THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 29, 1995 TAG: 9503290025
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 241 lines
IN THE SNAPSHOT, she looks like the model mother.
Her dark hair is in finger waves, a broad smile is on her face, and her arm is looped easily around her 3-year-old son's waist.
Richard Berendzen doesn't mind letting the world see this frozen frame of his mother.
``I want people to know that mental illness is not a person who wears a funny hat,'' Berendzen, now 56, said last week. ``It's someone who looks like a normal human being.''
When the camera was turned away, this same woman would knock her son against the wall on Christmas Eve for not knowing the words to ``Silent Night.'' She would beckon him into her bedroom to have sex when he was 8. And for three years she would molest him in the middle bedroom of their Dallas home.
He blames that same abuse for leading him to commit the most humiliating act of his life.
In 1990, at the height of his career as president of American University in Washington, D.C., he made obscene phone calls to women he picked out of classified ads.
Those sexually explicit calls led him to resign the presidency, admit himself to a sexual disorders clinic for 25 days, and then try to rebuild his life.
Thursday he will talk about how he overcame the abuse in a free public forum sponsored by Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters. He hopes it will shed light on what went wrong five years ago.
``There's a difference between an excuse and an explanation,'' says Berendzen, who teaches physics at American University. ``I provide no excuse for anything. I assume full responsibility for what I did. But there is an explanation. It's the scientist in me that looks for that.''
Today his emotions for his mother, June Berendzen, tumble against one another like the colors in a kaleidoscope.
There's the love a son feels for a mother. The anger of a small boy who lost his innocence one Sunday afternoon. The humiliation of a man who couldn't bury the abuse.
But there is also peace.
``I do not know if forgive is the right word,'' Berendzen says as he pauses over a cup of tea in a hotel lobby near his home in Northern Virginia. ``You come to terms with it.''
Berendzen, a boy who wore creased trousers and suspenders, felt as if he had two mothers growing up.
One was the kind, devoted, vivacious mother. The one who nursed him through the rheumatic fever that kept him bedridden for three years. The one who bought him a kite replica of an airplane, tied it to the rear bumper of the car and drove off, the two of them laughing. The mother who picnicked with him in front of the lion's cage at the zoo.
But there was another mother.
The one who could explode like a volcano in a second. Who made him pull down his pants so she could beat him with a yard stick. The one who shoved him in bright sunshine to take his picture, bellowing, ``Dammit, I told you to open your eyes and smile. Do what I tell you. Now look happy.'' She slapped him until he did.
But worse than any beating was the invitation to the middle bedroom.
Berendzen was 8 years old when he heard strange noises coming from the spare bedroom in the middle of their house. He peeked through the door, which was slightly ajar, and his mother called out to him, ``Come here.''
His parents were having sex, and his mother told him to get undressed.
He did.
What happened next would haunt him the rest of his life. ``I was baffled and bewildered and between them and under them,'' Berendzen wrote in a book titled ``Come Here.'' ``They were big and I was small and everyone was moving.
His mother would continue to sexually abuse him over the next three years, always calling to him ``Come here,'' a phrase that would elicit a shudder for decades to come.
His father did not participate in the abuse after that first incident. But he had a distant relationship with his son, and Berendzen was too afraid to go to his father for help.
Berendzen soon realized, however, that his mother was not just different but mentally ill. One afternoon when he was 14, she took him on a terrifyingly wild ride, careening in and out of traffic, saying they needed to get away from UFOs.
She skidded into a motel parking lot, and told Berendzen they needed to hide from spies. Berendzen called his father. Together they took her to be committed to a mental hospital.
He remembers seeing her in a straitjacket in a hospital where people screamed out windows and scratched at walls.
When she was released, after being treated with electroshock therapy, she would only sit and look out the window of their home.
``She was like a limp bag,'' he remembers. ``My hatred turned to pity.''
To stop thinking about the scarred side of his life, Berendzen poured himself into his school work. When he won a scholarship to go to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he asked the interviewer, ``What's the hardest subject?''
That's how he ended up studying physics.
Berendzen married his high school girlfriend, and soon became a father. When he was a junior he transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology because he'd heard it was the best and toughest place to go. He buried himself in his studies there as well, and his marriage suffered. His wife returned to Dallas and told him the marriage was over.
But one spring day his mother called and said she was in town.
``Where's Dad?'' he asked.
``In Dallas.''
``Where are you staying?'' he asked, thinking she'd name a motel.
``In an apartment,'' she answered.
The mother he thought he had left behind forever was now moving wherever he did. She followed him to two other cities after that, once when he taught at Boston University, and again when he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1974 to become a dean and president of American University.
``I wanted nothing to do with her,'' he said.
By this time she'd acquired a taste for red dresses. She had a closet full of them.
``Every time I saw something red out of the corner of my eye, I'd blanch,'' he said. ``I'd think, `There she is.' ''
It was not until June of 1987 that Berendzen would confront the middle bedroom of his childhood again.
He had returned to Dallas for his father's funeral, and went to the middle bedroom to find a suit for his father to be buried in.
The bed was unmade from where his father had slept. Seeing the rumpled sheets, and the outline of his father's body in the bed brought back the crushing memory of Berendzen's lost boyhood.
The words ``Come here,'' echoed in his head. His legs buckled, his head spun, his stomach twisted as he tried to keep from vomiting. He staggered to the bathroom to splash water in his face and mutter the mantra that had always gotten him through all the years since age 8: ``That was then, this is now; that was then, this is now.''
He got out of the room as quickly as he could, but the fault line that ran through his psyche had already begun to break apart.
Back in Washington he tried, once again, to bury the memory with 100-hour work weeks, no vacations, few sick days. Colleagues were accustomed to getting memos dated Dec. 25 or Jan. 1.
The university prospered from his workaholic schedule.
American University's reputation as a party school changed as Berendzen toughened academic standards. He recruited top-ranked students, lobbied people for endowments. He wined and dined politicos and trustees. He talked on national TV shows about astronomy. He sat on boards and commissions throughout Washington.
But another side began to bubble up, a side that only came out when he was alone, and then, only for minutes at a time.
He began making phone calls.
He'd pick out women who provided home-based child care from classified advertisements in The Washington Post. Then he called, pretending he was looking for child care, and went into detailed discussions of incest and child abuse and fantasies of a sex slave he claimed he kept caged in his basement. At first the calls were sporadic. Then they became more regular and more explicit. One woman he called, Susan Allen, realized she had an obscene phone caller and instead of hanging up, kept him on the line, encouraging him to call back.
Then she called police. They linked the phone up with a tape recorder and a tracer. Berendzen called back.
Fairfax County police traced the calls to the office of the president of American University. Trustees confronted him on April 7, 1990. He had just celebrated his 10th anniversary as president.
``I'm deeply sorry that I made the calls,'' he told them. ``I'm sorry for the university. I'm sorry for my family. I'm sorry for it all.''
He felt his heart fall out of his body.
Even worse, he had no idea why he had done it.
He checked himself into a sexual disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to find out.
Despite degrees from Harvard and MIT, despite years of studying physics, astronomy, the universe and the cosmos, he knew virtually nothing about what lay inside him.
Relentless questioning by psychiatrists, therapists and members of group therapy finally brought the abuse of the middle bedroom into the open.
``It was not a memory I had suppressed,'' Berendzen said. ``I just elected not to think about it.''
His mother was still alive, but her mental state was such that she couldn't confirm or deny her son's story. But when Berendzen repeated the story linked to a lie detector machine and under the influence of a truth serum test, the details lined up the same.
Psychiatrists determined he was not a pedophile, but was trying to resolve and understand more about the abuse he'd suffered as a child.
At first he refused to tell his wife, Gail, worried she'd consider him ``damaged goods.''
Then he invited her to his room at Johns Hopkins and talked for two hours.
At the end he stopped, not knowing what would come next.
She told him she loved him even more.
``It was a relief to understand,'' said Gail Berendzen, who met her husband while they were both attending school in Boston. ``Once you know the truth, you can deal with anything.''
It would be a long trip out of the darkest hell Berendzen had ever known. He had hoped to keep the matter private, but one morning Gail called him at Johns Hopkins to read a story detailing the phone calls in The Washington Post. Berendzen gagged throughout the call and finally threw up on the floor.
It was his lowest point.
He had no idea how he was going to support his family now that he'd resigned the presidency. He was completely humiliated. The press was hounding his wife and two daughters. And the whole world was wondering whether he was a pervert.
``I spent 48 hours trying to figure out how to get to the roof of the hospital,'' he said.
A phrase of Scripture on the wall of the hospital chapel pulled him through: ``He restoreth my soul.''
On May 23, 1990, he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges of indecent phone calls, and appeared the same day on ``Nightline.'' ``I had been president of a university,'' he says. ``I had 11, 12,000 students, hundreds of faculty members, 70 to 80,000 alumni. They deserved a statement.''
He told the world he had been a victim of child abuse and described his assailant as a woman who was close to him.
``I was shell shocked, on remote control.''
Still, mail supporting him poured in. Telephone calls. Telegrams. Letters streaked with tears. People stopped him in the street. Male survivors, in particular, sought him out, but also survivors of all kinds of trauma, from alcoholism to divorce to job loss.
Berendzen has given hundreds of speeches about physics and astronomy, about the Big Bang theory and cosmic wonders. But it's his talk about the inner recesses of his soul that moves people to tears. ``It isn't my story as much as their own that makes them cry. Mine just triggers it.''
During the next year, Berendzen gradually emerged from depression. The university agreed to his coming back as a professor, so he immersed himself in physics and astronomy. He dedicated himself to community service groups. And he decided to write a book, mostly in hopes of reaching out to other male survivors of abuse.
His book, ``Come Here: A Man Overcomes the Tragic Aftermath of Childhood Sexual Abuse,'' was his first public admission that his mother was the woman who had abused him.
The man once known as an astronomer, a professor, a university president, was now nationally known as an abuse survivor.
``It's not a side I asked for, not one I wanted. But life moves in unexpected ways. I decided to go public because someone has to break the code of silence. God put this on my platter, and I could not walk away.''
Meanwhile, in a nursing home somewhere near Dallas, a woman in her 80s sits staring into space. June Berendzen is oblivious to the infamous phone calls her son made, his recovery, his book that details their relationship. Senility bathes the mind that once set a airplane-like kite soaring, that loved red dresses and invited her son to the middle bedroom.
Miles away a son struggles to describe how he feels about her. ``I despise the mad mother,'' he says. ``But the loving, caring mother, I still love.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color pohto
KARIN ANDERSON
Photo
Richard Berendzen, shown here at age 11, had been sexually abused by
his mother.
KEYWORDS: CHILD ABUSE by CNB