Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  If I had bothered to read The Life of a New England School as a student, I’d have been knocked out by the story of the first-form boy who went to the infirmary later that spring of 1878, not with measles but with a sore throat. He was, Heckscher reports, “otherwise apparently in good health.” He was likely ten years old. Shortly after ten the next morning, he was dead.

  A letter to school parents advised them of the tragedy but encouraged them not to bring their living children home. “The risk of infection seemed remote,” according to the rector, Dr. Coit, whose name I knew because it belonged to our oak-paneled, high-table, Oxford-style dining hall. Coit appended to his letter the opinion of the school’s doctor and its founder, also a physician, arguing for no change in routine. In spite of the shocking loss, they wrote, “it was in the boys’ best interests to remain at school.”

  And so scarlet fever spread. Two more children died. With three bodies, “no choice now existed but to close the school.” Nevertheless, in announcing this closure, the rector reported that “the best authorities pronounced the sanitary conditions at the school satisfactory… and could find no cause for the recent afflictions.”

  Even accounting for the peril of childhood before antibiotics, this self-exoneration seems to me remarkable. It’s got both the knee-jerk, sputtering detail of the guilty, and a kind of fantastical entitlement too. Winter was cause enough for illness, surely. Not even an institution as blessed as St. Paul’s School would be delivered from ordinary dangers. Children had died there—one particularly haunting scene involved a third former who failed to show up to breakfast on the day he was to go home for Christmas, and was found dead in his bed. But the obligation of the school, which is first and foremost in charge of the care of children, is to react—immediately and generously—to prevent further harm. August Heckscher suffers no sadness or frustration on behalf of his minor nation of a school for failing to do so.

  I hadn’t reported to the infirmary with a sore throat and died. I suspect that what I did was worse. I kept living, and then a few months later I went and told people about a sexual assault. My parents called the school. I wasn’t on that call, nor on any others between my family and school leaders, but I can imagine their tone. Mom and Dad called, worried and deeply upset, and assumed that the people they spoke to would share their concern: two boys on campus had assaulted their girl. What could be done to address this?

  After my mother called the school to explain what had happened, the administration, as the school itself would later tell the Concord Police Department, conducted its own “internal investigation.” I was still on campus, since the year had not ended, but their investigation did not include talking to me. I have had to put together these few weeks from documents that remain—medical reports and what has been shared with me of the criminal case file from 1991. I was studying for my finals, knowing that the events of the night in Rick and Taz’s room were formally known to everyone now. The priests knew, the teachers knew, the deans knew. There was nothing left to hide. I felt exposed and exhausted. I thought I was almost finished with everything.

  School leadership talked to people about me. They had conversations with students, but not with my friends. They talked to the school psychologist, the school’s lawyer, and the physician in the infirmary. I do not know the substance of these conversations, but in the third week of May, the school psychologist, Reverend S., Vice Rector Bill Matthews, and the rector, Kelly Clark, sat down with the school’s legal counsel and arrived at the formal conclusion that, despite what I had claimed, and despite the statutory laws on the books in their state, the encounter between me and the boys had been consensual. They also concluded that they would not abide by state law and report the incident to the police. The authorities were not notified. They remained in the dark.

  When I heard about this meeting for the first time, decades after I’d left school, I remembered Reverend S. standing in my room, half-heartedly packing my books. What had he heard that helped him conclude I was promiscuous and had desired my statutory assault? No wonder he never asked me how I was doing. No wonder he wanted me gone.

  If the first violation of the boys who assaulted me was the way they made me feel erased, it was exactly this injury that the school repeated, and magnified, when it created its own story of the assault. This time the erasure was committed by men whose power over me was socially conferred rather than physically wielded, by men who—some of them—had never even been in a room with me. They still never have.

  But I knew none of this then. The school never said anything to me. They did, however, apparently find reason to enlighten my schoolmates about one thing. Before we all left campus that spring, the vice rector sat down with members of the boys’ varsity lacrosse team and told them that he didn’t want to ask any questions, but if any of them had ever been intimate with Lacy Crawford, he should go to the infirmary right away to get checked out.

  I have been told, variously, that this happened on the lacrosse field and in a teacher’s apartment. Where was I, at that moment? Certainly not at the infirmary. I still thought my throat hurt because I was a bad person who had done a terrible thing.

  Even once I found out a few months later about the vice rector’s bit of patriarchal counsel to his boys, I did not do the math to arrive at the realization made by a detective investigating the school more than twenty-five years after the fact:

  “So the students knew about the herpes before you did.”

  Yes, they did.

  Back in Lake Forest in early June, Mom took me to see my pediatrician. This doctor was new to the practice, and a woman. I was desperately grateful on both counts. Mom had called to set up the appointment, causing a note to be added to my file before I visited the office: “Child sexually assaulted by two boys last October. Child confessed this to mother last week.” The verb “confessed” is useful, nestled in the pages of this caring clinician—not that she thought I was guilty, but that she anticipated the guilt I was feeling.

  There was, by this time, a river of shame inside me. It curved and snaked and fed all manner of dark snapping certainties about who I was and what would happen to me. I considered what had occurred in that room to be my fault, and afterward I had gone and done what I’d done. It was clear what sort of girl I was. And if this conversation proceeded, I would be forced to say so.

  Dr. Kerrow asked me to tell her exactly what had happened. She wrote it all down, and my pediatrician’s office saved this report beyond the usual threshold of a patient’s reaching the age of twenty-seven. Every time I read it I remember: Yes, they did tell me, after they had both ejaculated into my mouth, that it was “your turn now.” Yes, they did warn me not to leave before they assaulted me, and said I would get caught if I tried. Yes, Rick did hold me down on top of Taz’s cock. All of that.

  Then these details disappear again. For decades I forget them, if forget is the right word for the white blast of nothing the mind deploys like an air bag at the memory’s approach. I have wondered if I’m able to lose these particulars again and again because I know they’re written down, so I don’t have to take care of them—but this is a curious piece of anthropomorphism. In fact, I murdered details by the thousand that spring and summer. I don’t remember, for example, how it felt to greet my mother when I came home. I don’t remember the look on my father’s face. What I do remember is sometimes difficult to categorize—why this bit and not that one?—such as the decorations in our kitchen when I heard my mother speak the boys’ names. I don’t remember who she was talking to. I do remember we had a nature calendar and an old New Yorker cartoon about “Mommy needing to go to seminary now.”

  I remember the kindness of Dr. Kerrow, who held my chin delicately in her fingers and said, “Hang on tight, this is going to hurt.” She did what was called a “blind swab”—she couldn’t see far enough down my throat to find anything worth scrubbing with a cotton bud, so she just dug around. “Just bear with me.”

  I didn’t tell her
about being fingered so she wouldn’t insist on examining me there.

  I still had not realized that I had contracted any diseases. Over and over, I’d cataloged what I knew. I still had the textbook from fourth-form health class because I saved all of my books. Herpes was blisters on the penis or vagina, and I did not have that. Gonorrhea and chlamydia gave you discharge. Syphilis was for drug users and nineteenth-century composers. I knew the word chancre. I thought AIDS would have killed me by now. None of it made sense. I just submitted, as I had before, and was grateful to the doctor for saying it would hurt. Because it did.

  I gagged and retched. She had the nurse fetch me a cup of water. Results would take about a week, and she would call as soon as she had them. She’d send me for blood work, which was for HIV and syphilis, but I didn’t know this.

  Then she turned to me, and there was a new force in her voice. “I am going to have to report this to the State of New Hampshire.”

  I pictured the state itself, narrow, stacked like a book on a shelf alongside Vermont. “What?”

  “To the police. I am mandated by law to report this assault to the police.”

  As I remember it, this was the first time I’d heard the word assault. It did not contain the events I remembered. It seemed to clothe them in armor and send them out into the world to do more damage.

  I begged her. Throat raw, tears running, I begged her.

  “I have no choice,” she said. “I am sorry. Nobody wants to make anything worse for you, but this is important.” Dr. Kerrow looked up at my mother, and then said, “Although, you know, I’m sure the school has already reported. You’ve talked to them?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mom. “They are well aware.”

  The doctor returned to me, and set a hand on my shoulder. I noticed this because it was something my mother did not do—she did not touch me much that summer. We had never been a family of huggers, but now I wondered if there was judgment in the withholding, or fear. Dr. Kerrow said, “Your headmaster will already have called the police. He is mandated by the same law I am. So they will already know everything I have to say. Nothing will happen that isn’t already happening.”

  “Then you don’t have to tell them,” I tried.

  She was firm, and gave me another piece of news. “You were fifteen, and that makes you a minor. In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t heard from the police or child welfare by now. Have you?”

  Mom shook her head.

  “Well, you will. I am so sorry.”

  I felt betrayed by this kind lady in the white coat. She had stickers on her stethoscope for the littlest kids. There seemed no end to how many mistakes I could make, how much worse I could make my life. Telling my mother, starting this cascade—the police? The state? All anyone needed to know was that I was ruined. There was nothing more to see or learn.

  The car ride home was particularly awful. Anytime I was alone with Mom, that summer, I burned.

  “Well,” said Mom, eyes straight ahead, “I’m glad that’s done.”

  I could not make sense of comments such as this. She spoke as though there were a trajectory here, some linear logic. I was engulfed.

  I would not have said much in reply. My throat was killing me. Mom, manicured fingers on the wheel, would have run her other hand over her mahogany hair, ending with a strand for idle twisting. Her beauty had not even considered beginning to fade. She was forty-one that summer, younger than I am now.

  Our squat little pediatrics office, an energy-efficient shoebox from the seventies, was becoming part of a “health care complex.” Giant construction vehicles dug and clawed behind the fences. Alongside a pillared assisted living facility, developers had put in a fake pond and a fake path between transplanted trees. Mom pointed this out. I thought that if I had to get so old and sick that I had to live in a place like that, I’d rather it be in a meadow. What was wrong with the meadow?

  How sour I’d become. Rolling betrayal like a candy in my mouth. Whether I had betrayed everyone I loved or the world had betrayed me, I couldn’t tell. It all felt the same. Everything in flames. The neat arithmetic of two-parent Protestant diligence left me nowhere to put catastrophes such as this, a battery of STD testing at the old pediatrics office where I’d gotten my ears pierced three years before. I remembered all the times I’d been a passenger on this winding lane. The woozy ride with a fever or the agony before shots. I remembered the time Mom sped wildly because my brother had cut his finger on a biscuit tin. His baby blanket was soaked in blood and he was eating the crackers Mom had given him to distract him—large table crackers blooming pink like carnations in his hands. I was in the middle seat, unbuckled. It was great fun, peeling around the turns. I had said so, and Mom had scowled at me. Because my brother wasn’t crying (the tin had cut him without his noticing), I hadn’t bothered to think about why we were going fast. I just loved the ride.

  Mom was excited about the idea of the Concord Police knowing what had happened to me. I don’t think she’d known that the school was required to report to them.

  “Wait till the rector takes that call,” she said. “It’ll be good to have law enforcement involved, don’t you think?”

  I couldn’t imagine what would be good about this.

  “Don’t you?”

  What had I imagined would happen once I told her? Nothing. I had failed to anticipate and now I’d lost control. People were taking it up and carrying it forward. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

  The report of a sexual assault triggered blood tests and criminal reports—a forensic process that followed my disclosure of the event, my representation of what had happened to me, in the only words I could find and at the only time I could manage. The witness lights up the grid of response. Which means feeling responsible not only for what happened to you, but for everything that follows, too.

  It was strange, because none of my parents’ calls were being returned. They’d left a message for Ms. Shay, my fourth-form adviser, because Mom had always felt a special affinity with her and had thought it mutual. They’d called my fifth-form adviser, Mrs. Fenn. They’d called Reverend S. again. Nobody called back.

  On the suggestion of Dr. Kerrow, Mom made an appointment for me with a rape crisis counselor. She found this person about forty-five minutes away, in Evanston, working out of a women’s center at Northwestern University. I drove there myself in Dad’s little stick-shift car. Though the cast was off my hand, I couldn’t grip with much force, particularly when the gear stick was rattling with highway speed, so instead I just bumped the stick in and out of gear with the base of my palm, the way my father did.

  The counselor’s office was in a small cottage behind a tidy lawn. I parked on the street. Walking in, I pretended to myself that I was a college student entering the facility to work on a college project: women’s rights, maybe, or feminist critiques of fairy tales. I wondered if the few women I saw in the building were students or rape counselors or real live rape victims. Clearly I did not belong there, and the counselor, when she greeted me, nailed this point home. She was a woman of color with excellent hair that corkscrewed and tumbled to uneven lengths all around her head. She demonstrated a physics of presence that defied everything I’d been taught. She sat squarely opposite me. Nothing crossed. Feet on the floor. I must have looked limp as a switch to her, assembling myself there.

  She said, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  God, I wished I could have laid before her a different tale: something nice and binary, maybe involving a dark alley or a country road. A snarling white man missing half his brain. Something to earn my place in this chair before this woman.

  I don’t remember how I replied.

  “It may be that you’re not ready to talk about it yet,” offered the counselor.

  Nonsense. I had talked about it plenty, I thought: I’d told my parents, the pediatrician, and now I would tell this kind woman. I impressed upon her my awareness that something troubling had happened and that it w
as important to be mindful of its impact on my thoughts and feelings. I nodded to her assertions about self-care. I should keep a journal, yes. Absolutely I ought to consider long-term counseling support.

  What she didn’t understand, I was convinced, was that I was a rising sixth former at an elite boarding school where you could either get counseling or be perfect, but not both, and that if you were not perfect, you were not safe. People would know you needed help. A psychiatrist visited campus one day a week and I’d never asked for a meeting with him, but I knew most of the kids who did. Success at St. Paul’s was not predicated on resilience or transcendence but on destiny, which meant you did not show defeat, not ever. In any case, the boys had graduated. Also, I explained, polite and patronizing, I was very close to my parents and had good friends and a great boyfriend, so I was very well supported. To show how serious I was about recovery, I drove directly from this little cottage to a huge Barnes & Noble to purchase a copy of a workbook she had recommended, The Courage to Heal. A workbook. I can still feel my sneer. I tossed the book beneath the window seat in my room, which Mom had made Dad build out for me just that year, though I never sat there. I preferred to wedge myself against the window screen, feet high on the frame, and wonder what it would take to fall out.

  This was an idle consideration. The screen was sturdy.

  “Was it helpful?” Mom asked. When I said that it was, she dropped the subject out of respect for the therapeutic experience.

  Mom filled those first days repairing obvious defects. I got a haircut, saw the dermatologist about my adolescent acne, and had my eyes checked. A surgeon evaluated the tendon in my right hand for potential surgery. This involved laying a protractor on my open hand, aligning zero with my fingers, and then bending my thumb as far in the direction of the injury as it would go. I had to recline during the procedure because patients often passed out from it. My temples filled with snow, but I didn’t lose consciousness.