“My” Sandusky

“I sit on the sofa with my husband, watching news of Sandusky’s decades-long abuse of boys in his care and, at 60, am right back there in Dr. B’s bedroom, right back there in my helpless 13-year-old’s body. For me, and the late Dr. B, it is always the present tense. He may be long cold in his Chicago grave, and I may be a woman of a certain age who has not seen him in almost five decades but, when I remember him, us, it is always “now”; it is happening to me now.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—7/2/2012—Only once in my long career as an essayist have I written—and then only tangentially, while writing about Leslie Kenton’s systematic abuse by her father, jazz legend Stan Kenton—about my own harrowing experiences as the prepubescent victim of a pedophile.

And I’m a writer (who writes every day), the daughter of a psychoanalyst, a person who prides herself on being “hyper-conscious,” hyper-aware.

Realizing this longstanding fact of omission—can I truly call it a “sin” of omission?—has been a revelation for me, as not a day goes by now that I do not, in some way, recall my tormentor, my torment . . . and most acutely when the 24/7 news cycle trumpets the latest developments in the ongoing saga of Jerry Sandusky and his host of accusers; the burgeoning scandal of systematic pedophilia kept so long under wraps at such bastions of academic excellence as Manhattan’s Horace Mann School.

I sit on the sofa with my husband, watching news of Sandusky’s decades-long abuse of boys in his care and, at 60, am right back there in Dr. B’s bedroom, right back there in my helpless 13-year-old’s body. For me, and the late Dr. B, it is always the present tense. He may be long cold in his Chicago grave, and I may be a woman of a certain age who has not seen him in almost five decades but, when I remember him, us, it is always “now”; it is happening to me now.

Once violated, once traumatized, a young victim can never eradicate the probing fingers, and more, from within the most intimate folds of her or his flesh; her or his memory. The 60-year-old is, somehow, always 13, and the condition—mine—is now called PTSD, and I suffer from it as surely as does the returning, “shell-shocked” vet.

Dr. B and I are “married,” one flesh, till death do us part. He saw to that.

Dr. B was not always so much with me, however, at least not at the level of complete consciousness. Between the year the abuse occurred—over the course of the summer of 1964—and the year, almost 30 years later, when the toxic memories of those long-ago events finally burst back into my adult consciousness, with a rage as blue-white as a Bunsen burner’s flame, I had packed them away so deeply that they existed, for all intents and purposes, in a storage unit located outside my body; outside my mind.

I had stored those memories . . . where the sun don’t shine.

The fact of children’s burying memories of experiences too painful to address—gnawing off extremities, as it were, too infected to function—is now common knowledge and, in both traditional medicine (psychotherapy) and less “Western” approaches to repairing the psyche (“soul retrieval,” just one example) doctors and healers of all stripes now recognize and address the sealed-away traumas of childhood.

That we lop off parts of ourselves too shattered, too violated, too traumatized, and go on with “phantom limbs,” is now accepted. But that there are so many of us? That the institutions that “foster” such abuse continue to foster it in silence and tacit acceptance? That there is not an immense groundswell of public outrage at the fact that our children are still being systematically victimized by those who have power over them—older relatives, priests, teachers, professors, counselors, doctors? Well, what does this say about us, as a culture?

It says we are still not listening to our children; still not hearing them as they try to tell us there’s something wrong with Uncle Ed, something dark going on down at the church, something bad happening at school, something Dr. B shouldn’t be doing to us, but is. Over and over and over again.

There were 64 pupils in my 1968 high school graduating class. I am not on that list, as I had left, at 15, after junior year, to enter college. Against the prinicple’s advice, and with no diploma. I would receive my diploma from Francis W. Parker four years later, along with my B.A. with Honors and cum laude.

In 1967, my father, a professor at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, was relocating to Athens, Georgia, to teach at the graduate school there, and was unwilling to leave his daughter behind to finish out her high school career at one of America’s toniest prep schools.

It will always be a mystery to me just why he decided against leaving me behind at the home of trusted friends to finish out my senior year. But he made the right decision. The more distance I could put between myself and Chicago just then, the better.

The man who molested me, repeatedly, was not, I hasten to add, one of my teachers. Parker’s teachers, in my experience, kept the clearest of boundaries. Unless I am very much mistaken, in the years I attended that truly great private high school, we students walked safe and secure within its halls. Those who taught us were fully-functioning adults, as far as I know, well aware of the one-up/one-down nature of the teacher/student relationship.

But Parker’s faculty and parents—because the student body was so small—were often thrown together. There were many meetings, many gatherings, many celebrations. We students were in and out of one another’s homes, and I still recall with great fondness Tommy Nathan’s father, Lisa Holabird’s father, Jenny Schwab’s. They were “real” fathers: when I visited, it was always clear who were the adults—responsible and somewhat distant in their adulthood—and who were the kids.

Not so with the parents of one of my very closest friends, however. There were no “boundaries” in Dr. B’s world; his web. A physician and, I later learned, a back-street abortionist, he would readily use his authority—his one-upmanship—to violate, humiliate and utterly invade a child’s space, physical and psychological.

Looking back now, I feel he must, also, have violated the bodies and souls of his adopted children—one, my close friend. And how many other children at Parker? And what, precisely, did his wife know at the time? How could she not have known? Like Mrs. Sandusky, how could she not have known?

I have had no children of my own—to love and protect and nurture. But I know that, given my early experiences, I would not, like my own mother, have silenced any child of mine when she came to me trying, feebly, to explain what was going on in the bedroom of her best friend’s father.

I would have coaxed forth the stories . . . and taken swift, certain action. There would have been hell to pay.

Even now, knowing how cunning and calculating was Dr. B, and knowing there may still be other students at Parker who suffered at his hands, I have some hope that telling my story more fully here may free them to face their memories; force them to face what we all have so long been sweeping under the rug in America.

Supposedly, we all now coach our children “not to accept candy from strangers,” not to get into strangers’ cars, to scream and run if pursued or touched inappropriately.

But “strangers” are not the real problem. Strangers one can usually do something to avoid, flee, escape.

It is, instead, Uncle Ed, Cousin Jack, Msgr. William J. Lynn, Coach Sandusky, Doctor B.—the pedophiles we know, and trust, and entrust with our children’s bodies and futures—that we must keep closer watch over.

I tried so hard to tell my mother, the mother who, herself, had been molested as a prepubescent child in the rural south, by the owner of the candy store in Townville, SC, but she turned away from me, as though what I were saying made no sense; as though my words had been uttered in a foreign language.

Doctor B.? Kindly, old, arthritis-crippled Doctor B, who had just paid for me to spend an entire luxurious summer at his exquisite, palatial family ranch in Idaho?

No. That wasn’t possible. I must be confused. Let’s talk about something else.

Were there others, I will always wonder. Was I alone? How could I have been the only victim?

No, like Jerry Sandusky, Dr. B was very accomplished at isolating and pinning down—in the middle of nowhere—a victim who could not fight back, who would not fight back against a figure of authority and power, a medical doctor who obscured the nature of his abuse as “physical examinations.”

Perhaps the most damning thing he said to me—for a line of banter always accompanied his physical assaults—was that I was “defective,” somehow; that I would never, as a woman, be capable of orgasm.

It was the first time I had ever heard that word. From his evil lips. And the poison works still, half a century later.

Wake up, parents of children at tony, expensive prep schools. Parents with children on scholarship in elite athletic programs. Children still, in 2012, left alone with priests, doctors, teachers—any figures of authority who may well have gravitated to their professions, gravitated to children-in-need, children one-down from their one-up positions, for the sole purpose of abusing them. For, in the locker rooms of our great universities, and in the halls of our impossible-to-enter private schools—in the places where we stupidly believe such atrocities cannot happen, atrocities happen apace.

And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot right them once they occur: the damage is for life.