Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  “There’s still plenty of time.”

  I laughed.

  Alex said, “Stick with me.”

  I could not stop my smile. “Why should I?”

  “Because I, my dear, will beat the shit out of anyone.”

  “Anyone?”

  “Anyone. I can travel if I need to, too. Just give me time to sign out for the weekend.”

  “Deal.”

  “Though I’d rather we sign out together and go hang out somewhere.”

  “Like where?”

  “I dunno. Somewhere I won’t get busted for murdering Rick Banner in his sleep.”

  “Paris?”

  “Done.”

  “Alex?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Was he always like that?”

  “Who. Banner?”

  “Yeah. Was he always such a dick?”

  Alex stopped on the path and turned me toward him. He took my hands in his hands, and when I was still he said, “Oh, my god, Lacy. You didn’t think it was you, did you? You thought it was you?”

  That spot in the meadow thereafter has, in my memory, a tiny light, a little firefly point I’m sure I could still see if I ever went back. Other places on campus lit too, that fall, one by one. The pillar at the front of the math building where one day I realized, ten seconds then thirty seconds then five minutes late to class, that I felt an actual pain in my chest when Alex and I parted. There’s a light at the step up into the dining halls, where he waited for me. There’s one where I sat in the choir stalls. One at the spot where he broke away from football practice to find me up on the soccer fields, grown men howling his name at his back. Above all a glow from the cramped single at the back of the top floor of Foster House, where in the evenings I’d lie for hours on Alex’s chest and he would stroke my hair.

  He loved to discuss history and nation-states and the collapse of empires and macroeconomics, but mostly he told me about his family. One sister was brilliant, at Harvard Law School, and he intended to follow her there. His other sister was not as bookish but had a gift with people, just wait and I’d see it myself, and indeed I did. His mother was a warm Southern belle with extreme smarts. Alex was born of these women, shaped by them such that with his teammates he could be a hockey thug tumbling toward the locker room grab-assing and gassy, badgering through a half-maw of chewing tobacco, and still shower, put on a pressed button-down, and arrive at my room to walk me to Seated Meal, because that’s what a gentleman did. And while I heard him vulgar and puerile plenty of times, never once did I hear him deploy the feminine as insult. He could hit hard enough to leave girls out of it.

  There lived, in Foster House that year, a critical mass of hockey players, whose stench began at the base of the grand staircase (the dorm had originally been a mansion) and boiled, once the radiators came on, into a carpet-based airbroth that made it almost intolerable to be inside those walls. During intervisitation hours, girls stood blushing at the bottom step with hanks of hair drawn across their noses, waiting for some younger jock to go fetch their friend. Had Alex not been Alex—my Alex—the place would have been a lion’s den to me. But as a sixth former I could stay out half an hour later than Alex could, so I would huddle with him there in his single room with its lone window cracked to the pine air until well past ten, when I was supposed to leave.

  One of the masters in Foster was too old to climb the three flights of stairs. Another—the young and handsome English teacher—was routinely racing the clock too, parking his little blue sports car with its long-haired passenger in the treed lot beneath Alex’s window. The third was a Japanese instructor whom the hockey thugs could not resist abusing. Caught with mouths of chewing tobacco, they stared and gawked when Mr. Hayashi asked why they were talking strangely, until the question, in its reflexivity, seemed absurd. They liked to leave their windows wide open and spread peanuts across their dressers so they could run yelling down the stairs that a wild animal was in their room, come quickly, what was it, what could it be? Mr. Hayashi would get caught in the double rhotic consonant of squirrel and spend whole miserable seconds trying to deliver his verdict.

  Late one night that fall Alex and I were lying in the dark, as we did, when Mr. Hayashi pushed open the door. Surgical light spilled in from the fluorescent hall. Mr. Hayashi saw us and blinked, trying to find the words.

  “Mr. Hayashi,” said Alex politely, “please go away.”

  The door closed.

  Alex had not come to St. Paul’s a virgin. He was old for his class and his girlfriend at home had been older still. He was not, with me, in a hurry. As I’ve said, he was terrifically strong. In the dark his arms looked as though someone had hurled muscle at him and it had stuck, mounding every stretch of skin and bone. I lay inside that strength. It was threat turned inside out, given to me handle-first. It is possible that I owe Alex Ault my life. I resist the tale that has the maiden rescued by the warrior, not least because it is dull—though if I am going to call hockey players thugs, I must admit a landscape of maidens, too. I was not among them. And I would not call it rescue, because once I was in college and Alex and I were no longer together, I felt the old powerlessness return. I had learned nothing at all.

  But while we were together, it held.

  Because he was a male tri-varsity athlete of a certain sort—football-hockey-lacrosse, with weight room and sprinting records, and an easy, popular way about him—he had heard all the news about me.

  “Scotty dumped me because of something Wyler told him,” I said, early on in our relationship. We’d have been talking in the meadow, or walking the long footbridge toward Chapel, or sitting on the porch of his dorm while the air was still mild.

  “I heard that,” said Alex. “What an idiot.”

  “Apparently Wyler said something about the coach telling them I was sick.”

  “That’s true,” said Alex.

  I got vertigo in moments of revelation like this. The collision of shame and rage spun in me like a cyclone, an unholy storm. But I tried to keep my voice light. “Was it Matthews?” I asked. “Gillespie? Buxton? What did he say?”

  “Oh, Lace.”

  “No, please.”

  Alex put his head down. He had a wide, masculine jaw, and I could see its outline even when he ducked his face. “I don’t care,” he said, and took my hand. “You know I don’t care.”

  “What did he say?”

  Alex sighed. “They asked if anyone had ever been, you know, intimate with you. I guess some guys said yes. And then they said that anyone who had should head to the infirmary to get checked for…diseases.”

  I didn’t ask anything else. Alex wasn’t looking at me, and I didn’t look at him. The bile in my throat burned, and it felt, in that moment, like a betrayal by my own body. See? said the pain. You are sick. They weren’t wrong.

  I had the scene from last spring in my mind, these young men out on the lacrosse field, sprawled in the sunny grass, helmets in their hands and sticks by their sides, and their mentors issuing their warning in low tones. Or it might have been in some coach’s apartment: men’s bodies on sofas and chairs, the loose, sophomoric gathering marked by a surprisingly sober moment. And then these boys had threaded campus with the warning about me. I imagined their jokes, the innuendo, the bluster. It infected everyone and everything, so that I could never enter a room and not wonder who was thinking about my body and considering me either dirty or dangerous.

  “But you really don’t care?” I finally asked Alex, unbelieving.

  He raised his head. He was angry, and I thought I’d pushed him too far. Of course he cared. My reputation, my history at the school, caused him shame and embarrassment. He’d just been ignoring it, and I’d forced him right to the heart of what was abhorrent about me, and now he’d turn on me too.

  “Don’t ever do that,” he said. “Not ever again.”

  I was already starting to sob. I’d have to leave school if Alex broke up with me—it would be the loss too great. I was almo
st afraid to speak. “Do what?”

  “Think I’m like those guys. Those schmucks. Do not ever.”

  I gave him my word.

  A curious thing happened. By the start of hockey season, the campus had become aware that we were an item, and Alex, for the first time in his life, was benched. The coaches wouldn’t play him. There seemed no reason. Alex talked to Bill Matthews, who had recruited him. Matthews had a problem with Alex’s skating, his stops, his turns, his stick handling, his slap shot. Or he had no problem, or he was just working out the lines, or Alex was overreacting. Mr. Ault took time off from work and came up to New Hampshire to try to sort it out. Alex spent extra hours in the weight room, missing Seated Meal and earning detentions. He sent me home early so he could get a good night’s sleep. Mr. Ault was reduced to headshaking scowls. Nothing added up. How could Alex demonstrate his worth if they never played him? A fourth former took his spot on his line. Matthews couldn’t seem to explain the problem in a way that could be addressed. A school change was discussed. The pounding, jocular crash-greetings I observed when Alex came across his teammates, or they him, started to lose their force. At first these players called me Hockey Yoko, but that quickly stopped—they understood that Alex’s performance on the ice had not changed. They lowered their eyes and set callused palms for long moments on Alex’s shoulders.

  After Thanksgiving I paid a visit to Ms. Royce, who had asked every returning member of the varsity girls’ hockey team to drop by her apartment after supper because she was gearing up for the coaching season. She put Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” on the stereo in her little apartment, and tittered with us cool sixth formers about how she shouldn’t do this, but wasn’t it a great song? I told her I’d be sitting out the season, and she was unkind. “You’re leaving me in the lurch,” she said, which was ridiculous—we all knew I was a terrible hockey player. “I’m disappointed in you. That’s a mistake. What are you going to do?” Even my friends showed their surprise.

  Avoid the rink was the answer; work on my ISP; gain a little too much weight; walk Raspberry through the snow. Try to figure out how to help Alex.

  But fate had begun its cascade. Kept from the ice, Alex lost his courage in classes. He started papers and could not finish them. Teachers gave him the highest grades on the first eight pages but had to fail him anyway. I spent hours in the library, finding books for him. When he told me, stricken, that this didn’t help, I’d clean his room for him while he worked alone somewhere else. It was a poor instinct, to mother him. But neither of us knew what demon this was or what it could do.

  Alex began an unraveling. I’ve wondered since if it was that only one of us could survive, as if we were in a lifeboat too small for two. Or was it a snakebite, and he took from me the poison? Or something other—some biological force as powerful as his intelligence but latent, that would, before he finished college, undo his academic gifts, and that had nothing to do with me?

  How he shook my grandfather’s hand, when Big Jim and Ginny arrived in Concord, looking awkward as shell-less snails, to sit in the gymnasium for my interminable graduation ceremony on a day of relentless rain. How he tousled and thumped my little brother, who could be observed dropping back to hold his breath and peer down at his own chest, trying to isolate his muscles, to find the strength in himself that was so clear in Alex. How Alex, his own athletic career stalling, cheered for me when I, having played in the top singles spot all spring, won the tennis prize. How he laughed with my mother about electoral politics and the church. How my father nodded and inquired about Mr. Ault’s Rhodes—maybe they had friends in common?

  I have no idea how Alex tolerated any of this. How he took up my shame and magicked it away. Somewhere between rescue and self-sacrifice is simple accompaniment, of sufficient force to bring a person back into her life.

  I graduated from St. Paul’s. Alex did not. He has made his way, but he is lost to me now. Still, there is a light at the cold door to Foster House, in the St. Paul’s map of my mind, where I arrived at a dead run with my Princeton acceptance letter clutched in my hand so Alex could be the first to know. He held me hard and his eyes shone. For Christmas, because I’d wanted it, he gave me a little silver ring.

  11

  Alumna, SPS Form of 1992

  For the next twenty-four years, I paid no attention to St. Paul’s School, with the rare exceptions of tragedies that shook me into communion. The summer before our senior year in college, Sarah Devens, the superstar athlete who had comforted me that cold hockey afternoon in 1991, shot herself at her father’s house. She’d been a rising senior at Dartmouth, captain of everything. I was a student at a writers’ conference in upstate New York when I heard this news, and I went out for a very long run, through rolling horse pastures and past sunset, as though in extremis I might meet up with Sarah’s spirit and understand why.

  Later that summer I received a form letter from her closest St. Paul’s friends inviting donations toward a girls’ hockey changing room to be dedicated in her honor. I remembered the rink, I remembered Royce’s ice-skating drill, Categories. That moment with Sarah was as clear in my mind as the day it happened: we had just left the drafty trailer where we changed when Sarah broke from the pack and jogged up to embrace me. I didn’t want to put her back in that locker room any more than I wanted to go back myself. I wrote to her friends somewhat haughtily that I would have preferred to give money toward something that was a more human honor—a scholarship, or a fund to endow a school counselor. I meant to celebrate Sarah, but my intentions were not pure. I had begun to hate what seemed to me another expression of almost unbelievable privilege: an uncomplicated relationship to institutions. These girls and their guileless trust. That trust had once been mine. Who wouldn’t want to write a check to St. Paul’s? Who wouldn’t want a new locker room for girls? What could be wrong with that?

  Sarah’s friends replied that her family had made their decision to honor Sarah in a certain way and I could participate or not. I sent a check.

  After college, another form-mate, a brilliant and wry writer, finished up his master’s at Stanford and died in a car being driven by his best friend from St. Paul’s. A third classmate barely cleared forty before dying of chronic disease. The Jesus painter’s redheaded brother drowned. A student who had been a year ahead of me died of cancer. Stewart, the son of the scion, who had teased me in his limousine, choked at a restaurant and left behind two little girls. A student who had been a year behind me, a wide-smiling classics scholar, killed herself.

  I considered each tragedy an education in perspective, and told myself I had nothing to begrudge the school, or fate. I had made my choices.

  Occasional reports of turmoil at the school rose to national media prominence, but I hardly registered that Bishop Craig Anderson, the eleventh rector, was forced out amid investigations into the misuse of school funds. Bill Matthews succeeded him as the twelfth. While Matthews was sitting rector, he oversaw the construction of a new hockey center. The trustees of the school decided that it should be named after him. The Sarah Devens Locker Room, I supposed, would sit inside the Bill Matthews Hockey Center. Two gorgeous new rinks. New stands. I pictured the spot back in the pines, behind the dining hall and Kittredge House, over an icy bridge: the enshrinement in physical space of the man who had said, to my father, She’s not a good girl, Jim, and inside it spotlit playgrounds for boys like Rick Banner.

  I did not spend time reading news reports about the girls who were suspended from school in an ugly hazing scandal in the early 2000s or the one who was sexually assaulted on a rooftop just a few days before the end of her third-form year, in 2014. There was an element of self-protection to my disinterest, of course—not just that I did not wish to revisit old feelings, but also that I knew there was nothing I could do about any of it. To risk the rise of indignation or even sympathy would be to experience all over again the powerlessness of the girl who was told that the lawyers were ready to destroy her.

  But i
t was not my choice to be uninformed about the dogged group of alumni from the 1970s who submitted to the school in the year 2000 a list of shared accusations of sexual harassment and assault by faculty members, with a request for investigation and response. The school handled their request silently, so nobody knew about it except a lawyer at the venerable Boston firm of Ropes & Gray, whom the school tasked with addressing the alumni request. The firm declined to investigate all but three accounts. No action was taken on any of those three cases. Subsequently the rector, the vice rector, and the chairman of the board of trustees together concluded that “an explicit confession of past sins…would be unjustifiably destructive to the interests of the School.”

  One of the faculty members Ropes & Gray declined to investigate was Mr. Katzenbach, who had taught me Modern Novel. He died five years after I graduated. In those five years, at least three substantial allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him. Over the long course of his employment at the school he had not only grabbed a student’s breast but exposed himself to other girls, propositioned them for weekends away, and consummated at least one relationship with a student. I had known he made wildly inappropriate comments, but I knew nothing of his predatory behavior. After I graduated, a female vice rector had brought witness accounts, along with her concerns, to the rector and the board of trustees, and argued to remove Katzenbach from the school community. The school responded by firing her.

  Mr. Katzenbach ultimately resigned of his own volition, citing health reasons. Mr. Gillespie—The Rock—wrote him “glowing” recommendations so that he might teach to the end of his life at another school, in Virginia.

  All I ever learned during these years is that poor Mr. Katzenbach had died.

  Meanwhile St. Paul’s wrapped up its investigation with form letters of apology to the alumni who had sought it. “The Trustees are satisfied that the School has acted swiftly, fairly, decisively and appropriately,” they wrote.