Denial

by Jessica Stern

“I don’t remember the act itself,” she says. And then adds quickly, “Then he got up and I think he just went out.”

  I see her switch again. She is finished with something; she is ready to be done with this topic.

  I ask her whether she remembers having to put other clothing on, whether she remembers any stones.

  “He didn’t make me do anything other than what I just said,” she says. “He didn’t spend a lot of time; there were other people in the house.” Perhaps he couldn’t take the risk that she would scream. There was no one there to muffle her mouth.

  “I remember that I lay there for a little bit. On my bed. Maybe ten seconds or a minute. I opened my door. I remember the feeling—a kind of cloud of haze. But when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I started to scream.”

  She continues, “I started screaming, ‘I got raped.’ At first they thought I got cut in the shower.

  “After that I don’t remember very much.” I see a quiver of pain in her eye, but no tears.

  “I do remember one awful thing, though,” she says. “The bedpan. I remember getting into a cruiser and going down to the hospital. We went to MGH. I don’t know why we didn’t go to Mt. Auburn, the hospital nearby. They examined me. They pulled a curtain around me. I remember thinking that other people might be able to see me, that I wasn’t well protected. They put a hard bedpan under my bottom, to raise up my body, so they could see. It’s hard to believe that they would do that to a little girl. A cold, hard bedpan, under me. Why did they do that?

  “I have my ER record. We had to get prescriptions. I’m not sure what for. I know I had to take the morning-after pill. I threw up all of the next day.

  “My father took me to the hospital.” She hands me the report.

  When I gave Lucy the list of dates and times of the rapes that had occurred in her neighborhood in 1971, she was furious. If only the police had informed the neighborhood, she said, she probably would not have been raped. There had been eleven incidents in an eight-block area in the neighborhood of Radcliffe, prior to Lucy’s rape.

  “You would have thought that the police would want everyone to know that there had been a series of rapes in the neighborhood, to make sure everyone knew, to protect the other girls,” she says, angry again.

  I wonder, Do I sound angry about my rape? Do I still come across as matter-of-fact?

  “But when we asked the chief of police at Harvard,” she says, referring to a conversation she had had with him after she and I started communicating, “he said that it was just a different time. People saw rape differently back then. And for the police—it was soon after the protests. They had different priorities.

  “I think he also meant that the officers were not as equipped psychologically to deal with rape as they are now,” Lucy adds. We are back in the present.

  “When I saw the photograph, I knew that it was my rapist. It was his eyes and his pockmarked neck. His eyes were very bright.”

  A part of me is oddly envious of Lucy in this moment. The fact that she can remember the rapist’s eyes. I remember so little.

  I haven’t looked very closely at the pictures of the rapist. The first time Lt. Macone warned me there were photographs in the file, I turned the page instantly. I did not want to look. And even now, I rush through the files when I know I’m near a photograph.

  Recently I found a photograph of him at the time he was arrested, and I realized that the photos I’d been seeing were from the time he was in prison, when he was older than he was at the time we were raped. This new photograph is of a thin man, with light skin, a long face. He looks vaguely familiar. I feel a chill, so I don’t look more than a fraction of a second. I might almost say that I recognize him. But is he familiar from a dream? Is he familiar from what I remember, or don’t remember, from 1973; or from a photograph that I glimpsed in the file, in 2008? I will probably never know. At this point I cannot distinguish my memory of the rape from my recollections of seeing the images and reports in that file. Eventually I will work up the courage to ask my sister, but I don’t want to ask her now. I don’t want to hurt her.

  “When we start talking about penetration—” she says, but then stops.

  She begins again. “Penetration. It creates this horrible shame…. It’s a barrier of your body, a barrier that gets broken,” she says.

  Once again, I notice that her eyes are slightly swollen. I always have the feeling that my own eyes swell when I’m thinking about my rape. And now I wonder, seeing Lucy’s face, whether the swelling I imagine is actually real, even if it’s too subtle for most people to notice.

  We return to the topic of terror.

  “That physical feeling. In my abdomen. The first time I had the feeling was right after I was raped. And then again, when my mother died.”

  “My mother was cut open from here to here,” she says, indicating that same part of her body she pointed to earlier, from her lower abdomen to her heart. What is she talking about? I never heard that her mother was murdered.

  “Her pancreas had ruptured. In the final attempt to save her, they had to cut her open. They left her open to kind of drain.”

  I am horrified by this image, but relieved that it was doctors who had cut her mother open, rather than a rapist.

  “I wasn’t supposed to see my mother like that in the hospital. She was covered up, but of course we could still see that she was cut open. She was covered in a kind of nightie, but we could see through it. When she moved. Seeing her like that.

  “That is what the feeling is like,” she says, “like you’re cut open. First, it’s the feeling of being startled. All your nerve endings, they jangle. Right after that there is that other feeling, an electric feeling. You know what I mean, your stomach is jazzed up. It’s a secondary reaction to the fear. It goes from your lower belly all the way into your chest.”

  The thought of this feeling brings her back to the rape, the subject that had been temporarily closed.

  “I remember barfing all day long the next day, the day after the rape. Maybe in my mind I put all this together, my mother’s belly sliced open, the rape, the barfing. And I got that same pain when my marriage began falling apart.”

  Now I know why the word penis sounded so alien to me. It is because Lucy is using the language we used as teenagers—“barfing,” “your stomach jazzed up,” “junk” to refer to something too “yucky” to name. It takes me back to my own time of terror, uncertainty, abandonment.

  Lucy continues. “If it came up in conversation, I couldn’t say the word rape,” she says. “It got stuck in my throat. I just couldn’t say it. If I said it, if I had to say it, I felt like I was choking. I prefer the words sexual assault, or aggravated sexual assault.

  “There is something very primal about rape, like cavemen. It’s a yucky word.”

  “What did you think when your stepmother told you that she had met a woman who had been raped around the same time you were?” I ask.

  “She e-mailed,” Lucy recalls. “It didn’t even occur to me it was the same guy. But I remember thinking it would be nice to talk to someone who had been through the same thing. I was visiting my cousins. They were asking me, Why would you want to meet this person, a random person who was raped? And I said, You have to understand that there is one person whom I know in the entire universe who had the same experience. It is a huge universe, and I’d never met anyone who was raped like I was, at gunpoint.

  “It felt so strange that it had come to me now—this possibility of meeting you—because it had been on my mind, and I was frustrated that I had to let it go…. I had to let it go because I had hit a dead end in my search for the files.”

  The Cambridge police cannot find the file. But Harvard University has its own police force and keeps its own records. So Lucy and I requested Harvard’s records. We wrote to Harvard’s president, who sent our request to the counsel’s office. It took the counsel a year to respond to our numerous calls. He was busy, he explained. Perhaps he was too busy to
redact the files. But would he have been too busy to help us if he knew who Lucy is, who her father was?

  “I think it’s my father’s divine intervention that we found each other,” she adds, unexpectedly. I would not have guessed that Lucy believed in divine intervention.

  “My father has a hand in things,” she says.

  What I learned about my rapist:

  After reopening a thirty-three-year-old cold case, the police are now persuaded that they have identified the man who raped my sister and me. Brian Beat was convicted of three earlier rapes and was sent to prison for eighteen years, only ten days after he raped us. Although the police knew of this man and had in their files information on a remarkably similar series of crimes that had occurred in the Boston area in the two years prior to our rape, they did not believe us when we insisted that we did not know the man who raped us. They did not put the pieces together, and for thirty-three years, the crimes remained unsolved.

  Brian Beat committed suicide several years before I began looking for him, so I was unable to interview him, and he was unable to confirm or deny our suspicions. But I was able to talk to many people who knew him, and to get access to many of the prison, court, and police records associated with his crimes. Based on the similarity of the description of the perpetrator, his weapon, and his unusual modus operandi, the police are now convinced that Brian Beat raped at least forty-four girls in Massachusetts between 1971 and 1973. The girls were between the ages of nine and nineteen. Most of the rapes were at or near private girls’ schools. Many of the rapes involved two or more girls.

  People who knew Brian Beat in his youth described him as a “gorgeous” and “brilliant” young man who was “nice” most of the time. But he was also capable of sudden, unprovoked acts of cruelty that seemed to come from nowhere, as if he had become another person. Although most of his relatives and friends focused, in their conversations with me, on the side of him that was “nice,” I learned that girls who were part of his circle were warned not to be alone with him, and that before he began his career of raping unknown girls at gunpoint, he tried to rape the sister of one of his best friends.

  All but two of Brian Beat’s friends and relatives insisted, at the beginning of our conversation, that he was innocent of any crime. But almost invariably, they would state, as if as an afterthought, as if only vaguely aware of the significance of their words, that he should not have done what he did (without specifying what that was), or that they knew he was “disturbed.”

  I cannot know what combination of biochemical or psychological or other factors caused Brian Beat to do such monstrous things. But I was able to learn this: He left a wake of suffering among many of those exposed to him, and he was himself traumatized. He was adopted by an aunt and learned of his provenance in the worst possible way, from a child on the playground whose aim was to hurt him. As a young teenager he learned that the woman he thought was his aunt was actually his birth mother; and that his cousin was actually his half sister. Although he was not openly homosexual, at least among the group of his friends that I was able to meet, he frequented gay bars and was excused from serving in the military because he claimed to be homosexual. He lived in a part of Massachusetts that was a dumping ground for pedophile priests, where members of the clergy passed their victims from one pedophile priest to the next. He attended a church in Milbridge, Massachusetts, that suffered a series of predatory priests. These abuses were brought to light after the church scandal broke in Boston in 2002. There were rumors about sexual abuse at his elementary school at the time he was a student there, but no case was brought to court at the time. The House of Affirmation, located in a nearby town and also part of the Worcester Diocese, was founded in 1973 as a treatment center for priests with psychological and sexual problems. However, a number of the priests residing there for treatment continued to engage in the sexual abuse of minors from the neighboring towns and became the subjects of multiple criminal investigations and civil complaints and settlements.

  Clergy sexual abuse was rarely discussed in the 1950s, and I was not able to identify a single court case from the period of Brian Beat’s childhood. It is not possible to know whether the alleged pedophile ring associated with the House of Affirmation was active prior to that organization’s formal establishment, or if pedophiles were routinely placed at Brian Beat’s church in the 1950s as they were in later years. However, the rituals associated with some of Beat’s rapes—including the stones he placed at the scene of the crime and the small stones that he routinely carried in his front pocket—suggested that he was reenacting a ritual of some kind.

  After serving eighteen years for three of the forty-four rapes, Beat returned to the small town in central Massachusetts where he grew up. The police did not get around to designating him a sexual offender under Megan’s Law until he began harassing a local police officer. His case fell through the cracks.

  chapter twelve

  War’s Victims

  My shrink tells me I have PTSD. Ridiculous. PTSD is what soldiers get, not girls.

  I know there are certain things that set my teeth on edge. Fluorescent lights. Greasy fingers. That ticking, scraping sound that overwhelms you with rage. When I’m in my analyst’s office, the sound of her clock intrudes into my skull. I cannot bear the sound.

  But still. The impact of war and the impact of sexual violence are not the same.

  Certain smells make me depressed. The smell of air freshener can make me want to die. It’s also true that I am spacy sometimes. Can’t drive. If I get lost, it feels like the world is caving in on me. Can’t think sometimes. My mind. It drips somehow. And I will admit I’ve done some dangerous things. But with good reason. My research.

  Is it really possible, as experts say, that rape or long-term “relational abuse,” to use a shrinky term, can have a physiological effect on the mind and body similar to that of the terror of war?

  Researchers armed with magnetic resonance imaging devices repeatedly report that they can see and measure physical changes in the brain associated with PTSD. They can measure significant reductions in the volume of the hippocampus and changes in the medial prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain that are involved in memory as well as emotional response. These physical changes have been observed in Vietnam vets and in victims of childhood physical or sexual abuse. There was no change in vets or victims of abuse who did not suffer PTSD. Reduction in hippocampal volume is specific to PTSD, and is not observed in other panic or anxiety disorders.5 I have read this again and again. But I can’t see my hippocampus. And it seems to me that PTSD is a fashionable disorder.

  I’m not going to take the word of a shrink. I’m going to talk to some soldiers and see for myself.

  I have a friend whose work puts him in regular contact with soldiers. Karl is a retired Special Services officer whose company does a lot of work in Iraq, and he knows a lot of vets. I ask him about the possibility of talking to an Iraq War veteran with PTSD. Sure, he says.

  Karl e-mails me the contact information for his son-in-law, who has complained of PTSD symptoms since his return from Iraq. Karl had mentioned his son-in-law Erik earlier, when Karl and I first met. We had earlier talked about my traveling down to Fort Bragg to one of the hospitals there. But his son-in-law lives relatively close by.

  I think I better tell you the backstory of how, when, and why I first met Karl. Karl retired after serving for twenty years in the Special Forces. After that, he started his own company, a military contractor. The war in Iraq was good for Karl’s business. He won a significant contract with the Department of Defense to help oversee American detention facilities. After General Petraeus’s “surge,” the American military found itself with some 26,000 Iraqis under detention, and Karl’s company became involved in overseeing their confinement.

  The large number of detainees was causing problems for both the U.S. and the Iraqi governments. Some 85 percent of the detainees were Sunni. The Sunni bloc in the parliament was regularly threat
ening to walk out. General Petraeus was anxious to find a way to “rehabilitate” the detainees and get them back out on the street as soon as possible. He hired Karl to develop a plan for rehabilitating the terrorists and insurgents, and Karl proposed to hire me. I was skeptical about the possibility that Americans would be able to rehabilitate professional terrorists, but I was happy to learn about the work.

  “I can see, Dr. Stern, from reading your books, that you believe in acquiring ground truths,” he begins.

  Karl refers to me as “ma’am” or “Dr. Stern,” even though I insist that he call me Jessica. He will comply for five minutes, but he always reverts to a more respectful form of address. I find this distracting, but also touching. Karl cannot give up the habits of a soldier.

  The phrase ground truths has a heavy sound to my ear. But the concept is appealing to me. I don’t like to rely solely on information contained in libraries or other people’s field research, which is what I was trained to do. I want to roll up my sleeves, immerse myself in the mess of the moment, allow the truth to reveal itself in the stories that inevitably unfold. How does he know this about me?

  And then, there is that word truths. How does he know how to flatter me so well? He sees that I am obsessed with finding truths, and not only that, that I understand that there is no one “truth.” He has identified precisely the qualities I am most proud of in my work. I am naturally skeptical of established facts. I am fascinated by the details of people’s lives. I like to bathe in the data, to look at every detail, to discover the secrets that a more single-minded, disciplined researcher would surely miss. Karl is skilled. He does not flatter me in an obvious way, in a way that would make me feel manipulated.

  What he needs, Karl tells me, is a person who knows how to talk to terrorists. “A person capable of getting beyond the political jargon,” he says. A person who is capable of discovering terrorists’ actual motivations, not the rationale they might publish on a Web site.