Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Tina became a public defender. Having accepted injustice from birth, she found solace in defending other people. When I met her, she was seven months pregnant. I wondered whether she had fears about being a mother. “Despite all the things that happened, in a lot of ways I do feel very fortunate, very blessed,” she said. “My grandmother was able to give us so much love. Even though I was only with her for eight years, she made such a huge impression.” Tina was engaged to a man with a warm, supportive family, “the exact opposite of mine.” Her fiancé is naturally affectionate, “and there are times when I’m suddenly, like, ‘Every time you come in the room, you don’t have to touch me.’ He knows how I’m damaged.” Tina has worked hard to build a life that can subsume the past. “I don’t know what happened to Donna when I was conceived,” she said, “but that curse has run its course, and it’s going to stop here.” She rested a hand on her pregnant belly, as though to indicate how love pushed away over and over again had finally found its object.

  • • •

  A woman who keeps a child conceived in rape has a permanent tie to her rapist. In some instances, hatred and fear keep the connection alive; in others, however, the mother is bracing herself for the possibility that either the rapist or the child might eventually seek out the other. Just as abused children cling to their abusive parents, driven by a biology beyond logic, so these women remain in thrall to their attackers, unable to break free of the terrible intensity of their connection. Unconditional rejection of the rapist, for them, feels too much like a rejection of the resultant child. If these women fail to experience the anger appropriate to being raped, they destroy themselves; if they evince such anger, they feel that they have failed their children. It’s a more extreme version of a common challenge for people who have divorced. It can take a generation to transcend this ambivalence; one woman told me that when her child was born, she had the rapist’s eyes. “Her beautiful baby daughter has her eyes,” this woman said. “Now they’re the family eyes, not the eyes of the man who raped me.”

  The grimmest challenge for many of these women comes if the rapist or his family tries to gain access to the child. Men who have gotten away with rape seldom retreat in shame or repentance; they sometimes play out their ghoulish exuberance by laying claim to their progeny. In instances where charges were never filed, the threat of joint custody is real. Stigma Inc., the online support group for people conceived in rape and incest, had a posting saying, “The father/rapist is thus deemed ineligible for visitation or custody of the minor child. However, as in the case of rape victims in general, the burden of proof that a rape took place is often placed upon the woman who has suffered the crime. Often it comes down to a ‘he said/she said’ issue.”

  • • •

  When Emily Barrett would hug her mother, Flora, she was always pushed away. “But it took a minute for her to realize that she wanted to shoo me off,” Emily told me, “and I miss those moments right before she did.” Flora was a light-skinned Jamaican woman who had emigrated to New York for a better life. By the time Emily was twelve, Flora was on her fourth husband. “She was extremely charismatic, and beautiful, and she was funny,” Emily said. “Other people loved her. She was a hypocrite, but it was still interesting to watch, almost like a science project.” As an only child, Emily was lonely. Her father, Phil, did not live in the household, but Emily saw or spoke to him every day until she was eleven, when he suddenly disappeared. No one would tell her what had happened, so she assumed he was dead; before she turned thirteen, she developed a crush on a good-looking nineteen-year-old, Blake. He took to giving her rides to and from school, and one day in the car, he leaned over and kissed her. As the years passed, her attachment to him grew. When she was fifteen, Emily gave him her virginity, even though she knew he had a girlfriend.

  That same year, Emily answered the phone one day, and it was her father, from whom she’d heard nothing for four long years. He told her to get together all the money she could and meet him at Grand Central Station. Emily headed for the station with $200. Phil appeared abruptly, yanked Emily behind a pillar, took the money from her, and jumped onto a train. Emily was shattered and tried to kill herself. “My mind went on some sort of carnival ride,” she said. “And at the end of it was a whole medicine cabinet.” Her mother took her to the emergency room. “I didn’t know how to explain it other than to say, ‘My dead father jumped out of Grand Central Station.’ They really thought I was crazy.” The resident psychiatrist kept Emily on the ward for twenty-three days, then advised Flora that Emily needed therapy. Three weeks after her release, Flora moved to Virginia, taking her reluctant daughter with her. “My mother dealt with problems by running away, and her idea of therapy was to buy a new house,” Emily said.

  In Virginia, Emily’s mother found her a job doing bookkeeping for friends who owned a restaurant; Emily called them Uncle Eric and Aunt Suzette. Uncle Eric asked Emily to help out his brother, who owned a store, and the brother raped her after driving her to work. “It’s not like on television,” Emily said. “There’s no black eye, and there’s no knives and guns. It’s five seconds. I was just stunned.” She spent the next few days in a haze, then finally called the police, by which time the man had fled.

  In the weeks that followed, Emily had severe headaches, and her breasts began to hurt. When Flora found out Emily was pregnant, she locked the doors and unplugged the phones while she decided what to do about it. “She told the school I had appendicitis,” Emily said. “Every day she would come home and just scream. And then I’d hear her in her room crying and wailing in her shower. Then Uncle Eric and Aunt Suzette were coming over saying how I’m ruining their reputation. I was sixteen and I had no business having a child. But that whole experience was just insanity.”

  Flora finally took Emily to a clinic for an abortion. Emily had been educated in Catholic schools even though her family wasn’t Catholic, because Flora thought it was a better education. Emily had been confirmed in the faith; now she was afraid she would burn in hell. She shared her regrets with the clinician, so he sent her home. “That ride home with my mother was one of the worst experiences of my life,” she recalled. Flora said that if Emily had really been raped, she wouldn’t care about losing the baby, and when they got home, she arranged an abortion at another clinic. Emily’s pregnancy was terminated five days later. “For a long time, I would calculate in my mind and imagine how old that baby would be from when I was sixteen,” Emily said. “I would see a baby and start to cry.”

  Aunt Suzette had assured Emily that the rapist had left the country, but Emily thought she saw him everywhere. “I was in a panic,” Emily said. “And one day, I was walking from the bathroom to the kitchen, and my mother whispered in my ear, ‘This never happened.’ And that was it. It was like a switch went off in my head. I never talked about it again. I tried never to think about it again. And eventually, it just sort of dissolved into my mind.”

  As abruptly as Flora had relocated to Virginia, she moved back to New York. For a few years, life returned to normal. Emily resumed her friendship with Blake. She went off to college, but dropped out to take care of her mother after Flora was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. Flora left Emily a small inheritance. In an eerie echo of Emily’s final encounter with her father, she soon got a call from Blake asking for an urgent loan; she gave him $5,000, and he vanished.

  Emily located him after a few years and asked about the loan; he said that he had some money to give her and told her to come over to collect it. “He gave me a drink with something in it,” Emily said. “Next thing I know, I feel my clothes coming off. I’m seeing flashing lights and pictures. He was positioning my body, he was moving me around. I couldn’t believe it. When I woke up, he was in the shower and I was shaking.” Emily gathered her clothes and drove home. She was dating a policeman at the time, and when she told him what had happened, he took her to the precinct to report it. Blake was arrested, and the bringing of charges began. “They told me not to
contact him, but I needed to know, I wanted to know why. I had known Blake for so long and he had been my best friend!” She called him, and he refused to talk because of the restraining order. Then he called her back and begged her not to go through with the charges.

  Emily sensed that she was pregnant but couldn’t face it: she took seven pregnancy tests, hoping that eventually one would be negative. She broke up with the policeman; her emotional life centered on Blake, the rape, and the pregnancy. At a hearing in her suit against him, when she realized that he might go to prison, she told the assistant district attorney during a recess that she couldn’t see it through because she was pregnant by Blake. The attorney asked for a continuance, and Emily left the courthouse. “Blake ran after me and asked, ‘What’s going on?’ And I told him, got in the car, made this crazy U-turn, and I drove.”

  Blake first convinced Emily not to have an abortion. “Then he said I didn’t want my child to have its father in prison,” she remembered. “‘What are you going to tell it when it asks you where I am?’ he said.” That question brought up Emily’s pain about her father’s disappearance. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I was losing it,” she told me. Eventually, she told the ADA that she would not go forward with the rape case. She asked Blake to leave her alone. “But he just kept checking in with me, I guess to make sure that I didn’t change my mind. When I was five months and a week pregnant, he told me that he was with another woman, that she was five months pregnant, and that she was moving in with him.” Though Emily had not imagined building a life with him, she was crushed.

  At the time, Emily was working at a day-care center. “I was a very happy, fun person,” she said. “I was around kids all the time, and they were my life. But when I was at home, I turned off the lights, I came upstairs, and I just cried until six forty-five the next morning, when it was time to start work.” Then Delia was born. “She was like a salve, like a panacea, which is a lot of responsibility for a newborn,” Emily said. She began to think about the blank line on Delia’s birth certificate, the one for the second parent, and she decided to add Blake’s name in case Delia ever needed another close genetic relative for a medical emergency. What Emily hadn’t considered was that Blake would be notified, and when she went to the courthouse to pick up the revised document, he was there. A judge granted him visitation rights. “I realized, ‘He’s going to be tied to me for the rest of my life,’” Emily said. “I didn’t sleep for days before his first visit.” So began an uneasy détente. Blake paid child support and saw Delia erratically for two years, then drifted away again. “I was so attached to Delia that I couldn’t let go at all,” Emily said. “When she was small, she was like a toy, so cute, all huge cheeks. But when she was about four, she started asking me questions about her father and where she came from, and it was like someone took a hammer and cracked me open and I spilled out all over the room.”

  By then, Emily was running a group of day-care centers. “And one day, I just stopped,” she said, “like a clock stops working.” She began having panic attacks, blackouts, olfactory hallucinations, and sudden flashes of disorientation. Her hair was falling out. Her doctor attributed the symptoms to stress and advised psychiatric counseling. “He said he wanted me to speak to somebody and he was going into his office to find some names of people he’d recommend,” she said. “I don’t remember anything after that, until I was in my office at school, and my phone was ringing, and my assistant was banging on my door. She said, ‘Miss Emily, Miss Emily! Your doctor’s been calling here for an hour. He said that you left your coat and shoes, and are you okay?’” Emily looked down and saw that she was in wet stockings; it was snowing outside.

  Emily became intensely agoraphobic and lost her job. “I don’t remember how Delia got food,” she said. “It got done. I couldn’t leave the house, except to go to therapy. Then I couldn’t leave the room. I wasn’t sleeping for days at a time. I was fragmenting.” A psychiatrist put her on antidepressants, and she did constant talk therapy with him, and she gradually began to reemerge. “He saved me,” she said. Just as she was getting it together, Blake turned up at the front door to say that he wanted to see Delia. The familiar cycle recurred. He would come occasionally to visit, then vanish, over and over. Emily decided she had to be strong for Delia and not keep her from her father, but Blake’s motives always seemed unclear. “I didn’t know what to do because he was her father, and she knew it,” Emily said. “If something happened to me, he could get her. So I had to make sure he wouldn’t hurt her, and the only way to do that was to let him know her so he would care about her.”

  Blake’s attention was never reliable. “When he wasn’t around, Delia sometimes said to me, ‘I wish I had my daddy here,’” Emily recalled. “He’d be gone a year, and then he would show up. She would ask where he is, and I’d say, ‘He’s working, maybe,’ or ‘He’ll come when he has time,’ or ‘Let’s do something instead.’ I redirected her for years and years, and every time she asked, I started cascading down a hill again.” At seven, Delia broke her leg and began crying for her father, so Emily called Blake; he returned the call five months later and started coming over again. Emily had had a brief romance and given birth to a son, Gideon, seven years younger than Delia. Blake told Emily that she belonged to him and that her new child was a betrayal. The sexual brutality his argument implied frightened her, and she decided to flee, so she moved the kids back to Virginia.

  When I met Emily, Delia was ten and had recently won a national academic award and matriculated in a magnet school for gifted children. “She’s never asked about how she came to exist, and I know she wonders,” her mother said. “She and I have had conversations about my prickliness, how I pull away. I would never, ever, ever tell her that it has anything to do with her. I always tell her it’s because of me, and because my mom pulled away from me. But I don’t do it with her brother.” Emily had recently become engaged, and she told me that her fiancé, Jay, found this coldness toward Delia upsetting. Emily could not bring herself to tell him about Delia’s origins in rape

  “Fix me,” Emily said to me as we sat on the floor of her office, late at night, doing this interview. “Why can’t I hug my daughter? I love her, but when she touches me, it feels like hundreds of razor blades scraping across my skin, like I’m going to die. I understand that I just have to let her because she’s a child, and so I do, but in my mind, I go someplace else, and I know that she knows it. So now she asks permission. I prepare myself. There are rules, like she can’t come up behind me. Sometimes she forgets, and I’ll jump, like a cat that you put water on, because her father had this stealth ability to just appear in front of you, and you don’t know where he came from. She inherited that.”

  It has been hard working around so large a secret. “She wrote me a really sad letter, a year and a half ago,” Emily said. “It said, ‘This little girl misses New York. This little girl misses her father.’” When Jay accompanied Emily and her two kids to New York for the funeral of a family friend, he encouraged her to contact Blake for Delia’s sake. So she did, arranging for them to spend an afternoon together. When he came to pick her up, he met Jay. The episode proved to be a turning point for Emily. “As soon as I got back to Virginia, my pregnancy, the incident, it all came into my brain and my body at the same time,” Emily said. She finally told Jay the truth, and he was shocked.

  “She looks like Blake in some ways, but not as much as she did when she was small,” Emily added. “She reminds me of me, and I attempt to focus on that. Even if I don’t always love myself, I can love myself in her. But there’s that other part that makes me struggle every single day, because while most mothers just go with their natural instincts, my instincts are horrifying. It’s a constant, conscious effort to keep my instincts from taking over.”

  • • •

  The idea of rape within marriage was introduced in the late 1970s by Diana E. H. Russell, who maintained that 14 percent of married women had been raped by a husband. In
the late eighties and early nineties, the marital exception to rape laws was gradually removed from the books in most states, despite spirited protests from the political Right, including some who claimed, echoing the misogyny of the colonial era, that accusations of rape within marriage would be used by vengeful wives to persecute innocent husbands. Instead, marital rape most commonly comes up in court within a larger pattern of domestic violence. Cases such as the 1989 Burnham case, in which a woman accused her husband of seventy counts of rape, were instrumental in this shift. Victor Burnham had over many years subjected his wife, Rebecca, to “beatings, being struck by gun butts, being held at gunpoint, being threatened with death, being tied up and raped, being forced to solicit strange men for sexual threesomes, being photographed in pornographic poses, being shocked with a cattle prod, and being forced to have sex with the family dog.” The trial included both pictorial evidence and sworn testimony from men who had been “invited” by Burnham to have sex with his wife and declined, recognizing Rebecca’s fear.

  Louise McOrmond-Plummer, coauthor of Real Rape, Real Pain and herself a rape survivor, wrote, “The woman raped by her partner was routinely blamed and told that since her rapist was her partner, it wasn’t ‘real’ rape. Women such as myself were being told that our pain was an overreaction; the fact of being in a relationship meant that any sexual rights were void.”

  • • •

  Ashley Green is blonde, slender, and fragile as a reed. She radiates a longing for protection. Growing up with poor white parents in western Pennsylvania, where her father worked intermittently as a coal miner, she had little of it. Both parents were negligent, physically abusive drug users. When Ashley’s father despaired of finding work, they moved to Florida. Ashley would often come home from school to find her depressed mother lying on the floor exactly where she had lain in the morning. Ashley was never sure whether there would be food to eat or when the electricity was going to be disconnected again. She had just turned sixteen when she met thirty-five-year-old Martin at a party. During the next year, he accompanied Ashley to church, paid for her to attend volleyball camp, suggested that he would get her a car. She already had a nineteen-year-old boyfriend, but she did not discourage Martin’s friendship, which was nonsexual in a way characteristic of men who are grooming a victim.