An Uncommon Education (39 page)

The house, when empty, had a way of creaking and settling so that just when you thought it was most quiet, everything you said would be punctuated by the structure around you. Ruth listened until I was done, but Julie became agitated almost immediately, asking me questions for which I had few answers. A rash of anger grew on her face as she spoke.

“You’re the only one who knows, aren’t you?” Julie asked me. “And where’s Jun?”

When I told her she stood up. Something had clicked in her that made her even angrier.

“Well, it’s simple, then,” she claimed. “We’ve got to speak up, get involved. Tiney can be smoked out.” Ruth began to shake her head. “What?” Julie snapped, already angry with Ruth for what she would say.

Ruth’s posture, in contrast to Julie’s, made them both tense; as Julie had grown rigid, Ruth had remained immobile, absorbing what I told them with the same evenness with which she’d been watching me sew.

“Jun didn’t want you to tell us, right?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “Not you, exactly. No one.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Julie clipped.

“Julie,” Ruth said, looking at her. For only a second they exchanged a look, but neither one could stand it for longer. Ruth looked at me when she spoke again. “I think we need to respect Jun’s wishes,” she said.

“She’s going to get kicked out,” Julie said. “Tiney knows it and you know it, and I’m sure Naomi does, too.”

“Not necessarily,” Ruth said. “Think of her parents. She won’t be kicked out.”

“Every other student at Wellesley has a pedigree, Ruth. The school has plenty of money. I’m not going to watch her hang herself. She’s not going to fight it, Ruth. You know Jun.”

“That’s her choice,” Ruth said. “Jun knows what she’s doing.”

“Naomi saved your life,” Julie spat. “The least you could do is show a little backbone, help her out.” She started to pace, unable to stay still. Ruth glared at her. I began to feel that I was no longer part of the conversation.

Julie turned to me, her pupils the size of pins. “She doesn’t just walk out on the lake because of Grandfather Wiefern,” she said. Something shifted in Ruth’s expression.

“Julie,” she said, but no sound came out.

Julie continued to look at me. When I looked over at Ruth again, she had turned her head away from us. She was sitting near a window, so the reflection of her profile in it looked like a bare sketch; just the most basic, elemental lines of her face.

“Her little sister died when she was four,” Julie said quietly and clearly. “She drowned.” I saw her swallow, the only qualm I’d seen in her since she’d decided to speak. “Fell through the ice.”

I could see from Ruth’s face now, the way her skin had turned the palest gray, that she’d been there.

“She won’t talk about it,” Julie said cruelly. “She’ll just stare off.”

Ruth was behaving, looking away.

“Julie,” I said. “Stop.”

“Why?” Julie interrupted me. “It’s the truth. I can’t just sit on it because she wants me to.”

It felt like Julie was trying to drown Ruth, intent on revealing an emotional weight far too great for her cousin to support. I looked away from Julie’s stare. “Ruth,” I said. She didn’t acknowledge me. I felt stuck between the two of them, unable to move. I was convinced that if I stood and interrupted the tension between us, they would have both collapsed, not from the loss of something substantial, but something imperative, some small lynchpin that supported the whole.

I spoke again to Ruth. “You know, when I was young, about nine, my father had a heart attack.” She made no move to indicate that she’d heard what I’d said. “I was with him at the time. And I thought, maybe, that there was a way I could have stopped it. That maybe there was a way that I could learn to stop such things.” I looked at Ruth’s hardened expression, wondering if she could hear me. “But the moment it happened, I think, it was already out of my hands. Even though . . .” I lost my train of thought and Ruth looked up at me. “Well, maybe we just don’t get to save other people, especially the ones we think we should.” She raised one eyebrow at me, just beginning to consider the intrusion of a doubt.

The front door opened and slammed. It silenced all three of us: Ruth with her arms at her sides, Julie and me with ours on the table.

Instead of going straight through the hallway to where we were, whoever had come in was walking through the great room. I thought someone must have lost something; I could hear her looking. I think we all hoped she would leave again, not come back through the door from the great room to where we were. Ruth and Julie would not meet each other’s eyes; it was an awful moment of waiting to see if what had been started would continue.

And then Mr. Oko was in the kitchen. His face was like stone, finding us there. He was dressed in a suit, and Jun, behind him, was in a dark skirt and sweater. Her expression was a mirror of his.

I stood up quickly and bowed, and Mr. Oko bowed very slightly in return. He took in Julie and Ruth, then walked through the other door of the kitchen. We heard them go up the stairs.

Ruth and Julie both looked at me as though I had an answer. The three of us listened to them walking above us. If they spoke we could not hear it, though we listened for that, too.

When they finished their tour, they walked back down the stairs and paused in the hallway. After a moment they were in the kitchen again. I stood up, making the space between Mr. Oko and me even shorter, though it called for more distance.

“Naomi,” Mr. Oko said.

I nodded.

“You will be at this meeting with the Wellesley administrators?” he said. “About Jun?” I nodded again. “I have been banned, as has the rest of the family.” His face did something quickly, a centered collapse, then righted itself immediately before he spoke again, “You will represent her, then,” he said. “As a friend.”

I nodded. There was nothing else to be said. I looked at Jun, behind him, but her face was blank. I wondered how long their tour had lasted, if they’d walked all over the Wellesley campus, her marching behind him in this way, not speaking as they passed the places where she’d been on her own for three years, ending up here.

“Jun has told me she has done nothing wrong,” he continued. Again, his face warped, righted itself. He dropped his voice. “Do you believe this to be true?”

I was startled by his question. “Yes,” I said. And Ruth or Julie must have made a motion, too, because he took them in, quickly.

He stood there for what seemed a long time, holding us all to our places. The house was as silent as it had ever been. He took in the costumes on the table, the appliances, the low ceilings, the windows with their thin red curtains. Finally, he asked me a question.

“Is this also the house of Amanda Wilcox?”

I nodded.

“The Shakespeare house,” he stated. “I do not understand why these plays are so popular in my country. This is English work,” he continued, “and does not belong in Japan. They are, as you might say, different beasts.” He nodded, as if agreeing with someone about something. “Maybe you do this because you think you will become like Shakespeare?” He tried to laugh a little. “Anything can happen in this country, as I understand it.” He paused.

“I am surprised to be here,” he said under his breath. Jun flinched. Her father turned to her and spoke to her in Japanese, and then they were gone.

“It’s a tour of the school,” Julie spoke first. “He’s having her walk him through.”

“Jun’s part of the school, at least,” Ruth conceded.

“It’s a funeral march,” Julie concluded.

I said nothing. Instead I left the kitchen and went to the front door, staring out of it until I could make them out, already far off and down the main road, indistinguishable from one another but connected by the ten feet or so that separated them. I would have known them anywhere, by the simple way that Jun would always walk behind him, by seeing that in the distance they kept between them they carried something vital.

T
he first May snowstorm in seventy years fell that night. Back at my dorm, I had several brief dreams about Teddy that came together as one chaotic nightmare. Toward morning I woke myself up and tried to think of something else. The storm came in as wind, then cold, then freezing rain, then hail, and, finally, the snow itself, heavy and quiet. By the time the sun rose, the storm had stopped and the entire campus was covered in a glittering, refractive light. The snow melted fairly quickly, but the small buds and leaves on the trees remained encased in ice. The streets were not passable that morning, so the pretrial was postponed until early afternoon.

I was the first to arrive at the dean’s office, followed by Jun, then Tiney, and finally Elena. Jun and Tiney were wearing suits under their coats, looking like they might be lawyers for Elena and me. The four of us sat outside on the benches, waiting to be called in. Once she realized Jun wouldn’t speak, Tiney began to glance her way. She was staring openly at Jun by the time Dean Silas poked her head out a few minutes later. Seeing that we were all there, she opened the door wider to invite us inside. It made me wonder if she ever fully stepped outside her rooms.

There were separate seats for everyone there: armchairs for each one of us, not unlike the setting of a forum. The office seemed emptier than it had been when I’d visited the dean on my own, and the spaces were filled with natural light. It gave me a sense of relief for the time being, as we took our seats and the dean made civil comments about the weather outside.

Dean Silas was joined by the associate dean of the college, a stocky African-American man named Martin Banks. The only time I’d ever seen him up close before this meeting was during our first week of school, and from then on only at a distance, making his quick, efficient way across campus. They stood for a minute at her desk, going through papers to prepare for the meeting, but then they took their seats and it was clear that the preparation was complete. They both sat, taking us in, each of their expressions a shifting cocktail of strain and disbelief. I studied the dean’s expression in particular, waiting to see on what side of the emotional territory it would land. As I waited, she forced a smile and asked us if we had each received a printed copy of the Wellesley College Honor Code and read it.

“You realize, girls,” she said, removing her glasses and her smile, “that if these accusations are true, the consequences for the accused are grim.” She looked at Tiney, who was nodding. All at once, the solemnity felt like absurdity, and a quick bubble of hilarity rose in my chest. A laugh like a cough broke through as I pictured the most incongruous thing possible: Weingarten in his presidential masks. The dean glared at me. I think she was already predisposed to be rid of someone.

“Given the circumstantial nature of the evidence against you, Miss Oko,” she continued, “Dean Banks and I have decided to meet with you girls before determining if this issue will need to be addressed at a formal college trial.” She smiled, a reassurance. “This is usually our process in such situations.”

Jun was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, not returning any of the dean’s expressions. Tiney nodded, smiled, and frowned timidly, but accordingly. On the stage, Jun’s integrity had lent her grace; here it looked cold in the face of Tiney’s attentive excesses.

“Miss Wilcox,” the dean began, checking her papers, “please state the nature of your accusation.”

I think this startled Tiney, but she rallied quickly.

“It is my belief,” she started, her voice hushed but urgent, “that a final examination under my care was taken from me. Miss Oko”—she would not look at Jun now—“was the only other student who knew of its whereabouts, and I understand that after all other reasonable searches, at my suggestion”—she smiled just slightly, as she might at something clever—“the Chief Justice found the missing examination among Jun’s papers.”

Dean Banks cleared his throat. We all looked at him. “I am not sure that your own search efforts need to be included in your accusation, Miss Wilcox. Or do they?”

Tiney looked momentarily confused. “No, I guess not,” she said.

“I urge you to include in your statements only exactly what you would like to have recorded,” he said. He sat with his legs crossed, one hand on each arm of his chair. The posture made him appear at one remove from the discussion. I hadn’t expected him to speak.

The dean stopped their exchange. “Miss Oko,” she said, looking at Jun, “do you understand the nature of the accusations against you?”

Jun said that she did.

“And you have named Miss Feinstein as a character witness should this go to trial,” she continued, taking me in the first time. “Miss Page”—she looked at Elena—“you may be excused. Professor Chang has had the time to correct your examination and has determined that there is little chance you saw, or used, the copy beforehand.” She smiled weakly, if generously, at Elena, who took a moment to comprehend what was being said to her, then dashed from the room like a startled rabbit. Her boots left two heavy, wet stains in front of her chair.

Tiney sneezed, and a thin trickle of blood made its way down her nose. This surprised us all, and the dean stood to find a box of tissues, which were located in the far corner of a credenza behind Dean Banks’s chair. While Tiney held the reddening tissue to her nose, Dean Silas began again.

“Miss Feinstein,” she said, “I don’t suppose you can recall where you and Miss Oko were on the night of March 9th?”

Tiney looked at me directly for the first time. I told Dean Silas that I could recall March 9th, and realized as I did that it had been a weekday night and that I could remember nothing remarkable about it. We were all studying at the time. It had been the week before midterms and I hadn’t spent much of it with Jun. Most of us had been holed up in one place or another with our private plans and anxieties. My memory had nothing exceptional to offer. I indicated as much to the dean.

She nodded. “Miss Oko has stated that she had no witness to her actions that evening.” I felt I had passed some test of honesty for admitting I knew nothing. I almost wish I’d had the right fiction to offer.