Denial (23 page)

One person asks, “What did you say?”

I start again. I tell the group that the rape occurred more than thirty years earlier, that the police reopened the case, that they believe they solved the crime. I tell them about the forty-four known victims, all between the ages of nine and nineteen years old. I tell them that twenty of the victims had been living in the eight-block area centered on the Radcliffe dorms.

I tell myself, I've done it. And even survived the telling.

One of the women, a widow, has been notably quiet until now. Vera. I know who she is. We all do. She is a longtime political activist who works on behalf of children. Her husband had been a famous professor of history, known throughout the world.

Now she speaks.

“One of the victims was my stepdaughter,” she says, flatly.

I look at Vera. I observe her precisely cut gray hair, thick gray brows over deep brown eyes. I take note of her woolen suit, a sensible gray-green. Eileen Fisher, I think to myself. She could almost be in one of those ads featuring middle-aged women who look like they've lived enviably complicated lives, but are now nicely pulled together, thanks to their clothing designer. She is aging well, I observe.

She is thought to be kind. She is thought to be reliable. I know this. But she is approaching eighty. In her era, the world was smaller. In her world, rapes were rare; and rapes at gunpoint, rarer still. In her world, you could assume that there could not possibly be more than one rapist active in town in any given year. Therefore, it stood to reason. But I couldn't believe this. I live in a more dangerous world, one where rapists are more common, or so I imagine.

“I will contact my stepdaughter,” she says, “and ask if she'd like to talk to you.”

“Thank you,” I say. I would like to talk to her stepdaughter. I've never talked to another victim of rape. But I'm sure, of course, that we were raped by different men.

 

Lucy, the stepdaughter, and I agree to meet. She will bring her sister as support, and I will bring Chet. I suggest Rialto, the best restaurant in Cambridge. I order the most expensive bottle of wine I've ever bought, in the spirit of the
Titanic
.

Lucy is almost exactly my age. Lucy's parents had divorced a few years before she was raped, just as mine were. Her mother died, just like mine; only Lucy was in her twenties when her mother passed away. Like her father, she is an academic. I know, before agreeing to meet her, that she is a successful academic. I hate to admit it, but I would not want to meet with her if she had been undone by this crime, if she identified herself as a Victim. She is a professor of criminology at the University of Vermont. She was raped at age thirteen, in her mother's home. The house was filled with women, her three sisters and a number of their friends.

She tells me that in the last few years, in her late forties, she has found herself feeling an overwhelming desire to learn about the man who raped her.

We compare notes. The gun. The mask. The command to stay silent. The presence of others. Still, there are many differences. In her case, she was on the second floor, and her mother and sisters and their friends were in the living room. She was alone in her room when she was raped.

We talk about our families' reactions. Although she was living with her mother at the time, her father was the one who took her to the hospital. The night after the rape, a group of kids
from the neighborhood slept in her bedroom to protect her. Afterward, Lucy slept in her mother's bedroom for years. I feel an embarrassing shiver of envy upon hearing this. No mother held me close against the terrors of the night. Her parents sent her to therapy. They decided to tell the whole school what had happened, to prevent Lucy from feeling alone. She was frightened, she says, but she felt held.

Lucy has tried to get her file from the city of Cambridge, but she has made no headway. I tell her that I will look through my files, to see if there is any detail about the rapes that occurred in Cambridge. I have a vague recollection of a detailed list, I tell her. I will see what I can find.

 

A few days later, I make my way back to my garbage can. I leaf through the files quickly, pausing only long enough to determine whether the words “Cambridge” or “Radcliffe” appear anywhere on the sheets. In my mind's ear I hear the words,
Seek and ye shall find
. I push these words aside, embarrassed by the banality of my own mind. Other words replace them.
No pain, no gain
. Again, I brush the aphorism aside. As I leaf through the papers, I tell myself, I will not be distracted by the victims' pain. I repeat these words to myself, like a mantra.

At last I find what I'm looking for, a handwritten note that details the times and dates of the Cambridge rapes, and other rapes, taken down by Inspector Nestle, who was at that time investigating the rapes that took place at Concord Academy in 1971. He had discovered that there had been a series of rapes in nearby towns at about the same time, and he went to talk to the Cambridge police department to see if the rapes were similar.

The note is titled, “Info from Cambridge PD. Re: Rape Case.” It is dated April 30, 1971.

I send the list of dates to Lucy. She was raped on March 15, 1971, at 8:30
PM
. Now she tells me about the salve, which she was too embarrassed to tell anyone before, even her mother. There was something particularly disgusting about it. And she tells me about the rapist's piercing blue eyes, which she says she will never forget.

 

Lucy's reaction, and the reaction of her family, is surprising to me. Her sisters treat me like a hero, rather than the troublemaker I know myself to be. They send me thank-you notes. They are interested in what I am writing, and when I send them parts of my manuscript, they respond almost immediately. We get together for brunch, as if we were gathering for a family reunion. Her sisters tell me that because I've helped Lucy find the identity of her rapist and because we've discovered that the rapist is dead, Lucy will live with less fear.

All this softness, at a time like this, is almost hard for me to take. I feel held, even loved. But I am afraid to express to Lucy and her sisters how much their reaction means to me.

I visit Lucy at her home. She lives on a cheerfully busy street in Burlington, Vermont, in a big, rambling Victorian, reminis
cent of the rambling Victorians you find in the part of Cambridge where she grew up. We are sitting in Lucy's living room, our stocking feet resting on a chair in front of her woodstove.

Now that we're pretty sure we were raped by the same man, Lucy and I have more detailed conversations.

“Why did you get curious about your rapist?” I ask her.

“I was coming up on my fiftieth birthday. I guess that was important because that was the age my mother was when she died. And then my father died. When we were going through his papers, I found a subpoena of one of the suspects. On the back of the subpoena I found a diagram in his writing. A diagram that showed where my room was in the house.

“So I found this subpoena,” she repeats.

She switches back to what was going on in her life when she first became curious about her rapist.

“My marriage had started to fall apart. I felt betrayed. Three years ago. And that brought back the memory of the earlier traumas, my rape, my mother's death. For months I had a feeling, that terror feeling, that feeling in your stomach.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. I never thought of any of the feelings I get when I'm afraid as a “terror feeling,” and I want to know what Lucy feels.

“It's like a spark of fear, the feeling you get when you see the police pulling up behind you. But it didn't go away, it stayed in my stomach.”

With a gesture of her hand in the air, she indicates a line in the air from her lower abdomen to her heart.

“It hurt so much,” she says. “I couldn't relax my abdomen.”

I imagine Lucy's muscles clenched tight, her abdomen trying to muscle something out, but actually forcing it deeper. I am listening to Lucy, but in another part of my mind, I carefully remove the pain from her abdomen.

“My marriage had fallen apart, and there was no reality in my
world anymore. I was afraid. It brought back an earlier period when I was afraid all the time. My father and mother split up when I was in seventh grade. My father remarried in June of my seventh-grade year, and in March of my eighth-grade year I was raped.”

“I think he was being a Peeping Tom before he raped me,” she adds, switching back to the rapist.

I don't ask her what she means by that. Maybe I'm too frightened. Did he case her house before he raped her, the way he scoped out ours? Before my sister and I were raped, the rapist had figured out how to cut off the telephone. In one of the files I read through quickly, a woman on the Cape came home to find Brian Beat in her home, apparently casing her house in preparation for a future crime. She saw him clearly, and was able to identify the intruder for the police. He would later be convicted of raping a woman who lived nearby, as well as breaking in and entering her home.

“You might have thought it was a dorm where we were living,” she says. “It was 1971. Cambridge. A big old Cambridge Victorian. There were eleven women in the house at the time I was raped.

“It was like there was a misfiring going on in my brain. All of these things were connected,” she says. She has switched back to her life of several years ago.

“My marriage was falling apart. I felt the same way I did after I was raped, the same way I did after my mother died. I lost a ton of weight. I couldn't get my stomach to relax. As I sit here today I'm so happy, I'm so happy, I'm so happy I don't have that feeling in my stomach….”

At first, hearing these words, I am puzzled. Why is she so happy? Then I realize she is talking about the pain. The pain had stopped.

“As I got into trying to understand this feeling, I started to
realize that I was very afraid. I was dealing with something that I was afraid of—I could meet the guy that raped me, I could…”

Again, I'm confused. Is she talking about the feeling in her stomach? I sip some of the coffee Lucy has poured for me, needing the caffeine, hoping it won't give me a stomachache. I have not been sufficiently vigilant about the ways her story might alter my own perceptions, might make it hard for me to stay in the room.