Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  The lesson was that, in some things at least, prayer is no match for politics. But I concluded that I had been remiss in my desire. I’d made a foolish request. If I’d been named head chorister, after all, the other girl would not have been. It was a zero-sum game, and my request therefore concealed a selfishness that could not be forgiven. This was why it hadn’t worked out. I had a jealous heart. I hadn’t noticed, but the Lord had. In the same way, I stood before that mirror in the second-floor bathroom of Brewster House, aged fifteen and almost unable to swallow, and determined that somehow my desire was to blame.

  St. Paul’s School is an Episcopal school. The head of school is the rector, and for a century and a half almost all of the school’s rectors have been ordained priests. The rector during my time there, Kelly Clark, had previously been head of the divinity school at Yale. “In today’s dark and dangerous world,” Reverend Clark said, on the occasion of his 1982 appointment to St. Paul’s, “the graduates of St. Paul’s are summoned to a stewardship of light and peace.” School language soared in the direction of an Anglican heaven. Priests were our chaplains and teachers, and bishops served as trustees. Many were also the parents of my peers. When she sent me there, Mom sent me into her new world. In my files is the release form I signed, months after the assault, so the Concord Police Department could retrieve my medical records. My name is first, and below it, because I was a minor, is Mom’s signature. THE REVEREND ALICIA CRAWFORD she wrote in all caps, showing them who she was, who we were, and above all, who she imagined me to be.

  Already, looking in the mirror, I knew this was a lie.

  I’d like to think that it was an impulse to self-care that sent me to the infirmary to get checked out, but I know it wasn’t. Only a fool walked into what I had walked into. In my memory of the night, which I experienced in strobe fashion (bright still shots rather than a running tape), I saw myself held against one damp crotch by the arms of the other man. Disposable, flimsy. A damsel, a whore. I hated the girl who had done those things. The last thing I would do was align myself with her needs. I did not think I deserved to get better, but I was a girl with a firm sense of doom. The Crawford Curse was mine. Whatever was going on with my throat was only going to get worse—I could lose the ability to swallow; I could suffocate—and I needed help to make it stop. So after Chapel I cut left out of the door, away from the students and teachers streaming up toward the Schoolhouse, and headed along the brick path to the infirmary perched on the hill.

  Already there in the little chairs (had they run up from Chapel, or skipped it altogether?) were a Japanese exchange student I recognized from my dorm and two third-form boys. In a different universe, I’d have gone to them and said hello, recognizing their homesickness through the flushed cheeks and tired eyes. But I was on fire, and contaminated; it was a kindness to them to keep my distance.

  “There’s something really wrong with my throat,” I said.

  The nurse took my temperature (normal) and told me strep was going around. She selected a tongue depressor. “Let’s have a look.”

  There was no other way. I opened my mouth to let the horror out. I imagined everything I had suppressed coming at this small woman. A ball of spiders, a cup of maggots. Vile things were nesting in my throat, and this was it—she was going to see it all.

  “Ahhhh,” I said. I gargled the sound. My eyes were pressed shut. The other kids sat there quietly.

  “Try again,” she instructed.

  I really went for it. “AHHHHH!” She pressed my tongue down with her wooden stick, and when she did I felt the tug of the back of my tongue where it met my throat, and how even that hurt. Tears escaped the corners of my eyes and ran along my hairline, into my ears.

  “Hm,” said the nurse. “Okay, you can close.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Nothing there,” she told me. “Tonsils normal, perfectly clear. Maybe just get a little more sleep?”

  I walked the brick path back to class.

  My throat was always worst first thing in the morning, when, it seemed to me, the act of lying down all night had allowed the raw skin to adhere to itself. By the afternoon it was modestly improved, and by evening I could join my choirs in rehearsals that met in the chapel after supper. I had gained places in the full school choir, which was not terribly selective, and in the Madrigal Singers, which was more so. Years of childhood choir paid off in my inclusion in a group with a proper musician for a conductor and other students whose voices were remarkable. (At least three of the kids I sang with went on to careers as vocalists.) Our director, Mr. Fletcher, modeled our sound on the old madrigals of the Anglican tradition. We often sang a cappella—mostly motets and Ave Marias, in four parts. As with English church music, the girls’ voices—sopranos and altos—were meant to be piercing but steady, without vibrato, so that we sounded like the little boys for whom our parts were written, purity of tone representing purity of heart. There was one chorister, Nina, whose father was director of liturgical music at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, who could make these sounds just by opening her mouth. The rest of us had to direct our voices up into our heads, behind our noses, to focus the tone and remove any hush or wobble or wisp of air. “I want you to feel your cheekbones vibrate,” said Fletch, who was forever sweeping his hands up, open-palmed, trying to raise the sound from our chests. He would swish in his robes right up to the choir rail and press a finger good-naturedly in the spot between our eyebrows. “It’s right there.”

  Then Dr. Schmidt, hopelessly underutilized at the piano bench, would pick out a chord in four notes, and we’d summon all of our energy into that delicate place at the heart of our faces, as though we were trying to illuminate.

  I did not have a good singing voice, but I had a good ear. What was particularly wonderful for altos was how we came in, usually after the sopranos, to complicate the sound—this was true for tenors too. It was harder to hit and hold the soprano notes, but their line was almost always the easier one, the melody. There was no harmony without us. We rehearsed in a small choir room off the transept that felt, with its wooden paneling and wooden pews, warm and unified, as if carved from a single source. Beyond us the enormous chapel lay dim and vacant, and above us the bell tower rose up. When I read, in class, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, with its “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” I gasped. I knew the carved pews. I saw the loss. I recognized the feeling of being a bird, lower and throatier, darting among the soprano line.

  Maybe, I considered, I was just losing my mind. Maybe I was going crazy and imagining that something was wrong with my body. It was a hysterical reaction. Quite dramatic. Very me, in a way. The sort of thing you’d expect from a kid already on Prozac.

  When I sang, I took myself up and out of my own throat. I hit the right notes. The sound we made together was often beautiful, and I belonged.

  A few days after I saw the nurse who saw nothing, I woke up tasting blood. I sat up in bed, back to the frozen windows, and forced myself to swallow. I felt the tug as clots pulled away, and I felt myself swallow them. Then the blood ran free. It was warm, deep in my throat.

  I went back to the infirmary. Things were becoming impossible: running on the soccer field, in air just above freezing; swallowing anything solid; singing without crying.

  This time they sent me to see an ear-nose-and-throat doctor in Concord, a proper physician. I took a taxi from the infirmary into town and back again, with a referral page clutched in my hand and a scarf wrapped tight around my neck. I have no memory of this visit, except that it explains why, for as long as I could remember, I had the word otolaryngologist available in my mind. According to the physician’s report, the clinician in Concord was able to numb my throat and look past my tonsils to see that the hypopharyngeal space, where the esophagus meets the trachea, was badly abscessed. But that’s all the notes show. He did not take swabs to culture. He did not test me for any diseases, sexually transmitted or otherwise. He did not ask me if a
nything had entered or wounded my throat. There’s no mention of a proper diagnostic process at all.

  The diagnosis recorded on my St. Paul’s infirmary referral form was “aphthous ulcers.” Canker sores. Remarkable, given that I had not a single sore in my mouth. It was recommended that I gargle with a tonic of Kaopectate, Benadryl, and Maalox to soothe the throat and counter inflammation. Follow-up as needed.

  Drinking Maalox didn’t help, because two days later I was back at the infirmary, feverish, swollen-necked, still unable to eat. I had lost almost ten pounds. My mother was calling my pediatrician at home, terribly worried, and looking into plane tickets to bring me home.

  The pediatrician employed by the school to come in and care for us in the infirmary saw me briefly that day, and wrote on my chart, “See outpatient report. Has herpetic lesions. Will start Zovirax.” He underlined the prescribed medication three times.

  It would be more than twenty-five years before I learned what he’d written that cold afternoon.

  The pediatrician did not talk to me about herpes simplex virus, those “herpetic lesions” he meant to treat with Zovirax. Had he done so, I’d have been floored. Herpes was an STD, and STDs were acquired through sex, and I had not had sex.

  He did not tell me and he did not tell my parents and he did not tell my doctors. Not then and not ever. And that “outpatient report” he referred to from the ENT in Concord was never shown to me or to anyone who cared for me, and it is now lost to time—or, as documents would come to suggest, to more pointed interventions.

  Reading his shorthand more than twenty-five years later, though, I can hear the nib of his pen. I’m there on the bed beside him, inpatient at Armour Infirmary, attempting to sip ginger ale. I don’t remember, but I can imagine. I’d have been articulate and compliant, but not forthcoming. I’d have been quite thin, with lank hair and not a lick of makeup. I was likely agitating to get back to class. He’d have had me open my mouth to say Ah, just because, and I can see him clicking the penlight and putting it back in his jacket pocket. Just like he was then, I’m looking for something I’m not going to be able to find. He was a pediatrician, after all. His job was to care for children. Certainly he could not have meant to lie to me. Is it possible that by writing herpetic he meant only to describe the appearance of the lesions, which he, without appropriate tools, could not even see? If so, who described them to him? How did they decide to give me Zovirax, and why did he underline this indication alone?

  And what did it say on that outpatient report?

  Information faxed much later to my pediatrician at home indicates that I was started on a range of medications: the Zovirax, yes, but also antibiotics, and throat lozenges and cough drops—everything you’d use if you didn’t know what a patient had and meant to cover all bases.

  Except that it seems that they knew. The ENT in Concord. The school’s physician. And at some point soon, via some process of privileged intrusion that would never be explained to me, the administration would know.

  Now. Here is a fifteen-year-old girl swallowing blood. The suspicion is that she has a sexually transmitted disease so deep in her throat it cannot be seen during a normal exam. You hold this suspicion strongly enough to make this note in her chart and indicate that she will begin the proper treatment for it. Her bafflement, coupled with the disease’s ferocious presentation, strongly suggests that she has just contracted it. Her body has never seen this virus before and is mounting a mighty response. Because she lives on campus—and, like all of her peers, is not allowed to leave without written consent from the vice rector—you can be reasonably sure that she contracted it from another student (or, I suppose, from a faculty member or an administrator). Therefore, there are at least two students at this school with a painful, infectious, incurable, and highly contagious disease. And here before you is a girl, a thousand miles from home, who cannot eat. You are, legally and ethically, in loco parentis of them all.

  And you say nothing?

  Hiccups, head colds, herpes, ho-hum?

  Maybe, said my physician years later, it was just that the sores were so deep. Herpes is very unlikely to present that way—that is, in the hypopharyngeal space and nowhere else. To introduce the virus only there would have required an aggressive act, and maybe that was unimaginable? You’d be surprised what a clinician can miss.

  To which I’d reply: You’d be surprised what a kid can find it unimaginable to say.

  By this time my pediatrician, psychiatrist, and an ENT at home in Chicago were discussing whether the Prozac might be making me sick. They couldn’t think what on earth was wrong with me. There was no record of it in the literature, said Dr. Miller, reached by phone, but the drug was so new that they supposed it might be possible, and neither the ENT in Concord nor the pediatrician at St. Paul’s had given them anything to go on. Also included in the differential were lupus and erythema multiform, a rash related to certain immune disorders. Blood work was ordered. It was decided that I would stop Prozac, just in case, and to the antibiotics and antivirals they added Vicodin for the pain.

  Not quite a week later, the records tell me, I went with my mother to see an ENT in Chicago. I have no recollection of this visit at all. My parents were so worried that they flew me home, but I don’t remember this—not the airplanes, not the night in my own bed, not the doctor’s questions. Certainly not my mother looking at me and my needing to hide what was there. I’d have been terrified. I was terrified. I went to the doctor dutifully because I knew I was already being punished mightily. God was taking care of business. No reason to make things worse by breaking my mother’s heart.

  By that time I had been on the Zovirax for several days, and the initial outbreak was finally subsiding. The ENT I saw in Chicago noted that the hypopharyngeal lesions were healing. He offered no diagnosis. I was instructed to continue the course of medications and follow up with a physician in New Hampshire if things got bad again.

  “Thank you for referring this interesting patient to us,” wrote the Chicago ENT to my pediatrician. “I am most gratified to report that the problem seems to be improved.”

  Prozac-free, with occasional Vicodin to help me eat, I was returned to school.

  I have files a few inches thick, each off-center page reproduced from the scanned originals, that record my passage from place to place, opening my mouth in the hope that someone would see.

  Perhaps I was just being dramatic. This is what my father would have said, and it’s not wrong: I wanted the injury to speak for itself. I thought it was pretty damn dramatic, in fact. What happened in the boys’ room seemed to me both monolithic and so obvious as not to require revelation, like a compound fracture or a dangling eyeball, the sort of thing that makes someone wince and say, “Oh, shit, okay, don’t move, I’ll call someone right away.”

  And no one saw.

  That feeling was not limited to my throat. Watching myself troop up and down stairwells, changing for soccer and then changing again into a dress for Seated Meal, racing across high stone bridges before the chapel bells rang, I thought, Can’t you all see this girl is ruined? Isn’t anyone catching this?

  The boys saw, of course. But everywhere else, I was waiting for it to be revealed. I had been waiting to be discovered since the moment I left their room, when I walked back as slowly as I could. Beneath how many streetlights did I linger?

  In the boys’ room, I had been unwilling to get caught and give up my perfect record and all I had achieved at school. Moments later, back on the path, I’d made a new bargain: I’d leave school altogether, as long as I never had to say what had just happened to me.

  My plan was to be found by a security guard out of my dorm after hours and brought, as I would be, before a Disciplinary Committee (the dreaded “D.C.”), which I would politely but firmly refuse to address. The committee was run by a chemistry teacher and lacrosse coach with a military bearing and a theatrical nickname, “The Rock.” He’d expel me, and still I’d say nothing. It was Bartleby�
��s defense, of Bartleby the Scrivener: I’d simply decline to participate in the world. I would prefer not to, I’d say, and they would throw up their hands and tell my parents to book a plane ticket, none of us the wiser. There were fine high schools in Chicago.

  I make no claims for the logic of my intended rescue. What I find remarkable is that I set up an encounter of this shape, in which I would be apprehended by a guard, a man in power in a place where I did not belong, and be forced to give something up—in this case, an explanation for what I was doing out after hours—as a means to my own release. I intended this to happen immediately after leaving a dark room in which exactly this sort of transaction had taken place.

  It did not once occur to me to seek my own remedy: to call someone or knock on a midnight door. I believed in rescue only if it was forced upon me, and only if I did not say what was true.

  When the security guards did not find me, I turned to doctors and nurses, and opened my mouth wide so they would force the telling out of me.

  But even fulminant viral disease failed to do the job. I thought, for years, Because I could not stop to tell, the telling kindly stopped for me. What was left, if not the bleeding throat? I would have no choice but to fall apart.

  4

  January 1990, Fourth Form

  I had returned to St. Paul’s in January of my fourth-form year on a tear. Having solved what I believed was wrong with me—my early-teen expression of clinical depression—I was a girl mightily fortified, if in placebo power alone, by the powerful new drug Prozac. In his limo on the way back from the airport, Stewart asked me how the ponies were doing in old Lake Forest. “Fantastic,” I replied. “Whinnying like champs.” As we drove up onto the frozen school grounds, Gaby emerged from her hair and said, “Hey.”