Denial

by Jessica Stern

  “I could tell you didn’t like Stevie. I knew that you didn’t like him. I didn’t want you to prevent me from going there. He gave us a lot of leads. We found out about Abby and Mary and all this stuff about him living on the Cape. I was most worried about the possibility that you might not want me to keep doing the work. I didn’t want you to tell me not to go.”

  “You’re a born detective,” I tell him. Just like me, I think to myself. I recently recommended Jack for a part-time job at the FBI, and the special agent in charge is pleased with his work.

  “Was this healing for you in any way?” I ask.

  “This conversation is healing. I am glad we’re talking. I was confused. Sometimes you’re really sweet to me…and then sometimes the other Jessica is there. I have experienced that before. It’s really personal work,” he concludes.

  Does he mean that the subject matter is personal? Or does he mean this sharing of what normally goes unsaid? I am not sure that Jack understands what he is telling me about himself and the reason he understands this zone thing.

  “Did it feel like you’re contributing to an understanding of PTSD?” I ask.

  “It’s relevant to my past,” he says, not really answering my question. “But until Jen pointed this out to me, I didn’t realize it. Until then it was just work.”

  Now I want to know why Paul Macone helped me. I want to believe that he helped me because he thought it was the right thing to do. But how can I be sure of anything these days? What if he had other motives?

  I decide the best way to find out is to ask him.

  I drive out to the station. At last, I am able to drive myself. But still, I feel that ghost of shame.

  “I had to reopen the case because a guy like that could still be out there,” he says. I know this. He has told me this before. But it’s not really what I want to know. I want to know why he continued to help me, even after we had identified the rapist and discovered he was dead.

  One thing I fear is that he helped me because he knew Chet. Chet became a state representative at age twenty-one. He ran for office as a way to fulfill a college requirement. Then, astonishingly, he won, even though a Democrat had not won an election in our town since the Civil War. He was the youngest state rep ever elected. And then he became the head of the Democratic Party in the state. And then he became a state senator. And then he headed up Ways and Means. And then he became a U.S. congressman. He lost his last election in 1992, in part because of his support of the Cambodian refugees who had moved into a town in his district, the same town where my father now teaches. Now he is in the private sector. But still. Maybe Paul was influenced by the fact that he knew Chet had political connections. Or maybe just because he knew Chet’s family.

  “No!” he insists. “I didn’t know that Chet would be coming with you when I asked you to come in. I didn’t know you two were involved when I decided to reopen the case.”

  I want to believe this.

  “How did you meet Chet?” I ask. He doesn’t seem to understand that I’m trying to smoke him out.

  “He was a little older than I. Somebody that everybody looked up to. He was friends with my brother,” Paul explains, smiling as he recalls. “The Atkinses, they were a well-thought-of family. You mention Chet Atkins. He’s a somebody.”

  “But Chet was…” He pauses, searching for the right word, still smiling. “He was a character. He once brought a live pig to school. Another time he brought a cow. He and my brother also managed to haul a car up to the roof of the high school. He was a well-known prankster. A character,” he repeats. Another time, Chet put bullfrogs in the girls’ toilets.

  I am mostly satisfied, having watched Paul’s face during this recitation. He is not pretending that he didn’t know that Chet was a “somebody,” which somehow makes his claim that he wasn’t influenced by Chet’s involvement more credible.

  But I can’t quite believe him yet.

  “Why did you become a police officer?” I ask, trying to put the story into context.

  “Lenny Weatherbee and I were old friends. [Lenny is now the chief of police.] We went to high school together. I was teaching shop at a special-needs school at the time. In Natick. I was teaching industrial arts,” he says. “Auto mechanics, photography, and machine shop.”

  He sees that these words don’t resonate with me. “All the things they taught us in the corner of the high school that you probably didn’t go into.

  “Lenny had just come onto the force. I used to see him here in Concord. One day, I remember we were at my girlfriend’s house at the time. She’s my wife now. He said to me, ‘Why don’t you come on as a Special. It will be fun. We can ride around and be cops.’”

  “What does it mean to be a Special?” I ask.

  “It’s a part-time job. They give you a gun.”

  “Did you know how to shoot it?” I ask, astonished that a person trained to teach at a special-needs school would be allowed to work as a part-time cop. I have shifted into my interviewer mode, the shame shimmering, almost invisibly, in the distance now.

  “Back then we had shooting in gym! Twenty-two-caliber rifles. Don’t you remember?” he asks.

  I don’t. I do remember that they would let us out of gym if we were studying ballet, an enormous relief to me. Learning to shoot might have been more useful to me than ballet, as it turned out.

  “You had to get a license to carry a weapon. I bought my own gun, a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber. You had to take a test in basic criminal law. We don’t have Specials anymore,” he says. “Accreditation reasons. Liability reasons. This was 1978.

  “So my friend was on the force. I thought, Why not? I wasn’t married yet. I was still teaching, but you could do it at night. Lenny was a patrol officer. The lowest rank. We went out together in the cruiser.”

  “Did you hang out at Brigham’s?” I ask. In our small town, it always seemed that the cops spent most of their time drinking coffee. There was so little crime.

  “We went to Friendly’s,” he says. My heart sinks. There were only two places you could get coffee back then. Brigham’s had better ice cream. Friendly’s, I knew, had a pay phone that worked.

  I’ve been in this station before, I am certain of this now. It was long ago. Paul doesn’t seem to sense the aura of shame around me, or maybe he’s just too polite to say. I’ve hidden this shame for so long, with security clearances and certificates and degrees.

  “What sort of crimes did you have to deal with?” I ask, wondering how a teacher would know how to respond to a crime. (After all, I’m a teacher now, too).

  Most of what you do in a small town like Concord is enforcement of motor vehicle laws, Paul tells me. There was the rare case of breaking and entering, he says. “Back then, on the weekends, kids were always having parties, and we’d have to tell them to be quiet. Sometimes they had parties in the woods. I remember one party at Ruggiero’s Piggery. A lot of kids smoking pot and drinking.”

  “But you weren’t much older than the kids!” I say. He was very straight back then, he tells me.

  “Were you excited to be carrying a gun?” I ask, trying to place him in a context I might understand. I’m accustomed to talking to men who like guns, accustomed to pretending it doesn’t frighten me. I still cannot bear the thought that Paul might have been acting out of goodness, out of kindness to me.

  “The first time you wear a gun, you’re bad.”

  I’m not entirely sure what he means by this expression, but I’m relieved that he told me the truth. And relieved that this “badness” was in the past.

  He must have noticed my confusion. “You feel pretty important,” he explains. “It lasts about a day.”

  “Did you ever have to use a gun?” I ask.

  “To this day I’ve never shot at someone…. I’ve been a cop for thirty years.”

  “Did you ever have to threaten anyone?” I ask.

  “Never had to threaten. Very, very seldom in Concord does anyone on the force have to use
a gun.”

  “Then what?” I ask.

  “A job came up. I became a patrol officer. Bottom of the barrel. I used to see the detectives coming in every morning, wearing sport coats, carrying their cups of coffee. You come in grimy. You’ve just finished riding around for eight and a half hours, all night long. From the very beginning it seemed like being a detective would be more fun. More challenging intellectually. I come from a mechanically oriented family. When you’re a mechanic, you’re curious about how things work. You know the engine runs well. Why? You take it apart. Same thing when it breaks down. You take it apart. You’re curious.”

  It turned out that Paul Macone was a talented detective, and he rose to be second in command of the force.

  Now I want to test out another troubling theory. I’m still not ready to believe Paul.

  “Was it because you know I had worked in government?” I ask.

  “The first time you came out, I Googled you,” he admits. “I was a senior in high school the year you were raped. I was always in the machine shop, that’s why we didn’t know each other. Whenever someone asks for a file, I try to figure out who they are, why they’re asking. You have to be very careful with a sexual assault case. You don’t want to retraumatize a victim. I saw you worked on terrorism, that you had worked in the Clinton administration. I could see you were someone I didn’t need to mince words with. Terrorism sometimes equals death. Terrorists do terrible, awful things. I thought to myself, This is not an extremely fragile person. Knowing the kind of work you had done did make me feel more comfortable sharing information with you,” he admits. “And you seemed sincere. You seemed like you wanted to understand who your rapist was for the right reasons.”

  What would the wong reasons be? To kill him?

  “And then it turned out you were able to help me.” He smiles. “If I noticed something, you’d bring up a counterpoint. It was helpful. You were looking at the case with me, acting like a colleague even.”

  And now, finally, I remember. I remember the source of this shame I feel when I am in the police station. I’d been summoned into that station before, several times. My sister and I had to look at photographs of suspects in our case. There were none we could recognize. I must have sensed that the police thought that I was lying, that the rapist was, as they told my father they suspected, someone that I knew.

  Victims, I somehow “knew” this to be fact, are ineffectual, weak, and dishonest persons who drag society down. I understood that terror and despair were contagious emotions, and that to indulge oneself in the feeling of terror was antisocial and possibly even immoral.

  I must have wondered if the police were right, if the entire story was a figment of my imagination. This is the worst impact of severe trauma: the victim loses faith in the evidence of her own senses. And this is the great gift Paul Macone gave me. He believed what I told the police back then. He believed me enough to try to solve the case, and he did.

  Perhaps because I’ve sought out evil in this world, attempting to understand and tame it, I am particularly moved by goodness. There is a light that animates an act of generosity, when a person is kind—not to call attention to his own goodness, or to make a pact with God, but just because he feels it’s right. I see this light in Paul Macone. Still, his kindness is almost too much to bear. I feel shy around him, despite this conversation. I even feel shy writing this down.

  chapter ten

  Collateral Damage

  The spy in me cannot stop pondering the meaning of the stones that Detective George Remas found in Brian Beat’s front pocket, as well as the stones that Beat placed nearby some of the girls when he raped them. I look into Detective Remas’s claims that there had been a series of pedophile priests at the church that the Beat family attended and discover that they are true. But those priests arrived after Brian Beat grew up. Could pedophile priests have been placed there routinely?

  I hear rumors about sexual abuse at Beat’s elementary school, during the period he was there. Chet drives me to visit the school and we speak to the priest who runs the school now. There may have been abuse back when Beat was a student, but there is nothing in the school’s files that would indicate there was, the priest tells us. Then I learn that the region where Beat grew up was a dumping ground for pedophiles. I decide to contact one of the victims of clergy sexual abuse in the area who has become an activist. His name is Skip Shea. The priests who abused him were from a town located next to Milbridge, Massachusetts, where Beat grew up.

  It ought to be a lot easier to talk with victims than with killers or rapists. They’re in pain, they’re afraid, they’ve been wronged. I’ve studied terrorism for more than twenty years, and I’ve interviewed hundreds of terrorists, but I’ve never interviewed a victim. Before commencing this book, I’d never talked to a victim of rape. My answer to the obvious question, “Why not?” is that I already know what it feels like to have a gun trained on you, to fear that someone is about to kill you. But actually, I’m not sure this statement is true. I had these experiences, but I’m not sure that I felt them. Perhaps I should just admit it: I’m afraid to empathize with a victim. I am afraid.

  There must be a frequency that victims acquire. I am afraid that the experience of being in a room with Skip will shake off a facade that protects me and holds me together—to reveal not only my fear but also my rage and shame.

  I’m trying to get this right, to explain my embarrassing position. Let me try this once again. I cannot bear to be around victims who see themselves as victims. I’m more comfortable talking to victims who are numb, or who have learned how to harness their unfelt rage and fear to do productive work. I’m most at ease with the sort of victim who ends up doing work that involves exposing himself to risk or violence—soldiers or human rights workers who work in danger zones, whose love for humanity is expressed without a display of feeling. But Skip is not this sort of survivor. His life’s work is to help other victims of clergy sexual abuse, which requires him to feel his own abuse, again and again, on a daily basis. This is what is hard for me to witness.

  I am relieved when Skip tells me that he will come into Cambridge to see me; I don’t like driving out to the area where Brian Beat grew up. For me, Milbridge smells of evil. For me, terror smells of cheap cologne and air purifiers, like the air purifier in Mary’s bathroom. And it’s only now, having just written that sentence, that I recall my observation to the police that my rapist wore cologne. For Skip, evil smells of cigarettes and Southern Comfort—the scents of the first priest who abused him.

  “When were you first abused by a priest?” I ask.

  “When I was eleven. Father Billing brought me into the basement of Saint Mary’s Church, near the nurse’s office. We were goofing around. He reached for my pants. I was terrified. He talked about love. I was an altar boy. He was an authority figure. I did as I was told. It continued, for months.”

  “Did it happen every day?” I ask.

  “Often there would be a couple of weeks between incidents. I was an altar boy, I attended his masses, so I saw him often. It escalated. He began taking me out of my CCD [CCD stands for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the religious education program of the Catholic church] classes—he would take me behind the rectory. He told me, ‘This is love, this is all about love.’ I cried. He would say to me, ‘God doesn’t want to see you cry.’ So I learned not to cry. Since then, I’ve had a hard time crying.”

  I know all about this—the difficulty that abusers of children have dealing with the impact of their abuse, how they try to brainwash their victims into thinking that the abuse doesn’t hurt, that it is actually good for them. If the abuse is sustained over time, the victim learns not to feel. But I don’t tell Skip this. I listen.

  “Did you tell anyone what was going on at the time?” I ask, gently, I hope.

  “No. I was afraid to. I grew up in a very religious home. In a very Catholic town. There were pictures of priests hanging on the walls of our kitchen. In our h
ouse, priests were next to God. I assumed that no one would believe me.”

  “How did your family react when you finally told them? Did they believe you?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t tell them until Billing had already been charged. He had been moved out of our church some time before that. I was in a suicide shelter.

  “But he was not excommunicated,” Skip adds.

  We are sitting in my living room, directly across from each other. I am sitting cross-legged, my computer in my lap, slumping under the weight of the shame that hangs in the air between us, the shame we both feel. Is shame contagious? I believe it is. But now there is a new energy in the room. Rage. This part of Skip’s story is still undigested, a bitter portion. The state has taken Billing off the street. The church has forbidden him from preaching. But the church apparently does not view the sexual abuse of children as a sin sufficiently serious to warrant excommunication. These are the crimes that the church considers to be the most serious sins: Attempting to absolve a person who has committed adultery. Acquiring an abortion. Violating the confidentiality of confession. Physically harming the pope. But not repeatedly persuading a child that allowing himself to be sodomized by a priest is an act of love.

  “There was a bishop in Texas who wanted Father Billing to move out there,” Skip continues. “He knew what Billing had been accused of, but he still wrote a letter asking for Billing to be sent to his community. You can read that letter yourself,” he says, telling me where I can find it.

  “Father Owen replaced Father Billing when Billing was removed from our church. Billing owned a house down on the Cape, and he and Father Owen used to go down there. Later, I realized, they must have talked about me. Owen replaced Billing in every possible way, including abusing me.”