Right and wrong no longer shocks

The Boston Herald

April 16, 1993

BEVERLY BECKHAM

"Before and After." It's a book I haven't been able to get out of my head.

Before and after. It's how we mark our lives. The befores and afters are turning points. Before we got married. After we got married. Before someone got sick. After she got sick. Before he died. After he died.

Something comes from without, something good or bad, and permanently changes the structure within. And forever after there is a division between then and now.

But Rosellen Brown's "Before and After" isn't about deviant cells decimating a life, or an act of God over which man has no control. It's about our most recent pandemic: losing control; a person and a world out of control. It's about a willful, hurtful, deliberate act and a family's and a society's quiet adaptation to it.

In a small New England town, a 17-year-old boy takes a car jack and clubs his girlfriend to death. It sounds like a news story, not a work of fiction. Except that because it's fiction, it takes you where news never does. It takes you into the minds of the boy's family, the people who live with him and love him. It is through their musings, their memories and their perceptions, that they and the boy are exposed.

Before the police knocked on the door, this is who we were. After the police knocked on the door, this is who we became.

Ten years ago, this book wouldn't have found a publisher. It would have been deemed too removed from the mainstream, too grim and unbelievable.

Today its familiarity is chilling. Teenagers commit murders every day. Sixteen-year-old Jason Robinson was stabbed to death Monday at Dartmouth High. This is the most recent and, therefore, the most horrifying atrocity. But we know about it only because it happened in our backyard.

A week before in Brooklyn, in someone else's backyard, a 17-year-old was stabbed to death in an argument over a basketball. "Seventeen years old, he died in his mother's arms on a cracked sidewalk, stumbling to get home," a New York Times reporter wrote in an effort to get people who read this stuff every day to feel what has become routine.

It has been routine for a long, long while.

Patty Gilmore stabbed to death how many years ago?

Matthew Rosenberg molesting, then drowning Kenny Claudio.

Shaun Ouillette walking in the woods, Rod Matthews behind him, stepping in his footsteps so he wouldn't be caught. Matthews hitting Shaun with a baseball bat. Shaun begging him to stop. Matthews just pounding away.

What stuns are not these close up views. We've seen murderers. We've imagined their actions.

What stuns is this book's close up of the murderer's family, the "eight-legged graceful animal alive under a single pelt" that spawned this boy. You watch it react, like a Venus Fly Trap, and then mutate.

That's what's happening all over this country. We're changing. And not for the better. We're getting worse.

The family in "Before and After" was upper-class ordinary. She was a pediatrician. He was an artist. She worked at a hospital. He worked at home. The kids went to school. The boy's room was a mess. So? How could a child from a family like this take a human life?

He had a temper and a few problems his parents didn't know about. But lots of people have a temper and problems.

Most don't commit murder.

When he does, his father goes into overdrive to cover up, to erase his son's involvement. He protects at all costs. His mother tries to reconcile the child he was with the person he has become. She cannot. She thinks about the murdered girl and weeps.

Only his sister reacts with horror. She cannot bear to be near him. He has never said he was sorry, and she cannot stand his lack of remorse, her father's lies, and her mother's silence. What if it were me? she screams. What if someone murdered me? Why is everyone protecting him?

And everyone does. That's the thing. Neither mother nor father condemns, curses, judges, or says, "You should pay. You deserve to be punished."

Instead the family mutates to survive.

Is it possible that as nation we are doing the same? Running away from problems? Avoiding confrontation? Adjusting and adapting to a world rife with knives and guns and car-jackings and lootings and random murders and rapes and riots and carnage and bombs and danger anywhere, everywhere, people out to get you, no one you can trust?

When we don't confront, we conform.

When we don't take control, we relinquish control.

When we don't differentiate between right and wrong, we get what we have today.