Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  I think about these things all the time now.

  The lying started in the eighth grade. Possibly it had begun earlier, and I simply hadn’t noticed. I remember clearly one specific day when we were in a store renting James a tuxedo for my older daughter’s wedding. I had picked him up after school, and we were driving to the store, and he was, I remember, very talkative that day. I recall thinking to myself, This is a good day, isn’t it? James is talking to me in a normal voice, and we are going to rent the tuxedo for Julie’s wedding. But when we got to the store, Julie looked at her brother in a curious and knowing manner, so much so that James kept turning away from his sister. He would pretend to be distracted by a jacket or a pair of cuff links. Julie said, “What have you been smoking? Your eyes are a mess.”

  I looked at my son. His eyes were pink and slightly bulging. How had I not noticed this before? They seemed full of water, as if they might burst at any moment.

  I thought, Maybe James has conjunctivitis. Maybe he’s been on the computer too long. On the way home, I asked him outright what Julie had meant. He said he had no idea. I stopped the car, and I said, “Look at me.” He did. Straight on. He seemed exasperated. “We saw a movie in class,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “I don’t know. It went on for hours. Maybe that’s why my eyes look terrible.”

  You had to hear James say that to understand that he was utterly convincing. I let it go. I never mentioned it again.

  But after that day, I began to be more watchful.

  First there were the stories from the middle-school mothers. Seventh graders were drinking, they said. Eighth graders were smoking pot. I thought it couldn’t be true. We live in a small town, though we do have the college, and I suppose because of that, pot and alcohol might be readily available, even to middle schoolers. I noted, though, that no mother believed it possible of her own child. I certainly did not believe it possible of James.

  Within the family, we had established rules. James had a curfew. He had to be home by eleven. He had to call me on his cell phone if he went anywhere other than the place he had told us he was going. I quickly realized, however, that I could never be certain where he was. I started checking on him, calling the parents at the houses he would say he was visiting. Once, I called and the mother said she had not seen him all evening. I could hear the surprise and the slight pity in her voice, and I knew exactly what she was thinking: Michelle has a son she cannot trust.

  When James got home, I asked him where he had been. He said he had been where he said he’d been. I told him that wasn’t possible, that I’d just spoken with the mother. He said he had been in the basement playing video games. There had been a crowd of boys, eight or nine maybe. The mother simply hadn’t known he was one of them. I knew this couldn’t possibly be true. What mother did not know who was in her house? But to hear James say these words was to believe him. To look into his eyes and to hear his tone of voice was to believe him. I hesitated, and he saw. At the moment of my hesitation, my son became indignant. Other mothers didn’t call parents. Why did I? Didn’t I trust him?

  After that, it seemed, James began to lie even more. Yes, he had read the book for English. I knew better; he had not. Yes, he had done his homework. I wondered when. I could no longer demand that he do his assignments in the kitchen; my son insisted that he be allowed to study in his room. I was to knock before I entered. I would knock and enter quickly, and I would see him on the computer, instant-messaging his friends. I would have glimpses of words within the little boxes. James would look at me and lie. He would say he was doing research. Or he was checking what the homework assignment was. There was no open book on his desk.

  Occasionally, I attempted humor. Sometimes I was stern. I would be an ally, I thought, or I would lay down the law. I would change the rules or I would adapt. I would pick my battles.

  I talked to my husband and told him what I thought. James was lying, and he was drinking. It’s a phase, my husband said. Sons need to break away from their mothers. I was overprotective, and I nagged too much. Let go of the burden of his responsibilities, my husband said, and he will pick them up for himself.

  It seemed a reasonable proposition.

  Our son is a good kid, my husband added. Has a teacher ever called? Has the principal ever called? Has any parent ever suggested . . . ?

  We decided in the spring to send James to Easton Academy in northeastern Connecticut. We had talked for some time about sending him away for high school, since the school in our town was not very good. But when we suggested the idea to James, he rebelled. He wouldn’t go, he said. How could parents want to send their child away?

  I nearly relented; I didn’t want him to go. I loved him and wanted him near me. Away from me, I thought, he wouldn’t study. I might not know what he was doing on a weekend night. But then again, I thought, wouldn’t he be better off at Easton, subject to stricter rules? Hadn’t I lost control already? Mightn’t it be easier on everyone if he went off and found himself?

  Reluctantly, James went to Easton, and immediately he set out to prove our decision wrong. His grades suffered. The reports that were sent home spoke of a lack of organization, of having an innate intelligence but not trying. There was a suggestion of making excuses for missed work. We talked to James, and we visited the school. We had conferences with his teachers and with his adviser. Our son had accumulated demerits for skipping classes, for dress-code violations, and for smoking. I didn’t know that our son had ever smoked a cigarette. When I confronted him, James said he had tried it just once. I wanted to believe him.

  James said he didn’t care about the school, and he didn’t like the teachers. He thought his adviser was lame. He hated his history teacher.

  Only his basketball coach sent home good reports.

  James grew six inches his sophomore year. Another two his junior year. He was exceptional at basketball. One in a hundred. One in a thousand, his coach said. One of the best players ever to go through Easton. Though James had always played basketball in town leagues, we hadn’t realized he had such talent. I thought to myself, This is it. This is the thing that will turn our son around. This is the thing that will save him.

  James would come home, for a weekend or for a vacation, and for a few hours he would seem to be another person, a nice boy, a good boy. More mature, less volatile. He would talk to us, share his ideas and his plans. We would chat about basketball, about which games we’d be able to make. I would be so happy then. I would think, We did the right thing. Sending James to a private school was the correct decision after all. James is growing up and taking on responsibility. The basketball has changed him. He believes in himself.

  But later, James would go to his room and shut the door. He would come down for meals and then go out with his friends. The lying started again, and this time I discovered that our son was a pro. He had logic now, and I could never be sure if he was telling the truth. I could never seem to catch him out. I would make discreet calls, inventing pretexts. He would ask, Why are you calling people? He demanded a later curfew and then a later one. I would ask, What can you possibly do in this town after midnight?

  I worried constantly. I felt that my son was chipping away at me. This small thing and then that small thing.

  One night, over Christmas break during his junior year, James came home drunk. I had waited up and was sitting in the kitchen in my bathrobe. I confronted him, told him he was drunk. I could smell it, and he was slurring his words. He became belligerent and denied that he’d been drinking.

  I woke my husband and told him to come down and see for himself. Matthew told my son to go to bed. We would talk in the morning.

  In the morning, James was painfully hungover. When we said that we were grounding him, he said that he was unhappy, that we had ruined his life. He hated Easton and was miserable there.

  I see now that planting the idea that we had ruined his life was a brilliant tactic on James’s part.

  In January of his junior y
ear, a scout from Gonzaga University traveled from Washington State to Easton to take a look at James. The basketball team that year was winning every game they played. My son scored twenty, thirty points a game. He was a “phenom,” we were told.

  Taking James out of Easton was no longer even a possibility. If he could get into Gonzaga on a full scholarship, did the grades matter all that much?

  The academic reports continued to be poor. James showed tremendous promise, but he didn’t do the work. I thought that maybe he had had an organizational problem all along, and that I should have had him diagnosed when he was younger.

  I could have done more for him, I thought. I might have helped him.

  In the fall of his senior year, my son was recruited for Gonzaga. The offer they made him was stunningly complete. We celebrated at home. My husband and I drank champagne. My husband offered my son a glass.

  In April, James was expelled from Easton for selling marijuana on school grounds. He did not deny the charge. He told me it was just the one time, that he was doing it for a friend because the friend desperately needed money. I told him I did not believe him. I was furious, and my husband was heartsick. Our son had thrown his future away.

  Perhaps not, the recruiter said when he called our house after hearing of the expulsion. If James could make up the credits in the summer and then go on to a postgraduate year somewhere else, the college would still hold open the offer.

  We scrambled to find a private school for our son. It was late in the year, too late for the normal application process. We wanted him close to home so we could keep an eye on him.

  We visited Avery, and they accepted James within the week. They made a show of caring about the expulsion and of making James take the entrance exams, but you could see how happy they were to have a basketball player of James’s caliber.

  We made our son go to a therapist. James thought he was smarter than the therapist. He was cynical about all therapy, he said. He didn’t believe in it, and if he didn’t believe in it, it wouldn’t work. By July, he had started to skip appointments.

  Let it go, my husband said. You can’t make an eighteen-year-old boy do something he doesn’t want to.

  In the summer, James went to a succession of basketball camps in preparation for what we hoped would be a stellar and redemptive year.

  In the fall, we drove him down to Avery. By then, I hardly recognized my son. He was large and muscular and had grown a beard. He towered over me, a fact that only served to emphasize how little influence I now had over him. Before we left, I sat him down and told him I loved him. I said to him that as long as he lived in our house, I would never give up on him. I said to him, “You reap what you sow.”

  I could see a small smile playing about his mouth. I thought, He’s laughing at me.

  In the fall, we drove to Avery, and I lost my son.

  What do I want to say to mothers of sons? Something hurts these boys, and I don’t know what it is. Take away the alcohol. If you suspect a problem, there is a problem. Don’t let them get away with even the very first lie. Be vigilant.

  Natalie

  You see them come in, these big lumpin’ boys, can’t get in the dining hall fast enough. Somethin’ in them frees up inside when they come in here. They’re animals wanting their feed. They’ll take four, five hamburgers and ask for extra fries and then take half a dozen pieces of cake. You can eat as much as you want at Avery. I’ve seen the boys down six, seven glasses of milk. I hardly know a one that eats a vegetable. I don’t know why we bother with vegetables. The food is good here. We have the salad bar, the frozen yogurt machine, the grill. You can get whatever sandwich you want. We have “Italian Night,” “Mexican Night.” They’ll eat seven, eight tacos at a sitting. I’ve known these boys since they were freshmen. Except J. Dot. He came in as a PG.

  Her, I didn’t know as well. The girls don’t eat. Or if they do, they do it in secret. They go straight for the salad bar. I’m behind the counter with the entrées. I’ll tell you, though, we got a dress code, but these girls, they dress like tramps, with their tiny tank tops and the skirts that show a lot of leg. I don’t know how the boys — or the male teachers, for that matter — can keep their pricks in their pants. It’s like The OC in there.

  I knew Silas and his family real well. We all went to the same church. They were a good Catholic family. Owen’s people have been here in Avery, oh, three generations, anyway. Anna, she was a fine mother. I always knew if I sent my kids over there to play, they’d be looked after. You never had to worry like you did with some mothers in town — the ones who drank, I mean. There’s always some of those.

  I liked Rob. He used to say thank you. No one ever says thank you. J. Dot, though, he was always looking to get a laugh. Center of attention. If you heard guffawing and you looked up, it would always be the table where J. Dot was sitting.

  You pick a boy in the whole school who was raised with the right values, though, it would be Silas.

  I don’t blame the girl. I blame the reporters. I could kill some of those reporters for what they did to those boys.

  Mike

  In April, Silas Quinney was accepted to Avery Academy for entrance the following fall. By then, Mike had progressed from the Quinneys’ kitchen to the dining room, as he had taken it upon himself to expedite the application and financial aid processes personally, bringing the forms to Anna and Owen to sign. In the interim, Mike had gotten to know Silas reasonably well, having met him several times and having attended one of his middle-school basketball games. Predictably, Coach Blount was wildly enthusiastic about Silas as a prospect, and Mike was beginning to feel that he had done Avery as well as the Quinneys an enormous service, more than compensating for the property damage that his Volvo, in concert with Mother Nature, had caused.

  Mike regarded Silas as a quiet, thoughtful boy with more than his share of what Mike liked to call character, a trait that seemed to have been traded, in recent years, for achievement. Whether this was a consequence of the boy’s religious upbringing — the Quinneys were devout Catholics — Mike couldn’t say. The boy took after his father in looks, though he hadn’t developed anything like the potential for a mischievous smile around the eyes. One doubted that he ever would. Silas seemed to take life, if not necessarily himself, seriously, and so made an ideal student as well as varsity basketball player (one of only two freshmen admitted to the team).

  One advantage private schools held over public was that they kept their students busy. School started at eight in the morning, and though classes were over by two o’clock, sports were mandatory for all students. Also mandatory was an enforced study hall for two hours in the evening for boarders. Though Silas was not a boarder (unlike Rob, J. Dot, and the girl), he was busy until six thirty most days and could be counted on to have at least three hours of homework of an evening, if not more. The teachers tended to pile it on freshman year to indoctrinate the students. Many was the time, when visiting the freshman dorms, Mike had looked into the open rooms between the hours of eight and ten p.m. and had seen the new students, heads bent to their desks not in sleep but in despair, some of them actually weeping. Mike liked to think that Avery students were exceptionally well prepared for college, and, indeed, new alumni often reported that because their academic training at Avery had been rigorous, college seemed easier to them than high school.

  Silas, on a varsity team, often had to travel long distances to at least half the games. In addition, Saturday school was mandatory every other week. These rules had grown out of a need to leave boarding students with little time to get into trouble, but they applied to day students as well. Anna complained laughingly that she hardly ever saw her son anymore, though she seemed happy enough that he was at Avery. She had become at first a tentative and then a tireless volunteer for the parent-teacher association. Owen, not one to hold a grudge, though Mike sensed he was willing to snatch his son from Avery at the least sign of trouble, took pride in his son’s success at basketball and tri
ed to get to every home game. Each time Owen entered the gym and made his way over to the home bleachers, Mike would manage, at some point, to stand or sit next to him and ask after Anna and, if Owen had missed a quarter or a half, fill him in on the team’s progress, Silas’s in particular. Owen never boasted about his son, and when someone complimented Silas, he would give a slight nod in acknowledgment. One could see, however, in Owen’s eyes, that beam of pride that only a father possessed. Mike envied him, for as much as he could cheer and celebrate when Avery had a winning or even a championship team, Mike never had that intimate jolt of joy that Owen Quinney had access to.

  Owen always came to games in worn overalls and the thick plaid jacket that smelled of sheep. He showed not the slightest discomfort about being either underdressed or a local. Indeed, if questioned, Owen probably would have admitted to a feeling of superiority over his fellow parents — some of whom had traveled great distances to attend the games — because, well, that was just how Vermonters were. Occasionally, after a game, Owen and Anna would invite Meg and Mike to come for a meal, but, oddly, in all the time Mike knew them, Meg had never accompanied Mike to the Quinney house. Mostly this was circumstantial — his wife often had meetings or practices that ran through the dinner hour — but some of it was simply her sense that the Quinneys were Mike’s deal, part of his job, and Meg did not consider his job her job. They had separate spheres of influence, separate universes of responsibility.

  Anna Quinney was a superior cook of the Vermont farmhouse variety. Mike remembered her buttered biscuits especially, and he doubted he would ever taste anything as good again. She made a lemon meringue cake worth dreaming about, and she could roast a chicken to perfection, the meat tender, juicy, and flavorful. The dining room was small, but because there was only the one son, there was always an extra chair or two for guests. Anna, Mike thought, liked to show off a bit, though one had to guess at that: she was modest almost to a fault. The table was underlaid with a blue woven cloth, similar to the place mats in the kitchen. The dining room and the linens reminded Mike of childhood meals at his grandmother’s house, and he often had the sense, when visiting the Quinneys, of having stepped back in time. He worried always about spilling gravy over the side of his plate, but the linens were spotless whenever he dined there. Dined was not really the correct word, he thought. Had supper would be more appropriate. There was never any wine; the food, however good, was not gourmet; no one dressed for the meal. Owen would be at one end of the table, Anna at the other. Silas and Mike would sit across from each other, Silas often looking slightly pink from his exertions on the court.