Agnes had come for me, to save me. Her expression had been frowning and fastidious as if she smelled something nasty but was too well-mannered to acknowledge it. Aunt Agnes refused to discuss Sonny with Georgia, though Sonny was her nephew. She refused to hear what Momma had to say about the situation. Yes it was tragic, it was very sad, but Agnes had come to Ransomville to rescue me. She would arrange for me to attend a girls’ boarding school in a Buffalo suburb, a “prestigious” private school she knew of since her college roommate had graduated from the Amherst Academy and was now an alumni officer. She would arrange for me to transfer from Ransomville High School as quickly as possible. At the time, I was fourteen. I was ready to leave Ransomville. Momma had accused her oldest sister You want to steal my daughter! You never had a baby of your own but Agnes refused to be drawn into a quarrel nor would I quarrel with my mother who’d been drinking and who when she drank said wild hurtful stupid things you did not wish to hear let alone dignify by replying Momma you’re drunk, leave me alone. Haven’t you hurt us all enough now leave us alone.

  At this time Sonny was gone from Ransomville. There was shame and hurt in his wake. There was no happiness in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road. No happiness without Sonny in that house he’d started to paint a luminous cream-ivory that glowered at dusk. Sonny was “incarcerated” in the ugly barracks of the Chautauqua County Youth facility north of Chautauqua Falls and he would not be discharged from that facility until his twenty-first birthday at which time he would be released on probationary terms. I had not seen Sonny in some time. I still wrote to Sonny, mostly I sent him cards meant to cheer him up, but I had not seen Sonny in some time and from my aunt Georgia the news I heard of Sonny was not good. Like he doesn’t know me sometimes. Doesn’t want me to touch him. Like my son is gone and somebody I don’t know has taken his place.

  When Sonny was first arrested, after Mr. Herlihy was hospitalized in critical condition, the charge was aggravated assault. He’d told police that he had only been defending himself, that Herlihy had rushed at him, attacked him. He had never denied that he’d struck Herlihy with the tire iron. But when Herlihy died after eleven days on life support without regaining consciousness the charge was raised to second-degree murder and Chautauqua County prosecutors moved to try Sonny as an adult facing a possible sentence of life imprisonment.

  At this time, we’d had to leave my aunt’s house. Momma had had to move us to live in a run-down furnished apartment in town for she and Georgia could not speak to each other in the old way any longer, all that was finished. Always there was the shadow of what Sonny had done for Momma’s sake, that Georgia could not bear. 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 gott
en 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, Aimée. 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 Aimée. Fuck Aimée!

  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, Aimée.”

  Aimée. 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,’ Aimée? 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.

  “Aimée? 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.

  Who would know, who could prove. You have only to say nothing.

  I knew this, of course. But I was angry and disgusted, too. If I did not want to cheat, I would be at a disadvantage when so many others were cheating. My heart beat in childish indignation It isn’t fair! It wasn’t just incidental cheating, a girl glancing over at another girl’s exam paper, two girls whispering together at the back of a room. Not just the usual help girls gave one another, proofreading papers, pointing out obvious mistakes. This was systematic cheating, blatant cheating. Especially in science classes taught by an affable distracted man named Werth where notes and even pages ripped from textbooks were smuggled into the exam room, and grades were uniformly A’s and B’s. In English and history it had become commonplace for students to plagiarize by photocopying material from the periodicals library at the University of Buffalo that was within walking distance of the Amherst Academy. Our teachers seemed not to know, unless they’d given up caring. It was easier to give high grades. It
was easier to avoid confrontations. “Well, Mickey: I know I can trust you,” Mrs. Peale had said once, mysteriously. The emphasis on you had felt like a nudge in the ribs, painful though meant to be affectionate.

  My first few months at the Academy, eager to be liked, I’d helped girls with homework and papers but I’d never actually written any part of any paper. I’d wanted to think of what I did as a kind of teaching. This isn’t cheating. This is helping. Uneasily I remembered how at freshman orientation questions had been put to the Dean of Students about the honor code, those questions Dean Chawdrey had answered year following year with her so-serious expression Yes it is as much a violation of the honor code to fail to report cheating as to cheat. Yes! A ripple of dismay had passed through the gathering of first-year students and their parents, crowded into pine pews in the school chapel. Aunt Agnes had accompanied me and now she murmured in my ear Remember what that woman is saying, Aimée. She is absolutely right.

  I felt a stab of guilt, thinking of my aunt. Agnes had such hopes for me, her “favorite” niece! She wanted to be proud of me. She wanted to think that her effort on my behalf was not in vain. I seemed to know that what I was doing would hurt Agnes, as it would hurt me.

  For nights I’d lain awake in a misery of indecision wondering what to do. In Ransomville, nothing like this could ever have happened. In Ransomville public schools there was no “honor code” and in fact there hadn’t been much cheating, that I had known of. Few students continued on to college, high grades were not an issue. Here, I’d come to think, in my anxiety, that our teachers had to know of the widespread cheating and were amused that girls like me, who never cheated, were too cowardly to come forward.