Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (4 page)

Arden knew well that without those early Saints, Lovell might still be a flyblown way station where steers paused to drink at the Shoshone River and trudged on to the railhead at Billings, seventy miles north. She wondered if Dr. John Story and the Reverend Terwilliger and the other elders of the Lovell Bible Church had known any of this history as they sat for three days listening to the visiting speaker's anti-Mormon poison.

When she put in a complaint during her next visit to the clinic, the doctor apologized and told her that the lecture series was the result of a misunderstanding. He swore he'd had no idea that the visitor would attack the Mormons and promised it would never happen again.

Arden was a long way from mollified. "If you're really interested in our church," she said, "why don't you bring in someone who knows about it, not some poor fool who's been excommunicated? He doesn't know anything or he wouldn't've been excommunicated in the first place! If you want to know about LDS, I'll be glad to get you some instruction."

Dr. Story didn't take the bait, but she made a mental note to try again. What a coup it would be to convert a man who didn't drink or smoke, who firmly believed in God, who was loving and gentle and concerned about mankind and bored with money and possessions, and on top of that was the town doctor! He seemed to follow LDS principles in everything he did. He'd even gone to Latin America with a Christian doctors' group and treated the natives. What was that but "compassionate service"?

One day he complained that he'd been trying to find a copy of the
Doctrine and Covenants,
a compilation of 150 years of messages from God to the LDS prophets. He said, "I know I'll never see it because it's secret."

"Sacred," Arden corrected him. "Not secret." It was a distinction that the Saints often had to make to their unbelieving friends.

Dr. Story said that as far as he could see, the two words were synonymous in LDS doctrine. "That's why I've never been able to get ahold of that book. I can get the Book of Mormon and
The Pearl of Great Price,
but that's all."

By now she was onto his eccentricities. If he couldn't put his hands on a book owned by every Saint in town, it showed a lack of control. And control, she suspected, was important to undersized men like him. "You listen to me," he'd told Arden's mother. "I'll make the diagnosis, not you." Everyone agreed that his favorite expression was, "I'm the doctor here."

She brought him a well-thumbed
Doctrine and Covenants,
and he seemed surprised and pleased. "Here's the secret document you ordered," she couldn't resist saying. "I bought it in a bookstore. I didn't even have to give a password."

* * *

After he'd had a few months to peruse the book, she asked, "Why don't you let me send a missionary out to see you?"

"Not unless they'll come after midnight," he said. "That's when I do all my studying."

"Well," she said, "I'm sure they could work that out."

He said he didn't want his wife and daughters involved. She took that to be another example of his need for control—he didn't want his family doing any independent thinking. Certainly his docile wife seemed to take most of her ideas from him, at least as far as Arden could see. When Marilyn spoke, you could hear his voice behind her words. Arden couldn't imagine him married to any other kind of woman.

She talked to the stake missionaries about the hot prospect and they made several nocturnal visits to the Story home. But they finally realized that the doctor had never been a sincere prospect; what he'd really wanted to do was convert them. The earnest young men in the neat dark suits and gleaming white shirts decided they had better uses for their time.

A year or so later, in the early 1970s, Arden got a phone call from her LDS friend Dottie Parry, a nervous woman who liked to gossip. Lovell's main street extended one mile, from the white colonnades of the sugar factory past the line of small homes and shops and out to the green McArthur fields, and sometimes the latest news seemed to travel that mile faster than sound or light— Lovell's own version of jungle drums.

Sister Parry rambled on disjointedly, and Arden only half-lis-tened till she caught Dr. Story's name: "... And he told me there was nothing wrong with me, it was all in my mind, and then he gave me a pelvic examination and did something that I—well, I'd rather not say. Ard, some strange things go on in that office."

Arden cut her off. "People can say anything they want about anybody," she said. "Dr. Story's been good to us. When we need him, he's there."

"But—"

"I'm sorry, Dottie," Arden said. "I don't want to discuss it."

She seldom altered a position once she'd made up her mind. There were
facts
and
nonfacts,
and Dottie was talking nonfacts.

Besides, Arden had been uncomfortable with sexual palaver ever since a traumatic childhood experience. She'd stayed overnight with close family friends. Before bedtime, the "aunt" warned, "Now Arden, if you get frightened you can come into bed with me and 'uncle.'
But be sure to crawl in on my side."
Six-year-old Arden crawled in on the wrong side and "uncle" spent half the night trying to penetrate her. She was afraid to cry out. She never told a soul till she married Dean because, as she explained, "Nobody tells things like that." Her husband said she'd been right to keep quiet.

It wasn't long after the unpleasant conversation with Sister Parry that another bolt of gossip flashed from one end of Main Street to the other. It was all about Dr. Story, and all insubstantial. Arden's daughters reported that the girls at Lovell High School were calling him Stud Story for his behavior during their Girls Athletic Association physicals. They said he made them undress, stared at their bodies, uttered ignorant comments about their "buds" and pubic hair, and administered intimate examinations that weren't even required.

Sure, Arden said to herself after she'd heard the bill of particulars, and I'll bet he rapes and beats them and puts out cigarettes on their skin.
Kids!
She advised Meg and Michele that whispering campaigns were the devil's work. It was right there in the Book of Mormon, Helaman, 16:22. "Satan spreads rumors and contentions."

Just the same, she stayed in the examining room the next time she took her oldest daughter Marie in for a pelvic exam. He'd barely begun when Marie screamed and said, "It hurts!"

He flushed. "Oh, for heaven's sakes," he said angrily. "What's the matter with you? All girls your age masturbate!"

Marie sat up so forcefully that her long leg slammed into his shoulder and buckled his knees. "I beg your pardon, Dr. Story!" she said. "This is one girl who has
never
masturbated."

He composed himself and said, "Well, Marie, you're going away to school. You'll be dating. If you want a good marriage, you'll come back. I'll put you under and dilate you so that you won't have any problems with your husband."

Arden thought, How concerned he is. He's always been that way about our family.

As they were climbing into the car, Marie said, "I can't believe a doctor would say that to anybody, even if it were true."

"Sis," Arden said, "he's a doctor. He knows more than we do. He's seen things we don't know anything about."

"What if he has, Mom? Why does he have to tell me what the other girls do? I'm not interested.
I don't care!"
The child complained all the way home.

The following Monday, Arden had an appointment for an arthritis treatment. "My daughter's very upset with you," she said when Dr. Story entered the examining room.

"Why?" he asked as furrows broke across his high forehead.

"Because of what happened when you gave Marie the pelvic."

"What happened?"

"You don't remember?"

"No, Arden. I'm sorry. I don't remember. I see a lot of patients, you know."

She was astounded. "You don't remember telling Marie that all high school girls masturbate?"

He swore that he didn't. She recited every detail. "Nope," he responded cheerfully. "Not me, Arden. Why, that doesn't even sound like me."

"But you did. I heard it!"

When he made a clumsy switch to another subject, she decided that he must be upset about something. She wasn't offended. The poor man juggled a long list of jobs—-G.P., emergency room physician, obstetrician, public health officer, gynecologist, school doctor, church elder, lay preacher, father, husband. Sometimes he rode shotgun on the hearse that doubled as the town ambulance. Lately he'd set aside one of his examining rooms for counseling, leaning heavily on his knowledge of the Bible.

Arden didn't know what had caused the outburst at Marie or the lapse of memory, but there had to be a logical reason. Maybe

"DOC"

he'd lost a patient. Or maybe there was trouble at home. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn't been in the examining room with her daughter. Probably nothing, she thought. Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I've begun to irritate him.

2

MEG
McARTHUR ANDERSON

A year later, the McArthur family's second oldest daughter, Meg, went to the clinic for her own precollege physical. She didn't look forward to the exam, but she wasn't nervous. Her mother revered Dr. Story, and Meg's own experiences on the examining table hadn't been all that traumatic. He'd given her three GAA physicals, each time kneading her breasts and putting his hands in her underpants. "I was just a kid and he was my doctor," she said later in her mellifluous voice. "Who knew what a sports physical consisted of?"

For this fourth physical, Meg stripped at the nurse's request and climbed on the cold table. Dr. Story told her how healthy she looked and instructed her to put her feet in the stirrups. The taut sheet across her upraised knees screened off the lower half of her body; all she could see was his head and shoulders as he moved closer. A painful jolt snapped her eyes open. "Ow!" she yelped. "That hurts!"

He stepped backward and said with an edge to his voice, "I can't finish this exam. You're just gonna have to keep coming back till I can."

She refused to return to such pain. She wondered what had gone wrong. As an eighteen-year-old virgin, could she have ... a female problem? She was afraid to ask her mother; they were close, but intimate matters weren't discussed at home. Nothing she'd learned at school or church shed any light. She wondered if she had a growth down there—cancer or something. But wouldn't he have told her? She thought, Oh, lands, I'm scared. Then she took a look at the form for the precollege physical and discovered that no pelvic examination was required.

As of that summer of 1973, Meg gave every appearance of being another McArthur success story. She had slender arms and finely sculpted hands which she used to make graceful gestures that enhanced her speech. She had the same disarming lisp as her mother, a minor defect that made her other qualities more affecting. She wore her whitish-blond hair shoulder length, parted in the middle, sometimes braided or checked by barrettes or bows. Her fair skin burned but didn't tan. She had a strong straight nose and the deep blue-green eyes that ran in the family. She wore a size nine dress, with tucks and adjustments for her small waist, flaring hips and prominent breasts.

"Meg stood in the right line," complained her younger sister Minda, who felt that she hadn't. Their mother liked to joke that she herself had been large in the bust herself, "but I gave it to you girls an inch at a time."

Meg's GPA always hovered near
4.0;
She was senior class president and National Honor Society member and a church teacher and leader. As a star drummer, she joined her trumpeting sister Minda in giving the high school band its tempo and drive.

Like most Mormon women, Meg lived in the shadow of males: the bishop, the stake president and other high priests, the current prophet and his twelve counselors in the Salt Lake temple. In a way, she was also subservient to her father and brothers, holders of a priesthood permanently denied to women, no matter how great their spirituality or accomplishments.

Dean McArthur opened his family's day at
4 a
.m
.; lying abed till daylight was considered "sleeping in." There were five phones in the two-story farmhouse and their father dialed a ringback number that made them go off together. The children would hear ten awful
brrrring-brrrrings.
The noise would stop, then start again. Even in the daytime, Meg jumped when she heard a phone.

By the time she dressed, her mother had breakfast on the table, robust farm food and plenty of it, and then the McArthur clan trooped to the barn, led by their father singing his favorite Mormon hymn in a voice that woke up the cows:

Let no one shirk.

Put your shoulder to the wheel.

Push along, do your duty

With a heart full of song.

We all have work.

Let no one shirk.

Put your shoulder to the wheel.

All her life, Meg loved to sing and talk about it. "To a Mormon, singing is a sign of courage and joy. We teach our kids—if you're afraid, think of a great hymn. 'Come, Come Ye Saints.' 'I Am a Child of God.' There's nothing scarier than walking into a cold dark barn, so we'd walk in singing. Then we'd sing and milk together—me, Marie, my big brother Max, Dad, and
his
dad—we called him Papa—and a hired hand or two. We milked a hundred cows and then did it all over again at four in the afternoon. No vacations, no days off.