Testimony

by Anita Shreve

  Mike seldom visited in the fall or spring, since there were fewer occasions then for him to run into Owen, but he might eat there twice a month during the winter. There was a single window in the room, a large clock that chimed the quarter hour, a shelf of knickknacks that must have held some special significance for Anna. On another shelf was a series of colored photographs, many of Silas as a baby and as a child. Owen was a raconteur and could hold forth on any number of topics. Certain issues in particular would set him off. The man in the White House made him eloquent with rage. The war in Iraq rendered him apoplectic. Owen was a pacifist, he announced, and would encourage his son, if ever drafted, to make his way north to Canada rather than serve. Tourists gave him a chuckle, and he had an endless store of anecdotes about clueless visitors from out of state that tickled him no matter how many times he told a particular story. Such tales might encourage Mike to tell stories of his own about visiting parents and prospective students — not the most politic of conversations for a headmaster, but in that dining room he felt safe. It was, doubtless, the combination of the exquisite comfort food, the evocative tablecloth, and the small space that in other circumstances might have made him feel claustrophobic. He thought, on balance, that Silas, though an only child, had been lucky in his family.

  Owen had not been bragging when he had said no one could drive to the basket like his son. Though the boy was short in stature, he more than made up for it in speed. He was gifted in his footwork as well, and it was a joy to watch him outwit opponents twice his size. When he missed a shot he should have made — particularly a three-pointer — or his team lost a game, Silas took it hard, often hanging his head to one side as if he expected to be taken out to the woodshed. Mike didn’t think either Owen or Anna had ever raised a hand to Silas, yet he seemed to have access, at times, to a deep well of shame. Failure was not acceptable, and Silas appeared not to be able to shrug it off in the way the other boys often did.

  Sometimes, when Mike encountered Silas crossing the campus, they stopped and chatted for a moment, Mike asking the questions and Silas answering. How were his folks? How did it look for the game on Saturday? How were his studies going? During Silas’s sophomore year, Anna and Owen held the annual dinner for the basketball team at their home; Mike was invited as well, and on that occasion, he progressed from the dining room into the living room. And once, during Silas’s junior year, the boy and he had had a real conversation.

  Oddly enough (and sadly), it was a circumstance that involved sex. Two boys, juniors, had been caught after school hours in the day-student parking lot smoking marijuana in a gray Honda Civic at the same time that one of the boys was being fellated by a sophomore girl. That a teacher had stayed late and happened to jog by the Civic on the way to his own car was simply bad luck for the trio, who were at once brought to the headmaster’s office. Mike spoke first to the boys, one of whom he had never liked and both of whom he had no trouble suspending from school pending further action by the Disciplinary Committee. As for the girl, whose name Mike could not remember, she sat across from his desk as he questioned her gently. He had wrongly assumed that she had been taken advantage of by the boys, that some sort of transaction might be involved. He was therefore somewhat shocked (though after nearly two decades with adolescents, little should have shocked him) when she freely admitted that she had followed the boys to the parking lot and had asked for a ride. Once in the car, she had begged to be allowed to perform the sex act on one of them. That the boys happened to be smoking a joint really had little to do with anything as far as she was concerned. Mike then asked her — perhaps out of annoyance that she could so blithely and casually perform what ought to have been an intimate sexual act, thus demeaning herself — if she routinely followed boys into cars and had sex, and she said, somewhat wistfully, he thought, “A couple of times.” When Mike asked her whom she had followed, she named a half-dozen boys, among them Silas Quinney. Mike was so taken aback that he had her repeat the name. “But it kind of didn’t work out,” she said, with apparently no sense whatsoever of female pride. “He didn’t really want to.”

  The girl was suspended for four days and readmitted, and then, if memory served, went on to Bowdoin. Mike then asked Silas to come to his office, and it was there that they had their first conversation of more than three sentences in a room not in the boy’s own house.

  Mike watched Silas walk across the office, his book bag slung over one shoulder. He settled himself into the chair in front of Mike’s desk, the chair the girl had so recently occupied. He seemed confused and perhaps a little wary. He didn’t know why Mike had called him in, but on the other hand, being summoned to the headmaster’s office was seldom a good thing. He was taller than when Mike had first met him and had filled out considerably. He had thick hair like his dad, and one could already see a dark growth of beard even though Mike guessed he had shaved that morning or the previous night. He wore a blue Shetland wool sweater that Mike had seen on him often, the sort of sweater one could buy at Wal-Mart. Like most boys his age, he had on jeans, though Mike was happy to see they did not hang below his hip bones, exposing inches of boxers.

  “How are your folks?” Mike asked.

  “Good,” Silas said, and then, perhaps out of politeness, he added a bit more — in the way children are taught to write additional sentences in a thank-you note. “My mom is talking about going back to school,” he said.

  “That’s great. Where?”

  Silas named a local junior college. “She wants to get a business associate’s degree and then start a bakery.”

  “Well, she’s the right person for that,” Mike said with enthusiasm. “We could use a good bakery around here.”

  Silas nodded, at a loss for more news.

  “Well, you’re probably wondering why you’re here,” Mike said. “There’s been an incident.”

  Mike named the girl and told Silas the reason he had been summoned. The blood left Silas’s head, and the skin of his face turned the color of the cream trim at the windows.

  “Silas?” Mike asked.

  Silas gave his head a slight shake.

  “Silas, you’re not in trouble.”

  The silence was so prolonged that Mike had time to register Kasia’s voice in the anteroom, a worrying ping of rain against the window (there was a varsity soccer game he was scheduled to attend later that day), the smell of coffee brewing in the lobby. “All I’m doing, really,” he explained, “is trying to confirm the truth of what the girl said.”

  Mike shifted in his chair. Silas’s gaze was fixed on the lip of the desk. Mike didn’t know what the boy was seeing in his mind’s eye: His mother’s reaction to the news? The girl groping him? A future at the public high school?

  “Silas, look at me.”

  Reluctantly, Silas raised his eyes to meet the headmaster’s. Mike noted that the boy’s foot was jiggling furiously against the leg of the desk.

  “You are not in trouble,” Mike explained. “You are not accused of a crime. If anything, you might reasonably have accused the girl of . . .” — he couldn’t exactly say the word harassing; it seemed too extreme — “bothering you,” he finished. “She has admitted to asking you for a ride and . . .” He hesitated again. “Groping, I think, is the appropriate word here.”

  Silas shook his head.

  “That’s not the way it happened?” Mike asked.

  “It did,” Silas said quietly. “It kind of did.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Mike said. “She’s been suspended for four days.”

  The boy shook his head again, violently this time. “She shouldn’t be,” he protested.

  “Well, that’s my decision, isn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t anything,” he said.

  Mike leaned back in his chair and tapped his pencil against the desk. “Sometimes,” he said, “a student needs, for lack of a better description, a time-out. A wake-up call. There have been a number of other incidents. We can’t let that kind of behavior conti
nue.”

  “It was just . . .” Silas said, opening his palms.

  “I have a pretty good idea of what went on,” Mike said. He was beginning to regret his decision to have Silas come into the office at all. The color still hadn’t returned to the boy’s face.

  “So, listen,” Mike said, hitching himself forward. He was developing a sudden desire for a cup of coffee. “We’re fine here. I just needed verification, and you’ve given it to me. If it weren’t true, and the girl was simply naming you, well then, we’d have had to take some other course of action. Get her help of some kind. Not that she doesn’t need help as it is.” The boy shook his head. Mike noted that his foot was still jiggling.

  “I won’t tell your parents about this,” the headmaster said. “There’s no need.”

  Silas’s head snapped up. “You think that’s all I care about?”

  Mike was taken aback by the strength of the emotion behind the question.

  “What my parents will say?” Silas added in case Mike hadn’t understood.

  “Well, no . . .” Mike began.

  “I let it happen,” Silas said. “I was in my car when she tapped on my window. I was a little surprised she was asking for a ride, since I didn’t know her. Before we were out of the parking lot, she put her hand on my fly. I just stopped the car, and for a moment I let her.”

  “Silas,” Mike said, “you’re a sixteen-year-old boy.”

  “Seventeen.”

  “You were undoubtedly stunned. A little paralyzed. Any boy would be, in that situation.”

  “I could have . . .”

  “Could have what?” Mike asked. “Acted a split-second faster?”

  “I think you should suspend me, too,” Silas said earnestly.

  “Silas, I can’t suspend you. I have no cause.”

  “It doesn’t seem right. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “I think she did know what she was doing,” Mike said calmly. “She may not know why she did it, and I am hoping she will be a little shocked at her behavior and that this . . . time-out . . . will give her time to think, so that she won’t want to do it again, but I do, Silas, I do think she knew exactly what she was doing.”

  The boy took a long breath and let it out. Mike noted, with tremendous relief, that the color was returning to Silas’s face.

  “It’s not that I’m a masochist or anything,” the boy said. “I’m not trying to get myself in trouble.” He paused. “If I got suspended, my dad would kill me, and I wouldn’t be able to play basketball.” Another pause. “It’s just that I think I did hesitate too long, that I could have stopped her, that I could have asked her to get out of the car a little faster. Instead, I just froze.”

  “Silas, it wasn’t your fault,” Mike said, a little more sternly than he might have otherwise. He didn’t want Silas to obsess about this. More important, he didn’t want it to get in the way of what he had to do in life, which was to continue to be a decent student, a good kid, and a sensational basketball player.

  Surprised by the sudden change in Mike’s tone, Silas sat up straight and put his hand on his book bag.

  “Where are you headed now?” Mike asked casually.

  “Chemistry,” Silas said.

  “You need a note?”

  “No, I’m good,” he said, standing.

  Mike stood as well. “Thanks for coming in,” he said, as if they’d been chatting about a course change.

  Silas nodded.

  “And say hello to your folks.”

  Mike watched him walk to the door. Silas had an odd hitch in his walk that reminded Mike of the boy’s father. At the threshold, Silas turned and seemed about to speak. Then he shrugged and left, and after a minute, Mike walked into the lobby. He poured himself a cup of brutally strong coffee.

  In the days that followed, Mike wondered why he’d called Silas in. Had it simply been for the purpose of verifying the girl’s account? Had that really been necessary? Or was there another reason: a father’s need to convince the son that he knows and sees everything? Mike was perfectly aware that he was not Silas’s father, but if there had been, despite the girl’s testimony to the contrary, some illicit participation on Silas’s part, mightn’t Mike have subtly wanted the boy to know that he knew it?

  After their “conversation,” there was a change in Silas’s attitude toward the headmaster. Whereas before, if Mike had visited the Quinney home and found the boy lounging in front of the television, Silas would have stood and walked over to Mike and shook his hand and said hello, now the hand wasn’t as ready and the eyes weren’t as willing to meet Mike’s. It was as if each time they saw each other, they were both reminded of the talk in the office and therefore had to imagine or remember — whether they wanted to or not — the incident in Silas’s car, knowing full well that the other was doing this, too, so that the picture of the girl with her hand on Silas’s fly functioned as a thin curtain between them. And in that way, Mike became a little more reluctant to just pop over to Anna and Owen’s house to say hello or to greet them in Silas’s presence when they came to the games. Mike was aware, however, in the spring of Silas’s junior year, that the boy now had a girlfriend, a lovely violinist named Noelle who Mike hoped was headed for Juilliard. Avery seldom had such outstanding and accomplished students (trophy students, they were called in the business because the school could easily point to them as bona fide successes, thus enticing prospective students as well as alumni donations; such students were nearly worth their weight in checks), and Mike had been following Noelle’s progress with growing enthusiasm. Just that September, she had given a concert in the chapel that had brought both teachers and students to their feet. Many had been weeping. It had been an extraordinary moment.

  Noelle was slender, with long dark hair, and she moved like a dancer. She had a winning smile. Had Mike been Silas’s age, he might have fallen in love with her, too. The headmaster thought Silas very lucky to have captured her attentions. On the other hand, Mike liked Silas tremendously and thought Noelle had chosen well herself. When he saw the pair of them, shoulder to shoulder, walking across campus, talking earnestly or laughing, he was suffused with a sense of the rightness of things. Occasionally, it did work, he would think to himself. There were teens who studied hard and had character, who didn’t routinely drink or take drugs, who had instead demonstrated exceptional promise in their chosen fields. Avery had harnessed their energies and had guided them along the correct path. Such successes briefly made one recklessly sanguine about the future of the human race.

  Noelle

  We are sitting on Silas’s bed. The house is still and quiet. His room is cramped, tucked under the eaves, with a window that looks out to the woods. The trees have just begun to bud, with clusters of red among the healthy green. I think it is a child’s painting. We are sitting side by side, almost touching but not quite. His parents are up across the Canadian border, looking at a sheep. I try to imagine what it means to drive all the way to Canada to look at a sheep. Though Silas hasn’t said so, I am guessing that his parents wouldn’t be happy to find me in the house in the middle of the school day. We are away from school when we shouldn’t be.

  Silas wants to show me things. He shows me his baseball-card collection and his CD collection. He shows me his trains, which he keeps under the bed, and tells me they are the N Series. I don’t know what the N Series is, but I like it that he used to like trains. There’s a picture of him shearing a sheep and another of him birthing a lamb. I study the second picture for a long time, having never seen a birth before. He tells me what it is like. He and his father have to wear beepers for a month in case a ewe should go into labor. One person cannot birth a sheep; his mother, who never leaves the house during lambing, can’t do it alone. Someone needs to hold the animal while the other puts his hands in. The ewe could give birth by herself, Silas explains, but the livestock is too valuable to allow for any kind of mistake or accident. This is how his parents make their living — by prod
ucing undamaged, quality lambs. Silas has been beeped in math class, while he was playing Wiffle ball with friends, and during a test. The teachers understand. They think it’s cool, he says, the way something can be more important than school. Silas says he loves the birthing but doesn’t want to inherit the farm. He and his father have never directly discussed it, though Silas knows this is his father’s wish. His mother and Silas have other plans. Silas says he might apply to the University of Vermont and to Middlebury College. Middlebury is a reach, he says.

  I tell him I want to go to Juilliard, but there are other schools I am probably more likely to get into.

  Silas shows me a portfolio of drawings of animals that he has been working on for three years in different art classes. I think they are amazing. There are sheep and dogs and hedgehogs and deer and horses, and it almost feels as though I can hear them or smell them. I tell Silas he should be an artist, and he shrugs.

  I can feel his nervousness all along the side of my body. The bed ripples each time he stands to show me something. When one of the dogs barks, Silas hops up and walks across the hall to look out the window. I can see the relief in his spine. Just the mailman, he says when he walks back in. I can hear the cars coming down off the hill into Avery, the steady whoosh of traffic. Even in the country, there are always cars.