Consent

by Donna Freitas

  It was the same thing with my parents. They wanted for me what they never got—opportunity, the kind of education that would take me places, that would change my life and financial circumstances. They worked their entire lives to give this to me and then suddenly I had it, just as they wanted, but there was a price. Richard Rodriguez, one of my favorite essayists, talks of how an education can separate a family when parents work to give a child what they never had. He writes of how much his parents wanted him to learn perfect English, which he did but in the process lost his ability to speak to them, since they spoke Spanish. There was an uncrossable distance that grew between them.

  My parents opened the doors that eventually made me valedictorian and that eventually got me into Georgetown, and Georgetown opened the door to things they couldn’t have dreamed of for me because they didn’t have the language, the academic vocabulary, the experience, to comprehend them. Georgetown opened the door to my PhD, and it was a long time—too long, I think—before I was self-aware enough to comprehend the relational cost of this pursuit, of the ways my education turned me into a person my parents no longer could understand very well, or knew how to talk to anymore, whose new dreams were foreign and strange, almost incomprehensible. Pursuing my educational dreams made me into a person who turned her back on where she was from, its people, her family, arrogantly so, condescendingly so. It shames me to think about it. For a long time, it didn’t occur to me that I might want to go back someday, that I might need to, that my circumstances might change and I would require the shelter of both the place and family where I grew up, the safety of an earlier time, the familiarity and security of it.

  So, there is a way in which my PhD cost me a sense of place, and the place itself, Rhode Island, a home where I could settle, the family I once had before I left them to go away, planning to never return.

  And then his part in all of it cost me the other place I’d hoped to someday call home, that I believed was my rightful home, the academy, the university that would welcome me with open arms and take me into its intellectual embrace, that I assumed would do this because I was worthy, and then it didn’t.

  But lucky for me, Rhode Island, and my family—unlike the university that never fully opened its arms for me, not truly—always welcome me back.

  Today, I am half professor, half not. I live in the place between, hovering in that liminal space of being a part of yet not being a part of something, of my profession. He put me there, in this no-woman’s-land, the same territory where so many women in my situation have come to dwell.

  We are unable to be a part of our chosen profession because of abusive men, because we were paid to go quietly, because once we are paid to go, we no longer hold the resources to go elsewhere. We lose our recommendation letters, our letters of reference, the support of our colleagues. We either risk becoming the sources of rumor or our secret makes it impossible to justify our search for another job. We are left with the choice of outing our history and scaring our interviewers, resulting in not getting hired anyway, breaking our silence and legal commitments, or we stay quiet, allowing our interviewers to suspect the worst possible reasons for our lack of the right references. For why we are in the job market at all.

  I had idyllic notions about the university, all universities, about being a part of academia, about one day living the storied life of the college professor. The university is the magical castle of the bookworm, the enchanted fairyland of bespectacled youth. Georgetown, my undergrad, preserved those notions, then grad school destroyed them. One man held the wrecking ball at just the right angle, then a group of administrators swung that wrecking ball with all the force it had straight into me.

  As a sometime professor now, I still hold these fantasies, these ideals, about the university. I hang on to them tightly, refusing to let go. For one, I still want them to be mine someday. But for another, I still believe in the university as an institution, as a beacon of hope and a force for good in the world. Maybe that makes me stupid, but I am unwilling to give this up. Universities were, are, my home. Though if this is really true, then today, I suppose, I am homeless.

  I am still Catholic. But it, too, is a sometimes painful, restless part of my identity.

  I never learned to love the mass, not even after I studied the liturgy and its history in graduate school. I learned to appreciate the ritual of it, the notion that it was like a portal, a door we could enter when we wanted to move from the profane into the sacred, to hover near God, that the mass itself was a liminal space, liminal like me, a place where you could move between worlds. I learned to love the idea of the Eucharist, its social-justice underpinnings, that Catholics took the body of Christ each week as a reminder that we are all one body and that as one body, if a part of the body is sick and in need, then we, as a people, are called to heal the wounded part of us. There are so many things I learned to appreciate, but in the end, they were all intellectual, and when I tried to go back to mass and soak it up like my mother did, to love it like she did, I couldn’t. I always found it as boring as ever, as boring as when I was in the first grade and would fidget endlessly in the pew alongside my family, desperate for the homily to be over, anxiously awaiting communion, which for me signaled that mass was almost done, we would be leaving soon, and nothing deeper.

  Then my grandmother died, and my mother shortly afterward.

  One day, in Brooklyn, where I live now, I went to Sunday mass because I’d recently met the priest who oversaw the parish across the street from my apartment. I told him I’d go, so I went, and I was surprised. I loved the mass that day in a way that I never had before, in a way I’d always wanted to love it but never could. It wasn’t because of anything the priest said, and in truth I have no idea what he spoke about for the homily or even the readings for that moment in the liturgical calendar. What I loved was that my mother and my grandmother were suddenly there with me.

  The mass had given them back to me for the precious hour I sat in that little church, listening, reciting the prayers. The ritual had finally performed its magic, become a portal for me to enter a space where I could dwell for a few moments in the company of my mother and grandmother as though we were all still together. My mother always told me she thought the mass was beautiful because of the unseen things it could evoke, because it allowed us to be in the presence of the communion of saints, how she could feel them there whenever she went. I never understood what she meant until that moment, until the words and the ritual of the mass, a ritual I knew by heart, had transported me to that place she’d told me about, and I found her there when I arrived. The Catholic mass had given me my mother back, my grandmother back, too, and from that day onward it always has.

  Every time I go to mass now, I can hear them with me, saying those words, because I heard them next to me doing just this for so many years as a child and then as a young adult. Nothing, no one, can ever take that from me. Not a cardinal or a bishop. Not even Father L. Especially not him.

  It was a gift from the women of my family, and as long as the mass exists, I will always have it, cherish it. I am grateful for it. To me, it is grace.

  There is a defiance rooted in my choice to remain Catholic, too.

  I have joked with my students about how if the Catholic Church is a big house with a yard, I am usually somewhere on the porch, swinging in a hammock, or standing on the lawn—not fitting snugly inside, but definitely still on the premises. I also tell them that sometimes I am just across the street, picketing, or heckling the men of the hierarchy on their way in and out of the front door.

  A big part of my Catholic identity resides in refusal—my refusal to go away, my refusal to stop being Catholic despite the inexcusable ways I’ve been treated by bishops and cardinals and the other men who rule this tradition. It isn’t only Father L. who put me in their crosshairs. My work about sex and consent on campus has made some men within the hierarchy angry at and fearful of me.

  But I remain Catholic also because I am Italian
and I am Portuguese, because my mother and grandmother and father passed on this tradition to me as a tradition of my family, all the saints and the Sunday meals and the masses, and I am unwilling to let this go. I am unwilling to let someone take this from me, steal it from me, wrest it from my arms. Doing so is akin to letting someone rob me of my mother and grandmother, the memories I have of my family as a child. Letting go of Catholicism would require me to let go of them, and I simply will not.

  And then, Catholicism to me does not equal the silly, pathetic, corrupt, and shortsighted men who rule it. At the heart of this tradition are people like Dr. H. and the many nuns I’ve known and loved throughout my life, that professor-priest who was slow like a turtle but quick to smile and laugh. It’s my mother, who was a devoted Catholic until the day she died, and her Catholic colleagues who donated their vacation days to ensure she could take the year off, and it’s the Jesuits I grew to admire at Georgetown. They are Catholic, too. And I am Catholic like them.

  29

  Around once a year I google him.

  It’s a strange thing—to realize I can search for him. Despite a world where everyone, all the time, is googling everyone else—where it is so easy to type a person’s name in the search bar and find out everything they’ve ever done, find information you’ve never dreamed of finding—it almost never occurs to me to google him. Well, it occurs to me only that I could, if I wanted to. Some of this has to do with my detachment from social media and all things online, my inherent resistance to them, which is also due to him. And then, I still mostly go through the world as though he doesn’t exist, because I don’t want to give him that much power over me. When I open the vault door in my brain and allow myself to peer inside that space, sometimes it is difficult for me to figure out: What is mine, and what is his? What in my life is exclusively of my own making, and which things has he influenced, permeated? This is a difficult question with which to live, so I do my best not to dwell on it. I also avoid thinking about the possibility that this man might google me, that I am quite googleable, unfortunately, despite my attempts to not be. I try to imagine that he has never googled me, not once. That it would never occur to him to type my first and last name into the search bar. And maybe he never has.

  Decades later, he does feel far from my life for the most part—until the moments when it suddenly feels like what happened was yesterday. Or when the mail piles up in my mailbox if my husband is away, or when the stack of letters with my name on it is teetering dangerously on the kitchen table. I have mostly worked through my aversion to the mailbox. I can go to the mailbox without wanting to vomit, but I still avoid what is a simple, daily act for most people.

  The last time I did google him, I felt incredible dread—dread that he might be dead.

  You would think I would feel the opposite, that I would want him to be dead, that I would rejoice at this information if I should happen upon it. I thought it strange myself that, when I typed him into Google and waited to see what came up, it occurred to me that his obituary might appear—and how much the possibility upset me. He is old by now, after all. It took me a few days of struggling to understand why I didn’t want him dead to realize the reason behind this worry—especially since I used to wish him dead all the time, wished he would die a painful death back when he was writing my mother and he was teaching her letters to my peers in his classes.

  The reason I dread his death is because I have things I want to say to him, things I’d like to tell him before he dies. Things I’d like him to know. And if he dies before I do this, I will have lost my opportunity forever.

  No one ever said they were sorry.

  Not my university, not the Catholic Church, and certainly not him.

  I wanted him to say it, most of all.

  “Don-na, I’m sorry for what I did to you.”

  I wouldn’t care if he did it in that singsong, scolding tone of his. I would care only that he would have finally acknowledged what he did do, that he did something.

  The fact that there was never any sorry, any apology, any acknowledgment that something had indeed happened to me, something out of my control, something that someone should have tried to stop, him ideally, the school eventually, once I told them—this kills me to think about now that I am older. That the only response I got was a demand that I pretend none of this ever happened, that I never speak of it again, had the effect of making me doubt that anything of substance did actually occur.

  I understand that universities, the Catholic Church, wanted to—still want to—avoid any and all acknowledgment of wrongdoing; that they believe if they say they are sorry, if they offer an apology to a victim, this is an admission of guilt, an affirmation that something wrong happened, something that may even be considered criminal. I get that institutions want to protect themselves, that this is always their interest in situations like mine—to silence the victim, to force the victim to sign away her life in exchange for something like help, at the very moment when she is at her most vulnerable and desperate and will do anything for that help, even the tiniest bit. But it is an act of cruelty visited upon this person, a young woman who has just started on her way, who is at the very beginning of her professional life; an act that will hobble her for decades to come, this compelling her to pretend that all that she lived never occurred.

  I wanted an apology from Tootsie, too. I wanted her to look me in the face and admit what she did, lying to me all those months, letting the statute of limitations run out, never telling me that our first conversation started a clock, hoping I wouldn’t know that it had, realizing that every day that passed from then on I was wasting time, I was giving away all my rights.

  Maybe Tootsie wanted to say she was sorry but couldn’t. Maybe they wouldn’t let Father L. apologize to me either. Maybe my school told him he wasn’t allowed. That the agreement we all struck together—me, Tootsie, the university, him, the Catholic Church—was so strict and binding that even private apologies were forbidden, any and all acts of contrition. That even though he was a man who could oversee the sacraments, including confession, he was not allowed to confess himself. Maybe they said it would be unbecoming for a man with his professional stature, a man who was a priest, to admit he had forsaken one of his vows, that he had hurt another person, a young girl. Maybe he thought about contacting me to say words of apology. Maybe he wished he could. Maybe he’s gone to sleep nightly during the last two decades wanting to get this off his chest, wanting to ask my forgiveness.

  But I also wonder what he would say, today, if I asked him what happened all those years ago. Would he know that what he did was wrong? Would he realize how totally and completely he traumatized me? How much his behavior terrorized me, hurt me, ruined me for a while? Does he feel any remorse? Or does he think it was all a misunderstanding on my part? A friendship gone awry?

  He must have known the Church would cover for him. I mean, did all priests know this at the time? Did he think he was unlike his abuser colleagues because he didn’t rape me? Because I wasn’t a twelve-year-old boy? He was powerful enough to know that the Church was moving people around. Maybe he thought he was being clever by not touching me. Maybe he knew that he was the untouchable one.

  If you asked him today what happened between us, I wouldn’t be surprised if he said it was all my fault, that he was just trying to be a good friend to me, that he was just trying to help me with my career. Maybe over the last two decades he has convinced himself that this is the real truth. Or maybe he didn’t have to work that hard to convince himself. Maybe he believed this was the truth all along.

  “Don-na,” he might say, “you were the one who was terrible to me.”

  It’s also true that lately I’ve been hoping that he might realize what labels apply to his person because sexual harassment and assault have been in the news so constantly, so everywhere we turn. I’ve been wondering if now, today, he might be able to name himself as the perpetrator in the situation that was ours.

  And
then, in this particular moment in our nation, I’ve also wondered whether, if this professor’s behavior had been happening right now, in this Title IX, consent-education-centric era of the university, would I have known to tell someone sooner? In this post-Catholic-abuse-scandal era, would I have been able to name his actions as inappropriate much sooner than I did?

  One would hope. But I don’t know.

  It’s not like I can go back and do everything over, do everything differently. I’m sure so many women wish they could go back and change what they did. Tell someone sooner—far sooner. For their own sake and that of others who would come afterward.

  Were there others after me?

  Were there others before me, too?

  To this day I don’t know if he was a kindly man, benign even in his stalking of me, a victim of circumstances that stunted his knowledge of love and sex, so much that he was powerless to understand his feelings for me and the way he expressed them. Or if he was a calculating monster who knew exactly what he was doing the entire time. Sometimes when I think of him, he is an evil little thing, hunched over, eyes gleaming red, demonlike, his mouth twisted into a sneer. But sometimes when I think of him, he is a sad little old man, lonely, frail, a being who has always been unloved, unloved in a real way, at least, who has never felt the connection he obviously so desired with me. In that version of him, I see another human being, a broken, suffering human being, and I feel sorry for him.