Denial (12 page)

“Can I see some ID or something?” she demands. “How do I know who you are?”

I assume that she is concerned about getting into a stranger's car for all the normal reasons. We might be rapists, or even terrorists. Okay, those might not be totally normal worries, but you never know. But she is not worried about her own safety, it turns out.

“How do I know you're not working for the feds?” she asks. “Brian is dead, but I still don't want to hurt him in any way.”

I paw through the papers stuffed carelessly in my purse. Why am I not more organized? Old receipts. Library notices. The results of medical tests. Other people's business cards, but alas, none of my own. Panicked, I offer up a driver's license and a Harvard ID. For whatever reason, these two items help to persuade her that I'm not a fed. She agrees to proceed.

She directs us to a shopping mall a few minutes down the road. Dunkin' Donuts is on the corner, just outside the mall. When we arrive, the coffee shop is crowded with retirees enjoying a mid-afternoon snack. I am worried that the happy din will be too much for Abby, but she seems unfazed. Chet asks Abby what she would like to eat. She requests coffee and a chocolate cruller. I wonder if this is her first meal of the day.

I ask her how she first met Brian.

“I was fourteen or fifteen,” she says. “He was a couple of years older. He had been going to a vocational school, an agricultural school. When I met him, he had just switched over to Milbridge High. There were three of us who started hanging out together:
Brian, me, and Simon Brown. Later, John Henry was part of our group. We were oddballs. People called us hippies.

“He was very intelligent. He knew everything about everything, things that a lot of us weren't interested in or didn't know anything about—politics, history. He was spoiled by his parents. His mother—she adopted him, she wasn't able to have children—she just adored him. He was her only child.”

Now I recall the document that Lt. Macone gave me, which indicated that Brian was adopted.

I ask about his birth mother, the sister of his adoptive mother. “He never got over the fact that his birth mother gave him up. She wasn't interested in him. She went on to have more children, but that side of his family only took an interest in Brian after his adoptive mother died, when it came to settling the estate.

“He hid a lot of things, the pain he felt at not being wanted by his birth mother. He told me things he wouldn't tell anyone else.

“He was so gorgeous,” she says, in agreement with her younger sister, at least on the matter of the gorgeousness of Brian Beat, a quality not at all consistent with my vague recollection of a skinny man with a gun, and not at all in evidence in the photographs I now have of him from his prison file, the photographs I barely caught a glimpse of, but an impression remains nonetheless.

“He went for other girls, too. I know a lot of girls were after him. He needed to have conquests. But I always felt that he did that because he wanted to prove he was a man.

“I was thin,” she adds. “One hundred and fifteen pounds, but he thought I was heavy. He thought I was supposed to look like Twiggy. I'm five foot five, that is my normal weight. But he made me feel like I was fat.”

“How old were you when you got pregnant?” I ask.

“Seventeen,” she says. “In my senior year of high school. We
didn't have birth control back then. Brian wanted me to have an abortion, but I refused.”

Abby's father was Brian Beat's father's best friend. The two fathers knew about Abby's pregnancy. But Mr. Beat supposedly never informed his wife that their son had impregnated Abby.

“My parents wanted to put me in one of those homes for unwed mothers. Girls who go there agree to give up the baby. I didn't want to do that. So my mother called my sister Sally, and I moved in with her.”

She lived with her sister Sally for a while, and ended up marrying the brother of Sally's husband. The brother of the man whom Abby and her sister Fay believe murdered their sister Sally. How could one small town sustain this much violence?

“I married Tom when I was eight months pregnant. He didn't care that I was pregnant with another man's child. He said it is one thing to impregnate a woman, another thing to father a child. He never threw anything into my face. He was very good to me. He loved my daughter. I didn't have any contact with Brian when I was married to Tom, living in Connecticut.

“But I was in love with Brian,” she says. “I really wanted to be with him.” She is smiling now, for the first time, drifting into a wistful space. The horror of it shocks me awake.

But her wistful mood quickly fades. “None of my relationships since then have worked out, because I was really in love with Brian,” she says.

Is it possible to be in love with a child rapist?

“He had a really hard time in prison. The other inmates mistreated him. They set fire to his bunk. They thought he was a diddler.”

I ask what that means. “A child molester,” she says. “They don't like diddlers in prison,” she explains.

“When he came out on furlough, he kept saying to me, ‘I didn't do it.'

“After he got out of prison, we were thinking about getting back together,” she continues. “But he was unstable. He wrote me a letter about how proud he was of me that I kept my daughter. But he kept asking, Are you sure it's mine? That really hurt me. There was a cold side to him. I realize now, looking back, that he was very cold when he made love to me. There was a lack of compassion during the sex act.”

“Do you think he could have been abused?” I ask.

“Not by his parents,” she says. “Maybe by someone else. There was a lot of sexual abuse and incest in Milbridge,” she adds. “No one was ever arrested, but the police knew about it. It was written up in an almanac, an annual report on the town. I was shocked when I saw it. There were over a hundred reports of incest, women getting abused, domestic violence. The police never did anything. Back then, they assumed that if a woman was getting beaten, she must have done something wrong.

“I really liked his mother. She told me that she always thought the two of us would get together. But she told me, You're too good for him. She knew there was something not right with Brian's mind—but people didn't talk about these things in those days. He was moody. Sometimes he was extremely charismatic. He kept himself really well. He always had to have his tan. He wore a corduroy suit…. People were intimidated by him. He was so bright. But sometimes he could be very cold. He had different personalities. He could be very charismatic and loving, but he could also be very cold. Not a lot of compassion.

“Karen was around thirteen when I told her that Brian was her father. She's been mad at me ever since,” she says.

I don't want to interrupt her story to ask who Karen is; I assume that she must be Abby's daughter.

But Abby suddenly recollects that she's not talking to an old friend. “My daughter,” she explains.

I do not ask where this daughter is. I do not want to meet her.

“Should I have told her or not?” she asks.

I am relieved that she doesn't wait for my response.

“I would have wanted to be told who my father was, even if he were accused of rape. I did what I thought was right. He stopped over a couple of times. She was a little afraid of him. Sometimes he acted bizarrely. I wanted to protect her.”

Protect her from what, exactly? I cannot follow the flow of her logic here, but again, I don't want to interrupt her.

“Things could have happened for him. He was so smart. But I just couldn't save him. I had to protect my daughter,” she repeats.

If she is persuaded that Brian Beat was innocent of raping children, from what, exactly, was she feeling the need to protect her daughter?

After he got out of prison, he changed, she repeats. “He became a loner, a recluse. He walked all day long, from Milbridge, to Webster, and back. Once I picked him up; I'm not sure he even recognized me. But he was still gorgeous. He was so strong. He walked all the time, very muscular. He was in fantastic shape.

“It was so awful—Why did he hang himself? He had nothing. Sometimes you think about these things. Someone I cared so much about. But I just couldn't take him in. He was crazy. I was a nurse. I know he should have been on meds. You can't help someone like that if they won't take their meds.”

She is crying now, sobbing, actually. I consider whether I ought to hug her, but decide that it would be dishonest. How can I comfort her about the death of the man the police believe raped my sister and me? I feel an overwhelming sense of compassion toward Abby, but I am immobilized by confusion. I can't comfort her—not only because she is mourning the death of a man who was convicted of raping children, but also because I don't know how.

In this moment I tell myself that she and I are of different
species: she—outwardly tough but inwardly shattered; I—effete on the outside but tough as nails on the inside. She looks so alone, so vulnerable, sitting there on a cold metal chair under the stark lighting, surrounded by her neighbors whom she doesn't know. But the compassion I feel is mixed with horror, shame, moralistic judgment, and guilt. In her presence I am profoundly aware of how unfair life is. She grew up in Milbridge, Massachusetts—where drunks and pedophiles were common and commonly on display, and where girls learned to expect abuse and prepare for it. I grew up in Concord—where drunks and pedophiles are well-bred and secretive, where good girls, of which, at this moment, I know I am not one, learn the fine art of denial.

She pulls herself together.

Out of the blue, she tells me, “I saw my father sexually abusing my older sister. I was so afraid. We were moving into a new house, and we were staying in an apartment. The apartment had one large room. Sally was in a bed in the corner, and my sister Fay and I were sleeping in a double bed. He came in, in the middle of the night. He was half shit-faced, as we used to say.”

This is just impossible, I'm getting more than I asked for. Can I ask her to stop, to keep these secrets to herself? I know that I cannot. It would be cruel.

“He went right over to Sally's bed. I covered my face. I was young; I didn't really understand what was going on. I was young, but I wasn't stupid. She didn't yell, but I know I didn't imagine it. After that I never trusted my father. I always left my door open a particular way, so that if he opened it to come in, it would squeak.

“Even back then I didn't sleep that well,” she says, launching into a discussion of the effects of a medication she takes for sleep.

“Where was your mother?” I ask.

“She had gone to the hospital for a gallbladder operation,” Abby explains. “She left us alone with him.”

I know all about this, these mothers who get sick and the wolves who move in, but I remain silent.

As I leave, I spell out my name for Abby and give her my phone number. “Jessica Stern,” she intones slowly. “That name will be famous someday.” Not, “You will be famous someday,” but “that name.” I ask what she means by that, thinking that perhaps she has seen my name in connection with my work on terrorism. “I just think we will all know that name someday,” she says. Does she mean that my name will mean something to her in the future that it doesn't mean to her today?

I leave Abby, strongly considering the possibility that Brian Beat was not my rapist. No, that's not quite right. Let me try again. I leave Abby, doubting that I was raped at all. Abby's face and Abby's world seem much more real to me now than my own rape. And I am suddenly worried about hurting Abby, or especially her daughter.

We are sisters of sorts, both having had sex with this man. But the man she had sex with was “gorgeous” and “charismatic,” even if “cold during the sex act.” The man I had sex with—if we can call rape sex—Let me start again. The man who penetrated me was a skinny pedophile for whom foreplay included demanding, under threat of death, that my sister and I put on our little sisters' clothing. Our sisters were then eight and nine. That man penetrated me with his shame.

Shame, I realize now, is an infectious disease. Shame can be sexually transmitted.

 

Now that I have learned that Simon Brown was another member of Brian Beat's close circle of friends, I do what I can to find him. Once again, I find it hard to call anyone who knew Brian Beat.
Once again, Jack locates Simon, and even makes an appointment for me.

Simon has asked me to come to his office, which is located in an old industrial city near my rapist's hometown. He runs a company that supplies sprinklers for use in large buildings. Chet has taken the day off, once again, to drive me to my interview.

The closer we get to Simon Brown's office, the more detached I feel, as if I were floating slightly above the ground. In the car, I cannot bear the sound of music. The notes are sharp, or flat, or in any case not right.

The building where his office is housed is stark and anesthetized-looking. Once inside the building, under the fluorescent lights, I feel even worse. I lose my ground in generic buildings like this one, the sort where inside, you could be anywhere in America. Without a sense of place, I float even higher. But you probably wouldn't notice that I'm floating if you saw me in this state. I would seem more officious than normal, more efficient, perhaps a bit rushed and cold; but not like a person who doesn't sense the ground under her feet.

Simon Brown's receptionist pushes a buzzer and informs him over an intercom, “Your ten o'clock is here.”

Simon Brown is ready for me. The assistant directs me to his office, right around the corner from where she sits.

I try to observe him carefully. It takes an effort to force my brain to process visual stimuli in this floaty state. I'm far more likely to notice sounds or moods or scents. I note that he is slender, with gray hair. He has handsome features, almost stately. He looks respectable. I sense that fastidiousness and debauchery might have wrestled for control at some point in the past. Fastidiousness won the battle long ago.