9Summer 1991
In early March 1878, when St. Paul’s was not quite twenty-five years old, a measles epidemic swept through the school. Dozens of boys fell ill, confined to their rooms, and one came so close to the brink that “the whole dormitory was awake and watching as brandy was administered and he was barely saved from death by strangulation and spasms.” We learn this from August Heckscher’s St. Paul’s: The Life of a New England School, a comprehensive history from its founding to the year 1980, when Scribner’s published the book. (The Scribners all went to St. Paul’s.) Several of us had this red-jacketed hardback on our shelves at school, often a gift from godparents seeking to impress upon us the honor of our matriculation. I never knew anyone to actually read it. It served to prop open doors on warm days, cushion coffee mugs on late nights, and elevate the little bowls of Siamese fighting fish that languished on our desks. Opening the book finally, as an adult, I recognize that not even the adolescent grandiosity we displayed as Paulies could touch Heckscher’s fire: “In writing about St. Paul’s, I have felt at times that I was dealing with a minor nation…”
If I had bothered to read The Life of a New England School as a student, I’d have been knocked out by the story of the first-form boy who went to the infirmary later that spring of 1878, not with measles but with a sore throat. He was, Heckscher reports, “otherwise apparently in good health.” He was likely ten years old. Shortly after ten the next morning, he was dead.
A letter to school parents advised them of the tragedy but encouraged them not to bring their living children home. “The risk of infection seemed remote,” according to the rector, Dr. Coit, whose name I knew because it belonged to our oak-paneled, high-table, Oxford-style dining hall. Coit appended to his letter the opinion of the school’s doctor and its founder, also a physician, arguing for no change in routine. In spite of the shocking loss, they wrote, “it was in the boys’ best interests to remain at school.”
And so scarlet fever spread. Two more children died. With three bodies, “no choice now existed but to close the school.” Nevertheless, in announcing this closure, the rector reported that “the best authorities pronounced the sanitary conditions at the school satisfactory… and could find no cause for the recent afflictions.”
Even accounting for the peril of childhood before antibiotics, this self-exoneration seems to me remarkable. It’s got both the knee-jerk, sputtering detail of the guilty, and a kind of fantastical entitlement too. Winter was cause enough for illness, surely. Not even an institution as blessed as St. Paul’s School would be delivered from ordinary dangers. Children had died there—one particularly haunting scene involved a third former who failed to show up to breakfast on the day he was to go home for Christmas, and was found dead in his bed. But the obligation of the school, which is first and foremost in charge of the care of children, is to react—immediately and generously—to prevent further harm. August Heckscher suffers no sadness or frustration on behalf of his minor nation of a school for failing to do so.
I hadn’t reported to the infirmary with a sore throat and died. I suspect that what I did was worse. I kept living, and then a few months later I went and told people about a sexual assault. My parents called the school. I wasn’t on that call, nor on any others between my family and school leaders, but I can imagine their tone. Mom and Dad called, worried and deeply upset, and assumed that the people they spoke to would share their concern: two boys on campus had assaulted their girl. What could be done to address this?
After my mother called the school to explain what had happened, the administration, as the school itself would later tell the Concord Police Department, conducted its own “internal investigation.” I was still on campus, since the year had not ended, but their investigation did not include talking to me. I have had to put together these few weeks from documents that remain—medical reports and what has been shared with me of the criminal case file from 1991. I was studying for my finals, knowing that the events of the night in Rick and Taz’s room were formally known to everyone now. The priests knew, the teachers knew, the deans knew. There was nothing left to hide. I felt exposed and exhausted. I thought I was almost finished with everything.
School leadership talked to people about me. They had conversations with students, but not with my friends. They talked to the school psychologist, the school’s lawyer, and the physician in the infirmary. I do not know the substance of these conversations, but in the third week of May, the school psychologist, Reverend S., Vice Rector Bill Matthews, and the rector, Kelly Clark, sat down with the school’s legal counsel and arrived at the formal conclusion that, despite what I had claimed, and despite the statutory laws on the books in their state, the encounter between me and the boys had been consensual. They also concluded that they would not abide by state law and report the incident to the police. The authorities were not notified. They remained in the dark.
When I heard about this meeting for the first time, decades after I’d left school, I remembered Reverend S. standing in my room, half-heartedly packing my books. What had he heard that helped him conclude I was promiscuous and had desired
