Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  Since I had taken it this far, I figured I might as well see it through.

  “I’d be honored to,” I said, and by the end of the afternoon, I had phoned Randy, the Pelzers, Shannon, Harriet, and my family to tell them why I wouldn’t be coming home next week.

  “I knew about it,” said Randy. “Jif told me the summer you came home after your freshman year. It doesn’t change things between us. But I really wanted to spend this summer with you.”

  It was painful to come clean with my parents and tell them what had happened at the end of my freshman year. But if Cecelia had the guts to go public on campus, I at least had to be honest with my family by letting them know why I felt it was important to stay at NBU over the next three months.

  Daddy hit something in Uncle Tinka’s automotive store when he heard—it sounded like a wrench banging into a hubcap. The poor Ice Lady wept uncontrollably in her prefurnished Charleston apartment as Lou napped over her open math textbook, worn out with learning.

  “It’s okay,” I told both of my parents when I brushed over the details of my assault. “It was awful, but I’m so much better. And now I have the chance to help make the school a safer place. You know?”

  “I’m proud of you,” Dale Pelzer said when I told him. “You’ve come so far so fast. Just keep it simple, Miss Adelaide. Keep your eyes on Him, that’s all.”

  Dale. Hmm. He was country, but he had smarts.

  A heightened awareness of the mistreatment of women was playing out on the national scene in the early 1990s. The Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas trials had unfolded in a manner unpleasing to many a woman, and when Thelma and Louise won the Oscar for Best Screen Play, the country seemed to be issuing an outcry on behalf of abused women.

  The Violence Against Women Act was being constructed in hopes that Governor Bill Clinton would win the 1992 election, and the act requested that a significant amount of resources be put toward stopping college-campus crimes.

  The Roanoke Times had caught wind of Cecelia’s story and a similar one at the University of Virginia, where fifteen women and two men had reported sexual assaults to their administration over the last year. When the paper came calling on NBU, Dr. Atwood and her student voice—moi—met with them to communicate what we were doing to fix the problem.

  Over the summer, Dr. Atwood and our committee of administration and faculty reviewed other colleges’ policies and attempted to recreate our own. I helped write a survey that went out to the alumni and researched where we might obtain funds for the following: training of campus security, strategic placement of help buttons around campus, education for male students on what constitutes a crime, and the creation of a hotline to volunteer advocates whom a victim could call after a crime was committed. These advocates would walk the student through her options for reporting a crime and seeking justice.

  Somewhere along the way, Newsweek magazine picked up the story and decided to write a feature article on date rape on college campuses. They decided to focus on NBU, UVA, and the University of Tennessee, where a woman had been brutally raped and murdered by a fellow student in her dorm room. A reporter and photographer came down for an interview in mid-July, and they took photos of Cecelia, Dr. Atwood, and me standing before the pillars of the colonnade as we discussed the new policy that would be implemented in the fall.

  I experienced mixed feelings rehashing the rape to a total stranger with a tape recorder. Sometimes I was ashamed, but more often than not, I sort of reveled in it, the way Daddy probably did when he talked about the Vietnam War at the Bizway meetings. At last, no one to say, “Pipe down, Piper!”

  Yes, a peculiar brand of pride was creeping up on me. Was it bad?

  I couldn’t tell.

  By August 1992, sixteen alumni had written in, most anonymously, to say that they had been sexually assaulted by a fellow student. Many of them gave donations for the installation of the alarm buttons. And in almost all cases, the victim knew the student who had raped her.

  More than 50 percent were on a date at the time of the assault.

  When Dr. Atwood called me to say that 60 Minutes wanted to interview Cecelia and me for an upcoming show, I couldn’t believe it. There was that part of me that had always wanted to be in the spotlight. That part that wanted out of Williamstown and into the great big enlightened world, but appearing on a national news show to talk about rape and campus policy wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

  Now other things were falling behind. My GRE review book hadn’t been cracked all summer, and my MFA applications were collecting dust on my desk. Then Georgianne called late on Friday to say, “The cheerleader asked him out, and he went.”

  I could tell Dr. Atwood was pleased that NBU was smelling like a wisteria bloom in all of this since it was taking the initiative to create the policy. Other schools were still dragging their feet or flat-out ignoring the issue, and so she wanted me to be in front of that camera, telling all of America that NBU had pledged to stop these kinds of crimes.

  It was all about PR for Dr. Atwood. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if she was excited about addressing student crime or simply thankful for her role in turning a difficult situation into an impressive amount of padding for her vita.

  “Make us look good,” she said when she put me on an airplane bound for New York City for the interview. (Cecelia’s grandfather was dying of lung cancer that very week, and she could not make the trip, but she had given me permission to share her story.)

  When I stepped out onto the curb at LaGuardia Airport, I gawked at the line of yellow cabs and the urbane people cued up to ride into the city with their dark, unshaven chins and weathered briefcases.

  “I’ll meet you at Marco’s tomorrow,” a tall brunette with wild hair said to a handsome guy in a gray T-shirt and tortoiseshell glasses.

  He nodded and opened the cab door for her.

  “I’ll take the next one,” he said.

  I wasn’t even in Manhattan yet, and I was completely enamored with whatever kind of life was pulsing around me.

  Mae Mae had taken me once to New York when I was twelve years old, and we had seen La Bohème at the Met and Cats on Broadway, and I had never forgotten the wondrous spectacle of humanity on the streets that we raced down to make our shows in time. Harriet was already back at Sarah Lawrence, getting ready for her next O’Connor play that would be produced at the beginning of her senior year, and she told me she’d take the train into the city and meet me for supper that night.

  As I hopped into a cab and told the driver the address of my hotel, I felt like a kid smitten with the biggest toy in the store. A secret fantasy was forming in my mind—MFA school in Manhattan and some sensitive, brooding poet to settle down with. Now, that was about as far away from Williamstown as I could ever hope to get.

  As I filed through my policy notes, the cab raced toward the bright lights of the city. It was two in the afternoon, and I had to quickly check in at the hotel before heading over to the studio for a review of the interview, which would take place tomorrow morning.

  After dropping my bags in a glorious eighteenth-story hotel room, I met up with the other students—two from the University of Virginia and one from the University of Tennessee, and we hailed a cab bound for Rockefeller Center.

  Boy, could I get so used to this! I thought.

  As the streets bustled with life, I sensed that the whole world was at our fingertips, and all we needed to do was raise our hands and catch a ride into untold universes, brimming with culture, art, and life.

  One by one we went over the questions with James Albright, then out for a bite to eat at a restaurant near the hotel. Harriet was running late and joined us at the end of the dinner for coffee. Leah, one of the girls from UVA, was downtrodden and could hardly look anyone in the eye, and the other girl, Allison, was flat-out angry. She said she fantasized about her offender’s death on a daily basis, and she was not going to relent until he was behind bars.

  “I hope someone rapes him in priso
n,” Allison said before ordering her gnocchi with pesto sauce. “I hope he’s afraid to go to sleep at night when he lands his sorry butt in there.”

  The other girl, Belinda, from the University of Tennessee, seemed frightened out of her wits. The city was unnerving her with its beeping horns and bustling pedestrians, and she seemed to have a case of posttraumatic stress syndrome, though her attack had occurred more than three years ago. When the waiter came up behind Belinda with our cappuccinos, she jerked back, and he spilled coffee and steamed milk on the wall and the floor in an effort to avoid burning her. It took the poor guy fifteen minutes and a half canister of salt to clean the place up.

  Harriet nudged me throughout dessert as we each recounted our experiences and the resistance we’d met from our colleges, families, and friends.

  “Let’s go for a walk after you get these guys home,” she whispered on the way back to the hotel. “You could use some fresh air and a tour of the city.”

  After I told the other girls good night, we walked south toward Times Square, catching up and breathing in the life. When we passed the theater where Les Misérables was playing, a high school teacher with a string of twenty kids behind her called to us. She had four extra tickets in her hand, and she offered us two of them.

  “What a town!” I said as Harriet graciously accepted the freebies and we made our way into the darkened theater, where we watched the beautiful story of God’s mercy unfold.

  “Let’s live here together after graduation,” Harriet said later as I walked her down to Grand Central Station to catch the last train back to Bronxville.

  “You read my mind. I’m going by Columbia and NYU tomorrow to pick up an application.”

  “Yes!” Harriet said as her train eeked to a halt before opening its doors. “You can come up for my play in September and have interviews.”

  “You bet,” I said, hugging her as the passengers stepped off and a few folks who’d spent the evening in the city shuffled inside with their papers and laptops and coffees to take their seats.

  “I’m relieved, Adelaide. I mean, I didn’t want you to get, like, sucked up in this rape thing forever.”

  “What do you mean, Harriet?” I rubbed my jewel and felt my ears redden.

  She rolled her eyes, and I sucked my teeth before furrowing my brow. “You have a problem with the antirape stuff?”

  She stepped back down from the platform toward me.

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I guess . . . I don’t want it to consume you, okay? I mean, if you keep hanging out with loony-bin material like those guys tonight, you might unravel too.”

  Now I was ticked. This was the most valid thing I’d done in my college career, and she was making light of it.

  “This is who I am, Harriet! This is, like, a critical thing to bring to light, don’t you think? I mean, you’re the one for chicken and egg rights—how about human beings? How about women?”

  “Forget it,” Harriet said softly, stepping back toward the train.

  “I’m not trying to minimize what happened to you. I just think, you know, it could become too much of a focus.”

  “It wouldn’t be bad if it did,” I said as Harriet checked her watch and blew a piece of hair out of her face.

  “Do you know how to make your way back to the hotel?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling a burning in my throat. I looked away to read some graffiti on the train that read “Z-man,” then back to her.

  “Why don’t you think this is a valid pursuit?”

  “Sure, it’s valid stuff, but you don’t want to see everything through the lens of a ‘postrape victim,’ do you? You’re, like, a lot more than that, Adelaide. You’re a poet and a Low-Country girl and a debutante.

  And more important than any of that, a recipient of God’s grace.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know that.”

  The train lights blinked, and the driver lowered his head to peer down the platform toward us.

  “I’ve gotta go. This is the last train, okay?”

  She stepped inside the doors, stretched her arms, revealing her hairy armpits, and waved good-bye as the compartments squeaked and rolled down the tunnel and the tracks toward Bronxville.

  What was up with her?

  Later that night, I threw open the draperies and sang the “Lovely Ladies” song from Les Mis as I danced and jumped from bed to bed. I wished I’d invited Harriet to spend the night, but then again, she was chafing me with her lack of support.

  Out of breath, I stopped to look out at the digital view of midtown and downtown. I could recognize the Chrysler Building staring back at me with its silvery fans of light, and the red and yellow lights on the Empire State Building dwarfing the midtown apartments, and then in the distance the twin towers of the World Trade Center illuminating the tip of the peninsula with their 110 floors of glass and steel as if to say, “Welcome to the center of the world.”

  Harriet. Humph. She had some nerve questioning me. It’s not exactly a walk on the beach telling a large percentage of America about your attack.

  The next morning James Albright interviewed us separately; then we joined a panel of experts on the subject. There was a member from NOW who was lobbying for the Violence Against Women Act and an administrator at Syracuse University who had heeded the warning against sexual assault a decade before and had a successful system in place to aid victims. Also, there was a handsome twentysomething young man named Tobias Moore, who had just started his own nonprofit, Rachel’s Rape, in memory of his sister, who was raped in her dorm at Columbia University in the middle of the night two years earlier. She had committed suicide six months after the rape. Fear and sleep deprivation had ravaged her mind, and she couldn’t face it another day.

  As I stood with the girls in the hallway outside the studio, waiting for the elevator, Tobias made his way toward me and handed me his card.

  “May I call you for an interview for our newsletter?” he asked. “I think your story is amazing. How you’re helping to write your school policy after what you’ve been through.”

  He hesitated for a moment, rubbing his chin, and I guessed he was wondering if he should risk asking for my number in front of four post-rape victims. I smiled his way as if to encourage him. He was truly dashing— tall with wavy blond hair and fair skin, and attractively dressed in an urban-preppy blend of a tattered oxford and corduroy pants. “Do you think I could buy you a cup of coffee before you leave town?”

  “Sure,” I said, looking over my shoulder at the heavy burdens of the girls behind me. I was happy to have a great-looking young man take an interest in me, and maybe these gals needed to know that there was life after assault.

  “How about now?” I asked.

  His bright blue eyes lit up like the front of the subway trains, and he couldn’t conceal his sheepish grin.

  “Great!” he said as the elevator door opened. “Let’s go.”

  It was a mild and beautiful August afternoon, and after ducking into a coffeehouse and getting two cappuccinos to go, we walked uptown to Central Park, where we meandered through the lush pathways of the circumscribed forest while we talked.

  When we shared a mustard-smothered knish on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, he told me about the pain of losing his sister. He had been a senior at Georgetown University when she passed away, and after graduation he called the big-name accounting firm that had promised him a job to say he was starting a nonprofit in her memory and he wouldn’t be able to take them up on their offer.

  He had created Rachel’s Rape in a one-room “suite” in the attic of an old investments building on K Street in Washington DC, amid several other minor nonprofits, and he’d spent the last two years lobbying Congress for tighter campus security mandates as well as creating educational programs for campuses to use, particularly in the Greek and athletic worlds, to teach men about what rape is and what the consequences will be for them if they commit the act.

  After we shared ou
r stories, he admitted he was late for a meeting with a potential funder and needed to catch a cab downtown. “Can I take you out to dinner tonight?”

  “Can we go to Chinatown?” I asked. “My friend Harriet said I have to try the dim sum at Little River.”

  “How about Little Italy?” he asked. “I can’t do Chinese—digestive issues, you know? But Luigi’s has incredible hand-rolled pasta and tiramisu.”

  He had noticed a smudge of mustard on the knee of his pants and took out a towelette like the kind they serve with lobsters still in their shells. Then he tore it open and rubbed it on the spot before pouring a little water from his cup over his knee.

  I chuckled at his meticulous cleaning job before saying, “It’s a date.”

  “Terrific,” he said, smiling up at me. “Why don’t I catch the first cab for you so you can get safely back to the hotel?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, “and I might as well check out the Met while I’m here.”

  He folded up the towelette, slid it into his back pocket, and shook my hand firmly good-bye.

  “I’ll look forward to seeing you tonight,” he said, staring into my face as if I were the most extraordinary sight he’d ever seen. “I’ll meet you in the lobby at seven.”

  I blushed and pointed out a cab that had just pulled up to let a lady out in front of the steps.

  I met Tobias in the lobby of the hotel just as the sun was setting. As we walked out onto the street, I watched the windows come randomly to life in a cacophony of light. New York City at nightfall was simply magical, and I was delighted to see a place that lived up to its reputation.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” I asked Tobias as he stared at his map and tried to figure what route to take to Little Italy. “It exceeds all expectations,” I continued before lifting my arms to embrace the air. I nearly whacked a short lady who was trying to pass us with an armful of groceries, and she grunted, “Watch it!”