Consent

by Donna Freitas

  But when I told on him to Dr. H. like a little girl telling on the playground bully, I was sealing my fate, ensuring that I would always have trouble down the line as I tried to get an academic position. From that day forward, my applications would always have this off quality, an unpleasant smell that, for me to explain, for me to justify, would require confessing to the fact that my missing letter involved sexual harassment—which I would not do, could never do, and which would doom my candidacy anyway if I did. I would need someone who knew the story to finesse the missing letter for me, to lobby on my behalf despite it, which Dr. H could have done, did do for me at the very beginning, when he was still alive. And then suddenly he wasn’t, and I would have no one.

  21

  In February, a friend at graduate school, not Dan, needed to talk.

  It was important, she said.

  She’d come running toward me while I was outside, walking up the hill from the street parking that lined the edges of campus. I was still avoiding the lot near his office windows, trying to avoid being seen on my way into the building. My friend was smart, a minister herself, poised and graceful. She and I had immediately established an easy rapport during our first semester of classes even though our lives were so different. She was married with children, with an entire church of people who depended on her, and I was single and mostly agnostic by then, though still bordering on atheist. We were of different faiths and different beliefs. But she was intellectually quick and socially fun, and one of the few women students in my program with whom I connected easily, with whom I could go to lunch and talk for hours.

  During December, when I had been debating what to do, whom to tell, I’d considered speaking to her instead of Dan. Like Dan, she was someone I admired, fair-minded, careful in her judgments, someone who was not inclined to drama or overreacting or who would jump to conclusions. And like Dan, she knew this man and knew him well, respected him greatly, had taken more than one class with him already and enjoyed them immensely. But unlike Dan, she wasn’t thinking of becoming a Catholic priest, and also, this man was the head of her specialization, too. I didn’t want my ruin to ruin her. I didn’t want to take from her what was taken from me. In the end, I needn’t have worried, because he did this to her on his own.

  When she approached me that day, she had in her hand a letter. The other held an envelope, ripped open at the top. Her face was a mask of confusion, of worry, the pace of her walk a bit frenzied, which was unlike her. This friend moved through the world with the calm surety of a ship across peaceful seas, steady, unhurried, relaxed. It was one of the things I loved about her, one I wished I could embody myself. It was another way that we were different. I was always a bevy of hurried, quick, bold gestures, but my friend was the opposite, which was also why the moment I saw her speeding toward me I knew something was wrong.

  We greeted each other, barely, and then she looked at me—hard. “Is there something wrong between you and Professor L.?”

  My stomach did one of those looping motions, swooping up and around and then dropping straight to the sidewalk with a thunk.

  “Why?” I asked, stupidly. I should have known even before she told me, but as with so many things he did, sometimes I failed at my duty of anticipating the lengths to which he would go to forge another road into my life and everyone in it.

  “He’s been writing to me and then he’s called me,” she went on. “And then he’s been trying to talk to me about you. He came up to me a few minutes ago.”

  My eyes sought the ground, joining my stomach. “Oh?”

  “Donna.” Her voice lost its edge.

  “What did he want?” I asked, studying the concrete below our feet.

  “To convince you not to be angry at him. To talk to him. He’s desperate to speak to you. He knows that we’re friends and thought you would listen to me.”

  I stopped breathing, looked up into the eyes of my friend. I thought I might sit down right there, on the cold ground of the sidewalk. Everything about my body was lead. But my heart was beating so fast I thought I would faint.

  “What is going on?”

  “I’m afraid to tell you,” I said. “I don’t want it to affect you.”

  She jerked the letter in her hand. “It already has.”

  The woman in the university’s office of human resources had short hair, curls all over her head, like my mother’s before she lost it to cancer. She seemed nice, she was serious, she nodded a lot as I spoke. I remember thinking how she reminded me of Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie of the same name, like she might be from another era, the 1950s, if I had to pick. A woman in her fifties, probably.

  Did she have children? A daughter like me? Would that have made a difference?

  I don’t remember how tall or short she was because she was always behind her desk, as though she never got up from it, as though it had her pinned to her chair permanently. She didn’t smile once during the long hours I’d spent in her office back in January—the first visit of what would soon become many.

  That January, on the same day I’d met with Dr. H., I fulfilled my promise to him and went straight to see the woman in charge of sexual-harassment complaints at my university. I went to see this woman. Tootsie.

  When I was done speaking my part on that first occasion, it was her turn to speak, and as I listened, hope bloomed inside me, pushing against the bomb that had taken up so much space for so long. Tootsie promised me so many things: consequences, admonishment, official conversations and communications, correction of what had obviously gone wrong, protection most of all, protection from him. A stop would be put to his behavior, immediately. She seemed outraged on my behalf, so strong and sure of what had to happen next. Like she knew exactly what to do, like she knew exactly what she was doing.

  I trusted her completely.

  I offered her the kind of faith my mother wished I would reserve for God and the Catholic Church. She seemed like the feminist goddess I’d been waiting for, that I’d been reading about in my gender-studies classes, a divine figure masquerading as a 1950s housewife look-alike, powerful and poised to come rescue me, to fix what I’d gotten myself into. And why not? Hadn’t I been taught on that very campus from my feminist professors that the divine can take many forms, any form, especially the form of a woman’s body, even a motherly body, especially a motherly body? It never occurred to me, not once, that this woman might not have my best interests at heart. Or any interests whatsoever to do with me.

  Tootsie looked like someone I could trust—and my parents had raised me to be trusting.

  My mother was and my father is a good person. They worked hard, went to steady jobs that paid little but sustained our family. Before my grandmother became the first woman manager at Raytheon, she’d been the secretary. She joined the company on the ground floor, when they were still operating out of a garage in Newport, with a sum total of four people, one of them her. Eventually she was promoted from secretary to something a bit higher, then promoted again and again until she was an important woman boss, going to work at 5 a.m. every day, coming home by three to watch her favorite soap opera, General Hospital, with me on the couch.

  There was a simplicity to our life. There were things that were good and things that were bad. Good things were the people around us, the nice neighbors, the nice parishioners, the nice teachers at my mother’s elementary school and my high school. The Catholic Church was good, the government was good, people in charge were good, and you always gave people the benefit of the doubt because most people were good at heart.

  My parents and grandmother believed in the Gospel of Hard Work. Do your best and you’ll be rewarded. Be diligent, get everything done that people ask you to do, and you’ll find that things will work out, enough to keep you going, enough to sustain you. This was America, and my parents, the son and daughter of immigrants, believed wholeheartedly in the American Dream. They raised me on it, were certain I was evidence of its truth, with my success in sc
hool that had gotten me into Georgetown, the second person in our entire extended family to go to college. I learned to work hard just like they’d shown me and was rewarded for this by being crowned valedictorian at my graduation before I left Rhode Island. God sees when people are good, my mother believed, and most people are good—it’s that simple.

  The bad things were cut-and-dried, too. Disobedience, lying, ignoring someone who is in need, not going to church on Sundays, not offering to help your mother, your grandmother, your father, when they needed a hand, not keeping your room clean. The really bad things happened on television, on the news, to other people. The really bad people were in the movies and at the theater, on the stage. They were characters in stories that were not our own. They were in someone else’s life.

  This woman, Tootsie, sitting behind her big desk, everything neat on top, unlike Dr. H.’s desk, which was full of chaos, in her long narrow office, was the woman in charge of me now. I assumed that I should listen to her. Obviously, she would see that I had done my best even in this situation and reward me accordingly. I’d been a good student and initially had tried to comply with this man’s wishes. Then I’d tried to let him know, subtly and politely, so as not to hurt his feelings, that I no longer wished to comply with his wishes and requests. Only when this didn’t work had I turned to more forceful yet still polite declines, then less polite ones. Then I’d tried to handle the situation on my own, so as not to upset anybody or cause any scandal, with that December phone call. And only after all of this did I tell Dr. H. And he was the person who sent me to her office.

  Tootsie was my absolute last resort. I was not a tattletale. I was not a girl looking for trouble. I wanted help of the most basic sort from her and nothing more.

  I wholly believed in this woman’s authority, her goodwill, that she would see all that I had tried to do, how I’d tried so hard not to throw my problem in her lap, how I had not wanted things to turn out this way and how I still wanted things to be settled quietly, so no one else had to know. Of course she would help me. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable request.

  What no one knew then, not my parents or any of our neighbors and fellow parishioners or the rest of the American Catholic Church and certainly not me, was that the Catholic Church was not good as an institution. That it was corrupt, that it was criminal in situations exactly like mine. At the time, no one knew the Catholic Church had a long-standing plan for responding to exactly the kind of complaint I’d brought to this woman, a standard operating procedure, and it did not involve doing the right thing.

  Then, doubly problematic, not only was I talking to a woman representing the Catholic Church because I attended a Catholic university, but I was at an institution of higher education, one of many that we also now know have fostered methods of ignoring victims in order to protect the institution from harm. In this instance, I represented the potential harm, the person who might injure the institution by making a claim against one of its own. Because my claim could result in public scandal, I was the enemy, and what the woman sitting behind the desk in front of me was really in charge of doing was protecting the university and the Catholic Church from me.

  So, this woman who looked like Tootsie, who seemed so benign, like someone who could be a fellow teacher at my mother’s school, a woman with whom she might sit on the beach, a woman who Dr. H. truly believed was going to help me, took my faith and distorted it, turning it into something pathetic, something laughable. She took full advantage of my trust. She knew exactly what to do with it, how to transform it into something for the institution’s benefit, for his benefit, for his own protection, not mine. She knew just how to exact it from me, squeeze it from me, until I was wrung dry.

  I stood there on the sidewalk, blinking at my minister friend, the letter from him in one of her hands, the envelope it came in gripped in the other, trying to decide what to tell her, how much to tell her, if I should tell her anything or try once again to lie for him, concoct another story that would make his behavior seem okay.

  But I couldn’t think of one.

  So far, I knew that Dr. H. had talked to him, had met with him, had done his best to put protections in place on my behalf. But the reason Dr. H. wanted me to report to human resources was because he could meet with this professor all he pleased, but in the end, they were just colleagues. At the time Dr. H. was a chair, and so was this professor. They were equals, both heads of programs and specializations. Dr. H. wanted someone who had real power over this man to put restrictions in place that had traction, and that person had to be Tootsie.

  Tootsie, in addition to her promises to me of consequences and other admonishments, explained that there would be a formal letter sent to this professor, informing him of all that he needed to comply with, outlining specific consequences, including a demand that he stop contacting me in every and all ways. Tootsie promised I would receive a copy of the letter as soon as it was sent.

  Weeks had gone by, the semester was progressing, and still I hadn’t received this letter. I assumed someone simply hadn’t gotten around to getting me a copy. It never occurred to me that there were no plans to ever give me the letter, because the letter Tootsie actually wrote was nothing like the one she’d described, and she didn’t want me to find this out.

  Meanwhile, my professor had continued to lurk in my vicinity, outside my classes. He continued to write to my mother. The beginning of the spring semester had been different in the sense that the amount of contact from him diminished, but the contact that continued now felt amplified, a million times more sinister for its defiance, for its clear desperation.

  At first I figured: he hasn’t yet gotten the letter from Tootsie. She must not have met with him yet. He must not know about the consequences yet. Because of course, he wouldn’t dare go against a no-contact directive from the powers of his own university or his Church. He would never jeopardize his job or religious authority by violating what they demanded of him.

  At the beginning of that spring semester, back in January and the first weeks of February, I’d done my best to immerse myself in my classes, to do some thinking other than the thinking I’d grown so used to about this man and his behaviors that had dominated my brain for over a year. I convinced myself it was just a matter of time before the contact really stopped for good and in every way. Soon it would be over. Soon.

  But now here was my friend with a letter from him, a letter he’d written to her about me, talking about phone calls from him to her about me, of finding her in the hallway and going up to her to persuade her to talk to me about him. A friend who needed this man for her own degree, and for this reason definitely did not need the way he was currently imposing on her.

  I was reminded, again, of middle school, of how middle school it was of him to try to get to me through a girlfriend, to try to persuade the girlfriend to persuade me to talk to him. He was acting like a twelve-year-old boy who’d gone through a breakup in the lunchroom, who didn’t know how to accept being broken up with, so he’d decided to try to talk to his former crush through her friend; as though her friend could save the day, as though she could make me see sense when I obviously couldn’t see it myself. Then I reminded myself yet again that he was not a middle-school student, that he should know far better than to do what he’d just done with my friend, and even worse than this, he probably did know better and still could not control himself.

  A chill was spreading over me.

  My friend and I went for coffee. I told her the abbreviated version of what had been going on now, for over a year.

  She was outraged.

  She went straight to Dr. H. and told him she also wanted nothing to do with this professor ever again. Then Dr. H. sent me to Tootsie’s office to make an additional report.

  And once again, I told Tootsie what happened, how fearful and upset it made me.

  She promised another letter would be sent immediately.

  I asked her if I could have a copy of the first one, explai
ned that I hadn’t received it yet. She seemed perplexed by this, reassured me that it must have gotten lost in the mail, that I would be receiving it very soon, along with the new one, the second one. Her assistant wasn’t around, otherwise she’d have the woman dig up the first one and give me a copy right then and there, before I left the office.

  I thanked her. I believed she was telling me the truth.

  22

  One day in March, I was studying with a fellow student.

  He turned to me and asked, “Is your mother friends with Professor L.?”

  I stared at him, unable to form words.

  So he asked another question. “Do they write to each other?”

  I kept staring, speechless.

  “Because I think I’ve read her letters to him,” he went on. “You know, in one of my courses.”

  “I don’t understand,” I managed, still feeling dumb about what he could possibly mean.

  He went on to tell me that in their class that spring, his professor—that professor—was focusing on suffering, the nature of suffering, the stories people tell about suffering. That each week, he had been passing out photocopies of letters from a woman with whom he corresponded, a woman suffering from cancer, a woman possibly dying of cancer, who was also a woman of great Catholic faith, a woman with a daughter, a woman who was terribly worried she would not live to take care of her daughter much longer, that her daughter might lose her soon. The name of this woman at the end of the letters had been blacked out. The professor often brought up the concern she expressed in these letters for her daughter. This fellow student and the rest of my peers in this class, he explained, had spent well over a month now, nearly two, talking about the mother-daughter relationship she described in a new letter each week.