Denial (17 page)

“You had projected onto her motherhood. You were going through that myth that Lisa was your mother,” he says, disdainfully.

I am astonished that my father would now see my accepting Lisa as my mother, at least as long as she chose to play that role, as a form of what he now calls “projection.” I was only doing what I was told. How was I to know that eventually my father would see this mother as a myth?

“But didn't you play a role in creating that myth?” I ask.

“How?”

We have sunk into a kind of cleansing rage, my father and I, divulging secret, shameful thoughts that we would not share in our normal states of mind.

“By banishing the memory or thought of our mother from our lives. No pictures anywhere in the house. I didn't even know that you had any pictures of her until two years ago,” I say, in what I now imagine was a childish, rageful tone of voice.

“You never asked,” he says, softly.

“But you helped create that myth,” I insist.

“In suppressing Shola. Yes, I guess I did.”

Silence.

“Why did you do that? Was it just ‘Move on—don't think about the past,' just move on to the next phase? Are you sure you didn't banish the memory of our mother because it was too painful for you to bear?

“Did you do this for yourself or for us?” I repeat.

In reading over these notes now, I can hardly believe that I had the courage to utter those words.

“I didn't give it much thought. Decorating houses with pictures of your dead wife didn't seem like a good idea when you have a new wife,” he says, apparently not wishing to ask himself how much of what he did “for the good of his children” was actually to protect himself from pain he could not bear to feel.

We move on.

“So are you satisfied that you behaved impeccably after our rape?” I ask, wanting now to end this conversation.

“I behaved reasonably,” he says.

“Were you courageous?”

He doesn't answer.

“We were so afraid of you,” I add. A non sequitur.

“I was a pussycat compared to what I had growing up,” he says. “I guess I would have been fearful of one thing. Of losing you. Losing one's child is a terrible thing.”

You haven't lost me, I think to myself. But I need you to feel what happened to you, so that I can let myself feel what happened to me.

I, too, am fearful of loss. Losing a parent, especially this parent, would be crushing, will be crushing. But at least he now knows what happened to me, and I know what happened to him.
No one can take that away. If we lose each other again, to denial or death, at least we will have this moment of knowing.

So my father didn't return home to us right away. Yes, he had work to do; and yes, he was scheduled to return to America several days later, in any case. But I sensed that there had to be a reason that he was capable of compartmentalizing his life in this way. This sort of mystery evokes irresistible curiosity in me. I am compelled to research. But the answers I get are not necessarily related to the questions I pose, and I am not always ready to hear them.

A
ll the people who knew Brian Beat claimed to be certain he was innocent.

Denial helps the bystander. We don't want to know what the boys we send to Iraq have done to others out of terror, or what others have done to them. We would rather not know about terror or be confronted with evil. This is as true about Abu Ghraib as it is about personal assaults and more private crimes, the crimes that occur inside families.

But the victim, too, cannot bear to believe. She may bury or dissociate from or disown her pain. She may drink or take drugs or become unwittingly promiscuous, compelled to repeat the violation again and again, sometimes in the role of victim, sometimes in the role of perpetrator. The impact of the violation drips lazily down, like that clock in Dalí's painting, pooling in the form of shame. She may remember the facts that transpired,
but the outline is blurry. There is a haze in the brain, and the facts are detached from feeling. Certain sounds or scents may terrify the victim, but she may not notice her fear. For me, it's that ticking sound. So irritating. I want to punch. Certain scents, too. But for a very long time, I'd forgotten or dissociated or denied the source of my terrors.

To be raped or abused or threatened with violent death; to be treated as an object in a perpetrator's dream, rather than the subject of your own—these are bad enough. But when observers become complicit in the victim's desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too. This is why traumatized groups sometimes fare better than traumatized individuals. When the feeling of terror is shared, victims have a harder time forgetting what occurred or denying their terror. In the camps, what mattered most, Anna Ornstein explains, was whether there were witnesses willing to share the burden of overwhelming emotion. Talking about what occurred with other survivors or witnesses was an essential part of recovery, Ornstein claims.

When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. Life for the victim now begins anew. In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses. Something seems to have happened, but what? The ground disappears. This is the alchemy of denial: terror, rage, and pain are replaced with free-floating shame. The victim will begin to wonder: What did I do? She will begin to believe: I must have done something bad. But the sensation of shame is shameful itself, so we dissociate that, too. In the end, a victim who has suffered the denial of others will come to see herself as a liar.

The terrible truth is that once a person has been raped or abused, she seems to acquire a scent or a frequency that makes
her an irresistible target for abusers. She may be haunted by a feeling of ungroundedness and by periods of hypervigilance. If she is lucky, as I was, she may find or fall into a career where hypervigilance is useful (though it is unlikely to be useful in her personal life). And if she is terribly unlucky—if she ends up a jailer in Abu Ghraib, for example—she may slip over the edge and victimize others.

The dizziness brought on by the denial of others is often worse than the original crime. When I think about what denial does, I can understand why some victims, thank God a small number, take out a gun and find someone to shoot or maul or rape, sometimes in their own homes.

 

No one wanted to believe that Brian Beat was a serial rapist of children. Even his jailers. They were in denial, too.

The Massachusetts Department of Corrections gave me a redacted copy of Brian Beat's prison file. Thousands of pages. I know there is a lot of information in these. I mean to read them, but they don't get read. Months go by. A year goes by. Well, if I'm honest, years.

I keep these files in a trash can. It is a small wastebasket, the kind you might use in your living room. I knew that the Concord police had offered me a treasure trove. But I put the files away; I didn't have time to read them. I put the trash can in a rarely used fireplace. And then I forgot about the files.

I look at my trash can, but that seems to be all I can manage.

Once, when I was decorating a house, I went to a sale at the Boston Design Center, the sort of sale where you get useless “decorator” things for 75 percent off. I bought a small wastebasket—a work of art—with three identical elephants enameled on its sides. They have deliciously wrinkled skin, those elephants, and friendly, floppy ears. You can almost feel the impact of their
slow, serious tread, which they repeat again and again, around and around. Will they ever get it right? Will they ever be released from this endless circle? The garbage can is too beautiful to use for garbage. I found the perfect use for it: to store the records of Brian Beat's rapes and of the period he spent behind bars.

Eventually, I take the trash can away from where I live and bring it with me to Tanglewood. I open the files in a place I feel safe, sitting outside in the open air, listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearse. On the day I finally find the courage to begin reading, Thomas Hampson is rehearsing Mahler's
Kindertotenlieder
, a song cycle for voice and a small orchestra. The songs are about a father's coming to terms with the loss of his two children. In the year after his two children died, the poet Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poems about their death. The lyrics are based on these poems.

This father is writing as a way to process some evil. I think I can understand this. But the father, at first, is in a state of denial. “I often think they have just gone out! Soon they will get back home,” he would like to believe, and half does. There is an implicit meditation on the problem of evil: If God is omnipotent, how could He allow these two children to die?

Two children. Our rapist, too, often raped children in pairs. If God is omnipotent, how could he allow these children to be raped? But we didn't die. Outwardly, we remained alive.

The struggle in the
Kindertotenlieder
is with natural evil—the evil caused by chance or by an act of God, such as bad weather or disease; whereas my struggle is with moral evil—the evil caused by men, acting with malevolent intent. But I begin to wonder—can we really distinguish these two forms of evil so cleanly—the moral evil of malicious intent with the natural evil of a storm or disease? Was Brian Beat partly the victim of a storm or a disease?

I did not seek to hear this music—but the musical depiction
of denial, followed by the struggle to sustain hope despite the recognition that evil exists, helped me begin to read.

Brian Beat was convicted of three of the forty-four rapes that the police now believe he was guilty of, and was sent to prison for eighteen years.

I read the statements of a girl who identified Beat as her rapist. (I am not allowed to quote from the redacted statement.) It is June 1972. There were five girls in the house, four of them in a second-floor bedroom. Suddenly a man appeared in the bedroom. The girls had not heard his footsteps on the stairs. They described him as five-ten, about 155 pounds, very slender.

He came into the room holding a gun in his left hand. He told them to be quiet, and insisted that they not look at him. He reached up and pulled the light cord to shut the light off. Then he put a mask on. He pointed to one of the girls and commanded that she follow him. He warned the other girls that if they spoke or did anything, he would kill the girl he was pulling into the next room, gun drawn. He commanded her to take off her pants and to lie down. Then he spread some jelly on her vagina. He told her he was putting the gun near the pillow. After he raped her, he got up and apologized. He told her his gun was really a cap pistol. She described him as gentle, and said she felt sorry for him, even though she had been afraid he would kill her.

 

These were early days in the rapist's career, two years before he found my sister and me. He hadn't perfected his technique. He did not forbid his victim to speak. He applied that lubricant to his victim's vagina, a thought that nauseates me. But there are similarities. The small pistol with the white handle. His informing the victim after the rape that the gun was just a cap gun. His
apologizing. The way he evoked sympathy: I felt sorry for him, too.

The music periodically penetrates my terror with sound. Eventually the father accepts that his children are dead. There is evil in this world, but there is still a God. This father has found a way to recover his faith. Will I, too, recover my faith, even after reading the words of these violated children? The song cycle ends in D major, in a mood of acceptance and transcendence. Will I, like Rückert and Mahler, experience moments of transcendence? Maybe, but not yet.

Now I have brought the files home, back to where I live. I race through them, as if trying to avoid being contaminated. Something has been unblocked. A geyser of fear. As I sit down to read the rest of the files, I am overcome with an embarrassing feeling of terror.

I need to buy some things in preparation for a trip. Sunblock and insect repellent. But I'm afraid to go out on the street. I step out the front door. There is a hum of excitement. Why are these people so unafraid? I feel the warm air on my naked arms. I walk into Harvard Square. It is summer, and the streets are filled with happy people. They are celebrating something. They are celebrating the warmth of the night. I do not like this happy night buzz; it terrifies me. I have the distinct impression that certain people—predators—can read the vulnerability on my face. If I were a young woman, I would be in danger now. Predators would smell my fear.

I return to my apartment. I am not going to fall apart. It is warm, I know that, but I put on more clothing to cover all my flesh. I sit down again to read.

Once Beat was admitted to Bridgewater State, he was evaluated to determine whether he was a sexually dangerous person. I find a letter with the results of this evaluation.

I read this letter, and I have to get up. I wash the dishes. I had soaked some dried lima beans overnight, and their skins have become loose and wrinkled, like tiny wrinkled foreskins. It seems to me these skins need to be removed. I gently peel the skin from every bean—a job I would normally find painstaking and annoying. I am satisfied by the clean white interiors; smooth, vulnerable, harmless.

It occurs to me that I would like to take a baseball bat to this man, this so-called psychiatrist, Dr. Henks.

“He then had sex relations with [blacked out] under threat of harm. She stated that he was very gentle and hurt her in no way.”

“Sex relations,” he writes! As if it were an unremarkable occurrence that a masked man with a gun would have “sex relations” with a girl.

Can a trained psychiatrist really assume that a rapist with a gun in his hand could have “sex relations” with a girl under threat of harm and still “hurt her in no way”? How can he repeat the petrified girl's use of the word
gentle
? What does the doctor mean when he says the rapist “hurt” her in no way? Does he conclude that, because Beat did not tear his victim's eyes out, did not bloody her limbs or break her bones, that he did not hurt her? As I write these words I imagine this doctor's penis wilting and shrinking in terror, as small as a bean, and there is some satisfaction in this cruel thought. But wilting is not enough: I want to bloody him. In my mind's eye I swing a bat right at this doctor's learned head, smashing his skull, the skull that contained his bad, addled brain, a brain capable of judging a convicted rapist as a not sexually dangerous person. I also take the bat to the part of him that had sex relations. I am a good girl, of course, so the doctor would not expect me to harm him.

But now that I've written these words, I retreat in horror at my own violence. I like to think of myself as civilized. I am seeking transcendence, not violence.

But there is a perpetrator inside me. I feel a kind of adrenaline at the thought of harming this man. Even as I'm ashamed of this ugly side of myself, I remain angry enough with this so-called doctor that I will leave these words here on this page. I will display my shameful thoughts to ward off future rapists and their protectors, to make clear how women may ultimately see them, to make these men cross their legs with a premonition of fear.