After all, the boys told everyone the story of our bodies in that room. The school took the news in stride. Despite their precious patter about goodness and virtue, my offense wasn’t what I did, and it certainly wasn’t what the boys did. It was that I showed up in a pediatrician’s office in my hometown with the clinical evidence of a crime. It was not until I challenged the school’s reputation that the school decided to care about mine.
I didn’t think I would change the school by writing this account. I did not think I would change the nation over whose leaders-in-training the school presumes to preside. We talked, my husband and I, about initiating charges against the boys: What would that do to our family, to our lives? How could that help others? We talked about suing St. Paul’s School—with my documentation and their fear of exposure, I was almost guaranteed a settlement of some sort. The school would pay me in exchange for my continued silence. We could fund college accounts for our kids. I could repay my parents for all the therapy of my youth. Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford had met with a local prosecutor in New Hampshire, who had been appalled by my case and had recommended I hire lawyers to seek redress. I could do these things. Most victims cannot. Not only most victims from St. Paul’s, I understand, whose experiences might not be as well-documented as mine, but victims from every place—every survivor who has been made to carry the blame.
What I wanted was to find some way to release my peers from their shame. I wanted to show them the secret letter buried in each of their files, the one where the institution aligned against them determined how to keep them quiet, this blueprint of patriarchal silence. So that voices like the vice-rector’s—you are bad, your family must not look closely here—will roll off them and onto the grass, and they will tell, and tell, and tell.
I talked with my husband about writing about St. Paul’s. It would expose me, I said. It would expose him. It would plant in the world these words (herpes, slut, rape) associated with my name, and these events for our children to discover. Their friends, their communities. Our community. Would it salt the fields? How large was the danger of regret?
My husband had been waiting for my question.
“Love,” he said, “you want to know what I think?”
I did.
He held me and said, “Burn it all down.”
It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time.
First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.
So I’ve written what happened, exactly as I remember. It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it is of witness: to go back to that girl leaving the boys’ room on an October night, sneakers landing on the sandy path, and walk with her all the way home.
15
I don’t remember during which of my three years at St. Paul’s it was that in the springtime a lone goose landed on the library pond and haunted us. Geese passed through in the fall and spring by the hundreds, but this one year—late April or May it would have been, when the air was soft—a solitary goose appeared and honked, riotously, as we streamed to Chapel in the morning along the brilliant water.
I remember laughing. Laughter rolled down the line of us. The bird, when we passed it, nearly barked, sounding an uproar, like an angry person caught in traffic, sputtering and cursing. Who couldn’t find a reason in her own life to yell like that? The laughter lifted us—we were always groggy on the way to Chapel—and caused us to look at the pond. The spring trees. It was so good to be reminded that we were young.
The goose talked throughout the day. Honk, honk. Other geese would arrive, we figured, or it would eventually leave. Some natural agenda would have its way.
At night, though, the bird kept calling. From midnight to 6 a.m. the chapel bells tolled only the hour, single bongs without melody, and the bird punctured those hollow hours erratically, enough to keep a lonely or frightened or sad student from sleep. In the morning, when we funneled to Chapel, it again made a riot. Even the teachers were discussing it. The drunk goose, the lonely goose, the seriously confused and disruptive goose.
A plot was hatched. An old Irish setter lived in a master’s apartment in Wing, the dorm adjacent to the dining halls at the top of the hill. We called the dog Murphy. Except in the deepest freeze, Murphy sat outside the front door all day long. He held his chin high and let his auburn ears feather in the breeze. We patted Murphy on the head for good luck, the way tourists rub the foot of Saint Peter in Rome. The dog’s head was burgundy where we stroked it as we passed, heading into and out of the dining halls
