Shades of Eva (19 page)

So the question arose: why the hell was she
reading two books about forgiveness by two martyrs if she was so
bent on penalizing these guys? I asked her just that and she
replied with a question as I thought she might: “Why not read them?
They were survivors. Someday I want to be more like them. To turn
loss into gain. To right things. To learn how to forgive, if that’s
possible. Forgiving is hard to do when you weren’t the one hurt,
though. Or more to the point: when you weren’t the one killed. How
do you forgive someone who has done something terrible to someone
else and that someone else is dead, now?”

“You can’t,” I said, rather quickly. I was
quite sure of my answer because there was another pictured face
staring up at me, this one from the tattooed arm of that dead
somebody’s mother. “The victim has to forgive,” I said.

“I think what you’re saying,” Amelia said,
relighting her cigarette and smiling coyly, “is that this matter
with your Uncle Ully and Fred Levantle is not about forgiveness; at
least as far as we are concerned. It’s about justice and respecting
your mother’s wishes.”

Again Amelia had given me a loaded
statement. Amelia had earlier pointed out to me in no uncertain
terms that my mother’s wishes were all that mattered to her. Father
and brother they will slay and burn this place amidst I lay! The
words echoed in my head. Forgiveness aside, we were going home to
deal with justice. That’s what frightened me. I was going home to
look into things, not murder anyone. Yet Amelia’s confession that
she’d killed people, offered so off-handed to me back at Pearl’s
Pub, was sitting with me like a ticking time bomb. It was then when
I started to wonder exactly what I had gotten myself into, and I
hadn’t even set eyes on a piece of so-called evidence. Sometimes
you’re brought home for reasons other than you realize.

Amelia, in turn, got more specific. “A lot
of Ully’s money is tied up in investments and real estate. He has
some cash and some bearer bonds in a safe in his lake condo.
Getting any of Ully’s money is going to involve a liquidation of
some of those assets.” Amelia stressed the word liquidation.

My head was swimming a bit; a liquidation,
as Amelia had called it, wasn’t something I was familiar with. It
reeked of extortion, which was also beyond me. “This is going to be
harder than I thought,” I said, turning my gaze out the window
toward the setting sun. “He isn’t going to make any financial
reparations willingly.”

Amelia nodded. “None of this is going to be
easy,” she said. “He’s not going to just open his home to us. He
won’t want to make any sort of reparation without a little
persuasion.” She emphasized the word persuasion in the same
manner.  “But since you’re focused on the money right now,”
Amelia added, “then answer me this: do you think you have a legal
right to any of that money?”

Whether I deserved any of that
money—morally—was one question. The legality of it was another. I
had no legal right to Ully’s money. He’d earned that money legally
by his own trade. Her asking about the legal angle of things seemed
to extinguish some of that self-important ire of mine, at least for
the moment. I didn’t probably deserve any of his money; I was sure
I didn’t have a legal right to any of it—but neither did Ully
deserve that kind of lifestyle if what Amelia was alleging—if what
Mom alleged—was true.

“Did I ever tell you why Ellie moved to
Gary?” Amelia asked, momentarily changing the subject.

“No,” I said.

“After your grandfather died in 1957, Ellie
couldn’t take care of the house. Your mom was just released and had
married your father. Ellie sold the place and moved to Gary to stay
with her son. She didn’t want to be alone.”

“I can understand that.”

“Your grandfather had quite a bit of money
in the bank. This is where things get a little tricky. He inherited
upwards of about two-hundred thousand dollars from a source I
haven’t yet identified in 1900. This was a long time ago, Mitchell,
before he ever met your grandmother. It might have been from his
parents; it might have been some kind of life insurance payout. I
don’t know.”

“But your point is?”

“That money grew. He left that money to Ully
and to your mother when he died.”

“How much are you talking about?”

“Close to one half-million dollars. It was
to be split between your mother and Ully. Your mother’s share,
however, was to be put into a trust and subject to certain
conditions. The way your grandfather worded things was a bit
troublesome for your parents.”

“What do you mean?”

“Eva’s share was to be given to Eva if, and
only if, she married, and then only to the husband of that union if
they were still married, and still released, after five years.
Those were your grandfather’s conditions. Sexist but true!”

“After five years? Is there something
magical about being married five years?”

Amelia seemed amused by the stipulation,
too, though nonjudgmental. “You usually give a gift made of wood
for the 5th anniversary,” she explained. “Your mother’s gift would
have been about two-hundred-fifty thousand dollars. So they had to
be careful. You have to understand.”

“But only to the husband? As in Brad? My
father?”

“Yes, as in Brad! He would have received the
trust in 1962.”

I had to recollect just when my parents were
separated. They didn’t separate until 1970. “They were married
thirteen years!” I chimed. “I don’t remember hearing about any
half-million dollars.”

“That’s because they never got any of it,”
Amelia responded, quickly.

“But why? I don’t understand.”

Amelia giggled as if I could have guessed
why. “Because of your father’s infidelity.”

“Infidelity?”

“Shortly before the five year deadline,
Ellie had your father followed by a private investigator. It was
because of something your mother was alleging.”

Here we go again, I thought. More
allegations.

“Your mother had accused your father of
having a mistress in 1960, just three years into her marriage. This
was someone in River Bluff, in fact. Your mother didn’t keep the
accusation to herself. She told her mother, if anything, for moral
support.”

“They’d been married three years,” I echoed.
“So Mom didn’t know about the five-year deal, then?”

“No. I don’t think she knew about her
father’s conditions or any money. It wouldn’t make sense. She would
have been singing your dad’s praises with a quarter million dollars
riding on his fidelity. She was loyal but she wasn’t stupid.”

“Just ignorant.”

“She was uninformed,” Amelia said,
correcting my word choice. “Unlike your uncle who knew about the
will! He was always one up on your mother in that regard.”

“Ully knew my mother had that kind of money
hinging on her marriage, and he didn’t tell my mother?”

“No he didn’t tell her. And yes, he knew. It
was his idea to hire a PI to verify her accusation. So you could
say he was concerned with the truth.” Again Amelia giggled as she
was amusing herself with all this.

“So he had my father followed?”

“Correct.”

At once, I was beginning to understand the
reasons why my parents (and by extension, I) had never seen a dime
of any of that money. I knew where this was going, but I asked
anyway.

“So what did the investigation turn up?”

Amelia smiled, as if the answer to that was
self-obvious—and it was. “Your father, a hotel, and your
step-mother: Meryl Von Rifenburg.”

I was struggling to remember Meryl’s
names—either of them—first or maiden. I’d almost forgotten my
father had remarried after Mom passed. I had never given thought to
when he might have met Meryl; I never assumed he was cheating on
Mom. I’d seen Meryl only once, which was the last time I saw my
father—and that was at my mother’s funeral.

Amelia was looking at me as if my mother’s
suspicion about my father’s infidelity in 1960 was a surprise to
me. In fact, she asked, “Did you know your father was banging Meryl
before you were even born?”

I didn’t appreciate how she asked that, but
it was what it was. “Mom never said anything about Meryl to me!” I
blurted this out, as if my ignorance offered something of merit to
my own unscrupulous sexual reputation. “And she didn’t say anything
about any investigation—let alone any affair!”

Amelia nodded. “Well, you were just a little
boy. She was protective. And what if she had, anyway? Your father
would just tell you it was all part of her stockpile of so-called
delusions. And he wouldn’t have told you about Meryl anyway.”

“Did Ully or Ellie tell Mom about the
investigation?”

Amelia grunted. “No.”

I was getting sick to my stomach. “Well,
what about the results?”

“They probably kept them to themselves. Your
mother knew the truth. She didn’t need a PI to prove it to her. She
tolerated your Dad, and she did the best she could.”

I almost threw up. I had to roll the window
back down at that point and stop talking for a while. This was hard
to wrap my mind around. This was all unduly cruel. Despite my
grandfather’s conditions, and despite my father’s infidelity, Mom
could have used that money! None of this was her fault.

“Is Meryl still alive?” I finally managed to
ask Amelia, wondering if Amelia had looked into my step-mother’s
fate, too. And she had.

“No,” Amelia replied. “She died a few years
ago. Your father took her passing very hard. He had to check in to
the Asylum for a short time after that, in fact. He had a nervous
breakdown over it.”

“So he committed himself, huh?”

“There’s a halfway house at the Asylum where
ex-patients can go if they need to for a short time. It’s a nice
place.”

I began to laugh. A nice halfway house
seemed an oxymoron. Insane asylums weren’t nice places according to
Amelia; halfway houses connected to them couldn’t be much nicer!
She seemed to be contradicting her own opinion of the place. She
had been the one to draw a distinction between the niceness of
hospitals and what went on in the 1950s-era mental institutions by
calling the latter asylums. When I tried to call her on her
apparent inconsistency and ask her what she meant by nice, she
replied, “It’s clean, palatial, and big! Isn’t that what nice means
to you?”

The question took my breath away.

Those were the adjectives I’d used to
describe my mother’s childhood home to my amnesiac mother! Clean,
palatial, and big, as if those were the necessary characteristics
of a nice, ideal home.

I was at once ashamed of myself.

Amelia was calling me on my incongruity. Mom
made a tiny house for us, certainly nothing big. But it was nice.
It was also simple—far from palatial. We sat in front of broken
windows watching a twelve-inch black-and-white television—when it
worked—and we slept in small, cold rooms, sometimes with one
another in the same bed just to keep warm. It was unkempt. It
wasn’t clean, but it was nice in those days, despite the snake pit
neighborhood into which it seemed to have been dropped.

And Mom was faithful to Dad. That was
nice.

The rocks and the broken glass weren’t Mom’s
fault. Neither was Dad’s infidelity. And neither were they mine. So
I got where Amelia was going with her lesson. Niceness has more to
do with what goes on in a house between nice people—with dreams and
shared meals and kept promises, with picnics and singing and
holding one another close when it’s a little too cold in the house
than it does with what was happening outside, or with how big or
how palatial or how clean a structure might be.

Amelia was shedding a light on the way I
denied my past, as well as my mother’s, by shining a light on the
material lens through which I tried to focus everything. It all
made me hang my head. Corrie Ten Boom’s and Viktor Frankl’s
pictured faces held the same placid expressions as Amelia’s held at
that moment. Each of them was staring at me with an expression I
could only describe as tender.

My heart began to ache again. I think it
ached because it was the first time I recognized, truly, my own
insolence. It was the same internal yip that drove the little boy
in me to whine until he got his mother to pour him yet another cup
of Kool-Aid. It was the same internal yip turned inside out that
kept me asking about where the money was.

It was all material, and it hadn’t a damned
thing to do with anything that truly mattered. Yet money remained
one of those things to me. You can do a lot with a little money, or
you can do virtually nothing with a lot of it. I had some choices
to make.

***

There are things worth fighting for. A world
in which brutality and lawlessness are allowed to go unchecked
isn’t the kind of world we’re going to want to live in.

~ General Walter Boomer on the eve of
Operation Desert Storm.

Shadow Journal

August 23, 1995

Meryl knelt down beside me. She handed me a
bouquet of flowers to put on Mom’s casket. I didn’t know who this
woman was at first, only that she had been standing beside Dad all
day and seemed to have been staring at me. She had sad eyes. That’s
how I remember them. She introduced herself as my step-mother. The
flowers were Marigolds, Mom’s favorite. She asked if I wanted to
toss them onto the casket once they lowered it. I took them and
thanked her, all the while wondering why you’d waste good flowers
like that.

How ignorant I used to be! She said she was
very sorry for my loss. She said she’d talk to my Dad and have me
come up as soon as she could to visit. I never saw her again.

In all of this time I’d never bothered to
ask Amelia where she and her family had lived, or where she had
grown up, what town she had called home for that matter, aside from
River Bluff. As the car rolled onward toward my mother’s childhood
home, I brought it up. “I guess I assumed you had a house
somewhere,” I began.