Virtue consisted in winning; it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people--in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.

--George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys

I have tried to be done with this.

I am one of five boys in the picture. There is a ballpoint arrow coming down from the sky, from outside the frame of the photo, and it points to me. I don't remember the names of two of the other four boys. We're all in baseball uniforms. Although the photograph is black and white, I remember that our caps were black with orange letters--NE for North End--and that the trim on our uniforms was a thin black and orange brocade. I don't remember this particular day although I know the spot where the photo was taken,just behind the handball courts at Jordan Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It is 1960 or 1961.

The coach of the North End team, Tom Feifel, the man who fixed us here, forever twelve or thirteen years old, was arrested, convicted, and incarcerated largely as the result of the publication of my memoir, Half the House, published in 1995. He had been arrested twice before for sexually assaulting young boys but had never been sent to jail. This time, with a number of boys and their families determined to testify, and with corroborating phone calls from men in their 40s, 30s, 20s whom he had also victimized as children, he agreed to a plea-bargain of eight to fifteen years in the state penitentiary. He was 68 at the time. It has been determined that he violated upwards of 400 boys during his nearly four decades of coaching.

On June 20, 1997, Dateline NBC aired an eighteen-minute segment on Half the House and its impact. The program, shaped by Dateline correspondent John Hockenberry, was several weeks in the making and included lengthy interviews with me, with my father, and with a twelve-year-old boy named Michael, one of Feifel's most recent victims. The segment was completed nearly a year before it finally aired, a year largely given over to the O. J. Simpson trial.

On the third day following the broadcast, I came home to a message from Detective Gerry Procanyn saying, simply, "I thought you should know that Mr. Feifel died yesterday morning after two days in the hospital." In other words, he had been admitted to the prison hospital the morning after the Dateline broadcast. He was soon transferred to the local hospital, where he died.

I was immediately suspicious. I have worked as a volunteer in prison substance-abuse and violence prevention programs. There isn't much to do in most prisons: lift weights, watch TV, and brutalize child rapists known as "skinners," "short-eyes," and a number of other terms.

I traveled to Pennsylvania to talk with Detective Procanyn who suggested we get together for breakfast. I thought I remembered where the diner was where we agreed to meet, but I left extra time in case I got lost. After all, more than thirty years had passed since I lived in that town. I got there early, of course. I sat in a booth where I could see the parking lot.

Gerry Procanyn was as I remembered him, short and stocky, sporting a trim VanDyke. He was wearing a suit and tie a little out of fashion and cowboy boots. As he approached the diner from his car, he ran a comb through his white hair and patted it on one side.

We ordered our breakfasts and Procanyn wanted to talk about "the TV show," what he thought was good about it and what he wished they hadn't left out. "I showed them all the evidence we had, all the stuff we collected from his house," he said. "I think there's a real story there. You heard anything else from those guys? Because when they were here a couple of them were talking about a movie. I think this would make a great movie. Nobody said nothing to you about that?

"I shook my head.

"You don't hear from them at all anymore?"

I shook my head again.

He talked about his passion for restoring antique cars. Our food arrived. He asked about my dad whom he'd met at Feifel's sentencing. He talked about his girlfriend, said he thought they might come to Boston one day and would it be okay to give me a call. Eventually I was able to ask him if he could find out how Feifel died.

"The death certificate from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania says that the deceased Mr. Feifel suffered heart failure." He was cutting a piece of ham; as he leaned forward and brought the fork to his mouth, he looked up as if to see if I'd noticed his change of tone.

"You don't buy it," I said.

His mouth was full. He shrugged, made a face. "That's what it says."

I poked at my homefries. I imagined Feifel watching the broadcast and understanding, really understanding, the nature of his crimes against children. Viewing his entire monstrous career compressed and focused in an eighteen-minute account, I told myself, might have been too much for his heart, stripped of the denial that had allowed it to go on beating. I wanted his depravity and his death to be instructive. I wanted to conscript his disfigured spirit to squat eternally, a gothic grotesque shouldering one pillar of a better future. I wanted to believe in a justice not administered by men but by conscience itself. I wanted him dead from the force of unobstructed truth, not a victim of murder.

"Remember that Mr. Feifel has living relatives." Gerry was holding his tomato juice in front of him as if he was about to make a toast.

"What do you mean?" It took me another moment before I understood what he meant: there was no way the state was going to invite a lawsuit from Feifel's family.

He drank his juice. "Richard, my friend." He wiped his lips on a napkin and leaned forward, gripping the table. "One day every person in this diner--you, me, everybody--will die of heart failure. Come on, finish up." He raised his hand and looked for the waitress. "We'll go up the station. I want to show you something."

At the station I saw for the first time the evidence the police had assembled for Feifel's trial. In addition to the pornography you'd expect, and the sex toys, (including a long, clear plastic tube I first thought was a bong, but was really a "penis pump") there were the "adult" comic books I remembered: Popeye and Olive Oyl, Dagwood and Blondie, even Mickey and Minnie Mouse. There were pictures of women with animals, and women penetrated by guns. I was about to turn away, to tell Gerry I'd had enough. What was the point of this anyway? Then he directed my attention to a long narrow box. "Have a look in there," he said. "I'll bet you find that interesting."

The box was filled with index cards. Each card had a picture of a young boy on it (unless the photo had fallen off), name, address, parents' phone, height, weight, and on the back, a coded system of notations about what acts Feifel had committed on each boy--when, where--amounting to, I guess, a card-catalogue of masturbatory memories, or else a kind of trophy case. (Later, trying to tell my brother Joe about it, I said that maybe if Feifel could have had each of us stuffed and mounted, he would have. That was the feeling anyway.)

Thumbing through the cards, which were chronologically ordered, I started to recognize names. I was shaking by the time I came to my card. I wasn't halfway through the box, not even close.

"What do you think?" Procanyn asked me.

I couldn't speak. I squeezed his arm, turned, walked out, and drove back to my father's house. Think? I have been thinking about that box for nearly five years now. It is the truth about child sexual abuse. In the face of talk about "man-boy love," about "child-abuse hysteria," about "witch-hunts," about "false memories," it is the truth. Inside it, in the darkness, are hundreds of boyhoods; inside it, in the silence, are hundreds of stories.

That is also how I came to have this photograph, printed for me by the police department's photo lab. The copy has a greenish tint to it that I don't remember from the original and is much larger. I don't think I can say why I asked for a copy; that arrow started me to shaking when I first held the small snapshot in my hand. I knew I should have it; simple as that.

Wanting to be done with this story is a kind of denial. To "move on" seems, at least to me, to suggest that an entire chain of events, having come to some resolution, has now become inconsequential, as if the hard fruit of those branching consequences does not arrive over and over in its season. To hold that a return to silence now would not also have consequences is denial as well. In fact, I believe it would be a kind of suicide to so radically refuse the story of my life.