But I had no desire to turn over rocks. Any case I initiated would be tried in New Hampshire. I pictured myself kissing my little boys goodbye and flying across the country. The motel room I’d stay in, the testimony I’d be required to give. The way defense attorneys would seek to discredit me, and how I’d have to protect my memory of the girl I had been from their assertion that they knew her better than I did.
The child I had been was gone. I had my own children now, who needed to be raised, and to stay with them seemed the better remedy.
In a later conversation, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford discussed the ways the school had worked to shut down my testifying about my assault. I told them about the unspoken contract that if I asked the district attorney not to press charges, St. Paul’s School would let me return for my sixth-form year. Did I have that in writing anywhere? they wanted to know. Because that would be huge for the attorney general’s investigation—a smoking gun.
Of course I didn’t. I could never prove a thing.
Julie had gone carefully through the criminal-case file from 1991, which I still had not seen. “It looks like nothing was ever done in response to the boys,” she observed.
We called them the boys even though they are, like me, in their fifth decade now. I am raising sons, and man is an honorific in my home. So is woman. I do not like to think of those two as men. This might be a way to continue to contain and reduce them in my mind. Nevertheless, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford were careful to follow my lead with language, introducing new terms only where legal diction required it.
Sometimes they introduced other terms, such as when Lieutenant Ford explained to me that for complicated reasons, the statute of limitations had not expired on prosecuting Rick and Taz: we could still bring a case against them if I wished.
“Speaking as a cop,” said Lieutenant Ford on speakerphone, “this is predatory behavior. And a tiger doesn’t change its stripes.”
Predatory. Yes. I admitted one shivery thrill. This was a new feeling, to have someone fighting for me.
But the boys weren’t monsters, and they weren’t tigers. They were men out there living their lives, and I was living mine. I had looked them up in a half-assed way—not going to the second page of search results, not trying alternate terms. Never on social media, ever. I found only one. I learned he had a daughter. What good would come of her daddy being taken away? How on earth could this help me?
“No,” I told the police officers. “Thank you, but no.”
“We support your decision, whatever it is, one hundred percent,” said Julie. “But you also said that you might reconsider if it was to protect other girls.”
Now I felt a new queasiness. Could it be that by exercising my right to keep my private life private, I had failed to offer witness to other victims?
“Would you be comfortable with us just talking to the boys, to ask some questions?” asked Julie.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now that nobody had ever done this. I’d been having this complicated and brutal one-sided conversation for decades, and the boys might not have had any clue.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’m okay with that. I don’t even know where they live.”
“We do.”
“Who will go?”
“Detectives.”
“What will they say?”
“They will have a conversation.”
I told her I didn’t see any value in revenge. I didn’t feel vindictive. I didn’t want anyone’s money. I didn’t want anyone to go to prison. “One of them has a daughter,” I said, to prove this point.
“Right,” said Julie, turning my point. “A daughter.”
I would have these exchanges with Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford, and when I hung up the phone I’d go back to my life, heading downstairs to start dinner for my children. It felt surreal and I wanted it to stay that way: St. Paul’s had receded in my mind to a span of gothic misery that was tangled in an adolescence and a certain narrow class consciousness I’d done my best to leave behind. I did not tell a single friend about my involvement in the investigation of St. Paul’s. The school itself had hired a new law firm, Casner & Edwards, to produce a fresh set of reports about faculty misconduct. The firm’s first report, issued in May of 2017, revealed much of the failure of response to the initial alumni allegations of 2000 and indicated that the firm was continuing to solicit accusations of faculty abuse from victims and witnesses. Once the AG opened its investigation in August of that year, this meant both Casner & Edwards and state investigators would potentially be talking to the same witnesses. I saw the school’s call go out over email, to all SPS alumni, for witnesses to “boundary violations,” and I laughed with my friend who had also been raped at St. Paul’s about what a fool’s errand that would be—to trust a firm on the payroll of the school with your story, rather than going straight to the police. “They’re beating the bushes,” said my friend. “Driving out all the victims before the cops can get there.” The current rector, we heard, was delivering heartfelt apologies by phone to survivors who offered their stories.
“Yeah, that’d help,” deadpanned my friend.
Even so, I didn’t tell her that I was talking to investigators in Concord. I wasn’t sure I would ever tell a soul outside my family.
But at the end of August 2017, I got a personal email from Casner & Edwards anyway. In cold and officious tones, I was informed that the law firm wanted to speak to me. The email did not indicate how they’d gotten my name or what they wished to say. I forwarded the email to Detective Curtin: What was this about?
She called me immediately. “It’s go time.”
She drove up to the campus that afternoon to request my student files. I had faxed her written consent to receive my documents, and on the St. Paul’s map in my mind I saw her car approaching the school, taking the left off Pleasant Street, and nosing into a spot in the empty lot behind the Schoolhouse, where I imagined records were kept. I felt guilty and wondered why. The rector at the time, Mike Hirschfeld, happened to be in his office, and he handed Detective Curtin my file. She photographed every page, both covers, and the little thumbnail photograph of me, aged fourteen, pinned inside.
The next day she called me again. Did I have any idea why someone would have been working in my file in the years after I graduated? Ten, fifteen years afterward?
I did not.
Did I have any idea why members of the administration would have wanted to go back through all of my documents? Did anything happen subsequently?
No, not that I knew.
There was something else in the file, Detective Curtin told me, that she and her fellow investigators had not expected to find. Something she was sure the school would not have wanted them to find.
She did not say this triumphantly. She said it with the air of a surgeon who bustles out of the operating theater to let you know things have become a bit more complicated.
Oh, I said. Okay.
She thanked me for my time, said she would be in touch soon, and ended the call. That’s how investigations run, I’ve learned: you’re given a set of questions that feel like someone peeling back your sky, but just before you see what’s causing the constellations to turn, the detectives ring off, protocol being the necessary precondition of justice. And then you hear nothing for a long time.
Weeks went by. Sometimes I had the feeling that my story about what happened at St. Paul’s, which I had tried so hard to tell these investigators truthfully and plainly, with accountability for my own actions and my own forgetting, was like a child—my child, dear to me, imperfect but uniquely mine—and I was now finally sending it into this edifice of criminal and civil justice like a kid into school for the first time. Would it stack up? Would it sit correctly, stand correctly, walk in a line? Would it fit with what the system required?
I waited to hear what they’d made of what had happened to me.
That fall, I started getting emails from people associated wit
h St. Paul’s School. Just trying to confirm my contact details, they wrote. Just trying to “reconnect.” I did not respond.
The school’s alumni office resumed sending me the Alumni Horae magazine. But the address label bore only my husband’s title, plus his first and last name, which I do not use—I was indicated only as Mrs. The first time it arrived, I was sure it was a mistake, and that some man in the area with my husband’s name must have gone there.
Finally, in early November, Detective Curtin wrote to set up a time to speak. Lieutenant Ford joined the call. Their voices echoed on speakerphone from Concord, hollowed and abraded by the room I imagined them in—metal chairs, faux-wood table. I paced my carpet at home, seeing nothing.
“This is one of the hardest calls I’ve had to make,” said Julie, to open.
I couldn’t think what she could tell me that would make things worse. The worst part was all way behind me, long since over.
“What’s happened?”
“I’m very sorry, but I can’t work on your case anymore,” she said.
“What? Why?”
“We’ve been severed from the investigation,” explained Lieutenant Ford.
I told them I didn’t understand.
“Well,” said Julie, permitting an edge in her voice, “neither do we. This has never happened before.”
Julie talked for a few moments, delivering stilted sentences. They had been working up various aspects of my case, but now, for reasons Julie described as “murky,” the attorney general’s office had instructed them to stop working with me entirely.
“So what do I do?” I asked.
“The last thing I would ever ask of a victim is to have to go through the process of giving testimony more than once,” said Julie. “We don’t do that. Even in cases with multiple jurisdictions, we don’t make a victim testify twice. To be frank, any difference in what you say could be used by the defense to discredit you. Anything at all. So if the attorney general’s office asks you for an interview, I recommend you consider that.”
I thought I was beginning to understand: these detectives empathized so thoroughly with victims that they hated to suggest I might have to live through the retelling another time. It’s fine, I thought, I’m tough, I can do that once more.
“Am I going to have to give a taped interview again?”
There was a pause. “Well, we don’t know,” said Ford.
A longer pause.
“The attorney general’s office doesn’t want your file,” said Julie.
I began to feel wild. “Why?”
Ford again, strained: “We can’t say.”
“So my case won’t be included in the cases they are considering against St. Paul’s?”
“We can’t say.” But the attorney general’s office was not interested in my case or in any of the information that had been collected by the Concord Police.
Wildness moved from my fingers into my palms, lacing my wrists, rising up in my belly. The school was at it again—the school was manifest again, had reconjured itself as an entity I could not see or name or talk to but that would force me to be silent. The cascade returned and it was roaring right behind me.
“They’re covering it up,” I said. My voice cracked with anger, and I felt, hearing myself, that I would lose credibility all on my own. “St. Paul’s is covering it up again. They are powerful and they are enormously wealthy and they are going to make it go away.”
Nobody said a word.
“They’re making me go away,” I said.
“We’re not giving up,” said Julie. “I will call the investigator, Jim Kinney, in the AG’s office myself and tell him to talk to you. I already have. I will do it again.”
I rebounded. I was not fifteen. I was in my forties, with a home and a husband, a base from which I could work.
“I will call Jim Kinney,” I said. Knowing his name felt like a foot in the door.
“Good,” said Lieutenant Ford.
“Good,” said Detective Curtin.
Four months had passed since I’d first contacted the authorities.
“I’m sorry I can’t work with you any further,” said Detective Curtin. “I’m so sorry.”
That afternoon I called my pediatrician’s office back in Lake Forest, something I should have done decades before. As a matter of policy, I was told, they destroyed medical records when a patient turned twenty-seven. I had missed the mark by almost fifteen years. But the woman on the phone asked me to hang on, and when she returned she was humming. “Whoo-ee!” she said, all music. “You got lucky!”
She printed it all off microfilm and sent it to me. This is how I saw, for the first time, my pediatrician’s written report of my account of the assault, and the positive culture for herpes. Also included in these documents were pages faxed from St. Paul’s School. The school had destroyed my health files after I graduated—or so they told detectives. But at some point the health center had faxed to my doctors at home pages of progress notes from 1990. This is how I learned that the school’s pediatrician had known my diagnosis and failed to disclose it to me. He clearly failed to reveal it to my Chicago pediatricians too, because there are pages of notes detailing the Chicago doctors’ conversations with colleagues, making careful lists of differential diagnoses and trying to figure out what was ailing me.
At no point had anyone suspected that canker sores were the answer. Nobody was even fool enough to write that down.
I paged through these documents sitting on the floor of my bedroom, in front of a white cardboard file box I had commandeered to contain them. Old work files were unhoused to make room. This felt like a regression. The pages began with my infant vaccinations. First well-child checkups. That time I had an infected spider bite in second grade.
As I read them, the person I ached for was my mom: the woman who kept calling, as these pages noted, the one who brought me in every single time, the unseen person behind all these details, trying to make and keep her daughter well.
I was at St. Paul’s in the first place because I had parents who believed, above all, in the education of a girl.
“Mother called again,” reads a note from November 1991. “Child in infirmary. Fever, losing weight. Mrs. C very concerned.”
I contacted Jim Kinney in the New Hampshire attorney general’s office and was told politely that they intended to investigate every case and that they would not overlook mine.
Then, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford called again. It was the end of the day in New Hampshire when they rang, and the upcoming holiday had taken from the workweek its momentum and its obligations. The timing of their call was worrisome. Didn’t they want to get started on their weekend, head out, head home?
Ford spoke first. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
I hovered patiently. “What’s happened?”
Though they had been severed from my case, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford had been called to present their early findings to the attorney general’s office. It had not gone well. “They called us in,” he explained. “It felt like the Inquisition. We almost felt like we were the suspects. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years and it’s the most difficult experience I’ve had in that time.”
Both of them were quiet for a moment.
“They’re rejecting my case,” I said, so they wouldn’t have to. Silly seasoned detectives—they’d thought the law would prevail. “They’re actually going to cover it up again.”
“We’re all in agreement that there seems to be some collusion or incestuous relations between attorneys here,” said Julie.
I did not know at the time, but there was certainly a case for incest because the lead counsel for St. Paul’s happened to be the former attorney general of New Hampshire. He’d be working with his former colleagues on which documents would be admitted into the investigation. Anything related to me, apparently, would not.
“It’s attorneys tipping off attorneys,” s
aid Lieutenant Ford. “Put it this way: If I’m the San Francisco Forty-Niners and I’m playing the New England Patriots this weekend, I don’t call up Bill Belichick and tell him what plays I’m going to run.”
I was too upset during the conversation to work out immediately that this was likely how Casner & Edwards, the firm working for the school, got my name. Once Julie and Lieutenant Ford had begun presenting my case to the attorney general’s office, the information had gone to the school’s attorneys—and Casner & Edwards had contacted me to try to get their piece of my participation in the investigation.
“This is like that movie The Pelican Brief,” said Lieutenant Ford. “You know, the St. Paul’s pelicans? I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. We should retire and write a book.”
The pelican is the mascot of St. Paul’s School. An icon of early Christianity, the pelican represented martyrs in their faith because mother birds appear to violently tear flesh from their own breasts to feed their young. In fact, early Christians misunderstood what they were seeing: adult pelicans hunt other birds’ nestlings, eat them, and regurgitate them for their own chicks.
“The way we were treated up there is shocking,” said Julie. “They won’t include, will not include, anything from your file. They have specifically instructed us not to send them anything else. And I think what we have with your case is the smoking gun.”
Smoking gun. I had heard this before, from the pediatrician decades earlier. She’d used the phrase to explain to my mother how the sores in my throat were so far down that they all but precluded the possibility of consensual activity—never mind that my age negated consent altogether. When the doctor had said this, my mind had conjured a hot gun shoved in my mouth, muzzle right where it hurt.
“What’s the gun?” I asked.
Notes on a Silencing Page 31