Denial (4 page)

“He kept saying he wouldn't hurt us. He kept saying to listen, to be quiet.”

I was quiet. I listened.

I'm still listening now. I hear a rush, in my mind's inner ear, of insistence. A kind of aural premonition, but a kind of premonition that goes both backward and forward, the soundless protest of all the raped, shamed, and silenced women from the beginning to the end of time. “He hurt you, he altered you forever,” the chorus soundlessly insists, grating on my inner ear—the ear that wishes not to be reminded of feeling. I respond to that chorus: Hurt is not the right word for what that man—if he was a man and not an apparition—did to me. I feel a void. Something got cut out of me in that hour—my capacity for pain and fear were removed. The operation to remove those organs is indeed painful, as you might guess. But the surgeon cauterizes the cut, and feeling is dulled, even at the points where the surgeon's knife entered the once-tender flesh. There is no more tender flesh. It's quite liberating to have feeling removed, the fear and pain of life now dulled.

Nabokov once said, “Life is pain.” Buddhists, too, believe that to live is to crave and to crave is to feel pain. To live in this world involves pain. Had I not been catapulted, in that one hour, half
way to death, and therefore closer to enlightenment? In death we no longer feel human cravings, no longer feel human pain. I was now halfway there.

Later, of course, I would come to reject this understanding of what happened to me that day. Yes, I was partly released from the pain of being alive. But my spirit had traveled, not toward the infinite divinity of enlightenment, but toward the infinite nothingness of indifference. A soft blanket of numbness descended like snow from the heavens, obscuring and protecting me from terror. Instead of fear, I felt numb. Instead of sadness, I experienced a complete absence of hope. I would come to feel, in a very small way, the indifference of the Muselmänner, the Auschwitz slang for the prisoners who had lost all hope, who no longer fought to stay alive. A divine spark, the craving for life, had been extinguished in those prisoners, who were destined for death. Their hopelessness turned out to be a death sentence. The other prisoners knew, by the blankness in the eyes of the Muselmänner, that these prisoners—whom Primo Levi referred to as “the drowned”—would soon die. The still-living prisoners avoided “the drowned” like the plague, as if indifference were contagious.

They were right, of course. Indifference is a dangerous disease.

“He kept saying to listen, to be quiet.”

I have listened and I have been quiet all my life.

But now I will speak.

At the very bottom of the page, in a penmanship slanting ever more backward, I finally focused on what the police really wanted to know, the appearance of the apparition that had visited itself upon me.

And then more detail.

It must have been hard to report the evidence of my senses—it came last, as if it were too painful to record anything other than the facts that transpired.

In the margin at the end of my statement, the police officer wrote what must have been my words to him at the time: “Forcing myself, determined to get it out.”

My sister's statement reported the same facts, but her style is quite different from mine. She wrote in whole sentences, rather than lists. She began with how the rapist looked—his height, his socks, his sneakers. She remembered some things that I seem to have forgotten. That he made us lie down on the rug in the living room. That he had the woolen mask in his hand when he arrived. That we did not believe him at first when he said that he had a gun. She observed that he acted, throughout, as if he were teaching us.

After the rape, I fell into a perilous numbness, but fortunately, my sister took charge. Sara was petrified, but also determined to get help. She had the thought of walking out of the house into the cool night and going to use a pay phone on the street. So we did. That phone, too, was broken. We seemed to have entered a new, separate world where there was no way to communicate with the people we once knew.

Once again, Sara came up with a plan. We went to Friendly's. There, finally, we found a phone that worked. We called the
babysitter who was in charge of us while our father was away in Norway.

Yes, we had been visiting our first stepmother, Lisa, our father's ex-wife. We visited Lisa, and our half sisters, every Monday night after ballet. But on that particular Monday night, October 1, 1973, she went out to dinner with our half sisters, leaving us behind to do our homework in an unlocked house in a safe neighborhood in a safe town, a town filled with good girls, though we were especially good. I was a good girl—I always did my homework, even when I was bad.

T
he phone at Friendly's worked.

I still recall, or imagine I recall, the familiar, metallic scent of the coin; the silver coin sweating, or damp from someone's else's sweat sticking it to my palm; then the comforting click as the coin slipped into its familiar slot; the familiar sounds of the line connecting. Some things seemed right and real. The sheen of the dime. The phone. The waitresses' white aprons, taut across their bellies, their bubble-gum-pink dresses with short sleeves. Simple objects unfettered with emotions, objects I could see up close, were not entirely distorted. But I was aware, as if in my peripheral vision, that much of my world was now blurred, as if I were underwater or looking through the hazy shimmer of fluorescent lights in the dark night air. The shimmer had a sinister edge. Straight lines curved into asymptotes, but soft things seemed hard or dull. Friendly's felt
unfriendly to me now, like the fluorescent-lit café of Hopper's
Nighthawks
. The waitresses—whom I had always thought of as tough but kind—now struck me as stupid and unaware. Their movements slowed to a crawl in my vision. They were unaware of the real world I had seen—a real world where gun-toting rapists could come into your safe suburban town and change your life forever.

The babysitter, who was staying with us in my father's absence mainly to ferry us around, was a high school teacher from a neighboring town. In that town, too, child rapists were beyond imagination. She, too, had been transformed by my experiences of the last hours into a person too slow and stupid to warrant notice. Nonetheless, when she saw our faces and our disheveled appearance, she finally believed us. She called our family doctor, who arranged for us to be examined at the local hospital.

My father learned that we had been raped when our family doctor called him in Europe. A long-distance call. I remember thinking that the call must have been expensive. But my father didn't come home to us right away. I have long known this, but I forget it, again and again. I have not been able to take in this information long enough to retain it in my memory, until now.

The doctors prescribed sleeping pills. But I didn't sleep. I lived in a haze, both night and day, until eventually the world slid back, more or less, into place. I no longer know what the world looked like before I was raped, but I know that afterward—for a week or so—I descended into a state of dizzying calm.

We stayed, until my father came home, with Lisa, our first stepmother, in the house where we had been raped. I remember that Lisa comforted us, that she took us in like baby birds that had fallen from the nest. I remember sensing that she was on our side. Other than her kindness, I remember little else
from that period. I know that my father didn't come home to us right away, not because I remember the days that followed our rape, but because it says so in the police report I now have before me, and because my sister remembers. I can access very little from my memory of what transpired in the days after the rape. I don't remember trying to call our father on the phone. I imagine we would have thought such a call far too expensive to consider.

My father married Lisa when I was five years old, very soon after our mother died. She was only twenty, just out of college, still a child herself. Lisa's mother, Myra, was a wicked witch out of a fairy tale, not at all the sort of grandmother you would expect to encounter in real life. Myra pushed Lisa, her eldest daughter, down the stairs. She threatened Lisa's younger sister, Judy, who was my age and my very best friend at the time, with a kitchen knife. She would occasionally leave Judy, who was red-haired and “obstinate,” on the median strip of a highway. Even now, writing these words, I want to gather up that redhead into my arms and keep her safe.

During my father's courtship of Lisa and in the first year of their marriage, we spent a lot of time with Myra. Every night before our bath, Myra would line the three of us up—my sister, our aunt Judy, and me—to wipe our vaginas clean with a rough dry cloth. I still recall the feeling of the toilet where Myra made us sit. It was one of those fancy ones, with a wide mouth, the kind that a child might fall into if she didn't clutch the edge of the seat. Myra pushed hard, as if this part of our bodies required extra effort and strength to cleanse. I remember the dizzyingly bright lights of the room, the tiny white tiles on the floor. I am not sure why Myra felt the need to clean out our vaginas before our baths, but she did.

Our new mother, Lisa, desperately wanted to be a grown-up, and my father desperately wanted someone to help take care
of his newly motherless girls. With the encouragement of my grandmother and Lisa's mother, my father married the charismatic Lisa, imagining that his problems were solved.

Soon Lisa had two children of her own. But Lisa's desire to mother my sister and me was erratic. If you pleased her, she made you feel like the daughter of a queen. If you disagreed with her, her affection waned. Six years later, Lisa and my father divorced. My sister and I remained with Lisa for nearly two years, while my father lived on his own. Children need their mother, he said when I asked him why he left us with Lisa during that period. But Lisa had not adopted us. When she decided to start a new family with a new, younger husband, she asked my father to take my sister and me back into his household. Still, we continued our regular visits with Lisa and our half sisters, and it was there, in the evening, that the rapist entered what had once been our home.

After the rape, Lisa rose to the occasion. Calamity brought out the best in her. She took us in and nursed us back to life, as best she could.

Upon reading part of the file in 1994, I learned that my father had informed the police that my sister and I “seemed to have forgotten it” four months after the rape. I also learned that the police had concluded that my sister and I were lying when we insisted that we did not know the perpetrator, and that my father did not defend us against this claim. Nor did he insist that the police continue to investigate the crime. There was no evidence in the file that Lisa had spoken to the police at any point after the rape itself.

In the spring of 1994, soon after seeing the file for the first time, I wrote my father a letter asking him why he had remained in Norway.

My father sent me an e-mail from his MIT e-mail account. His response was organized, with Q's and A's clearly specified.
He explained that he had been told that we were receiving medical and police attention. Lisa was taking care of us, and he was scheduled to return in three days in any case, he said. He was laying the groundwork, he said, for a decade-long collaboration between Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked, and similar labs in Norway and France.

He seemed to assume that once I knew his reasons for remaining in Norway, I would understand and approve of his sensible decision.

Despite this e-mail exchange, I managed to forget, for a second time, that my father did not come home right away, and I am shocked, for a third time, when I reread the file.

 

In spring 2007, I ask my father to read the description that I wrote for the police, at their insistence, immediately after the rape. I tell him that I would like to interview him for a book about my rape.

He comes to my apartment, glumly, determinedly, dutifully. He has done his homework—he has read the description of the rape and the draft of the previous chapter.

Within a few minutes of my father's arrival, my worldview begins to blur, as if the very erectness of his posture makes me question the correctness of my own. His right angles are at odds with mine. And yet, there is softness to his eyes. He has the posture of a soldier with the soft brown eyes of a deer.

I discipline myself to take note of his looks. So handsome, my father is. I am surprised, as I am every time I see him, that a seventy-nine-year-old man could be this muscled. He stands erect, dominating the room, even in his present dejected mood. He is wearing jeans, a no-iron shirt, an old Harris tweed sport coat, military posture. Everything faded but neat. Athlete's watch. Gray hair, beard, chiseled features. We make pleasantries.
He picks up the
Times
, as if he doesn't know that I know him well enough to know that he has already read it at first light.

I am having trouble with my tape recorder. I cannot get it to work, though it worked when I tested it just before my father's arrival.

He takes the machine out of my hands; he is the engineer, and I am the daughter.

“You see, you don't stick it in like that; you stick it in like this,” he says. It is unclear to whom he is speaking—perhaps to me, perhaps to himself, perhaps to the machine. He pushes the tape back in, just the way it was before he took the machine out of my hands. He asks about the batteries. I tell him they are new. He points to a flashing red light. I bring a large box of new double As—the same box from which I took two batteries twenty minutes before. I tell myself that with his engineer's eye, he will choose more reliable ones.

I notice that a calm descends between us. We've done this many times before. My father, at ease in the physical world, delighting in fixing some
thing
for his daughter. And I am delighted to be fixed. I wait, becalmed by the familiar role, in the knowledge that my powerful father can make all things right. Children and dogs obey his orders, which are mostly issued in a calming baritone. If they don't obey the first time, they learn.

The material world becomes more orderly in my father's capable hands. When we were children and there were suddenly too many of us, he built beds in the laundry room. When we needed more rooms, he erected walls. He was still climbing Mount Washington into his eighties. When I moved into the apartment where I am writing these words, he measured the walls and drew up blueprints, wanting to ensure that my pictures were centered and straight. But I am living on the second floor of an old house. The floors slant rebelliously. Despite the careful measuring and drawing, the pictures did not submit to
my father's will. Undaunted, my father started again, this time with a level. The pictures succumbed.

But this time, although he's tried all angles, the machine refuses to work. He diagnoses the problem: the mechanism isn't working properly. It's old, I say. A cheap machine.

I bring him a cup of tea, and we settle into the task at hand: I will type as fast as I can, which is very fast indeed, while my father answers my questions.

“What are you most proud of in your life?” I ask.

“It changes with age. Now I am proudest of my children because they are extensions of me into the future,” he says.

“Do you believe they are a good extension of you into the future?”

“Yes,” he says. “They exhibit qualities I admire. They are independent. They have taken possession of their lives. And what they do, by and large, are things I admire.

“It's the lives they're living that I'm proud of. Sara has realized herself. She wants to sing, and she sings. She is a successful mother, a successful wife, and a successful professional. It's the life she leads.

“It's the same with Arabelle. I admire that she found a vocation for herself. I admire that she has the perseverance and ability to fashion a life for herself and be successful at it.

“Same thing is true with Genevieve.”

He has started with the second-eldest and ended with the youngest. I am the eldest. Of course I wonder if or how he will find a way to say that he is proud of me, even though I am presently his interrogator.

“Same thing with you,” he says, at last. “You are your own person. And the most important role a parent has is to help children achieve that status.”

“How did you do it?” I ask, genuinely curious, hoping I will learn something that will help me raise my son.

“I don't know. By letting children struggle rather than jumping in. Helping them only when necessary. Encouraging them to take responsibility for themselves as soon as they were able. To the extent that I could, helping them gain an education that prepared them for life.”

I watch my father pausing to reflect. I can see that he is determined do his duty—to get this right. I take great comfort from my father's integrity, even though I know that his desire to stick to the truth might sometimes hurt me.

“This is too narrow,” he corrects himself. “I'm proud of your music. I'm proud of your achievements. Actually, I'm not proud—I admire the way you play the piano; I admire your achievements. I admire your writing ability,” he says, giving me the opening to talk about the description of my rape.

Even though he has given me an opening, it feels as if I am breaking through ice.

I broach the topic: “Were you surprised by what you read? Did you know what happened when we were raped?”

“No,” he says, answering only my second question.

“I didn't know about it,” he continues. “After reading your tract of your rape, I notice that you have not made up your mind to put that horrible experience behind you and move on to the future as I did. Usually a person who is preoccupied with the past becomes basically dysfunctional in life. But you're able to be preoccupied and yet to function very well. I'm proud of that.”

Is this really a compliment? I wonder.

I tell him that I'm deliberately going back over this material because of the book I'm writing.

(Vaguely, I am aware of a familiar defensiveness in my voice that happens when my father expresses disapproval of me.)

I start out slowly, a technique I have learned from talking to terrorists for so many years. Never with small talk; that would
feel too manipulative. But I skirt the topic we both want so much to avoid.

This time, however, it is not only my interviewee whom I want to put at ease, but also myself.

“When have you been afraid in your life?” I ask him.

“I was very much afraid from the time I was six until I was almost ten,” he says. My father is prepared to be brutally honest, even, or perhaps especially, at his own expense. But he answers me with little feeling, as if fear were something he once read about in a newspaper, but never actually experienced in his own body.