Part Four: Chapter 3

III

Early in the week I am walking around the pond in front of the high school and I call Amy Tuckerman on my cell phone. She is a bit distant, but at least she acknowledges that fact rather than acting like it is not there.

“I’m giving you some space,” she says.

“What if I don’t want it?”

“You get it anyway. I think you and Diana need it.”

“I guess we do. I’m not sure we know what to do with it.”

“You should try to do something with it.”

“This is a new theme for you.”

“I had breakfast with Rachel this morning.”

“Breakfast? Rachel hasn’t been up for breakfast since I got home.”

“It was breakfast for me. Five a.m. on a bench on the Boston side of the River. She called and woke me up. I brought scones.”

“Where did you find scones at five a.m.?”

“In my breadbox.”

“You have a breadbox?”

“I’m experimenting with adulthood.”

“But you’re becoming fast friends with Rachel.”

“I think she’s going to need an adult friend.”

A few days later I submit and op-ed column to the Transcript under a shared by-line: “By Chet Spiro and Stanley T. Branford.” I am not entirely proud of what I am submitting as a comeback column, but I am piecing myself back together and trying to find the path on which I must put one foot in front of the other. An important part of the process, just as it was over a decade ago in the early days of Chet’s column, is for me to put words on paper and commit myself to them and to what I mean by them in a public way. I am under no illusion that this epistemological process of self-definition helps me to achieve a higher moral standard in my life than I could achieve by mere actions, unadorned with words, but I am hopeful that it will help me at least to achieve some clarity.

Beyond this column I have yet to return to work at the Transcript. The ownership appears to be somewhat nervous about the possibility, although there has been plenty of news coverage in all three papers about the police errors and the incorrect assumptions that led to my arrest in the first place. I suppose it may be difficult to perform as the conscience of the Transcript if I am going to be wearing some sort of scarlet letter for the crimes that have been wrongly attributed to me.

Crocker Talbot and his family will be even more nervous when they read my first comeback column, but I suspect the bean counters will approve of it and that they – perhaps with some help from the marketing folks – will prevail over the Nervous Nellie corporate lawyers. Suddenly my name – Stanley T. Branford, even more than Chet Spiro – sells newspapers! So they will be pleased that I am submitting the column under both names. My reasons are different, but the folks at the Transcript have every reason to believe that Chet and Stanley will prove to be a very marketable duo.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

By Chet Spiro and Stanley T. Branford

I am not the kind of man who ordinarily makes a commitment to track another man down and exact revenge upon him with my bare hands, or even with a weapon. If my life were a movie Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone would never play me. Maybe John Malkovich or William H. Macy: I am mild-mannered, middle-aged, and politically correct. I have not been in a physical fight since I was twelve years old.

But I will track you down, Henry Gibbs. When I find you, it is possible that, because of your age, I may be too civilized to take the revenge that I have imagined taking on you. But I will find a way.

I apologize if I have gotten a little ahead of myself here. For over a decade, reader, we have been meeting here Saturday mornings, in this space where I have written this column about my dear departed wife “Kate,” about the difficulty of saying good-bye to her, both while she was here and since she’s been gone. In an effort to protect our family’s privacy, I called her “Kate” here, and I called myself “Chet Spiro.”

I believed every word I wrote about her here, and in that sense it was all true. But as is often the case, there was more to the story. In the past few weeks both the privacy of my family and the image of Kate in which I believe have been blown to smithereens. I have learned that Kate’s essential honesty was built upon an edifice of necessary lies, lies that she was forced to weave together so that she could protect herself and hold some part of herself separate from a monster who had been haunting her since her childhood.

That monster’s name is Henry Gibbs.

Beginning when Kate was five years old, back in my hometown, she was molested, by Henry Gibbs and, probably under his coercion, by his son Bruce Gibbs. The abuse continued for several years directly, but its scars were permanent. It stole her childhood and haunted her for the rest of her life. Henry Gibbs ruined their lives, both of which are now over, and if that was not enough, that terror and brutality and violation spread into my life and my daughter’s life and the lives of hundreds of other people during the past several weeks.

But it will not stand. If secrecy is the shroud that has allowed Henry Gibbs to continue spreading his evil into the lives of innocent people, I will not allow him another day of secrecy and darkness.

As Stanley T. Branford, throughout what I have experienced as a mostly charmed and comfortable existence, I have been civilized, unabashedly liberal, sensitive, gentle, almost a pacifist. Not quite a pacifist, but certainly a believer in diplomacy and negotiation rather than aggression and barbarism.

Well, negotiate this, Henry Gibbs. I am coming for you.

In the past few days I have tried to find my way back to my old, civilized way of handling things. Should I be content that I have turned the whole mess over to the police, so that they can tell me that the statute of limitations has expired on your crimes, the victims are dead, can’t we just let it go? Should I move on with my life?

Well, that’s the problem. The definition and the terms of “my life” have changed these past few days. I am experiencing new needs. I have come to realize that the rage and revenge that I must exact upon Henry Gibbs is a necessary thing for myself and for my daughter, Kate’s daughter.

Readers of this newspaper and of Boston’s other newspapers may have already read enough to understand my anger at Henry Gibbs and Bruce Gibbs. Bring framed as a thief and a trafficker in pornography in drugs, and then being hauled off to prison on these false charges, was certainly no picnic either for me or for my family.

But it was the story behind the story that became the final straw for me: learning what had been done to my beloved Kate as a child, and then finding out that this sickness was spreading into the next generation as Henry Gibbs’ son Bruce Gibbs tried to meddle in my daughter’s life.

I don’t know what he had planned. I just know that it is time to break the cycle.

It is going to stop here. And now. I will find a way to ensure that. Even if all I am able to do is shine the light of truth on an evil man who is somewhere in or near this city, somewhere in this state, or somewhere beyond. Trying to hide in plain sight.

For me, as I try to sort through the issues that are entangling my life, it is as if Chet and I, these two incarnations of my spirit, are crossing each other’s palms in blood. It is the old “blood brothers” ritual I remember from being a kid, except that what we have here, instead of blood, is words. If I am insufficient as a man, it is because I trade too much in words and too little in blood. But words will have to do. Words are what I always have. We are making a solemn commitment to each other, and I find something appealing in the whimsical notion that we are making this commitment in full view of everyone, so that there will be no confusion about our intention to call Henry Gibbs out and to rid the world of the sick bastard once and for all. Or if not of him, of the sickness that he has spread into our lives.

It is almost as if I need to complete what Bruce Gibbs has begun: the process of hijacking my old identity, of obliterating the comfortable liberal by going public with my vengefulness against Bruce Gibbs in the names of both Chet and Stanley, in order that I will have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nothing to do except for what’s right. Only then will I be able to move on.

Only then will I be truly confident in my ability to look Diana and Rachel in the eye again.