Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [85]
He watched her walk away, a slender, compact figure in exercise clothes, carrying a leather briefcase. She was barely five feet tall. The men on the ferry were so much larger. He remembered that she had once told Susan that she took up running because of her fear of rape. “I’ll just outrun them,” she had said. Men didn’t know anything about that. They didn’t understand that fear.
But there was another kind of fear that only men felt. He looked at the newspaper column with deep and growing unease. Key words and phrases jumped out at him:
Vindictive . . . bitter . . . can’t tolerate a woman . . . blatant hostility . . . rape . . . crime of males . . . smearing his supervisor . . . affairs with young women . . . excessive drinking . . . late to work . . . unfairly jeopardized . . . pigs in the pen.
These characterizations were more than inaccurate, more than unpleasant. They were dangerous. And it was exemplified by what happened to John Masters—a story that had reverberated among many senior men in Seattle.
Masters was fifty, a marketing manager at MicroSym. A stable guy, solid citizen, married twenty-five years, two kids—the older girl in college, the younger girl a junior in high school. The younger girl starts to have trouble with school, her grades go down, so the parents send her to a child psychologist. The child psychologist listens to the daughter and then says, You know, this is the typical story of an abused child. Do you have anything like that in your past?
Gee, the girl says, I don’t think so.
Think back, the psychologist says.
At first the girl resists, but the psychologist keeps at her: Think back. Try to remember. And after a while, the girl starts to recall some vague memories. Nothing specific, but now she thinks it’s possible. Maybe Daddy did do something wrong, way back when.
The psychologist tells the wife what is suspected. After twenty-five years together, the wife and Masters have some anger between them. The wife goes to Masters and says, Admit what you did.
Masters is thunderstruck. He can’t believe it. He denies everything. The wife says, You’re lying, I don’t want you around here. She makes him move out of the house.
The older daughter flies home from college. She says, What is this madness? You know Daddy didn’t do anything. Come to your senses. But the wife is angry. The daughter is angry. And the process, once set in motion, can’t be stopped.
The psychologist is required by state law to report any suspected abuse. She reports Masters to the state. The state is required by law to conduct an investigation. Now a social worker is talking to the daughter, the wife, and Masters. Then to the family doctor. The school nurse. Pretty soon, everybody knows.
Word of the accusation gets to MicroSym. The company suspends him from his job, pending the outcome. They say they don’t want negative publicity.
Masters is seeing his life dissolve. His younger daughter won’t talk to him. His wife won’t talk to him. He’s living alone in an apartment. He has money problems. Business associates avoid him. Everywhere he turns, he sees accusing faces. He is advised to get a lawyer. And he is so shattered, so uncertain, he starts going to a shrink himself.
His lawyer makes inquiries; disturbing details emerge. It turns out that the particular psychologist who made the accusation uncovers abuse in a high percentage of her cases. She has reported so many cases that the state agency has begun to suspect bias. But the agency can do nothing; the law requires that all cases be investigated. The social worker assigned to the case has been previously disciplined for her excessive zeal in pursuing questionable cases and is widely thought to be incompetent, but