It had occurred to my fellow student, because of the content of the letters combined with what he knew about me, that I might be the daughter she spoke of, that she might be my mother. Everyone in my department, both the students and the professors, knew that my mother was sick and might die. There were prayers up for her on the wall of the Etc. Room, where we ate lunch and got our coffee and tea. It was not a secret that she had cancer, and it was not a secret that I was struggling because of this. So this fellow student knew enough to guess that the letters might be hers.
He’d asked me his questions as though the writer’s identity were a mere curiosity, a mysterious puzzle he just happened to figure out, a small “aha” moment that cleared up a question he’d been carrying about the woman’s identity, not a pressing one, but still it was there. He was a nice person, jolly, even, tall and a bit rotund, with a great red beard and a deep, raspy voice. He had no idea that informing me about what he and his peers were studying in this professor’s class would be my undoing—if he’d known, I doubt he would have said a thing.
“Yes,” I told him now, because I didn’t know what else to do or say, “my mother and he used to write to each other.”
His brow furrowed. “They still do,” he said.
Some of the letters he’d read were recent, he told me. As recent as last week. There was a kind of ongoing chronicle of their correspondence at the start of each class.
It had been a long time since I’d asked my mother if my professor was still writing to her, and if she was still writing him back. In truth, I hadn’t wanted to hear her answer. I was afraid to. I still had not told my parents what was going on. I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Oh,” I said, and shrugged.
My fellow student and I went back to studying.
But my mind could no longer focus.
How many students had wondered the same thing about the mystery-woman letter writer? Had any more guessed it was my mother?
That a group of students was using the correspondence of my mother, my mother, who was fighting cancer and living through the pain of chemo, who was trying to be brave in the proximity of her own death, as a source for classroom debate, like any other book or academic article, as this professor led the way, was beyond my ability to comprehend. I sat there, taking in the fact that my peers had spent the semester discussing me as the daughter in the equation. They were likely picking apart my mother’s prose, how it conveyed our relationship, trying to glean the deeper meaning in her words as though her letters were mere texts, like any other readings in a class.
Was he trying to punish me? Was that what this was? Or did it not even occur to him I might find out? Was it some bizarre new way of drawing me close without my knowledge, of keeping me in his life through my mother, by bringing us into his classroom, the one place where he would always have power, where he would always rule, the place where he was king?
I had to get the letters back. I could not allow him to keep them.
I excused myself from the study session. I went straight to Dr. H.’s office and gave him this new information. He was astonished. His colleague’s newest behavior was reprehensible, inappropriate to a degree that surpassed anything else the man had done before this moment. Unforgivable. Dr. H. promised he would talk to him once more and demand he give my mother’s letters back. He sent me once again to Tootsie’s office to report this latest violation.
I went.
I am not a violent person.
I hide under the covers during violent scenes on television shows, or sometimes I leave the room and come back when all the noise seems to have died down. I can’t watch anything gruesome. I’m not one for getting angry either, or one for conflict. It takes a lot to provoke me, as my close friends know.
But I began to have violent fantasies about this man.
I began to think about scratching his face with my pink painted nails, leaving bloody trails down his cheeks and across his eyes. I began to think about pounding my fists against his head, taking his skull and smashing it against a wall, crushing his rib cage, beating him until he could no longer stand.
The person having these thoughts seemed so far away from the person I was, or believed myself to be. I didn’t know that I could become violent if pushed far enough, hard enough, brutally enough.
But using my mother’s letters in his class with my peers was so far beyond what I ever could have imagined him doing, or thinking to do, that I found myself in this place where thoughts of violence, scenes I could not bear to witness at home on the television, became appealing, so appealing that they were a comfort. I couldn’t stop myself from having them, and at some point I stopped caring that I was.
I’m going to give Tootsie the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Put myself in her shoes.
Or I’m going to try to, because it’s also true that I came to hate her, and I’ve hated her ever since, with an outsized rage, decades now of hate, as though she were somehow worse than him. And maybe she was, in a sense, because I thought she would help me, and instead she lied.
But maybe Tootsie did what she did, gave me the runaround, made it so that my life fell into an even greater hell than when I first came to see her, because she, too, was trapped. Maybe she really did care about me, really did worry for me, really did feel horrified on my behalf, but she was stuck in a system that would never allow her to do anything to help me, not really, or to stop him, not really. Maybe she wanted to, badly, but this would require her to stand down the Catholic Church in addition to her university bosses—bosses who paid her salary, who put food on the table for her and the daughters I imagined she might have at home, bosses who were also bishops and other high-ranking members of the Catholic hierarchy.
In the news recently, because of the tidal wave of sexual harassment and assault accusations moving through our world thanks to #MeToo, I have read articles warning women that HR representatives are not—that they never have been—our friends in situations like harassment and assault. Though they may be the people we are supposed to report to when incidents occur, their real job has nothing to do with protecting us, and everything to do with protecting the bosses and the reputation of the company itself. They represent the institution, not you, the articles have warned. They are not your advocates, they are the bosses’ advocates, the company’s advocates.
But those articles have also spoken of the terrible dilemmas of these HR reps, most of them women themselves, how they, too, are caught in a corrupt and dishonest system, just like the women who go to them in order to report horrors in the workplace. How these HR reps often wish to help these women, believing it is the right thing to do, yet by doing so may lose their own jobs in the process.
Isn’t this a disgusting thing for all of us to realize?
The reporting system in place supposedly to protect us—that was supposed to protect me—is not there to protect us at all. The reporting system is there to do the dirty work for the company, the institution, the men in charge, there to collect information that the bosses need to know about, so as to better and more quickly squelch it, silence it, before it can ever come to light. A system designed to let the bosses know whom, exactly, to fire, the very moment a potentially fireable offense is committed, however outlandish and far-fetched the so-called offense might seem. Whom, exactly, whether student or worker, to brush under the rug.
So maybe this system was behind what Tootsie did and didn’t do. Maybe she was a victim of sorts in her own right, walking a tightrope, trying to keep a job that was tied to a corrupt—no, a criminal—system put in place decades before at my university. Maybe she lost sleep at night over the impossible situation she was in, with regard to me and others who had made similar complaints in the past. Maybe she wasn’t as callous as I began to believe, callous and cruel and uncaring about what I was going through. Maybe when she made all those promises to me, she really believed she could come through on them, maybe she wanted to, maybe she even tried to deliver on
them and then was told no, absolutely not, by her bosses.
Or, maybe she knew exactly what she was doing, maybe she had her job because she was good at this, at lying to victims, at pretending she cared. Maybe she believed in the cause. Maybe she believed that what she was doing was the right thing and that I was in the wrong, that in the end I was just a crazy girl who’d misunderstood a friendship with a professor—which was how she described my claims in the letters she’d written to this man, the ones she was refusing to let me see, the ones she would eventually be required to show me because I’d gotten a lawyer to force her to show them to me.
Tootsie, as always, was a flurry of concern when I went to report my professor’s latest transgression, his discussion of my mother and me in his classes. And, as always, Tootsie was awash in confusion as to why I still hadn’t gotten copies of the letters she’d sent to him after the other occasions we’d met.
Did she have the wrong address, perhaps? she asked me. Had I changed apartments since we’d spoken?
As usual, no one was around to help her dig them up, but as soon as the person returned, she’d have them do so. She apologized for the third time for not following up with a phone call after her meetings with my professor to report that they had happened—yet another thing she’d promised each time I met with her, then never did. But this time, she quieted my growing dismay at her lack of follow-up and the failure to produce the promised letters with a proposal far more attractive than anything she’d suggested in the past.
Would it help if he was placed on sabbatical? she asked me.
Would that make me feel at all better? Safer?
I nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes, it would,” I told her, nearly shocked at the suggestion, that it was even an option. I was stupid to believe her again, I know, I know. But at the time, I was so tired, and she’d dangled something so appealing. He would be placed on sabbatical the next year, as a way of forcing him to stay away from me.
Would the school really do that? I wondered.
Of course, she told me.
It seemed like such a big consequence. Tootsie was acknowledging that what was happening was serious—very serious. The spring semester was nearly over by then. There were about six weeks left.
Could I keep my head down and make it to summer? she wanted to know.
Yes, I could, I told her. I would force myself.
I believed she would make a sabbatical happen. I walked away from her office believing that when I returned for classes in the fall, I would no longer have to worry about running into him, about him lurking near the rooms I was in, about meeting him in the stairwell, or about him peering through the blinds of his office window as I walked by.
23
My mother passed the six-month mark and kept on going.
Summer arrived and she was still alive, she’d survived chemo, survived cancer, for now.
Little by little, she recovered. Her doctors were stunned the cancer had disappeared, for now. My father and I took her to the beach when she was strong enough. She was anxious to return to teaching in September, to go back to her classroom once or twice a week, whenever she was up to it. She missed her tiny nursery-school students, their parents, her colleagues.
My father and I were elated.
We’d braced ourselves for the worst, and instead we enjoyed the ocean and sand with my mother in July and August, my mother the quintessential beach bum who’d drag us there at 7 a.m. if we were willing, toting a cooler stocked with sandwiches and cut-up watermelon. That February, March, and even in April, she’d been sure, we were all sure, she’d never set foot on the beach again, never march up to the place by the lifeguard chair where she sat like she owned it, like she’d purchased it in a sale, setting up the familiar orange-and-white-striped umbrella we’d had since I was small, the one that marked her spot and told everyone that she had arrived.
The students in my residence hall were gone for a blissful three months of peace, so I could travel without having to ask anyone to cover for me. I went back and forth to Rhode Island as often as I could to enjoy this reprieve from my mother’s cancer. I went back and forth to Tennessee, too, as much as my boyfriend, Christopher, wanted to go.
Despite everything that happened, my grades were good from the previous spring semester, nearly perfect.
I’d somehow done the impossible!
I commuted to help with my family, kept up with my schoolwork, held down a job at Georgetown that could be all-consuming, maintained a relationship with a boyfriend and also my friendships, all while being traumatized by one of my professors, and all while preventing my other professors (save the two I told) from finding out what was going on—and keeping my parents from finding out, too. They had enough to worry about. I had contained the damage, mostly.
I even looked forward to starting classes again, to returning to the version of life where I worried about nothing other than pursuing my intellectual curiosity, to stoking the excitement that never left me about ideas, philosophy, feminist theory.
Tootsie had promised a sabbatical.
I relished what that sabbatical was going to be like, fantasized about it all summer.
I would be able to walk across campus, walk from my car into the building that housed my department, without worrying that someone was watching, that someone was waiting for me beyond the doorway. It was going to seem like last year never happened.
Best of all, I hadn’t heard from him. Not a letter, a postcard, a phone call, not a glimpse of his mousy self, peering at me through a window or popping up when I rounded a corner. I stayed away from school during those hot and humid months, and he stayed away from me.
When my mother reached the one-year anniversary of her diagnosis, in August, and passed it, I did my best not to remember what else had happened that day the year before. Instead I reveled in her continued presence with us.
I had a lot of reasons to hope by the close of that summer.
I dwelled there, treading water, legs working to sustain that suspended state. Above the surface I was calm and collected and smiling.
School started again, and he was around like always.
There was no sabbatical, no consequences. Just him teaching his classes, as though it were perfectly fine that he’d been using my mother’s letters as a tool for analysis and discussion with my peers. As though it were absolutely aboveboard that he’d brought a friend of mine into this mess, pressing her to make it all better, trying to get her to convince me that I should forgive him. As though it were no big deal that a professor had been following around a student for over a year, refusing to take her nos for an answer.
When I stepped onto campus and realized he was still there, teaching and lurking in the halls like always, I was livid. I was also confused.
Why? How could the school have let this go? Hadn’t Tootsie promised me he’d be gone? Hadn’t she sworn to provide me with peace and security for the first time in ages?
Maybe this was my fault.
I should have insisted the last time I left her office that she find those letters, demand that she make copies and hand them over or I’d refuse to leave. Just as before, she hadn’t followed up with me over the summer.
Stupid, stupid me.
I was so desperate to move on, to move forward, to forget about everything, that I didn’t call her office over the summer, not once, demanding information, asking to know his status, if the sabbatical had indeed worked out.
I went to Tootsie’s office now.
The way there was familiar.
But this time, I was different.
I wasn’t the nice, demure student asking for help. I was the angry student, unstable, really, the ground seeming to crumble under my steps as I walked. Nothing was as it appeared, or as anyone told me it would be.
I wanted him to be on a fucking sabbatical, and he fucking wasn’t. I wanted him to suffer some fucking consequences for what he’d done. Hadn’t I suffered plenty of fucking consequences because of
him? What the fuck?
While I’d been willing to have faith the previous spring in all that Tootsie promised, the curtain had been pulled back, and finally I was able to see that there was nothing behind it. That there had been nothing all along. How could she have done this to me? How could she have lied to my face when I was so scared and desperate?
“Where are the letters?” I demanded, standing before her, refusing to sit when she asked me to. “You told me you wrote letters, that you’d give me copies. Where are they? I want them now.”
I seethed. Today, I wouldn’t leave without them.
In truth, she couldn’t give them to me, she explained. They were private.
Then why didn’t she tell me this before? Why had she said otherwise? Why was he not on sabbatical? Why, why, why?
I was leaning over her desk. I wonder if she was afraid. I was afraid of myself in that moment. Tootsie was speechless, made no more promises. She must have known I would no longer believe them, that it was useless for her to say anything. I left her office, zigzagging across campus. I was like a drunk person.
I ended up at the provost’s office. I demanded to see him immediately. Said I wasn’t leaving until I spoke to him. The secretary kept her eye on me as she picked up the phone. She watched me carefully, as if she could see a bomb strapped to my chest, underneath my clothing.
The provost at this university was a VIP. It was a big university, so going to see him was akin to showing up to see the president. He had power, real power. And like so many other powerful people at my university, he was also a priest.
Consent Page 22
