“There is plenty to be learned even from a bad teacher: what not to do, how not to be.” –J. K. Rowling

This post contains incidents of the sexual abuse of a minor. Viewer discretion is advised.

In 1971 I was thirteen, Richard Nixon was president, the voting age was lowered to eighteen, the Vietnam War raged on, and my history teacher started to sleep with my friend, also thirteen, with me as their beard. History was my favorite subject, but I hated this man and felt his behavior reflected the essential truth that the world was terrible. Adults had no interest in protecting me from harm. My father was still drinking with periodic binges that left marks on my mother and our family life in pieces. My eldest sister was attending Radcliffe, and the riots on college campuses were constant and terrifying. On May 4th, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of students and killed four. 

I loved history. My strengths were all on the side of humanities, and what I loved the most was storytelling and what was history but a story. I had never particularly liked this teacher; he was a bit too anxious to seem cool and frequently looked at me during class as if to gain my approval. In retrospect, he likely had targeted my friend, and since I was close to her, I might be helpful. Back then, with almost no exceptions, adults were immune to children’s thoughts, fears, and pain. I told my parents as little as possible to avoid the reality that they did not care how I felt. We needed to get on with it, to go to school and set the table and not cry when we heard things breaking and not expect to be listened to unless we were highly amusing, in which case you might capture some airtime. 

This girl and I had a checkered past, friends sometimes, other times not so much. Her parents were strict and controlling, her older sister was considered wild, and there was Christian Science as a backdrop to their religious life. We had no religion. My parents were survivors of Boston Latin School and graduates of Harvard, and we understood God was a story and not a well-told one. If the movie we watched was Paramount Pictures, I thought the woman holding the torch at the movie’s end was God. My eldest sister had insisted on a Holy Communion, but on discovering she was no longer allowed to wear the veil, she left the church at age twelve. My other sister joined the Unitarians mainly to participate in overnight sleepovers, and we all went briefly to Quaker Sunday school, where I recall building lost cities in the sand.

At thirteen, I was innocent, with vast exposure to inappropriate literature, movies, and adult conversations. Living abroad and traveling through Europe, I read Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence and many other books not meant for children. I had watched Fellini movies like Juliette of the Spirits, Godard’s Breathless, and even Barbarella because why not? I was obsessed with James Bond because Sean Connery was just so sexy. I had a recurring fantasy of being one of those sexy spy women in a black dress who Bond kisses while he cuts the straps of her gown or one of Illya Kuryakin’s doomed girlfriends on The Man from Uncle. I had a mad crush on a comic book character who lived in the jungle, had a panther, and was always in a mask called The Phantom. But then the screen went black. 

The screen didn’t go black when my history teacher seduced my friend. I sat in the back seat of his car while they made out in the front, or I sat in the kitchen where she was babysitting and waited while they had sex upstairs. He was a paunchy, red-faced, awful man who once arrived at one of these babysitting jobs with his hand bandaged and, when asked, told us his wife had stuck a fork in his hand during an argument. “I’d like to stick a fork in your eye,” I thought. The story was that she was coming to my house after the orphanage to work on our project. Also, he was driving us to a local orphanage where we spent time with abandoned children who had parents, but their imperfections made them so unlovable their parents gave them up. Somehow this arrangement was transformed into a humanities project featuring the two of us, with him acting as the advisor. The world was in chaos, so who cared to question the activities of two girls? My parents were utterly ignorant of my life away from home. They both worked and while there were moments of attention, I was neglected.

One day it all blew up. He didn’t get her home on time, and her mother called our house. I decided I could no longer manage this web of lies. I told her I had no idea where she was but that she was with him. The silence at the other end of the phone was enough. Her mother knew everything. At dinner that night, I announced to my parents that my friend was having an affair with my history teacher, and she was missing. I’m unclear on this memory, but I don’t recall much being said besides my mother expressing her dislike for my friend and her mother. My father looked briefly dumbfounded, and so it ended. She disappeared into a Catholic girl’s school.

I stayed in his class so angry I could barely answer his questions. No one asked me any questions. The school did nothing. I cheated on a final exam I knew all the answers for, didn’t hand in my homework, and spent the remaining part of the school year wondering how anyone could be so gross. In my eighth grade yearbook, he wrote: “I’m sorry we disappointed you so badly.” Someone must have left it on his desk. I was given an A-plus. Two years later, I discovered drinking and, in that discovery, could accept the dark truth that most people sucked.

I tell this story because I am attending a reunion of my elementary school and junior high school classmates this fall, and someone mentioned his name in the Facebook group, having run into him playing golf. Several people said he was their favorite teacher. He retired with a full pension. I will have been sober this December for thirty-nine years; I have a wonderful son, daughter-in-law, and husband. I found a way to connect with and forgive my parents long ago. This memory hit me very hard after reading his name online. I cried for both those girls and the fact that so many children are hurt by the cruelty of adults. That may be why I became a teacher and tried hard to honor and respect my students.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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