“He was very good-looking. Same physical size as me. He had good features. Blond hair—a Beach Boy look.”
“Abby says that she was really in love with him. Do you think that is true?” I ask.
“We both had girlfriends…. You were of the moment back then. She was infatuated with him. She was in love with him as much as a sixteen-year-old is capable of being in love. But it wasn’t reciprocated, I can tell you that. She was available. And other girls were also available.”
“Did you ever see any signs of instability in Brian?” I ask.
“No. He was pretty rational.”
“Apparently he was obsessed with poetry. Did you ever notice that?”
“I was not aware of any obsession,” he says. “But he wrote me a couple of letters from prison that had some poetry in them.” He lost the letters, he tells me, when he got divorced and moved.
“When we were in high school, Brian and I were on Highland Street, and some kids from Cambridge came by. We went to a party with them. We ended up doing acid with Timothy Leary,” he says.
“Were you part of an experiment?” I ask.
“No! It was just a party. His use of acid was not strictly academic.” He corrects me, somewhat prissily. I imagine he is nursing a judgment against academics—their naïveté, their veinless pedantry, so removed from real lives and real passions.
“What was he like?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I was stoned out of my mind. I didn’t realize who he was until later, when I read about him in a magazine.
“You never knew where we’d end up. Friday or Saturday night, someone would say, There’s a party over there, in whatever town, and we’d go.
“Brian was the one with a car. Filomena gave him a car at one point. When he was sixteen. For his birthday, or maybe it was Christmas. She gave him what seemed to us very extravagant gifts.”
“What kind of car was it?” I ask.
“A Studebaker. They don’t make them anymore. A green Studebaker.
“It wasn’t new,” he adds. “But still it seemed an extravagant gift to us at the time.”
“Did he seem tortured?” I ask, wanting to avoid an extended discussion on the topic of cars.
“No. Maybe about his father,” he reconsiders. “He felt really bad that his father gave him up, didn’t want him.”
“What about his adoptive father?” I ask. “What was he like?”
“Ken was fairly strict. But Ken and Ellen—they cared for him a lot. Until the drugs kicked in. Then they really didn’t know how to handle him. They would try being strict. They would ground him. But he would sneak out of the house after they went to bed. Then they tried being lenient, but that didn’t work either.
“He might have had signs of—what do you call that?—OCD,” he says, apparently reconsidering his earlier position.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“He would insist on listening to the Beach Boys twenty-four/seven.”
The 1990s expression is jarring. I’m feeling the mood of the 1960s—before hard work and commercialism became so fashionable. I have entered this story and entered Simon’s mood; a habit I learned trying to get terrorists to talk to me, a style of conversation that comes naturally to me now when I’m trying to understand something that terrifies me. But as Simon continues, I’m pulled right back in.
“Then it would be Dylan. Then it would be the Stones. If someone tried to stop him, he would get angry. There was no moderation. He was gung ho.
“And he was a risk taker,” Simon repeats. “He had the money to buy gas for his car, but he always wanted to steal gas from a farmer down the road instead of buying it because he thought stealing was more fun. He got a thrill out of doing these things.”
“Do you know how he lost his virginity?” I ask, aware that I’m intruding onto territory where I don’t belong. Not because we’re talking about the man who I suspect was my rapist. At this moment we aren’t—we are talking about Simon’s childhood friend and, I suspect, his lover (perhaps the lover that Brian Beat referred to in his efforts to get out of the draft). I am feeling myself to be a teenager at this moment, not cool enough to be part of their clique. Not the sort of girl who would have been friendly with these boys, but the sort they would disdain. And I’m poaching, pretending to myself and to Simon that I would have been their kind.
“We were both twelve,” he says. “We talked about it. We wanted to do it. There was a girl in our neighborhood. She was fifteen. She was developed. She looked good in a bathing suit. She was willing to have sex with us. So we all did it, together,” he states—as if wanting a girl and having a girl were tantamount to the same thing.
“You mean you were together in the same room?” I ask, surprised.
“Yes,” he confirms.
“Did Brian like it?” I ask.
I cannot imagine where I got the audacity to ask these questions or why Simon didn’t kick me right out of his office. There must be a part of me that needs to imagine my rapist as a virgin—in order to see him as a human being rather than a beast, an aberration. And there must be a part of Simon that knows I need this and wants me to have it.
“I think so,” Simon says.
“Did you remain friends with her?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “She was one of the girls we had sex with. We also had sex with her younger sister. She was twelve or thirteen.”
So she was fifteen, and had a younger sister, too. I don’t process this right away. All I notice is that something about this story makes me fly higher—my self now out of the room, out of reach.
And then it comes to me. I was fifteen, too. I, too, had a little sister. The forcing that ripped my flesh, tore it so that it would never return to its original state. My younger sister was fourteen. The two girls. The watching. The theater.
“After we got out of prison, I said to Brian, Brian, this is not for me. I sort of cut off our relationship then. We were seventeen or eighteen. I would run into his parents, and they would tell me what he was up to. He and John Henry went down to the Cape. They worked down there for a while.”
I ask Simon if there is anything else he thinks I ought to know about this person, Brian Beat, victim, perpetrator.
He thinks for a minute, and then repeats, apologetically, “I really cut off relations with him when we were seventeen or eighteen, so there really isn’t much else I can add.”
For reasons I can’t really explain, I blurt out, “You really should tell your son about the period you spent in prison. I think it would help him to know this.”
He seems to consider the idea.
Why did I say that? I am embarrassed by my outburst.
Still, I have an idea that both of us have been changed, at least in a small way, by what we shared in the last hour. And that he will probably tell his son soon, and that his son will be relieved to hear the story. And that the planes of his face will settle into a less shamed state.
Jack, my intrepid research assistant, has gone back to Milbridge several times, to see what he can learn by hanging around at Global Gas. He discovers that one of the Beats’ neighbors, who lived there at the time Brian Beat was growing up, is still living in the same house.
I call Mary several times, and eventually she agrees to meet with me. Chet, once again, agrees to drive me. Once again, he takes time off from work. I’m terribly embarrassed about having to ask him, but we both know that I won’t make it if I drive alone.
We chat cheerfully in the car, as if we were on an outing. Chet knows the way now, and I have become an old hand at being driven out to this awful town. It is hot. As we get closer, I begin to sink. I have no feeling I can name. Only a sense of wilting. I am lost in a sea of sleepiness.
The houses in the area seem tiny to a twenty-first-century eye. A post–World War II development, built for millworkers seeking a new life in the suburbs. Were people smaller then? I feel claustrophobic even looking at these houses, even more so when Mary opens the door
to her parlor. She is a small person. She just got a perm, right before we arrived. Her hair is done up in a pale blue bouffant. A suffocating profusion of drapes, chests, and glass display cases crowds out light and air. “Sit down.” She smiles, pointing to a velvet sofa, robin’s-egg blue. I sink down into spent foam depths. She offers me a glass of water. I am so hot after the long drive. There are silver-and gold-colored coins painted on the sides of the glass. An embarrassing string of unkind thoughts come into my mind: contaminated wells, lead paint, poverty, incest, mentally retarded children.
I drink the water. The side table is crowded with photographs and statuettes. Kittens and children. I’m confused about where to place the glass. I push a kitten to the side. I feel awkward, too big for this house, too big for Mary.
I know that Brian Beat lived in this neighborhood, but until Mary tells me, I don’t realize he grew up right across the street. “They were here when we moved in,” Mary tells me, pointing to a small house directly across the street. “They were the original owners of that house.”
I see a coffin-shaped house across the street.
“When was it built?” I ask. Nineteen forty-nine, she tells me. All the houses on the street were built back then.
“How well did you know Brian?” I ask.
“I watched him grow up,” she says. “He was a very polite kid.
“Disturbed,” she inserts. I check my notes several times. Could I have imagined that she said that?
“I was divorced, and I had to work. I used to drop my daughter off at their house to wait for the bus there.
“He hung himself in the garage,” she says. “Right by the door that goes into the kitchen. I had gone out bowling that day. Right there, in that garage.”
She points across the street, to a white garage. The houses here, everything so neat and small.
“At one point I had a serious argument with her,” Mary says, referring to Brian Beat’s mother.
“What was the argument about?” I ask.
“I can’t tell you. I don’t like to speak ill of people. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,” she says.
As she says this, she pulls herself up to her full height. She must be four foot ten. I feel myself cowering slightly under her gaze, like a child who has been reprimanded for sneaking around, spying on people. I am not of your kind, the kind who would speak ill of the dead, she seems to be telling me.
I try to control my thoughts, but I discover that I cannot. My mind keeps returning to the image of Brian Beat, swinging from the door between the kitchen and the garage, in the small house across the narrow street.
“Tell me more about what Brian was like as a kid,” I say, steering us, I hope, back to a more innocent time.
“He was a loner. He always dressed well. He was a couple of years old when they moved here. He was the same age as my daughter.
“He went to Catholic school. St. Louis. We aren’t Catholic. But he didn’t take to it, and he switched.”
“Do you know why?” I ask.
“No, I don’t know,” she says. “I’m not Catholic,” she repeats.
“Do you think it is possible that Brian was abused by a priest?” I ask, astonishing myself with this question. Detective Remas was the one who put this thought in my mind, but it seems rude to mention this topic to an elderly lady.
“I wouldn’t know,” she says.
She thinks for a moment and then adds, “There are a lot of boys today who have been abused; it happens all the time around here. There was that priest in Milbridge who was shipped to a neighboring town. One in Northbridge, too. One in Webster. It was going on all over the place around here until someone was finally brave enough to speak up.”
Now she drifts back to a later period, after Brian was released from prison. Did something happen back then that makes it hard for her to remain on the topic of the long-ago past? Something that made her mad at Brian Beat’s mother?
“He walked a lot. He rode a bicycle. But he got into an accident, and the bike got ruined. When Kenell [Brian’s father] had to go for treatments, Brian drove him. Every day he drove him. The treatments were in Worcester, off of 290.
“My daughter Kathy was good friends with his cousin Carla. Carla stayed here a lot. In the summer. Ellen [Brian’s mother] took care of her a lot of the time.”
“Ellen was a very critical person. She was blunt. Kenell was quiet. She would criticize me for anything,” she adds, gratuitously. I can see that something remains unresolved between Mary and her former neighbor, even though Ellen is now dead.
“I still don’t know why he committed suicide. It was a shame,” she says, referring again to the recent past.
“He knew that she was going to visit Kenell’s grave,” she adds, taking Ellen’s side for a moment, thinking about what it must have been like for Ellen to get up from breakfast and find her fifty-nine-year-old son hanging from the door frame, blocking her way to the car she intended to drive to the grave of her husband, whom she had buried less than three weeks before.
I am no longer conducting this interview. I let Mary talk and take notes, trying to follow the broken thread of her logic, while concentrating on avoiding thoughts of rape/rope.
“When he was going to high school, he quit several times. Moved down to the Cape. He would go to the Cape with only a nickel in his pocket. To Provincetown.”
I look up from my notes to ask why he was attracted to Provincetown. She doesn’t know.
How could a young man survive in Provincetown with only a nickel in his pocket?
“I went to the funeral. I was asked, so I went. The service was at the cemetery. It wasn’t in the church. North cemetery. Near the high school. Past the center of town.
“Ellen never went to church. Kenell went every week. He went alone. Ellen was bossy. Anything she wanted him to do, he’d do. Caspar Milquetoast. She was a very jealous person. He couldn’t do anything without her okay.
“I don’t think anyone in Milbridge knew he’d been in jail,” she says, lurching back to the topic of Brian Beat. This is not the impression I got from the police or from other people in Milbridge.
“But anyway, he was never on the list of people to be afraid of.” Does she mean a list of sexual predators? Does she know that when the police realized that he had slipped through the cracks and were about to put him on that list, Brian hung himself?
“He was a nice-looking kid,” she emphasizes. Again, the broken thread of logic. “He had everything to live for. They bought him whatever he wanted. But he changed when he knew he was adopted.”
“Do you know how old Brian was when he found out he was adopted?” I ask.
“Well, it happened in grammar school. Ellen told me. On the playground. Some kid. You know how kids are. They got into an argument. The kid said, ‘You haven’t even got a father. You’re adopted.’ That is how he found out about it.”
“How did that child know?” I ask.
“From his parents.”
“Was Brian upset?”
“He got upset about it when he was a teenager. He was an only child. He never had anybody to talk to.”
There was a pause.
I ask whether Kathy, Mary’s daughter, might be willing to talk to me.
“No,” she says, a little too loudly, slamming that door shut. “She doesn’t want to think about any of this. I’m certain she would not.”
Afterward, I wonder what memory Mary is protecting her daughter from.
I need to take my leave now. I can no longer keep my focus. The effort not to think about Brian Beat swinging across the street is pressing in on me.
I ask to use the bathroom. The toilet seat is made of that soft plastic that your buttocks sink into. Enveloping and warm, just like the sofa. I wash my hands with Mary’s antibacterial soap. My hands feel stripped. Superficially clean. I smell chemically sweet, of generic ersatz flowers, the scent of a funeral home. I think of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Howard Hughes, I tell myself. He
would have been paranoid about this soap, too.
I take my leave. As we’re walking out the door, Mary tells Chet, “He was a smart kid. But what he did was dumb.”
What was dumb? The rape? The rope he hung himself from? Whatever he did or did not do to her daughter? Why does she tell Chet this, and not me?
We are outside at last. You can breathe out here. Chet proposes to drive me around the block. We find the stream where Simon Brown told us that Brian Beat played as a child; and where, later, when he was homeless, he lived. The water is barely running now, in this heat. The smell of skunk cabbage. Empty soda cans littering the side. I imagine Brian Beat’s feet sinking into the black mud. I see him washing his clothing in the stream, hanging it to dry from sticks. Those dirty feet. I push the feet out of my mind.
We circle back to the Beats’ house, 1 Orton Place. Built in 1949. A white fence encircles the yard. A small statue of Mother Mary. An angel. Two Norway spruces. Everything proper. Everything fenced in. We are in the sad hour of the afternoon, when the searing pain of the suburbs sinks into your heart.
We drive to the end of the dead-end road. The stream is wilder here, the water flows. The birds seem happy this year, I’ve noticed. Their song is not sweet; not today, at least. But it is joyful. As if they don’t know a rapist of children lived and died on their street.
chapter six
Climbing Away
We all try and we all fail, at least to some degree. My father has tried harder than most. My father and I continue our conversation about fear, the shameful under-current of so much our lives, both his and mine, but about which we never spoke, until now.
“Do you like taking risks?” I ask him. It is still the same day he told me about the Nazis. I know the answer to this—I’ve been the beneficiary as well as the victim of my father’s love of risk. But I’m not sure he knows that he is drawn to danger.
He thinks for a moment. I wonder if he considers risk-seeking behavior irresponsible.
“Calculated risks, yes,” he says. “Professionally, yes,” he adds, electing to stay on safe ground. “My program was to be canceled at Lincoln Lab [MIT’s defense lab, where my father worked for nearly forty years], and I had to pick a new target for the group. I could have followed everyone in the field.
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