Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  This group of alumni pushed back, requesting an open call for accounts from anyone who had been victimized at the school. They were refused.

  How might my life have been different if that call had gone out when I was still a very young adult?

  I was devastated during those early years of adulthood, but it was as if I were still gagged. Three weeks into my first year in college, the underclass dorms were alive with talk of the “face-book party,” an upperclass event held off campus to which freshman girls received invitations, slid under their doors, issued on the sole basis of the hotness of their photographs in the student directory. I’d heard it said that Princeton was a men’s college that admitted women, and this felt right to me—I relished saying it—but when a sleepy-eyed blond classmate approached me that fall, beer in hand, and said, “I’ve heard you think women are not equal here. Why is that?” I could not answer her. The girl who asked me this question was dating one of the men who hosted the face-book party. I had been invited, too, and I’d gone. It had seemed a triumph. I felt grateful to these college men I didn’t even know for overlooking the gossip about my herpes. I was still smarting about high school face-book ratings. With what clarity, what empathy, could I explain to the drunk girlfriend that this was not what equality looked like?

  My education should have helped, and to some extent it did. I read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and found language for the vice rector’s choice to tell a group of boys that I might have gotten them sick. Sontag writes, “Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.” But the culture on Princeton’s campus—or at least the culture whose validation I longed for—did not emerge from the scholarship I approached in class. Rather it seemed to repudiate it. I wrote about Sontag and then went to dine in an eating club, newly coed, where men in formal wear raised glasses of whiskey to roast a young woman in absentia for having had a yeast infection. I was disgusted, yes, with their words, but more than that I was grateful they weren’t roasting me.

  My sophomore year, by grace and proximity, I met a philosophy professor, Susan Brison, who was completing a fellowship. Brison is a survivor of rape and attempted murder. At Princeton she was working on philosophical expressions of the catastrophe experienced by victims of trauma when they report what has happened to them and are not believed. I told her a bit about St. Paul’s, though not much. What had happened to me paled beside her attack—and in any case I did not yet understand how the school’s silencing of me had been, in its way, the greater crisis. But Susan must have, because she gave me a copy of a paper she’d written about the importance of being heard. It was due for publication in a major journal. She gave it to me in manuscript form, and those paper-clipped pages felt to me like a secret.

  “The denial by the listener inflicts…the ultimately fateful blow,” Brison writes. If nobody believes you, part of you cannot survive. I grasped this instinctively. I carried her paper everywhere, keeping it in my bag beside my calendar and my notebooks and my student ID.

  But I felt I did not deserve her insight. Brison’s primary archive was Holocaust testimony, and with the Holocaust as referent, an experience such as mine becomes vanishingly insignificant, except—for me at least—inasmuch as the banality of its cruelty seems to bloom: This happened in a school? In a church school? In a cosseted New England boarding school? It’s not historic evil, it’s everyday evil: it’s wasteful, churlish, absurd.

  There was nothing I could do about what had happened to me. I read as much as I could. I saved Sontag’s essays, I saved Brison’s paper. I did not know how to change my life because of what I found there.

  Twice a year, St. Paul’s School asked me for money. There were invitations to receptions in Hong Kong and Hobe Sound. When the jewel-toned Alumni Horae arrived, thick and matte, I tossed it immediately. I moved cities, on average, every two years. When I interviewed after college to teach high school English, twenty-one years old and quivering, the department head who eventually hired me told me that I should find a way to make myself sound at least neutral about my own high school experience. I’d thought I had.

  In addition to teaching, I tried being a reporter for public radio, but I hated coaxing people into sharing things they did not wish to say. I started work toward a doctorate in English and wrote a master’s thesis on metaphor in the rape testimonies of small children. I turned twenty-four, twenty-five. I hitched my wagon to the star of a lying man who looked good on television, and followed him to London. There I sat on the floor of an overheated charity office that had run out of chairs and wrote reports to tie together information coming in from the field, where staffers were using brand-new GPS technologies to identify illegally felled trees on the Thai-Cambodian border and illegally mined diamonds in Congo and illegal bribes to agents of U.S. oil companies in Niger.

  But they couldn’t pay me, so I got a job with a British lord, writing his correspondence, and when I’d wobble down the stairs in the heels they’d requested I wear, summoned in sonorous tones to take a note, I’d find some of the dodgy corporate leaders I’d profiled in my charity reports waiting to go in: Kazakhs filling their three-piece suits like envelopes of cash, two or three matching monsters with fingers in their ears lingering in the vestibule. While the lying man was away, reporting on foreign wars, I met an English fighter pilot who shared his taxi in a downpour. He rang me up at the lord’s office and nipped over from Whitehall to take me for a drink—and then for an entire winter of chaste drinks, followed by supper and walks in the park, all under cover of the London night because of course he was already married. In this way I managed to pretend I was not alone, while not actually having to be in a relationship at all. No man touched me.

  Everything glistened but nothing grew. I lived alone with my dangerous-looking Belgian shepherd and failed, year by year, to build a life. The plan was to drown myself in the Thames, though I left the door open for other actors to play the water’s part. It is an oversimplification to say this was all the fault of what happened at St. Paul’s. But the problem found its teeth there.

  Not long before I turned thirty, I received a phone call from a strange number: a guy I had dated briefly, without intention or intimacy, a decade earlier, at the writers’ conference in upstate New York. He’d been living that summer in a rented house with five buddies and a lizard called Gandalf they kept alone in a room, lashing and hissing, at the top of the stairs. Once a day one of these college kids would crack the door and throw in a bag of frozen vegetables. I’d been working at a café, where I arrived before dawn to meet the baker’s van and her warm trays of pastry. Nights Ted was a valet parker. We made up stories about the people whose cars he drove. You could tell from the dash what lives they led. The key chain, the cupholder, the scents that remained. All of this ten years before. “Hi,” said Ted. “How are you? How have you been? Funny, yeah, gosh. Time!” Turns out he lived in Los Angeles now, where his sister the screenwriter had gone to a bar and heard from someone that I had herpes, and did he have to worry?

  “Ted,” I said, in flames. “Are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  “Do you have herpes?”

  “Uh, well, no,” he said.

  “Are you sick?”

  “No. I’m great, actually.”

  “Then why are you calling me?”

  “Because my sister said that a guy at the bar said you’d had it in high school, and I just didn’t remember what you and I did, and maybe if I still could have caught it—if I’d know by now—”

  I would drown myself at dawn. As soon as I found someone to take my dog.

  I said, “Ted, if you are unwell, I think you should call your doctor. Otherwise, I think you should leave me alone.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was a pause. I went to disconnect us. “I’m sorry,” he told me. “It’s just that I’m in love. I’ve met… the one. You know. And I don
’t want her to get sick.”

  It would be another year before the spring morning when I returned in light rain to my little flat and found a letter from the other woman my then-fiancé was engaged to. I remembered Budge’s Candace as I rang up the letter writer. She revealed that while I’d been wearing his diamond in our home in London, he’d gone to Israel to ask her dying father for his blessing on their wedding. Just then our cell phones pinged, this woman’s and mine, at exactly the same moment with exactly the same text from the lying man, saying how much he missed each of us. He was still in Iraq, reporting on a war that was itself based on a lie. Together, we confronted him upon his return. Six weeks after that, he was engaged to a third woman, whose name we had never heard.

  How carefully I had denied myself truth, companionship, a future. My devotion to shame, to the St. Paul’s depiction of me, had taken precedence over everything.

  I sold the lying man’s ring and rented as many months as it afforded me in a haunted basement flat with its coal scuttle still visible on the street-side wall. I was close, then, to meeting the people who would help me begin to live, but I did not know it yet. When the dog and I walked across London to our new home, I wore a backpack containing my most precious things. I might have been fifteen. On my way to the Schoolhouse, on my way to the rink, on my way home from Rick and Taz’s room.

  When the boys did what they did to me, they denied the third person on that bed. I had no humanity. The impact of this violation only sharpened with time. My careful distinctions of injury and responsibility—the difference I imagined between what they did and rape, between terrible things you should put behind you and truly hellish things no one would expect you to bear—allowed me, for many years, to restore that third person in the room in my mind. I could pretend that having been permitted to keep my jeans on while being choked by cocks was something like agency, that it meant that at least they saw and heard me, the girl beneath them. I worked—I still work—to restore the boys’ humanity as a way of restoring mine: they were symptoms of a sick system, they were tools of the patriarchy, they were fooled by porn.

  But then the school went and did the same thing, denying my humanity, rewriting the character of a girl and spilling all her secrets to classmates to tempt them into shunning her. The teachers, rectors, lawyers, and priests of St. Paul’s School lied to preserve their legacy. It would take decades to learn not to hate the girl they disparaged, and to give her the words she deserved.

  It was the school’s inhumanity I could not—cannot—overcome. Because now I was up against an institution that subsumes human beings and presents a slick wall of rhetoric and posture and ice where there should be thought and feeling. Thus is the world, this world, made.

  I saw it everywhere.

  12

  Investigation, 2016

  By the time I turned forty, I had found safe harbor in marriage to a kind man who was unimpressed by Wasp wealth and had had a fine time attending the public high school a mile from his house in Los Angeles. His immigrant parents could not imagine what would cause a family to send its child across the country for high school: What had I done? My husband and I laughed and left it there. My family never talked about what had happened at St. Paul’s, and our new friends in new communities would never know. There’s no tidy way to tell the tale, no obvious antecedent that requires explication, and the result of any such revelation in an otherwise civil relationship is to coat everything with a sticky alien muck that might or might not linger in the form of shame or timidity. With my husband the event was dropped into the well we tend, where our courtship resides, too, and the births of our sons, along with the premature deaths of loved ones and my husband’s experience as a first responder at the World Trade Center. There are things he saw there that he will not tell me of. We hold these stories not in how we talk about them but in how we talk to each other about everything else.

  I had finally outrun St. Paul’s. The alumni office had even lost track of me—I no longer received solicitations for money, or the Alumni Horae. My eldest child was almost ready to start exploring online, and on the day he’d think to pick out the letters of his mother’s name, I realized gratefully, nothing about any of this would come up.

  Then in August of 2016, my oldest friend, Andrea, called.

  “My God. St. Paul’s. Those motherfuckers. Can you believe it?”

  In spite of steady headlines about the latest sexual-assault trial, I’d been ignoring the news out of New Hampshire. It was easy to do. Not my life, I’d decided. Not anymore.

  “I’m sure I could believe it,” I told my friend, “but I don’t know what it is.”

  Andrea explained that the school, facing a civil lawsuit from the assault victim’s family, had filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Concord to force the release of her name. By universal convention, the names of underage victims of sexual crimes are redacted in court filings. Her attacker had now been convicted on multiple counts. A handful of powerful alumni had fund-raised to pay his legal fees. Now the school did not feel it fair that everyone should know the name of the institution accused of failing to protect the young people legally and ethically in its care, but not the name of the girl who was assaulted there. So this Episcopalian school, with an endowment at that time worth well north of half a billion dollars, meant to force the teenager to defend herself to the world. They meant to intimidate her, perhaps to silence her.

  It was such an astonishingly nasty legal action that Andrea, who is a lawyer, could not at first believe it was true. She’d gone so far as to find the motion on the court website to be sure.

  “It’s such a dick move,” she said.

  Is the term itself a cheap shot? A generalization, certainly. We let it stand.

  The girl, Chessy Prout, outmaneuvered St. Paul’s. Composed, articulate, she went on television and “outed” herself.

  I recognized the school’s act, of course. Its precise cruelty, the fanged transformation of private pain into public shame, turned a key in me. I sent a note to the Prout family’s lawyer. When he called me, I asked him to please tell Chessy that they had done something just like this to me. I asked him to tell her she was not alone.

  Then in July 2017, the State of New Hampshire announced that it was opening a criminal investigation into St. Paul’s School. The investigation would consider first whether the school had ever engaged in conduct endangering the welfare of a child—putting or keeping us in harm’s way—and second whether it had obstructed the course of justice by failing to report crimes or by interfering with the investigation of those crimes in order to protect its own reputation.

  I read this and thought, Hmm.

  Anyone with information regarding criminal conduct at the school was urged to contact the attorney general’s office. I sent an email without thinking what might follow, as though intention were nothing but reflex, and then all but forgot I’d done it. So practiced was I, still, at banishing the assault from my mind that I was puzzled for an instant when the attorney general’s office called me. A detective with a voice like a granite shore told me they’d pulled my criminal case file from 1991, and would I be willing to talk with investigators?

  The measure of how young I was in 1991 is that I’d had no idea a case file existed. The measure of how close I still was to that girl in 2017 is that I was shocked to hear there was a case file now. If I’d not had a two-year-old clinging to my knees when the call came in, I might not have believed myself in the world.

  I gave a recorded interview to the female detective in Concord assigned to my case. Julie Curtin had been working sexual assault cases at St. Paul’s School for a dozen years. “It’s not all she does,” joked her supervisor, Lieutenant Sean Ford, on speakerphone, “but it seems like it is.” I told Detective Curtin what I remembered. When I hung up I was shaking, and it was difficult to place my finger over the correct button on the phone to end the call. The linking of memory to memory felt violently interior, as though I were making a chain
of my own internal organs. Everything tethered to the same ugly gut hook, my own small history.

  On the call I had stressed that I had no wish to speak about the assault in public or to press charges, having learned the hard way decades before that speaking up only made things worse. My intention was simply to bear witness to the way the school had treated me. Detective Curtin was quiet for a while. I thought I knew why. I’d given her—this careful, victim-centered professional—the story of a crime, then asked her to do nothing about it.

  At the very least, she said, she would work up my case and add it to the list of offenses being considered by the attorney general’s office. The AG had brought out of retirement a seasoned detective whose last project had led to the exposure and dismantling of the institutional harboring of child sexual abusers in the Catholic Diocese of Manchester. He would be the one to try to act on everything Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford were able to pull together on my case.

  Detective Curtin—I began to call her Julie—interviewed my parents and attempted to get hold of my red file from the murdered psychoanalyst’s estate. I told her I was quite sure the school had failed to report the assault. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “We got that.” But failure to report is a civil not criminal crime, and the statute of limitations is only two years. Still, the attorney general’s office could certainly use my case to help argue a pattern of behavior on the part of the school.

  That sounded fine, I told her. That sounded good. I admitted to Julie that I sometimes fantasized about knocking on Bill Matthews’s door. He had since retired from the school, after the celebration of his leadership and of the opening of his eponymous hockey center. I imagined approaching his house, wherever he lived now. In my fantasy it was springtime and I stood boldly on a front stoop to knock. When he appeared at his door I would ask him, on behalf of the girl he had slandered, “Why did you hate me?”