by Bill Rowe
“Objection,” roared Dylan. “My learned friend is now deliberately trespassing on forbidden territory.”
“Sustained.”
Nina said, “Depression. I have suffered from clinical depression for years. The drinking by the girls’ biological father was a cover-up of his own depression. I’m afraid my two daughters inherited more than their fair share of that. I believe that Rosie’s bad period, so-called, and Pagan’s death were part of their tragic genetic heritage.”
Lucy was able to get out of her that her consumption of prescription drugs, including sleeping pills, perhaps deadened her to some activities going on about the house, but, Nina said, “I’m old enough to know what sex sounds like and what it can leave behind on the bed, and I would not have been oblivious to all that, night and day, no matter what I was taking.”
When Nina stepped down the defence lawyer asked for a recess to greet his next witness, who had just flown in from the United States. I could hardly stand with the rest of the room for the judge’s exit. I told Rosie that I felt ill. She took one look and said I should get a taxi home and go to bed right away.
My first hour in bed I spent fighting off waves of nausea. I lost the battle and had to run out to the bathroom and vomit in the toilet. The cool tiled floor invited me to lie down on it, but after a few minutes there I felt impelled to crawl back to the toilet and sit down for a watery bowel movement. Then I tottered back to the bedroom and collapsed on the bed.
I woke up in a delirium. My mother was over me shaking a thermometer. Answering her questions about my symptoms, I stopped to instruct her, “Don’t tell anyone I was throwing up and had diarrhea, because I’d have to say it wasn’t caused by sexual abuse, and that might undermine Rosie’s case.”
“Don’t you worry, my man. Nobody will find that out from me. Here. Keep this under your tongue for a minute.” She took my pulse before removing the thermometer. “You have a high temperature. Think you can keep down an ibuprofen capsule with a drop of ginger ale?”
I nodded and she left. I heard Dad saying to her downstairs, “What the hell was I thinking of when I drove him out into that rain? I should be shot.”
“He picked up a virus and his immune system may be stressed by everything he’s going through. You didn’t cause it, Joe.”
Dad muttered something else self-deprecatory and Mom replied as she started up the stairs, “It is not your fault, sweetheart. He’ll be okay in a few days.” A few days! What about the trial?
When I woke up again, Rosie was over by the wall sitting in my chair. “Jesus, how’d you get up here,” I blurted, “past Mom and Dad?”
She laughed. “They’re a bit pissed off at me, I gather. Your mother told me you had a fever when I called, and I asked if I could come over and she said sure, as long as I stay back from you. So here I am, across the room.”
Rosie sat there till ten-thirty, studying by the little lamp on my table when I was asleep and chatting with me whenever I came to. Oddly, she never once mentioned her mother or her testimony, a refraining which I took, even in my befuddled state, as a measure of Rosie’s heightened suffering. I told her I was going to the trial in the morning no matter what, and she told me I definitely was not, I was staying right there in bed. My health meant more to her than a hundred frigging old trials. Leaving, she said she’d call in the morning and drop in to see me during lunch break.
I listened for the extent of the interaction downstairs: a “good night,” rather terse, between Rosie and Mom, but no response at all from Dad. That did it! Here was a woman who had risked her life in the icy atmosphere of this house to show her love, only to get short shrift from that bastard. I’d show him. Next time he skulked down the hall for a look into the bedroom, as he’d done earlier, I would ignore him and pretend to be asleep again. Serve him right. He was only a prick anyway.
I gleaned from Rosie and media reports what Dylan’s next witness had to say. His name was Dr. Johnnie von Himmel from Loma Linda, California. Hailing originally from Vienna, the birthplace of modern psychology, he said “with a smile that set dazzlingly white teeth against tanned features” that he encouraged people to call him simply “Dr. Johnnie,” as he had no desire to impose on the egalitarian Americas the aristocratic surname one was saddled with by ancient European history. His credentials showed degrees in psychology from Geneva, Oxford, and Berkeley, with a specialty in human memory, and he had testified in hundreds of trials on questions pertaining to adult recall of events from childhood. He had acted as witness for the defence, for the prosecution, for husbands and for wives, for parents and for children, for plaintiffs and for defendants, all with scientific impartiality in the cause of truth.
“In other words,” Lucy Barrett said, objecting to his being sworn as an expert witness, “you are a hired gun prepared to shoot down anyone on behalf of the highest bidder.”
Dr. Johnnie replied, “I assure you, madame, I am neither a slave to any dogma nor a toady to any person. Though I rub shoulders daily with world-famous celebrities, my sole mandate is scientific truth.”
“How much are you paid to testify as expert to the stars?”
“Extremely well paid indeed: six thousand dollars a day plus expenses. I command that fee every day, two hundred days a year throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, with a ten-month waiting list, indicating, I must modestly concede, credibility as an expert witness before impartial tribunals such as this, based solidly on scientific objectivity.”
“Credibility?” said Barrett. “You say you are originally from Vienna, but I can still hear remnants of your New Jersey accent.”
“Thank you for the compliment, madame. Ever since arriving in the States at a very young age, I have been striving to attain a local accent.”
Prosecutor and defence counsel argued the matter of expert status before the judge, with Ms. Barrett calling Dr. Johnnie von Himmel “a witch doctor trafficking in this newfangled false memory syndrome as the latest cultic, pseudo-scientific fad from La La Land tricked out in fake medical research garb and on a par with womb memory and return-from-death memory.” Judge Ledrew, sighing that she had to give every possible leeway to an accused who was in the difficult position of trying to establish a negative, had him sworn in as expert witness for the defence.
No one who had survived the onset of puberty, Dr. Johnnie testified, would be astounded to hear that it was a bewildering time. And hey, what would anyone expect with all those strange new hormones spurting and colliding? Nor was it altogether surprising that researchers had oftentimes observed arising from that emotion-inciting hormonal soup a false memory of sexual abuse. The literature was replete with instances of the false memory syndrome doing its insidious work. He would give a random example: A young girl approaching puberty might be jealous of the attentions paid to a sibling, her sister, say, by a father figure. Unconsciously the pubescent girl might be experiencing sexual yearnings towards the father figure, a phenomenon accepted by modern researchers as wholly natural and normal in these more enlightened days. Ordinarily such yearnings would never be acted out but simply rest there in the young girl’s mind as painful unrequited love. However, the traumatic hurt of this young jealousy and this unrequited love has been observed to transform those sexual yearnings, by some form of mental alchemy not yet fully understood, into a conscious memory of actual sexual activity. Other traumatic experiences during those swiftly changing developmental years could have a delusional effect on the memory as well. Grief could very well play a role. As a random example of that, the death of a beloved parent under shocking circumstances has been noted as an actuating force responsible for transmuting fantasy sex in a young girl’s mind to a memory of actual sex. Furthermore, guilt might well enter the picture at this point, and play a huge role in the further mutating of the girl’s sexual memories. Sexual activity with that father figure, recalled in her memory years later as actual rather than imagined, would give rise to guilt because, of course, voluntary sexual activity by the you
ng girl in such circumstances would be considered by her as morally wrong. Thus, of necessity, in order to rid herself of her intolerable burden of guilt, the sexual activity must be misremembered by her mind as either forced or as exploitation of her as a helpless victim. Moreover, research had shown that the more intelligent and sensitive and well-read and educated and exposed to fiction and poetry a person might have been, the more likely she would be to create a fantasy world and a delusional remembrance and a false memory of sexual events that never, in fact, occurred.
Dr. Johnnie von Himmel instanced several cases “out of a plethora of similar travesties” where accused persons convicted of sexually assaulting children were later shown, as a result of new evidence or the recanting of a complainant’s allegations, to be entirely innocent after years in prison suffering brutal assaults, even death, at the hands of criminal thugs.
On cross-examination, prosecutor Barrett asked the celebrity memory expert if modern witch-hunters tracked down their evil women, not by finding the devil’s marks on women’s bodies like in the dark ages, but by discovering false memory in women’s minds. Dr. Johnnie replied that he’d often heard similar belittling arguments from his good feminist friends, and he’d been forced to point out to them that they couldn’t have it both ways on this memory business. If, as they claimed, a woman could bring out as an adult a suppressed memory of sexual abuse as a girl, then surely a woman could also create as an adult a false memory of sexual abuse as a girl. In the interests of fairness, one had to admit that the mind worked both ways. Prosecutor Barrett’s description of this as “so much piffle and wind” was objected to by Murray Dylan.
The last witness for the defence was the accused himself. The prospect of being father to two lively intelligent girls, he testified, had been very much a bonus in his marriage to their mother, inasmuch as he had discovered from a test in anticipation of marriage to a woman years before that he was sterile and unable to father children. This revelation had caused the termination of that engagement and sent him overseas in heartbreak. To have found another woman in his new home whom he loved and who already had a wonderful family that he could become part of was nothing less than a heaven-sent miracle.
Dylan asked him if, following the test establishing his infertility, he had worn, or indeed would have to wear, a condom in any sexual activity to prevent pregnancy. He replied that a condom for that purpose was entirely unnecessary. Indeed, when he heard the complainant allege that he had worn a condom, that statement to him was proof positive that the sexual activity she had accused him of could not have taken place.
He got along swimmingly with both girls at the start. Soon, however, he became concerned about Rosie’s mental well-being. Disturbing features of her behaviour struck him as aberrant in a prepubescent girl. A simple hug of greeting between them, if they were unobserved, was becoming an opportunity for her to press her lower body against him in a knowing way. One time she sat upon his thigh with a leg on either side and pretended she was riding a horse, but moved herself against him with such obviously sexual intent that he became embarrassed. Naturally he discouraged that kind of contact without making a big fuss, not wishing to cause further damage to her emotionally. But on one occasion he was so frankly shocked by her behaviour that he let his professional guard down. She liked him to read to her in bed as her natural father had done, and at first he was happy to oblige. One night as he was sitting by the side of her bed reading, she took his hand, brought it inside the covers, and actually placed it between her legs. He was so flabbergasted he blurted out that her mother would kill her if she knew she’d done that. Then, regaining his professional poise, he told her he’d meant to say that what she had done was wrong and if she did anything like that again, her mother would have to know so that they could bring the girl to a psychologist. She replied that she couldn’t help it because she loved him, and pleaded with him not to tell her mother. He assured her that a crush on someone in his situation was normal, but that it was not morally or medically right to do what she had just done.
It didn’t occur to him till a while afterwards that for her to have done such a thing so forthrightly, someone may have done it to her before, perhaps someone in or close to the family. Wondering what to do to help her, he kept himself out of all opportunities for a repetition, in spite of her aggressive efforts to get close to him physically, and after a period she appeared to develop a resentment of him and went into the decline others had mentioned. Then the principal of the school called his wife and him to go in for a serious discussion about the complainant’s condition.
Immediately, he told his wife of his concerns and they shared them with the principal and the complainant’s teacher on a confidential basis. It turned out his misgivings accorded somewhat with theirs, but there was no evidence against anyone, nothing but speculative questions, which he himself considered too dangerous to indulge in. Had some teacher or some adult friend molested her? Had there been abuse going on before his arrival in the household? The aggressive way she had advanced on him as a father figure made him suspect the worst concerning her own father. But he had absolutely no proof of that. He suggested to her principal then and there that they go to the police. But the consensus they all ultimately arrived at, led by the principal, was to watch her closely for a short time longer rather than risk setting off a baseless witch hunt.
To everyone’s delight she soon bounced back, but her attitude toward him remained the same. Indeed, she seemed to resent him more as time went on, and she would accept no generosity whatsoever at his hands. She turned down flat his offer to send her to a private school in Ontario like her sister, refused to go on trips with him and her mother and sister, staying in their absence at her friend’s house instead, said no to his offer to pay her way to world-class universities when she graduated from school, even as her sister’s name was put in the queue for Harvard. He did notice that, regarding the one thing she most enjoyed—tennis—well, she didn’t hesitate to accept his offer to send her to a tennis camp on the mainland.
Rosie clung to, he believed, a morbid memory of her natural father and his frankly obscene poetry and whatever kind of a relationship he had imposed upon her. Her attitude to himself as stepfather appeared to have gone from unhealthy sexual love to unhealthy loathing, and God alone knew what fantasies had occurred in her mind between the two extremes. He was sorry now he hadn’t done more about her mental problem at the time, but she was so positively thriving academically and athletically that both he and her mother thought she was cured. Little did they realize what mad imaginings were festering inside that traumatized young brain.
Celebrated defence lawyer Dylan asked the accused if he had ever voluntarily touched the complainant sexually. He replied indignantly that, except for the time the girl herself had initiated it in her own bed, which had shocked him so profoundly, he had never done and would never dream of doing such a morally odious deed.
On cross-examination, prosecutor Lucy Barrett asked the accused if being four years younger than his wife had given him pause before he’d married her. None whatsoever, he replied.
“Was that because your attention was more focused on her young daughters?”
“I find your insinuation offensive, madam, and I doubt that you would have asked the question if it were I who was four years older than my wife. Attitudes are changing in more broad-minded persons, however, as may be seen from the fact that John Lennon is eight years younger than Yoko Ono.”
Prosecutor Lucy Barrett then asked the accused whether, at the time of his hurried departure from England some years ago, he had been estranged from his family there, even to the point of threats of physical violence from his own brothers-in-law, the husbands of his sisters and the fathers of his nieces. The defence lawyer objected to this as irrelevant and prejudicial, “as the prosecutor is well aware.” The prosecutor argued she had grounds to believe that the reason the defendant had just given for having left England was not the real reason, and si
nce the defendant himself had stated it as true, she had a right to cross-examine him on that as on all the rest of his smarmy, self-serving testimony. The judge ruled that she could indeed cross-examine him on the ruptured relationship he had given as a reason and could even present rebuttal evidence if she had any, but disallowed the line of questions the prosecutor had embarked upon regarding his family and cautioned her “not to persist in trying to trespass on forbidden territory through the back door.”
ROSIE CAME IN TOMY bedroom just after I’d finished watching the resumé of the lawyers’ arguments that day on the news. I called myself a useless turkey, wimping out on her like this, letting her down at her neediest moment. She replied that she missed me sitting there next to her, but it made no difference to the trial. The die was cast there. The outcome was out of our hands. I should stop berating myself. She picked up the newspaper from my bed and leafed through it, occasionally shaking her head as she read something else unsettling from Rothesay. “My God,” she said, “the lies.”
“You can see where someone close to the victim could actually kill a bastard like that,” I said, and Rosie breathed in and out heavily, nodding her head the while.
THE NEXT MORNING THE newspaper contained a sentence that made me lurch out of my sickbed. I was reading the summary of yesterday’s addresses by the lawyers to the jury, at the end of which appeared the reporter’s statement, “During the past two days there has been only one empty seat in the entire courtroom, that of the complainant’s boyfriend who is bedded by the flu, and its emptiness beside the complainant in the packed gallery has made it very conspicuous.”
Feet on the floor, elbows on my knees, head in my hands, I sat on the side of my bed in the sudden realization the jury would not know I had the flu. They were sequestered every night in a hotel and were not allowed to read newspapers or listen to the news and knew only what they heard from testimony of witnesses and arguments of lawyers. They must be thinking I had abandoned Rosie. The judge had started her instructions to the jury this morning, and she’d probably be finishing this afternoon, and here it was nearly one o’clock. I had to get there. The jury had to see me next to Rosie again. They had to know I believed in her.