If I Only Knew Then...

by Charles Grodin

  I began to investigate the “similar transactions,” other little girls Gates was accused of molesting, accused but never prosecuted. I found one of the oldest daughters I mentioned earlier, now all grown up but seemingly defeated by life.We sat together in her one room, on the bed, and she described her father, Gates, molesting her for the first time. She was the one who resisted and was beaten black and blue. She was twelve. She went to school the next day with a black eye, swollen and battered. She told her teacher. She told the school detective. Nothing happened, except she went home each day after school and the abuse continued.

  I found another victim. She was gorgeous and articulate. She hadn’t grown up with her biological father, Walter Gates, but instead lived with her mom in another state. On her first visit to her biological father for the summer at age fourteen, he took her out to the stables where he housed all the livery horses and raped her. In stark contrast to the destroyed lives of her half sisters, she had gone on to write a book on the subject and lecture across the country. I then found the teenage sister of the two current victims. She had moved out of the beautiful home they had and into some of the worst housing projects in the city of Atlanta in order to get away. He had been assaulting children for years.

  Enter the lawyers. One, a noted defense attorney (and part-time judge!), was defending Gates. It would become one of the most wrenching trials I ever worked. The weekend before the trial, while I honed the witness list and wrote my opening statement and direct examinations of each witness, the defense got busy too, but with a very different strategy. They had the mother of these two little girls bring them to the defense attorney’s offices over the weekend.

  I found out that the little girls had apparently recanted only when the lead attorney announced it in his opening statement before the jury. I nearly blew a gasket. How could they do such a thing? My objections became more and more angry and confrontational, thereby making the judge more and more angry at me. Remember, the defense lawyer was his brethren, a fellow judge, albeit part-time!

  In a final move to drive the recantation home to the jury in a way no five-year-old ever could, the defense lawyer put his own law partner on the stand, who “happened” to be there at the law offices that Saturday to witness the so-called recantations of the little girls. I crossed him with a vengeance, and it was hard to do. The law partner was one of those guys that just ooze charm—smooth-talking, calm, and cool. After a series of questions that were getting me nowhere, I hit upon a line of questioning: money. This was all about money. The mom was suported by Gates, the family lived off him, the lead attorney was making thousands off the defense, and the law partner–witness would share in the fees. It was sick. I would cross him on his pecuniary, or monetary, interest in the outcome of the case.

  The minute I got the question out regarding Gates’s huge retainer, counsel roared an objection, claiming any and all fees were secret, subject to the attorney-client privilege. The trial judge overruled me in front of the jury and gave a lecture from the bench on attorney-client privilege and the sanctity of a lawyer’s confidential business dealings, ending with the observation that I didn’t know the law. I believed I did.

  Firmly recalling my memory of the OCGA (Official Code of Georgia Annotated), I turned directly to the witness and did it again. I asked the very same question just overruled.

  The judge, furious, red-faced, and yelling, sent out the jury and admonished me. He also promised to hold me in contempt, which could require at least one night in jail and a stiff fine. I could also get in trouble with the Georgia Bar Association. I stood there wondering if I could lose that thing dearest to me, my license to practice law.

  I agreed to refrain from doing it again, and sat down in my seat. I was so mortified, I couldn’t even look up from my lap, much less into the eyes of a triumphant defendant and defense lawyer. My face was hot. I accepted the judge’s ruling. I would keep my law license and stay out of jail. As a government worker, I didn’t have money for a big fine, anyway. When the jury came back in, I would announce “nothing further” and cease questioning. I waited and the jury began to file back into the box. It was time to eat a dirt sandwich and back down.

  I glanced up and caught one of the jurors returning a smile to the defense partner still sitting on the witness stand as the jury walked back in. It made me sick inside. The jury believed there was no money connection, that the line of cross-exam was wrong. They would never understand that this was all about money and not at all about the truth. At least the two little girls were no longer in the courtroom and I didn’t have to meet their eyes.

  The judge turned to me. “Ms. Grace?”

  My mouth was dry and I could hear blood pounding in my ears. Backing down to avoid jail on contempt had been a horrible mistake. My mistake in accepting the judge’s ruling was grievous. The children’s recantation would be accepted and Gates would walk free. The mistake was bigger than me, bigger than the courtroom. I stood.

  “Isn’t it true this is ALL ABOUT MONEY? You and your partner will make a mint off this case . . . Those little girls didn’t truly recant!” Words to that effect hung in the air for a split second.

  Then, all hell broke lose. Books fell, papers flew, the judge banged the gavel, leaping up off his leather swivel chair, and he ordered the jury out. He immediately held me in contempt, and before you could blink your eyes, the courtroom filled with troops and troops from the public defender’s office, thrilled to have a front-row seat to see me cuffed and hauled off to jail.

  It was all worth it. The jury got it. They convicted. The night of the guilty verdict, I got long-distance calls from four locations across the country, all from women who had been molested by Walter Gates. Their cases had never been prosecuted. We toasted long-distance . . . to Lady Justice and her sword.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  I learned in one blinding moment, in the face of an enormous mistake: Believe in what you know to be true and be ready to fight for it. Be cold or hot, but never lukewarm. And last, if it’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for. And you can sometimes prevent a bad mistake right in the middle of making it.

  P.S. I didn’t end up in jail, and even better, the appeals court agreed with me. I did know the law after all . . . at least that time!

  ROSIE O’DONNELL

  Comedian, Actress, Advocate

  My father filled out my college applications. A lot of people tell me this is weird. Not to me. Left to my own devices, or lack thereof, I would never have gone.

  College was important in my family. There was no “if” we were going, only where. My father sacrificed to make sure we all had access to the best universities. Why? I don’t know. I figure he thought it would ensure our financial futures. It was the way he made it out of where he was to where he is now—a far better place. My father grew up in the tenements. He had a secret, mysterious childhood that was, I’m sure, as much responsible for his deficits as his strengths. I tried when I was a teenager to get him to talk about what had happened to him. Had he himself been hurt? Neglected? Abused? He always avoided these conversations. He’d say, “That doesn’t matter. What matters, Dolly, is you getting a good education.” College. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to be a comedienne.

  My father sent away for the brochures, all those shrink-wrapped booklets showing blond students on brick walls. It’s not that I wasn’t tempted to enter such a world. I just knew, right from the start, that it wasn’t gonna fit me. It didn’t.

  Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, accepted “me.” It was a good school, full of a bunch of kids a lot smarter than I was. The campus was too cute. There were elm trees and little gardens. There was a playing field chalked with neat white lines, as though space, the world, can be fairly divided. Leading up to the dorms there were pathways lined with trees that bore berries that looked delicious but were poisonous. I was sure that murderers loomed in those trees, waiting to assault a wandering coed. I would never go out at night alone.

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nbsp; There was a pub on campus called the Hub. Which sounds quite Dr. Seuss–esque. I hung out there a lot. Too much. I would imagine myself with Dave Mangus, the junior boy who looked so much like this new actor Tom Cruise who had just starred in Risky Business. He was, my Tommy, from the moment I saw him, the most handsome man I’d ever seen. Remains true today, twenty some odd years later. His double, Dave Mangus, kissed me once there in the Hub pub.

  I first spoke to Chrissie in Professor Betty Barnes’s environmental science class. I had seen her the day before in anthropology. She had red sweatpants and a white sweatshirt—no zipper—with a hood. It had that worn-out, preppy, no-flea-market look to it. She had a blond ponytail, two notebooks, and a Snyder’s hard pretzel in her hand. She was beautiful in a non-magazine way. She looked like she’d walked out of a J. Crew catalog.

  I saw her and I knew immediately I would love her, and there was nothing sexual about it. Not then. A full five months later, though, I would be throwing up every time she was near me. Then, I would say, it became sexual in my mind, or at least the option of it did. I puked. Go figure. I would puke almost every morning; the other girls on my hall were convinced I was pregnant. No, just gay. And, for the first time, sexually awake.

  One evening, I came home from a study hall and the dorm was strangely quiet. It was early, but for some reason the lights in most of the windows were off, and the entryway was dark. Just a few weeks back there’d been some crime on campus, a petty burglary, a brandished knife, and a warning had gone out. I stood in the hallway then, my back pressed to the wall. Something didn’t feel right, but when I looked around me, nothing exactly was wrong. The moonlight flowed in through the common room window, landing on the TV with its bent rabbit ears, the floor littered with wrappers and bright blobs of gum. “Hello?” I called out, stupidly, as though this were a home and not a sixty-person dorm, and no one answered me. Silence.

  I climbed the echoing steps and came out on floor two, where the hall light was on, bright and violent. I blinked. There was still silence. I looked for signs of the struggle, blood-soaked clothes. Nothing. I went upstairs to the TV room, and there sat sixty silent women, crying, glued to the TV set. John Lennon had been killed in New York City. John Lennon was dead. Chrissie was bereft. I wanted to touch her.

  I didn’t know, exactly, that I was gay. I did know that sex terrified me; ever since the seventh grade, when the boy-midget of my class had kissed me, I’d felt terror at the prospect of touch. I did know that when I’d gone out with kids in high school, where I’d been popular, I was always the designated driver, waiting with the car keys while they did it with each other on the beach, and I stood separate, and safe. I’d had the occasional thought, for some reason always in a car when I was driving, that perhaps I was a lesbian, and in my giddier moments I’d even shouted it out, just to hear it, but the words never moved me much, and I forgot about them as soon as I said them. Being a lesbian didn’t interest me much back then. I wasn’t worried about being gay or straight. I was mostly worried about avoiding sex with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

  I did not sleep well in college. What with the murdered Beatle, Three Mile Island, mass murderers, and Chrissie three flights up.

  I don’t really remember what we talked about the first time we had lunch together, just that we talked, that words were easy between us. I remember what she ate, a salad from the salad bar with bright yellow shredded cheese on top, and cherry tomatoes as cheery as holiday ornaments. I remember watching her lift a cherry tomato with her fork, how first she pierced it so a spurt of seeds came out the sides, and then she raised it to her tongue, and then she chewed, the fruit’s juice making her lips go glossy. I was mesmerized. She was everything I wasn’t, but for some reason that didn’t make me feel bad, as it had with the other college girls. She showed me all her stuff. I loved her stuff. She loved my humor. She let everyone on campus know that I was a seriously funny person, and my stock rose.

  After classes we’d go back to her room and rifle her closet. I tried on her shirts and skirts. I told her about my past—not everything, but a lot. I told her about the broken-down house on Rhonda Lane, the cancer and my mother. She told me her mother was Norwegian, her dad a professor at Temple University. That impressed me. She got excellent grades and I never saw her study. I sometimes studied, and my grades sucked. Sometimes, trying on her clothes, I’d ask her to button me up the back. Then I could feel her fingers on my spine and it made me, quite simply, want to cry. After one of these instances, I’d go back to my own dorm room, exhausted by the intensity of my feelings, fall onto my bed, and sink into a deep sleep.

  Then Chrissie and I started staying up all night, talking. I started to count the hours till I would see her again, and to experience the hours away from her as just filler. We drank beer at the pub and studied science together and somehow it happened, that after a late night of talking, or trying on clothes, somehow it wound up that we started sleeping together in the same bed. There was nothing sexual going on, yet the word got out—we were lezzies. Her mother, who was very cool and beautiful, said, “Are you and Chrissie lovers?” We both said no, and she said, “So why are you so worried?”

  But the talk increased. One night I gave Chris a back rub. I could feel the tension in her muscles; I could feel her flinch when I touched her. We had the light on, a lamp on the bedside table, its shade chenille—soft, small dots. I worked her shoulders, her spine, and then the small of her back, where we hold our hurts. I would not have gone any lower, had no plans to go any lower. I placed my palms flat on the small of her back and pushed in. I pushed the pads of my fingertips into her thin skin and watched, when I lifted them, the fading ovals on her back.

  “Chrissie,” I said, in a voice all raw.

  “Okay,” she said, her own voice muffled in the pillow, and then she lifted her head. “Okay, Roseann, enough.” And then she shook me off and walked across the room, and we stood there, staring at each other.

  After that, things changed between us. I started throwing up again. She stopped eating. Sometime around the middle of November, she came to me. “People are saying we’re gay,” she said. “We can’t hang out in my room alone.”

  “Who cares what they’re saying,” I said. I paused. My voice rose. “And so what if we’re gay?”

  Chrissie looked at me. She looked at me long and hard. “I’m not gay,” she said, and for the first time I noticed a twitch in her eyes. She was afraid.

  The snow started early that year, pre-Thanksgiving. It fell in dry white flakes, as light as package stuffing. That was when I saw a starving squirrel on my window ledge, its tail a piece of gimpy cartilage, its fur battered. And then it died. That night, it was cold, so cold that shovels shattered on the sidewalk when you tried to use them, and the moon was frosted over. Back at home, I stood with my sister in the bathroom, and I told her I was in love and not sure what to do about it. For some people, making this claim is shattering and revelatory, but for me it was a clear confirmation of what I had always known. It was not revealing but confirming.

  When I returned after the new year, Chrissie was sick. She’d grown, with no warning, terribly thin. You could see the planking of bone on her face. You could see the strings stretched taut in her neck. You could see the fanning of ribs, like the piping of bird bone in a wing. “Chrissie,” I said, coming up to her in the cafeteria, where she was fretting over the iceberg lettuce at the salad bar. “Chrissie, what happened?”

  She refused to discuss it. I was wrong. Nothing had happened. She had no idea what I was talking about. And so we finally drifted apart. No more sleepovers. No more nights of quarters and beers. Her life revolved around the food in the cafeteria, the stuff she would not taste. She had the menu memorized but she would eat only salad, with the occasional Bac-Os.

  The year ended. I packed up my rented car, told the girls on my floor I’d be right back. I was just going to get some chips for our goodbye party. I watched Chris watch me drive away. She knew I wasn’t
coming back. I didn’t. I’ve never been good at goodbyes.

  As for Chris, she ended up going back to Norway, where she worked out her food issues. She married a man she loves and has two babies. Sometimes now, when I am walking down the street and I see a woman with a long blond braid, I think it’s Chrissie, still, after all these years, and I experience it all over again, the saltwater-spray-in-the-lungs feeling of first love. Then it goes. The person passes me by.

  Six years ago, after fifteen years of not having spoken a word to her, I got a letter out of the Nordic blue from Chrissie. That’s when she told me about her husband and kids. She also told me in that letter that she finally wanted to talk about our freshman year in college. But there was nothing left to say. At last, at last, I told her I’d loved her purely. I told her that she’d changed my life by loving me back, and—no matter what—it would stay that way. It was what it was.

  As I write this now, I wonder where in this story lies my big mistake, the biggest one I ever made. Why did Chrissie come to mind when thinking about my most serious failure? If I were to ask my teachers from that single college year (I never graduated), they would say the mistake in this story happened when I drove away at the end, and for good. But if I were to ask myself—and I am now asking myself—where the single most serious mistake here lies, I might say it was simply, and irrevocably, in the passage of time: how long it took me to tell her that I loved her. It took more than twenty years.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  I am forty-four now. I awake some nights soaked in sweat: the menacing midlife change. Time moves swiftly, pages torn from a book. As a woman I have learned what I did not know as a girl: that the stellar detritus that makes us up is but the briefest form; in the blink of an eye it’s gone, and you lose your classification, whatever it may be—gay, woman, mother, daughter, friend. In the blink of an eye, we lose our humanity, slip back into space, and become a part of the galaxy—planets, stars, holes—from which we once came. I took what seems a long time to say I was gay, but longer still to learn to say “I love you.”