No Skin No Skin
The year after Clare left the Institute, she was no end of trouble to her parents. Away from her family, she had progressed from debilitating sickness to sporadic bouts of nausea. Now she was seventeen years old and back where she had started.
"Well, what has he done?" Mummy asked. "You let a little thing–"
Clare moved down into the bedclothes.
"What is it then?"
Mummy was plump and matronly. It was Clare's job to keep the worried edge from that voice. Daddy was elderly and distinguished. It was Clare's job to avoid his contempt. Clare herself was petite and nervously polite, with enormous eyes and a cloud of dark hair. She kept her silence.
But appointments were set up with her old therapist. In his gentle presence the truth which had surfaced so often over the years would no longer respond to the old refrain.
But it's not important.
But it's not important.
But it is, and he'll know it. Soon you will be free.
She was eighteen by the time she strode into his office and announced that her father had sexually abused her for the past seven years.
It was not important because Clare was a child of privilege. Being incompatible with that premise, it went into the 'inconsequential' file, until she was no longer a child at all. But the damage was already done. Dismissing slow torture even as she walked away from it was saying that her feelings did not matter. And it's what you tell yourself that is most convincing.
Clare would never forget the moment she became a different being, when after a few seconds she realized what her father was doing, and what had suddenly caused the inhuman gleam in his eye. When the ordeal was over, a harsh realization sank through her stupor. From now on she would live in her predator's shadow. She was in big trouble, with no one to help her. That was her life now.
From that day she found it necessary to check the entire house, run upstairs and hide in a corner to change her clothes with trembling haste and a heavily beating heart. Alone in a room, she had to watch out from the corners of her eyes. He used to wait for her, and might materialize silently from anywhere before she could slip away. She seemed quite assertive when she wasn't being bullied, but her mind was radically different from other people's. Had she been urged to reveal the truth, she would have told anything but the one piece of information nobody wanted to hear.
Daddy found her irritating, as though she were to blame. One day, in a flash, she understood the meaning of the elaborate admiration and exaggerated sympathy he professed for his wife. To him, the issue was marital infidelity. To his mind, Clare's mother was the wronged party, and he was an unfaithful husband doing the madonna-whore routine.
When he appeared as Clare dressed, catching her in the act –for they were equally wily– she would turn away from him.
"You're not hiding yourself, are you?" he would say in gentle amusement.
And Clare, shamefaced and sullen, would mumble, "No". For she had been taught that it was atavistic and silly to feel inhibition about her body.
There had been no locks on the bedroom doors, and living in the bathroom all day had not been an option. Afraid to completely close her door, she would leave it open a crack, peering through because Daddy specialized in sudden appearances.
Incest breeds in silence.
Children are brought up to believe that their families protect them from an uncaring outside world. Precisely because their home lives are horrible, children from abusive families are less willing than others to look for help. Those people must be even worse. Everything drives the point home –all the abusive parent teaches with the pleased approval of outsiders, every holiday tradition whose meaning is turned into a lie, every display of protective care, every declaration of affection. Incest victims look between the lines and never read the script, because nothing has ever been literal for them. "We love you" means this is all the family they're ever going to get. "Your mother and father love each other" means the enemy is united. "We're here to help you" means the whole society supports their parents. "We'll always love you" means they'll never escape.
When Clare lost in the endless game of hide and seek and was caught face to face with her father, she was considered unreasonable to break out in a cold sweat, knowing what the next half hour would be. Her father had taught her what was allowed and what was not.
Our society perniciously assists and excuses incest while professing to be against it. Even public support for incest victims is a pro-incest statement because it comes only from strangers. Nobody actually wants to know an incest victim, or have one in the family. She, who is purged of this evil, is seen as contaminated by people who taint themselves in the process. It is they who are now infected –and by the crimes committed, not by her. The only defense against the infection is true morality, and most people do not have this. So they avoid the infection, and thus they contract it. The more they hide the deeper they sink. To their credit, they pay lip service, but all support is in the public arena where it can be categorized separately. As soon as private lives are touched, denial sets in because incest shakes these people to the core. Yet only in this arena will opposition to incest really make a difference.
What alternative does the victim have? Being picked up by a pimp? That happened after Clare left her parents. He was looking for the mark of the slave. Being raped a few times was nothing compared to her father's assortment of abuses, which had technically avoided intercourse. In later years when she told her story, men automatically treated her body as though they owned it. As for women, most forgot what she told them. She found herself preferring the company of criminals because they alone acknowledged her past.
Before Clare’s admission to the Institute, her father had taken advantage of long talks about the possible causes of her persistent nausea, to dry her eyes and change the subject to her own developing body. He used to wait for her to get home. He read The Idler. No matter how long she stayed at school, he was alone in the house when she arrived home. Mummy worked late, and he always managed to get rid of her sisters. In the midst of Clare's tears he would suddenly remark on what a big girl she was now, slipping a hand under her clothes. Or he'd suggest that they sit down, with his supposedly comforting arm holding her straining body in a vise-like grip.
For the rest of her life she was jumpy. Doctors knew that something was wrong. She could not brush down a jacket. When over-the-shoulder seatbelts were introduced, she held hers gingerly with one hand. At a touch identical to any she had suffered, her whole body would jerk convulsively. It felt like an electric shock, and indeed it was. A neural highway had been blazed. Movement along it was triggered when certain nerve endings were touched, as though her skin had been ripped off in the salt water bath of everyday life which had no effect on others. The time it would take to realign this highway was longer than a human lifespan. She lived like a cat, constantly on the alert, her ruined body like a minefield.
Clare remembered sitting on the living room couch, listening to her father speak earnestly of right and wrong at the same time that his hands slipped into her underwear. The words were for her benefit only, since they were alone, and she understood perfectly what she was being told. It was one of those odd situations in which two people know something which neither mentions.
As the years went by, the sight of his face became inextricably associated with the feeling of his fingers crawling over her flesh. Torturer and victim shared the intimacy of hatred, for only they knew the truth.Someone who commits incest will do anything if given the opportunity. Beyond this taboo there is no barrier. Even after Clare confronted her parents there was no sign of comprehension from her father. On one occasion, he remarked upon the possibility of an incestuous relationship between a friend's two pets. Mummy's eyes flickered, but he was totally unconcerned. On another occasion he started picking at Clare's blouse, remarking that she looked very attractive. She had not thought he would dare, after she had spoken up. But why not? It had already been clearly established that the world was on his side. Like the invertebrate he was, Clare's father could squeeze through any opening. He was a liquid enemy, constantly learning all but the one thing he should know. Each new move was another trick.
An incestuous father is infinitely adaptable. He believes in everything. He may even go into 'therapy', as if he were ill, in order to assuage the unpleasant impression that he has done something wrong. Our prisons are full of people who don’t respond to deterrents, but he is in none of them. He chooses to commit crimes which cannot be discovered until all evidence is gone, and counts on the fact that by then weak minded people will deem punishment to be inappropriate. It is part of his calculation that no one will care, just as no one cares now. Incest is not a single isolated crime, but a countless series repeated over many years. After each he has the opportunity to repent and does not. He plans each violation the way he might choose an evening menu.
Daddy had been brought up with ideas that were intended to screen hypocrisy. He was ahead of everyone, and knew all the tricks. He lied about lying about lying. He would be the first person to say that actions were louder than words, and would add that even then he was only talking. He professed to disapprove of crimes he had just committed. One of his favourite causes was the liberation of women, and never did he resent the fact that his wife brought money into the home.
The whole thing came out when Clare scribbled a note to Mummy, who read it upstairs while her daughter waited in the living room comparing her two sets of memories.
When Mummy emerged, her reaction was the single one in all the world that Clare had never expected.
"What's this?" she demanded accusingly. Clare explained. "Do you really expect me to believe this?" her mother snapped. "What are you trying to do now?"
"Go and ask him yourself," was the reply.
After the parents had talked alone, Mummy returned and announced contemptuously, "He denies everything, of course".
Daddy was there. "It's a lot of nonsense," he echoed.
The following afternoon he came upon Clare reading in the living room. He asked to speak to her and cleared his throat.
"I must tell you," he began, "I could not admit to your mother that what you'd said was true. I felt that for her sake I had to deny everything."
Clare did not move.
"All I can say is I'm sorry. And I do tell you one thing more. This I swear. I never did anything to your two sisters. You were the only one."
He was swiftly covering his bases. An apology to keep Clare quiet and a disclaimer to keep her sisters quiet. He had often mentioned that she took after him, which caused a rift with her sisters. Not only did this serve as fuel for her self loathing, but it prevented the disclosure that they too had been abused.
The next day Clare was madly typing. The result of this effort covered two long sheets of legal paper in very small letters, single spaced. About twenty items were mentioned. Each of these specified a certain type of abuse at a certain location, since she could not possibly have counted individual incidents. She formally presented this document to her mother in Daddy's study. The door was closed behind her.
Mummy did not read the papers. Instead, she cross-questioned Clare like a machine gun, using terminology so clinical that her daughter was tongue tied. Clare was backed up against the wall, like an insect on the head of a pin. For the rest of her life, whenever she felt like reporting the crimes committed against her, she remembered this episode and thought twice.
She was left stunned for a minute while her mother went to fetch her father, who again denied everything.
"I am forced to believe," he commented, "that you are a very sick girl. It horrifies me that you can say such things. I only hope you do not truly believe them. Because if you do, it hurts me very much to think that your mind is so disturbed."
The next day Clare ventured to speak to him alone. She did not believe that, away from his wife, he would persist in the strategy he had chosen. She was wrong.
The truth and the appearance of truth often seem the same, and many people never fully realize that the two are distinct. For years Clare's father had fooled the world. Only two people knew he was lying. He thought he might be able to persuade her that she was the one not telling the truth. After all, there was no one else to support her.
"You are a very sick girl," he repeated.
When someone tries gently, caressingly, to persuade you that something which has ruined your life never happened, you're usually driven to screaming. And Clare did her share of screaming in the days that followed. She also brought up the subject repeatedly with Mummy. Finally, self righteousness in every inch of her small frame, Mummy retorted that she was really quite fed up at this selfishness disrupting the whole family. And with deliberate brutality, Clare slugged her in the jaw.
When Clare tore up her bedroom she heard Daddy laughing in the hall with her older sister at such a shocking lack of control. Mummy saw fit to pay a visit. She took a deep breath and said tremulously, "I'm going to tell you something which we decided we'd disclose when you're older. I'm not your father's first wife. I'm your father's second wife."
I talk about incest, thought Clare, and you talk about a divorce.
"Your father's first wife was Ella." Clare remembered meeting Ella when she was very small. "Your father married her during the war because she was afraid, since she was Jewish, and only by marrying him could she come to Canada. Your father proposed that they emigrate here. It was understood to be a matter of convenience. Then he met me. Divorce was not easy in those days. The way to get one was adultery. So what your father did was hire a rather shabby detective, go with a girl, and have the detective take pictures of them. And you know," she finished, "your father is very fastidious".
"Fastidious!" exclaimed Clare. "After what he's done?"
"The other thing I would like to tell you is that your father was an anti-war demonstrator. There was a speech to be made, and no one would make it. Your father volunteered to do so, and as a result –which he knew would happen– he went to prison."
And thus he had avoided the war with his reputation intact.
The next day Clare asked for lie detector tests. The Institute did not give these, but a nearby mental hospital did. Clare received a patronizing letter from the hospital saying that such tests were not a reliable method of discovering the facts. It was the most bogus document she had ever seen. You've guessed the sixty million dollar question, of course. If lie detector tests were useless, why did the hospital have them?
These people weren't even good liars. But then, they didn't have to be. Clare was totally in their power. She remembered when her parents had announced plans to move to England last year. She had wanted to stay at the Institute rather than go with them. Earnestly the Institute staff had said that her time of residence there was over because she had been coming along so well, and that she must go with her mother and father to England. At the same time, her doctor had been urging her parents to have her put into a place called Tavistock when they arrived in London. Tavistock provided excellent care, he had assured them.
Not until many years later did Clare understand what these people were really up to. For the Institute was something of a halfway house. She had been far too well for a halfway house, but really must be put in Tavistock as soon as possible. She had been registered and approved for admission to Tavistock SIGHT UNSEEN, and this had alerted her to the fact that something was very wrong. The Institute had underestimated Clare's influence at home. Having much to hide, her parents had been dreadfully afraid of her making waves, and this battle she had won. She had never seen Tavistock.
Upon her parents' return, she had become an outpatient at the Institute, which hadn't seemed so bad until she had started to talk about her father's crimes. After that everything had changed. Her parents were going in for long discussions with the staff about her 'erratic behaviour'. They were solemnly advised that it must be stopped gently but firmly. This had an impressive ring. She must be disciplined for her own good. If they gave her an inch she would take a mile. Nip it in the bud, they were told. This was how they interpreted the fact that she would not be satisfied until justice was done. Everyone was busy making up reasons why she was speaking. No one cared to hear what was being said.
Later in life she would remark that when she lied everyone took her seriously, but when she told the truth no one believed a word.
At the time she didn't realize that psychology was armchair science. What psychologists really observed was behaviour. Beyond that they could only guess, because the motive for that behaviour was the exclusive domain of someone else's mind.
The first line of defence is denial.
Although the subject of incest is suspiciously boring and forgettable, sometimes an accusation must be acknowledged. It does not, however, have to be taken seriously. Incest victims have trouble looking other people in the eyes, so all their lives they're branded as dishonest. Everyone wants to believe they are paranoid, or willingly courting trouble. In later years Clare never mentioned her grandfather's fingers slipping when she was a child, nor counted how many times she was raped after leaving home. A long list of abuses would only have been evidence against her.
That was her mother's father, in case you wondered.
"I'm not supposed to tell you this," Mummy announced to Clare in a hushed voice. "The Institute's diagnosis was schizophrenia."
Clare harboured threatening ideas. She did not share her doctor's opinion that the world was a wonderful place, that he was nice, and that appearances did not deceive.
Schizophrenia has been defined as 'having a poor grasp of reality'. Whenever you disagree with someone you think she has a poor grasp of reality. Clare disagreed with her therapist on whether she had been abused. He had not been at the scene of the crimes, but he thought he knew better than she. Even the old Freudian argument was rolled out, that she was persistently ill because she wanted to bear her father's child, not because she wanted to get rid of her own body. Yet she had never heard of morning sickness. It's amazing what teenagers haven't learned. Yes, Clare was unbalanced. But no one paused to consider how that might have happened. Her listeners were passive, secure in the knowledge that it was her job to win them over, and they didn't want to be won over. They held every card. No conspiracy was needed, for the most terrifying thing about incest is the victim, and everyone wants to get rid of it.
Clare's next course of action was a call to the police. She didn't know how to begin. For one thing, she had never been taught the difference between civil law and criminal law. It's amazing what teenagers haven't learned.
"How do you file a lawsuit, please?" she asked.
"How do you do what?" asked the policeman on the other end of the phone.
"Well, my father sexually molested me for seven years. What should I do?"
"You can lay a charge," he said. "Are you living with your parents now?"
"Yes."
"Well, I suggest you move out and find some other living arrangement. Write to the police station then and say that you wish to lay a charge against your father."
"Would it damage my case that I was considered emotionally disturbed?" She might as well know now.
"Ah, emotionally disturbed, are you?" His voice had utterly changed. He wanted to know where Clare was receiving treatment, but she did not care to pursue the matter. He had just given her all the information she needed.
Upon his rejection, Clare's therapist sustained her contempt with inner calm. "It's hard to leave someone you're fond of," he said with a fatuous smile. He advised her parents that she was 'in remission' but that her psychosis might flare up again. In other words, she might tell the truth sometimes. When she was under pressure, her parents were assured, not when freedom seemed within reach, so that they were invited to feign sympathy in response to her outbursts. But more often they feigned boredom and sighed, "Oh that again", as if to ask what trick Clare was up to now. Only the same one it had always been and always would be. Perhaps they were tired because it was they who had twisted motives. Clare showed no fatigue.
One day Mummy announced rather pompously, "We cannot put up with your disrupting the family any longer. We've decided that it is necessary for you to live somewhere else. We're willing to pay for this because we want you out as soon as possible."
Then Mummy began stating when Clare could come home. Clare said she couldn't wait to get out. The conditions became offers.
"I don't want to visit," she said. "I don't think I love you any more."
"Then it's the best of all possible worlds, isn't it?" came the reply. And with that sentence, Clare's love for her mother died.
Doubtless both parents were told that she'd walk out whenever she couldn't have her way. Clare was not there to hear it. She no longer heard the moralizing with which her father covered his guilt, the moralizing that had intensified her pain. She had flown.
But in the years that followed Clare's past was never laid to rest, for its existence was repeatedly denied and thus brought into focus. Everyone persisted in assuming that she was close to her parents and kept in touch, as if incest were a misdemeanour. Twice people said to her, "I know what your father did to you, but I like him anyway". Her parents must have been wonderful, she was told –even by those who knew the truth. One such person was herself an incest victim. How then did one not qualify as a wonderful parent? Someone even managed to smuggle information about Clare to her mother, in full knowledge of all that had happened, because turning her in "seemed the right thing to do". A woman who had always seemed to sympathize with Clare confided that she might well have done the same herself –family, you know. When Clare expressed her outrage, another apparent sympathizer urged her to be indulgent toward someone who didn't have her own experience. She must cater to the fortunate, instead of the other way around. Clare's victimization had never truly been acknowledged in these people's minds. It had all been an act. Even as she walked out on them, 'no' was just another word in their ears. It meant nothing to them that someone else had been tortured. Everyone was a weak link. Everyone was a creep.
It was easier to remain silent. That way, when people said she was lucky, Clare could pretend it was because of the silence. If she spoke, that small mercy was gone. But she did not remain silent. And as the years passed hers became the generation that finally spoke up on the subject.
The second line of defence is belittling the crime.
It began with the usual excuses that had always categorized this crime separately as not to be taken seriously. These ranged from "It was an accident", through "It was only a touch", "It wasn't really a sexual touch so it doesn't matter whether she minded or not", "It was only fondling", "It wasn't intercourse", "She didn't get pregnant", "It's probably not his baby", "It was only once", "It wasn't every week", "It wasn't every day", "It was only for a few years", "She didn't say anything", "It didn't leave a scar", "It didn't leave many scars", "It didn't ruin her life", "That wasn't what ruined her life", "It wasn't in the family so it's not our business", "It was in the family so it's not our business", "She probably liked it", "At least she didn't like it", and finally "Well, she's dead now anyway".
When it became increasingly apparent that incest victims were emerging as a political movement, the backup forces moved in. Victims were scapegoats for people who had been accused. There were masked threats to take away their children, in many cases all the family they had, when those who declared themselves were precisely the ones whose children were safe. Not that they ever went public where their children played, just that sometimes they were found out. After years of being treated as a joke, they were taken seriously when they could reproduce their own kind, and often recanted under the pressure. But most of the time, the enemy made light of the whole thing. Victims were compared to professional whiners, to people who made their own problems, and were told encouragingly that they were responsible for all that had happened to them. Suddenly it was against one's religion to report a crime. A studied neutrality was maintained in the name of justice. Reports were regarded as tasteless violations of privacy. Any success at leading a normal life was seen as indication that the whole thing was not so very terrible after all. After being dismissed as disturbed, now the victim was not disturbed enough.
"How can you be so cruel?" Mummy had moaned upon discovering that Clare had told her sisters the truth. Like hers, their first thought had been for the listener. Both believed Clare, but instantly said that close relatives must not be told. The news would be too upsetting. It is not surprising that each incest victim considers herself an exception to all rules. She lives in a world which claims that incest is appalling, yet is not appalled when it happens to her. I'll wager that if incest victims demonstrate on Father's Day they'll be asked to change the date for the sake of people who have decent families. Asked to feed the rich, to sacrifice themselves for an ideal of perfection. Cainites left by the wayside, tainted by their own suffering. Clare's younger sister remarked that, terrible though it all was, everyone must remember that other teenagers had suffered real abuse.
What qualified it as real? The fact that it had occurred outside her own family.
The third line of defence is therapy.
Incest victims are the one and only minority group that doesn't come out even to each other. Each believes she is the world's only unimportant person. When one speaks up, others feel even less at liberty to follow her example. Some don't even want the world to improve. Therapy is always for the others.
It turns out that's just as well. Twenty years after Clare's ordeal the victims were still the targets, not the crimes. 'Borderline' schizophrenia was now caused by incest. Therapists, who never did like criticism, said that patients who resisted being stroked to death were not trying to help themselves. Their rage had to be removed so they would never taste victory. When people warn you against using a weapon, check which side they're on.
Clare never sought these people, but was bombarded by their theories in community centres and parent groups. In so-called 'abuse prevention' programs, children were taught that only certain body parts were private, and were told they were responsible for protecting themselves by speaking up. Apparently Clare was no longer a victim, merely a survivor. Her view of the world had been a delusion; therapists knew better. Complacence was a personal triumph, not a defeat, even though the world remained exactly as before. We have a term for this catharsis. It's called bad art.
Programs set up to protect neighbourhood children carefully assumed that fathers were not potentially dangerous, and made much of working in cooperation with parents. The reality of abuse was still being denied. "Naturally it's confusing for the child," a smug voice droned at a school information meeting, "since sexual touch is bound to be pleasurable". The enemy had mustered all its resources. For the truth was not a stage through which Clare would eventually pass, to believe in those lies which the world held dear. The real war had not yet begun.
As for Clare's father, doubtless he continued to moralize over cups of tea in various people's living rooms, secure in the knowledge that he was protected by the magnitude of his crimes. He lived off the women in his life.
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