A Survivor’s Voice and the Music of Healing

The tattered scrap of paper that Linda Katherine Cutting pulled out of her wallet must have been folded and refolded a thousand times. The words were worn to the point of erosion. Cutting had not only read the message over and over, she had rubbed her fingers across it, as if it were a message carved in stone.

“Stay alive so you can tell,” it read.

The admonition came from a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust. He treated Cutting in 1992 after she observed the anniversary of her brother David’s suicide by taking every pill she had: “Prozac, Ativan, Fiorinal, Naproscyn--enough to do the job.” Before she lost consciousness in the failed attempt, she scribbled out some sort of will to make sure her parents did not get her piano after she died.

Her piano was, after all, her voice. Like many adults who experienced incest and physical abuse in childhood, Cutting was for many years unable to speak of the terrors of her youth. And so she expressed herself through music. Her father once wondered, “What are you practicing for? No one will listen to you anyway.” But she proved him wrong and became a concert pianist. With leading orchestras and conductors such as Seiji Ozawa, she performed around the world. She performed often enough at Boston’s Symphony Hall to worry that audiences might begin to tire of her outfits.

Her music was her lifeline to sanity. It was also the bitter symbol of the unspoken bargain Cutting struck when her clergyman father bought her a piano for her sixth birthday. By agreeing to create beautiful sounds on the piano, she knew she was assenting to keep silent about her family’s secrets. Silence became suppression.

Then, as Cutting writes in “Memory Slips” (Harper Collins), her affecting, just-published memoir, came the terrible moment in 1989 when her life and her career spun into hiatus. Cutting was 6 1/2 bars into the opening of Beethoven’s Sonata in E, Opus 109, when she heard footsteps. It was a latecomer taking his seat. But she was convinced it was her father, finding his way into her bedroom. She stopped playing and put her hands in her lap.

“There are three kinds of memory slips, I tell my students,” writes Cutting, who teaches piano at several Boston area institutions. “One, when memory slips but you find your way back without losing a beat. Two, when you don’t find your way back until the downbeat. Three, when you don’t find your way back in time and must restart the music.

“I don’t tell them about a fourth possibility,” she continues, “when one memory slips, another intrudes, and you don’t find your way back for a very long time. It took about 17 seconds to recover the music I forgot in the Beethoven. It has taken 10 years to recover the life I forgot I had lived. The life that began before music or words.”

That Cutting, 41, is both an accomplished musician and a survivor of childhood incest and violence is entirely consistent, said Anne Marie Eriksson, president of the Incest Survivors Resource Network in Las Cruces, N.M. “A lot of us have used some form of the creative voice,” Eriksson said.

One in three women, and one in five men, have experienced incest as children, Eriksson said, citing recent studies. Like Cutting, many incest victims hail from pillar-of-the-community homes, “families that look very good from the outside,” Eriksson said. Eriksson was also unsurprised to learn that Cutting’s father is a Protestant minister. “A lot of our parents,” she said, “were in ‘helping professions.’ ”

Cutting’s father has offered a variety of denials to his daughter’s claim that, beginning when she was about 2 years old, he would sexually abuse her and sometimes beat her. He has said flat out that what she describes in her book never took place. He has also said his daughter was definitely abused--by the janitor at his church. On other occasions he has charged that a teenage baby sitter was the perpetrator. He has volunteered to make television appearances with his daughter as she promotes her book, but only if he is accompanied by a specialist in false memory. Cutting declined the offer.

She points out that her father also put an interesting spin on the 1989 death of her brother, David, one month shy of his 30th birthday. A death certificate states that David died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Cutting said during the interview that her father dictated an obituary to the local newspaper describing David’s death in an automobile accident.

There was less room for fudging when Cutting’s brother Paul hanged himself at 24 in 1975; his wife found him swinging from a beam in their home. Cutting said both sons were physically abused by their father. “It’s not clear” whether the fourth sibling, Cutting’s younger sister, was abused as well, she added.

Hard figures on the correlation between incest and suicide are difficult to obtain, said Harvard University psychiatrist Judith Herman, author of “Trauma and Recovery” (Basic Books, 1992), widely considered the seminal clinical volume on incest. But, Herman said, “The risk of suicide after childhood experience of abuse is certainly much higher than in the general population.”

Cutting nearly joined her brothers as a suicide statistic. Her second attempt at taking her own life, in 1992, landed her in a hospital for trauma survivors in Colorado. Her parents refused to discuss her treatment, she writes, but did send a check to cover the cost. In the course of her recovery, Cutting contacted officials of her father’s church to report her family’s experiences. Not long afterward, her father became a minister in a different denomination.

But the silence that so often enshrouds cases of incest was not entirely broken until Cutting decided to write “Memory Slips.” She began with a widely read “Hers” column in the New York Times in 1993, recounting how her parents’ most recent gift to her was “underwear, high-cut lace bikinis in hot pink, ivory, black and blue. An unusual gift in normal families,” she observed. “Not so unusual where incest occurs.”

Expanding the story into a book meant, in a manner of speaking, washing her family’s sordid linen in a highly public forum. It also meant that Cutting was joining the ever-expanding literary genre of personal trauma biography. But once she found the strength to break her silence, “it was less of a choice for me maybe than for others,” Cutting said. “What made my situation different from a lot of other incest survivors is that my two brothers had killed themselves, and I was next in line.”

Besides, she went on, “I feel a real sense of mission about this. It may come from not being able to save my brothers’ lives. I feel if one life is saved, then I’ve done my work.”

The book has earned strong reviews in the Washington Post, the New Yorker and elsewhere. It appears on the heels of the well-received Australian movie “Shine,” in which a gifted male pianist turns out to have been abused as a boy by his father.

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Herman said these personal stories help peel away the layers that surround the horror of incest. “Secrecy is so built into the dynamics of the events,” she said. “There are no witnesses, and the layers of threat just multiply. It’s quite crazy-making.”

A cultural discomfort with the subject also keeps many survivors from discussing incest, Herman said, noting, “It’s often repeated that the taboo seems to be on talking about it, not on doing it.”

In Cutting’s case, her relationship with music made her story stand apart from much of the literature of abusive families. Sitting in the Writers’ Room, an office space she shares with a group of other Boston writers, she said, “I felt that the music would lift the story out of the mire of pure tragedy, just as the music had lifted me out of my tragedy.”

Music, in fact, provided Cutting with the form of her book, which leaps between her experiences as a concert pianist and her sojourns in mental institutions. “These two tandem worlds were so far apart that the straight chronological narrative just wasn’t going to work.” So she borrowed from the fateful Beethoven piece in which she first suffered a major memory slip to intersperse vivace and adagio passages.

After years of treatment and two close brushes with extinction, Cutting said she was finally able to forgive her father. “I did so for myself, so I could come back to the piano whole, in one piece,” she said.

The piano, after all, she said, “saved my life.” It also brought her happiness in the form of Keith Whited, her second husband. The pair met when Whited, an engineer, studied piano at one of the schools where Cutting teaches. (Her first marriage, she writes, succumbed to the drama of her family.)

Cutting hopes next to write a children’s book based on Schumann’s “Scenes From Childhood.” She is also at work on a novel. And she is performing concerts again--with joy, and to critical acclaim.

By writing “Memory Slips,” she said, “what I’m trying to say is that there are many creative ways out. Music is one. Gardening is one. Writing is one. Anything where you can reconstruct can be a metaphor for healing.”