Close to the end of the questioning Rafferty said, “Did you have a neighbor when you lived on 372 Main Street, Robbie, in your old house, a kid by the name of Jack Sheridan?”
Robbie said, “So?”
“Jack was a little bit older than you, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mrs. Sheridan didn’t baby-sit you, I know that, but she looked out for you, didn’t she?”
He shrugged.
“She came to your house once, on May twenty-third, last spring, just before school was out. Do you remember that night?”
Anyone who had watched Robbie before would have known that he was thinking. He didn’t move or blink. It was impossible to say if he was
wondering how to respond, or if the question had carried him back in time.
“Mrs. Sheridan came to your door. She asked if Jack was at your house. You wanted her to come in, to see something. You had something to show her.”
Mrs. Mackessy shrank into her chair; it was as if she faded away, as if her lights went out. Her boy came into focus: the dark circles under his eyes, his unnerving stare, his unhealthy complexion, his skin pale and taut as the hide over a drum. There, the jury must see, was a sick boy. The blond beehive of the taller juror was bobbing with her touch of Parkinson’s, and she had such wide, wondering eyes she seemed to be willing herself to stay awake. Mrs. Dirks was objecting loudly and asking for an offer of proof. The two lawyers and Judge Peterson trooped into the inner sanctum. After several minutes they returned, and Rafferty continued his line of questioning.
“Mrs. Sheridan came to your house on May twenty-third, Robbie, and you told her you had something to show her. Is that something that you remember?”
He didn’t answer, which Rafferty noted to the court reporter.
“Is that something that you don’t want to talk about?”
Still no answer.
“It was just getting dark that night, and you said she had to come look in the den. Do you remember that, pal?”
Rafferty quietly asked that it be entered into the record that the witness sat expressionless and refused to respond.
Later he asked, “Wasn’t Mrs. Goodwin’s job, her main job, to give you medicine when you were sick?”
“No.”
“Did Mrs. Goodwin ever give you medicine when you visited her in your office?”
“No.”
“You never got Suprax, that yellow medicine which comes from a bottle and tastes like strawberry syrup? You never got that medicine from Mrs. Goodwin?”
“I said no.”
“Were you scared when you showed Mrs. Sheridan in the den?”
There was no music in the courtroom after all, nothing but dull questions, shouts from Mrs. Dirks, the tired judge paving the way for justice. The one time I looked at Susan Dirks she had her entire bottom lip drawn into her mouth and she looked to be biting down fairly hard. Her pen was between her second and third finger and she was beating it on her notepad.
“Did Mrs. Goodwin give you your medicine with a spoon?”
“Yeah.”
“She gave you that yellow stuff, Suprax, with a spoon?”
“Yeah.”
“So sometimes you went to her office and she gave you your medicine?”
“Stop asking me that,” Robbie cried. “You’re so boring! You hurt me when you’re that boring.”
“I’m hurting you?”
“I SAID, ‘YOU’RE HURTING ME.’ ”
There was a hush over the room. “No further questions, your honor,” Rafferty said, after a decent interval.
Over the noon hour Howard and I sat by the lake in the cold and I wondered out loud what the jurors were eating, and were they bonding over their boxed lunches, and had the leader already emerged? I tried to flesh out the few I’d taken an interest in, tried to imagine their home life, but Howard wasn’t listening. If I said much more, he would ask me how I could be detached at a time like this. And I’d have to say that if I thought about the trial too hard I’d be so nervous I’d have to consider drastic alternatives. I’d be seriously tempted to flee. There was among the jurors a woman with graying curly hair and half-glasses, who always seemed to be paying attention, who looked intelligent. Perhaps she would be the one to guide the group to an informed decision. Howard and I had ham-and-cheese sandwiches, which we ate in the bitter wind. We passed the Thermos back and forth, clutching the cylinder for the last warmth of the coffee. We were out of sync with our surroundings, having the kind of picnic people have when they are in love, when it’s worth braving the cold, when you’re so happy you don’t notice the stale bread or the temperature of the drink. I stopped talking and we ate, watching the gulls.
Mrs. Dirks called the child protection worker that first afternoon. Myra Flint was a broad woman with a turned-up nose, nothing like Mrs. Mackessy to feast our eyes upon. She clumped to the witness box in blue clogs, the noise of which somehow penetrated the carpet. A good deal of her testimony was about interviewing techniques she had used to elicit Robbie’s confession. The technical nature of the questions may have disappointed those few observers who had hoped for the lurid stuff of TV dramas, but I found that I could fasten on her, that for the most part I could follow the concrete and suffocatingly tedious and repetitive questions and answers. The judge had to reprimand one of the jurors, an older man, because he was snoring.
“Children’s memories,” Myra Flint explained, “can become locked inside their minds. One possible key to unlocking those memories is to ask very specific questions, or even leading questions. In the legal context, of course, we are not allowed to do so. Consequently, one set of techniques I use provides children with retrieval strategies and cues, while at the same time steering clear of leading questions. The cognitive interview is a technique I use on older children, but with some modifications it is also useful on someone Robbie’s age.
“Context reinstatement,” Myra droned on, “is another technique I use, when appropriate, for improving children’s recall. Taking a child back to the scene of an event helps to reinstate, if you will, the child’s memory.”
“So you helped him, didn’t you?” Rafferty asked at the start of a series of questions. “Spent quite a lot of time with him? In fact, this is how you make your living, in part, helping children to recall?”
“It can be a long process, Mr. Rafferty, helping children through the trauma of abuse.”
“It takes many sessions to enhance their memories?”
“That is not what I said.”
“In fact, isn’t it fair to say that oftentimes it is your work that allows someone like Robbie to recall enough to allow him to testify at all?” He was always hinting at, but never asking the question: Without your work, Ms. Flint, Robbie is like a ventriloquist’s dummy? “Isn’t it right that without your skill in memory enhancement children would not be able to come up with the specifics necessary for believable testimony?”
The accusations had been shocking in the beginning, but they had lost their sting the second time around. The details seemed flat, without meaning. I tried again to think what the trial was actually about. I had thought that it was about hate, pure, undiluted hatred: hate for the joyous sake of hatred—but I wasn’t sure anymore. It was peculiar, that I couldn’t very well remember how Robbie used to affect me. We are told when we are growing up that Hate is a strong word, that we should save it for the despicable things in life. In quantifying my feelings for Robbie I had to strain to remember back all those months, to gauge the intensity of my anger as he came scraping along the hall. He’d stand at the door, staring me down. He always looked as if he knew full well that he had far more knowledge than was appropriate, or good for him. I used to try to keep in mind that I hated what had made him foul-mouthed and cold-hearted. But I remember the sinking feeling I had when he appeared in the doorway of my office, the feeling that there wasn’t anything beyond him in the moment to hate. Now those violent sensations were no longer with me. He had made me feel small and empty. In a way it was an immense relief, to know that a boiling rage could leave one, that emotions were temporary, that they could chase away, like rats scurrying down the gangplank, evacuating the ship.
Myra was an able and committed therapist who clearly cared about the children she treated. She was convinced from Robbie’s acute symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, from his reporting to his mother and to herself, that he had been sexually abused by the school nurse. In the cross-examination she did not let Rafferty rattle her. She never became belligerent or wary or defensive, although the temptation must have been considerable. When Rafferty asked, “Isn’t it true that all children lie at times?” she said, “Yes, of course! Adults do too. Children, however, generally lie to get out of trouble rather than into trouble.”
“Isn’t it true that Robbie is a known liar, Miss Flint?”
“I am well aware that he has had problems at school. It is all the more important that Robbie be assessed by experienced clinicians who are trained to tease out truths from falsehoods.”
“Isn’t it possible for lies to become set in concrete as a child repeats them, so that a child believes the lie to be true?”
“Yes, indeed. For children and adults.” She went on to discuss how
the clinical data in Robbie’s case included his spontaneity, his sexual knowledge, and the fact that he did not retell his stories in a rigid manner, which would have suggested rote memory.
“Would you say that young children have active fantasy lives, Miss Flint?”
“Yes, often.”
“Isn’t it possible that this accusation of sexual abuse is nothing more than wishful thinking or a fantasy based on a sexual scene from television, or parental behavior?”
“I would say, Mr. Rafferty, that that is an unlikely interpretation. Fantasies tend to be oriented toward positive experiences. Very few children or adults daydream about being assaulted. Fantasy is directed toward solving problems—not creating them, which is certainly what happens when an allegation is made.”
“What, Miss Flint, do actuarial studies prove about the frequency of sexual fantasies and abuse in young children?”
“I haven’t recently read up on actuarial studies on that subject, Mr. Rafferty. I’d be happy to go over the evaluation of Robbie specifically and tell you again what I discovered about his fantasies and how they fit with the overall clinical picture.”
She was not behaving the way Rafferty would have liked. Although she was not charming or attractive, she was never evasive or defensive. Her sensible skirt and sweater, her short easy-to-care-for hair, her sturdy frame—everything about her, except her clogs, suggested sound judgment.
He later tried to trip her up when he questioned her about anatomically detailed dolls. “Isn’t it true that many different anatomically detailed dolls are manufactured?”
“Yes, it is,” she said.
“Isn’t it also fair to say that the anatomical detail in the doll, the design and sexual nature, differs markedly from one manufacturer to another?”
“Yes.”
“Are there published and accepted standardized procedures for using anatomically detailed dolls?”
“None exist that I know of,” she answered. “And it’s just for that
reason—that standardized procedures are not available—that interviews using anatomically detailed dolls call for experienced clinicians, who know how to be objective and who over the years have developed practical norms.”
“Isn’t it true,” Rafferty persisted, “that the Board of the American Psychological Association has determined that these dolls cannot be considered standardized assessment tools?”
She pushed her hair behind her ears with both hands before she began to answer. “There are indeed experts who have criticized the dolls as inaccurate tools that lead to false conclusions of child sexual abuse. However, the statement written last year by the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, judged that doll-centered assessments may be the best practical solutions in the hands of competent psychologists and social workers.”
“How many articles have you written for professional or scientific journals?”
“None.”
“Not even one, in any journal, anywhere?”
“That’s right. While some of my co-workers spend their careers writing for publications, my focus has been on helping and evaluating people.”
“You are not a medical doctor, is that correct?”
“As I told the court, I have a masters in social work.”
“Have you had graduate-level courses in memory and perception?”
“I’ve not had formal courses on those subjects, Mr. Rafferty, but every social worker is required to take psychology courses, classes which stress the fundamental role those factors play in people’s lives.”
“Have you ever misdiagnosed a client, Miss Flint?”
“A medical doctor can look at an X ray and be sure that the diagnosis is a broken arm. Evaluating people for emotional trauma does not always produce a neat diagnosis.”
“I understand that. Have you ever had a client, a child, who you thought had been sexually abused and then later recanted?”
“Yes, I have, Mr. Rafferty.”
“Some of your colleagues believed that you had so aggressively questioned the girl she confessed the abuse in order to placate you.”
“Objection,” Susan Dirks called.
“Could you give us a profile,” Rafferty later asked, “of a character-disturbed or unattached child that a social worker such as yourself would find in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
and in the book called,
High Risk, Children Without a Conscience?”
“I’m not familiar with that second publication. I don’t know the comprehensive list by heart, Mr. Rafferty, but some of the symptoms an unattached child might exhibit are self-destructive behaviors, ah, the inability to give and receive affection, various types of learning disorders.”
“Isn’t also included in that list a particular pathological type of lying—‘primary process lying,’ I believe it is called.”
“Possibly.”
“As well as abnormalities in eye contact, cruelty to others, a lack of long-term friends?”
“I haven’t recently studied the list in depth.”