Shades of Eva (22 page)

Mom never said move on. Her coping style was
just the opposite: hang on described her style. Hang on to that
curiosity, she would say, because someday you will find your
answers.

Hopefully, I thought, taking another step up
those stairs behind Amelia, I’d find some of Mom’s answers in these
upper rooms.

I remember finally putting my eyes to work
on those stairs so I didn’t trip going up, so I didn’t mentally
undress my guide. I remember quite clearly that climb, the
intermittent, almost uncontrollable curiosity of lust and resultant
sneaked peaks at Amelia’s ascension, and the subsequent uneasy
approach to my mother’s room when we’d reached the upper floor. I
remember Amelia offering me a somber tour of my mother’s bedroom, a
room that resembled every bit the room in my country home
dream.

There was the curtain-free window with
peeling paint, and the dark glass that overlooked a river. There
was the closet door. If you imagined hard enough, there were the
little stuffed animals atop a toy box, and the little girl
clutching one in her bed. There were the tears frozen from the
coldness of temperature and time beneath her eyes. There was the
unwelcome terror that painted her face, the sadness that had
burgled her, and the anger that covered her like a red-hot blanket.
And why? I didn’t know. That was the dream girl said to be my
mother, and this, the room, according to Amelia, of which I had
dreamed so many times before.

Amelia made her way to the closet. With a
long, sickening creak of old hinges and time-beaten pins, its door
opened. Amelia shined a light inside and then onto a small landing
within, and then toward an attic entrance cut into its ceiling. She
climbed onto the landing and then pushed a board above her
hauntingly away, just enough to reveal yet another level of
darkness.

Amelia climbed up and in, and I
followed.

Dusty-laden boxes were stacked floor
to ceiling in a random fashion. Canvas-covered artifacts from a
bygone era, long forgotten or simply abandoned, filled in the dusty
spaces between. Amelia shone her light at the plywood floor, along
which a sort of path ran from about where we were standing to the
wall furthest in front of us. 

“I want to show you one thing before we get
started,” Amelia said. She walked to a section of flooring covered
by some boxes and moved them aside. She revealed what looked like
another attic entrance door cut into the floor where the boxes had
been. There was a metallic loop nailed to the door with a length of
rope attached to it. Amelia bent over and gave the rope a tug.

I walked over to get a better look into the
opening she’d revealed. “Two attic entrances?” I said, shining my
light down the second hole. “Where does this go?”

“If you drop down into it you’ll find
yourself in another bedroom closet,” she replied.

It didn’t hit home right away, and then I
heard another ephemeral laugh coming from the left side of my head.
Amelia didn’t hear it, but I did. It was younger than the old man’s
ghostly laugh downstairs. There were two bedrooms on this side of
the second story, and this entrance had to have been cut into my
uncle Ully’s closet.

It was Ully’s laugh I heard. I had the
miserable thought that the laughing footsteps in that little girl’s
dream world were those of my uncle and his so-called friend, Fred
Levantle, just as Amelia argued they were, boys who saw in these
portals easy accesses to and from a little girl’s bedroom. It was a
sick thought.

“That’s convenient, isn’t it?” I said,
shaking my head in disgust.

Amelia didn’t answer me, but she did
nod.

She let the door close and stepped to one
side and gestured me over. I shined my light around. There were a
couple bookshelves to the far right and far left of center of the
far wall. I gave Amelia a look of confusion, and she shined her
light over my shoulder, between the shelves, onto the middle of the
wall as if to prompt me to look closer.

I walked up to get a better look. I stopped
just inches shy of the wall and again noticed nothing of
importance. I reached out and tapped its wood paneling with my
light. It made a thump. I tapped along the length of maybe two feet
until the thump sounded more like a hollow thud. Again I tapped. In
that one section it sounded hollow.

“Is this a door?” I said, turning to
Amelia.

She didn’t answer. I sensed she was getting
some type of kick out of watching me struggle with this puzzle,
probably because she’d struggled with it some days prior.

I ran my light up and down the edges of the
planks, feeling the grooves between them, feeling for anything out
of the ordinary until at last my hand ran across something
protruding an earwig’s length out of the wall in one of the
grooves. I nearly cut myself on it. It felt like a thin steel dowel
or pin with a sharp edge. That’s just what it was.

I pulled it, and lo and behold, two of the
wall’s planks seemed to separate a bit and I was finally able to
pry them apart with my fingertips. It wasn’t one plank that pulled
away, though. A width of wall about two feet wide opened before me.
It was a door.

***

I stood in the doorway of a room four feet
deep by twenty wide, with an octagonal window in its far wall to
match the one at the other end of the attic I’d seen from the
yard.

“In the old days, people would have these
rooms walled-off and then hide the things they were ashamed of
inside,” Amelia said. “This is your grandfather Virgil’s
disappointments room, and these are the things I found.”

She shined her light atop a small table on
the inside wall where a chest was sitting. It was a small trunk
about two feet wide by two feet deep, and one foot tall. It was
made of black leather with decorative metal strapping. It also had
a keyhole; a key rested within. I turned it and opened the
chest.

At first I saw just tablets of paper and
letters and ornaments. As I sifted through, I realized that the
tablets were diaries, and upon closer inspection, they were the
diaries of my mother. The letters were a mixture of
correspondences, most between my grandfather Virgil and two women:
my grandmother Ellie, and a doctor calling herself Anna Norris.

I hesitated because the name Anna Norris was
familiar to me. “My mother’s doctor,” I murmured, setting the
letters down. Dad called her Tweedle Dee, or maybe it was Tweedle
Dumb. Regardless, Anna Norris was my mother’s psychiatrist at
Coastal State. I could almost feel her ghostly kiss on my
five-year-old cheek in that room that night.

 “You might not believe this,” Amelia
replied, “but Anna still works at Coastal State. She’s the medical
superintendent of the place.”

“In other words: the boss?”

Amelia nodded. “I don’t think your mother
knew this room existed. I think your grandfather used it for what
it is—a simple hiding place.”

Shades of Corrie Ten Boom
, I thought.
“Why didn’t he just burn this stuff?” I was rifling through reams
of tablets, one of which contained page after page of pencil
sketches. “Why go to all this trouble if you just want to get rid
of things?”

Amelia only shrugged her shoulders.

The correspondences between my grandfather
and Dr. Norris were few, maybe ten or so. These were informal
semi-annual reports Dr. Norris had sent home. My grandfather had
saved some of his replies to the reports. These were letters of
thanks, mostly, in which Virgil took opportunity to make some
pointed requests to her: please discourage Eva from meeting with or
talking to Brad; please discourage Eva from drawing pictures of
dead people; please discourage Eva from crying.

As I shuffled through the pencil sketches, I
realized these were sketches of the same someone’s face: that of a
young woman who appeared to be from a Victorian era. She was
wearing a buttoned up dress in the drawings, with what looked to be
a war medallion or broach of some sort at her neckline. There was
an inscription along the top border of the broach that read, quite
clearly:
Gallantry in Battle
, and another phrase:
Chankpe
Opi Wakpala
along its bottom edge.

The sketches were all signed,
Emma.

I didn’t know any Emmas, and neither did
Amelia, to my surprise. Neither could I read Native American. I
also didn’t know women wore war medallions (if that’s what the
broach was), particularly women of that era.

Amelia told me that the word Emma wasn’t a
signature; instead, it was a title.

“Emma is the woman’s name who is depicted
here,” she explained. “I saw her name in your mother’s diaries at a
couple places with reference to your aunt Dorothy Biggs.”

Amelia then showed me similar sketches of
the same face drawn in my mother’s diaries on several different
dates, all with the same broach or medallion with the same
messages, all titled Emma.

“Maybe Granddad had a mistress,” I said.

Amelia shrugged her shoulders.

“What is this?” I asked, pointing to the
phrase:
Chankpe Opi Wakpala
.

“That’s Sioux or Lakota for Wounded Knee
Creek,” Amelia explained.

All I knew of Wounded Knee was that it was
the name of an infamous battle in the American-Indian wars. I
didn’t know it was an actual place. I thought an American general
or someone might have gotten clubbed in the knee. Might have served
him right!

Amelia said that if you look on any good map
of South Dakota you’ll see it, but it won’t read Wounded Knee
Creek, it would read Wounded Knee Massacre. She explained it was
perhaps the most brutal battle in the Indian-American wars and may
have been the last true battle before Native American
surrender.

I did the math. Virgil died in 1957 at the
age of eighty-four, so he would have been alive in 1893.

Amelia clarified. “He would have been of
fighting age. I think this is his Medal of Honor.” She pointed to
the broach about Emma’s neckline.

“I thought you said it was a massacre,” I
said. “Wouldn’t it be a medal of dishonor, then?”

“Depends how you look at it.”

“Mom must have known something about this
Emma.”

“I don’t know,” Amelia said.

I flipped through a few of the tablets and
there were literally hundreds of pencil sketches of this Emma. It
seemed like overkill or some sort of obsession.

We just shook our heads.

I stood there dumbfounded by what I was
seeing, because, as far as I knew, my mother couldn’t draw. She
never had, but then again my mother lived four lives. Before her
first committal, she was a pre-adolescent who apparently drew. From
fourteen to twenty-one she passed adolescence and entered adulthood
as an involuntarily committed state mental patient. From twenty-one
to thirty-four she became a wife and mother.  And after that,
she wore the peaceful serenity of the lobotomized.

Now I had found some true elements of the
pasts I was never privileged to see, of that energetic so-called
first life of hers as a stubborn teenager; and once again, I heard
that chorus of laughing ancestors bellowing somewhere around me. I
sat the sketches aside. I felt thirsty, but I felt excited despite
the unease that was settling upon me. It was as if the world had
just unfolded a small portion of itself to me, one that allowed a
glimpse into the truths surrounding its origin. I was a kid rifling
through a sort of family time capsule, picking through the
artifacts of my mother’s early childhood, aroused by the unexpected
exhilaration this chest had brought me.

Beneath the sketches there was a tiny
woodcarving; a miniature figurine of a woman whose face resembled
Emma’s face from Mom’s drawings. And then more…scores of them.
Little whittled figurines: unique carvings of Native Americans, and
scores more of European-American women.

I lifted the one on top, a figurine that
looked like Emma from the drawings, and held it up for a minute,
testing its weight, peering curiously into its blue speckled eyes.
It appeared to be carved from pine or some other soft wood. The
figurine was painted. It had brown hair. The figure wore a green
dress of an emerald shade, and a blue bonnet shading bluer eyes,
but no medallion.

I looked again to the sketch of Emma. They
looked similar in feature. “Do you think this figurine is a
representation of this Emma?”

“They look similar,” Amelia concurred.

“You suppose my grandfather carved all of
these?”

Amelia reached into the chest and pulled
forth a leather case and unfolded it. The inside of it bore the
initials:
V.M.,
my grandfather’s initials.  Virgil
McGinnis. Inside the case was an old set of whittling knives.
“Pretty sure these are your grandfather’s creations.”

I uncovered another layer and
withdrew
a pile of letters rubber-banded together as Amelia sat
the whittling pouch aside. Each letter opened with the salutation,
Dear Ben.

Amelia explained. “Ben was a neighbor about
your mother’s age. He and your mother were good friends when she
was a little girl. His last name is Levantle.”

I turned curiously to her. “Fred’s
brother?”

Amelia nodded. “Yes. Ben is Fred’s brother.
He’s a nice guy. He’s a psychologist down in South Bend.”

I scanned some of the letters, feeling as
though I was intruding on something very private. The letter I was
looking at was an obvious love letter, complete with a few red
hearts with Mom’s and Ben’s initials inside of them, and a
lipstick-smudged kiss alongside Mom’s signature.

But why did Virgil have this letter? Why did
he have any of my mother's writings for that matter, or any of
these things? These things certainly weren’t meant for his eyes.
Then again, they weren’t meant for mine, either.