Beauty and "The Beating"

"The house that looked ugly but dignified from the road looked, up close, only just ugly...the kind of house...in which, in a fairy tale, a troll would live" (128).

This is the description that Madelyn Fleet gives of her former math teacher's house to which he brings her for a clandestine and creepy rendezvous in Joyce Carol Oates's "The Beating." Immediately, this quote made me think of the story The Beauty and the Beast, in which a young woman is brought against her will to a monster's house where he is trying to recuperate from a terrible situation (i.e. being turned into a beast). Mr. Carmichael is dealing with the loss of his wife and young children--to what we do not know--and attempts to seduce Madelyn by taking her away from her depression. The twist is that Mr. Carmichael is not a kindly yet narcissistic prince on the inside, but a creepy, pathological child-molester who is rotting away with his house, and Madelyn doesn't fall in love but out of love with him.

This change from facade to interior is echoed throughout the story, from Madelyn's description of her father as the "everyman" who yet shares very little of his life; to the Brewer Building, which literally has a facade that hides its shady underneath; to Mr. Carmichael himself, math teacher on the outside, criminal on the inside.

Question: What does the idea of facade have to do with the fact that Madelyn waited fifty years to tell this story? And, what actually happened to her father?