It was a ringing quiet. Fool girl, I had trusted that documents and perpetrator admissions and the fullness of time would suffice.
As it happened, on the day the New Hampshire attorney general announced his deal with St. Paul’s School, the senior United States senator from the State of California, where I make my home with my husband and sons, forwarded to the FBI a letter from a woman detailing a sexual assault committed by a male nominee to the United States Supreme Court. The woman’s name was redacted, but she could not be protected. I thought I knew how the Brett Kavanaugh matter would unfold, and that is how it happened. The feeling was of concentric craters—mine, and then the nation’s—giant blast zones we could not seem to climb out of.
I spoke to Detective Curtin once more, to follow up on a few last pieces of her department’s investigation, which she was closing.
“The attorney general’s office ended their investigation,” I prompted.
“Yes.” Julie waited a moment. Then she said, “We thought about you around here, when we heard that. We thought of you.”
I was surprised by how this moved me. I wished I could go back decades and tell myself as a girl about the two detectives in Concord who would be waiting to listen when I was ready to talk.
When she’d asked to interview my parents about the assault, Julie had suggested I might contact them first to let them know she’d be in touch. My parents and I do not speak easily or often, and we have not for many years. But when I wrote to them about St. Paul’s, they called immediately. We spoke with a formal dignity, as one would of a diagnosis or a loss.
I had explained the state’s investigation, and that I had come forward as a student who was victimized—was raped—on campus. Would they be willing to be interviewed?
“Yes,” said my father. “Yes, of course.”
I thanked him.
“That whole thing was so excruciating,” Dad said, “that I haven’t thought about it in years. I’ve really just sort of blocked it out.”
My father has a gentle voice, warm and musical. He sings tenor in the same church choir where I soloed on Christmas Eve when I was nine. I leaned into the familiar tones even as his words caused me an old, deeply known pain. My father did not think about what happened at St. Paul’s and he had not in years.
Maybe I should have been happy for him to have forgotten, to have that shadow lifted. But I was not that generous. I wanted so much from his words. I was still looking to be redeemed by him and for him. I reminded myself that I was an adult, and that it was up to me now.
“But the thing I will never forget,” he added, “is Bill Matthews’s voice, saying, ‘She’s not a good girl, Jim. You don’t want to go there, Jim.’”
I had taken my phone outside and was standing next to the raised garden bed I tend with my sons. The garden was trampled and sprawling, full of bright fruits they’d missed. I counted tomatoes. Dad remembered Matthews, of course. How could a father forget? I waited for him to keep talking, with his next breath to go on to disparage Bill Matthews and restore me—that asshole, can you imagine, I hope he’s dead, my wonderful girl. Maybe Dad thought it unnecessary to say these things. Maybe all of that was clear.
Still, the only words between us were the ones Bill Matthews spoke. We weren’t remembering what had been done to my body, but what had been done to my reputation. Maybe, by a set of hellish degrees, it was somehow less painful for Dad to recall his daughter’s slandering than her violation.
I am a parent. I think I understand.
“I’m sorry you felt so much shame,” I told him. “I’m sorry that is still there for you.”
Mom came on the line. “Oh, yes,” she said. “And I will never forget”—she said a priest’s name, someone with powerful connections to St. Paul’s whom she had approached, devastated—“I will never forget him telling me, ‘Oh, no, this is on Lacy. This is really Lacy’s doing.’”
I hadn’t known this about this priest, to whom our family was no longer close. It made sense that she would have appealed to him for help, that summer I was sixteen: he shared her vocation, knew her daughter, knew and was known by the school. I was not surprised to hear that he seemed not to have believed that my assault was real. Mom, like Dad, was remembering the agony of her own abandonment, but I had long preferred to imagine that the people who might have helped us simply did not believe. I had always liked this priest. He’d met me when I still wore ribboned barrettes in my hair. If he had known what the boys had done, if he’d known what St. Paul’s had done, wouldn’t he have fought for me? If not that horrible year, then during all the years since, when wave after wave of allegations about the school rose to national prominence? This was one small refuge of the survivor, to grant to the silent the grace of ignorance.
I was counting globe tomatoes and feeling off the ground, finding it all a bit funny. Lacy’s doing! Not a good girl. How powerful they had made me, these men, in denying the truth. How much they imagined I could choreograph in their storied New England boarding school. I had been a fifteen-year-old girl in duck boots. Many days, I could barely speak.
I did not know, when I first told my parents about the brand-new investigation, that I would write about St. Paul’s. I had spent so much time considering the challenge of bearing witness, of finding ways to transcribe
