“Sure you do,” I mumbled. Sighing, I raised my head from the wheel, trying to straighten out. I was going to have to move on, get reservations, fly to New York, forget last night and today, call Phil Samuel, finish the book on Joseph’s work, get married, have children, age and die … I needed to sit up straight, look forward, and drive on, without clemency or pardon. “Of course Americans don’t want to accept responsibility for anything. We can’t, or we won’t, solve our problems on a social scale. It’s easier to go to a shrink than to rebuild our infrastructure.”
“So that’s what you think.” Francisco shifted in his seat. Sweat rolled down the sides of his temples.
“Do you want me to turn on the air?”
“Let’s open the windows.”
We rolled them down. Francisco breathed in Tampa’s warm pollution and sneezed. A finger under his nose he asked, “Then how can you be a psychiatrist?”
“I don’t treat those people, I treat …” I sighed. My father’s point of view, his impatience with child abuse, wasn’t as unusual as he liked to believe. People just don’t know. They hadn’t sat with me for all those hours, not with criminals trying to get a lighter sentence, not with celebrities looking for a hook to their autobiographies, but with the broken bodies and the lonely eyes of the abandoned. I sighed again and found my father regarding me with genuine curiosity, waiting for me to answer, perhaps for the first time in thirty years, actually prepared to listen. “I can’t make racism go away, Dad. I can’t convince my fellow citizens that owning a Mercedes isn’t as satisfying as having a just world. But I can pull a few of their discards out of the sewer and try to wash them clean.”
Francisco smiled with his lips closed, a gentle smile of regret and, I fancied, a smile of forgiveness. “You can’t change the world a person at a time.”
“I don’t think I can change the world, Dad.”
He turned away, looking at his childhood home. “What you mean is: the world can’t be changed. That’s what you think Cuba proves. That’s what you think this”—he gestured to the barred houses and the baking, empty streets—“this so-called triumph of capitalism proves. But you’re wrong.” He rolled up his window and opened the door. He put one foot out, then twisted his torso back in my direction, showing his handsome face, convinced of his command of me. “I’m seventy-four years old and I can assure you, the world can be changed. It has been changed. It’s been changed for the worse.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Catastrophic Failure
“I DON‘T THINK YOU‘RE GOING TO FIND THE PEDIATRICIAN STUDY TO BE good news,” Phil told me when I reached him at home on Sunday. Diane was out, having brunch with an old friend. I sat on the couch, morosely watching the weekly television news roundup shows, listening to reporters and columnists pretend they were historians or psychics, making sweeping judgments about the importance of yesterday’s presidential news conference or equally confident predictions about the year ahead. (When the Berlin Wall came down none of them had been able to imagine a single brick would be chipped merely a few weeks before the event. Watching Tom & Jerry cartoons would have told me more about our political future.)
“Why is that?” I asked Phil, my finger on the remote’s mute button, wondering why Sam Donaldson didn’t spend more money on his toupee. At least, I hoped it was a toupee.
“Well, the best thing is for you to read it and you should look at one of the videos. I’ll send a video too, okay?”
“Sure. But give me the short version. What did you find?”
In the background I heard a little boy ask, “Dad! Come on! You said you were going to play.”
“Just a minute.” Although Phil’s words were harassed, his tone was friendly. “I’m talking to somebody for a minute, that’s all. Then we’ll finish the game. Now go outside and wait for me, okay?” He lowered his voice to explain to me, “I’m being shot with laser guns.”
“Hope it doesn’t hurt,” I said. Sam Donaldson had given way to a young woman in a string bikini, her buttocks undulating as she carried two six packs of beer across a pink beach heading for turquoise water. A young man who would not need Sam’s toupee for quite a while joined her and, in an unlikely action, seemed more interested in holding the beer than her.
“That’s the great thing about laser guns,” Phil said. “They make a lot of noise, but when they blow a hole in you, there’s no blood.”
“We must issue them to all the armies of the world.”
“Listen, Rafe,” he said, “this study is going to rock you. I’m sure you’ll be tempted to reject it out of hand, that’s why I hope you’ll look at the video. We used your techniques. You’ll see that. But it made no difference. Almost half the kids made up stuff about what the doctor did to them. Incredible stuff — sticking stethoscopes in their vaginas, ramming their anus with tongue depressors. One boy said the doctor swallowed his penis and wouldn’t give it back until he touched the doctor’s penis. Well, you’ll see. They had no trouble fantasizing without verbal cues. In terms of proving that children under six are reliable witnesses, it’s a disaster. I’m delivering the paper at the Arizona Children’s Forum in two weeks. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to recommend that psychologists refuse to assist child abuse prosecutions when the alleged victims are this young. God only knows how many innocent people we’ve ruined.”
I turned off the TV. “Phil,” I heard myself chuckle. In fact, my mouth was dry and my vision compressed, so that my lap and the carpet under my bare feet seemed to be all that was left of the universe. My voice, however, was as smug and self-assured as Sam Donaldson’s. “You’re being a little melodramatic, aren’t you?”
“Look at the study, Rafe. I’m not saying when there’s physical proof we should ignore the children’s claims. Obviously, if there’s evidence of an STD or bruises, that’s a different story. But even then, you can’t put a kid under six on the stand and have any confidence that the details will be accurate. And if there’s no physical corroboration, forget it. They just don’t know the seriousness of what they’re saying. They make it up out of the garbage that’s in all of us about sexuality and they have no clue — how could they? — that it’s going to destroy people.”
“Do you make reference to me in the study?”
“Of course not. And not to your techniques, but Rafe, come on, people in the profession will know these are your guidelines, this is your procedure at the clinic.”
“But you tested other techniques, also, right?”
A pause. Far, far in the background, I heard the whoop of children chasing each other and faint sounds of toy sirens.
“Phil?” I called.
“Rafe, your techniques are the purest, the least polluted by adult prompting. No verbal cues, all dolls, no pressure, everything videotaped. There was no reason to use other techniques. If yours don’t work, the others would only be worse.”
It was some time before I got up from the couch. I took a shower and I shaved, although earlier I had planned to indulge and leave the stubble until Monday. I went back and forth on the question of whether to broach the subject with Diane. I could tell her about Phil’s call without confessing the mistake of my broken promise. But I had to admit to myself that giving Phil the tape of her sessions with the Peterson girls was an error, at least in tactics, if not principle. Now, when I read his study, if I found it to be flawed, and wished to attack the findings, Phil’s reply would be more persuasive, and devastating to me personally, should he choose to reveal the origin of the techniques he tested. And I had no doubt he would betray me and reveal his source. He could do so and believe himself to be not only honorable, but noble, a scientist saving the innocent from persecution.