Denial

by Jessica Stern

  “It would be the whole book,” he says, finishing his sentence, but not his thought. I can see that there is some awful memory plaguing him that he wants to unburden himself of. He wants to tell me, but he is afraid that I won’t be interested. I sense this, but I do not help him. I just listen, trying to stop myself from empathizing. Writing this now, I feel ashamed that I did not want to hear any more. I want to tell him that I, too, suffered, even though I was never homeless, and even though I look so well cared for and well fed.

  “My sisters and I. We used to huddle together and cry under the covers at night. Whenever it was possible, I protected them. I was the oldest. They black it out. They’ve forgotten. I’m sort of jealous….”

  “I’m an oldest sibling, too,” I tell him. I don’t voice the thought that I, too, saw and remember more than my sisters do. I, too, saw and remember more than I wish.

  “One time they were fighting so severely. There were French doors. I hate French doors to this day. I was watching through the French doors. He stuck her on a hook. I saw my mom on that hook. I was nine. I ran up to where she was. I had to take her off the hook. She fell on me. We were lying there in a pool of fluids and blood that was coming out of her,” he says.

  A pool of fluids. Terrible thoughts come into my mind. Perhaps her eyeballs were leaking. Perhaps an organ got caught on the hook. Perhaps an eardrum had burst, releasing a thin yellow stream. It was probably just blood. The sight of blood and tears would be shocking to a nine-year-old boy, I tell myself.

  “I would never do that to someone,” he says. Why does he tell me this? Is there a someone he would have liked to hang? Is he worried I might think he would?

  “I wish it never happened,” he adds.

  I have a sense that there is more to this scene than he remembers, images or sounds or scents that he could not process at the time.

  “Of course she stayed with him after that,” he says, bitterly. “She had that syndrome.”

  At this moment, neither of us remembers the phrase battered-wife syndrome.

  “She said she married him for the sake of us kids,” he says, skeptically. “I think it would have been better for all of us if she had remained single.” An understatement.

  In spite of myself, I am drawn into the story. I am with this nine-year-old boy now, who was so determined to protect his little sisters, those sisters who cannot even remember what happened.

  “My sisters have successfully blanked this out,” he repeats.

  I see that John is alone on this earth, that he is haunted by the image or sound or scent of those fluids, whatever they were, even at age sixty-three.

  “I know that those kinds of experiences could lead me to be very violent. That is why I became a vegetarian and started meditating,” he says. He tells me that he started meditating as a teenager.

  “I don’t get close to people. I don’t enjoy the give-and-take of close personal relationships. He travels fastest who travels alone.” I don’t respond, still overwhelmed by his story.

  “You know that saying, don’t you?” he asks. “‘Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels fastest who travels alone.’”

  I tell him that I recognize the words, though I don’t know what they are from. He’s not sure either. Later I will find that the longer version of the proverb comes from Kipling. Gehenna is a Hebrew word that refers to hell, the place where evil is ultimately destroyed.

  “We all got kicked out,” he continues. “My mom kept us together for a year and a half. But she wasn’t up to raising us on her own, and one day she just disappeared, leaving us behind.

  “So it’s during that period, when I was homeless, that’s the time when I spent a lot of time with Beat. We did a lot of drugs. I regret that now,” he says.

  “What kind of drugs?” I ask.

  “Brian’s girlfriend was working in a nursing home, and she could steal prescription drugs. She could steal anything. We always had pills…. We could get any pills we wanted, for a long time.”

  He must be referring to Abby, I realize now. This is what her brother was talking about when he said that Abby had laid her own bed and now she had to lie in it. That terrible bed.

  “I was homeless, so I was spending time with these guys. It got me in trouble in ’66 or ’67. We had a party at a house that I was living at, and the police came looking for drugs. I had to go to jail for a few months for that. Jail was a wake-up call for me.

  “After that I moved to the Cape. I got off drugs. I had calmed down. I had a day job, cleaning up a restaurant. I was living in a tent. It turned out that Brian was living down on the Cape, too. One day I ran into him. He asked me where I was living. I told him. He said to me, I got a place, I could use a roommate. He had rented a small house. He seemed to be doing really well. He had a nice job. He was working long hours as a plumber’s apprentice.

  “Brian was strange, though,” he says, returning to the topic I came here to discuss. “He had a mean streak.”

  “What do you mean by a mean streak?” I ask.

  “He wasn’t mean the way I picture rapists.”

  So he knows that Brian was guilty.

  “It was as if he had a dual personality. He was always smiling. But he could be sadistic.”

  He thinks of an example. “We used to do intravenous drugs—we prepared them out of the drugs that his girlfriend brought us. We made opium out of paregoric. It was used to put on baby’s gums when they are teething, but it has opium in it, so if you had enough of it you could extract the opium. We had all done it enough so we knew what we were doing. It was easy to find the vein and stick the needle in. But there was a girl with us who didn’t know what to do. Brian offered to help her. He missed the vein. If the drug goes into your muscles, it burns. He burned her arm very badly. Her arm swelled up, but he was smiling the whole time.

  “Brian had this grin on his face,” he repeats. “We all agreed later that he did it on purpose. He seemed to enjoy it.”

  He pauses.

  “I would say he was disturbed,” he says. That word again. The same word Mary, the Beats’ neighbor, used to refer to Brian Beat.

  Now he has some misgivings. There is a part of him that is like Mary. He, too, would like not to speak ill of the dead.

  “I feel disloyal telling you all this. He could understand the beauty of a beautiful poem, but he couldn’t arrange his life so he could live that way. He could envision the beauty of life and the goodness of life but somehow wasn’t able to actualize what he knew was possible. It’s a shame. Like I said, most of the time he was a nice guy. It’s just that one of the gears didn’t mesh….”

  I don’t respond. I have little tolerance for this kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, especially in this context.

  Then I tell him. “I think Brian Beat raped me.” I tell him this apologetically, tentatively. I am worried about how he will react. This is an experiment for me, to tell someone who knew Brian in his youth that I knew him, too, but in a very different way.

  “I didn’t know that!” he says, covering his mouth, as if wishing he could take back everything he said until now. I see that he feels responsible for not knowing, that he might have tried to alter the way he talked about Beat or himself had he known that I, too, was a victim, even though I write books and teach at a famous university.

  “How could you possibly know?” I ask, in what I hope is a sympathetic tone. But in truth, I am happy he feels ashamed. This is the first of Brian Beat’s friends who hasn’t insisted that Beat was innocent, and I am relieved. But not totally relieved. I want him to suffer, at least a little bit, for the denial of his childhood friends and for that spiritual mumbo-jumbo, too.

  The room is now permeated with shame—his story of drugs and homelessness, my thoughts about running away, my unbecoming desire to hurt John. Even the dog is ashamed of her paltry bark. And now that I’ve divulged my rape, there is the presence here, too, of my violated vagina. As I type this word, I cross my legs. I cover my vagina
with a thick metal shield. Titanium with spikes. I surround myself with armed guards.

  Now that my rape is in the air between us, I want to leave immediately. I want to stand up and walk out that door. I will myself to remain seated. I justify my claim by telling John about the police reopening the case, about the gun, the unusual modus operandi.

  “Are you sure you want to talk about this?” he asks.

  “I’m sure. Don’t worry,” I lie, trying to make light of all this. But there is something new here. I cannot pretend that I’m so strong that the rape means little to me, the way I used to.

  “Tell me more,” I insist. “More about his mean streak.”

  “One time on the Cape, I was walking down the street. He was walking toward me, eating an ice cream cone. I noticed he didn’t look like himself. When he reached me, he bit me, hard, on the cheek. He hopped on my back and put the ice cream cone on my head. All the while he had a grin on his face. But he looked demonic. I was scared. He was a lot bigger than me. He wasn’t thuggish or churlish, but he could be crazy looking. It came on suddenly. Some of his behaviors were crazy.”

  “Did it hurt when he bit you?” I ask, shocked by the bizarreness of this story.

  “A lot.”

  “What did you say to him?” I ask.

  “I was scared. I didn’t know what was going on,” John tells me. “Sometimes he was strange. Scary. He was thin, but he was always a little bit taller and strong. Not big, but strong. And taller.

  “One time we were driving. We had just drank cough syrup to get high. We hit a dog. We yelled at Brian to pull the car over to help the dog. He didn’t want to pull over, but we insisted, and he did. The dog was dying. I felt sick. But there was nothing we could do for the dog. Brian didn’t seem to care at all. He wasn’t upset like the rest of us.”

  “Tell me about what happened when you were living together on the Cape.”

  “He was always coming and going. Some of these jobs were late-night commercial work. So he was always coming home late. I never knew where he was. That’s why when he tried to get me to be his alibi, I wasn’t really sure if he was home when he said he was. He told me that some girls had been raped, that the police might be coming to ask some questions. He told me that I should tell them that I remember him being home, that I was watching the news on the couch in the living room. I think it was the eleven o’clock news. The rape must have occurred during the newscast. It may have been half an hour before or after. He wanted me to say that he was there. Truthfully, I really didn’t know. I had dozed off.

  “I went to Hyannis, to the courthouse, to testify. He had this really inept lawyer.”

  “In what way was he inept?” I ask.

  “He was really unimpressive. He wanted me to testify, but I sat in the court all day. They never called me.”

  “How did you come to believe he might be guilty?” I ask.

  “Just reflecting on the whole thing…. It just felt right that he could be a rapist. I can’t say it was any one thing. There was a wildness to Brian. He was not a fighter or a bully in my experience. But he had this wild spurt of sadism…. The time he bit me. The time he punched me in the stomach, still smiling. The time he missed the vein on purpose. Always smiling. You add it up. There was a bizarre element to him. And one of the girls who had been raped, afterward I talked to her. I was defending Brian. And she said, ‘That man raped me.’ Somehow, I understood then that it was true.”

  He is thinking now. “I wonder if he had any paraphernalia in the house,” by which I assume he must mean the mask and the gun that Beat used. He used a wig, too, for the rapes on the Cape.

  “I am not a nosy, meddlesome person. I never went in his room. But he had a truck—a panel truck. It was the kind they used to use as a bread truck. It was sinister looking,” he recalls. “They didn’t have the windows like the vans do now. There might have been a little side window. He might have hidden things in there.”

  The truck seems to make him think of something else.

  “One thing I thought was strange—Brian used to like to go out late at night in these real short shorts. Jeans with the legs cut off to make shorts but cut real short. Like a woman would wear. I thought it was strange. Too short for a straight man to wear in Provincetown.”

  “Do you think he might have been homosexual?” I ask.

  “I wouldn’t say he was gay in general. Girls were attracted to him…a lot. He had no trouble getting dates, wherever he went. He seemed so smooth with girls. I was kind of jealous. I wasn’t smooth at all.

  “But he liked to go to this gay bar with his short shorts. He would make an excuse that he was going there to swim. It was a gay bar at a hotel. They had a pool. The pool had lights, and it was open at night. I think it was called the Crown and Anchor. It was the last bar on the left if you were going down the strip toward the water.

  “It was fine to be straight in P-town back then because you knew where to go. You wouldn’t go to the gay clubs because you knew they were gay clubs. I always felt like he went there in his tight shorts not just because he liked to swim.”

  “Did you know that Brian got out of the military by saying that he had been homosexual?” I ask.

  “No, I wasn’t aware of that,” he says. He looks surprised.

  But then he thinks of something else.

  “Years later, after I hadn’t seen Brian or Simon for a long time, I started getting more into the folk music scene. I was pretending I knew a lot about it. Brian and Simon used to go to this club in Boston all the time—I think it was called the Loft. They said that they went to hear folk music. I never went with them. But a few years later I was trying to impress some people, trying to make them think I knew about folk music. I told them I used to go to the Loft to hear folk music. They all laughed and said that the Loft wasn’t a folk club but a gay bar. I was embarrassed, but I said, No, no, it’s a folk bar. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was a gay bar and Simon and Brian went there trolling, looking for older men to buy them drugs or whatever.” The Loft was in fact a gay bar back then.

  “Did you ever hear about abusive priests at your elementary school?” I ask, changing the subject.

  “I was naive about that. At that time families went to priests for help. You wouldn’t suspect them of anything. But one time my mother and stepfather sat me down and asked me pointedly if this one priest ever did anything to me. There must have been rumors going around about him because my parents asked me in a funny way. Pointedly, like there was a good reason for their question.”

  “Did you ever hear that any other boys might have been abused?”

  “No,” he says. “I never heard anyone talk about that.” But then he tells me about a boy at St. Louis School who was openly gay. “It was unusual back then,” he says. “His family was involved with the church. He had a few brothers. One brother hung himself. In Webster. The brother who hung himself, he was gay, too.”

  I wonder why the brother hung himself. Could he, too, have been abused by a priest?

  John urges me again to talk to his sister. He gives me her number. As we are leaving, he says to me, “I have never told anyone that story about the hook. I’m glad I told you. I feel much better now.”

  We have exchanged gifts, this recluse and I.

  One of the gifts he gave me was the recommendation to call his sister Cathy. When I did, I discovered that Brian Beat had tried to rape her, too. He was in high school at the time. She managed to fight him off. At that time, he hadn’t yet thought of threatening his victims with a gun, at least not with her. At last, I have found someone able to confirm that the sadistic rapist that I think I recall was real. At last, I have found someone who doesn’t feel the need to protect herself—and punish me—with denial.

  chapter nine

  The Witnesses

  Research is unpredictable. You can chase some subjects seemingly forever and hit a brick wall; but sometimes serendipity strikes. I wanted to interview Hamas, for example, so I went
to Amman. I left Amman without a single interview. But when I got to Gaza, two important leaders were willing to talk to me. I’ve learned to accept, even to expect, that luck will play a big role in my work. Even so, Jack’s coming to work for me and what he has been able to help me see have been a surprise.

  I was away when Jack began to search for John in earnest. First he drove out to Worcester, John’s last known address.

  “I went to his mailbox,” Jack told me. “The mailbox at the address I found for him. I thought about opening it. But then I realized it might be illegal, so I called my friend Julian. He’s a lawyer. Julian told me it’s illegal to go through someone’s mail. You can look, but you can’t touch. So I looked. I saw that John’s roommate owned a cleaning company. I ended up looking up the company. I found another lead by looking into another mailbox without touching. It was one of those mailboxes in an apartment building, so the top was stuck up. I went to the other address and there was nothing there. I came back and told you we had some leads. I went to the third address, and there was a car there. It was a truck, a pickup truck. I sort of staked out the scene. I drove by his house a few times. To get the license plate number. I didn’t want to stop and be seen. But I’m not sure if it’s his house. So I called my friend who works for an insurance company. She has access to the RMV system. I said to her, I need a favor. I need you to look up this license plate. And it was John Henry’s. I wondered, should I knock on the door. Then I saw him.”

  Jack kept searching for John, long past the point where I have given up on finding him. Why was he so determined?

  First I better tell you how I found Jack, and how he came to work on this project as my research assistant. A friend of mine, Jen Lockwood, who is an artist, bought a share in a storied Irish pub in Cambridge called the Plough and Stars. The bar was famous for offering Guinness on tap, long before it was available anywhere else in America. It is a rowdy bar that attracts a mix of locals—housepainter poets, construction worker artists, drifter intellectuals, academics from Harvard and MIT, and politicians. Jarrett Barrios, who had once worked as a bartender, launched his campaign for state senate at the bar. It was the birthplace of Ploughshares, a leading American literary journal, in 1971, but had recently fallen on hard times. Jen put a lot of energy into reenlivening the bar. She remodeled. She painted the walls a velvety red and hung silvery stars from the ceiling. She brought in her husband as the new chef. And she hired Jack as her bartender.