The Sociopath Next Door (21 page)

Hannah described a time in her childhood when her mother had been critically ill and in the hospital for nearly three weeks. Hannah believed her mother had contracted pneumonia, but she said, “I was really too young to remember much about it.” Hannah's aunt had taken her to see her mother during this time. But her father had not visited his wife once while she was hospitalized, and when she returned home, he was angry and agitated, concerned that his pale and weakened wife “might not get her beauty back,” as Hannah phrased it.

As for Hannah's pretty mother, “There really isn't much to tell,” Hannah told me. “She's sweet and gentle. She always took good care of me, especially when I was little. She likes to garden, and she does a lot of charities and such. She's just a really nice lady. Oh, and she was the homecoming queen when she was in high school. Dad likes to tell people that.”

When I pressed Hannah about her mother's reaction to her father's neglectful behaviors, she said, “I don't know. I mean, to be honest, there were things that would've made me really angry if I'd been Mom, but she never said anything. She just kind of goes her own way. Like I said, she's a sweet, gentle lady—that's probably what you'd hear if you asked someone who knows her—and I guess what goes along with that is she never really stands up for herself very much. She certainly never confronts Dad. I mean, I think I'd faint dead away if she ever did that. She's the perfect lady. Her only little flaw, if you could even call it that, is her vanity. She's really beautiful, and I think she knows it, and she spends a lot of time working on her hair and her body and such. I think she sees that as her only power in the world, if that makes any sense.”

Hannah looked at me questioningly, and I nodded that I understood what she meant.

“And to give him his due, Dad's really good to her about that. He sends her flowers when he's gone, and he always tells her how beautiful she is. I think that kind of thing must really mean a lot to her.”

“He sends her flowers when he's gone?” I asked. “Where does he go?”

When I asked that question—“Where does he go?”—Hannah's composure lost a little ground. She shifted in her chair and said nothing for a moment. Finally she replied, “I don't really know. I know that must sound sort of lame, but I don't. Sometimes he'd come in really late at night, or he'd even be gone for a whole weekend. Mom would get flowers—I mean, really, it was between the two of them. It was just too weird, so I tried to ignore it.”

“His absences were weird?”

“Yes, well . . . That's the way I felt. I don't know how Mom feels about it.”

“Any guesses about where he went?” I pressed her, probably a little too hard, but it seemed an important point.

“No. I always tried to ignore it,” she repeated. Then she began to study my bookshelves again.

The next week, I asked Hannah the conspicuous question of whether her father had ever been physically violent with her or her mother. Had he ever hit them?

She brightened and answered eagerly. “Oh no. He's never done anything like that. I can't even imagine it. In fact, if anyone else ever hurt me or Mom, I think he'd kill them.”

I waited an instant for the impact of her words to strike her, but she appeared unaffected. She shifted her position again and reinforced her answer, saying, “No. He never hit us. Nothing like that ever went on at all.”

She was unaccountably pleased to answer me in this way, and somehow I was inclined to believe her, that her father had never been physically violent in the context of his family. But after twenty-five years of treating trauma survivors, I have learned that getting hit is actually one of the more bearable ways a person can be assaulted.

I tried a different tack. I said, “I know you love your father, and you need to hold on tight to that love right now. But all relationships have their difficulties. There's nothing about him that you'd change if you could?”

“Yes, that's absolutely right. I do need to hold on to him. And he really deserves to have huge sympathy from everyone, especially now. . . .”

She paused, and craned her neck to look behind her at the double doors to my office. Then she turned back and looked at me for a long moment, as if appraising my motives, and finally said, “But since you want to know what I'd change, there is something, actually.”

She made a little humorless laugh and blushed scarlet to the roots of her shimmering black hair.

“What's that?” I asked, as matter-of-factly as I could.

“It's a silly thing, really. It's, well . . . Sometimes he flirts with my friends, sort of, and it really bothers me. Actually, now that I say it out loud, it sounds even more ridiculous. I guess it shouldn't bother me so much. But it really does.”

“He flirts with your friends? How do you mean?”

“Since junior high school, more or less . . . Some of my friends are really gorgeous, you know? There's this one in particular, named Georgia. . . . Well anyway, he flirts with them. He winks at them and kind of grabs them and tickles them. And sometimes he makes what I think are really suggestive remarks—like he'll say, ‘Going braless today, Georgia?' or something—but I guess I'm misinterpreting. Oh man, now that I'm talking about this out loud, it's like
über
-dumb, don't you think? It probably shouldn't bother me at all.”

I said, “If I were in your place, I think it would bother me, a lot.”

“You do?” She looked encouraged for a moment, and then sagged. “You know, at the high school Dad runs—the high school I went to—parents have actually claimed that he was ‘inappropriate' with their kids. There were three times, I think, or at least those are the ones that I heard about. I remember one time the parents were really steamed. They actually took their kid out of the school. Everybody came to his rescue after that. They thought it was really sad these days that such a good, kind man could be accused of some perverse thing just because he gave one of his students a hug, or whatever.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don't know. I'll probably burn in hell or something for admitting this, but the truth is that I don't know—I guess because I've seen him do so much stuff that people could misread really easily. You know? I mean, if you're the principal and you walk up behind some hot-looking sixteen-year-old in the hall and you grab her by the waist, you've got to expect her parents to get a little ticked if they hear about it. I don't know why he doesn't understand that.”

This time, Hannah did not ask me to confirm her opinion. She stared at the bookshelves some more, and was silent.

Finally, in a little flood of rushed words, she said, “And you know what else? I've never told this to anyone, and I hope you're not going to think less of me because I'm telling you, but one time this girl I know—I didn't know her very well, but she went to the high school—she came up and sat beside me in the library and started writing notes. She was smiling and she wrote, ‘Do you know what your father told me about Central High?' and she passed it to me. I wrote, ‘I give up. What?' and she wrote, ‘He told me Central was like a sexual cafeteria.' She put sexual cafeteria in big quotes. I was so furious I almost couldn't keep from crying, but I got out of there, and then I didn't know what to do with the piece of paper, so I crumpled it up and I put it in my pocket, and when I got home, I got matches and I burned it in the sink.”

The rush of words over, she looked down at the rust-colored carpet.

“I'm so sorry, Hannah. You truly didn't deserve to have that happen to you. You must've been so embarrassed, and so heartbroken. But why did you imagine I'd think less of you for telling me?”

In a voice much younger than her twenty-two years, she answered, “I should've kept it a secret. It's disloyal.”

Hannah and I continued our sessions together. At the beginning of many of her appointments, she would tell me about strange phone messages her mother was receiving back home.

“After the night of the burglary, we pretty much stopped being able to answer the phone. There were so many so-called reporters, and so many cranks. At this point, Mom always just lets the machine answer, and if it's somebody she wants to talk to, she can pick up. It's okay, I guess. She just erases the cranks. But lately she's been getting these weird druggie messages. They really upset her. They're freaky—I mean, even freakier than the usual freaks.”

“Has she told you what they say?” I asked.

“Sort of. She gets so upset, it's a little hard to make sense of what she's saying to me on the phone, but I think the basic idea is they're accusing Dad of dealing drugs or something. Ridiculous stuff—but it really gets to Mom. She said they were demanding to get some kind of ‘information' from the house, or they were going to hurt him. I guess they kept saying something about ‘information,' and things about hurting him. But there's nothing in the house, and, I mean, Dad's not there. He's in prison.”

“Has your mother notified the police about the messages?”

“No. She's afraid that she'll get Dad in trouble.”

For a moment, I could not think of an appropriate reply to this last remark, and when I was silent, Hannah filled in. She said, “I know, I know. It's illogical.”

By the end of Hannah's first year in medical school, her mother had received a dozen or so of these incomprehensible and frightening messages, and still neither mother nor daughter had reported them to the police.

In May, Hannah decided she wanted to fly out and visit her imprisoned father. We talked about how emotionally painful such a visit would be for her, but she was determined to go. We had several conversations about her upcoming trip, trying to prepare her for the various situations she might need to handle, and for the feelings she might have when she saw her father in prison. But nothing could have prepared either Hannah or me for what did happen. In retrospect, I believe he must have reached the point of wanting an audience for his gamesmanship, a frame of mind similar to Skip's when he enticed his little sister to the lakeside. I cannot think of any other likely reason that Hannah's father would suddenly have been so forthcoming with his daughter. As for Hannah, she had not told me she intended to be blunt with her father. Perhaps she did not even know this herself beforehand. To my mind, her behavior when she visited the prison is one of the best illustrations I have ever encountered of how much a person can know about another person without consciously knowing that she knows it.

When she got back to Boston, this is what she told me about their conversation. I imagine that more was said, but the following is all that Hannah shared with me. She began somewhat tearfully, describing the harrowing and undignified process of getting into a prison to visit an inmate. Then her tears cleared completely and she told me the rest calmly, with a certain intellectual detachment.

She said, “I was terrified he'd look pathetic and beaten, but he didn't look that way at all. He looked fine. He looked . . . I don't know—
alive
is what I want to say. His eyes were sparkling. I've seen him like that before, but I really didn't expect to see him that way in prison. He seemed glad to see me—he asked me about my grades. I thought he'd ask me about Mom, but he didn't. And so I thought, Why put it off? So I asked him.”

She made this statement as if I knew what she meant, and I did not. I said, “You asked him what?”

“I asked him, ‘What was that man looking for in the house, Dad?' He said, ‘What man?' But I'm sure he knew what I was talking about. He didn't look ashamed or embarrassed or any of that. I said, ‘The man you shot.' He didn't even blink. He just said, ‘Oh, that man. He was looking for some names. But he didn't find them. I can assure you of that.'”

Hannah had been speaking without looking at me. Now she made eye contact, and said, “Dr. Stout, his expression . . . He looked like we were talking about something that was really
fun
to talk about. I wanted to run out of there, but I didn't.”

“I didn't know you were going to do this. You're amazing.”

“It was awful,” she continued without seeming to hear that I was marveling at her actions. “I said, ‘So you knew him?' And he said, ‘Of course I knew him. Why would I kill a perfect stranger?' And then he laughed. He
laughed,
Dr. Stout.”

Still speaking directly to me, though with considerable emotional distance from the subject matter, she went on: “And then I said, ‘Are you involved with heroin?' He didn't really answer that one. He just told me that I was smart. Can you believe that? He told me that I was smart.”

She shook her head in disbelief and was silent for a while.

Finally, I prompted her. I said, “Did you ask other questions, Hannah?”

“Yes. Yes, I did ask him. I said, ‘Have you ever killed anyone else?' And do you know what he said?”

Then she was silent again.

After a moment, I replied, “No, I don't. What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I plead the Fifth.'”

Only then did Hannah cry again, this time without restraint. Her sudden, wrenching grief, for the father she had thought was there, reminded me of a quotation from Emerson, who said that of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

She wept for a long time, but I was relieved to find that when her tears were finally spent, she was able to turn her thoughts to her own safety. Wiping her face with a handful of tissues from the box, she looked at me and said in a steady voice, “The lawyers are going to get him out, you know. What am I going to do?”

And I heard myself answering, with decidedly more directive maternal ferocity than I am accustomed to using in therapy sessions, “You're going to protect yourself, Hannah.”

What Can the Conscience-Bound Do
About the Guiltless?

Sociopaths are not few and far between. On the contrary, they make up a significant portion of our population. Though Hannah's experience was especially up close and personal, for any individual living in the Western world to get all the way through life without knowing at least one such person, in some capacity or other, is virtually impossible.

People without conscience experience emotions very differently from you and me, and they do not experience love at all, or any other kind of positive attachment to their fellow human beings. This deficit, which is hard even to ponder, reduces life to an endless game of attempted domination over other people. Sometimes sociopaths are physically violent, as Hannah's father was. Often they are not, preferring to “win” over others by raiding the business world, or the professions, or government—or simply by exploiting one person at a time in parasitic relationships, as Sydney's nonhusband, Luke, did.