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David’s Scrapbook

Alicia Parks

    David Birnbaum’s most valued possession, the only thing other than his laptop that he would run into a burning building for, was a scrapbook: big enough to paste an entire sheet of paper to, almost two inches thick, bound in red cloth. He had spent hours the year he was fourteen assembling the thing, and he still liked to flip through it every few months.
    The red cloth had been a random choice at the time. He had wanted something less formal than black leather – which was the only other thing on the shelf at the time – but he had come to like it. He’d developed the habit of running the fingers of his right hand up and down the slightly textured edge of the back binding, to the point that in many places the underlying cardboard was now exposed.
    On the first page of the scrapbook, rotated ninety degrees and filling the entire page, was a semi-posed shot of eight teenage boys and young men in yarmulkes, all laughing and poking each other. The next page, now right side up, held eight pictures of twelve-ish year old boys, of the sort that are taken at school. If someone were to study these pictures for a moment, they would determine that they were the same boys as in the previous picture. When David studied them he fancied that he could see a shadow in each one’s eyes, but he knew that might have been his imagination.
    On the next page was a 8x10 police mug shot, identifiable as such only by a plaque of numbers along the bottom margin and otherwise entirely obscured by layer upon layer of heavy black marker. David had started out marking out only the eyes, and then a few weeks later the name and mouth, and then the face, and then the hair and body. He had even, just because covering him with marker was so satisfying, done the background, but had always – with effort – resisted blacking out the serial number. He liked having him reduced to numbers. When he needed to black something out he just went over and over again where he knew the face had once been.
    The next page was the first real writing. David had had to haggle pretty extensively to get this piece of paper. It was the only piece of paper in the whole process that had had all eight names on it, and he wanted it in black and white. It was a list of witnesses for a sentencing hearing for someone whose name had been marked out with the same heavy black marker. The powers-that-be had kept the younger kids out of the trial itself, but all of them had banded together and insisted that all eight testify at the sentencing. They were listed in order of age, top to bottom: Eliot Davidovitch, Nathaniel Pearlman, Yoshua Levine, Yosef Abrahmsohn, Daniel Blumstein, Simcha Horowitz, David Birnbaum, Asher Skolnik.
    The next page was a newspaper clipping stuck to the page with fancy archival tape (which had cost a shocking amount of money), with proper documentation of the date and page, from the Boston Globe. The story had gotten more press than it likely would have had it happened elsewhere, things being what they were. The headline read: “Local Synagogue Finds Pedophile in Bar Mitzvah Program.”
     The story explained that the synagogue had had the in theory lovely practice of supplementing their formal bar mitzvah prep program with one-on-one mentoring from an adult man in the congregation, but had recently discovered that in practice it didn’t work out equally well for all the boys. The article included extensive quotes from the Rabbis about how grieved they were at the situation and that they were doing what they could to support the boys and make sure it never happened again, and to please respect the boys’ privacy.
    The name of the perpetrator was also blacked out here. This was not in any deference to the privacy of the accused. On the contrary. A few months after the story broke the eight of them had agreed that they would no longer say nor suffer to hear the name of their perpetrator, and almost everyone in the synagogue had complied. Some followed the boys’ lead and called him “Creep,” but most made do with “you-know-who.” The only people who still referred to him by his name, causing everyone in hearing range to flinch, were his parents. His wife and his children – who had been younger than his taste, thank goodness – had moved to California, where Davorah Weintraub (now Epstein) had demanded that her new synagogue initiate a vigorous “good-touch-bad-touch-you-can-come-to-me-with-anything” program such as David’s had installed less than a month after the story broke.
    But of course inevitably gossip that juicy is hard to be respectful about, and the identities of the boys Creep had worked with was a matter of public record. For the first two days after the initial newspaper story the five boys not yet at college were continually stopped in the halls and on the sidewalk and on their yards and asked if it was true and what it had been like and why they hadn’t told and if they hadn’t told obviously they must have liked it. Also thus interrogated were the victim’s brothers and sisters, including some elementary kids, not to mention Creep’s kids themselves. The phones were ringing off the hook at all nine families’ houses and the houses of Creep’s neighbors, some of whom had seen the police cars at his house, plus just the general roar of gossip among those with no connection to the case.
    The several pages after the newspaper stories, therefore, were strongly worded emails from the Rabbi (with lots of capital letters), one to all the families in the congregation, and another for all the teachers in the congregation’s day school to read to their classes. The emails had almost stopped the direct interrogations and reduced the background roar to a manageable level, although there were more such emails scattered throughout the next several months of the scrapbook.
    They’d actually been really nice about it. The Rabbis. No hint that they’d thought even for a millisecond of covering the thing up like Catholics are wont to do. No whisper that the boys had been breaking the Law by ‘lying’ with a man. They’d even paid for therapy for all of them, including group therapy, which is where they’d become so tight – the older boys pulling each other through and then reaching back to grab the younger ones.
    Next was a rather long Globe interview, dated four days after the first one, of Nathaniel, who had been the one to break the story. He had gone off to college and established that the “once you’re tired enough you can sleep anywhere” theory does not apply to sex abuse survivors who freak out when they find themselves alone with another man. He’d limped along for over a week napping while his roommate was in class and sleeping in the dormitory lounge before finally giving in and showing his shame to the woman at student housing. She had granted him the single on the condition that he get counseling, and the counselor had bullied him into reporting by pointing out that “these men don’t strike once.” The article ended with Nathaniel pleading to all the sex abuse survivors in the reading public to report, for the sake of the children.
    Going forward from there were more newspaper articles, into which the word “rape” gradually crept, and then a rising number of legal documents, all larded with more emails and newsletters from the Rabbis: giving updates on the case, telling people how to respond, announcing the new sex abuse prevention program. In each of these documents, the name was crossed out. It had been work. Even a year later, David was still finding occurrences of the name and searching frantically for his marker.
    The legal documents reached a creshendo nine months after the first newspaper article. He had been given twenty two years, which would pop him out of the system at fifty one. The DA insisted that that was as good as could be hoped for, but there were some low days imagining all the havoc he could wreck with other boys’ lives, and how to manage to follow him around for the remaining thirty years of his life to make sure he never got access to any other kids.
    The last page contained only a five inch Boston Globe obituary – name crossed out, documented by date and page – dated almost four years after the first newspaper article: “Bar Mitzvah Pedophile Found Dead in Cell.” Creep had been requesting frequent HIV tests in prison and had hanged himself three days after he finally popped up positive, according to the woman sergeant who came to tell them he had died. Completely off the record, of course. She said she didn’t know whether the sex had been consensual or not, but they knew.
    A month after the sentencing Eliot had gone to the prison and asked to meet with Creep, to make sure he was getting the treatment that they’d been assured child abusers get. Sure enough, both in jail awaiting trial and in prison after sentencing, he’d been gang raped by eight men his first day in. Creep had whined that they kept doing it, as if he thought Eliot had come to stop it. They had felt only slightly guiltily at the great pleasure this news gave them.
    But when the news came that he had hanged himself, they didn’t bother with guilt, they just bought champagne, lots of champagne, and drank it together until they could no longer stand. Even Asher, who was only seventeen.

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