“Talk to you,” he says.
I am surprised, because I don’t recall my father making any special effort to talk to us.
“About what?” I ask.
“I tried to get your mind off it. Not dwell on the rape. Dwell on things that have to do with life. That would have been my reaction. To try to put it behind you and then move on. And help you with that.”
“So you read the material I gave you. Your first reaction was to judge me for being preoccupied, for contemplating my navel, as you used to say.” I say this even though I, too, see the seductive appeal of moving on, not contemplating one’s navel.
“Yes, that was one of my favorite expressions,” he admits. “I’ve seen people who were preoccupied with the past…,” he says, not finishing the thought, but disapprovingly.
“So you thought Sara and I should forget about what happened and move on? As you did, after you escaped the Nazis, and after our mother died?”
“Yes,” he says. “And seizing opportunities and life as they present themselves. That would have been my attitude. It still is.
“I believe the best revenge is to live,” he says.
This sounds sensible, even admirable. What I love and admire the most about my father is his capacity for joy. My father is drawn to euphoria. He finds those moments of sun so intense that you barely feel the subzero cold. That may be the most precious gift he has given us.
But then I wonder—revenge against whom? Against God for allowing Nazis and rapists?
We move on.
“What is courage?” I ask.
“Bearing witness. That is a form of courage. Accepting reality as best as one knows how.”
“When did you come to that position?” I ask.
“All my life,” he says.
“What have you borne witness to in your life?” I ask.
“Watching your mother die…not withdrawing like some people do. Watching my sister die. I’m going to visit her tomorrow. It is very painful to see her.
“Talking to you now,” he adds.
I smile.
“I agree with that,” I tell him, firmly. “You are very courageous to talk to me now.”
“But I want to help you,” he says, apparently not realizing that his bearing witness, for the first time, is help enough.
Still, I feel abandoned by this word help. He is pushing me away again. I don’t want him to help me. I want him to know me.
“What do you think I do for a living?” I ask, a bit superciliously.
“You teach and write,” he answers, puzzled.
“What do I write about?”
“Terrorists,” he says.
“What do you think I’m doing in my writing? Would you say that I am bearing witness?”
“Yes, I suppose you are,” he concedes.
“Is it truly courage if you bear witness, but you don’t feel anything?” I ask.
“Oh, sure, you’re right,” my father concedes again.
I wonder if he truly believes that.
“What are your most important values?” I ask.
“Honesty…integrity…the sense that if I make a commitment, I keep it. Steadfastness and the capacity to love. And to enjoy,” he adds, as if admonishing me for what he perceives, at least in this moment, as my willful refusal to enjoy life.
“You don’t seem to have had an emotional reaction to the material I gave you,” I shoot back.
“I wasn’t suffused with an emotion,” he says. “I thought you were revisiting something that happened long ago…it was a preoccupation.”
Oh, my God. Again I have to hear this. We are stuck, my father and I. I slash again and again at our mutual denial about what happened and what we would have felt had we been able to feel at the time these events occurred. And he keeps reverting to the accusation that I am preoccupied by the past. I have a notion that if we can admit what happened to us, if we can feel it, we will be freer of demons. But maybe not.
We take a short break. I make us some more tea, and we get back to work. “Why didn’t you come home after we were raped?” I ask, finally getting to the question I most want to ask him. My annoyance with both of us has eroded my fear of broaching this topic.
“I think you’re confused about the timing,” he says. He doesn’t seem to remember now what happened. Although he dutifully read the material I wrote about my rape before coming to see me, he seems to have forgotten to read the letter he wrote to me in 1994, in which he explained that he was scheduled to be home in three days. Still, he has excuses for what he now says he doesn’t remember.
“Sidney [our physician] saw you at the Emerson hospital,” my father says.
“No, he didn’t. His partner did,” I correct him.
“And he reported that you were well cared for,” my father says. “You had Lisa there, and you didn’t really want me.”
My father had “moved on,” I understand now. He was living in his future with his new wife, not in his painful past, when he left my sister and me with his ex-wife, who had not adopted us.
I have always felt that my longing for a mother was childish. Forbidden. It might slow us down. A shameful perversion, right up there with S and M. Probably worse.
Yes, Lisa was caring for us in my father’s absence. She was taking good care of us. But our father knew that our relationship with Lisa was complex. We had come to love her as our mother, but she did not always think of us as her children. And who could blame her?
Soon after my father married Lisa, she and our father urged us to refer to her as our mother. She must have wanted daughters as much as we wanted a mother. At first it felt false to call Lisa my mother. I started with “Marmy,” from Little Women, graduating gradually to “Mom.” By the time I was able to utter the word “Mom,” without feeling like a Sarah Bernhardt, as we said back then, I had imprinted on her like a duckling. I hadn’t noticed that she wasn’t in fact a mother duck, through no fault of her own, but a swan.
I was very angry at my father when he insisted, two years before my sister and I were raped, that we move in with him and his third wife, yanking us from the home of our half sisters and Lisa. But it turned out I was mad at my father for the wrong reasons. It was not my father who had initiated this change, but Lisa. My father didn’t or couldn’t tell us the truth; he wanted to protect us. Our love for Lisa was only intermittently requited, which made us feel the loss of her even more keenly. She had not adopted us, but we had adopted her utterly.
As a small child, I was unusually quiet, a very good girl. But something happened to me by the time I reached puberty. I took on the mantle of difficult child: I was defiant, annoyingly loyal to ideas and persons, skeptical, and tough. I had a hard time accepting Lisa as my second mother, and an even harder time leaving her. But Sara was different: she drank love in, whatever its source. She was beguilingly cheerful and sweet. Anyone would want to take care of such a child, I would have thought. But I would be wrong. I am certain that Lisa loved us, just as we loved her. But we were second class in both households, and would remain so. My father, however, preferred not to notice.
Denial was seductive, not just for us. Despite my efforts to accept the adults’ words, the evidence of my senses kept leaking in, and the gap between what was acceptable to think and what a bad, ungrateful girl could not help but observe grew dizzyingly wide. We tried not to notice the obvious disparity in presents for the “real” children and presents for us. But children do notice such things. When I did notice, I felt greedy and ashamed, hoping that my feelings did not show on my face. When Sara and I were not included in a family photograph at our aunt Judy’s wedding—Judy, who had been my best friend—I found myself dizzy with confusion. I felt suddenly light and unburdened from the loss of my family, but also alone, unprotected, in a brave new world. Family photographs on the fridges of both houses included our stepmothers’ “real” children, but not my sister and me. Of the eight children in the two households, we were the only two who needed bra
ces who didn’t get them, but nobody seemed to notice. We were the only ones without a mother to insist.
I tried not to notice. I felt ashamed of feeling pained about such trivial matters—presents and photographs and American-looking teeth. Eventually I came to accept the only explanation that made sense: the grown-ups were good and wise, as grown-ups should be, and I was bad. That conclusion made sense, in part because I was in fact a terror. I would come to see myself as second-class, not just in the context of my family but in the world at large. When good things happen to me in life—and oh, my Lord, they do, again and again—I’m sure there must be a case of mistaken identity.
Even today, typing these words, I feel like a brave but naughty child removing a Band-Aid. Look where I tore off the bandage! There is nothing here but a hypertrophic scar where a dead mother should be. And yet, had I the audacity to mention the word motherless when I was a child, it would have been interpreted as a sign of immoral ingratitude and severe instability. In denying that we were motherless, the adults, I am certain, had our best interests in mind. No one wanted to harm us. On the contrary, they wanted to protect us.
“You had projected onto her motherhood. You were going through that myth that Lisa was your mother,” he says, disdainfully.
I am astonished that my father would now see my accepting Lisa as my mother, at least as long as she chose to play that role, as a form of what he now calls “projection.” I was only doing what I was told. How was I to know that eventually my father would see this mother as a myth?
“But didn’t you play a role in creating that myth?” I ask.
“How?”
We have sunk into a kind of cleansing rage, my father and I, divulging secret, shameful thoughts that we would not share in our normal states of mind.
“By banishing the memory or thought of our mother from our lives. No pictures anywhere in the house. I didn’t even know that you had any pictures of her until two years ago,” I say, in what I now imagine was a childish, rageful tone of voice.
“You never asked,” he says, softly.
“But you helped create that myth,” I insist.
“In suppressing Shola. Yes, I guess I did.”
Silence.
“Why did you do that? Was it just ‘Move on—don’t think about the past,’ just move on to the next phase? Are you sure you didn’t banish the memory of our mother because it was too painful for you to bear?
“Did you do this for yourself or for us?” I repeat.
In reading over these notes now, I can hardly believe that I had the courage to utter those words.
“I didn’t give it much thought. Decorating houses with pictures of your dead wife didn’t seem like a good idea when you have a new wife,” he says, apparently not wishing to ask himself how much of what he did “for the good of his children” was actually to protect himself from pain he could not bear to feel.
We move on.
“So are you satisfied that you behaved impeccably after our rape?” I ask, wanting now to end this conversation.
“I behaved reasonably,” he says.
“Were you courageous?”
He doesn’t answer.
“We were so afraid of you,” I add. A non sequitur.
“I was a pussycat compared to what I had growing up,” he says. “I guess I would have been fearful of one thing. Of losing you. Losing one’s child is a terrible thing.”
You haven’t lost me, I think to myself. But I need you to feel what happened to you, so that I can let myself feel what happened to me.
I, too, am fearful of loss. Losing a parent, especially this parent, would be crushing, will be crushing. But at least he now knows what happened to me, and I know what happened to him. No one can take that away. If we lose each other again, to denial or death, at least we will have this moment of knowing.
So my father didn’t return home to us right away. Yes, he had work to do; and yes, he was scheduled to return to America several days later, in any case. But I sensed that there had to be a reason that he was capable of compartmentalizing his life in this way. This sort of mystery evokes irresistible curiosity in me. I am compelled to research. But the answers I get are not necessarily related to the questions I pose, and I am not always ready to hear them.
chapter seven
Denial
All the people who knew Brian Beat claimed to be certain he was innocent.
Denial helps the bystander. We don’t want to know what the boys we send to Iraq have done to others out of terror, or what others have done to them. We would rather not know about terror or be confronted with evil. This is as true about Abu Ghraib as it is about personal assaults and more private crimes, the crimes that occur inside families.
But the victim, too, cannot bear to believe. She may bury or dissociate from or disown her pain. She may drink or take drugs or become unwittingly promiscuous, compelled to repeat the violation again and again, sometimes in the role of victim, sometimes in the role of perpetrator. The impact of the violation drips lazily down, like that clock in Dalí’s painting, pooling in the form of shame. She may remember the facts that transpired, but the outline is blurry. There is a haze in the brain, and the facts are detached from feeling. Certain sounds or scents may terrify the victim, but she may not notice her fear. For me, it’s that ticking sound. So irritating. I want to punch. Certain scents, too. But for a very long time, I’d forgotten or dissociated or denied the source of my terrors.
To be raped or abused or threatened with violent death; to be treated as an object in a perpetrator’s dream, rather than the subject of your own—these are bad enough. But when observers become complicit in the victim’s desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too. This is why traumatized groups sometimes fare better than traumatized individuals. When the feeling of terror is shared, victims have a harder time forgetting what occurred or denying their terror. In the camps, what mattered most, Anna Ornstein explains, was whether there were witnesses willing to share the burden of overwhelming emotion. Talking about what occurred with other survivors or witnesses was an essential part of recovery, Ornstein claims.
When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. Life for the victim now begins anew. In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses. Something seems to have happened, but what? The ground disappears. This is the alchemy of denial: terror, rage, and pain are replaced with free-floating shame. The victim will begin to wonder: What did I do? She will begin to believe: I must have done something bad. But the sensation of shame is shameful itself, so we dissociate that, too. In the end, a victim who has suffered the denial of others will come to see herself as a liar.
The terrible truth is that once a person has been raped or abused, she seems to acquire a scent or a frequency that makes her an irresistible target for abusers. She may be haunted by a feeling of ungroundedness and by periods of hypervigilance. If she is lucky, as I was, she may find or fall into a career where hypervigilance is useful (though it is unlikely to be useful in her personal life). And if she is terribly unlucky—if she ends up a jailer in Abu Ghraib, for example—she may slip over the edge and victimize others.
The dizziness brought on by the denial of others is often worse than the original crime. When I think about what denial does, I can understand why some victims, thank God a small number, take out a gun and find someone to shoot or maul or rape, sometimes in their own homes.
No one wanted to believe that Brian Beat was a serial rapist of children. Even his jailers. They were in denial, too.
The Massachusetts Department of Corrections gave me a redacted copy of Brian Beat’s prison file. Thousands of pages. I know there is a lot of information in these. I mean to read them, but they don’t get read. Months go by. A year goes by. Well, if I’m honest, years.
I keep these files in a trash can. It is a small wastebasket, the kind you might use in your living room. I knew that the Concord police had offered me a treasure trove. But I put the files away; I didn’t have time to read them. I put the trash can in a rarely used fireplace. And then I forgot about the files.
I look at my trash can, but that seems to be all I can manage.
Once, when I was decorating a house, I went to a sale at the Boston Design Center, the sort of sale where you get useless “decorator” things for 75 percent off. I bought a small wastebasket—a work of art—with three identical elephants enameled on its sides. They have deliciously wrinkled skin, those elephants, and friendly, floppy ears. You can almost feel the impact of their slow, serious tread, which they repeat again and again, around and around. Will they ever get it right? Will they ever be released from this endless circle? The garbage can is too beautiful to use for garbage. I found the perfect use for it: to store the records of Brian Beat’s rapes and of the period he spent behind bars.
Eventually, I take the trash can away from where I live and bring it with me to Tanglewood. I open the files in a place I feel safe, sitting outside in the open air, listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearse. On the day I finally find the courage to begin reading, Thomas Hampson is rehearsing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, a song cycle for voice and a small orchestra. The songs are about a father’s coming to terms with the loss of his two children. In the year after his two children died, the poet Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poems about their death. The lyrics are based on these poems.
This father is writing as a way to process some evil. I think I can understand this. But the father, at first, is in a state of denial. “I often think they have just gone out! Soon they will get back home,” he would like to believe, and half does. There is an implicit meditation on the problem of evil: If God is omnipotent, how could He allow these two children to die?
Two children. Our rapist, too, often raped children in pairs. If God is omnipotent, how could he allow these children to be raped? But we didn’t die. Outwardly, we remained alive.
Denial Page 14