Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

And then the letter arrived.

On his first reading he didn’t understand what she was saying. The language she used was foreign and distracting, full of the jargon of political correctness. (He’d worried about that when she’d chosen Ward, and here it was, flowering up from his daughter’s hand.) She made vague allusions to events that he couldn’t identify: “what you did to me all those nights.” He reached the end mystified as to what she was accusing him of. What had he done to her, all those nights? When she was a girl he had tucked her into bed, read a chapter of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist , and turned out the light. At some point this had ended, and she began putting herself to bed. And then, with a heave of revulsion, he got her meaning.

He was dimly familiar with the idea of repressed memory. He understood repression in the Freudian sense, feelings pushed out of conscious awareness. But the contemporary notion that shocking, dramatic events can somehow go unrecalled for years, only to emerge, intact, on the therapist’s couch… he hadn’t noticed when this piece of sophistry had entered the popular wisdom. And now his daughter believed that her childhood, the decade he’d spent battling for her happiness in the face of her mother’s death, was a pretext, a cover story for awful crimes against her. He’s no longer the loving father, he’s the pervert, the twisted man who can satisfy himself only by turning on his own child. Every tender thing between them, every wound dressed, every wish assuaged — all vanished. The dinner-table seminars, the bedtime readings from Dickens, the bike-riding lessons and trips to Paris and Rome, the years he put up with Valerie so that Maya would have someone to talk to when she began menstruating — these were no more than the most elaborate cover story ever devised. And his marriage, the passion between him and Daphne — do pedophiles have such feelings, or was this false too, a scheme to generate what he really wanted, a prepubescent? Donald’s voice has gotten louder and his hand smacks the armrest of his chair. The moment he opened that letter, this became his story: the accusation, the defense.

He phoned and phoned, left message after message, until the roommate, that awful Emily, picked up and asked him to stop calling. He contacted the university and got passed around the phone network until he reached someone at Campus Affairs, an ignorant feminist, who said something about student privacy and made it very clear that, as far as she was concerned, anyone accused of molesting a child was guilty until proven innocent. He called organizations that dealt with child abuse, but none of them had anything to say about false accusations, and one asked for his name and address in a way he found sinister. He wanted to call his lawyer, but by then he had realized that he should watch his mouth, even with his attorney of fourteen years, whose son’s wedding he had attended six months earlier. His life had become a Kafka novel, or one of the stories you used to hear from the USSR: an innocent man is caught up in the omnipotent machinery of persecution. And so he found himself in the public library, intellectual home to every conspiracy’s victim, where he used the Internet for the first time. That’s how he learned about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Donald spoke by telephone to a volunteer there, who reassured him that he was not alone and who sent him a packet of newsletters and clippings describing the epidemic that had swept his daughter away.

“It’s the therapists,” he says. “It is criminal, absolutely criminal, what these people are doing.” His voice becomes firmer and more rehearsed. “You walk into their office and say, I’ve been feeling a bit down lately . Perhaps you’re having difficulties in your life, perhaps you’re feeling anxious or depressed, and you go looking for help. And they say, I can tell just from looking at you that you were abused as a child . They go down a checklist and say, Which of these fit you ? and they read you a list of statements that could apply to anyone: I feel different from other people, I feel uncomfortable about sex . And when you say, No, I was never abused , they say, Ah! The abuse was so awful that you’ve blocked it out . They say, It must have been someone you were very close to . Sometimes they hypnotize you; they tell you hypnosis can bring these ‘repressed’ memories to the surface, when all it does is make you suggestible, so you produce whatever ‘memories’ they’re looking for. Other times they say you won’t get better until you can recover your memories, and they insist that you imagine being abused, write stories about being abused, until you start dreaming about being abused, and then they say, Aha, the memories are coming back !

“If you’d asked me before all this began, I would have told you that Maya was too smart and confident to fall for that kind of thing. But she was away from home for the first time, and vulnerable, and they took advantage of that. This therapist, she worked for the school, do you believe it? Ward College, to which I sent twenty thousand dollars a year, employs therapists who tear children away from their parents, who plant delusions in their minds, who warp their reality until they can’t trust anyone.”

Donald has had no direct contact with Maya since the letter. The registrar’s office stopped sending him her grades. For want of other ideas, he hired a New Hampshire private investigator named Lucas Moore, a skinny man with a ponytail who could blend in on a college campus. Lucas shadowed Maya twelve hours a day for a week, watched her go to class, to the library, to parties, to cafés, back to her dorm. It was clear that daily observation wasn’t going to reveal anything, so Donald and Lucas switched to a long-term arrangement in which, once a month, Lucas sent a photograph of Maya in some public location, along with the date, time, and place the photo was taken. Lucas watched Maya graduate and sent one last picture before she left Concord: in cap and gown, surrounded by friends.

Donald decided not to hire an investigator in San Francisco. He was remarried eighteen months ago, to a woman who supports him and believes him and has encouraged him to think of the period when he had a daughter as something that’s over.

“You keep sending the letters, though,” I say.

“I will keep sending them until I die,” he says. “I still send her a gift on her birthday, too. I send her a check every year. She never cashes it. I started increasing the amount. I wanted to see if there was anything she’d consent to take from me. By last year it was up to fifteen thousand dollars.”

“I don’t think she wants your money.”

“Apparently not,” he says. He looks down at his hands, folded across his stomach, and gives a little grunt, some kind of communication with himself. “Thank you for listening to all that,” he says. “I’ve had to give up my daughter to this madness. But this awful image of me that she plants — it’s not something I can tolerate. There are people who hear my name and think, Yes, that’s the man who molested his little girl . I want to go up to each one, to explain, to clear my name. Honestly, you have no idea what your name is , what it means , until something like this happens.”

I would like to be able to say what he wants to hear, which is You couldn’t possibly be a child molester — you’re a civilized man ! But how can I say that?

“I’m sorry,” I say, pushing myself up from the chair.

When he stands I remember how tall he is. He wears a terrifying expression of disappointment, a look I’m sure Maya has seen plenty of. “Will you tell her I love her,” he says. He knows I can’t; he’s just handing me a shard of his pain to carry around.