Consent

by Donna Freitas

  Whenever I did speak about graduate school, I talked of it like it was one of the best times of my life—because it was. With the exception of everything related to this professor, I’d flourished in graduate school. I’d gotten nearly perfect grades, I was a beloved student of my other professors, and I was considered promising in my field. Because I’d split my memories of that time in two, I could decide to recall either one set of memories or the other. In one set, all had been well, all had been wonderful, actually. In the other, it was all darkness and shame and living under the perpetual gaze of a man who repulsed me, who tormented me, who relentlessly stalked me and, because of this, threatened to ruin my life and future. I never let the two sets mix. Never. It was imperative not. My career and my life, I felt, depended on this.

  But eventually the memories and the accompanying behaviors I’d learned as coping mechanisms caught up with me. They would come flooding into my consciousness, taking over my brain as though this professor were waiting for me outside the classroom where I was now teaching, in my new life as Professor Freitas, far away from where he still taught himself. And eventually, because these experiences got worse and worse, I underwent years of treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Because the memories, the associations with what and how I lived back then have their own timelines, their own will, because they are locked away in that vault in my brain, it has taken me years to comprehend what I went through for what it was, and the myriad ways it still affects me, sneaking up on me in places and moments and situations when I least expect it. My memories of him behave much like he did.

  It was the same thing for me with the Catholic abuse scandal. When it broke, I read about it, read all the articles in the newspaper, about the ways the Catholic Church covered up crimes and abuses committed by its priests for decades, how it evaded public scandal, paid victims for their silence. I felt the same outrage and shock everyone around me felt, discussed it with friends and colleagues—all without realizing that maybe what happened to me with this priest was related to the scandal. It would be several years after the news broke before it even occurred to me that my professor was an abusive priest, and that part of the ensuing cover-up and silencing I endured with my university—a decidedly Catholic university, full of priests and affiliated with high-ranking bishops—involved the same method for deception and silencing victims employed by the Catholic Church for decades.

  I’ve lived two lives, simultaneously, and have two different memories of those lives, accordingly. I generally live along only one track, but occasionally, very rarely, I’ll jump over to the other for a bit, often not by choice but because something in my present evoked something in this part of my past, opening that vault door a crack. For a long time, I didn’t know, not consciously, and I didn’t want to know, that this professor’s actions would haunt me for the rest of my life, that they would haunt my relationships, my daily activities, and my career. I didn’t want to give him that kind of power. I still don’t. But in so many ways, he still has it. He’ll always have it, if I’m honest. And each time I feel his power getting a grip on me, I do my best to yank it away immediately.

  Even though I know all of these things about myself, about how my brain is divided along the lines of the life I want to remember and the life that I do not, it is strange to try to come to terms with the fact that for a solid decade I did not notice that my work about sex on campus, and sexual assault and harassment in particular, the ways that schools have been burying incidents of it, has relevance to what I lived myself. That when I was out there talking about Title IX, I was also talking about myself. Well, I didn’t realize it until, one day, I did.

  Maybe the worst part of this story begins here.

  It’s difficult to decide which is the worst part, though. Was it all that unwanted attention from a professor I once admired who’d become a man I found repulsive? The relentless calling and showing up and letter writing and inviting me here and there and the chastising when I refused to go? Or was it the part when I began to ask for help from my university, a university I assumed I could trust because it was a university, and universities were my most sacred sanctuaries, and that university lied to me and determined that the only course of action was to ensure that I went away, that my voice was silenced for good?

  I think it might be the latter.

  20

  It was a cold January day when Dan and I went to see our chair.

  This professor, Dr. H., was the man who recruited me to this graduate program, who found more money to support me there than any of the other schools where I’d been accepted. I remember how he had called—when I was in Hawaii, working for a few weeks on an education program for high school students—to make me an offer, to up his last offer, to try to get me to commit to his program. I said yes on that call. I was so excited. And this man was one of the professors I was most excited about in the program because he taught hermeneutics, and I was still and always would be a philosophy geek because of Georgetown.

  Dr. H. was tall and thin and always smiling and laughing. He was also a priest.

  This felt like yet another test. I’d told Dan, who was thinking about becoming a priest, then we’d told our woman professor, who was the kind of person who might roll her eyes at a priest, but now we were about to tell another professor, this one a priest himself and one of the professors I most admired in the entire program. What if he didn’t believe me? What if all that enthusiasm he’d shown for my presence in the program evaporated the moment he heard this story? What if he came to regret that phone call to me in Hawaii and the accompanying offer of financial support so I could attend his school?

  Dan and I didn’t make an appointment. We just showed up at Dr. H.’s office. It was a couple of days before the holiday break ended and our spring-semester classes would start. Dr. H. was always around, a fixture in the department, greeting students and inviting them to chat. He was friendly and approachable, one of the most social professors in the school. We told his assistant we needed to speak to him, but not why, and soon she was ushering us into his office.

  The light was gray. The blinds were slightly open, the dirty snow outside visible beyond them. It was a big space, but everything about it was old, like a principal’s office from the 1980s with its worn, knotted wall-to-wall carpeting and a heavy metal desk messy with stacks of paper and a fat, hulking computer.

  In my hands was the grocery bag with the letters that survived my periodic tosses into the garbage can, including the unmarked ones he’d sent most recently. I’d shoved the books he’d given me in there, too, and they sagged at the bottom. There were six or seven of them.

  Dan and I sat down. This professor had an area with chairs and a coffee table in his office. The three of us made a little triangle, Dan and I on one side of the table, Dr. H. facing us on the other. At first I didn’t know how to begin. Then I took the grocery bag and placed it on the table.

  I pointed at it and said, “These are from Father L.”

  Then, as I’d done with Dan, I began to recount the details.

  “It started when I agreed to go to the theater with him a year ago.”

  I stopped. Backtracked.

  “Um. Maybe not then. Maybe it’s because I went to his office hours every week my first semester here.” I stumbled once more. Tried to right myself. “Well, really it was probably more than once a week. Sometimes twice. Really I was doing it all the time, going to see him.”

  As I spoke, I could see my fault written into every word, every sentence I uttered, embedded in them. Guilty. Guilty. I was obviously guilty.

  But I kept going. Dr. H. sat there, listening, his ankle resting near his knee, like always, hands clasped on top of it, a position of repose, of peace, of patience. He wore the exact same outfit I was used to seeing on Father L.: the black shirt and pants of a priest, white collar around his neck. Nearly all the professor-priests in my program wore this uniform.

  Dr. H.’s friendliness, his
smile, disappeared as I spoke.

  His mouth became a tight, pressed line as I went down the list of the various things Father L. was doing. Phone calls. Invitations. Mail. Going into my file. My mother.

  My mother, my mother, my mother.

  When I finished speaking, finished an edited version of the longer story I’d told Dan, but still a more detailed version than the one I’d given Christopher and Hannah, I was exhausted, shaking, that new permanent state of mine, just slightly, just a tremor, but I felt it, could see it in my hands. I wondered if other people could see it too and wondered how they might read it—whether they’d understand it as fear, as fatigue, or as an admission of guilt.

  I was scared to hear Dr. H.’s verdict.

  They were professors together. They were priests together. They were colleagues on multiple levels.

  Dr. H. leaned forward, peered into the grocery bag again.

  Then he looked up.

  “Donna,” he said quietly. He seemed to be searching for the right words.

  He was about to condemn me. This was it. Probably. Right?

  “This is unacceptable,” he said. “Unacceptable.”

  Which part? What he did or what I did?

  Then, “I’m sorry,” he said, just like Dan had.

  He sounded so certain. So confident.

  Not me, then. Not me. Okay.

  Dr. H. kept talking. He was appalled. The sheer quantity of the correspondence in the grocery bag appalled him, and it was only a small sampling, around forty items or so, because the other letters were long gone. Dr. H. was so definitive. Something was wrong, we were right to come to him and tell him, and he was going to do his best to help make the behavior stop.

  I remember feeling stunned.

  I’m not sure if it was all relief that followed. Relief was a part of it; Dr. H.’s confirmation of what I’d long suspected meant I wasn’t crazy, that I hadn’t been inventing dramas and overreacting to innocent behavior. But having another person—a professor and priest himself, one with so much authority and so much of my respect and admiration—confirm there was a problem meant that there probably really was a problem. And I still wanted to get out of this without it being a problem, without causing problems—for myself or anyone else.

  Dr. H. immediately promised me several things. One, that I would never have to take another course with this man, that we would figure a way around the requirements he taught; Dr. H. would make sure of this. Two, that I could stop worrying about needing this man on my dissertation committee, because there was no way he was going to allow that to happen. And three, Dr. H. was going to hold a meeting with this professor to inform him that he was to have no further contact with me, to reinforce all of the things I’d originally said over the phone, the demands that he no longer approach me or call me or write to my mother.

  But Dr. H. made me promise him something, too.

  That I was going to march over to the office at my university that handled sexual harassment and file a complaint, that I was going to do this right now, the moment I left his office. He told me he was going to pick up the phone when I walked out the door to let the woman in charge know that I was on my way.

  I agreed, but this was definitely not what I had wanted. None of this was what I’d wanted. I’d wanted things to go away quietly, secretly, without anyone else’s knowledge. The more people who knew, the bigger a deal it would become. But Dr. H. reassured me that it was essential I do this, that it would help put in place the official measures necessary so he could do his job on my behalf.

  It’s funny, I know that Dan was there with me for the entire meeting. I remember him accompanying me, I remember walking into Dr. H.’s office with him, sitting down with him there, but once my story starts, that story, I can’t see Dan anymore. It’s like he disappears from the room in my memory. It’s like I erase him, or maybe he quietly tiptoes out.

  I remember only Dr. H. and I remember him so clearly, the tone in his voice, how strong but also caring, how concerned he was that this was happening to me, and how sad he was that I had been afraid to tell anyone before now. The entire time I was in his office and he listened as I spoke, heard what I had to say, he never flinched.

  I would eventually come to understand Dr. H. as my Academic Dad.

  The father who was also a father; a father squared. This man, this priest, this professor, who had recruited me to this program, who had called me with his exciting offer of financial support, would become the mentor I’d originally believed Father L. to be. But Dr. H. was my mentor for real.

  From that day in his office and going forward, Dr. H. rose like a wall around me, dug and filled a moat around my intellectual endeavors, doing his best to clear a bright, comfortable space so I could once again roam safely on the academic playground that had once been my happiness. He would become the counterforce to all that would happen next, the person who defended me against the people with far more power than both of us who would not be on my side. He would become the professor for many of my remaining classes, and he would eventually become my dissertation director, the most passionate believer in the possibilities of my intellect. He would prove to me that Catholic priests could still be good. That the university was still my home. That I had still had some luck remaining when it came to professors. That I was going to be Professor Freitas myself, someday soon, regardless of this mess—he never let me forget that part either. He used to address all of his letters and eventually his emails to me with Dear Future Professor Freitas.

  I credit Dr. H. for the fact that today I am a writer. By directing my dissertation, by the way he directed it, through his rules for how to get through one, he taught me how to write a book. Those rules are burned into me, they go wherever I go, they are there when I sit down at my laptop every morning, as is his faith that I would see my dream, that I would write many books, all kinds of books—he was convinced of this and told me it often.

  Many years into the future, my first novel would be dedicated to his memory, and to my mother, and my grandmother, too—to his memory because he would die, unexpectedly, just a few months after he handed me my diploma. I would lose him, just as I would lose my mother and my grandmother, too, all of them a few months apart.

  I think maybe before I showed up in Dr. H.’s office that day, Dr. H. and Father L. had been friends. At the very least, they had been colleagues. They were both smart men, gifted intellectuals, exceptional ones, vibrant and dynamic as they spoke of ideas. This is why I’d been attracted to both of them during graduate school, albeit with very different outcomes.

  And it was an attraction, a kind of eros I felt, but of the intellectual kind. With Father L., that attraction became twisted and wrong, something I viewed as a punishment for marching into the traditionally male territory of the life of the mind, of philosophy and theology, unafraid of what I might find there, naïve about its buried potholes and hidden cliffs, its darkness, its punishments for the brazenness and boldness of women. But with Dr. H., I would find an altered landscape, bright and colorful and sunlit. A place where I belonged and flourished.

  If Dr. H. and Father L. had been friends that day I showed up in the former’s office, they certainly stopped being friends by the time I left.

  Before Dr. H. would die, he’d give me a precious gift. He restored my belief that a professor could become a mentor and only a mentor, seeing me as a student and only a student. That I could go to a professor repeatedly, sit in his office, full of questions about a reading or about my dissertation, talking excitedly, hands gesturing, face smiling, without having him interpret this as something other than what it was—a student, engaged by her graduate work, eager and alive with ideas. I could do all of this while wearing high-heeled boots and cute outfits and not have this matter, that it had never mattered what I wore or what I looked like, that my intellect was why we were really there. He reassured me that a professor could go with a group of us to see the new Star Wars movie, hang out with Dan and Christopher and
me and play football on the grass outside the theater as we waited in line, and not have this lead to something sordid later on, something dark and unwanted. That I could be a human in his presence, sad about my mother, fearful she might not get her wish of seeing me graduate with my PhD, and have him not see this as a selfish opportunity. He reminded me that a Catholic priest could act like a Catholic priest and not something entirely other.

  What I didn’t know then was that Dr. H. was helping me into the career that would become my trade-off when my dream fell apart. Writing, my non-dream, in exchange for being a professor, my true dream.

  Dr. H. didn’t know that then either, and it wasn’t his intent. He thought he would be around for years to help me navigate the professional minefield created by my situation, tell me to move right instead of left, head off the questions that would inevitably be asked regarding my job applications and what was conspicuously missing from all of them—a letter from Father L. Academic specializations are small, and everyone knows one another, knows who went to what school and who must have taught them at that school. Which is also why eyebrows go up when an applicant appears without a recommendation and supporting phone call from the person in their specialization from their graduate school.

  I forfeited my recommendation from this man that January day in Dr. H.’s office.

  By telling on Father L., I was taking the letter I would need each time I threw my hat in the ring for an academic position and setting fire to it, watching it burn. We were all watching it burn, the three of us, Dan, Dr. H., and me, in his old office with the dirty snow visible through the blinds. It would always, always be strange when I showed up for a job interview without Father L.’s stamp of approval. I’d known this as I answered the phone a thousand times when he’d call and as I piled the letters he sent me higher and higher on the windowsill of my office, but the fact of it had gotten blurry. The only thing I could see clearly that dreary January was the need to get Father L. out of my life completely and permanently. He was a stain on my person, and I wanted him scrubbed out. I would worry about the job problem later.