Denial

by Jessica Stern

  Why does everyone in this story seem to be spending so much time on the Cape?

  “Father Owen took over for Father Billing when I was thirteen or fourteen. He was more appealing than Billing. He had a really cool stereo,” he adds.

  “Where did he try to have sex with you?” I ask.

  “In his room, in the rectory. He was a teacher. He regularly brought students into his rooms, his office was there.”

  “How long did Owen abuse you?”

  “Until I was sixteen or seventeen.”

  I am drawn by cruel thoughts. Not when I was with Skip, but now, reading over these notes. Unseemly, embarrassing thoughts that I would normally shoo away, and would normally not want to admit, even to myself. But now I wonder whether others have had similar thoughts about me. Perhaps it is only victims who hate other victims. Perhaps victims who still deny their terror.

  Skip was immobilized by terror. How unbecoming to feel afraid. I want to condemn him, first for feeling afraid, and second for not running away. I want to condemn him, in particular, for allowing his victimization to become such a central part of who he is. He calls himself a survivor, not a victim. But “survivor,” it seems to this cruel, censorious side of me, is just a fad-dish, politically correct way of saying “victim.” Is this why my father refused to accept reparations from Germany, because it would infuse “survivor” or “victim” onto his identity? Is that why my father reassured the police, several months after my sister and I were raped, that we had gotten over it—that he didn’t want his children to take on the mantle of victim?

  What is the difference between a victim and a survivor? Survivors, we are told, emphasize their own agency, and are thus different from victims, who cringe under fate’s blows, passively accepting fate’s amoral and senseless punishments. But what agency did I exercise in my own survival? I stood still, entranced by my rapist’s gun. I made no quick movements. I did not grab the gun from the pillow and aim it at my rapist. Why? Because I was immobilized by terror. And I wonder, too: What agency did my relatives exercise in their own survival—not the ones who fled, but the ones who remained behind in Germany, ultimately to perish? Were they, too, frozen by fear?

  Freeze, fight, flight. Freezing is the first reaction. But a person can get stuck, frozen forever. Flight is not an option for a slow-moving animal facing a gun, slow-moving animals such as girls. And flight is not really an option for boys who believe themselves to be serving God by servicing sick priests. Victims, unless they are trained, do not get to choose the way they will react when they are “scared to death,” the phrase we use to describe the altered state that is evoked when someone or something threatens, credibly, to annihilate us, body or soul. Body or soul or both. Skip and I have this in common: we both froze, and we are both still immobilized, at least some of the time, by shame.

  “Wouldn’t you have been able to overpower him by that time?” I ask.

  Did I press him too much? But there is something shocking about this—a teenage boy unable to fight off a priest.

  Skip has big biceps, I see. I imagine his thick arms snapping the spindly legs off his predator priest. In my fantasy, I join him. I have strong arms, too. To join him in fighting the supernatural power that was attached to a sickly specimen of a human being who held himself above others by virtue of his supposed connection with the divine.

  What is a victim? If I keep thinking about victims, embarrassing thoughts rise to consciousness. Embarrassingly cruel thoughts that are not politically correct. One feels sorry for victims, but one also feels lucky not to be one—even a bit superior, a not entirely unpleasant feeling.

  Victims are weak. They must be. Why else would they be victimized? Especially rape victims. Morally and physically weak. And then there is the comforting thought that victims lie. If the victim is exaggerating or has made his story up out of whole cloth, I don’t have to confront my own unattractive desire to punish him. For the first time in my life, at age fifty, I realize that I might feel defiled by what the Nazis did to my relatives, the way my father and his brothers were forced to flee in terror, leaving their home behind; the way my father’s cousins were murdered.

  I hate victims because I was raised, from early childhood, on this prejudice. I know it’s wrong to hate victims, it’s ugly, I’m ashamed of it. Yes—I blame victims. Yes, I blame myself—both for having been victimized, and for hating victims. Yes, I know, in the sane part of myself, that it is wrong—both morally and logically—to blame victims.

  And all this leads me to wonder about you—my reader. Are you feeling sorry for me, but also a bit superior? Are you toying with the idea of imagining that I exaggerate, that I made any part of this story up? I will reveal the secret perpetrator within me—the secret perpetrator hidden in every victim of violent crime or sexual abuse: I’d like to see you try getting through what I got through. I’d like to see how long you could stand, how long you could sustain both sanity and humanity.

  “I was small, and he was huge,” Skip explains, responding to my question about why he didn’t attack his perpetrator. This perpetrator, in my mind’s eye, is a broken man with skinny, easily broken limbs. I have made the mistake of imagining that the strength of the priest’s body matched the weakness of his spirit.

  “But I finally had the courage to demand ending it because I became very interested in a girl,” he says, surprisingly.

  “How did Owen react when you told him this?”

  “He said, That’s okay, because I was going to end it anyway. I was going to end it, he said—and this is the worst—because you’re inadequate in technique and in size.

  “You’re inadequate in technique and in size,” he repeats. “Those words have haunted me ever since. After that I couldn’t have a relationship with anyone that wasn’t initiated by them. So much shame. Ashamed of what I did, and ashamed of my body.”

  This is what occurs to me now. I would like to kill this priest. At the moment, the thought of violence against pedophiles is extremely appealing.

  There is something attractive about the idea of becoming a terrorist in response to being terrorized. One would like to respond to terror in kind—to maul or perhaps kill one’s assailant in self-defense. I could smash this pedophile. I could explain to him, “You’re inadequate in body and soul. You’re not a real man.”

  I’d like to have murdered my own rapist, too. But physically defending my sister or myself is not all that I would like to have done. I would like to have terrorized my perpetrator, to have returned terror for terror. A court of law might well exonerate me for violent actions taken to defend my sister or myself from harm. But would a court of ethics forgive the hatred I feel, the desire not just to defend my sister and myself from harm but also to terrorize and to hurt our rapist? And what if I, unable to terrorize my own perpetrator, turned my rage against others? What if I became a professional terrorist? Would my rape, or the assaults my family sustained, be sufficient to excuse, morally if not legally, my own violence against others? The answer, I believe, is absolutely not.

  “First Father Billing, then Father Owen, then a third priest facilitated by Father Curran. I don’t know the name of the third one. Again and again. I don’t think my story is that unusual in the church. It was a common thing to pass kids along from priest to priest. Pedophile priests formed rings. Billing was also involved in a ring in Texas after he was pushed out of the ring around the House of Affirmation up here.”

  “Do you know how they selected kids?”

  He isn’t sure, he says, but then offers an idea. “Pedophiles go after victims who have just suffered a major trauma. The priest comes in to help the family, and then abuses a child. They also go after families with a lot of faith—faith itself can be a kind of weakness in their eyes. They exploit individuals who have suffered severe trauma or who have strong faith,” he summarizes.

  “My drinking started with Father Billing,” he says, turning to a new topic. “Alcohol was a big part of this. The firs
t time he gave me a drink in his car. It was sweet, Kahlúa…which helped immensely. It made the moment tolerable.

  “These are holy men. I started to think it was my job to help these priests, who had God’s job to do. I can’t even say that I was surprised when the second priest seemed to pick up where Father Billing left off. In the Catholic world, there is a lot of mystery, a lot of mysticism. I thought it was just my role to help them, to serve them.

  “There was terrible collateral damage from all this,” Skip adds. “The main collateral damage is that I drank, and I hurt my children deeply. But I also started seeing shadows of people who weren’t there. And smelling things.”

  What kind of shadows?

  “I don’t know,” he says. “A hooded figure.”

  A flashback, I think to myself.

  “Is it a shadow of a priest?”

  “It was always dark…. I think it was a priest. There was a hood or a hat…. It was like a poster for The Exorcist—a priest walking through the fog.”

  “Did the priest ever talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “What did you smell?”

  “Sometimes I would smell cigarettes.”

  “Did Father Billing smoke?”

  “Yes. Sometimes I would smell liquor—Southern Comfort. At first I thought I had drunk Southern Comfort at my home, that I was remembering something that happened at my parents’ house. But my parents didn’t drink Southern Comfort; Father Billing did, and I would smell it on his breath. He also got me to drink it, to make me more relaxed during the sex act.

  “I know I’m under stress when I see the shadows. These shadows come to me when I feel unbearable anxiety.”

  “What are you anxious about?” I ask.

  “I am most anxious when there are stories in the paper, and people refuting the story of sexual abuse in the church. I am anxious about people knowing what happened to me. People thinking I was gay. Sometimes I don’t know—would it be a bad thing to be gay? I feel terrible shame.

  “So my children had a drunk for a father. The shame is huge.”

  I take this in, what it must feel like to recognize the harm we do to our children as a result of all the ways we strive to avoid feeling our own pain. I am distracted by a recurrent thought. I worry that if I don’t feel the pain of my mother’s death and the terror of rape, I will harm my son, Evan, in some way, perhaps by overprotecting him. But I need to stay in the room. I will feel about this later.

  “The collateral damage, it goes on and on…. I taught my twin girls pro wrestling techniques. I wanted them to be able to protect themselves. I thought it was a good thing to teach them this. I realized, much later, what I was doing—teaching them to defend themselves from potential pedophiles and rapists.” Just as my father, I believe, was training us to survive a war.

  “When does it end—this collateral damage? It gets passed on and on, from one abused child to the next,” he says.

  This is my hypothesis. Terrorizing others—including by raping them—is a way to reassert one’s manhood in the face of extreme humiliation. Feeling terrorized is humiliating. Having been raped is humiliating. To be treated “like a woman” is humiliating. Thus, the lament of one of the victims of sexual torture at Abu Ghraib, “They were treating us like women.”1 Rape is a perfect way to discharge one’s shame. But like fear, shame is contagious. The shame and fear of the rapist now infect the victim, who, depending on his psychological and moral resilience, may discharge his fear and shame into a new victim, not necessarily through rape. I do not mean to assert that all terrorizers have been humiliated, or that all people who are severely shamed will ultimately terrorize others. My hypothesis is that shame is an important risk factor for savagery.

  “I often feel like nobody,” Skip says. “I ask myself: Why would you want to talk to me? Why would anyone want to talk to me? It comes on me suddenly, this feeling that I’m not anything…a person who has spent a lot of time in bed, who doesn’t want to be anything.”

  I know what he is talking about, and this time, I tell him that. For years, I could not understand why anyone took me seriously. I could not understand how I managed to get into MIT or Harvard, why anyone would offer me a postdoctoral fellowship or a job. I could not understand why people kept turning to me after September 11. I didn’t see myself as a person who couldn’t get out of bed, but as a salesgirl in a coffee shop—the job I had as a teenager who was afraid to apply to college. My identity was stuck there for years.

  “Inside me, there is the person who wants to be dead,” he says. “I can’t advocate for myself. I can advocate very strongly for others, but not for myself. When I realized that my work might prevent additional suicides, I began advocating strongly for victims of clergy abuse, but it’s much harder for me to do this for myself. Sometimes I’m not even sure that I exist. Is this really me—this person whom people want to consult about clergy sexual abuse? Or am I really the person who can’t get out of bed? I’ve gotten better—I spend more of my time living in the present. But it takes a lot of effort to stay in the present—a lot of yoga and meditation.”

  I ask him whether he goes into altered states. I ask him for myself. I have read that other people experience the kind of altered states that I do. But it’s another matter to hear about it from a live person. I want to hear what it feels like.

  “The most annoying dissociative state that I experience is when I feel very sleepy. It is not really safe for me to drive. Have you ever felt that one?” I ask him.

  “The sleepy one. Yes. It feels like eyelids half closed, feet in mud, slow motion. My brain is in a total fog. In this state I feel completely unsafe.

  “Sometimes,” he adds, “I become a prisoner of detail. I see too much, hear too much, it is painful. Hypervigilance. Like a cocaine high. The mind is hyperfocused, heightened awareness. I have an ability to scan quickly…. I feel super-smart. I seem to be able to problem-solve a lot quicker. If someone is looking for something, I can find things…. I could do a jigsaw puzzle ten times faster in that state. It is almost as though I have hyper-vision. It is not a state I mind being in. I can sense the feeling in a room. I can sense the mood of a crowd. If there is aggression in a crowd, I can tell just by scanning the place and stepping inside. I have a feeling. It’s as if a veil were lifted—you can feel people’s feelings. I can sense when there is sexuality in the air. I can be incredibly attracted to it, or I want to run….

  “I can use these states to my benefit,” he concludes.

  I know what he is talking about. There is a state where I feel smarter than normal. That often happens when I feel endangered, or I fear that someone I love is in danger. I agree that this state is not entirely unpleasant, and it is extremely useful when someone’s life is in danger. It is also useful for highly stressful work. But the stress is addictive. I believe that this “high,” as Skip puts it, is what makes some people stay in dangerous jobs.

  When I am truly in danger, my reaction time is very fast. I notice everything around me, and think and act quickly. If I feel agitated but there is no physical danger, my mind will sometimes focus on unimportant details. And I, too, feel unsafe when I’m in the sleepy state that Skip describes.

  I want to learn more about these states. Soldiers, I’m told, suffer from them as well.

  I ask Skip what has helped him the most. “Meditation,” he said. “Also yoga. Anything that keeps me in the present.”

  chapter eleven

  Child Victims

  I decide that I want to read what the other girls in the neighboring towns had said about their rapist, to see for myself how similar their stories were to mine.

  The town counsel in Concord gave the police department permission to release redacted material from the files of rapes that involved a similar MO to mine. These rapes occurred between 1970 and 1973, in Concord and nearby towns.

  I walk over to my trash can, the one with the elephants. I see a packet of files, held together with one of those jaunty-lo
oking paper clips, yellow with red stripes.

  I look inside one of the files. I see the girls’ careful penmanship. They were writing for the police.

  I realize, once again, that I can’t read the files at home. I ask Chet to take the trash can and put it in the trunk of my car. I will take the trash can to another state and read the contents there. Chet often lifts heavy things for me when I’m traveling. The trash can is not heavy. But, anyway.

  I wonder aloud, Would it make sense to transfer the files to a bag that is easier to transport? Perhaps this one here, a small black bag on which is written “TrueValue Hardware”?

  “Let’s leave them in the wastebasket,” Chet responds. I do not ask him why. I think to myself, Perhaps he thinks the files are safer in the trash can. Perhaps he thinks that I am safer with the files in the trash.

  I take the trash can from the trunk of the car into the cabin where I’m staying. I pull out a few pages. I begin to read. I see the words bed and tall lean man with a gun pointed at me.

  I stand up. I am cold. Maybe I should make a fire. Once my kindling is crackling, I add a small log, bark side down. The bark ignites.

  I sit down to read a page. I see the words grayish black pistol, and he said don’t scream, and do as you’re told and you won’t get hurt.

  I decide to make a pot of tea. I fill the pot and straighten up my desk. By the time the water boils, my fire has gone out. I insert fresh kindling. I push some logs around.

  Once again I sit down to read the file, with a cup of tea warming my hand. I read a few more sentences.

  I see the words bend my knees wide open and unzippered.

  I get up. I am not upset. I just can’t sit still.

  Finally I decide to bring the trash can somewhere else. I take it to a nearby library, where there are people, and I have reason to hope I will be less likely to feel spooked.