Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  By this point I understood a little more about Peter’s ‘incident.’ The archive on the Boston Globe’s website reaches back to the 1980s and a quick search of ‘Peter Sullivan’ and ‘abuse’ eventually turned up the right guy. There was a picture of Peter, beardless and loose-haired, above the headline – a staff photo, his pale, childish face sitting on top of a necktie striped with brown and green, the school colors. The same look he gave Paul’s camera in Missolonghi: a broad, embarrassing, unembarrassed smile. Nothing that had happened in the intervening thirty years had had any effect on the face he made for photographs. The headline itself read ‘When Abuse Is Only Civil,’ and the purpose of the article was to point out some of the oddities of Peter’s case. This was clearly a follow-up to a previous piece, a short item I found a minute later, not more than a paragraph in a sidebar column devoted to court news: ‘Prestigious Boston Prep-School on Trial.’ The only other reference to the incident was an editorial that did not name Peter directly, though it referred to Beaumont Hill, among other schools, and addressed the question of settlement. ‘How much can we blame a school for the misconduct of its teachers? How do we measure such blame? In dollars.’ Etc.

  Peter’s case highlighted a number of interesting gaps in the law. In Massachusetts, the age of consent is sixteen for women and eighteen for men, but this applies only to heterosexual sex; there is no provision in the law for homosexual consent. There is, however, a separate clause regarding ‘sexual inducement,’ which appears to apply equally to men and women and to homosexual and heterosexual acts, and which sets the age of consent at eighteen. But it also requires that the victim be of ‘chaste life,’ which the law does not define and which is usually difficult to establish. In any case, parents tend to shy from exposing their children to the necessary parade of testimony. There was some talk early on of applying ‘sexual inducement’ laws to make a criminal case against Peter, but the plan was dropped. Apart from anything else, the proof of intercourse depended on the evidence of the boy, Lee Feldman, who eventually refused to testify – by this stage he was a sophomore at Brown. Peter was never a defendant in the lawsuit, which was levied at Beaumont Hill; and, in fact, the evidence against him was slight enough that the Massachusetts Department of Education could find no grounds to refuse a renewal of his certification. Peter himself might have had a case to make against the school, for firing him, but he seems to have let the matter drop on accepting the job at Horatio Alger. The civil suit was settled out of court.

  But a few suggestive facts emerged at the pre-trial hearing. Lee Feldman was adopted. The plaintiff, his father, owned a number of car-dealerships in the Boston area. He was also a ‘prominent figure in the Brookline Jewish community’ and a member of the board at Temple Ohabei Shalom. Mr Feldman had recently closed two of his shop-fronts, in Newton and Watertown, and was under ‘internal investigation’ for his role in certain loans the temple had taken out to finance the construction of a new community center. According to defense lawyers, Lee’s ‘sexual inclinations’ had been a subject of commentary in the Feldman family for several years before the incident at Beaumont Hill. They intended to establish that Mr Feldman had discussed it with Rabbi Mordecai Stern shortly before his son’s confirmation in the spring of 1986, six months before he first attended a class taught by Peter Sullivan. Lee Feldman was an indifferent student, but his grades improved dramatically after taking Peter’s course. The Feldmans had been delighted and surprised by their son’s acceptance to Brown University, which they attributed largely to Peter’s influence. They even invited him to Lee’s graduation party, for which they rented out the ballroom of the Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston, an event costing ‘upwards of thirty thousand dollars.’

  The Feldmans, for their part, claimed they knew nothing of their son’s sexual orientation until the summer after his freshman year in college, when he announced it to them. This announcement apparently included the phrase, ‘What did you think Mr Sullivan and I were always doing, reading?’ Lee Feldman first admitted and subsequently denied that intercourse between them had taken place. He said, in fact, that Mr Sullivan used to invite him to his office, where he would ask him to ‘read out loud to him.’ At the time, Peter was acting head of the Dramatic Society, which entitled him to a ‘room of his own’ a few doors down the corridor from the English office. The Feldmans alleged that Mr Sullivan used his ‘position’ to entice their son into his office on the pretense of considering him for a part in the school performance of A Winter’s Tale. Since Beaumont Hill is a single-sex academy, boys are often forced to play female roles, and Mr Sullivan provided Lee with ‘costumes for changing into.’ It was also alleged that at least on one occasion, and possibly more, Peter Sullivan masturbated himself behind his desk while Lee Feldman read aloud to him. Lee refused to confirm this accusation to his father’s lawyers, but he did not deny it either, even after recanting the rest of his story.

  ‘I couldn’t really see what was going on over there,’ he said, when the Globe interviewed him by telephone from his college dorm room. (I’ve adapted the article to reflect the fact that what took place was a conversation, with questions and answers, and not a series of statements.)

  ‘What were you reading?’ he was asked.

  ‘Byron, Swinburne, that kind of thing. Whatever he wanted me to.’

  ‘And what kind of clothes did he ask you to wear?’

  ‘Oh, most of what my parents said was bullshit. There was a wardrobe in the office with some costumes from other plays. Peter didn’t care what I wore but he let me try stuff on. He didn’t like it much, because some of the costumes went back as far as the 1930s, organza dresses and things like that, which were pretty easy to tear, but he let me anyway because otherwise I refused to come.’

  ‘Did he watch you when you undressed?’

  ‘Probably he did. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What made you decide to tell your parents about Peter Sullivan?’

  ‘Look, he started calling me freshman year and wouldn’t leave me alone. Beaumont Hill wasn’t a specially happy place for me. I don’t blame Peter for that – he tried to help. But my life is different now; I don’t need any help. I thought if I told my parents about Peter, they could get him off my back. So I made a few things up. But I didn’t expect my dad to go ballistic like he did. I mean, he knows what I’m like, that’s all bullshit, too. The whole thing got out of hand. That’s when I had to step in and tell the truth.’

  ‘Do you think there was anything improper in your relationship with Peter Sullivan during your time at Beaumont Hill?’

  ‘What do you want me to say? I’m not that into proper anyway.’

  ‘Do you think there was anything the school should be held accountable for?’

  ‘Oh, definitely blame the school,’ he said.

  The article also quoted the Beaumont superintendent of police, which had made its own investigation. ‘It is very unusual,’ he said, ‘in cases involving a male teacher and a male student that only one kid comes forward. Mostly you see this kind of pattern with a female teacher and a younger boy, where the teacher considers it a consensual relationship and believes herself to be in love. I’m talking about relationships lasting several years. Where the motive for abuse is primarily sexual, and not emotional, you usually find little clusters of incidents – periods of activity. In Sullivan’s case you had a teacher who had been at an all-boys school for almost twenty years. It makes no sense to me that this is the only incident. For one thing, there’s usually a lag between the crime itself and the moment it gets reported. And here we have a lag of three years. That’s a long time for a sexual predator who has learned he can get away with something to remain inactive. What we do is put out little feelers in the community, to see if anything else comes up. But it takes time; it takes time.’

  This was the note the story ended on, but if anything else subsequently ‘came up,’ the Globe failed to report it. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, on one of my ‘child-care Frid
ays,’ I put my daughter in her car seat and picked up Kelly from her apartment a few blocks away. (Caroline was researching a story in the Public Library and took the train.) Kelly also needed to bring her three-year-old and spent a few minutes transferring her own car seat and buckling her daughter in. By this stage our children knew each other fairly well, and their excitement at sitting side by side in the back of my dirty Corolla contributed in large part to the excitement Kelly and I felt at setting out together. Boston is a cold city but not a dark one and even in November sunshiny mornings outnumber the gloomy ones. Then there are the changing leaves, which seem to possess their own internal sources of light. By mid-November most of the leaves have fallen, it’s true; but this only has the effect of reducing the ratio of leaf and twig to the natural proportions of a candle and its flame.

  ‘There are times I don’t mind not being in Austin,’ Kelly said, as we drove through neighborhood streets to the highway.

  At Beaumont Hill she gave her name to the guard in his hut, who checked it against a list and waved us through. And slowly the campus opened out before us – not one building or two, but at least a dozen, spread out against the kind of landscape, green and loosely wooded, always described by its acreage. Some of the buildings dated from the founding of the school, in the 1920s. They had soft red bricks and white pillars. But subsequent decades were also represented, and a dark glass structure, curiously angled and roofed, was still under scaffolding. It overlooked a wood, which fell away from the hillside; even from the road you could see across the tops of the trees the tops of the Boston skyline. We drove for several minutes to get our bearings. The place looked more like a college than a day-school, though a handful of students still boarded in the original clapboard mansion, gabled and dormered, that had occupied the land before the school moved in, and which was known as Founders. An extension had been built on at the back of it, which is also where the parking lot was. So we parked and got out and wondered where to go.

  Kelly called her friend, who came to meet us. A bell rang somewhere, a proper church bell, clanging, and a few students emerged into the cold bright afternoon, carrying backpacks and trays of food. There were stone benches along some of the paths and circling some of the trees. Peter had landed a job at Beaumont Hill straight out of grad school and never taught anywhere else until they fired him twenty years later. At the time, he had lived among these scenes for almost half his life. The rest of the world seemed very far away. Kelly’s friend, a slim southerner with a face roughened by acne scars, introduced himself to me and led us across several paths to one of the red-brick buildings where the cafeteria was. Bob Schiele, he said his name was, and the students who passed him called out Schiely. There was a dress code for most of them, which involved brown trousers and a green jacket, and a tie that depended on age and position in the school. Only the seniors could wear their own clothes, which made them stand out and also exaggerated their restless, intimate airs. I didn’t have the sense that this was an unhappy place, but unhappiness is often difficult to spot, even in teenagers.

  Bob had been at the school three years. He spoke sometimes too softly for me to hear him. His accent had the gentleness and gentlemanly ironies common to both certain gay men and privately educated southerners, and I couldn’t decide at first which camp he belonged in. But he had once made a pass at Kelly in grad school, which went ‘unreciprocated’; was married, to a venture capitalist who worked in Boston; and had a kid, a small boy, just six months old. All this came out in the first few minutes of conversation, while we were waiting in line at the faculty canteen. I had my daughter in my arms, but Kelly let her girl roam free among the Formica tables and metal-legged chairs. When Bob introduced us to his colleagues, who asked us what we were doing eating in the Holmes Hall Cafeteria on a Friday afternoon when we weren’t contractually obliged to, Kelly said she was visiting Bob, and I said I used to teach at Horatio Alger and was trying to find out something about ‘an old colleague of mine, who had once taught here.’ By this point we were sitting around a round table. A handful of people had heard of Peter, a few of those remembered why they had heard of him, and one or two remembered the man himself.

  ‘I suppose you’re coming because of those books,’ someone said. A fat-lipped old man with hanging cheeks and moles on his cheeks. ‘Those novels.’

  ‘Have you read any of them?’

  ‘I picked one up out of curiosity. It may interest you to know, they had it on what’s called the Beaumont table in the upper school library. Where they put books written by faculty and alums. But curiosity gets you only so far when you have as little time for spare reading as I do. Nothing much happens in them, isn’t that right?’

  ‘It seems to me quite a lot happens, incest, rape; a suicide. But I should tell you, I’m their editor. At least, I helped to get them published. It also depends which one we’re talking about. They’re quite different.’

  ‘Yes, but you know what I mean. They’re more about how people feel.’

  ‘That sounds fair.’

  ‘But you can’t really know how people feel, can you? Especially real people and if they’re dead.’

  ‘What do you teach?’

  ‘I should have told you, history. Also, a little economics.’

  ‘Did you know Peter? How long have you been teaching here?’

  ‘Sure, I knew Peter.’

  ‘And did you like him?’

  ‘Sure, I liked him. Didn’t see any reason not to. Even when there turned out to be a reason, I still liked him. You don’t stop liking people because of reasons.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I said, who knows what goes on behind closed doors. Also, don’t have any illusions about these kids. They say all kinds of things. But this was not a popular opinion at the time. We were very sensitive to the issue, even before those priests made all this stuff public interest.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘I thought you knew him. Very funny, when you could make him out, which wasn’t all the time. A good colleague. Not somebody you got to know better or invited home, but somebody you didn’t mind seeing in the hall coming your way.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Look, it’s been a while. I once had a kid, a foreign kid, not a dumb kid, but couldn’t write an essay to save his life. So I talk to his English teacher and Peter goes to work on him, and the kid does fine. Not great but fine. This is the kind of interaction we had together, but believe me, there are teachers out there who can turn even this kind of a discussion into a he said, she said.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you about his private life?’

  ‘This is what I’m telling you. What do I care about people’s private lives. All this scandal-mongering. Whenever I hear something like that, I think of what my mother used to say: unhappiness is mess.’

  ‘Were there people who knew him better?’

  ‘This is also not the kind of information I keep track of.’

  I wasn’t sure what I hoped to find out, but this conversation was representative. The people who still remembered him didn’t remember him well. Mostly I wanted to get a sense of the life he had lived at Beaumont Hill, whether he had changed much by the time I knew him. One thing I learned: the school has some faculty accommodation on campus. These days it’s restricted to teachers willing to take on pastoral responsibilities for the boarders, but while Peter was around, a few of the bachelors saved money by renting rooms in Founders and dining in Hall with the students. For most of his twenty years at Beaumont Hill, Peter occupied one of these ‘suites’ – a single room, large enough for a desk, attached to a private bathroom. If he wanted a shower he could use the communal showers. Twenty years was longer than usual but not unheard of. And part of the worry, part of the reason the school board reacted so harshly in the Feldman case, had to do with their nervousness about the possibilities entailed by this arrangement. Which also explained why the teachers’ union failed to act in his defense.

  The
re was only one woman at the table, who introduced herself to me as we waited by the kitchen doors to bus our trays. Another quiet talker, with soft red hair and not very much of it, and glasses. Beaumont Hill began hiring women a couple years before Peter left, and there was some controversy over it at the time. A few of the teachers made the women feel very uncomfortable. This lady wanted to tell me Peter wasn’t one of them. She taught German and European literature; Medley was her married name, but she was born Katarina Wupperthal. One of the things she remembered about Peter was that he always called her Fräulein Wupperthal.

  ‘I don’t know if this is what you find interesting. It isn’t very interesting, but it is what I remember.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘Sometimes even then he discussed his writing.’

  Katarina had a natural interest in children. She was one of those women who can’t be around them without, for example, taking off her wristwatch and quietly setting it aside where they can reach it, then snatching it playfully from them until they ask her for it. This partly explains why she said little at lunch; she was amusing my daughter.

  ‘That’s interesting. He never discussed it with me.’

  ‘Well, maybe I don’t mean discussed. I didn’t even know at the time he was writing anything, but I remember once he told me he had an idea for a story, or maybe it wasn’t a story it was just an idea, was man auf Deutsch ein Gedankenexperiment nennt.’ (She had heard me speaking German to my daughter.) ‘I think you have the same word in English. A thought-experiment.’