Denial

by Jessica Stern

  I find that I must think carefully about where to put the trash can. I do not want it in my line of sight, nor do I want it behind my back. I find a spot just outside my line of vision, on a forward diagonal to my left, on a black leather chair. I am not a superstitious person. I feel embarrassed, even in front of myself, that all this seems to be necessary.

  I have read about triggers—the sounds or smells or sights that can suddenly catapult us back to the moment when we faced a violent death; the way the sound of a backfiring car can bring a grown man to the ground. But it is hard to understand how this works. The soldier knows that cars will backfire. Can’t he learn to ignore the sound? Can’t he use his rational mind to overcome his response to that sound? And can’t I, similarly, knowing that these files pertain to a dead man, treat them like ordinary paper?

  Finally, sitting in the library, I am able to read through the files. I am not allowed to quote from the redacted reports, but here is a summary.

  The rape at Concord Academy occurred at 11:30 PM on April 29, 1971. A tall, lean man walked into a student’s room, wielding a gun. She was sitting on her bed, doing her homework. He pointed a gun at her. She observed that his eyes were a clear whitish blue. She described the gun as a gray-black pistol with a white handle. He told her to do what she was told and she wouldn’t get hurt. He asked her how old she was, and whether the girl in the next room was pretty. He told her to put on a skirt and to dance for him. After that he directed her to the bed, where he made her bend her knees wide open and began touching her “lower parts” with his hands. He put down his gun on the condition that she wouldn’t scream. He also put two rocks down by the gun. He pulled out a gray tube. He rubbed a salve on her “lower parts” and said it would make it slipperier. He tried to have intercourse with her but did not succeed. He asked her to go into the neighboring girl’s room and wake her neighbor up, and to make sure the second girl wouldn’t scream. The first girl reports that she opened the door and called softly to the girl in the neighboring room, telling her to be quiet, promising that the man with the gun would not hurt her. The second girl screamed in fright. The first girl reports that she muffled the mouth of the second girl to keep her quiet. The second girl calmed down. Then the man raped the second girl. The first girl reports that she heard the second girl’s cry of pain. As he left, he told the two girls not to call the police. He also told them it was a cap gun.

  I know these files cannot hurt me, but I feel them to be dangerous. As I read, I sense my body slowing down, as if I were dying. How could it be that this man managed to terrify a girl to the point that she was willing to “muffle” another girl’s mouth? How could it be that the second girl calmed down, with the weight of the first girl’s palm on her mouth? I want to scream.

  I want to be precise here. I know I am not dying, or at least if I am dying, it is only in the sense that every second we live we are one second closer to death. But the weight of the words drags me down until I feel myself bent down like a little old lady in a fairy tale.

  I get up, of course. I get up again and again; I cannot sit this through.

  This is the part where my breath gets caught—the way the first girl talked the second into complying.

  Why did she tell the other girl to be quiet?

  Why did she promise the second girl that she would not be hurt?

  Why, when the second girl didn’t obey the command to be quiet, did the first girl muffle the second girl’s mouth?

  This is how the Nazis got the Jewish elders to arrange the orderly deportation from the ghettos to the death camps, how they got the Kapos to do their dirty work. Scared them half to death, but then let them live. In the moment a person is broken by terror, she is more easily seduced into “muffling” others. You will move up in the world if you only follow orders, if you sell out your sister, if you muzzle her.

  Again and again, my mind gets snagged on “muffled.” What does it mean? A muffled scream; a light snuffed out. To muffle means to suppress, repress; to smother, squash, or kill. This is what most rape victims do, they muffle themselves. I think again of the Muselmänner, the “walking corpses” in the concentration camps, who lost the will to live. They were not sent to the gas chambers, but they died, nonetheless, from terror, usually within days of arriving at the camps.2

  Their light was muffled. You could see them, but they would not see you, Primo Levi tells us. They did not bother to avoid blows or to seek food, he says. The other prisoners could easily identify these condemned men as “Muselmänner,” or “the drowned.” The other prisoners steered clear of them, as if their suicidal despair were contagious.

  This is what muffled means to me. Muffled is the way I let go, let myself down into my own nonbeing, when I thought the rapist was about to kill my sister and me; or perhaps my sister or me. I want to emit the terror that was muffled back then. I want to bellow like a creature facing slaughter, on behalf of my sister and me and on behalf of these two girls, the one attempting to stifle the other and the one struck dumb by the other girl’s palm.

  I consider walking out of my cabin and into the woods and screaming as loud as I can. This time I will not be muffled: I will lacerate the ear of God. I will wail wildly: How could you let this happen? I will scream so loud that the molecular structure of the air will change. You have not heard of this happening, you will say. But just wait and see. I will roar argon into chlorine, xenon into fluorine, all the noble gases into reactive ones. My lament will terrify even the stars.

  I see, in my mind’s eye, the tremor of the stars as my dirge reverberates into space. I will shout out the sound that has been building in all of Brian Beat’s victims for decades.

  But what if my scream isn’t loud enough? What if the stars don’t tremble? Even worse, what if they do?

  I could go out in the woods and scream, but I’m too inhibited. It seems that I muffle myself. Or maybe I’m afraid to wake the dead. If I truly rage, if I truly grieve, Brian Beat would surely hear me, dead though he is. He might come back and get me. I am afraid that if I scream too loud, this time he will kill me.

  Is this the reason I lost my capacity to feel afraid? I was too afraid, perhaps. Irrationally afraid. Once it starts, it might not stop.

  I get up again and again. And yet I feel a kind of duty to read the raped girls’ words, so I read the second girl’s story, too.

  She was asleep when the girl in the neighboring room came in, followed by a man with a gun. The first girl told her, she said, not to scream and to do everything the man said, and then promised her that she wouldn’t get hurt. It was because she trusted her neighbor, she said, that she complied. Then the man with the gun commanded her to dance. He spread the salve on her. When he entered her, he admonished her to loosen up, she was too tense. He had clear blue eyes, she wrote, and was tall and thin.

  There it is again; the first girl muffled the second one. Even so, the second girl trusted the first girl. Be quiet, the first girl said, so that we can both survive.

  I’ve been quiet, too, for the same reason. I’ve been quiet for years.

  The Muselmänner disintegrated into a state that “signaled the approach of definitive indifference,” after which there was no turning back.3 Physical death was imminent, but the Nazis did not kill these victims with gas. They killed them with terror.

  But I’m not quiet anymore. No longer a Muselmann. What my life tells me is that it is possible to survive, outwardly, while remaining blanked inside. To be a Muselmann only inside.

  And now I wonder: Which girl suffered more—the girl who was penetrated, or the girl who wasn’t? The girl whose cries were muffled, or the girl who has to live with the knowledge that she muffled her sister as a service to their torturer? The Jews who were killed, or the Jews who survived as a result of their work for the Nazis?

  There are more files of similar rapes, the others at other private girls’ schools in the Boston area. I read these files as quickly as I can. The rapist described in these cases is al
ways slender and tall. Most of the victims described his eyes as “startling bright blue,” “whitish blue,” or “clear blue.” He always asks his victims’ age and where they are from. He always threatens to kill them. He always commands that they look away, but only dons a homemade mask during the act of rape. He does not seem to be deterred by the presence of potential witnesses: he often entered dorms or homes that were filled with people. There is almost always more than one victim, usually two; and in many cases, only one of the victims is penetrated. He seems to take his time. He likes to have an audience. He is particular about his victims’ positions. In some cases, the victims notice a white handle or white grips on a gray-black gun. In other cases they describe the gun as grayish black. In almost every case, when the rapist is done, he admits that the “pistol” they observed was a cap gun. Some of the victims observed acne scars on his neck and face. He is usually described as having a “Boston accent,” or “local accent.”

  His technique changes over time. In the beginning, he carried a tube of jelly, which he spread on the victim’s vagina. He also carried stones in his pocket, and laid them out on the bed or nearby on the floor, as if reenacting some kind of ritual. Sometimes, early on, he wore a wig or gloves, but later he did not. He claimed to be from different places, often the state his victim was from, and he used different names.

  It is a bleak and cold January day. My son is with his father, and Chet is away. I have been writing all day. My neighbor, Pebble Gifford, has invited me to her house for dinner, where there will be other neighbors. I have written too long into the afternoon, trying to take advantage of the silence in the apartment. It is hard to transition from the dead Brian Beat to the living world, but I take a walk and a bath and I find a way back.

  It is a convivial Cambridge party. Most of the attendees are a generation older than I. They are sophisticated—well traveled and well read. Many of them have known each other for decades. They have worked on failed campaigns together. They’ve seen one another through triumphs and then a slowing down. It is a group to which I don’t belong.

  But I feel welcome. I also feel safe.

  Two of us are outsiders in this group—Joe Finder, a successful writer of thrillers, and myself. At one point, our hostess asks the two of us to tell the group what we are presently writing.

  I have told very few people the subject of this work. Not that it’s a secret—it just feels odd to talk about it. I propose to Joe, the famous writer, that he go first.

  But he, the famous writer, wants to give the floor to me.

  It’s not that I’m afraid. Of course not. What is the point of writing a book if I can’t reveal its subject, even to a friendly audience?

  I tell myself I have no colleagues here, that I have nothing to lose, that it’s good practice to talk about the subject of this work.

  “I am writing about my own rapist,” I blurt out, perhaps a bit too quickly, perhaps a bit too quietly.

  I sense confusion. There is a silence, but also a rustling, as people shift their bodies. They are uncomfortable with what they couldn’t quite hear. Maybe they are trying to get a grip on the meaning of the words they heard.

  One person asks, “What did you say?”

  I start again. I tell the group that the rape occurred more than thirty years earlier, that the police reopened the case, that they believe they solved the crime. I tell them about the forty-four known victims, all between the ages of nine and nineteen years old. I tell them that twenty of the victims had been living in the eight-block area centered on the Radcliffe dorms.

  I tell myself, I’ve done it. And even survived the telling.

  One of the women, a widow, has been notably quiet until now. Vera. I know who she is. We all do. She is a longtime political activist who works on behalf of children. Her husband had been a famous professor of history, known throughout the world.

  Now she speaks.

  “One of the victims was my stepdaughter,” she says, flatly.

  I look at Vera. I observe her precisely cut gray hair, thick gray brows over deep brown eyes. I take note of her woolen suit, a sensible gray-green. Eileen Fisher, I think to myself. She could almost be in one of those ads featuring middle-aged women who look like they’ve lived enviably complicated lives, but are now nicely pulled together, thanks to their clothing designer. She is aging well, I observe.

  She is thought to be kind. She is thought to be reliable. I know this. But she is approaching eighty. In her era, the world was smaller. In her world, rapes were rare; and rapes at gunpoint, rarer still. In her world, you could assume that there could not possibly be more than one rapist active in town in any given year. Therefore, it stood to reason. But I couldn’t believe this. I live in a more dangerous world, one where rapists are more common, or so I imagine.

  “I will contact my stepdaughter,” she says, “and ask if she’d like to talk to you.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I would like to talk to her stepdaughter. I’ve never talked to another victim of rape. But I’m sure, of course, that we were raped by different men.

  Lucy, the stepdaughter, and I agree to meet. She will bring her sister as support, and I will bring Chet. I suggest Rialto, the best restaurant in Cambridge. I order the most expensive bottle of wine I’ve ever bought, in the spirit of the Titanic.

  Lucy is almost exactly my age. Lucy’s parents had divorced a few years before she was raped, just as mine were. Her mother died, just like mine; only Lucy was in her twenties when her mother passed away. Like her father, she is an academic. I know, before agreeing to meet her, that she is a successful academic. I hate to admit it, but I would not want to meet with her if she had been undone by this crime, if she identified herself as a Victim. She is a professor of criminology at the University of Vermont. She was raped at age thirteen, in her mother’s home. The house was filled with women, her three sisters and a number of their friends.

  She tells me that in the last few years, in her late forties, she has found herself feeling an overwhelming desire to learn about the man who raped her.

  We compare notes. The gun. The mask. The command to stay silent. The presence of others. Still, there are many differences. In her case, she was on the second floor, and her mother and sisters and their friends were in the living room. She was alone in her room when she was raped.

  We talk about our families’ reactions. Although she was living with her mother at the time, her father was the one who took her to the hospital. The night after the rape, a group of kids from the neighborhood slept in her bedroom to protect her. Afterward, Lucy slept in her mother’s bedroom for years. I feel an embarrassing shiver of envy upon hearing this. No mother held me close against the terrors of the night. Her parents sent her to therapy. They decided to tell the whole school what had happened, to prevent Lucy from feeling alone. She was frightened, she says, but she felt held.

  Lucy has tried to get her file from the city of Cambridge, but she has made no headway. I tell her that I will look through my files, to see if there is any detail about the rapes that occurred in Cambridge. I have a vague recollection of a detailed list, I tell her. I will see what I can find.

  A few days later, I make my way back to my garbage can. I leaf through the files quickly, pausing only long enough to determine whether the words “Cambridge” or “Radcliffe” appear anywhere on the sheets. In my mind’s ear I hear the words, Seek and ye shall find. I push these words aside, embarrassed by the banality of my own mind. Other words replace them. No pain, no gain. Again, I brush the aphorism aside. As I leaf through the papers, I tell myself, I will not be distracted by the victims’ pain. I repeat these words to myself, like a mantra.

  At last I find what I’m looking for, a handwritten note that details the times and dates of the Cambridge rapes, and other rapes, taken down by Inspector Nestle, who was at that time investigating the rapes that took place at Concord Academy in 1971. He had discovered that there had been a series of rapes in nearby towns at about the same tim
e, and he went to talk to the Cambridge police department to see if the rapes were similar.

  The note is titled, “Info from Cambridge PD. Re: Rape Case.” It is dated April 30, 1971.

  Cambridge has had 20 incidents of rape and attempted rape, all with the same MO. These incidents began on April 9, 1970, at 9:35 PM and continue thru, to date. There was one long break in the pattern, from May to August of 1970. It was in late August that Provincetown had four (4) incidents with the same MO. Cambridge had it start up again on 9-2-70. The following are the dates and times of the Cambridge incidents for 1970:

  4-9-70, 9:30 PM

  9-2-70, 10 PM

  9-15-70, 10:14 PM

  10-10-70, 9:30 PM

  10-13-70, 9:30 PM

  10-28-70, 8:30 PM

  10-28-70, 9 PM

  11-23-70, 9:50 PM

  11-24-70, 9:30 PM

  12-2-70, 10:15 PM

  In all of these incidents the subject’s description and MO are the same. The subject’s description is as follows: White male—5’11” to 6’2”. His weight runs from 135 lbs to 155 lbs. In all incidents the eyes are described as “clear blue.”

  Subject uses a gun. It is said to be a small black or dark grey revolver with white grips. After having the victims disrobe, and lay down, he uses a salve or lubricant from a tube silver or grey in color (there is a possibility this is medication for the treatment of gonorrhea—several of the Cambridge victims have come down with a strong strain of it) on the genitals, and then has intercourse with them. All victims state that the subject appears to be fairly well educated, well spoken, with a medium pitched voice. He is very methodical in his movements. The victims all state that the subject is very nervous, almost to the point of being as scared as the victims, and he always is polite and apologizes to the victims for what he is doing and he keeps stating he doesn’t want to hurt them.