Denial (21 page)

“But you weren't much older than the kids!” I say. He was very straight back then, he tells me.

“Were you excited to be carrying a gun?” I ask, trying to place him in a context I might understand. I'm accustomed to talking to men who like guns, accustomed to pretending it doesn't frighten me. I still cannot bear the thought that Paul might have been acting out of goodness, out of kindness to me.

“The first time you wear a gun, you're bad.”

I'm not entirely sure what he means by this expression, but I'm relieved that he told me the truth. And relieved that this “badness” was in the past.

He must have noticed my confusion. “You feel pretty important,” he explains. “It lasts about a day.”

“Did you ever have to use a gun?” I ask.

“To this day I've never shot at someone…. I've been a cop for thirty years.”

“Did you ever have to threaten anyone?” I ask.

“Never had to threaten. Very, very seldom in Concord does anyone on the force have to use a gun.”

“Then what?” I ask.

“A job came up. I became a patrol officer. Bottom of the barrel. I used to see the detectives coming in every morning, wearing sport coats, carrying their cups of coffee. You come in grimy. You've just finished riding around for eight and a half hours, all night long. From the very beginning it seemed like being a detective would be more fun. More challenging intellectually. I come from a mechanically oriented family. When you're a mechanic, you're curious about how things work. You know the engine runs well. Why? You take it apart. Same thing when it breaks down. You take it apart. You're curious.”

It turned out that Paul Macone was a talented detective, and he rose to be second in command of the force.

Now I want to test out another troubling theory. I'm still not ready to believe Paul.

“Was it because you know I had worked in government?” I ask.

“The first time you came out, I Googled you,” he admits. “I was a senior in high school the year you were raped. I was always in the machine shop, that's why we didn't know each other. Whenever someone asks for a file, I try to figure out who they are, why they're asking. You have to be very careful with a sexual assault case. You don't want to retraumatize a victim. I saw you worked on terrorism, that you had worked in the Clinton administration. I could see you were someone I didn't need to mince words with. Terrorism sometimes equals death. Terrorists do terrible, awful things. I thought to myself, This is not an extremely fragile person. Knowing the kind of work you had done did make me feel more comfortable sharing information with you,” he admits. “And you seemed sincere. You seemed like you wanted to understand who your rapist was for the right reasons.”

What would the wong reasons be? To kill him?

“And then it turned out you were able to help me.” He smiles. “If I noticed something, you'd bring up a counterpoint. It was helpful. You were looking at the case with me, acting like a colleague even.”

And now, finally, I remember. I remember the source of this shame I feel when I am in the police station. I'd been summoned into that station before, several times. My sister and I had to look at photographs of suspects in our case. There were none we could recognize. I must have sensed that the police thought that I was lying, that the rapist was, as they told my father they suspected, someone that I knew.

Victims, I somehow “knew” this to be fact, are ineffectual, weak, and dishonest persons who drag society down. I understood that terror and despair were contagious emotions, and that to indulge oneself in the feeling of terror was antisocial and possibly even immoral.

I must have wondered if the police were right, if the entire story was a figment of my imagination. This is the worst impact of severe trauma: the victim loses faith in the evidence of her own senses. And this is the great gift Paul Macone gave me. He believed what I told the police back then. He believed me enough to try to solve the case, and he did.

Perhaps because I've sought out evil in this world, attempting to understand and tame it, I am particularly moved by goodness. There is a light that animates an act of generosity, when a person is kind—not to call attention to his own goodness, or to make a pact with God, but just because he feels it's right. I see this light in Paul Macone. Still, his kindness is almost too much to bear. I feel shy around him, despite this conversation. I even feel shy writing this down.

T
he spy in me cannot stop pondering the meaning of the stones that Detective George Remas found in Brian Beat's front pocket, as well as the stones that Beat placed nearby some of the girls when he raped them. I look into Detective Remas's claims that there had been a series of pedophile priests at the church that the Beat family attended and discover that they are true. But those priests arrived after Brian Beat grew up. Could pedophile priests have been placed there routinely?

I hear rumors about sexual abuse at Beat's elementary school, during the period he was there. Chet drives me to visit the school and we speak to the priest who runs the school now. There may have been abuse back when Beat was a student, but there is nothing in the school's files that would indicate there was, the priest tells us. Then I learn that the region where Beat grew up
was a dumping ground for pedophiles. I decide to contact one of the victims of clergy sexual abuse in the area who has become an activist. His name is Skip Shea. The priests who abused him were from a town located next to Milbridge, Massachusetts, where Beat grew up.

It ought to be a lot easier to talk with victims than with killers or rapists. They're in pain, they're afraid, they've been wronged. I've studied terrorism for more than twenty years, and I've interviewed hundreds of terrorists, but I've never interviewed a victim. Before commencing this book, I'd never talked to a victim of rape. My answer to the obvious question, “Why not?” is that I already know what it feels like to have a gun trained on you, to fear that someone is about to kill you. But actually, I'm not sure this statement is true. I had these experiences, but I'm not sure that I felt them. Perhaps I should just admit it: I'm afraid to empathize with a victim. I am afraid.

There must be a frequency that victims acquire. I am afraid that the experience of being in a room with Skip will shake off a facade that protects me and holds me together—to reveal not only my fear but also my rage and shame.

I'm trying to get this right, to explain my embarrassing position. Let me try this once again. I cannot bear to be around victims who see themselves as victims. I'm more comfortable talking to victims who are numb, or who have learned how to harness their unfelt rage and fear to do productive work. I'm most at ease with the sort of victim who ends up doing work that involves exposing himself to risk or violence—soldiers or human rights workers who work in danger zones, whose love for humanity is expressed without a display of feeling. But Skip is not this sort of survivor. His life's work is to help other victims of clergy sexual abuse, which requires him to feel his own abuse, again and again, on a daily basis. This is what is hard for me to witness.

 

I am relieved when Skip tells me that he will come into Cambridge to see me; I don't like driving out to the area where Brian Beat grew up. For me, Milbridge smells of evil. For me, terror smells of cheap cologne and air purifiers, like the air purifier in Mary's bathroom. And it's only now, having just written that sentence, that I recall my observation to the police that my rapist wore cologne. For Skip, evil smells of cigarettes and Southern Comfort—the scents of the first priest who abused him.

“When were you first abused by a priest?” I ask.

“When I was eleven. Father Billing brought me into the basement of Saint Mary's Church, near the nurse's office. We were goofing around. He reached for my pants. I was terrified. He talked about love. I was an altar boy. He was an authority figure. I did as I was told. It continued, for months.”

“Did it happen every day?” I ask.

“Often there would be a couple of weeks between incidents. I was an altar boy, I attended his masses, so I saw him often. It escalated. He began taking me out of my CCD [CCD stands for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the religious education program of the Catholic church] classes—he would take me behind the rectory. He told me, ‘This is love, this is all about love.' I cried. He would say to me, ‘God doesn't want to see you cry.' So I learned not to cry. Since then, I've had a hard time crying.”

I know all about this—the difficulty that abusers of children have dealing with the impact of their abuse, how they try to brainwash their victims into thinking that the abuse doesn't hurt, that it is actually good for them. If the abuse is sustained over time, the victim learns not to feel. But I don't tell Skip this. I listen.

“Did you tell anyone what was going on at the time?” I ask, gently, I hope.

“No. I was afraid to. I grew up in a very religious home. In a very Catholic town. There were pictures of priests hanging on the walls of our kitchen. In our house, priests were next to God. I assumed that no one would believe me.”

“How did your family react when you finally told them? Did they believe you?”

“Yes. But I didn't tell them until Billing had already been charged. He had been moved out of our church some time before that. I was in a suicide shelter.

“But he was not excommunicated,” Skip adds.

We are sitting in my living room, directly across from each other. I am sitting cross-legged, my computer in my lap, slumping under the weight of the shame that hangs in the air between us, the shame we both feel. Is shame contagious? I believe it is. But now there is a new energy in the room. Rage. This part of Skip's story is still undigested, a bitter portion. The state has taken Billing off the street. The church has forbidden him from preaching. But the church apparently does not view the sexual abuse of children as a sin sufficiently serious to warrant excommunication. These are the crimes that the church considers to be the most serious sins: Attempting to absolve a person who has committed adultery. Acquiring an abortion. Violating the confidentiality of confession. Physically harming the pope. But not repeatedly persuading a child that allowing himself to be sodomized by a priest is an act of love.

“There was a bishop in Texas who wanted Father Billing to move out there,” Skip continues. “He knew what Billing had been accused of, but he still wrote a letter asking for Billing to be sent to his community. You can read that letter yourself,” he says, telling me where I can find it.

“Father Owen replaced Father Billing when Billing was removed from our church. Billing owned a house down on the Cape, and he and Father Owen used to go down there. Later, I
realized, they must have talked about me. Owen replaced Billing in every possible way, including abusing me.”

Why does everyone in this story seem to be spending so much time on the Cape?

“Father Owen took over for Father Billing when I was thirteen or fourteen. He was more appealing than Billing. He had a really cool stereo,” he adds.

“Where did he try to have sex with you?” I ask.

“In his room, in the rectory. He was a teacher. He regularly brought students into his rooms, his office was there.”

“How long did Owen abuse you?”

“Until I was sixteen or seventeen.”

I am drawn by cruel thoughts. Not when I was with Skip, but now, reading over these notes. Unseemly, embarrassing thoughts that I would normally shoo away, and would normally not want to admit, even to myself. But now I wonder whether others have had similar thoughts about me. Perhaps it is only victims who hate other victims. Perhaps victims who still deny their terror.

Skip was immobilized by terror. How unbecoming to feel afraid. I want to condemn him, first for feeling afraid, and second for not running away. I want to condemn him, in particular, for allowing his victimization to become such a central part of who he is. He calls himself a survivor, not a victim. But “survivor,” it seems to this cruel, censorious side of me, is just a fad-dish, politically correct way of saying “victim.” Is this why my father refused to accept reparations from Germany, because it would infuse “survivor” or “victim” onto his identity? Is that why my father reassured the police, several months after my sister and I were raped, that we had gotten over it—that he didn't want his children to take on the mantle of victim?

What is the difference between a victim and a survivor? Survivors, we are told, emphasize their own agency, and are thus different from victims, who cringe under fate's blows, passively
accepting fate's amoral and senseless punishments. But what agency did I exercise in my own survival? I stood still, entranced by my rapist's gun. I made no quick movements. I did not grab the gun from the pillow and aim it at my rapist. Why? Because I was immobilized by terror. And I wonder, too: What agency did my relatives exercise in their own survival—not the ones who fled, but the ones who remained behind in Germany, ultimately to perish? Were they, too, frozen by fear?

Freeze, fight, flight. Freezing is the first reaction. But a person can get stuck, frozen forever. Flight is not an option for a slow-moving animal facing a gun, slow-moving animals such as girls. And flight is not really an option for boys who believe themselves to be serving God by servicing sick priests. Victims, unless they are trained, do not get to choose the way they will react when they are “scared to death,” the phrase we use to describe the altered state that is evoked when someone or something threatens, credibly, to annihilate us, body or soul. Body or soul or both. Skip and I have this in common: we both froze, and we are both still immobilized, at least some of the time, by shame.

“Wouldn't you have been able to overpower him by that time?” I ask.

Did I press him too much? But there is something shocking about this—a teenage boy unable to fight off a priest.

Skip has big biceps, I see. I imagine his thick arms snapping the spindly legs off his predator priest. In my fantasy, I join him. I have strong arms, too. To join him in fighting the supernatural power that was attached to a sickly specimen of a human being who held himself above others by virtue of his supposed connection with the divine.

 

What is a victim? If I keep thinking about victims, embarrassing thoughts rise to consciousness. Embarrassingly cruel thoughts
that are not politically correct. One feels sorry for victims, but one also feels lucky not to be one—even a bit superior, a not entirely unpleasant feeling.

Victims are weak. They must be. Why else would they be victimized? Especially rape victims. Morally and physically weak. And then there is the comforting thought that victims lie. If the victim is exaggerating or has made his story up out of whole cloth, I don't have to confront my own unattractive desire to punish him. For the first time in my life, at age fifty, I realize that I might feel defiled by what the Nazis did to my relatives, the way my father and his brothers were forced to flee in terror, leaving their home behind; the way my father's cousins were murdered.

I hate victims because I was raised, from early childhood, on this prejudice. I know it's wrong to hate victims, it's ugly, I'm ashamed of it. Yes—I blame victims. Yes, I blame myself—both for having been victimized, and for hating victims. Yes, I know, in the sane part of myself, that it is wrong—both morally and logically—to blame victims.

And all this leads me to wonder about you—my reader. Are you feeling sorry for me, but also a bit superior? Are you toying with the idea of imagining that I exaggerate, that I made any part of this story up? I will reveal the secret perpetrator within me—the secret perpetrator hidden in every victim of violent crime or sexual abuse: I'd like to see you try getting through what I got through. I'd like to see how long you could stand, how long you could sustain both sanity
and
humanity.

“I was small, and he was huge,” Skip explains, responding to my question about why he didn't attack his perpetrator. This perpetrator, in my mind's eye, is a broken man with skinny, easily broken limbs. I have made the mistake of imagining that the strength of the priest's body matched the weakness of his spirit.

“But I finally had the courage to demand ending it because I became very interested in a girl,” he says, surprisingly.

“How did Owen react when you told him this?”

“He said, That's okay, because I was going to end it anyway. I was going to end it, he said—and this is the worst—because you're inadequate in technique and in size.

“You're inadequate in technique and in size,” he repeats. “Those words have haunted me ever since. After that I couldn't have a relationship with anyone that wasn't initiated by them. So much shame. Ashamed of what I did, and ashamed of my body.”

This is what occurs to me now. I would like to kill this priest. At the moment, the thought of violence against pedophiles is extremely appealing.

There is something attractive about the idea of becoming a terrorist in response to being terrorized. One would like to respond to terror in kind—to maul or perhaps kill one's assailant in self-defense. I could smash this pedophile. I could explain to him, “You're inadequate in body and soul. You're not a real man.”

I'd like to have murdered my own rapist, too. But physically defending my sister or myself is not all that I would like to have done. I would like to have terrorized my perpetrator, to have returned terror for terror. A court of law might well exonerate me for violent actions taken to defend my sister or myself from harm. But would a court of ethics forgive the hatred I feel, the desire not just to defend my sister and myself from harm but also to terrorize and to hurt our rapist? And what if I, unable to terrorize my own perpetrator, turned my rage against others? What if I became a professional terrorist? Would my rape, or the assaults my family sustained, be sufficient to excuse, morally if not legally, my own violence against others? The answer, I believe, is absolutely not.

“First Father Billing, then Father Owen, then a third priest facilitated by Father Curran. I don't know the name of the third one. Again and again. I don't think my story is that unusual in the church. It was a common thing to pass kids along from
priest to priest. Pedophile priests formed rings. Billing was also involved in a ring in Texas after he was pushed out of the ring around the House of Affirmation up here.”