III
Diana and I are coming up on eight years of marriage but our enjoyment of each other has not been dulled. There was a lull before and after Sam’s birth, but now that he is occupied with a growing number of organized activities and Rachel is out of the house as often as she can manage with her “posse” (as Diana and I call her friends, to the rolling of Rachel’s eyes), the pleasures of our initial years together have been rekindled by opportunity, and each of us, much to the other’s delight, is becoming more inventive and less inhibited with every passing year.
In all likelihood we will find two or even three opportunities to get busy with each other over the long weekend, and at least one of these will probably involve some prefatory time in the nicely appointed Jacuzzi and sauna room off of the master bedroom suite that we created in our walkout basement the summer before last. I will also take a couple of opportunities to devote myself to less pleasurable forms of exercise, either on the treadmill that occupies another room in the basement or, if the spring warming trend continues, on the little four-mile loop I like to run from our house in Belmont over to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, around the pond, and back.
Can life possibly be any better? Sure it can. A little more money might reduce the stress level a tad, but I’m not complaining. I don’t have a greedy bone in my body, but Diana and I often feel that the choices we make – choices to which we agree after calm and careful conversation – seem to keep us from having much left over with which to splurge. So we drive sensible cars, wear sensible clothes (even on television), take sensible vacations, and even use the public library sometimes to borrow books and DVDs rather than paying for them. As a result – and this, of course, is the point – we are able to tell our children that they will be able to attend any college to which they can gain admission, and in the meantime they are not suffering either in the extra-curricular activities department or in the areas of wardrobe and “toys.” Although we occasionally worry aloud to each other that we are spoiling our kids by failing to teach them discipline and the ability to make difficult choices, these worries never seem to prevail in the form of our denying them much of what they ask for.
The fact is that we both enjoy having enough to spoil our own children in ways that the two of us certainly never experienced as children. We worry a little that the kids will grow up with some kind of self-absorbed and ungrateful perspective that they are simply entitled to whatever they have, but we make an effort to overcome this possibility by making our sense of gratitude for what we have an explicit part of our family culture. We make social action and community engagement a part of our daily lives, and from what we can tell these values seem to be taking hold in very evident ways in our children. Diana beamed brilliantly and rushed home to tell me when one of Sam’s pre-kindergarten teachers told her “Sam is the most generous little boy I have ever met.” It wasn’t until a week later that Diana mentioned to me that the same teacher also told her that Sam had scored in the 98th percentile across the board on some stupid standardized test. And I loved it when, after observing Rachel’s dedication to organizing a weekly student food drive for Rosie’s Place, a Boston inner-city women’s shelter, the principal at Belmont High quipped for my benefit that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
The front door is ajar a few inches inside the storm door, which means that Rachel is home, either on the phone picking over the details of the day with one of her friends or logged onto the family computer in the study. I close the door firmly behind me and listen for the “Hi, Daddy!” that usually follows the door’s sound even when she is on the phone – a sequence that I choose to interpret as a signal of her caring for me rather than of any secretive vigilance as to my alien parental presence – but the house remains silent as I remove my Polartec zip jacket and hang it in the front closet. Funny, she hasn’t become obsessive about the internet, but it pleases me that she is becoming more computer literate than either Diana or myself, and I am confident that she will know how to protect herself and maintain appropriate boundaries with anyone with whom she might interact online. Rachel and I have an exceptionally close bond, one that is natural given what we have survived together and the fact that we entered into this current family, with Diana and more recently with the addition of Sam, joined at the hip in a kind of father-and-daughter package deal. Diana, for her part, desperate in her desire to be a good stepmother to Rachel, has a wonderful ability to understand and embrace such realities without ever having the need to verbalize them except when I need to hear something about them.
I trust that Rachel has the inner strength, the experience-processing tools, the tradecraft of living that will enable her to protect herself from the challenges and potential violations and lurking predators of the internet or any of the other playgrounds, both benign and sinister, that life presents to a fifteen-year-old girl these days. Mary Kate and I began the process of raising Rachel to be precocious and aware at the same time she was somehow soulful and uncynical, and I continued along the same lines in our years alone together (even when I felt I was not succeeding at much else) and in the initial years of my efforts to build a courtship and ultimately to blend a family with Diana.
It has not been an easy process of family blending for Rachel, despite her dutiful efforts to present herself as supportive and accepting and even interested in this new woman with whom her Daddy was falling in love. I really wanted to believe in Rachel’s happy-face acting job, because it made life a hell of a lot simpler and easier, but I had to face the truth when my running buddy and occasional attorney Wade Gannon sat down next to me in the steam room and did narrative justice to a scene that his daughter had described to him of Rachel’s full-blown but not very flattering impersonation of Diana, right down to the slight lisp and the glasses perched on the end of her nose, punctuated with a final reference to Diana as the “skinny-ass bitch.” Not exactly terms of endearment. But we kept working through it, and I believe that Rachel, if still a little brittle and sensitive, has reached the point where she is secure enough about my love for her and is actually beginning to accept Diana as a sort of mother, and perhaps even a sort of friend.
There are a couple of household maintenance tasks that I have promised Diana I will take care of at some point this weekend, and as I close the closet door I decide that I will tackle a small one now – moving all the storm windows up to their “warm weather” position so that the window screens can be lowered to their functional position – and thus render the balance of the coming weekend even more of a treat. First, of course, I will duck my head into the study to greet my obviously very occupied daughter.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I call as I open the door.
Rachel is out of place. She is not sitting in the little mobile office chair in front of the monitor. She is staring at the monitor, but the chair has been pushed back a couple of feet behind her as if she was sitting there initially and then slumped to her current kneeling position before the keyboard and screen. Tears stream down her face. Her body is heaving, shuddering almost noiselessly.
“Daddy, how could you do this to me?” she wails. “What is all this?”
There is an unadorned anger in her voice that I have never heard from her before, not aimed at me, not once.
I zero in on the screen. The full screen is a photograph that I have never seen before. There is no pretty way to put it. It is a photograph of a naked woman servicing a horse. Sexually. Orally, to be precise.
As soon as I register what I am looking at, the picture vaporizes into an electronic white dot in the middle of a blank, black screen, and that point of light then explodes a second later into another full-screen image: two naked men are standing side-by-side, facing the camera, their inside arms around each other’s shoulders in a fraternal gesture, their outside arms holding their penises, with which they are spraying an apparently teenaged girl who is posed in the picture’s foreground, her legs spread open and her fingers at work inside her as she raises her open-mouthed face and upper body slightly to catch the two streams of yellow fluid that splash onto her.
Rachel moves and is looking at me now, with a mask of horror and injury that I have seen before, one I had hoped I would never see again on her face. It was the very same face I saw when she was four years old and I first told her that her mother was going to die and leave us alone. It is a face in which extreme anger and extreme sadness are fused together inextricably, and I rush across the room to embrace her and to place myself physically between her and the monitor, as if I could protect her from any more of these visual assaults that have somehow violated our home.
“Get away from me, Daddy,” she spits at me as she rises up and springs out of my path, starting for the door. “Don’t ever touch me again.”
She is in motion past me as I shrink at her command. I look back again at the monitor, which is refreshing itself yet again and this time filling up with a photograph of two well-tanned, toothsome, grinning, towheaded children standing side by side on a beach, facing the camera. They are perhaps nine or ten years old, happy and healthy and wholesome by all outward appearances, except for the fundamental horror: the little girl is reaching down with one hand and fondling the little boy’s erect penis.
Where have these hideous pictures come from? What are they doing on our family computer? A recognition comes quickly over me, drowning me in a knowledge of evil. Never in my life have I come face to face so intimately with evil. I feel in an instant the sensation that makes people say their blood “chilled.” I am also, suddenly, very weak. There is a movement of bile, at the very least, regurgitating its way upward toward my gullet. I could easily give in now to a kind of paralysis and bleak devastation, but my instinct to save Rachel, to act as if could save her and perhaps save my relationship with her, is stronger, and I turn and run after her as the front door slams behind her and she leaps out onto the front walk and takes off at a dead run. I want to catch up to her and hold her gently by the shoulders and ask her to “Take a deep breath, honey,” and comfort her and find out how she happened to be looking at these grotesque pictures. But she is already around the corner and heading up the little hill toward Concord Avenue by the time I am out the door. We jog together often and there are a few road races each year that we enjoy running together, but the balance between us has shifted in the last couple of years and she is now decidedly faster than I am. I run hard to the corner and look up the hill. She is already long gone.
I walk back forlornly to the front yard. Shadow, our black retriever, is in the fenced-in side yard, barking with excitement at this new game and petitioning desperately for me to redress my obvious and grievous mistake of having left him out of the fun. A neighbor, Paula Leavitt, stands in her front doorway taking in the whole scene with a judge’s imperious grave.
Why the hell is Rachel so angry with me? But now I look up at Paula Leavitt standing arms akimbo in her storm door, and I begin to get it. I give a half-hearted neighborly wave to Paula and she makes no effort to return it, but turns her head slightly downward as if she were admiring her own front lawn.
Rachel thinks that the pornography is mine. That is the only thing that can explain her extreme and unprecedented behavior toward me. I am hurt, but every bit as much as I am hurt, I am ashamed, as if her implicit accusation carries with it some self-validation that makes me believe it in spite of all that I know to the contrary. Don’t I know my own mind? Can the concrete reality of my perceptions be bullied so easily by the shame that is overtaking me? I turn my back on the street. But I can still feel Paula Leavitt’s eyes upon me.
My button-down shirt, I notice, has come untucked during my fifty-something man’s version of a sprint down the street. Suddenly I feel rumpled, disheveled, like a suburban hobo returning to my neighborhood after somehow becoming disoriented and spending a night sleeping in a public park. I step inside my front door. I am relieved to have a little privacy from Paula Leavitt and any other neighbors who might be more subtle about their rubbernecking.
I hope it won’t be long before Rachel returns. Diana and Sam will be home soon and the notion that Rachel might still be at large then is disconcerting. I do not want to have to explain myself, or her. I know of other families with girls Rachel’s age who stay out all night long, scream profanities at their parents at the drop of a hat, and do whatever they please. Such possibilities terrify me, but I know that is not Rachel. Diana and I do not want or try to control Rachel just for the sake of exercising control. We simply want to help her have the best life she can have, and part of the delicate orchestration of that vision involves, if not control, certainly some direction, some guidance, some structure imposed on her life.
It seems to be a positive by-product of the step-family relationship between Diana and Rachel that Diana and I have settled into a pattern wherein the parental influence that we exercise over Rachel’s life comes less from explicit family hierarchy and more from less tangible moral authority, which ensues from the fact that each of us, although certainly I more than Diana, enjoys Rachel’s trust, her respect, and her love. It is something to cherish, something to protect as tenaciously as I am able.
Which makes this minor crisis of misunderstanding all the more troubling, but I will get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible. I push the chair over to the computer and sit down, my shirt still untucked. The slideshow continues, although now the picture of two women in cheerleader garb performing sexual acts on a well-endowed man in what remains of a basketball uniform seems positively mainstream and all-American compared with what I saw before.
I left-click the mouse and nothing happens, then hit the ESC key and the slideshow program is downsized to a manageable window with the familiar clickable icons in the upper right-hand corner that allow me to minimize, maximize, or resize. Okay then. The slideshow refreshes, and in the smaller window is a smaller picture of a smaller girl, a girl of seven or eight who is weeping, her face contorted with obvious pain as she braces herself against what appears to be a kitchen cabinet in a rough-looking, dirty kitchen. The tears, or the pain, or what is taking place in the rest of the picture makes me begin to weep silently, but I forge ahead with my efforts and right-click on the photograph, then click on the word “Properties” from the pull-down list of choices that appear on the screen. A new window appears and reveals the file name of the picture of the seven-year-old girl: stanleybabies41.gif. That is strange. The data in the new window also reveals the location of the file on the computer’s hard drive:
C:/stanley/documents/stanleyaccounts/stanleybabies41.gif
My quiet sobbing continues, even as its emotional content begins to change. What is going on? It appears that Rachel was reading an email and had her attention diverted. The only other open window I can see is an email message to Rachel from one of her track teammates on the not very interesting topic of what is best to eat for breakfast and lunch before an afternoon track meet. I minimize both open windows and check to see what other applications or windows might be open. Hidden behind the email window is a small pop-up window that has opened itself with an instant message:
StanBran: If you want to see what I’m into, click here!
“StanBran” is my nickname on our family’s Google account, chosen for me by Rachel several years ago. But I haven’t sent out any such messages. My chest begins to constrict and ache.
I position the mouse as indicated in the instant message and click, and the same sick slideshow maximizes again, just as it had, obviously, for Rachel before me. It transfixes me, and on some level I am her, Rachel, as it begins its assault on us. The next picture shows more of the same trash. This one – probably the first one that Rachel saw – involves an adult woman crouched on all fours as she looks back over her shoulder while experiencing double-barreled penetration from two males who look young enough to call her “den mother.” I quickly minimize the slideshow program again with a couple of keystrokes, then open Windows Explorer and navigate my way to the subdirectory in which these disgusting photographs have been stored. There are over a hundred of them. Each photograph is named with a numerical suffix appended to the root name “stanleybabies,” each with a little camera icon next to it.”
My initial instinct is to start deleting this trash from the hard drive, but already I am beginning to doublethink my situation. I don’t want to appear to be hiding something, although I cannot help but begin to wonder if somehow I may have something to hide. I don’t want to destroy any evidence, because it is clear to me that these pictures are criminal in nature, and also that somebody is trying to hurt my family and – it seems – to make it appear that I am somehow behind the existence of these pictures on the computer’s hard drive. That I’m not would be obvious to anyone who knows me, wouldn’t it? I’m certain it would be.
I notice that my breathing is constricted and I loosen my tie. The sounds of people entering the house break the silence. It is Diana and Sam. Before I can even stand up from the chair Sam explodes into the room full of his boundless energy and takes a flying leap right into my lap, arms out to embrace me as he yells at the top of his lungs, “Daddy, we don’t have any money!”
I lift Sam up and carry him out to the front room where I set him down on the sofa and look up at Diana, who is removing her jacket.
“We don’t have any money?” I repeat, trying unsuccessfully to mask my concern about the content of the question by mimicking Sam’s singsong delivery.
“You look white as a sheet, honey,” says Diana.
“Probably coming down with something,” I say, feeling immediately dishonest and, shocked that I would turn to a lie without a second thought, even more vulnerable, even less myself. “Did you shop?”
“Tried to,” she says. “But it’s like Sam said. We don’t have any money.”
“Told you!” yells Sam triumphantly, but we are entering that zone of extremity and the unexpected where children are not heard.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, beginning to feel a little irritated.
“You tell me, Stanley,” Diana answers, not doing quite as good a job as she did at first at coming across as pleasant and undisturbed. “I got to the checkout counter with a cart full of stuff and a hungry boy and they declined all three of my credit cards and both of my ATM cards.”
There is a teardrop on her cheek now and she is struggling a bit.
“It must have been some sort of malfunction at the store,” I say. “There’s plenty of money available.”
“Everybody else’s card was working,” says Diana. “I even drove through a bank ATM on the way home and tried them all again. Insufficient funds, insufficient funds, insufficient funds, insufficient funds, insufficient funds.”
“Insufficient fun!” yells Sam with great exuberance.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I say. “That must have been pretty frustrating. Tell you what. Give me five minutes to check out our accounts online and I’ll see what’s up with them there.”
I don’t wait for an answer. A few seconds later I am back at the computer, the study door closed behind me. I am no longer concerned only about the pornography on the hard drive.
All our bank accounts are online now and, even better, Rachel took a website creation class at her summer camp last year and she has created a password-protected family web page that has all our information stored conveniently in one place so I can check everything we own, every penny we owe, and all the news that is fit to print in just a few minutes of clicking, and do the same with our email accounts, shopping sites and wish lists, interactive calendars, you name it. The page has links to personal bookmark lists and favorite sites and even our professional links such as the intranet websites for the Transcript and for Diana’s radio show, and a website for Chet Spiro.
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