Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (6 page)

"Uncle Bob kept at me till I was ten or eleven. Then one night we all got together and told our parents. It was very hard. We'd never talked about sex in our house. There was a lot of talking and crying that night. And then Bob walked in and we all had root beer floats together! He wasn't kicked out! Nothing! Dad was working part time for him, laying carpets. Maybe that's why."

Minda brushed at a watery streak of mascara. "Do you know what that does to a kid?" she asked. "As far as we knew, nothing was ever done about Bob, except that Mom and Dad wouldn't leave us alone with him after that." She raised her voice.
"Nothing was ever done about him!
That's what hurts the most."

She turned away and blew her nose. For once, she spoke slowly. "Later a teenager came to Dad and complained about Uncle Bob. He said, 'Dean, I can't take it anymore. You have to help me.' Nothing came of that, either."

She sniffed again. "I had to go to the new ward bishop to be interviewed for a Temple Recommend. Shoot, I knew he'd turn me down." Applicants had to meet seventeen requirements, including abstention from coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco and cola drinks; total adherence to "commandments of the gospel"; attendance at church functions; refusal to associate with backsliders; and, above all else, moral cleanliness. "I was unclean," Minda said. "I told the bishop about Uncle Bob, and I remember crying and saying I wasn't worthy. When I was finished, he asked me when it had happened last, and then he assured me I hadn't done anything wrong. I got the Recommend and went off to our temple in Idaho Falls to be baptized for the dead. I've always had blind faith, I'm a total believer. It makes me feel better about myself."

Sex and sexuality remained taboo subjects in the McArthur household. Arden and Dean were demonstrative with each other but not with their children. "At night, Dad would sit in his big old chair and Mom would plop down in his lap or sit on the arm, and they'd be there the whole evening," Minda said, smiling at the memory. "Or Mom would be standing in the kitchen and Dad would give her a big kiss. But they kept their distance from us kids —maybe a little kiss on the cheek at bedtime, but never all huggy-huggy. Well, gol, of
course
they loved us. They showed it all the time, like my dad saying, 'Have a good day today. Turn the world over. You know you can do anything!' He'd say, 'Don't you look pretty today. You sure are beautiful!' "

« * *

After the Bob Asay revelations, the MeArthurs tightened enforcement of the Mormon strictures about modesty. "Mom made me wear skirts below the knee," Minda recalled. "I always had to wear T-shirts for underwear. Morn said, 'When you grow up, you won't have a problem changing from skimpy clothes to modest clothes that'll cover your garment.' "

It was the sacred obligation of every committed Mormon to protect against Satan by wearing "the garment," disparaged by detractors as "magic underwear" and "angel chaps." In the required ritual, the high priest intoned: "It represents the garment given to Adam when he was found naked in the Garden of Eden, and is called the Garment of the Holy Priesthood. Inasmuch as you do not defile it, but are true and faithful to your covenants, it will be a shield and a protection to you against the power of the destroyer until you have finished your work here on earth."

The garment was a cotton sack in the shape of old-fashioned B.V.D.s, with a trapdoor in the rear and arcane slits and markings over the private areas. It was supposed to be worn next to the skin for life; fundamentalist Mormons made love in the garment, gave birth, underwent surgery, swam and showered and took part in sports in it. Every Mormon could recite tales attesting to the garment's efficacy. Believers believed that neither steel-jacketed bullet nor chain saw could pierce the godly weave.

Both McArthur parents wore the garment. Dean, though openly less pious than his wife, had been a bishop. On hot days Minda used to see her mother standing in front of the stove wearing nothing but the garment—the kids called it LDS air-conditioning.

The high neck and knee length presented a style problem, and Mormon mothers prepared their daughters by first dressing them in T-shirts and long skirts. Minda, of course, rebelled, but Arden was not one to yield on sacred matters. When Minda was in the sixth grade, "a visiting cousin left her bikini at our house and I changed into it every day at the pool. My mom never found out. Then there was a phone call to send the bikini back." She sighed. "These are the things that break a kid's heart."

* * *

When Minda entered junior high, the Lovell schools were just beginning to consider sex education. "My mother was adamant against it," Minda recalled. "She said the teachers would be single, and what did they know about sex? My sisters and I were indifferent. Sex wasn't discussed at home or in church. Why should it be taught in the schools?"

The closest the church came to offering sexual guidance came in the form of occasional instructions from Salt Lake City. A typical memo was entitled "Steps in Overcoming Masturbation" and recommended breaking off relationships with other self-abusers, leaving the bathroom immediately after a bath and avoiding the mirror, wearing tight clothes in bed "so that it would be difficult and time consuming for you to remove those clothes," yelling "stop!" and reciting Scripture or imagining "having to bathe in a tub of worms" when the urge became overwhelming, reading
How to Win Friends and Influence People
or holding the Book of Mormon firmly in hand through the night. "In very severe cases," the bulletin went on, "it may be necessary to tie a hand to the bed frame." Such pronouncements were aimed mainly at missionaries and insiders; they were seldom seen by the children and most ordinary members of the church.

An eighth-grade teacher showed a film about menstruation, and Minda was so embarrassed she refused to look. The prepubescent schoolboys were always pulling tampons from the girls' purses and waving them about. Minda turned purple. She spoke against a teacher who showed a movie about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's theories on dying. So did most of her friends, and the teacher was pressured to send the film back. Lovell was a tight little Mormon town, barely affected by trends and happenings in Billings and Casper, let alone the rest of the country, and its children reflected their parents more strongly than most.

At thirteen, Minda told her mother, "Gol, Mom, I think I started my period."

Arden looked startled and said, "You did?" When Minda realized that her mother would have no more to say on the subject, she moped off to her room.

MINDA McARTHUR BRINKERHOFF 41

A year later, she cut her hand while doing the dishes, and the family doctor took stitches at the hospital. At school the next day a senior boy asked, "Who sewed you up?"

"Dr. Story," Minda answered.

"Is
he
your doctor?"

"Yeah."

The senior asked, "Don't you know what he's like?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you know that he fools with girls in his office?"

"Oh, for crying out loud!" Minda said. "I've been going to him since I was three months old. Shoot, if he did things like that, don't you think I'd know?"

The boy said, "I just can't believe you'd keep going back to him."

Minda blew up. "You can't say things like that!" she yelled. "You weren't there! You don't know!"

Nor could she fathom her classmates' warnings about the GAA physicals. All Dr. Story ever did was check her heart and reflexes and sign the form. The other girls insisted that he took liberties. "No way," Minda said. She knew malicious gossip when she heard it. If Dr. Story were kinky, her mother would have been the first to know. And she was his number-one backer.

4

MEG ANDERSON

Four hundred miles away, Meg was majoring in drama and speech at her father's alma mater, Utah State. She was interested in marriage but still too afraid of men to join in the mating game that preoccupied the other students. All her life, she'd felt like an insect looking up the pant legs of men. Her female teachers had been imitation males; she could hear their fathers speaking through them. Bob Asay had saddled her with an irrational fear of sexual mistreatment. At night she forced herself to walk down the long dark hill toward town, but she always wound up shaking and shuddering and running back to the dorm.

From the first, she'd liked Logan. It looked like Lovell, only
bigger.
Like every other town in Utah, it was strongly LDS. The
college
sat in groves of trees; there were flowers everywhere and a fcomforting Mormon expansiveness to the streets and buildings.

^did
odd jobs all week, cleaned houses on weekends, and managed a f
_u
u
_curr
i
_cu
i
_um
. After eighteen years of hoeing beets and milking cows, it almost seemed like a vacation. She acted in school plays,

^san
g
in the college chorus, pounded on a used set of traps in a basement practice room, dabbled in piano, and let a friendly cowboy teach her "Night Rider's Lament" and "The Streets of Laredo." She took out a loan from a Lovell bank to buy guitars for herself and her upperclassman sister Marie so they could practice together, then strummed till her fingertips split.

Meg's first man turned up in the unexpected setting of Family Home Evening, the Mormons' traditional Monday night of prayer, play and song. In the campus setting, Meg was named Family Home Evening "mother," responsible for the moral and spiritual health of her group. The role fit; she'd been a church leader since junior high.

After a few meetings, a clean-cut young member named Greg Hagan asked for a date. She couldn't say no. She certainly wasn't going to tell him that she had a morbid fear of rape. When he returned her to her door, he slammed her against the wall and grabbed her breasts. She screamed and locked him out.

She reported the incident to her LDS branch president the next day. "Don't worry, Meg," he said grimly. "We'll take care of him."

A month later Greg Hagan was married in the temple. Meg was crushed. She told herself, Every day of my life I've been taught morality. It's our shining ideal, way up here, out of sight. Why, immorality is the greatest sin next to murder!
And yet the branch president signed Greg Hagan's Temple Recommend!
She pondered and prayed but received no enlightenment.

When she was twenty, she met the man she would always think of as "Mr. Expert." His area of expertise was sex, but he kept his talent concealed till she was hopelessly in love. She fought the sofa wars for two years and lost four or five times. When the relationship ended, she felt so degraded that she confessed every detail to her bishop. He brought her before a church court—the Mormons called them courts of love—and she was disfellowshipped by a jury consisting of the bishop, his two counselors and the ward clerk. She was stripped of her job as Relief Society counselor and forbidden to lead prayers or speak at meetings while she set about repenting her sins.

"The sacrament was what I missed the most," she recalled later. "In our ritual, the broken bread and water are handed along the pew. All I could do was pass it on. Everyone in the church knew why."

Alone at night, she mourned her loss of worthiness. "The hardest part is forgiving yourself, and I couldn't. The whole thing ripped me to pieces. I thought, I'm not a terrible person, I'm a
good
person. I'd wanted to marry the boy, but he told me he couldn't be true. I tried everything in my power to get him to marry me."

She stayed in her room and spurned males. The church court had ordered chastity, and she took no chances. Healing came slowly. She repented publicly at a branch meeting and gave the required talk on modesty. She changed wards and attended youth meetings. She began to speak up at church functions, usually to younger members in need of counsel. She'd been a leader for as long as she could remember, and it was unnatural for her to keep silent. One of the men took her aside and said, "You're a born leader. Why don't you take over one of our groups?"

They were the first kind words she'd heard in months, but she had to tell the truth. "I can't," she said. "I've been disfellow-shipped."

His face froze. "Then keep your mouth shut at the meetings," he ordered.

She cried in her room. For weeks she told herself this wasn't happening. She slipped into a melancholia so profound that she would strum her guitar for hours, seeing no one and talking only to

herself.

At the end of a year, she was brought before church authorities and asked if she'd stayed "clean"—no petting, no heavy kissing, nothing remotely sexual. Did she feel above reproach morally,
back
on the true path?

^No
»" she answered. "I don't feel any different now than I did a $ear ago. I'm just as repentant now as I was then, but inside I . . . I don't feel different."

One of the brethren smiled and said, "Meg, you won't feel different till you've forgiven yourself. Have you been able to do that?"

"Hunh-uh. I haven't."

MEG ANDERSON

The elders huddled and then ruled that she'd made amends to her church and the world.

She began seeing a likable young man. On the night he date-raped her, she couldn't have held him off with a club. She didn't date again for a year.