“To refresh your memory, manipulative behaviors, phoniness, superficial attractiveness, and friendliness with strangers, are also included as symptoms.”
“Again, I haven’t studied the list lately.”
“Would you like to review it?”
She looked over the sheet he handed to her.
“Did it cross your mind, as you examined Robbie, that he had some of those characteristics I just mentioned, that he was manipulating you and his mother?”
“No, it did not, Mr. Rafferty.”
“Did it ever occur to you that he might have the profile of the character-disturbed child.”
“Most definitely not.”
“Did you interview Robbie’s mother?”
“No.”
“Did you not think it might be important to interview the child’s primary caretaker?”
“In a case where a child reveals abuse the child is our focus.”
“Keep your chin up,” Rafferty said during the break. “We’re doing great.” He was whacking his letter opener against his pant leg. “Heard anything from the girls over in the jail?” He was someone who didn’t often make small talk or show signs of nervousness. Perhaps Myra Flint
had not been as pliant as he’d hoped. I reached over and touched his hand, to still him. “Keep your chin up, Paul,” I said.
Howard and I drove home without saying too much the first afternoon of the trial. When we parked the car outside of the day-care center Howard lingered in the driver’s seat, absently knocking the key chain against the steering wheel. I put my head back, knowing he would say something worth hearing. “I wish,” he began.
I waited for him to develop the thought and when, after a few minutes, I could no longer hold out, I said, “What? What do you wish?”
“Why couldn’t he have been the one to drown? He might as well have. He might be better off if he’d died.”
“Robbie, you mean.”
“Why have we let this go on? The questioning was the devil’s version of Simon Says. Rafferty baited Robbie and then trapped him. There must have been something we could have done to keep that poor kid from getting slaughtered.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve felt that all along, that he is the one who will suffer more than anyone, more in a way, than we have. I still have music and words, our children—”
“Rafferty is—I’ve never met someone before who made me sick, who made me think I was going to vomit.”
“I have to get Claire,” I said, “or they’ll charge us for the next hour.”
“You never listen to me,” he muttered. “Did you know that?”
“Howard,” I said, “I am listening. I just don’t know what else to say. Robbie didn’t drown, Lizzy did. If not Rafferty, who? Maybe I should have copped a plea and served a sentence, and then we wouldn’t have had a trial. But that didn’t seem the right thing to do, not for me, and not for us, in the long run. I could say I’m sorry for the rest of my life, every day, every minute for the rest of my life and it still wouldn’t exhaust all the sorriness I have inside me. I’m sorry for Lizzy most of all. I’m sorry for Robbie, I’m sorry for Theresa, I’m especially sorry on your account, and for Emma, and Claire. I’m sorry specifically, and I’m just plain sorry. I’m sorry Rafferty makes you sick. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll get me off, and then we can somehow try to begin all over, or back in the middle, or go forward from this ending place.”
He stayed in the car, clicking his key chain against the steering wheel
while I went for Claire. We drove back to Spring Grove, picked up Emma at the school after-care program, went to the A&W, had the salad bar and bacon burgers, which even Emma had grown tired of, and finally made our way home. Many of the Pheasant Glade units had not been sold and the few that had been set aside for rentals had not been snatched up either. The two blocks of apartments had the feel of a ghost town, particularly at night. By the time we left it, it had begun to fill up, but we often felt, coming home, that we were driving into a place where nobody else wanted to be. All those nights during the trial we’d eat out or scratch up a supper, put the girls in the whirlpool tub, tuck them into bed, and then, because there didn’t seem to be anything we could talk about, nothing to say until we knew one way or the other, I’d rearrange the cupboards or play solitaire until I figured Howard was upstairs fast asleep.
On the third day of testimony for the prosecution, David Henskin, the principal at Blackwell Elementary, and Robbie’s teacher, Mrs. Ritter, both took the stand. It seemed a ridiculous exercise, both of them saying that I was sullen, that I was somehow sinister, Rafferty protesting at every turn, valiantly trying to keep character assassination out of the evidence. I was wearing an old quilt jacket I’d made years ago and a green corduroy skirt, which Rafferty had the nerve to pronounce bookish and eccentric. “Don’t wear it again, all right?” he ordered. Mrs. Ritter said that she realized now, with hindsight, that Robbie was always disturbed after he’d been to see me, that his artwork was violent, that his behavior was problematic only in relation to his visits to me. As an aside she mentioned that she frequently saw me out in the hall doing some kind of strange dance. She had always had such faith in the staff at Blackwell Elementary, she said, and she had never thought to suspect any of the employees.
Rafferty did not bother to cross-examine her because he thought her worthless. He explained that the jury would think so too, when they saw that he would not dignify her by asking a single question. He had had a floor plan of the school blown up to fit an easel so that the office spaces were visible. With his pointer he took Mr. Henskin through the various hallways and offices asking as he went: Did Henskin often leave his own door open to encourage students and teachers to seek him out? Did the secretary leave her door open? He rarely had to use the intercom, she was
so close? His schedule was varied and unpredictable, wasn’t it? Did he have to leave his office to solve a problem in another part of the school? Several times a day? And when he so frequently left his office he walked right past, or even through the nurse’s office?
Rafferty had told me that the jurors would ask themselves how in the hell the abuse had taken place with Henskin in and out a dozen times a day. After Paul had gotten his point across, he said, “There has been a great deal of publicity about sexual abuse in the last decade. Have you ever been concerned, yourself, about being accused of sexual molestation?”
“It’s something that crosses your mind, as an educator. I think anyone who works in this climate with children is aware of what care must be taken.”
“What climate are you speaking of?”
“People are sensitive to the issue of child abuse.”
“It is a climate where anyone on your staff could be charged with abuse?”
“We have an excellent staff at our school, overall.”
“I agree your staff has always been excellent, but my question to you, sir, is given the climate, as you say, a sex-abuse charge is a real fact of life for any of the district’s employees and yourself included.”
“Any person who works with children has to be exemplary.”
“Because of the hysterical climate—”
“Objection,” Susan Dirks shouted.
Rafferty rephrased the question. “Would you say, Mr. Henskin, that an employee at your school has to be beyond reproach, because there is a heightened awareness about sexual abuse?”
“Yes, I’d say so.”
“And a fear about sexual abuse?”
“There is new, general knowledge that child abuse is pervasive in our culture.”
“Would you say that many parents are afraid for their children?”
“I couldn’t say specifically, but I suppose that’s true.”
I scanned the jury, trying to see if they were getting the idea, that they, too, could be accused. The Greek God had been wearing Hawaiian shirts all week, in spite of the fact that it was December. I dressed in particular for him every morning, wondering if he would think better of
me if I was wearing the pink sweater or the blue cotton shirt. In addition to the blond beehive ladies there were two other older women who had become individuals as the week wore on: Grace and Bette, I called them, the type of women who went home to put on their aprons and knit by the television. They were both plush and grizzled, unpretentious, surely satisfied by their lot. I imagined the big crystal jars on their end tables filled with hard candy, homemade afghans draped over their chairs and sofas, a cherished little dog. I thought of them in the evenings, both of them widows, home alone, heating up supper, thinking as they waited for their food, of me. They would both be overwhelmed and saddened by the case. They wouldn’t know what to think. They would sit at the table over their beef stew, thinking not of the words of the experts or any of the witnesses, but of me, and the single question: Did she do it? Could that girl with the handsome husband in the back have done it?
On Thursday Susan Dirks called Dr. Eugene Bailey, a psychologist from the University of Wisconsin. He was a frail-looking man with small round glasses, thinning red hair, and a cyst on the bald part of his head. Rafferty had never seen him in court before. He had told me at the break that he nearly felt sorry for the professor. “The guys Dirks usually haul in must be out of town. I can’t imagine how she dragged this poor mole away from his books, unless he’s a relation, a brother-in-law. I bet he’s been in the tower for the last forty years, going back and forth on the path between his office and the lecture hall. I felt like asking him if we should call his mother, that we permitted our witnesses to sit on their mother’s laps.”
Dirks questioned Dr. Bailey primarily about post-traumatic stress syndrome. There was the litany: bed-wetting, aggressive behaviors, nightmares, detachment from others, recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event. By now so many of the questions seemed formulaic that I felt that I could have asked them myself. “Dr. Bailey,” she said, “you have told us that Robbie Mackessy suffers from PTSS. Have you formed an opinion based upon your training and experience and based upon your evaluation of the child, to within a reasonable degree of psychological certainty, as to the cause of PTSS?”
“Yes, I have.”
“And what is that opinion?”
Again I watched Bette and Grace, the Greek God, the Dairy Man, the intellectual woman, while Dr. Bailey declared that I had both physically and sexually abused Robbie Mackessy. My favorite jurors had settled into their duty. Some of them rocked a little in their comfortable chairs. They were all listening, but their faces were placid, unruffled. They were saving their judgment, their emotion, for the deliberation perhaps; I couldn’t have begun to say what any one of them was thinking of Dr. Eugene Bailey’s partially audible, careful testimony.
Rafferty began his cross-examination by saying, “Let me ask you, Dr. Bailey, about the so-called trauma of the primal scene. By the primal scene I am referring to sexual intercourse. The orthodox psychoanalytic notion I believe is this: A child who witnesses the primal scene is deeply traumatized. Is that correct?”
Dr. Bailey was wearing a turtle neck and sucking on lozenges. It was good to know that his voice may not normally have been so thin and reedy. “That is Freud’s general interpretation, yes,” he answered.
“When a child witnesses the primal scene does he not frequently interpret sexual intercourse as a cruel, destructive act?”
“That is one of the possible misinterpretations on the child’s part. The psychic content will vary according to the child’s age and previous history.”
“Uh huh. But what is almost always present in the young child, the four-, five-, six-year-old, who witnesses intercourse, is the linking together of sex and danger. Is that not true?”
“The content varies according to the details that have been witnessed.”
“But if a young child does witness the act, it is possible for that child to be traumatized?”
“Yes.”
“Traumatized to the degree that he may develop subsequent neurosis?”
“Freudian scholars would certainly agree with that statement.”
“Other psychoanalysts, not only Freud, but Róheim and Ferenczi, for example, talk about the identification with the mother, who represents the support of the child, and the child’s inability to deal with the mother’s relation to other objects, such as the father. Ferenczi says, if I recall
correctly, that the child is overwhelmed by emotions that he cannot yet organize when he witnesses the primal scene. Is that a reasonable statement?”
“Reasonable, yes.”
“We all understand that there is enough literature on this subject to more than fill this courthouse. Would you be so kind as to briefly tell us what effect the primal scene has on a young child in your view?”
Dr. Bailey cleared his throat. “When a child sees that his parents cannot transcend the body in their most intimate relations, the child naturally has anxiety. The child is in the process himself of trying to work out the problem of the body, trying to overcome the horror of the body.”
It wasn’t difficult to understand why Dr. Bailey could speak to the horror of the body, when his own form—his sunken chest, his slim waist that required a belt for which he likely had to make extra holes—might alone have caused him plenty of trauma and subsequent neurosis. I liked Dr. Bailey, felt his sensitivity, his probable fondness for moss and lichens, wild flowers, Debussy.
“If the child then sees the parents in conjugal relations,” he was saying, “he can well feel betrayed by them. He sees the adults keeping the relationship, an obviously special, deep relationship, of the body, away from the child, in fact denying it to him. The child will undoubtedly experience alarm and confusion, but as I said before, the trauma is dependent on what he witnesses, how much, how long, and so forth and so on.”
“Is it possible, Dr. Bailey,” Rafferty said, walking along the jury box and tapping it with his pen, as if he meant to wake them up, “is it possible that when a child sees his parents having sex he may feel betrayed?”
“I believe I just said so, yes.”
“What would you say are typical reactions to betrayal: If a person feels that he has been betrayed how might he act, in general?”
“Well, I’d say that typical responses might include anger, despair, perhaps vengeful feelings.”