Of course I got that. He did not take swabs to culture. Rick had won a top award. They did, however, apparently find reason to enlighten my schoolmates about one thing. By all accounts save mine, the encounter had been consensual. In July, a call came in. But my children are very small and I’m their primary caregiver, so I will see what bears out. The rector during my time there, Kelly Clark, had previously been head of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I stayed away. Her bafflement, coupled with the disease's ferocious presentation, strongly suggest that she has just contracted it. Disposable, flimsy. I was studying for my finals, knowing that the events of that night in Rick and Taz's room were formally known to everyone now. John Buxton, a vice rector with whom I had never had a conversation and never would, had known that I had visited this clinician in town and had called him directly to discuss my private medical records. "Oh my God," I said. Who told them? What was so astounding? Then they shamed me. She gripped her throat to demonstrate. I'd close my mouth and look at my reflection, as though there might be traces visible on my skin. You'd be surprised what a clinician can miss. Back in Lake Forest, home for the summer before senior year, Mom took me to see my pediatrician. He did not test me for any diseases, sexually transmitted or otherwise. "Tonsils normal, perfectly clear. So after chapel I cut left out of the door, away from the students and teachers streaming up toward the Schoolhouse, and headed along the brick path to the infirmary perched on the hill. "Basically," my father said, his voice rasping, "they're promising to destroy you." Necessary Errors, a coming-of-age novel by Caleb Crain. And maybe against the school. A parent did pull out a checkbook and offer to pay Crawford to write a personal essay. Here was the contract, as I understood it: I would not speak of the assault, and they would not do anything to interfere with my applications to college or my progress toward graduation. This was not the game I'd thought it was, a civilized dance of virtue and discretion. Lacy Crawford: Truly, I think it’s as simple as this. Lacy Crawford was told ‘rape stories are a dime a dozen.’ ... and there are no parents there, so you’re going to have to figure this out. When news of other, similar incidents starts to come out, Crawford is compelled to revisit her own experience and frankly grapple with the way violence, truth, and guilt are handled in our country's most exclusive institutions.” But the intent of the accusation was not to posit fact. "Let's have a look.". Yes, they did warn me not to leave before they assaulted me, and said I would get caught if I tried. I imagined everything I had suppressed coming at this small woman. My father turned and took her into his arms. Parents only want the best for their children, and students are fighting for college seats that will give them a head start into work and adulthood. Maybe just get a little more sleep?". The authorities were not notified. I sat up in bed, back to the frozen windows, and forced myself to swallow. When she told her mother about it months later, at the end of her junior year, her parents sprung into action, spending hours on the phone with school representatives. High schools would be staffed with counselors trained to help students identify colleges and financial-aid opportunities, with an eye toward helping them begin to build a life. My careful distinctions of injury and responsibility—the difference I imagined between what they did and rape, between terrible things you should put behind you and truly hellish things no one would expect you to bear—allowed me, for many years, to restore that third person to the room in my mind. This includes various health care providers, some who intentionally misdiagnosed Lacy and the cover up of the event by the school and local authorities when she finally is able to tell her parents. Lacy Crawford is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Notes on a Silencing.” The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. My father walked down the hall to the den where he kept his home office to call the vice rector. That year, I'd go to the bathroom at odd hours so I could be alone to lean over the sinks, put my face right up against the mirror, and open my mouth as wide as possible. I was baptized in the same church where my parents were married and my grandparents would one day be buried. But what was there struck a note so sharp I could hear it, a chip of ice so cold it must be the hard center. He said, "That the two boys were not the only ones. They chose not to inform the police. The suspicion is that she has a sexually transmitted disease so deep in her throat it cannot be seen on a normal exam. "Okay, you can close. Subscribers have complete access to the archive. "Lacy, they're saying that you've had sexual partners.". And the students’ essays in the book are fictitious. Beneath how many streetlights did I linger? A ball of spiders, a cup of maggots. She cooked and left bowls on the counter for my father to serve. I'd never lost a pill, never given one away. St. Paul's School is an Episcopal school. He was the rook behind the queen. First, they refused to believe me. And it wasn’t pretty.” She did not apply to that preschool, but other preschools she considered asked questions about her child’s developing personality. One day Mom came bashing through the dining room door and said, as though the room were waiting to hear it, "The district attorney said he's had enough with St. Paul's School. A damsel, a whore. It's so simple, what happened at St. Paul's. But I knew none of this then. School language soared in the direction of the Anglican heaven. Published by Little, Brown. Our piety meant that Dad wore a metal cross discreetly around his neck, never visible beneath his Turnbull & Asser shirts and Hermès ties. The culture from my throat had tested positive for Herpes Simplex Virus. Lacy Crawford, whose new memoir “Notes on a Silencing” was published in July, said the written apology from the elite boarding school in Concord, N.H., was e-mailed to her on Aug. 19. Unless, of course, you were willing to flat-out lie. Mom worried about getting her nails done before celebrating the Eucharist. Crawford entered the prestigious St. Paul’s School when she was 14. The moment when he might have laughed at that drug-dealing bit had passed. "You don't want to go digging, Jim," he told my father. Every time I read it I remember: Yes, they did tell me, after they had both ejaculated into my mouth, that it was "your turn now." The pressure — in the novel and in real life — builds as parents, fearing for their children’s futures, fantasize about what a diploma from a top college can do. Mink in winter. I do not know the substance of these conversations, but in the third week of May, the school psychologist, Reverend S., Vice Rector Bill Mathews, and the rector, Kelly Clark, sat down with the school's legal counsel and arrived at the formal conclusion that, despite what I had claimed, and despite the statutory laws on the books in their state, the encounter between me and the boys had been consensual. To introduce the virus only there would have required an aggressive act, and maybe that was unimaginable? KATEY RICH, JOANNA ROBINSON, LAURA REGENSDORF, 1 more ... Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our. NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with author Lacy Crawford about her new memoir, Notes on a Silencing, about her sexual assault at an elite boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire. Instead, I saw my whole family staring back at me, my mother and father and grandparents who had wanted this school for me so much that they had been willing to send me across the country to receive what they believed was the best education the nation could offer. School officials had known about the sexual contact—Crawford was given herpes by one of her rapists—and had known that legally this was statutory rape. The pediatrician employed by the school to come in and care for us in the infirmary saw me briefly that day, and wrote on my chart, "See outpatient report. I worked—I still work—to restore the boys' humanity as a way of restoring mine: they were symptoms of a sick system, they were tools of the patriarchy, they were fooled by porn. They contacted the school, which had an obligation to inform the police. My parents stood side by side in front of me. LACY CRAWFORD: I have a few pieces of narrative nonfiction in the pipeline, and I’ve been working on a new novel for about a year. He said that. To which I'd reply: You'd be surprised what a kid can find it unimaginable to say. It was to threaten me. I suspect that what I did was worse. There was never anything to see. Copyright © 2020 by Lacy Crawford. I tried to understand her meaning: What did she want? I'd been so careful and so worried. When the boys assaulted me, they stole from me. Dr. Kerrow asked me to tell her exactly what had happened. Crawford no longer counsels students. That is, if you agree to press charges against the boys, they will get you on the stand, and here's what they're going to say.". I did not think I deserved to get better, but I was a girl with a firm sense of doom. It's not a remarkable story. Now. Crawford was mystified but convinced there must be a reason, so she slipped across her boarding school campus and met the boy at his dorm window. Linen or silk in summer. That feeling was not limited to my throat. I'd fought the dissolution of the lawns and classes and people I knew into a faceless institution, monolithic and cruel. They chose not to inform the police. We collect and match historical records that Ancestry users have contributed to their family trees to create each person’s profile. I don't know yet. You can clear the board with that combination. At some point I made the necessary formal statement over the phone that I did not wish the police to move forward with criminal charges. All speech that followed was cannily performative, every line parry or thrust. I have wondered if I'm able to lose these particulars again and again because I know they're written down, so I don't have to take care of them—but this is a curious piece of anthropomorphism. In fact, it's ordinary. I did not want to give up one thing more. Had he done so, I'd have been floored. The milk filled me up more than the water did. Where was I, at that moment? Matthews went on. The daughter of socially ambitious upper-middle-class parents who believed in “the value of education,” she immediately felt out of place among her privileged, preternaturally sophisticated classmates. Will start Zovirax." It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it is of witness: to go back to that girl leaving the boys' room on an October night, sneakers landing on the sandy path, and walk with her all the way home. Lacy told her parents about what happened months after her first rape. He would have hoisted his trophy high over his head in front of them all. "It's not what we wanted for our daughter," he told me, and they left my room. It is a statutory claim and there seems to be little dispute about what, um...went on. Looking in the bathroom mirror, I knew this was a lie. The daughter of socially ambitious upper-middle-class parents who believed in “the value of education,” she immediately felt out of place among her privileged, preternaturally sophisticated classmates. Then the blood ran free. "Five, Lacy is not welcome as a student at St. Paul's School.". The diagnosis recorded on my St. Paul's infirmary referral form was "aphthous ulcers." My father was a regular reader of the lessons and served on the vestry. I have been told that this happened both on the lacrosse field and in a teacher's apartment. Crain is “willing to be a romantic and takes his time on the page. A sexual assault at a New England boarding school. The pediatrician did not talk to me about herpes simplex virus, those "herpetic lesions" meant to be treated with Zovirax. Click below to read an interview with Lacy in The New York Times About Lacy Crawford. ", Dad was the only one of them to speak. And I had chosen not to until now? Author of NOTES ON A SILENCING. As soon as it became clear that there would be no charges, the school, which had been so certain I was a criminal drug dealer, found no reason not to enroll me for the sixth form. I dragged my mind from the thought of being a Prozac dealer to the far less interesting accusation of teenage sex. After these calls, the administration, as the school would later tell the Concord Police Department, conducted its own "internal investigation." He did not ask me if anything had entered or wounded my throat. They let them go home. The rasp terrified me. It would be more than 25 years before I learned what he'd written that cold afternoon. Then these details disappear again. Our fealty was total. All of that. She wrote it all down, and my pediatrician's office saved this report beyond the usual threshold of a patient's reaching the age of 27. A knock at my door. My father had made it very clear to the school's lawyer that he expected this. Lacy told her parents about what happened months after her first rape. I could not get past Prozac. "In today's dark and dangerous world," Reverend Clark said, on occasion of his 1982 appointment to St. Paul's, "the graduates of St. Paul's are summoned to a stewardship of light and peace." The school's characterization of me as a drug dealer was the boldest lie I had ever encountered. When I got really hungry, I did this with skim milk. When novelist LACY CRAWFORD was a teenager, her parents sent her off to St. Paul's School, hoping for the best education money could buy. The district attorney told me that this has happened time and time again. In American terms, I was a junior. Before we all left campus that spring, a vice rector sat down with members of the boys' varsity lacrosse team and told them that he didn't want to ask any questions, but if any of them had ever been intimate with Lacy Crawford, he should go to the infirmary right away to get checked out. I have told it to parents and friends and therapists. The rector did not admit that only one side had a legal obligation to report the assault to the police, and it wasn't me. Lacy was herself a brilliant student. Maybe, multiple physicians told me years later, it was just that the sores were so deep. There was no higher form of rightness than righteousness. Concord Police knew nothing about it until my pediatrician called. © 2020 The Trustees of Princeton University, The Craziness in the College-Admission Process, ‘That was really my project with Eleanor ... to tell her in a way that was closer, maybe, closer to the way she had actually lived her life’, Ten Wilson family members, including four Princeton alumni, appear on ‘Meet the Weatles’, The building itself is composed of nine interlocking cubes, or pavilions, The user-friendly tool helps people make informed decisions about social interactions, ‘If it is possible to be both professional and flirtatious, she was’, Browse past episodes of the PAWcast, our monthly interview series, When a Democratic candidate needs data to win a race, Mark Mellman ’78 is likely to get the call, ‘We have this golden network of stories that tells us … we are not all that different’, At 29, Rampell became one of the youngest columnists in The Washington Post’s history, “It has its emotional, dramatic moments — maybe more so than some other Triangle shows,” said John McEnany ’21, PAWcast: Author David Michaelis ’79 on Rediscovering Eleanor Roosevelt, Campus Grows With McCosh Makeover, New Residential Colleges, Princeton Adds To Its Endowment in 2020, But Uncertainty Remains, Seven Princeton Alumni Re-elected to Congress, This Princeton Family Recorded a Beatles Cover Album, Museum Unveils Design for New Home, Aims to Reopen in 2024, Joshua Weitz ’97 Is Mapping the Risk of COVID-19, Essay: Former ‘People’ Editor Recalls Tea With Princess Diana, Glee Club Hosts Yale for Centennial Concert Nov. 15, Robin Broad *83 and John Cavanagh *80 Recount an Epic Battle for Clean Water, Randolph W. Hobler ’68 Tells 101 Stories of Peace Corps in Libya, PAWcast: Maria Tatar *71 on the Scholarship of Fairy Tales and Folklore, Jon Wiener ’66 on LA Activism in the 1960s, Columnist Catherine Rampell ’07 Shows Why Policy Changes Matter, Triangle Club Turns Its Annual Show Into a Movie. If I'd been so upset, why hadn't I alerted a teacher or advisor straight away? ... We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. He got his wish. It was recommended that I gargle with a tonic of Kaopectate, Benadryl, and Maalox to soothe the throat and counter inflammation. Just a phone message taken in the middle of the summer in 1991. These are the parents who have sought to enroll their child in the best preschool when they first find out that they are pregnant. https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2020/7/the-silencing The “aha” moment of parental anxiety that spurred Crawford’s idea for Early Decision came when she was applying to preschools for her older son, then 4 months old, despite being told she was already too late. The damage to me was done. She chafed at the constant use of the male pronoun in the Book of Common Prayer, and would loudly sing at the Doxology, "Blessed is she who comes in the name of the Lord." My dad had taught me to play chess when I was tiny. What could be done to address this? I still thought my throat hurt because I was a bad person who had done a terrible thing. My eyes were pressed shut. When the boys did what they did to me, they denied the third person on that bed. A parent did pull out a checkbook and offer to pay Crawford to write a personal essay. From the author of Notes on a Silencing, Lacy Crawford draws on 15 years of experience traveling the United States as a highly sought-after private college counselor to illuminate the madness of parents pursuing college admissions in her debut novel Early Decision. Is it possible to face the fall semester of senior year without losing your mind? I'd have been at home in Lake Forest, taking my Zovirax. From Notes on a Silencing. Discourse was now impossible. Perhaps the adults might acknowledge, with deep regret, that there really was nothing to discuss. He set up his pad of quadrille paper, clicked out a few millimeters of lead, and told Reverend Clark that we weren't making progress. It would have been hopeless to try to support their investigation without my parents supporting me. You are, legally and ethically, in loco parentis of them all. "Four, Lacy is a promiscuous girl who has had intercourse with a number of boys on campus, including the accused. That’s what Lacy Crawford ’96 does in her debut novel about college admissions. Vile things were nesting in my throat, and this was it—she was going to see it all. "The lawyer for the school says that you are not welcome to return to campus. I hated the girl who had done those things. The assault took place just before Halloween of what was—using the English terms—my fifth-form year at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. Go to warwicks.com for information. In writing the novel, Crawford wanted to comment on the craziness she saw in the admission race. "Two, Lacy is a drug dealer, who has sold her Prozac and other drugs to students on campus, endangering them. ... ©2013 Lacy Crawford (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers. Herpes was an STD, and STDs were acquired through sex, and I had not had sex. She's not a good girl.". This time the erasure was committed by men whose power over me was socially conferred rather than physically wielded, some of them who had never even been in a room with me. I was hung up on that word. My father got out his graph paper. Mom loved a classy lady, dignified and reserved: vintage Lagerfeld or Halston. THE REVEREND ALICIA CRAWFORD she wrote in all caps, showing them who she was, who we were, and above all, who she imagined me to be. And here before you is one of them, this girl, a thousand miles from home, who cannot eat. If she could wave a magic wand to transform college admissions, she’d have colleges revert to their own, unique applications and essays, and require interviews. "Lacy. I knew the morality but not the mechanism. //-->. The school had failed this first test. Read & Listen Only a fool walked into what I had walked into. I don't remember, for example, how it felt to greet my mother when I came home. My mind forgets them anew, the white blast of nothing deploying like an airbag at the memory's approach. The last thing I would do was align myself with her needs. Columns Books Latest Shareable He's been waiting ten years to go after St. Paul's. She ate a chopped salad and sent an engraved card the next day, even if she had treated. Tears escaped the corners of my eyes and ran along my hairline, into my ears. Thus is the world, this world, made. The rector didn't have much to offer. The story lines are based on situations she encountered with her former clients, though identities are disguised. "Three, Lacy regularly abuses privileges and circumvents rules on campus. Has herpetic lesions. "Would like to speak with you about [a patient]," reads the message. Child confessed this to mother last week." If the first violation by the boys who assaulted me was the way they made me feel erased, it was this injury that the school repeated, and magnified, when it created its own story of the assault. That "outpatient report" he referred to from the ENT in Concord was never shown to me or to anyone who cared for me, and it is now lost to time—or, as documents would come to suggest, to more pointed interventions. I have always remembered. Even once I found out a few months later about the vice rector's bit of patriarchal counsel to his boys, I did not do the math to arrive at the realization made by a detective investigating the school more than 25 years after the fact: "So the students knew about the herpes before you did.". It was the school's inhumanity that I could not—cannot—overcome. Regrettably, the students which assaulted her were never held accountable and instead graduated with awards. Isn't anyone catching this? The rector only said, Why didn't Lacy tell anyone? This time, the infirmary sent me to see an ear-nose-and-throat doctor in Concord, a proper physician. Because she lives on campus—and, like all of her peers, is not allowed to leave without written consent from her advisor—you can be reasonably sure that she contracted it from another student (or, I suppose, from a faculty member or an administrator). The idea that I sold that or any other drug was insane. The nurse took my temperature (normal) and told me strep was going around. “Write what you know,” the adage goes. The boys saw, of course. LACY CRAWFORD: Thank you, Leslie! //--> My parents came in, looking pale. It also includes successes. Then you could say whatever you wanted. Historical Person Search Search Search Results Results Lacy Crawford (1936 - 1949) Try FREE for 14 days Try FREE for 14 days. Again and again, Crawford saw parents wanting to help their children, but what they did often damaged or wore down their child’s confidence, she says. My name is first, and below it, because I was a minor, is Mom's signature. I was not on campus. "There's something really wrong with my throat," I said. His mouth funneled down into jowls previously invisible, and his eyes shrank not by narrowing but by deepening into his skull. I would be happy to tell the truth. And then she'd go out there on Sunday mornings and turn crackers into the body of Christ. The conversation simply ended. Then they silenced me. But everywhere else, I was waiting for it to be revealed. I imagine I could have convinced a court I had never sold drugs. My mother was calling my pediatrician at home, terribly worried, and looking into plane tickets to bring me home. The records that remained of my visit appear woefully incomplete. Crawford entered the prestigious St. Paul’s School when she was 14. Nothing is so deadly to the necessary college memoirist’s perspective as Mom or Dad, no matter how loving, leaning down to read over one’s shoulder. The verb "confessed" is useful, nestled in the pages of this caring clinician—not that she thought I was guilty, but that she anticipated the guilt I was feeling. Because now I was up against an institution that subsumes human beings and presents a slick wall of rhetoric and ice where there should be thought and feeling. I'd spit in the sink and then open my mouth again, wider, and peer down my nose until my eyeballs ached because there had to be something there. My dad sounded so old. "Call returned," noted someone else. They talked to the school psychologist, the school's lawyer, and the physician in the infirmary. Saliva accumulated in my mouth. But that's all the notes show. She repeated, "The district attorney, Lacy." “I went and told my parents about the sexual assault. [CDATA[//>