Shades of Eva (23 page)

Amelia told me that perhaps Ben gave the
letters back to my mom, and that they, like a lot of her
possessions, were simply confiscated.

The idea that anyone had taken these things
from Mom, regardless of her age or her mental state, infuriated me.
I think the word Amelia chose was a carefully considered one.
Confiscated
seemed as good a term as any to describe the
nature of my mother’s life, not just the fate of her small quarry
of possessions. She was arrested. Her time and her efforts, her
longing and her loves all seemed confiscated, and this chest and
its contents were the evidence of that arrest, and it made me
sick.

She could have said that Virgil had just
saved
Mom’s things, or
stored
them away, but Amelia
didn’t. She used an almost criminal term, as if this chest and this
room was evidence of a crime. It was the right term. It was
inflammatory, and it was warranted. It put Amelia and me on a more
even playing field: my anger for my mother’s confiscated artifacts
told Amelia that I could appreciate the confiscation of her Aunt
Emily’s art, and suggested I might even understand where Amelia’s
tears had come from when she spoke of her aunt’s artistic losses
back in Neah Bay.

I hadn’t acknowledged those tears, or those
losses. I hadn’t acknowledged the importance of these kinds of
family heirlooms, or family memories for that matter. All I could
remember thinking about Amelia’s aunt’s art was that the crazies in
the Asylum didn’t create works of art, and that Amelia had to have
been crying because she’d lost a mother and a husband, not for want
of art or its loss.

There was enormous value in something as
simple as a letter, a figurine, or a drawing. Sentimental value!
These were heirlooms, these letters, these drawings, and the
implication of someone stealing these things was no longer abstract
to me. Open up a drawer and find a letter written in the
handwriting of a lost loved one and you understand what I’m saying.
It’s as if they are alive again, and with you.

My mother’s, and Amelia’s aunt Emily’s,
confiscations took on a personal meaning in that attic as if they
had been stolen from us, not just them. It was that real to me. The
things that I was looking at and holding, reading with strained and
jet lagged eyes, were real. They were parts of my mother, and parts
I didn’t want to let go of.

I became all at once angered at my
grandfather, again, as if I had never been angry with him at all.
If this was a confiscation—if he had taken these things from my
mother and hid them—I couldn’t believe he felt it appropriate to
plunder such personal things. I thought back to his letter to Dr.
Norris asking her to discourage my mother from drawing, and from
seeing my father, and from doing something as simple as crying. He
was controlling his daughter from her artwork down to her tears. He
must have felt that his daughter’s possessions were somehow
possessions, by extension, of his; just like her tears were
probably extensions of his. That was shameful, and I felt ashamed
of him for trying to erase or obliterate any aspect of her
life.

And I hadn’t even mentioned Elmer’s
obliteration!

I came home to learn something about my
mother’s rape and who did it. Now I was learning about another form
of rape—a mental one—and it was sickening me. She was confiscated,
and by extension, so was I. I deserved a mom who remembered her
past and had seen justice afforded to her life. I deserved a mom
who remembered her first love, who remembered her mother, even; not
one who needed a forgetful son to try and recreate that past in
fantasy. Mom’s past was buried in a chest inside some dank,
sweltering disappointments room! For that I was ashamed for all of
us.

Looking back on it all, the alcohol
withdrawal symptoms were only then emerging. They would not mix
well with the mixed bag of emotions I had been handed, and the
subsequent mixed bag of grief I was silently reaching for. When I
regained my bearings, I looked again to the letter in my hand
addressed to this love interest named Ben. That’s when the question
of Elmer’s true last name was starting to take weight.

So I asked Amelia, “Is Ben a possible father
to my brother Elmer?”

She scratched her head. “I’m not sure. Ben
wasn’t a rapist, though. I know that. In my reading, your mother
never mentioned any sexual encounter with Ben. They were close
friends, and I doubt he’d ever have done something like that to
her, that is impregnate and then abandon her, but I don’t
know.”

“Do you think this Ben Levantle would know
where his brother Fred is?”

Suddenly Amelia was smiling. It was as if
she’d already considered that question. It must have been the
question she’d been waiting for me to ask.

“He might,” she replied.

I turned my attention back to the chest.
That’s when Amelia handed me one of my mother’s diaries. She had
opened it to a certain page. I read: 

…
I found out that Ully had $100 today,
and I found out where he got it, and why. How can my brother hate
me so? I have done nothing to him but love him. And he profits from
my torture. Fred is $100 poorer, and Ully $100 richer. He has been
paying him for access to me…. 

Amelia explained that on other dates, my
mother had described times when Fred would come through her closet
to talk to her. She wrote that it was innocent at first, if not
exciting. But he was older by five years, and it wasn’t innocent—at
least not in the end. Mom had written that Fred fondled her, made
her take off her clothes and watch him while he masturbated. This
went on for a year; happened almost every time Eva came home on
leave. Mom was specific, and certain that Ully and Fred had made a
deal—money for sexual access!

“Torture,” Amelia explained, “was what your
mother called it, because as things progressed, things got more
violent. She started refusing to see Fred, and he didn’t take that
so well. On one occasion, he hit her. On another, he pinned her and
put his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t cry out. Fred also
began threatening Ully; said that if he didn’t allow Fred access to
his sister he was going to tell their fathers about the money
exchanges.

“Your mother confronted Ully one day about
it, but Ully threatened her, too. Said he’d tell their parents that
she was the one who’d been inviting Fred into her room all along
and that he would deny knowing anything about any money. I think
torture is the right word for what she was forced to endure with
those two.”

Rage couldn’t begin to describe what I was
feeling for Ully and his friend if all of this were true. This kind
of betrayal was sickening and it far surpassed the sick feeling the
word confiscation had just evoked. Another term for Ully’s behavior
was prostitution, but that didn’t exactly describe the situation,
either. There was something darker, more malevolent about giving
your own sister over to a friend like that—something akin to incest
that I couldn’t quite define.

“So, what about this Ben?” I said. “I take
it he didn’t believe my mother was raped, and probably resented her
for accusing his brother?”

“That sounds reasonable,” Amelia agreed.
“Your mother didn’t make the rape accusation until after Elmer was
taken—and at that point, she’d practically given up writing Ben. In
these letters, she seemed to be begging him to reply to her. It
reads like he quit responding to her. But I’m not sure. I haven’t
met Ben and I haven’t asked him.”

“What about Fred? You did a search for
him?”

“He went AWOL from the Army in 1954. Same
week Elmer was killed; and he hasn’t been seen since as far as
anyone knows.”

I was finding it hard to believe that a guy
would just up and vanish like flatulence and not try to have some
contact with his only brother. But then again, isn’t that what I’d
done to River Bluff? Up and vanish like smoke in the wind?

I made a mental note to learn more about
this Ben Levantle. As things were shaping up, he might be the only
chance we had at locating Fred.  

There were other letters written
by
my mother in that chest—letters to her own mother, in fact. I was
looking at one, which was less a letter than it was a plea. Part of
it read: I have to come home. Please don’t leave me here. The
letter was dated 1951. Sadly, it must have fallen on deaf ears. Mom
remained at the Asylum for another six years.

What I next found staring up at me was my
mother’s committal papers, dated June 13, 1950. They were signed by
Grandma Ellie and Grandpa Virgil, as well as by Dr. Anna Norris,
and some other stamped signature Asylum bigwig, Cranz Eibolter.
Amelia told me that Eibolter was one of the psychiatrists handling
the lobotomies at Coastal State.

Mom was initially given the diagnosis of
schizophrenia with tendencies of uncontrolled passion and
pathological lying. “Prior to her committal,” Amelia began, “there
was an incident in the family dining room. Virgil claimed she tried
to push him down a flight of stairs for no reason. In her diaries,
she wrote that he had come after her with a length of garden hose
and had begun whipping her with it in the kitchen.”

Amelia directed my attention to Mom’s diary
entry. It was hard to read, almost illegible, but I could make out
the gist of it. Mom had tried to run out of the house, but Virgil
had grabbed her by the arm. There was a struggle on the front
porch, and that’s where the whipping had taken place. Mom fought
back this time and pushed her father. She said that he fell off the
porch and hit his head on a rock at the edge of the sidewalk. He
had to be hospitalized for a night. Mom was taken to Coastal State
for evaluation the next day.

It was sad to read. It made me think of Ully
again, and I wondered if I had ever fought back as my mother had.
Dad used to hold me by the arm, too, as he worked me over with his
belt. But after a while, I stopped fighting him. I stopped fighting
anyone. I think children are trained to stop fighting, trained to
simply take their licks. Ully used to tan my hide with no
resistance whatsoever. And I was older then. I could picture that
passivity: me bent over the edge of the bed, bent over the back of
a chair, the arm of the couch, the end of the kitchen table, and
lip of the bathtub. Once he broke skin with me bent over an old
termite-ridden tree stump in his front yard. Another time at the
end of the dock extending out into Lake Michigan. On and on the
pictures came, and never, never had I once resisted Ully.

I diverted my attention to Mom’s committal
papers. Virgil also accused her of being obsessed with his past, my
grandfather’s words. I asked Amelia what she made of the
remark.

Amelia then referred to the Emma drawings,
and eluded to the likelihood that my mother might have been
pressing her father for information about who Emma was, and more
than likely, who this Dorothy, as well. He denied fathering
her.

Mom came to some harsh conclusions in her
diaries. She accused her father of abandoning a first wife and
child. She accused him of forgetting them. She therefore accused
her father of murder.

And with regard to what Fred and Ully were
doing to her, the diary entries went far back. According to my
mother, the first instance happened when she was only ten years
old. Fred was fifteen. Ully fourteen.

This was the first instance where I had the
strong inclination to try and retrieve my mother’s Asylum records.
I wanted to know what she’d told her doctors about all of this, and
more so, I wanted to know what the Asylum’s response was to all of
this.

Of course Amelia shook her head as if it was
a naïve question. “Their response,” she told me, “was to commit her
for seven years. That’s not a neutral response if you ask me.”

And she was right. It wasn’t.

If my mother was as stubborn a daughter as I
remembered her to be as a mother, then she never recanted any of
these allegations that might have contributed, somehow, to her
committal. I was beginning to understand why Ully never came around
and why she spent so many years in that place.

Amelia saw something remarkable in my
mother, and I had to agree. She held to her allegations in the same
way Joanne Greenberg’s character, Deborah Blau, held to her
fantasies in the
Rose Garden
book. She held on to the idea
that she had a sister out there somewhere, and a stepmother, too.
She held on to her dignity by not recanting her allegations against
Fred and her brother, allegations no one around her believed.

I had to believe that despite Mom’s pleas
for release, what she really wanted was for her mother to believe
her. Mom stayed another six years, stubbornly, and with the truest
form of grit, I came to believe, because the truth of her beliefs
existed despite the ears upon which they fell—deaf or not.

My mother was brave in that regard, just as
Amelia said she was, and for that bravery I felt proud.

I also found an old whiskey bottle in that
chest, a tin pan, a tin cup, a lace cloth, and a tin spoon wrapped
in an old shirt. Then I found an original copy of the book,
The
Wizard of Oz
, whose author I noticed, upon Amelia’s cue, had
signed the inside cover, L. Frank Baum, and had written a short,
personal note to Grandpa Virgil that read,

Here is that copy I promised you, Virgil.
May it bring you and yours

an ounce of the joy that it has brought Maud
and I.

I was dumbfounded. The Oz books were
treasures to me and to Mom. She read them over and over again to
me. And now in my hand lay an original copy of Baum’s
turn-of-the-century masterpiece. I also had to wonder how and when
my grandfather ever came to know an author as prolific as Baum.

Amelia explained that L. Frank Baum married
a woman named Maud Gage in South Dakota. There was that reference
to South Dakota again. First, Wounded Knee, and now Aberdeen, where
Baum once worked as a newspaper editor, Amelia explained, where he
must have met either Virgil or some other descendent of mine.