ARE THEY MONSTERS? I DON'T KNOW
She thought long and hard. "Ok, I trust you. I'm going to do something I've spent the last 8 years not doing. Pouring it all out." She paused. "The night mom and dad came to get me so that we could flee, Mr. Beeman was in my parking garage, below my apartment in town. With his gun on us. There he was quizzing us as to what we were doing."
She continued. "At first dad played dumb. My parents tried to be the familiar neighbours, good old pal Philip with his old buddy Stan. Then it became clear that Mr. Beeman was shaking us down, so my dad confessed. Everything. Right there in the underground garage. Mr. Beeman had his gun drawn and everything."
She paused again. "Then my dad bluffed him, or something like that. Said that he'd have to shoot us, because we were going to just drive away. Which is what we did. Mr. Beeman just lowered his gun and stood out of the way."
She paused one last time. "It was the damnedest thing I ever saw. For the rest of our run for Canada, I thought mom and dad had superpowers. They either faked him out, I thought - either that or, Jesus, Mr Beeman was one of them! Sorry for the 'Jesus', by the way."
I chuckled, "Don't worry about it. So, let me ask: Mr Beeman was or wasn't one of them?"
Paige then looked back at me, instead of answering, said, "But here's the thing. As we were getting into the car, my dad said to Mr. Beeman, that Renee Beeman may be one of them." Paige paused and added, "I never had the opportunity to ask dad what he'd meant - whether he was just jerking Mr. Beeman around."
Some of it was starting to make sense. But not much. Stan Beeman had let them go. Coincidence? So I said, "But what about between then and now. No opportunity to ask your dad something, suggests you got separated."
She looked back out to the lights on the far mountain opposite: "Not separated. I ditched them. At the Canadian border so that they couldn't do anything about it. That was late 1987. It's now 1996. Believe you me, there's a lot of water under the bridge, stuff I'm not going to talk about."
Paige looked directly at me as a soft rain reappeared. "I will do this from memory." She then started to recite:
They've build a successful small business, smart kids who do well in school, don't get into trouble. But saying they're not what they seem is the understatement of the century.
Are they monsters? I don't know. But what they did to their daughter I'd have to call monstrous. I've seen sexual abuse…..
"Paige!" I said, not exactly a 'yell', but an expression of shock. "Where'd you get that?" All she replied with was, "Let me recite it all, Pastor Tim. It's an ear worm in my brain." When she continued, she put emphasis on the initials, 'P.J.'
…. I've seen sexual abuse, I've seen affairs, but nothing I've seen compares to what P.J. has been through. I worry that the damage to Paige is permanent, that she'll never trust anyone again and that Paige isn't aware of the magnitude of what's been done to her.
There's a severe psychic injury that may be permanent. Faith may help, but how can she trust anyone ever again? She may never understand the difference between truth and lying, or even right from wrong.
I fear for this poor girl. I fear for her mind and I fear for her soul. She doesn't even know how much she's suffering.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I know those words that Paige just spoke. Dale once wrote something about the Jennings which riffed off of that old diary entry of mine. Those words, they're mine. She must have seen the look of recognition on my face as I allowed her to finish. We just then sat silently in the misty rain.
She eventually said, "Yes, Pastor Tim, those are your words, stuck in my brain. Written a dozen years and an eon ago. About me."
I said, quite gobsmacked, "I'm so sorry, Paige. Truly I am." But then said, "Where did you get my diary? I still have them. Back home. Including that one from just before we left for Argentina. How on earth did you get that?"
She sat there on the log, silent as the sand - again looking out over the water as the mist continued to fall on us both. "No one is as sorry as me."
Paige was soon to be in her thirties. Obviously not the completely doubt-paralyzed teenager I'd known. Except some of it was still there. Injury now hard baked. When I dropped her back at the hostel she just hung at the passenger door a bit, and said, "If you're going to call the police, call before the morning. After that, Paige becomes a ghost again. Pastor Tim, I want you to know that you continue to save my life. I'll never be able to repay you."
That night was the only time I'd been called 'pastor' here in Canada.
REST IN PEACE
Getting back to the D.C. metro area, Alice could immediately tell that something had gone on out west up in Canada. Me, I wanted to reconnect with the two girls, and then get my Thesis in order, now that my laptop & back-up mishaps were a thing of the past. I had hard copies made, and the thesis's defence was the week following.
By the way, in lieu of asking those questions that Bob had advised, I just politely declined both positions out there in Canada. I'd been offered both. It was nice to have a choice, but after refusing I was still drifting a bit professionally.
And, yes, one night after the girls were in bed I did tell Alice everything. About Paige. About Special Agent Stan Beeman. I may have told it wrong, because for Alice it just confirmed for her the suspicion that Beeman, too, had been a spy. For the Russians. Or at the very least he was 'running' the Jennings on behalf of the FBI.
About Paige quoting verbatim from my diary, from an entry ten years ago….. all Alice said was, "Well, she did have the run of the house while babysitting!" I made a note that I was going to have to track down Dale Woods.
Three weeks after getting home, I called the hostel back in Vancouver asking for Bob. He was there, saying, "Hey, I heard you turned down both those positions. The place up in the Okanagan has now offered the position to the second place guy, but the university church is back to square one in their search. If you play your cards right…"
I stopped him by saying that the call had not been about that. I did not wish to play cards. I asked him if that young woman was still there. He said, "Oh no, she's gone. Again. She had a skookum laptop, though."
A 'what' laptop?, I asked. "Oh. That's a west coast Chinook word. Skookum is a word for powerful. That kid from the computer store keeps calling here. For her. Last time all he'd do was cry into the phone."
Alice said she didn't want to hear anything about any of this ever again. She was sick of it. Me, I had a doctor's appointment for the day after my thesis defence. As long as I stay away from the stuff that has killed generations of my ancestors, I'll be fine.
But for today, my addiction shifted somewhat. The Jennings themselves had not been around, not for a long time. But they were stuck in my brain. But there was also him - Stan Beeman. I found his phone number, but left the actual call to him for a time when I could figure this all out.
(Rest in Peace, Pastor Tim.)
DALE WOODS LETTER
Clare-Louise here, assembling dad's stuff following his death. It's fallen to me to handle dad's papers. Neither my sister nor my mom want anything to do with anything pre-Argentina. Me, I'm obsessed with it!
Me, I'm getting as hooked as Pastor Dale Woods got. I thought I was nuts until hearing Alexandra Zapruder talk about her family, and how the JFK assassination's famous Zapruder film had altered her family's trajectory. Alexandra is Abraham Zapruder's granddaughter. Her life had been altered forever by those '26 seconds in Dallas', as she said.
I will probably write a book, as she was doing. But for now, the following is Dale Woods' letter to my dad, referenced above. He goes into a depth about Paige Jennings, my first babysitter, as well as her parents that I have never heard before.
Hey Tim
That phrase, 'there's a severe psychic injury that might be permanent' is what you applied to Paige Jennings. I don't know if you're up on the latest, but in the 1980s, it used to be called 'moral distress'. Then a few years ago a researcher named Jonathan Shay codified it as 'moral injury'. If we were to take seriously that The Jennings had been 'soldiers in a war', then Shay's definitions seem to hold.
He emphasized that it was only in 'high stakes situations' where individuals were supposed to act against their internal morality, that moral injury comes to be. He emphasized that these were otherwise normal people having to do ugly things in extreme situations. 'Extreme situations' is the key. I base this on finding out that in some of their 'operations' in the USA, they actually found out that it had been the USSR transgressing, and using their information for bad purposes. There is evidence to suggest that that effected both the Jennings very badly. That they'd been complicit in their country's wrongdoings, and took what little power they had to mitigate it.
You'd asked, 'Are they monsters?' You said you didn't know, but that they had done monstrous things. I think that is a great definition of what Shay describes. All this provides insight into what you had perceived in Paige Jennings in the middle'80s, but also into the character of (mainly) Elizabeth Jennings. My research into them seems to indicate that Philip Jennings was all-but retired from his spy-work by 1987.
Of course, this insight into their character does not, and should not exempt them from accountability. But it should help in having a serious dialogue with Paige Jennings, if you were ever to find her. These people were not psychopaths, but normal people required to do ugly things - which ate at them.
My 'research' suggests that Elizabeth and Philip Jennings are now living in Russia, probably under their real Russian names.
In any event, Tim, do some reading on 'moral injury', Jonathan Shay is a good place to start.
You, dude, were writing in your diaries the first draft of a bizarre history of US/USSR relations, where all of this played heavy.
Your buddy,
Dale
