Shades of Eva (31 page)

At once it became clear to me that if I
didn’t do something to alter that fact, there’d be no mention of
him, no memory, ever, of my brother, save the cold case file most
likely buried in some vaulted River Bluff police archive. It would
be as if he never existed. He’d be graveless, unmarked, just like
Amelia said, and that wasn’t acceptable to me. 

Then I searched for my own name: Mitchell
Rennix. There were others. One was a banker in New York. One, a
guitarist for a band named
Abex
out of Seattle. Several
references to a Mitchell Rennix in several family tree links:
Mitchell born in 1745; Mitchell born in 1896; Mitchell born in
1915, 1956, 1958, and one, Mitchell Rennix, born in 1965 in River
Bluff.

I was in awe. There, in this evil eye
staring back at me, was my name—a reference to me…fourteen
characters attesting to one past. It was a database page listing
births in Owen County where I was born.

I was impressed, but there was another name
on my mind. The would-be sister to my mother: Dorothy Biggs.

I’d never heard of her and decided to see if
the Internet had a record of her. I searched for her, and after
perusing a few pages, I settled on a page that looked promising. It
was a genealogy page created by a Hannah Biggs.

The name Dorothy Biggs was highlighted in
blue and I clicked on it. It brought me to a web page called:
www.hannahbiggs.com/BIGGS. There were tabs up and down the left
column: Home. Site Map. About Me. And several surnames appeared:
Grant, BAUM, Srevemeyer, and BIGGS.

Baum and Biggs! Holy shit!

I clicked on the ABOUT ME heading, and
another page appeared. There was a picture of a young lady taken
outdoors on a sunny day. She had red hair and brown eyes. She was
about my age and very pretty. She was smiling big, her red hair
glowing in the sunlight. The name beneath the photo read
HANNAH.

Below this, there was a short biography.
Hannah was a student at San Jose State studying psychology. She was
into genealogy, had a cat named Fiffle, and loved to collect owls
and, wouldn’t you know it,
Wizard of Oz
memorabilia.

Hannah Biggs was the daughter of Dorothy and
Clarence Biggs out of San Francisco, CA. Parents of Clarence were
listed, but there were no biological parents of Dorothy given.
Dorothy was listed as adopted. Her adoptive parents: Lyman Frank
Baum and Maud Gage Baum.

The author and his wife!

That would make him the adoptive father of
my mother’s presumed half-sister. The original wizard of Oz—my step
uncle.

Amelia thought—Amelia said—that Dorothy was
a sister to my mother. What I was looking at was an immediate Baum
connection. What a strange and informative piece of equipment I was
toying with, this Internet.

This all made me think of Emma, my
grandfather’s presumed mistress—according to Amelia. Could Emma
possibly be this Dorothy’s true mother? Was my grandfather Virgil
her father? My head was spinning. This girl, Hannah, didn’t appear
to know who her maternal biological grandparents were. Amelia
wasn’t sure who Dorothy Biggs was, either. Maybe Hannah Biggs was
someone we needed to contact.

I tried to remember where the newspaper
article from the attic had said Dorothy Biggs was from, but
couldn’t. Doubt began to set in and I immediately emailed
Amelia.

[email protected] to
[email protected],

Monday, April 21, 1995: 12:34 p.m.

Where was Dorothy Biggs from?

Amelia replied almost immediately.

[email protected] to
[email protected]

Monday, April 21, 1995: 12:36 p.m.

San Francisco!

This message sent from Phone-Effigy
Wireless.

I made a note of the Web address and set it
aside for the time being.

I had one more order of business to attend
to before I left to apply for the guard job. I clicked a HOME icon
at the top of the screen and it brought me back to a search page. I
typed in the name Benjamin Levantle in the subject line, then hit
ENTER.

At the top of the list, a link to the Notre
Dame University psychology department home page appeared. I clicked
on it and it brought me to another page titled PSYCHOLOGY
FACULTY.

Benjamin Levantle was the chair of the
department. He bore several letters after his name: Ph.D., DCSW,
MA, BA. Impressive. I clicked on his name. It brought me to the
professor’s personal faculty page.

Like Hannah’s page, there was a brief bio
and picture and a CONTACT ME link. The man in the photo was smiling
beneficently. He appeared pleasant, friendly, nothing like the
aristocratic pomp of which his titles might suggest. His students
probably adored him. He appeared bourgeoisie, egalitarian, and
jovial. He was most likely a good man as Amelia believed—a good
man, however, who was likely harboring a pretty troublesome
secret.

I clicked on the CONTACT ME tab and compared
his number to the number Amelia had stored in my phone for him. It
was identical. I dialed Ben’s number, and to my surprise, the man
with all the titles answered.

“—Hello. Doctor Levantle speaking.”

After a short conversation I learned
that Ben was retiring in two weeks. He was also not taking new
patients. He was open, however, to the idea of giving some
direction to an alcoholic on the verge of sobriety. He agreed to
meet me that very evening on the campus of Notre Dame, in fact,
whereby he’d said he could give me several references to detox
clinics, addictions specialists, and personality counselors who
would be very happy to help me.

He seemed a kind man—but would he know where
his brother was?

***

12:47 P.M.

I pulled the Impala into the Asylum main
entrance about a quarter to one o’clock, and sat there in my car
looking around. The sun was beaming high overhead, and it was hot
that afternoon. I shut the Impala off and rolled my windows down to
let some fresh air in and to take in the sounds of the place.

The first things I heard were the birds of
Michigan: the cheerios of the Robins, the bell-like
toolools
of the Blue Jays, and the nasal
seets
of the Finches. High
overhead, two cardinals were settling into a silver oak tree. The
Cardinals were bright red; their coats and their metallic chipping
calls gave them away. The cardinal was my mother’s favorite
bird.

Beyond the noise of the birds, there was the
noise of children playing, something I hadn’t heard much in my
travels. There appeared to be a soccer game going on at the far end
of the grounds to the east. I watched them play for a minute,
reminiscing about my own youth, which was less a youth engaged in
the sport of teams. The games I played were solitary for the most
part, and for a moment, I was almost jealous of those kids.

I had never set foot on the grounds of a
mental institution, and I was a bit awed as I sat there amidst the
trees. The north wing, anchored by the immense, three-story
administrative complex, was directly in front of me and seemed to
be addressing me as if to ask: where the hell have you been?

I followed the north wing’s lines to the
east and west and noticed that all the windows in the upper two
floors in both directions were barred. I hadn’t noticed that detail
from the road, earlier. North Hall across the street, gagging from
willow tree branches and drowning in a bed of black-eyed susans,
didn’t even have barred windows.

There was no fence around the grounds, just
open land and trees.

There were a few people wandering around
closer in to the buildings, mostly in pairs. It was hard to tell if
these were patients, dyads of patients with counselors, or just
visitors. Two men walking side-by-side were passing me. I was able
to eavesdrop just a bit on their conversation. One of the men, a
rather large and somewhat disheveled looking person of middle age,
was smoking and seemed to be complaining to the other about someone
who was bothering him. He had a twitch about his face that made him
appear as if he were winking constantly. I figured he was a
patient. The other man just walked beside him, listening as if his
mind was somewhere else, altogether. I figured he was a
counselor.

The dense foliage from a variety of trees
between me and the north wing undercut the building’s industrial
feel just a bit, which gave the place an austere and eerily
peaceful quality that was enhanced by the chirping of the birds.
From the road, Coastal State is a daunting spectacle. Essentially
the asylum proper is arranged in one sprawling, four-story square
complex called a Kirkbride layout, named after its architect, Dr.
Thomas Kirkbride, whose palatial designs inspired many of these
grand institutions all over the country in the 1800s.

Coastal State wears a dark red brick face
dotted with tall, rectangular windows, four stories of them set in
neat rows and columns along her sides, each framed in black
trim.

The north wings, presumably one for male
patients and one for female, extend east and west along those
lines, almost as far as the eyes can see. There is a small
cornerstone embedded in the masonry of each wing flanking the
administrative center. I could see two such cornerstones from the
Impala. To my left, a stone read WARD C. That ward—or wing—extended
a good two hundred feet in the direction of the soccer game. To my
right, there was a stone that read: WARD B. That wing extended the
same distance, but toward a tiny, freestanding chapel resting idly
beneath the branches of two poplar trees in the distance.

The east lawn, beyond the soccer game, was
mostly open ground and unfenced. The more proximal sections nearest
Admin were splotched with an array of differing types of trees.
From the car I could see red and silver maples, and two white
birches just behind them. A loblolly pine: more common to the
Southwest, and a red oak: home for the moment to two playing red
squirrels, flanked the nearest part of the sidewalk just ahead of
me. Beyond them I could see the bluish-green needles of an eastern
white pine, a beautiful tree, and several eastern redcedars lining
the rest of the long walkway to the front entrance doors.

The grounds were a sort of arboretum that
gave the place a wooded, serene look that in turn gave the place
the therapeutic feel it needed to complement its austerity, which
made it more like a retreat and less like the stereotypical
institution.

I felt home.

There used to be a lake on the grounds
called Bluff Lake, but it had been drained and filled in some years
back, probably near to where the kids were playing soccer. There
was a water feature amidst the redcedars on the front lawn. The
fountain was a large, statuesque structure, bronze or pewter it
appeared, comprised of a little boy and little girl holding hands.
A hose in the little boy’s right hand threw up an arc of water to a
pale raised playfully in the girl’s left. A circular brick abutment
surrounded the fountain and there were two or three people sitting
on it, one of whom was snapping a picture of the statues, another,
pictures of the administrative center.

Podjen had written a history of the place.
Not to rehash everything I’d skimmed from the book Amelia had me
read, but there are some things worth mentioning. Coastal State was
constructed in 1837. It was originally called the River Bluff
Asylum for the Insane. The sign out front now bore a more
politically correct, yet equally cumbersome, title: Coastal State
Regional Psychiatric Hospital. Large as they were, the grounds were
smaller in area than I had expected. It was now about ten acres of
what used to be over four-hundred. Most of those original acres
have been sold to real estate developers and the University of
Southwestern Michigan, and many of the outbuildings and cottages
have been simply demolished, save those like North Hall across the
street, and a few other abandoned structures primarily under police
patrol.

There are four buildings on the main grounds
where I was. I exited my car to give myself a walking tour. One of
those buildings is the enormous Kirkbride square that forms the
largest part of the Hospital complex. More on it in a minute. The
second building is the chapel I mentioned, just to my west, which
sits along Sacramento Drive beside the main parking lot. The third
and fourth buildings weren’t visible from where I was. They rest at
the back of the property overlooking the ravines that fall away
toward Cascadia Creek at their base, and the railway beyond.

One of those buildings is the halfway house
Amelia had referred to, the one my father sought refuge in shortly
after his second wife, Meryl, passed away. It’s called the Sax
Rehabilitation Center, and just beside it is the fourth building—an
abandoned structure: a small, two-story outbuilding that was once
the juvenile detention center.

The east wing, Ward C, of the Kirkbride
building is a prison, though it doesn’t resemble the typical
prison. It’s a small, minimum security lockdown wing for juvenile
delinquents and petty criminals, essentially. It’s a place for
itinerants, really, drifters much like myself in some cases,
vagrants who’ve acquired some crime to their discredit to go along
with some concomitant mental illness or substance abuse.

Take Kern Circle around to the west and
you’ll pass the chapel. Follow it around toward the rear of the
property and you’ll see the Sax Rehab Center in the distance. But
pay attention. To your left is Ward D—the southwest wing of the
main complex. This is the main hospital unit where most patients
are received. This side of the facility is also called the
Infirmary. There’s a circular driveway leading up to its entrance,
much like you see in any emergency hospital. In fact, the sign out
front of it reads ambulance entrance. It appears more like a
loading dock where supply trucks might off-load cargo than it does
a hospital entrance. There is a long ramp connecting the driveway
to the infirmary’s front door, where I imagine the most extreme,
and the most ill, patients find their greeting.