But Abby suddenly recollects that she’s not talking to an old friend. “My daughter,” she explains.
I do not ask where this daughter is. I do not want to meet her.
“Should I have told her or not?” she asks.
I am relieved that she doesn’t wait for my response.
“I would have wanted to be told who my father was, even if he were accused of rape. I did what I thought was right. He stopped over a couple of times. She was a little afraid of him. Sometimes he acted bizarrely. I wanted to protect her.”
Protect her from what, exactly? I cannot follow the flow of her logic here, but again, I don’t want to interrupt her.
“Things could have happened for him. He was so smart. But I just couldn’t save him. I had to protect my daughter,” she repeats.
If she is persuaded that Brian Beat was innocent of raping children, from what, exactly, was she feeling the need to protect her daughter?
After he got out of prison, he changed, she repeats. “He became a loner, a recluse. He walked all day long, from Milbridge, to Webster, and back. Once I picked him up; I’m not sure he even recognized me. But he was still gorgeous. He was so strong. He walked all the time, very muscular. He was in fantastic shape.
“It was so awful—Why did he hang himself? He had nothing. Sometimes you think about these things. Someone I cared so much about. But I just couldn’t take him in. He was crazy. I was a nurse. I know he should have been on meds. You can’t help someone like that if they won’t take their meds.”
She is crying now, sobbing, actually. I consider whether I ought to hug her, but decide that it would be dishonest. How can I comfort her about the death of the man the police believe raped my sister and me? I feel an overwhelming sense of compassion toward Abby, but I am immobilized by confusion. I can’t comfort her—not only because she is mourning the death of a man who was convicted of raping children, but also because I don’t know how.
In this moment I tell myself that she and I are of different species: she—outwardly tough but inwardly shattered; I—effete on the outside but tough as nails on the inside. She looks so alone, so vulnerable, sitting there on a cold metal chair under the stark lighting, surrounded by her neighbors whom she doesn’t know. But the compassion I feel is mixed with horror, shame, moralistic judgment, and guilt. In her presence I am profoundly aware of how unfair life is. She grew up in Milbridge, Massachusetts—where drunks and pedophiles were common and commonly on display, and where girls learned to expect abuse and prepare for it. I grew up in Concord—where drunks and pedophiles are well-bred and secretive, where good girls, of which, at this moment, I know I am not one, learn the fine art of denial.
She pulls herself together.
Out of the blue, she tells me, “I saw my father sexually abusing my older sister. I was so afraid. We were moving into a new house, and we were staying in an apartment. The apartment had one large room. Sally was in a bed in the corner, and my sister Fay and I were sleeping in a double bed. He came in, in the middle of the night. He was half shit-faced, as we used to say.”
This is just impossible, I’m getting more than I asked for. Can I ask her to stop, to keep these secrets to herself? I know that I cannot. It would be cruel.
“He went right over to Sally’s bed. I covered my face. I was young; I didn’t really understand what was going on. I was young, but I wasn’t stupid. She didn’t yell, but I know I didn’t imagine it. After that I never trusted my father. I always left my door open a particular way, so that if he opened it to come in, it would squeak.
“Even back then I didn’t sleep that well,” she says, launching into a discussion of the effects of a medication she takes for sleep.
“Where was your mother?” I ask.
“She had gone to the hospital for a gallbladder operation,” Abby explains. “She left us alone with him.”
I know all about this, these mothers who get sick and the wolves who move in, but I remain silent.
As I leave, I spell out my name for Abby and give her my phone number. “Jessica Stern,” she intones slowly. “That name will be famous someday.” Not, “You will be famous someday,” but “that name.” I ask what she means by that, thinking that perhaps she has seen my name in connection with my work on terrorism. “I just think we will all know that name someday,” she says. Does she mean that my name will mean something to her in the future that it doesn’t mean to her today?
I leave Abby, strongly considering the possibility that Brian Beat was not my rapist. No, that’s not quite right. Let me try again. I leave Abby, doubting that I was raped at all. Abby’s face and Abby’s world seem much more real to me now than my own rape. And I am suddenly worried about hurting Abby, or especially her daughter.
We are sisters of sorts, both having had sex with this man. But the man she had sex with was “gorgeous” and “charismatic,” even if “cold during the sex act.” The man I had sex with—if we can call rape sex—Let me start again. The man who penetrated me was a skinny pedophile for whom foreplay included demanding, under threat of death, that my sister and I put on our little sisters’ clothing. Our sisters were then eight and nine. That man penetrated me with his shame.
Shame, I realize now, is an infectious disease. Shame can be sexually transmitted.
Now that I have learned that Simon Brown was another member of Brian Beat’s close circle of friends, I do what I can to find him. Once again, I find it hard to call anyone who knew Brian Beat. Once again, Jack locates Simon, and even makes an appointment for me.
Simon has asked me to come to his office, which is located in an old industrial city near my rapist’s hometown. He runs a company that supplies sprinklers for use in large buildings. Chet has taken the day off, once again, to drive me to my interview.
The closer we get to Simon Brown’s office, the more detached I feel, as if I were floating slightly above the ground. In the car, I cannot bear the sound of music. The notes are sharp, or flat, or in any case not right.
The building where his office is housed is stark and anesthetized-looking. Once inside the building, under the fluorescent lights, I feel even worse. I lose my ground in generic buildings like this one, the sort where inside, you could be anywhere in America. Without a sense of place, I float even higher. But you probably wouldn’t notice that I’m floating if you saw me in this state. I would seem more officious than normal, more efficient, perhaps a bit rushed and cold; but not like a person who doesn’t sense the ground under her feet.
Simon Brown’s receptionist pushes a buzzer and informs him over an intercom, “Your ten o’clock is here.”
Simon Brown is ready for me. The assistant directs me to his office, right around the corner from where she sits.
I try to observe him carefully. It takes an effort to force my brain to process visual stimuli in this floaty state. I’m far more likely to notice sounds or moods or scents. I note that he is slender, with gray hair. He has handsome features, almost stately. He looks respectable. I sense that fastidiousness and debauchery might have wrestled for control at some point in the past. Fastidiousness won the battle long ago.
My attention is immediately drawn to the sound from a printer in the corner, which is spitting out blueprints. I ask him what the plans are for. “It’s a blueprint for a very large building. We do everything on CAD [computer-aided design] now,” he tells me.
I am relieved that there is something being designed and produced here. There is something for my mind to catch hold of. Details of other people’s lives always tether me. To have one’s attention held—to be fully engaged in anything—relieves this floaty feeling, which is painfully annoying. It is like being stuck between earth and heaven, not quite alive but also not dead, accessible to neither people nor angels.
Simon answers my questions about how long he’s been in business and who his clients are, and asks if I know a government-office building in Central Square where he has a new contract requiring his staff to acquire security
clearances.
Eventually we turn to the business at hand. He has heard from my research assistant that I am writing a book about victims and perpetrators that is partly about Brian Beat.
Without being asked, he tells me right away, “I don’t believe Beat raped anyone. I’m quite certain of it,” he adds.
“Why are you so certain?” I ask.
“I don’t want to go into all the details,” he says, apparently imagining that the intimate details of his life or the life of his dead friend would be boring to a stranger. I want to urge him on; I am never bored by people’s life stories, or by the stories they tell themselves. But I restrain myself, confining myself to one question.
“Was Brian Beat gay?” I ask, puzzled by Simon’s caginess.
“No, I’m sure he wasn’t gay.” Again, Simon doesn’t hesitate.
“Well—I can’t speak for what happened when he was in prison. But he wasn’t gay when I knew him,” Simon adds, unnecessarily.
Once again, I am aware of the strong planes of Simon’s face, as if an architect had a hand in designing his features. The planes have softened with age, and there is that whiff of sensuality about his mouth, apparently renounced in favor of propriety. In this altered state, which I’ve been in before, I can feel my way—as if my mind had fingers, as if his features were a form of braille—into what I imagine is my interlocutor’s character.
Oddly enough, when I am in this altered state, my interlocutors bare their souls. The communication between us is a life raft in a wild river, as if both of us would drown if we didn’t speak. My job is to ask, their job to tell. It feels to me, in interviews like this one, that if I don’t ask (with or without words), if they don’t answer, we will drag each other down in a sea of fear. I cannot control whether I enter this altered state, but it almost always happens when I’m interviewing terrorists.
Here I see propriety softened by the sadness of unmet expectations. In place of those expectations I sense kindness, acceptance. There is a hint of shame in the corners of his mouth, which you might not notice right away, distracted by the handsome planes of his cheeks. I note these fleeting observations, and I place them aside. Even though I’ve been through this before, at some level I know that these judgments might reflect my own prejudices. I will let Simon’s story unfold in his words, at his pace.
“I was living out of state at the time he was accused. But I have a hard time imagining…We dated the same girls. A lot of them. It was the period of, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Not necessarily in that order.
“I’ve had no contact with him to speak of since I was twenty-one,” he tells me, “other than seeing him on the street.”
“You mean when he was a street person?” I ask.
“Yes,” he confirms, his eyes looking out now at some horizon, some sad memory.
“You never met Brian?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
In this moment I have fully inhabited his sadness, the sadness of observing a close friend throw his life away.
A minute later I am shocked to realize what I have done: I just lied. Worse still, I fully believed the lie in the moment I uttered it. I am a reporter here, not a victim of rape, certainly not the victim of this Brian we’re discussing. Now I begin to watch myself more closely, wanting to avoid inadvertently lying again, wanting to avoid inadvertently revealing more than I intend. I will correct this lie, I tell myself, at the first opportunity.
“How old were you when you met him?” I ask.
“We moved to Milbridge when I was in third grade. We were very good friends from the time we were eight years old. We went to school together until high school. I went to Milbridge High. He went to high school in Worcester, to an agricultural school. A surprising choice for him. He was extremely bright, extremely entrepreneurial,” Simon explains.
“What do you mean by entrepreneurial?” I ask.
“You never met him…,” he says. And I interject. “Actually, I did. I completely forgot about it. I met him, very briefly, a long time ago.”
On a track of his own, he lets this go by, as if it didn’t matter. Or maybe he already knows the actual source of my curiosity about his childhood friend. Perhaps it is easier to imagine that I didn’t know Brian. In any case, I didn’t know the Brian he is describing.
He continues. “One summer we bought root beer and sold it on the street. We each made around a thousand dollars. Another time we bought several hundred ears of corn, and we walked door to door to sell it. We made a hundred to two hundred dollars per week.
“He was a risk taker. Very curious. Always wanting to try something new. He would often get into quote/unquote ‘trouble.’ There was a river near our houses. We trapped muskrats to sell the fur. When the ice starting breaking up, we would use icebergs as a boats, travel down the river that way.”
“Do you think he might have been sexually abused by a priest?” I ask.
Simon doesn’t seem surprised by the question, and he has a ready answer.
“No. It’s the sort of thing he would have told me about. I’m sure he would have told me if he were,” he says.
I wonder to myself, How can he be so confident?
“And anyway, he went to church in grammar school and middle school, but he stopped going by the time he got to high school. His mother wanted him to go, but he always found a way out of it.”
“It might have happened when he was really young,” I suggest. “When he was at that Catholic elementary school. And it isn’t the sort of thing that kids necessarily talked about back then. You would have had to be really close. Were you really that close?” I ask.
I have a slightly heady feeling—as if we have switched to a different atmospheric plane, where the normal social rules don’t apply. The way you might ask impertinent but crucial questions when you are speaking to someone who is about to die. Will he be annoyed?
He seems surprised rather than annoyed, as if he had never thought about this, but also persuaded. “I guess you’re right,” he says. “But I still think I would have known if the priest at Saint Roch’s was abusing boys. Everyone in the neighborhood was Catholic. And I used to see the priest at social functions, at dances.”
I don’t bother telling him how many of the priests at Saint Roch’s were kicked out for preying on young children, or the rumors about sexual abuse at Brian’s school.
Time to change the topic.
“People keep telling me that he changed when he realized he was adopted. Did you notice that?” I ask.
He agrees. “What he told me was that his biological mother had an affair when she was in high school. His biological mother gave him to her older sister to raise. He would have been approaching sixty today; he was born in ’47. In those days it was unheard-of for a woman to raise a child on her own. He was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid—and then he discovered that his cousin was actually his sister, his aunt was actually his mother.”
“Did his biological mother ever marry?” I ask.
“No. Filomena was a little nutty. She had a long-term boyfriend. But twice a year she would break up with him, and she would take up with two or three other men. Then she would get back together with her boyfriend. It was very strange for us, to see Brian’s aunt, who was actually his mother, showing up at his house with different men. We lived in a stable neighborhood. Everything was very hush-hush. So this was pretty shocking.”
“How old was Brian’s birth mother when she had the daughter she kept?” I ask.
“Carla was two years younger than Brian. Only two years younger,” he repeats, as if for the first time noticing how painful it must have been for Brian to learn that his birth mother felt able to raise his sister on her own, but not able to raise him, even though she still wasn’t married when she gave birth to his younger sister two years after she gave him up for adoption.
“I saw Filomena’s daughter at Brian’s funeral. Carla. I liked Carla,” he says.
“Were Carla and Brian close?”
I ask.
“They were quite close when they thought they were cousins. And they stayed close when they learned they were brother and sister. We saw a lot of them. Filomena came by around twice a month. I liked Carla,” he repeats.
“I heard that there was a group of you that hung around together. Brian, you, Abby, John. Is that right?”
“Yes,” he confirms. “And Carla,” he adds.
“Did you hear that John Henry had died?” I ask.
“It wouldn’t surprise me. He took a lot of drugs. We all did back then, but Brian and John—they didn’t stop.
“Brian and I went to jail together because of drugs,” he offers.
Some painful truths are fair game, it seems.
Out of the corner of my eye I observe a new awkwardness in his demeanor, a look of distaste, as if the proper side of Simon were half disgusted with the more sensual side he left behind. The proper side was still in control, but was prepared to allow the hungrier side to unburden itself of some shame, to seek absolution.
“We were in Bridgewater State together for a couple of months. Then in Worcester. After that I was done with that life. No more drugs.
“And I was finished with Brian, in fact,” he says, as if washing his hands of Brian yet again.
“Sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” he repeats. “I’m not at all proud of it. It was a time of experimentation. We all experimented. But jail hit me pretty hard. It wasn’t just a slap on the wrist.
“I’ve never told my son about this,” he confides. “He knows I didn’t go to college, but he has no idea why.”
I am intensely interested in this topic—the secrets that don’t get told, that become malignant in the not-telling. But I stop myself from asking more. Brian is the story here.
“Did Brian get raped in jail?” I ask.
“No. He didn’t,” Simon says. Too quickly. I wonder to myself, once again, why he is so certain, why he is so sure he would have known, but I let the subject drop.
“Abby says that Brian was very good-looking. Is that true?” I ask. “What did he look like?”
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