Read Online New England White by Stephen L. Carter - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen L. Carter
Tags: Fiction, General, LEGAL, Suspense, Psychological, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, Mystery Fiction, Family secrets, African American, new england, College Presidents, University Towns, Women Deans (Education), African American college teachers, Race Discrimination
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“You didn’t tell them about…about Gina?”
Vanessa crinkled her nose and grinned. “Oh, Moms, come on. You know how Gina hates when I talk about her.”
“Right. Right. So you’ve said.” Both returned to their dressing, the daughter serenely, the mother uneasily. Julia dared not say more. She and Vanessa quarreled constantly, as adolescent girls and their mothers do, and Julia reveled in these rare moments of peace.
Gina Joule, according to one theory, was the cause of Vanessa’s peculiar mania. The other view held that Vanessa’s obsession with Gina was only a symbol, a sort of Jungian manifestation of a deeper trauma. Gina was seventeen, like Vanessa, a resident of the Landing, also like Vanessa—and her father, like Vanessa’s, taught at the university. As a matter of fact, Merrill Barnes Joule had been the beloved dean of the divinity school: another connection. Merrill Joule had even been a leading candidate for president of the university, but events had overtaken him. Gina was a shy, creative child, as Vanessa was, her only true experience with the opposite sex having begun in the fall of her eleventh-grade year: that is, about the time Vanessa had her own first date. She had Vanessa’s height, moderate smile, and slightly gangly grace, for Vanessa kept an enlargement of a newspaper photograph of Gina atop her dresser until Dr. Brady urged her, Julia begged her, and Lemaster ordered her to take it down.
Whenever Vanessa unexpectedly vanished for an hour or two, she would explain that Gina needed her, and leave it at that. True, Gina was white, and Julia had never forgotten her mother’s dictum about finding her children black friends. Gina’s skin color, however, was very far from being the largest problem in the friendship between the two girls. Nor was the largest problem that Vanessa had surprised everybody, including her teacher, with the last-minute announcement a year ago that she had changed the topic of her term paper for AP United States history—she had decided to write about Gina. No, the largest problem was that Merrill Joule had been in the ground a good quarter-century, and his daughter, Gina, had drowned at the town beach back when a stamp cost eight cents, Cokes were a dime, and Leonid Brezhnev ran the Soviet Union.
(II)
I T WAS THE TERM PAPER , of course, that had started all Vanessa’s problems, far too much to demand of eleventh-graders, which was what Vanessa was when she flubbed the paper and burned the car. Advanced Placement American History asked the unreasonable. So Julia believed, anyway, and, less agnostic on the matter of her daughter than on the matter of the God she professed every Sunday at the adamantly defiant Saint Matthias, she clung to this view in the face of contrary arguments by doctors, teachers, her august husband, even Vanessa herself, who insisted, a year later, that she still wanted to finish the research. The paper had earned an embarrassing C+ because, although the text was elegantly written, its use of sources, said Ms. Klein, was thin—and Julia, who had read it, agreed.
A year ago, Vanessa had been an honor student, with ambitions not unlike those of her older brother, who left high school at sixteen to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The intervening months had been painful ones for her résumé. Her test scores were still high, but, between her behavior, her arrest, and her rapidly dropping grades, the college counselors no longer knew what to counsel. Vanessa had said more than once that she would happily attend the state university, or even a two-year college, but Lemaster, the immigrant, was in matters educational a considerable snob; as, for that matter, were Julia and most of the Clan.
At the regional high school, where African Americans were less than 2 percent of the student body, Preston’s buddies had mostly been math and computer nerds, but Vanessa hung out with more marginal citizens, as Lemaster in his clever
Vanessa crinkled her nose and grinned. “Oh, Moms, come on. You know how Gina hates when I talk about her.”
“Right. Right. So you’ve said.” Both returned to their dressing, the daughter serenely, the mother uneasily. Julia dared not say more. She and Vanessa quarreled constantly, as adolescent girls and their mothers do, and Julia reveled in these rare moments of peace.
Gina Joule, according to one theory, was the cause of Vanessa’s peculiar mania. The other view held that Vanessa’s obsession with Gina was only a symbol, a sort of Jungian manifestation of a deeper trauma. Gina was seventeen, like Vanessa, a resident of the Landing, also like Vanessa—and her father, like Vanessa’s, taught at the university. As a matter of fact, Merrill Barnes Joule had been the beloved dean of the divinity school: another connection. Merrill Joule had even been a leading candidate for president of the university, but events had overtaken him. Gina was a shy, creative child, as Vanessa was, her only true experience with the opposite sex having begun in the fall of her eleventh-grade year: that is, about the time Vanessa had her own first date. She had Vanessa’s height, moderate smile, and slightly gangly grace, for Vanessa kept an enlargement of a newspaper photograph of Gina atop her dresser until Dr. Brady urged her, Julia begged her, and Lemaster ordered her to take it down.
Whenever Vanessa unexpectedly vanished for an hour or two, she would explain that Gina needed her, and leave it at that. True, Gina was white, and Julia had never forgotten her mother’s dictum about finding her children black friends. Gina’s skin color, however, was very far from being the largest problem in the friendship between the two girls. Nor was the largest problem that Vanessa had surprised everybody, including her teacher, with the last-minute announcement a year ago that she had changed the topic of her term paper for AP United States history—she had decided to write about Gina. No, the largest problem was that Merrill Joule had been in the ground a good quarter-century, and his daughter, Gina, had drowned at the town beach back when a stamp cost eight cents, Cokes were a dime, and Leonid Brezhnev ran the Soviet Union.
(II)
I T WAS THE TERM PAPER , of course, that had started all Vanessa’s problems, far too much to demand of eleventh-graders, which was what Vanessa was when she flubbed the paper and burned the car. Advanced Placement American History asked the unreasonable. So Julia believed, anyway, and, less agnostic on the matter of her daughter than on the matter of the God she professed every Sunday at the adamantly defiant Saint Matthias, she clung to this view in the face of contrary arguments by doctors, teachers, her august husband, even Vanessa herself, who insisted, a year later, that she still wanted to finish the research. The paper had earned an embarrassing C+ because, although the text was elegantly written, its use of sources, said Ms. Klein, was thin—and Julia, who had read it, agreed.
A year ago, Vanessa had been an honor student, with ambitions not unlike those of her older brother, who left high school at sixteen to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The intervening months had been painful ones for her résumé. Her test scores were still high, but, between her behavior, her arrest, and her rapidly dropping grades, the college counselors no longer knew what to counsel. Vanessa had said more than once that she would happily attend the state university, or even a two-year college, but Lemaster, the immigrant, was in matters educational a considerable snob; as, for that matter, were Julia and most of the Clan.
At the regional high school, where African Americans were less than 2 percent of the student body, Preston’s buddies had mostly been math and computer nerds, but Vanessa hung out with more marginal citizens, as Lemaster in his clever
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