To this day it’s hard for me to listen to jazz,” Dylan told me. “He [Allen] would take me with him [when he practiced the clarinet with his band]. I’d be in between his legs, facing out. I felt like a dog or something. I was just told to sit there. I did what I was told. He used to sing to me the famous song ‘Heaven’ [“Cheek to Cheek,” by Irving Berlin]. It really sends shivers up and down my spine and makes me want to throw up, because it’s a throwback.”
Dylan (who now has another name) has never before spoken publicly of what she remembers about Allen and how his behavior back then has tormented her. She refuses ever to say his name. “There’s a lot I don’t remember, but what happened in the attic I remember. I remember what I was wearing and what I wasn’t wearing.” I asked her if what she had said happened in the attic happened more than once. “That was isolated. The rest was just everyday weirdness—the weird routine I thought was normal.”
From the time she was able to register Allen’s obsessiveness toward her, Dylan said, she could never shake the feeling that she was disappointing one parent or the other. “After I told my mom what happened to me in the attic, I felt it was my fault,” she said. Individuals outside the family who were there at the time remarked to me how Dylan would shut down when Allen came around. She would complain of stomachaches and lock herself in the bathroom to avoid him. A babysitter testified that on the day of the alleged attic incident, while Mia was out shopping, she had come upon Allen in the TV room, kneeling, face forward, with his head in Dylan’s lap.
“I didn’t know anything formally wrong was going on,” Dylan said. “The things making me uncomfortable were making me think I was a bad kid, because I didn’t want to do what my elder told me to do.” The attic, she said, pushed her over the edge. “I was cracking. I had to say something. I was seven. I was doing it because I was scared. I wanted it to stop.” For all she knew, Dylan said, “this was how fathers treated their daughters. This was normal interaction, and I was not normal for feeling uncomfortable about it.” (Allen initially denied having gone into the attic. When hairs of his were found there, he said he might have popped his head in once or twice. Because of where the hair was found, his presence could not be proved conclusively.)
“Did he tell you it was a secret?,” I asked.
“Yes. He said, ‘You can’t tell anyone.’ I didn’t realize how careful he was—things that would happen when nobody was in the room. I was not feeling O.K. with him putting his thumb in my mouth, or how he hugged me.” When she was told that such behavior “wasn’t normal, I felt more guilty. There was no way not to make me feel guilty. There was no way someone was not hurt, whether me, my father, or my mother, and my brothers and sisters having to cope.” She thought she was to blame for all the tears and turmoil. “I felt I was damaging the family structure; that was crushing, damning.” Allen was already paying for a shrink for Dylan on the day she went missing with him. “I remember the doctor coming over once a week, and it was so annoying,” Dylan said. “I didn’t want to sit in a room and talk to grown-ups.”
The depression lasted all through college, exacerbated to high decibels twice when Allen succeeded in contacting her, Dylan said. The first time, she was bringing the mail in at Frog Hollow when she found a typewritten envelope addressed to her with a postmark from London. It was shortly before her 19th birthday, in 2004. Mia also saw the letter. According to Dylan, it said now that she was 18 he wanted to have a conversation. He was willing to meet anytime, anywhere, and would send a helicopter for her. He allegedly said he “wanted to set the record straight about what your mother has told you. Love, your father.”
Three years later, during her senior year of college, she said, a large stuffed manila envelope arrived at the school. “I should have recognized the handwriting—I didn’t. It had a fake return name: Lehman.” Inside she found “a four-inch-thick explosion of pictures of me and him—pictures, pictures, pictures everywhere. Some had tack holes in them. There was never anybody else in the pictures—there was definitely a theme going on.” None of them was inappropriate, but “it was scary.” According to her, the accompanying letter read, “I thought you’d want some pictures of us, and I want you to know that I still think of you as my daughter, and my daughters think of you as their sister. Soon-Yi misses you.” It was signed “Your father.”
“How do your daughters think of me as their sister?,” Dylan wondered. “How does that work?” She told me, “I held it together enough to get back to my room, and for three days I didn’t move. I wouldn’t answer my phone or answer my door.”
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