Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  So my story vanished. Was finished. Went cold.

  It was hockey I thought of when I read about the agreement. I pictured two teams of young men scraping and slamming on the bright new ice, and how we imagine they are rivals when really they’re kings. This is their game. So the school scrimmaged the state, and delivered the outcome. I was never going to have my chance.

  How many experiences like mine have been similarly secreted away? Detective Kinney had said there were dozens and dozens of incidences of assault on campus, but I did not have the chance to ask for details, and he would not have answered if I had. We did not speak again.

  It was a ringing quiet. Fool girl, I had trusted that documents and perpetrator admissions and the fullness of time would suffice.

  As it happened, on the day the New Hampshire attorney general announced his deal with St. Paul’s School, the senior United States senator from the State of California, where I make my home with my husband and sons, forwarded to the FBI a letter from a woman detailing a sexual assault committed by a male nominee to the United States Supreme Court. The woman’s name was redacted, but she could not be protected. I thought I knew how the Brett Kavanaugh matter would unfold, and that is how it happened. The feeling was of concentric craters—mine, and then the nation’s—giant blast zones we could not seem to climb out of.

  I spoke to Detective Curtin once more, to follow up on a few last pieces of her department’s investigation, which she was closing.

  “The attorney general’s office ended their investigation,” I prompted.

  “Yes.” Julie waited a moment. Then she said, “We thought about you around here, when we heard that. We thought of you.”

  I was surprised by how this moved me. I wished I could go back decades and tell myself as a girl about the two detectives in Concord who would be waiting to listen when I was ready to talk.

  When she’d asked to interview my parents about the assault, Julie had suggested I might contact them first to let them know she’d be in touch. My parents and I do not speak easily or often, and we have not for many years. But when I wrote to them about St. Paul’s, they called immediately. We spoke with a formal dignity, as one would of a diagnosis or a loss.

  I had explained the state’s investigation, and that I had come forward as a student who was victimized—was raped—on campus. Would they be willing to be interviewed?

  “Yes,” said my father. “Yes, of course.”

  I thanked him.

  “That whole thing was so excruciating,” Dad said, “that I haven’t thought about it in years. I’ve really just sort of blocked it out.”

  My father has a gentle voice, warm and musical. He sings tenor in the same church choir where I soloed on Christmas Eve when I was nine. I leaned into the familiar tones even as his words caused me an old, deeply known pain. My father did not think about what happened at St. Paul’s and he had not in years.

  Maybe I should have been happy for him to have forgotten, to have that shadow lifted. But I was not that generous. I wanted so much from his words. I was still looking to be redeemed by him and for him. I reminded myself that I was an adult, and that it was up to me now.

  “But the thing I will never forget,” he added, “is Bill Matthews’s voice, saying, ‘She’s not a good girl, Jim. You don’t want to go there, Jim.’”

  I had taken my phone outside and was standing next to the raised garden bed I tend with my sons. The garden was trampled and sprawling, full of bright fruits they’d missed. I counted tomatoes. Dad remembered Matthews, of course. How could a father forget? I waited for him to keep talking, with his next breath to go on to disparage Bill Matthews and restore me—that asshole, can you imagine, I hope he’s dead, my wonderful girl. Maybe Dad thought it unnecessary to say these things. Maybe all of that was clear.

  Still, the only words between us were the ones Bill Matthews spoke. We weren’t remembering what had been done to my body, but what had been done to my reputation. Maybe, by a set of hellish degrees, it was somehow less painful for Dad to recall his daughter’s slandering than her violation.

  I am a parent. I think I understand.

  “I’m sorry you felt so much shame,” I told him. “I’m sorry that is still there for you.”

  Mom came on the line. “Oh, yes,” she said. “And I will never forget”—she said a priest’s name, someone with powerful connections to St. Paul’s whom she had approached, devastated—“I will never forget him telling me, ‘Oh, no, this is on Lacy. This is really Lacy’s doing.’”

  I hadn’t known this about this priest, to whom our family was no longer close. It made sense that she would have appealed to him for help, that summer I was sixteen: he shared her vocation, knew her daughter, knew and was known by the school. I was not surprised to hear that he seemed not to have believed that my assault was real. Mom, like Dad, was remembering the agony of her own abandonment, but I had long preferred to imagine that the people who might have helped us simply did not believe. I had always liked this priest. He’d met me when I still wore ribboned barrettes in my hair. If he had known what the boys had done, if he’d known what St. Paul’s had done, wouldn’t he have fought for me? If not that horrible year, then during all the years since, when wave after wave of allegations about the school rose to national prominence? This was one small refuge of the survivor, to grant to the silent the grace of ignorance.

  I was counting globe tomatoes and feeling off the ground, finding it all a bit funny. Lacy’s doing! Not a good girl. How powerful they had made me, these men, in denying the truth. How much they imagined I could choreograph in their storied New England boarding school. I had been a fifteen-year-old girl in duck boots. Many days, I could barely speak.

  I did not know, when I first told my parents about the brand-new investigation, that I would write about St. Paul’s. I had spent so much time considering the challenge of bearing witness, of finding ways to transcribe experience so other people would understand. The work of telling is essential, and it is not enough. There is always the danger that the energy of the injustice will exhaust itself in the revelation—that we will be horrified but remain unchanged. The reason for this, I suspect, is that these are stories we all already know. A girl was assaulted. A boy was molested. The producer, the judge, the bishop, the boss. To hear these stories spoken aloud is jarring, but not because it causes us to reconsider who we are and how we are organized. It is only when power is threatened that power responds.

  After all, the boys told everyone the story of our bodies in that room. The school took the news in stride. Despite their precious patter about goodness and virtue, my offense wasn’t what I did, and it certainly wasn’t what the boys did. It was that I showed up in a pediatrician’s office in my hometown with the clinical evidence of a crime. It was not until I challenged the school’s reputation that the school decided to care about mine.

  I didn’t think I would change the school by writing this account. I did not think I would change the nation over whose leaders-in-training the school presumes to preside. We talked, my husband and I, about initiating charges against the boys: What would that do to our family, to our lives? How could that help others? We talked about suing St. Paul’s School—with my documentation and their fear of exposure, I was almost guaranteed a settlement of some sort. The school would pay me in exchange for my continued silence. We could fund college accounts for our kids. I could repay my parents for all the therapy of my youth. Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford had met with a local prosecutor in New Hampshire, who had been appalled by my case and had recommended I hire lawyers to seek redress. I could do these things. Most victims cannot. Not only most victims from St. Paul’s, I understand, whose experiences might not be as well-documented as mine, but victims from every place—every survivor who has been made to carry the blame.

  What I wanted was to find some way to release my peers from their shame. I wanted to show them the secret letter buried in each of their files, the one where the institut
ion aligned against them determined how to keep them quiet, this blueprint of patriarchal silence. So that voices like the vice-rector’s—you are bad, your family must not look closely here—will roll off them and onto the grass, and they will tell, and tell, and tell.

  I talked with my husband about writing about St. Paul’s. It would expose me, I said. It would expose him. It would plant in the world these words (herpes, slut, rape) associated with my name, and these events for our children to discover. Their friends, their communities. Our community. Would it salt the fields? How large was the danger of regret?

  My husband had been waiting for my question.

  “Love,” he said, “you want to know what I think?”

  I did.

  He held me and said, “Burn it all down.”

  It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time.

  First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.

  So I’ve written what happened, exactly as I remember. It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it is of witness: to go back to that girl leaving the boys’ room on an October night, sneakers landing on the sandy path, and walk with her all the way home.

  15

  I don’t remember during which of my three years at St. Paul’s it was that in the springtime a lone goose landed on the library pond and haunted us. Geese passed through in the fall and spring by the hundreds, but this one year—late April or May it would have been, when the air was soft—a solitary goose appeared and honked, riotously, as we streamed to Chapel in the morning along the brilliant water.

  I remember laughing. Laughter rolled down the line of us. The bird, when we passed it, nearly barked, sounding an uproar, like an angry person caught in traffic, sputtering and cursing. Who couldn’t find a reason in her own life to yell like that? The laughter lifted us—we were always groggy on the way to Chapel—and caused us to look at the pond. The spring trees. It was so good to be reminded that we were young.

  The goose talked throughout the day. Honk, honk. Other geese would arrive, we figured, or it would eventually leave. Some natural agenda would have its way.

  At night, though, the bird kept calling. From midnight to 6 a.m. the chapel bells tolled only the hour, single bongs without melody, and the bird punctured those hollow hours erratically, enough to keep a lonely or frightened or sad student from sleep. In the morning, when we funneled to Chapel, it again made a riot. Even the teachers were discussing it. The drunk goose, the lonely goose, the seriously confused and disruptive goose.

  A plot was hatched. An old Irish setter lived in a master’s apartment in Wing, the dorm adjacent to the dining halls at the top of the hill. We called the dog Murphy. Except in the deepest freeze, Murphy sat outside the front door all day long. He held his chin high and let his auburn ears feather in the breeze. We patted Murphy on the head for good luck, the way tourists rub the foot of Saint Peter in Rome. The dog’s head was burgundy where we stroked it as we passed, heading into and out of the dining halls for meals.

  Every year, newbs squirreled bits of food out for Murphy and were frustrated when he wouldn’t eat. Nobody understood why he refused, but the running theory was that someone had fed him LSD back in the seventies—hence his preternatural calm, too. I don’t think anyone worked out that dropping a tab in the seventies would have made this dog Methuselah, but the explanation had become axiom long before I arrived.

  Murphy, it was decided, could handle the goose. He was a setter! Against all evidence, students figured that he would spot the goose in the reeds and go bounding in, scaring it off to haunt some other pond. After lunch Murphy was led by his soft collar down to the spot closest to where the bird’s calls were coming from. Its cries increased in frequency as the students approached.

  But Murphy was unmoved. So a student picked up a rock and tossed it in the direction of the goose, to alert the dog with the splash. Murphy barely widened his eyes. His ears hung still.

  Another boy threw another rock. And a third. It was only a matter of time before someone hit the goose, and the miserable squawk it made gave everyone a chill. Still, more rocks followed. How could they not? There must have been something wrong with the bird in the first place, of course. It was probably already close to death, said the few boys who would talk about it later. That’s why it was stuck there, making that racket. It was a mercy, frankly.

  We were all grateful the honking stopped.

  We had all read “The Lottery,” of course. It was a staple of fourth-form English class, along with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Hawthorne and Hamlet. But nobody meant to reenact Shirley Jackson’s horror story. We were as blind to allegory as we were to privilege. Consequences were not our concern. The school’s rules were not even called rules—they were formally known as expectations. Here the children of the elite were trained not in right or wrong but in projections of belief.

  Once the dead bird began to smell, the maintenance crew drove their cart down the path and waded in. Murphy, failed setter, resumed his spot at the door to Wing, overlooking his grounds.

  When I was a sixth former, my parents, pleased that it would soon be over, suffered a convulsion of thanks and made a cash contribution to St. Paul’s. They had noticed that the school’s banner was in tatters. This was the gilded tapestry hoisted by an acolyte in formal chapel processions, just before the high cross. The red stitching of the crest was dulled and loose. You could barely make out the pelican in the corner. I’d seen the banner looking like a sail after a storm and not even guessed what it was. Mom, alert to parish pageantry, rang up the development office and commissioned its renewal.

  For the final service of my sixth-form year, with my parents and all the graduates’ families teary-eyed in the pews of the magnificent chapel, the restored banner was revealed. I watched it come down the aisle, shining like a wing. That was our part, I thought, the Crawford part, though nobody knew. I felt neither anger nor pride. It was enough to know that I had been there, and of my time this silk would remain. Alex was beside my family, watching me sing. My parents I could barely look at, so I focused on my fellow choristers—their mouths framing sound, their faces docile, grateful.

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  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Detective Julie Curtin and Lieutenant Sean Ford of the Concord, New Hampshire, Police Department, whose honesty and consistent focus on victim-centered discourse were transformative. Almost alone among administrators and authorities who were involved with my case, they saw through bureaucratic obstacles, diversion, and obfuscation and worked to restore truth and integrity. Where there cannot be justice, there is sometimes clarity, and this is its own mercy.

  This book would not have a voice were it not for the leadership of Tarana Burke and the advocacy she has inspired, or for the example of fortitude and fierce care offered by Chessy Prout and the Prout family. Every survivor and witness of abuse at St. Paul’s School who spoke up, anonymously or otherwise, helped generate enough interest and anger to rouse an institution slumbering in its pride and reach those of us who had resigned ourselves to silence. Thank you.

  After this book was completed, the trustees of St. Paul’s voted to remove Bill Matthews’s name from the hockey center. This decision was made without consideration of how Matthews treated me and my family, but stemmed from his handling of more recent events. Archibald Cox Jr., as board chair, and Kathy Giles, current rector, presided over a decision that was, and remains, highly contentious among alumni and trustees. The symbolic removal of Matthews’s legacy bespeaks good intentions, but I find cause for hope only i
n the fact that current leadership is willing to tolerate antagonism to force conversation about change. I wish them courage.

  I first wrote about St. Paul’s in a writing seminar led by Toni Morrison, who encouraged this work in its very earliest form and beyond the seminar’s end. The staggering privilege (in all senses) that put me in that room of six women, in the space she created, is in my mind dwarfed only by Professor Morrison’s generosity. In the years since, I’ve been lucky to be encouraged in this telling by wonderful writers, particularly Russell Banks, Carol Edgarian, Tom Jenks, and Mark Strand. Thank you especially to Meg Howrey and Sameer Pandya, who offered essential support through multiple drafts of multiple books.

  There are several people who, quietly and with kind patience, offered me words, books, and examples of awareness and advocacy. Thank you to Susan Brison (and to Eva Feder Kittay, for the introduction), Molly Bidwell, and Marva Butler White. I am indebted to the philosopher Heidi Maibom for her insights regarding nonhuman expressions of shame.

  Thank you to Jeffrey Baron, Andrea Bent, Alexia Brown, Kendra Dobalian, Melissa Floren Filippone, Margo Furman, and Nelson González for critical conversations about gender, sexuality, boundaries, privilege, and violence during these few years, and for decades of friendship besides.

  Thank you to Stephen Grosz.

  Thank you to Maggie, whom I miss very much.

  I wrote these pages knowing Sarah Burnes was waiting to read them. Her advocacy has been irreplaceable. Thank you to Seth Fishman for opening the door, and to Julia Eagleton, Rebecca Gardner, Will Roberts, and Anna Worrall at the Gernert Company.

  Sarah and Asya Muchnick have been as supportive as it is possible to be, and offered a collaboration that is the only cure for the loneliness of sending a revealing book into the world. They have never confused the book for the writer or the writer for the girl, and this clarity allowed for consistent expression of care and respect. Thank you also to the entire team at Little, Brown, especially Terry Adams, Reagan Arthur, Ira Boudah, Sabrina Callahan, Allan Fallow, Evan Hansen-Bundy, Shannon Hennessey, Pamela Marshall, Elisa Rivlin, Maggie Southard, Massey Barner, and Craig Young. Thank you to Elizabeth Garriga and Nicole Dewey for their instincts to both publicity and protection.