by Truddi Chase
“There are times,” Stanley said, “when I wonder whose world is more real, yours or mine. But I can only go by my own references.”
“Just as we can only go by ours,” Catherine said with the wry smile that had stamped her identity in his mind from day one. “So we are at loggerheads on this issue. There is something else. You mentioned integration. Whom would you choose among us to live beyond that integration? Whom would you kill? The whole Troop Formation is up in arms. For them, contemplating integration is like living back at the farmhouses when the daily threat of death hung over their heads. Do you think we survived the farmhouses only to have you convince us of the advisability of mass suicide?”
He said integration was up to them and tried to remember where he’d gotten the idea that eventually, all multiples in therapy accepted the idea of it. In the interest of more recall, Stanley put Rabbit under light hypnosis. Stanley watched the woman drift in and out, sharing Rabbit’s recall.
The selves had been active today: expressions of terror and sadness; an amused, wry look now and then; the happy smile of someone who had to be around twelve years old. But always, interspersed among the others, there were glimpses of one specific attitude—someone who heard her own music and whose body moved in time with it.
As Rabbit moved through the recall of being beaten with a leather strap, a low, keening wail began, and escalated into a howl. The actuality of the beating that had caused Rabbit’s howl suddenly reached the woman. She was fully conscious of the presence that hurried to her from somewhere with a deep, furious concern, the way that presence entered her being and took the breath from her lungs . . . the awful concentration of that presence as she and it, in unison, sucked the breath of both . . . and held it. The breath was released. The pain was gone.
After the break, Stanley made a decision.
“How would you like to meet some of the abusers?”
“You trust me that much?” The woman knew she didn’t trust herself at all.
“Why not?” Stanley grinned. “I’ll be there, running interference. I think that seeing you might help these men understand why their daughters need therapy.”
“Amen,” Sister Mary Catherine said.
* * *
In the bathroom that night, someone lettered in a childish scrawl, with a lipstick on the side of the claw-legged tub, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t wanna integrate!”
“Stanley is a mean man,” Lamb Chop told the woman later. “He wants to kill us.”
“That’s not what integration means. . . .” The woman couldn’t finish the sentence. What did integration mean for them all? They were individuals, no two alike.
“Are you going to let Stanley kill us?” Lamb Chop stood first on one foot and then the other, suspicious.
“No,” the woman said.
“On the farms, the stepfather could have killed us all, he was stronger and bigger. Stanley is stronger and bigger than us. I’m scared.”
“Don’t be,” the woman said. “We have choices now. Stanley gave them to us. Nobody here is going to die.”
The words comforted Lambchop. But the woman experienced the dizzy feeling . . . someone else bearing down too hard, using hammer thoughts instead of subtlety to express their own terror. The subtlety was what had always kept the woman on a relatively even keel, giving her the impression that she was just like everybody else, capable of acting on her own.
Mean Joe bought a bottle of Grey Flannel cologne, torturing her with the possibility that she might sometimes smell like a man. Each night her planned wardrobe vanished, to be replaced with whatever the others wanted to wear. Three days in a row, she found herself in the same black skirt and vest with the same smartly patterned blouse.
She looked forward to meeting the abusers as proof that she could, even if through others, face someone on an issue, any issue. But being in the same room with men who had done the same things the stepfather had done . . . no one in the Troop Formation had assurances that the meeting would not turn out to be the disaster of their century.
THIRTY-THREE
AT dusk, a cold sleet needled their faces as they navigated the parking lot. The woman entered the doors of the Protective Services agency at Stanley’s side. They passed through the reception area, where a number of volunteers sorted through boxes of canned goods and used clothing. The building was cold with the draft from the front doors, but the woman didn’t feel it. She and Stanley continued on, down the hall to a room at the end.
“Are you sure nothing I say will harm their therapy progress?”
“No way,” Stanley said. “Let the chips fall.”
Pale green walls, a worn leather sofa, and a circle of chairs, some upholstered, some the plastic folding variety. The room seemed to explode with masculine, joking voices, and she stood there in the doorway, to one side of Stanley, watching the men watch her and hearing the sound of their voices stop.
She sat down next to Stanley. Wary but self-contained and anxious to finish, each man introduced himself, giving his chosen fictitious name and a description of what had brought him here. Some looked her in the eye, some did not.
“Of course she knew what she was doing,” one man told her in reference to his girlfriend’s eight-year-old daughter. He was new to the group. He sat back in his chair, one leg crossed at the knee. In a round, cherubic face, pale brown hair and eyes were the only colour.
“What do you mean?” the woman asked.
“I mean,” he said, “that by her actions, the way she came at me, asking for it, she wanted what I was giving her.”
Another of the abusers made a quick motion as if to object to the statement but the woman heard herself interrupt him.
“Are you telling me,” she sounded almost noncommittal, “that at the age of eight, she knew what sex was all about?”
“Well,” he paused.
“Didn’t it occur to you that maybe someone else had gotten to her first, one of her mother’s boyfriends or even, possibly, her own father?”
He looked away and admitted that could have happened.
The short man she turned to next was only forty-two. But his face was deeply lined, with dark circles under runny blue eyes. “I ain’t got the vocabulary these other guys got. Only thing in my mind is that I know I done a bad thing to my daughter. When she was fourteen, it started. My life stunk and there she was the only warm person in it. I’m gonna be sorry the rest of my damn life. I know I hurt her.”
His last lengthy comment of the night was that Stanley used too many fifty-cent words.
“I just ain’t up to it,” he said, and faded away abruptly.
From then on, the woman kept eye contact with him, both to ensure his comfort in the face of her presence—and to make certain he knew that she was a real person. Somehow she knew that in the mind of each man here was an unseen mechanism that made their acts and their children unreal for them. That was how they avoided confronting much of anything.
How did a mechanism like that get started? Something went click in a couple of Troop minds. Their therapy, combined with the intensity of reliving it through the manuscript pages, had reached a point where a session like this one, with these men, would open doors they’d never dreamed existed. The woman heard crying in her mind and it came from more than one Troop member.
She saw the eyes of the third man. Under the yellow lamp glow, his sexuality seemed to be in them, flat out and offensive.
“I’ve been working with Doctor Phillips for three years,” he said to no one in particular. “Ever since they let me out of jail. Finally, I’m almost ready for the ‘streets.’ My daughter and I have a good relationship with each other now. She knows I love her and that I’m sorry it happened.”
“Is she in therapy?”
“Doesn’t care to talk about it. She saw someone from Protective Services three times. She can handle it on her own.” He had a toneless, mesmer
ising voice and the pipe in his hand let out an aromatic stream of smoke.
“But it’s taken you three years to be able to handle it?” The woman looked down at her skirt.
A rawboned man of twenty-eight with strapping muscle structure, whose shaggy blond hair shaded a wide face, acknowledged his turn. His voice rumbled in the woman’s right ear as he told how he and his two-year-old daughter had fondled each other, how that had escalated into oral sex. The incest had gone on with only minor interruptions caused by his daughter’s tears or tantrums, and once her failing grades, until a year ago when she’d turned eight. His wife had discovered her crying in her bedroom and confronted him. The man told of turning himself in to the police, of being booked and fingerprinted. The police commissioner told him, “Buddy, your ass should be in jail. You’re scum and the first time you break probation, I’ll get you.”
The woman recoiled at “scum,” even as she knew it to be justified and at the word “fondle,” which was being used here a great deal tonight. Some Troop members sent emotions indicative of a desire to stomp these men to death. Some huddled against remembered terror. Others reached out mentally to each man, with understanding. From the depths of the Tunnel, someone roared out a silent command to the Troops for patience, courage, and silence.
“By the time I got married,” the abuser went on, “I needed love and affection so bad. Without trying to put any blame on my wife—she’s what I’d call cold, and so was my mother—I turned to my two-year-old daughter. She was always there, I was there, and my wife couldn’t seem to lay an affectionate hand on either of us to save her life. Every time my wife left the house, I’d get a hold of my daughter and just . . . sink into it. I love my child and I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. The fondling meant warmth and affection to me, more than it meant sex.”
“Wait a minute,” the woman heard herself say to Stanley. “His daughter knew how to fondle at two years old?”
Stanley and the abuser both nodded.
“He taught her,” Stanley said.
That a small child could be taught something like that was so new an idea . . . at least to the Troop member who was the adult core’s mirror-image.
“What did your stepfather teach you?” Stanley was making a note on his clipboard. His watchful expression and the pressure being exerted by too many Troop members . . . the woman received their thoughts: What the men in this room had been taught to do by their parents, the Troops had been taught by the stepfather.
Stanley had some of the men recount their own physical and sexual abuse as children. There had been mothers, foster mothers, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, who had used them sexually, as small boys. Their fathers had beaten them, some had used them sexually, there had been emotional abuse and dehumanisation.
Click. There was the similarity.
“I don’t understand.” Twelve turned to Stanley. “We went through the same things they talk about, and more. But we never thought of Page as a sexual object. Why?”
“You’ve had a lot of help from each other,” Stanley said softly. “Other than that, I don’t have an answer for you.”
The men didn’t understand what Stanley meant. The blond-haired man spoke up, again. He told of his grandfather’s sexual abuse of him, how his brothers and even his mother had availed themselves of his small body. “My grandfather was ten feet tall from the time I was four years old. Even now when I think of him, I shudder. Nobody ever said no to him.”
Twelve wanted to punch out his relatives, as much as she wanted to kill the stepfather. Her voice was a whisper in her head.
“Are you telling me that even boys can be scared?”
He smiled. “Still am,” he said. “But I’ve gotten up the nerve to be on the radio with voice distortion and I did an anonymous newspaper article. Maybe that still makes me a coward but my family couldn’t survive if I were recognised and lost my jobs.”
Jobs. Stanley had said that most of these men worked as many as three jobs to keep separate roofs over the heads of themselves and their families during the therapy process.
A fifth man, smaller than the others, sighed when Stanley signaled his turn. He gave his name, adding like an automaton, as had the others, “I’m a child abuser.
“She was ten. My wife’s daughter by her first husband. I started . . . fondling her, you know, friendly-like at first . . .”
“Friendly?” Nails’ voice was cold. “Describe it to me.”
“Well, the first time, I took her to the movies. Her mother was working. It was a Walt Disney cartoon and I put my coat over the arm of the chair, between us.”
“How did you start, what was your first action?”
“Under the coat, I sort of put my hand on hers, then her arm, then her thigh, and she . . . didn’t object.”
“She didn’t move or say anything.”
“No, she didn’t. I moved the hand higher, to her crotch.”
“She was ten years old,” the woman repeated softly.
“Yeah. Ten.” His eyes swung to the wall and he didn’t look at her again. “Listen, lady. She never said no!”
“How could she?” the abuser to her right cut in. “She was what, three and a half feet tall? You have to be seven feet tall to her! I’m a big guy, but to me my grandfather is still a giant.”
“There’s more to it,” Twelve said. “Victims feel as if they somehow invited the incest and therefore can’t object. We’re taught from day one to do as our parents, or as authority figures in general, tell us. We’re powerless.”
“‘Powerless.”’ The abuser who’d been abused by his entire family leaned forward. “I still am, when somebody hits on me.”
Coffee, strong and hot, was being passed around in white paper cups. The woman surfaced and wished these men would sit on the floor, so she could follow suit. In the opaque bag in the chair beside her, the teddy bear lay concealed, a comfort no one dared to take up.
“My client,” Stanley nodded at her, “is, as you all know, an incest victim with a particular . . . problem, as a direct result. She’s going to explain to you what she’s going through, many years after the fact. And I’d like you all to remember as she speaks, that her problem is not unique, as was once thought.”
She gave her name and spelled it for them, gave the name of her company, and told them she was a real estate broker. “I’m using my own name,” she said, “because I’ve got to get used to this, because someday perhaps we’ll meet on the street. Should that happen, I hope you say hello to me. I’ll say hello to you.”
No one looked away from her.
“It’s important that each one of your sons and daughters gets therapy as early as possible, that they learn to talk about the incest freely, to understand it. Otherwise, as Doctor Phillips has told you, they’re going to wind up my age, sitting in a room like this one tonight. And they won’t know how or why it happened; they’ll just know they missed the majority of their lives. Incest victims even without my particular problem go through hell every day, whether they are fully aware of it or not.”
There were nods of agreement from all but two of the men. Stanley had explained that they would be willing to listen, if not to agree. She was very conscious just then of the erratic, sharp sound of her voice in the cramped room. Show them reason, she told herself, not what may be, to them, insane behavior. But it involved a control she wasn’t sure she had. Someone inside her head laughed and told her to relax. She tried. It had been so long since she’d talked about the incest or the multiple experience to a human being outside of Stanley, that once in a while he had to break in and keep her on the track.
When it came time to say “penis,” and “vagina,” another mouth opened onto her own and pried the words out for her, one by one. She felt eyes, cold against her skull, forcing each male eyeball in turn to meet hers as the words poured out, words she couldn’t hear. The stepfather’s voyeurism in the
outhouse, his acts of sodomy and bestiality, caused the men to look at one another.
“We’re not suggesting,” Stanley broke in, “that any man in this room would go to such lengths. Her stepfather was a severely disturbed man. He was sick.”
The woman nodded. “It all seemed normal to me at the time. I hated it and it scared me, when he’d stand in the barn doorway, waving his penis at me . . . but it wasn’t until I got out in the world that I knew other people were different.”
“Jesus, I hope so.” The man to her right poured coffee all around.
“There is one thing, though.” She didn’t look at Stanley, knowing he wouldn’t give her signals anyway. “Incest leaves the victim with no real connection to him- or herself or anyone else.”
There had been a flurry of facial structure and body changes for the last hour. To someone who didn’t know, it might simply have been “mood swings” affecting the face and form of an unusually expressive person. As she looked up from the twisted hands in her lap, the voice that came out of the woman’s throat had taken a deeper tone, heavier with restrained anger.
“You’ve all mentioned loving your children. We have a child who is fourteen. We can’t honestly say we’ve ever felt an emotion like love. Hatred for various things, yes. Love, no. Incest is a thief; it steals more from its victims than you can ever imagine. Make no mistake—by whatever pretense—incest, child abuse, stinks out loud.”
Why did the men and the Protective Services worker stare at her that way? What had happened? The woman lit a cigarette even as she knew the one in the ashtray, filter-deep with pale lip gloss, had to be hers. She told them that she was a multiple and tried to make sense of the mechanics for them. Her explanation of Mean Joe and Miss Wonderful’s emergence for the first time, of the needles in her hands and their strength overriding her own, forced the abuser to her right almost to his feet.