Freedom Page 5

  To avoid waking her little sister, she went and cried in the shower. This was, without exaggeration, the most wretched hour of her life. Even today, when she thinks of people who are oppressed around the world and victims of injustice, and how they must feel, her mind goes back to that hour. Things that had never occurred to her before, such as the injustice of an oldest daughter having to share a room and not being given Eulalie’s old room in the basement because it was now filled floor to ceiling with outdated campaign paraphernalia, also the injustice of her mother being so enthralled about the middle daughter’s thespian performances but never going to any of Patty’s games, occurred to her now. She was so indignant she almost felt like talking to somebody. But she was afraid to let her coach or teammates know she’d been drinking.

  How the story came out, in spite of her best efforts to keep it buried, was that Coach Nagel got suspicious and spied on her in the locker room after the next day’s game. Sat Patty down in her office and confronted her regarding her bruises and unhappy demeanor. Patty humiliated herself by immediately and sobbingly confessing to all. To her total shock, Coach then proposed taking her to the hospital and notifying the police. Patty had just gone three-for-four with two runs scored and several outstanding defensive plays. She obviously wasn’t greatly harmed. Also, her parents were political friends of Ethan’s parents, so that was a nonstarter. She dared to hope that an abject apology for breaking training, combined with Coach’s pity and leniency, would put the matter to rest. But oh how wrong she was.

  Coach called Patty’s house and got Patty’s mother, who, as always, was breathless and running out to a meeting and had neither time to talk nor yet the moral wherewithal to admit that she didn’t have time to talk, and Coach spoke these indelible words into the P.E. Dept.’s beige telephone: “Your daughter just told me that she was raped last night by a boy named Ethan Post.” Coach then listened to the phone for a minute before saying, “No, she just now told me . . . That’s right . . . Just last night . . . Yes, she is.” And handed Patty the telephone.

  “Patty?” her mother said. “Are you—all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Mrs. Nagel says there was an incident last night?”

  “The incident was I was raped.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was home this morning. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why, why, why? Why didn’t you say something to me?”

  “Maybe it just didn’t seem like such a big deal right then.”

  “So but then you did tell Mrs. Nagel.”

  “No,” Patty said. “She’s just more observant than you are.”

  “I hardly saw you this morning.”

  “I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying.”

  “And you think you might have been . . . It might have been . . .”

  “Raped.”

  “I can’t believe this,” her mother said. “I’m going to come and get you.”

  “Coach Nagel wants me to go to the hospital.”

  “Are you not all right?”

  “I already said. I’m fine.”

  “Then just stay put, and don’t either of you do anything until I get there.”

  Patty hung up the phone and told Coach that her mother was coming.

  “We’re going to put that boy in jail for a long, long time,” Coach said.

  “Oh no no no no no,” Patty said. “No, we’re not.”

  “Patty.”

  “It’s just not going to happen.”

  “It will if you want it to.”

  “No, actually, it won’t. My parents and the Posts are political friends.”

  “Listen to me,” Coach said. “That has nothing to do with anything. Do you understand?”

  Patty was quite certain that Coach was wrong about this. Dr. Post was a cardiologist and his wife was from big money. They had one of the houses that people such as Teddy Kennedy and Ed Muskie and Walter Mondale made visits to when they were short of funds. Over the years, Patty had heard much tell of the Posts’ “back yard” from her parents. This “back yard” was apparently about the size of Central Park but nicer. Conceivably one of Patty’s straight-A, grade-skipping, Arts-doing sisters could have brought trouble down on the Posts, but it was absurd to imagine the hulking B-student family jock making a dent in the Posts’ armor.

  “I’m just never going to drink again,” she said, “and that will solve the problem.”

  “Maybe for you,” Coach said, “but not for somebody else. Look at your arms. Look what he did. He’ll do that to somebody else if you don’t stop him.”

  “It’s just bruises and scratches.”

  Coach here made a motivational speech about standing up for your teammates, which in this case meant all the young women Ethan might ever meet. The upshot was that Patty was supposed to take a hard foul for the team and press charges and let Coach inform the New Hampshire prep school where Ethan was a student, so he could be expelled and denied a diploma, and that if Patty didn’t do this she would be letting down her team.

  Patty began to cry again, because she would almost rather have died than let a team down. Earlier in the winter, with the flu, she’d played most of a half of basketball before fainting on the sideline and getting fluids intravenously. The problem now was that she hadn’t been with her own team the night before. She’d gone to the party with her field-hockey friend Amanda, whose soul was apparently never going to be at rest until she’d induced Patty to sample piña coladas, vast buckets of which had been promised at the McCluskys’. El ron me puso loca. None of the other girls at the McCluskys’ swimming pool were jocks. Almost just by showing up there, Patty had betrayed her real true team. And now she’d been punished for it. Ethan hadn’t raped one of the fast girls, he’d raped Patty, because she didn’t belong there, she didn’t even know how to drink.

  She promised Coach to give the matter some thought.

  It was shocking to see her mother in the gym and obviously shocking to her mother to find herself there. She was wearing her everyday pumps and resembled Goldilocks in daunting woods as she peered around uncertainly at the naked metal equipment and the fungal floors and the clustered balls in mesh bags. Patty went to her and submitted to embrace. Her mother being much smaller of frame, Patty felt somewhat like a grandfather clock that Joyce was endeavoring to lift and move. She broke away and led Joyce into Coach’s little glass-walled office so that the necessary conference could be had.

  “Hi, I’m Jane Nagel,” Coach said.

  “Yes, we’ve—met,” Joyce said.

  “Oh, you’re right, we did meet once,” Coach said.

  In addition to her strenuous elocution, Joyce had strenuously proper posture and a masklike Pleasant Smile suitable for nearly all occasions public and private. Because she never raised her voice, not even in anger (her voice just got shakier and more strained when she was mad), her Pleasant Smile could be worn even at moments of excruciating conflict.

  “No, it was more than once,” she said now. “It was several times.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m quite sure of it.”

  “That doesn’t sound right to me,” Coach said.

  “I’ll be outside,” Patty said, closing the door behind her.

  The parent-coach conference didn’t last long. Joyce soon came out on clicking heels and said, “Let’s go.”

  Coach, standing in the doorway behind Joyce, gave Patty a significant look. The look meant Don’t forget what I said about teamwork.

  Joyce’s car was the last one left in its quadrant of the visitor lot. She put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it. Patty asked what was going to happen now.

  “Your father’s at his office,” Joyce said. “We’ll go straight there.”

  But she didn’t turn the key.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Patty said.

  “What I don’t und
erstand,” her mother burst out, “is how such an outstanding athlete as you are—I mean, how could Ethan, or whoever it was—”

  “Ethan. It was Ethan.”

  “How could anybody—or Ethan,” she said. “You say it’s pretty definitely Ethan. How could—if it’s Ethan—how could he have . . . ?” Her mother hid her mouth with her fingers. “Oh, I wish it had been almost anybody else. Dr. and Mrs. Post are such good friends of—good friends of so many good things. And I don’t know Ethan well, but—”

  “I hardly know him at all!”

  “Well then how could this happen!”

  “Let’s just go home.”

  “No. You have to tell me. I’m your mother.”

  Hearing herself say this, Joyce looked embarrassed. She seemed to realize how peculiar it was to have to remind Patty who her mother was. And Patty, for one, was glad to finally have this doubt out in the open. If Joyce was her mother, then how had it happened that she hadn’t come to the first round of the state tournament when Patty had broken the all-time Horace Greeley girls’ tournament scoring record with 32 points? Somehow everybody else’s mother had found time to come to that game.

  She showed Joyce her wrists.

  “This is what happened,” she said. “I mean, part of what happened.”

  Joyce looked once at her bruises, shuddered, and then turned away as if respecting Patty’s privacy. “This is terrible,” she said. “You’re right. This is terrible.”

  “Coach Nagel says I should go to the emergency room and tell the police and tell Ethan’s headmaster.”

  “Yes, I know what your coach wants. She seems to feel that castration might be an appropriate punishment. What I want to know is what you think.”

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  “If you want to go to the police now,” Joyce said, “we’ll go to the police. Just tell me if that’s what you want.”

  “I guess we should tell Dad first.”

  So down the Saw Mill Parkway they went. Joyce was always driving Patty’s siblings to Painting, Guitar, Ballet, Japanese, Debate, Drama, Piano, Fencing, and Mock Court, but Patty herself seldom rode with Joyce anymore. Most weekdays, she came home very late on the jock bus. If she had a game, somebody else’s mom or dad dropped her off. If she and her friends were ever stranded, she knew not to bother calling her parents but to go ahead and use the Westchester Cab dispatcher’s number and one of the twenty-dollar bills that her mother made her always carry. It never occurred to her to use the twenties for anything but cabs, or to go anywhere after a game except straight home, where she peeled aluminum foil off her dinner at ten or eleven o’clock and went down to the basement to wash her uniform while she ate and watched reruns. She often fell asleep down there.

  “Here’s a hypothetical question,” Joyce said, driving. “Do you think it might be enough if Ethan formally apologized to you?”

  “He already apologized.”

  “For—”

  “For being rough.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I said I wanted to go home.”

  “But he did apologize for being rough.”

  “It wasn’t a real apology.”

  “All right. I’ll take your word for it.”

  “I just want him to know I exist.”

  “Whatever you want—sweetie.”

  Joyce pronounced this “sweetie” like the first word of a foreign language she was learning.

  As a test or a punishment, Patty said: “Maybe, I guess, if he apologized in a really sincere way, that might be enough.” And she looked carefully at her mother, who was struggling (it seemed to Patty) to contain her excitement.

  “That sounds to me like a nearly ideal solution,” Joyce said. “But only if you really think it would be enough for you.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Patty said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “I thought you just said it would be.”

  Patty began to cry again very desolately.

  “I’m sorry,” Joyce said. “Did I misunderstand?”

  “HE RAPED ME LIKE IT WAS NOTHING. I’M PROBABLY NOT EVEN THE FIRST.”

  “You don’t know that, Patty.”

  “I want to go to the hospital.”

  “Look, here, we’re almost at Daddy’s office. Unless you’re actually hurt, we might as well—”

  “But I already know what he’ll say. I know what he’ll want me to do.”

  “He’ll want to do whatever’s best for you. Sometimes it’s hard for him to express it, but he loves you more than anything.”

  Joyce could hardly have made a statement Patty more fervently longed to believe was true. Wished, with her whole being, was true. Didn’t her dad tease her and ridicule her in ways that would have been simply cruel if he didn’t secretly love her more than anything? But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

  There was a smell of mothballs in her father’s inner sanctum, which he’d taken over from his now-deceased senior partner without redoing the carpeting and curtains. Where exactly the mothball smell came from was one of those mysteries.

  “What a rotten little shit!” was Ray’s response to the tidings his daughter and wife brought of Ethan Post’s crime.

  “Not so little, unfortunately,” Joyce said with a dry laugh.

  “He’s a rotten little shit punk,” Ray said. “He’s a bad seed!”

  “So do we go to the hospital now?” Patty said. “Or to the police?”

  Her father told her mother to call Dr. Sipperstein, the old pediatrician, who’d been involved in Democratic politics since Roosevelt, and see if he was available for an emergency. While Joyce made this call, Ray asked Patty if she knew what rape was.

  She stared at him.

  “Just checking,” he said. “You do know the actual legal definition.”

  “He had sex with me against my will.”

  “Did you actually say no?”

  “ ‘No,’ ‘don’t,’ ‘stop.’ Anyway, it was obvious. I was trying to scratch him and push him off me.”

  “Then he is a despicable piece of shit.”

  She’d never heard her father talk this way, and she appreciated it, but only abstractly, because it didn’t sound like him.

  “Dave Sipperstein says he can meet us at five at his office,” Joyce reported. “He’s so fond of Patty, I think he would have canceled his dinner plans if he’d had to.”

  “Right,” Patty said, “I’m sure I’m number one among his twelve thousand patients.” She then told her dad her story, and her dad explained to her why Coach Nagel was wrong and she couldn’t go to the police.

  “Chester Post is not an easy person,” Ray said, “but he does a lot of good in the county. Given his, uh, given his position, an accusation like this is going to generate extraordinary publicity. Everyone will know who the accuser is. Everyone. Now, what’s bad for the Posts is not your concern. But it’s virtually certain you’ll end up feeling more violated by the pretrial and the trial and the publicity than you do right now. Even if it’s pleaded out. Even with a suspended sentence, even with a gag order. There’s still a court record.”

  Joyce said, “But this is all for her to decide, not—”

  “Joyce.” Ray stilled her with a raised hand. “The Posts can afford any lawyer in the country. And as soon as the accusation is made public, the worst of the damage to the defendant is over. He has no incentive to speed things along. In fact, it’s to his advantage to see that your reputation suffers as much as possible before a plea or a trial.”

  Patty bowed her head and asked what her father thought she should do.

  “I’m going to call Chester now,” he said. “You go see Dr. Sipperstein and make sure you’re OK.”

  “And get him as a witness,” Patty said.


  “Yes, and he could testify if need be. But there isn’t going to be a trial, Patty.”

  “So he just gets away with it? And does it to somebody else next weekend?”

  Ray raised both hands. “Let me, ah. Let me talk to Mr. Post. He might be amenable to a deferred prosecution. Kind of a quiet probation. Sword over Ethan’s head.”

  “But that’s nothing.”

  “Actually, Pattycakes, it’s quite a lot. It’d be your guarantee that he won’t do this to someone else. Requires an admission of guilt, too.”

  It did seem absurd to imagine Ethan wearing an orange jumpsuit and sitting in a jail cell for inflicting a harm that was mostly in her head anyway. She’d done wind sprints that hurt as bad as being raped. She felt more beaten up after a tough basketball game than she did now. Plus, as a jock, you got used to having other people’s hands on you—kneading a cramped muscle, playing tight defense, scrambling for a loose ball, taping an ankle, correcting a stance, stretching a hamstring.

  And yet: the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, and a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste.

  In Dr. Sipperstein’s office she submitted to examination like a good jock. After she’d put her clothes back on, he asked if she’d ever had intercourse before.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. What about contraception? Did the other person use it?”

  She nodded. “That’s when I tried to get away. When I saw what he had.”

  “A condom.”

  “Yes.”

  All this and more Dr. Sipperstein jotted down on her chart. Then he took off his glasses and said, “You’re going to have a good life, Patty. Sex is a great thing, and you’ll enjoy it all your life. But this was not a good day, was it?”