In the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to avoid the Penn State scandal as much as possible.  I’m not a football fan, and to tell the truth, didn’t even know who Joe Paterno was until he ended his career in disgrace.  I think everyone involved deserves their day in court and refuse to comment here on the veracity of the horrible accusations.  But one thing I can’t escape are the questions Why are we so angry at Joe Paterno?  Why is he the villain here and not merely Jerry Sandusky? 

And as strange as it seems, I get the greater rage directed at someone who isn’t actually accused of raping any little boys than someone who is.

In August of 1986, I began the first grade—Grade One, Room One—at St. Mary Elementary School in Greensburg, Indiana.  Greensburg is a working-class, mostly German-American town of about 10,000 in the southeastern part of the state.  Roughly a quarter to a third of the residents were Roman Catholic and members of St. Mary’s Church; the rest were mostly divided among various Protestant denominations.  Its economy then was based almost entirely on manufacturing and family farming.  Now with many of the factories shuttered and the rise of corporate agriculture, it might be methamphetamine manufacture and the black market re-sale of prescription painkillers, but twenty-five years ago, Greensburg was a Norman Rockwellish place.  Its pride and joy was and is the large-tooth aspen tree growing out of the roof of the clock tower in the courthouse downtown.  The phone book was filled with Scheidlers and Nobbes and Schroders and Greiwes and Lechers and Buenings and Zapfes.  (In a rather unironic fashion, when I was a teenager working as a reporter for the local radio station, one of the Greensburg Powers That Be referred to his fellow salt-of-the-earth Greensburgers as “Ordinary Germans,” a phrasing that much amused my dark and twisted sense of humor.)

The first and second grades at St. Mary’s were located in four classrooms on the middle floor of the three-story building.  It dated from around the turn of the last century, and each first-grade classroom shared a “coat hall” with a second grade classroom in addition to opening onto a large central hall painted with polka dots and a giant clown who appeared to be suffering from impetigo.  Anything said in any of the classrooms could be heard clearly in any of the other three classrooms, and the main doors all had large glass windows.  There were two first-grade teachers there at the time:  Sr. G and Mrs. F.  Betraying all stereotypes of the Catholic schoolteacher nun, Sr. G was an amazingly sweet and patient woman who never had to so much as raise her voice, let alone her ruler.  Three years later, my brother would be assigned to her class and have a wonderful experience.  I, on the other hand, got Mrs. F. 

Most children do have an innate sense of justice and a pretty decent bullshit detector.  It was clear to me from the beginning that Mrs. F was a sadistic lunatic.  Her tactics would maybe possibly be acceptable in an Army boot camp, were there any logic behind them and did they get any results, which there wasn’t and they didn’t.  Every day, the halls would echo with her screams at her six-year-old charges, calling them retarded, comparing them to the actual learning-disabled student in the class, insulting the learning-disabled student who was in her second year in this very same classroom, hitting them upside the head with heavy dictionaries for daydreaming in class hard enough to make their glasses go flying and their ears ring, dumping out their messy desks in front of the class and then pushing them down while telling them to clean it up, calling them babies if they cried during tornado drills, threatening to make them wear diapers when they wet their pants because they couldn’t hold it until a bathroom break, threatening to throw their security-blanket toys away when they brought them to school, making fun of one child for being nervous and throwing up his morning milk on the first day of first grade, making him so nervous that he was going to do it again the next day that for weeks it became this cycle of him throwing up and getting made fun of. 

It was obvious to me back then that E. was slow, and it was obvious that this was absolutely no fault of her own, and it was obvious that belittling her for her condition was not going to get her to be able to memorize the numbers 1-10.  It was obvious that B. was freaking out on the first day of school…and that throwing up was an entirely normal response for a six-year-old boy going to school full-day for the first time…and that he didn’t WANT to vomit but the constant worry about vomiting and being humiliated for vomiting was creating a horrible vicious cycle of nerves.  It was obvious that six-year-olds will daydream in class, that they won’t keep their folders and pencil boxes in perfect alignment, that a fair number of them will carry stuffed animals or security blankets or suck their thumbs or get scared and cry during tornado drills or occasionally wet their pants.  This was not because they are bad or irresponsible or stupid but because six-year-olds are CHILDREN and will behave as such. 

I know personally of at least two children who got dislocated shoulders from being yanked around by the arm by Mrs. F and one whose shirt sleeve was torn completely away at the seam.  I learned how to give an Indian burn to my younger brother from her—grab the forearm as tight as you can in both hands, twist the skin in opposite directions—and got in trouble for doing so at home.   A lot of us had bruises and red marks on our arms from her.  None of this was officially sanctioned discipline at St. Mary’s—they gave out a handbook to all the parents each year at registration.  Ours sat in the drawer of the antique washstand in our front hall, and I pored over it:  the dress code, the mission statement, the school supply lists, the Mass and prayer service schedule, the fees for lunch and morning milk, the rules of student conduct, the very clearly delineated disciplinary proceedings for miscreants.

I complained of Mrs. F’s behavior in class to my mother, the hitting, the public humiliation, the insulting of not just myself but students with obvious learning disabilities.  And she believed me, especially more so after Dad reported back that he had seen her hit, belittle, and yank about students when he was on playground duty.  You know, the one nun they have there is great with the kids, but Leeann’s teacher is downright nasty. 

And nothing was done.  I don’t want to be thought of as the whiny parent who tries to get her kid switched to another class. 

Over the years, stories filtered back:  from my brother’s Scout leader-- She was like that when I was there twenty years ago.  She’s old and she will retire soon—, from other teachers and alumni—At least there’s only one of her.  At least my kid doesn’t have her.  At least only one of my kids had her. 

And whatever lessons St. Mary’s was trying to teach, the one that came through most clearly to Mrs. F’s students was this:  Nobody’s coming.  Nobody will step in and say that this is wrong.  Nobody will do anything.  You are powerless because you do not count.  And the rest of them, they don’t count either. 

They saw.  They heard.  They knew.  They were the good people.  They would never do such things themselves.  I don't hate them.  Yet they all found ways to rationalize and diminish what Mrs. F did.  And they all found reasons for why they did nothing to stop her.  It wasn’t until I was in college and read Hannah Arendt’s description of “the banality of evil” that I realized there was a phrase for the phenomenon of such self-willed institutionalized blindness to and co-operation with something that was obviously horribly wrong. 

I don’t want to be thought of as the whiny parent who tries to get her kid switched to another class.

She was like that when I was there twenty years ago.  She’s old and she will retire soon.

At least there’s only one of her.

At least my kid doesn’t have her.

At least only one of my kids had her.

What happened at that school in Greensburg going on three decades ago certainly wasn’t the Holocaust.  It wasn’t the sodomy of a child in a locker room.  But it seems to me that the difference in monstrosity was merely that of degree and not of underlying structure.   I don’t know for sure whether Arendt was right about Eichmann, but she sure as hell nailed St. Mary’s.  And that, far more than anything Mrs. F ever did, was where the lasting effects of abuse come in to play.  My arm was never dislocated, the Indian burns left no scars, my ear is no longer ringing from being slammed in the side of the head with a Webster’s dictionary.  I knew that she was full of it when she called me retarded.  Sticks and stones never broke any bones and her words never really hurt me.  In some ways, it’s easier to make sense of the insane:  they act that way because they’re crazy.  Just try to stay out of their way as much as possible and don’t take it personally. 

Nobody’s coming.  Nobody will step in and say that this is wrong.  Nobody will do anything.  You are powerless because you do not count.  And the rest of them, they don’t count either.

And then there are the others:  the parents and teachers and workers who saw Mrs. F pull kids out of their desks by the arms, dislocating shoulders and ripping sleeves, whack them in the heads with heavy dictionaries hard enough to make their ears ring, pick up their desks and dump them out in front of the class, then push them down and make them clean up the mess.  They heard her scream insults at the learning disabled and ridicule children who were sick.  They knew that none of this even fell remotely into acceptable behavior, because none of them used these tactics themselves.  They KNEW.  And they did nothing. 

I don’t want to be thought of as the whiny parent who tries to get her kid switched to another class.

She was like that when I was there twenty years ago.  She’s old and she will retire soon.

At least there’s only one of her.

At least none of my kids has her.

At least only one of my kids has her.

I have no idea if Mrs. F is still alive—she would probably be in her eighties or nineties if she was.  The last time she spoke to me, I was ten or eleven years old.  Her husband had died suddenly and the funeral Mass was being held during school hours.  A handful of her former students from each grade were allowed to attend, and I volunteered for the dual and entirely uncharitable reasons of wanting to see her in pain and to get out of English class.  For some reason, I remember what I was wearing that day—black dress pants, a white blouse, a a gold brocade vest my mother had made me on the sewing machine, black socks and black moccasins borrowed from my mother since I was already wearing an adult size six shoe.  And after the Mass, we filed past her to give our condolences and, though it’s entirely cliché, I was struck by how SMALL she was, maybe an inch or so over five foot and a hundred pounds wringing wet.  I was still a little girl myself, and I was almost her equal in size and certainly, on that day at least, her equal in strength.  I could take the woman in a fight, easy.  And I remember that she was crying, and grabbed my wrist in both hands the way she would for an Indian burn, and she shook my arm—hard, but not enough to dislocate anything—and looked me in the eye and said “Thank you.”  I honestly have no idea if she knew who I was, other than a former student from four or five years back, but I knew that she meant what she said.  And as much as I tried, I couldn’t bring myself hate her.  Just as I’d always thought, she was a sick, twisted old woman…but she was incredibly tiny and incredibly alone.

Years after that, when I was in late high school or possibly college, I got a letter from SMAFA, the St. Mary’s Alumni and Friends Association.  Mrs. F had retired, and had been given some sort of lifetime achievement award for her decades of service at St. Mary’s, oh, and they wanted some money from me.  You’ve GOT to be fucking kidding me, I guffawed.  And then I was filled with a nauseating anger.  For awhile, the letter hung on the bulletin board in my childhood room, and then at some point I took it down.  I held onto it for a while for shits and giggles, I know, and then I honestly don’t remember if I threw it away with all the science fair ribbons and math league medals and other stuff I earned at St. Mary’s, or if I tucked it away in the cedar chest with a yearbook or photo album or Tracy Dog or the love letters I wrote and never sent to various boys. 

As far as I could tell when I was a student at St. Mary’s, SMAFA’s function was to give each graduating sixth-grader a wall crucifix on their last day of school.  Mine came in a flat gold box with a typewritten note to the tune of how the St. Mary’s Alumni and Friends Association hoped that I would always treasure this as much as I did my days at St. Mary’s and that I’d someday also become a member of SMAFA and provide  the money to buy future alumni with their crucifixes.  I held onto the box and note for several years—using it to hold the aforementioned science fair ribbons and medals—and then one day chucked the whole lot in the burn barrel behind the house. 

I still have the crucifix on my living room wall, though.  It’s one of maybe five items—my radio station jacket, my backpack, my copy of The Brothers Karamazov with the fish-shaped bookmark I’d made on the first day of Mrs. Rettig’s third grade class at St. Mary’s—that have been with me at twelve of the thirteen addresses in three states and two foreign countries where I’ve lived for any period of time.  It’s gone with me every time I’ve evacuated for a hurricane.  Maybe I keep it because it’s pretty, or because I can’t either literally or metaphorically bring myself to throw out Jesus, or because hey, anything that’s stayed with me against the odds of that many moves ought to be treated with some kind of respect. 

Maybe, just like SMAFA hoped, I keep it to remind myself of my days at St. Mary’s.  Or maybe I keep it to remind me of the banality of evil, and how easy it would be to become something terrible.