She kept quiet on the other end of the line.
“You’ve got to meet Daddy halfway. He’s been doing what you wanted him to do all of his life; now it’s your turn.”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried, Adelaide?” she said in the most forceful voice I could ever remember her mustering. “He’s gone and done a 180-degree turn on us all, and he won’t even look back to see the damage.”
“Mama—”
“Never you mind,” she said. “Just promise me you’ll wear your down jacket, and don’t forget about that long underwear in your top drawer.”
Despite the tumult between my folks, the last year had been an extended honeymoon with my Maker. As I began reading the Bible and attempting to pray, I could look back and see how God had been courting me from my earliest days in the form of familial love, natural beauty, and countless acts of mercy that had spared my very life.
Everything had clicked during the last year. When I’d have a question or a thought, what I can only believe was God would confirm it at once either in Scripture, in the classroom, in a conversation, or in Mr. Lewis’s books, which I continued to devour, one hearty steak meal after another. God seemed as attentive as a new husband to me that year, and I thought the foundation of my faith was being laid in granite.
One of the astounding acts of mercy that I had been the recipient of was Dr. Shaw and Professor Hirsch’s success at convincing the dean of Undergraduate Studies to give me another chance (after failing my calculus exam sophomore year). The dean consented as long as I agreed to work off part of my scholarship as a dorm counselor. So for the second half of my sophomore year, I underwent training, and at the start of my junior year, I became the RA to an eclectic group of freshman girls who were trying to make their own way at NBU.
Not only that, but Whit and some of the other religious studies majors invited me to a study of the book of Acts, and by the end of the year, I declared a double major in English and religion. I was already beginning to research my senior thesis, which would be a study on the religious symbols in the short stories of Flannery O’Connor.
Ruthie Baxter had taken a semester off after the Christmas of 1990 to undergo outpatient psychiatric treatment and take part in a support group at the local crisis pregnancy center. She said she’d had a dream during that time at home of a precocious two-year-old girl peering around a doorway at her before running away, her laughter echoing down a hallway. And after that, she felt that the life connected to the heart on that fuzzy ultrasound screen was now in the care of God. And this brought her an immeasurable kind of relief.
And when NBU led a plant-a-tree campaign for the south side of campus, which had been hit hard by Hurricane Hugo, Ruthie and I combined a few months’ spending money to buy and plant a white elm tree on the back quad in memory of the short life that had permanently changed us both. The tree grew and blossomed and provided shade for many a student in the years that followed.
I had spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years backpacking across Europe with Harriet, thanks to Marguerite’s generous financial travel aid. (She was still recovering from her stroke, and the doctor had strongly advised her not to spend the summer of 1991 in Nice.) Harriet and I figured out the train system and successfully made our way through Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic on fifty dollars a day. In each new city and village that we visited, we lived on wine and bread and sought out the grand cathedrals so we could gander and pray in the massive structures that had taken lifetimes to build.
Dizzy had gotten into the cooking school at Johnson & Wales and seemed to be excelling in the baking department. She was leaning toward a major in pastry making and had FedExed a half dozen of her original almond croissants to me. I ate one with great pride as I sat on the porch facing the front quad and sipped my cappuccino. Who’d have thought that Dizzy, in all her black clothing and makeup, would be the creator of such a sweet and delicate treat?
It was Lou I worried about now. She had been hit hard by Mama and Daddy’s separation. Not only did her speech impediment worsen during high school, but a rare learning disorder akin to dyslexia had been identified, and she was forced to enroll in a special-needs academy outside Charleston. Mama dutifully rented an apartment for she and Lou near the academy, and they would spend their weeknights there before heading back to Williamstown for the weekend. You had to give it to Greta—she was one devoted mother.
When Daddy wasn’t traveling with Bizway, he’d take Lou in at Uncle Tinka’s apartment, and she hated sleeping on the pull-out sofa in the dust-encrusted bachelor pad, listening to two men snore like beasts in their separate rooms.
As for Randy, he moved up to first-string kicker his senior year, and he hit the road with the Gamecocks all fall. What he wanted to show me that winter of 1991 was that he’d put the money he’d inherited from a great-uncle down on a deepwater lot on Pawleys Island. The lot had a rickety cabin on stilts and a crumbling dock that snaked its way out into the marsh.
“I’m going to rebuild it all,” he said to me the day after the debutante ball. He pulled me in beside him. “And I hope you’ll be the one sharing a life with me here.”
“I just don’t think—,” I said, but my uncertainty about our romantic life never seemed to slow him down. “Let’s see how this summer goes, okay? I’ll be home, and we can really see where this thing is going.”
“You’re on,” he said.
Now, instead of the bad love poetry, he mailed me photos of the island property with his step-by-step restoration plans for the house. He was putting a cupola up on the top, and from it you could see the beach on one side and the creek and marsh on the other.
“Not bad, eh?” he had written on the photo. “A poet could get inspired here. You can test it out come June.”
As for Frankie Wells, he became the assistant editor of the campus paper and joined Harmony. I didn’t know if this meant he was gay or just supportive of the gay society, and I was trying to get up the nerve to ask him.
Whenever I saw him, he was smoking a cigarette and scribbling something down in his little notebook. We still had lunch together when the paper had been put to bed and midnight study breaks along the colonnade. But, like many a friendship, we were adept at avoiding certain subjects.
Jif had rallied for a while. She’d gained back the fifteen pounds she needed to look remotely healthy, but after turning Harriet and me down on the European backpacking adventure for a summer internship at Vanity Fair in Manhattan (thanks to one of the Northeastern girls’ contacts), she slid back into her old habits. The hollowness reappeared in her cheeks, and she was always chewing gum. Ned Crater had finally broken up with her because it killed him to see her wasting away, and she had gone through a string of good-looking frat jerks to satiate her desire for attention.
I continued to call her and invite her to the campus coffeehouse or to Sunday night vespers, but she usually declined. Sometimes I could hear her drunken and flirtatious laugh from my cracked dorm window late at night. I’d smile longingly for my friend and peek out the window to see her flip her cashmere scarf around her neck and lean on a boy’s arm.
On these occasions I would picture her at the midnight breakfast following the debutante ball the previous year. How she had devoured the egg-and-sausage casserole, fruit, and muffins as we recounted the grooming mishaps that nearly prevented the presentation from taking place. She ate like there was no tomorrow that night, and she laughed and hung on Ned’s arm. He had grinned as though he was the luckiest boy in the whole wide world, and I breathed a sigh of relief, because it seemed that her relationship with food was on the mend.
I never heard from Peter Carpenter, who was locked away in the Virginia State Penitentiary outside Richmond. Frankie said he’d heard he wouldn’t be up for parole for another two years. And according to Mama, his mother rarely came out of her Williamstown house.
When I thought of Brother Benton grinning at me on the grass that day at ori
entation, it still sent a coldness into my bones. Two promising lives had been demolished my freshman year that I knew of. But I imagined there were others whose stories were hidden in shadowy places, covered by the tight-lipped administration, who shielded themselves behind the colonnade on the hill in hopes that no one would shine a light in the crevices.
College was a scary place at times. It was a safe haven for young and privileged criminals, and if you came up against one, it could mess you up for good. “This,” I wrote in a creative nonfiction essay for Professor Dirkas’s workshop, “is not something that they tell you in the gold-lined promotional materials or in the admissions office or on those quaint little campus tours in which only the attractive, clean-cut type take part.”
That is why I enjoyed being a dorm counselor. It was like being a bossy big sister to sixteen other women, and I felt as though I had a little role in combating the dark side of campus life. I helped my freshman girls with their English papers and scolded them when their music blared at 3:00 a.m. I offered advice on how to cure their acne and thwart the freshman fifteen that crept up on them unawares.
At least one Saturday night a month, I’d pop popcorn and offer a movie so they might have another alternative to a trip down to fraternity row, which I still considered to be the noose around the place. I even bailed two of my girls out of jail when they were caught singing show tunes on the roof of an old apartment building downtown with some guys in the chorus. I laughed when I entered the jailhouse to learn that the girls had not been drinking. They had just wanted to sing at the highest place in the city, but their show had woken up a little old lady who did not like their rendition of “Oklahoma” or their footsteps plodding overhead.
Once a week I would hold a hall meeting they nicknamed “Piper Pipes,” where I’d bring the girls up to date on campus events and invite them to share whatever was on their minds. I would remind them of ways to stay safe, blending some of my own philosophy and religion into the agenda: go out in groups; don’t find yourself alone with someone you don’t know well; know that there are consequences to actions; take Dr. Shaw’s social justice class.
Two of the girls on my hall were from Tupelo, Mississippi, and they reminded me of Jif, Ruthie, and me our freshman year. They weren’t as cultured or polished as the rest of the crew, and they had found themselves on the fringe of the social life and struggling to make the grade on the academic side. I tried to look out for them— invited them to vespers and even on a community service trip that Whit and some of the others were putting together over spring break to help with the cleanup in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.
One of the Tupelo girls, Cecelia Honeycutt, reminded me of myself. Cecelia was the only one on the hall who went to Florida on the relief trip and was a tremendous help, but she had a complete wall up when it came to religion, and she could not be persuaded. She struggled with weight gain and social rejection, and when I tried to reach out to her, to even share hints of my faith with her, Cecelia reared back and said, “Don’t strap that Bible Belt on me. I came up here to get away from all of that.”
“Simmer down, Honeycutt,” I said with a grin, and I felt as though I were looking into my own fiery and discontented eyes of two years ago. “From now on I’m going to call you Jalapeñocutt. Or Peño for short.”
“Whatever, Adelaide,” she said, and I grinned when I heard her say under her breath, “Bossy dork.”
I never officially laid eyes on Devon Hunt during the rest of my college career, though I assumed he was on and off campus from time to time since his father still served as the provost. Jif said she’d heard he was working for his local congressman in DC, and that really chafed me. A rapist aiding a representative on Capitol Hill. Humph.
Once I thought I saw his figure in the dark, walking with a group down the hill toward town, but I couldn’t tell for sure. At this point, I couldn’t really picture him in my mind’s eye, but I knew that if our paths crossed, I would recognize him. Often I pondered the question Harriet had posed to me over a year ago—about whether I had forgiven him—and I still didn’t know how to respond to that. Thankfully, I didn’t replay the event in my mind. That part was a blessed side effect of the passing of time and the hope that came from my new faith. It wasn’t an escape trick to suppress the pain, like Mama had taught me. It was just that somehow I had been released from the most acute trauma of the rape. But I didn’t think I could ever forgive him, and I knew I never would forget.
Though I had received relief, something else continued to haunt me about the rape. The farther I got away from it, the more I wondered why I never reported the crime to campus security. I also wondered why the security guard who picked me up that night and Nurse Eugenia never asked me to do so. It seemed evident that I was not the first one they had seen abused in this way, and yet there was no real acknowledgment of the crime by either of them, and this bugged the heck out of me. I wondered sometimes how many others it had happened to.
A freshman girl in the hall above us had attempted to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol, but her roommate found her in time and rushed her to the hospital. And a fellow classmate of mine, Jane Avery, had successfully hanged herself toward the end of our sophomore year in an off-campus apartment. As with the case of Peter Carpenter and Brother Benton, the administration quickly covered up Jane Avery’s suicide and stonewalled giving out information to the press and even her family.
I had known Jane Avery distantly after having taken an American lit class with her our freshman year. She had seemed strong, bright, and self-assured, and I wondered sometimes what had happened to her. Could she have been assaulted too? Or had she wound up in that abortion clinic in Roanoke, care of Nurse Eugenia? No one knew for sure.
Nonetheless, I was curious about it and concerned for the girls on my hall. I would eavesdrop in the bathroom and the hall from time to time—picking up bits of freshman-class tales. How a classmate they knew had been cornered by three freshman pledges in the basement of the frat house until her friends broke a window and pulled her out.
And how another girl had been walking down frat house row late at night when a boy jumped off the porch and grabbed her forcefully by the arm. Luckily, a security guard had come along at just the right moment, and the offender acted as though it had just been a joke.
At the end of my junior year, I began to write candidly about the crime committed against me and the emotional aftermath I had experienced, and I submitted the piece to Professor Dirkas toward the close of my creative nonfiction class. Dirkas was troubled by my story, and he was obligated to show it to the administration. He encouraged me to speak to the dean and explain my experience in hopes that a stronger awareness about this sort of student-to-student crime could be raised and the crimes themselves dealt with in a just manner.
Upon my agreement, he gave the story to Dr. Josephine Atwood, the dean of student life, who knew me from that “pig’s head on a stick” remark my freshman year. She called me promptly into her office and, to my disappointment, tried to squelch the matter.
“Miss Piper, the statute of limitations has nearly run out on this so-called crime that you wrote about in this essay. I doubt you would have a case with no evidence, but you may exercise your adjudication right before May if you wish. Otherwise, I strongly encourage you to put the matter behind you.”
Dr. Atwood was the quintessential young administrator trying to mask her age and inexperience. I could see that now that I had a few years of college under my belt. Everything about her was navy-blue professional and toned down so as to dull her youthful appearance, from the light brown lipstick that left a ring on the rim of her coffee cup to the dowdy square heels and travel buff hose. Though the doctorate diploma from the University of Michigan in the brown frame behind her desk read 1982, her dark hair was pulled back tightly in a low, inconspicuous barrette, and she might as well have been menopausal.
The freshman me had been somewhat intimidated by a powerhouse woman like
Dr. Atwood making the mock slash across her lips the day Peter was arrested, but the junior me, the one who wasn’t on my own anymore, wanted to push.
“I don’t wish to exercise the adjudication right, Dr. Atwood. What I want is to bring my experience to your attention so that the administration might understand the kinds of crimes that have been committed here in the past in order to better protect the students who will follow in our footsteps. I’m here on behalf of the freshman girls on my hall and the freshmen to come next year, in hopes that a general awareness might be heightened and a clearer policy might be created to aid victims of campus crimes such as this.”
Wow. Polished. Not the muddled stuff I used to spit out when McSweeney asked me to dissect a Stevens or Frost poem on the spot. Every time he cornered me like this, I’d had difficulty collecting my thoughts, and I always thought of the brilliant conclusions I could have communicated two hours later over supper in the dining hall.
“The policy exists, Miss Piper, and it is quite adequate, I can assure you. You must do your homework before you criticize the system.”
She tucked a pen behind her ear and began to scan a file on her desk.
“Where can a student find out about the policy?”
“In the handbook, of course,” Dr. Atwood said as a strand of her stiff hair loosened and fell lightly across her chin. She quickly tucked it back into place and took a call on the speakerphone from her assistant.
I walked over to the handbook, which was on a coffee table in the office, and flipped through it as Dr. Atwood swallowed a moan of frustration.
When she hung up, I held up the open book and said, “There is nothing specific in the handbook about reporting an assault. The only ‘crime’ that is specified in the handbook is the violation of the honor code, which strikes me as ironic—the fact that one can snitch on someone for copying their French homework, but there is no clear outline of procedures for an assault victim or the potential consequences facing a rapist.”
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