Donnally smiled. “Yes, you did.”
“Spill it.”
He nodded, then lied to another old person.
“I’m trying to help a lawyer prove that the diocese knew about the molestations by Father Phil and others, but I’ve dead-ended. The last lead I have is the first name of a kid that he may have molested. Melvin.”
“Melvin.” Theresa squinted up toward the chandeliers, then looked back at Donnally. “Did he have a nickname?”
“Not that I know of. Just Melvin.”
Theresa went back to her upward squint. “Melvin. Melvin. Melvin.” She slapped the tabletop, then fixed her eyes on Donnally. “I know who that is. Little Mel Watson. During high school he worked at The Sweet Tooth. Pale-faced, earnest little runt, but man did he know how to pile chocolate ice cream on a cone.”
She paused and her brows furrowed.
“You’re not going to believe it, but he became a goddamn priest.”
A s he walked to his car, Donnally repeated in his mind the thought that Theresa had left unspoken: Molested children sometimes become molesters themselves. And what better place for someone like Melvin Watson to disappear than back into the scene of an unprosecuted crime.
Chapter 45
B rother Melvin rested his forearms on his thighs and stared down at his thin hands. He and Donnally were sitting on a concrete bench outside the neo-Gothic hillside chapel of La Sallian University in Vancouver.
“How did you identify me?” Melvin asked.
“It’s a long story.”
Melvin looked over. “I could sue you for defamation or something and make you tell it.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.” Melvin sighed. “I won’t.”
Melvin then gazed out over the Canadian city, oblivious to the hushed rumble of traffic rising up from the freeways crossing the inlet below.
“I know the question in your mind,” Melvin finally said, without looking over at Donnally, “so I’ll answer it first even if I don’t answer anything else: No. I didn’t join the Christian Brothers in order to molest children. If this all becomes public, everyone who’s important in my life outside of the church will think I did. But the truth is that celibacy was my life raft and I’ve never let go. Never.” He looked over his shoulder toward the twenty-acre campus. “The tests of temptation were the students.”
“Maybe you should’ve become a monk.”
Melvin smiled for the first time since Donnally had knocked on his office door a half hour earlier.
“I didn’t like the uniforms.” Melvin’s smile died. “Anyway, isolation wouldn’t have solved the problem that Father Phil and the others left me with.”
“What was that?”
“Sexual confusion. It’s not as if a boy becomes gay because his first sexual experience is in the form of molestation by a man. It’s that the act causes you to lose your bearings. It’s a sudden exposure to unlimited possibility, like getting lost in the wilderness, or watching your mother murder your father, or seeing the World Trade Center collapse. The world seems to lose its natural order.
“If your first homosexual experience happens when you’re older, in the army or in a seminary, you can place it into the context of the rest of your life. You know right away whether it’s out of character or a turning point in your understanding of your sexuality-but not when you’re a kid.”
Melvin rubbed his forehead. “And when it’s a priest, it’s even worse. First it seems absurd, then like a betrayal.” He lowered his hand and looked at Donnally. “But what’s really weird is that you start to feel special, even privileged. After all, the priest picked you from all the rest of the boys for his attention. In time, of course, you discover there are others, and then it turns into a secret, exclusive society of the chosen.”
He smiled again, this time with a hint of embarrassment.
“Isn’t it strange that as adults we can be ashamed of our naivete as children? Delusions of imaginary friends, the mythic power of our blankies, games of hide-and-seek that seem as real as warfare. But for me and the other clients of Dr. Sherwyn-”
Donnally turned toward Brother Melvin. “Sherwyn? You were being treated by Sherwyn?”
He nodded. “Father Phil wasn’t his patient. I was. He called it Reenactment Therapy.”
Donnally stared at the young man, but his mind was seeing past him. “You mean…”
Brother Melvin closed his eyes and rocked back and forth. Tears formed and rolled down his cheeks.
“It seemed as real as the seven sacraments.”
R eenactment Therapy.
Donnally took a sip of beer in the airport bar as he waited for his flight back to San Francisco.
That’s what RT stood for.
He hadn’t told Melvin, but it was his confessing it to Anna Keenan that had cost her her life. And it was that same knowledge that had plagued Trudy since the day of the murder and had sent her into hiding for more than twenty years, all that time twisting herself into a psychosomatic bundle of self-deception.
Trudy had overheard the arguments. RT wasn’t Artie and it wasn’t Robert Trueblood-and she knew that from the beginning, and pretended to herself that she didn’t.
A pudgy seventy-year-old executive sat down on the next stool, his face soft and pink, his lips thin, his nails manicured. His tailored suit seemed to have been machined rather than sewn.
The man ignored Donnally as he ordered a martini, then stared into the mirror, tracking a blond-haired teenage boy in baggy pants strolling by behind them.
For a moment, Donnally wondered whether the man was one of the beneficiaries of Dr. Sherwyn’s Reenactment Therapy and was a member of the secret society to which Melvin had told him its graduates had been introduced.
Maybe he had been one of those anonymous, elegant men who attended the parties that Melvin had told him about, who sat on the love seats with their arms around the shoulders of the youngsters or who scanned the boys playing in the pool, inspecting them with the eyes of casting directors searching for the exact one to play the required role in a burgeoning fantasy. And the boys glancing over to catch the eye of the one who would set them up in an apartment, give them an allowance, maybe even a credit card on which to charge their lives.
T he paths of good intention.
That’s what Brother Melvin had called the routes by which the boys arrived at Dr. Sherwyn’s door: from the court, from Children’s Protective Services, from probation, or, like Melvin, from the church.
And each walked through it thinking it was his escape from sexual abuse at the hands of his father or uncle or coach or priest.
Donnally cringed as he imagined little Melvin sitting across from Dr. Sherwyn in his North Berkeley office, listening to a fantastical theory, one that he thought must be true because it had been sanctified by the monsignor and authenticated by science.
Then entering an almost hypnotic state of wonder and exhilaration in which everything-past, present, and future-made sense. And the warm pleasure of being invited into an esoteric world, whose integrity had to be defended by secrecy.
The image Brother Melvin had left Donnally with returned. Melvin on all fours on the carpet, Sherwyn kneeling behind, clothed, pantomiming the act, even down to the grunting and sweating and swearing. Boys like Melvin who had held still, even at the cost of shivering disassociation, passed the test. Then from one session to the next, hands began to reach and articles of clothing were removed.
Only too late did Brother Melvin come to understand that the purpose of Reenactment Therapy wasn’t to get past the trauma, but to get accustomed to it.
O n the flight back, Donnally figured out the kind of Reenactment Therapy he wanted to engage in: his hands around the throat of William Sherwyn.
Chapter 46
“T hat’s absurd,” William Sherwyn said to Donnally, standing on the landing of the doctor’s Spanish Colonial in the Berkeley hills. “Completely absurd.”