Shades of Eva (36 page)

I then asked him when he took his first
drink. Interestingly, he said, “Twenty-five years ago in a toolshed
with my pop.”

I asked him how old—or young—that would have
made him. He told me five-years-old. I asked him if this was the
same toolshed in which the neighbor was shot, his molestation had
occurred. He paused for a moment and said yes.

I had to take into account how frequently
he’d been drinking, which Mitchell admitted, as far as the whiskey
was concerned, was just about every day since he was
five-years-old. A sufficient abuse to say the least! In fact, if I
had time to look into it and could document it, Mitchell at one
time just might have been the world’s youngest alcoholic.

I asked him how long he’d heard the voices
and the laughing in his head, the internal noise of his
congregation. He replied, “Since age five or so, I guess.”

“Five or so?” I reiterated, pausing to give
my new client time to connect the four concepts: age five, his
first drink, his molestation, and the origin of his so-called
congregation. He didn’t answer me, but he nodded. He did seem to
understand the connection.

It’s no secret that alcohol—and almost all
substance abuse—is a means to cover up certain existential
problems. Just as laughing at one’s misery is a form of coping with
that misery, alcohol is also a coping mechanism. For some, drinking
is a cover for abusive relationships; for others depression. For a
lot of men, it’s a cover for that age-old demon called anxiety. In
Mitchell’s case, it was blanketing a history of severe trauma, and
an old history at that.

I wanted to hear more about his
parents
, though; and, specifically, more about a little dispute
they once had regarding who would be an older brother to
Mitchell.

Mitchell said he believed that he had a
brother out there. Somewhere out there were Mitchell’s words, which
were also the words of Carl Sagan when he referred to
extraterrestrials. It was shades of Mitchell’s
visitor-from-another-planet theme.

“Where out there?” I asked, picturing a man
similar in feature to Mitchell flying around the galaxy in a
UFO.

He said that he did not know.

Mitchell moved the conversation on. He said
this brother was born into a mental institution where his mother
had been staying. He said the child was taken just weeks after his
birth and never seen or heard from again.

There were two points of dispute, now: who
this baby’s father was, and whether or not the child was alive or
dead.

On point one—paternity—Mitchell’s parents
fought about who the father to this baby might be. I thought that
strange, particularly when Mitchell said that his father claimed
the child was his. It’s typically the other way around—the father
denying the infant.

His mother, Mitchell said, accepted this
claim for a while, and even had it put into writing, but changed
her mind about its truth after the baby was taken. It was then,
Mitchell explained, when his mother alleged to have been raped.

Just why she waited to allege such a thing
was certainly a question I had. Mitchell didn’t know, and he didn’t
offer an opinion as to why she waited right then.

That was one-half of the dispute. Point
two—the baby’s fate—was the other half. Jack Rennix (he told me his
father’s name was Jack, if I haven’t already explained that)
believed the baby to be dead. His mother said otherwise. Since
Mitchell said the child was never seen or heard from again after
his abduction, the truth remained to be seen.

I wanted to address the first issue with
Mitchell: this baby’s paternity. I needed to try and get a sense as
to what side of this logjam Mitchell had been standing. “Do you
think your mother was raped?”

“She said yes,” was Mitchell’s reply. “Dad
said no,” which wasn’t a reply at all.

I asked what his opinion was, taking the
time to inform him that, “Women don’t usually lie about things like
that.” Again I asked, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said, somewhat
stubbornly.

I took in a long breath, giving Mitchell a
chance to reflect on what he was saying, and his neutrality. It
would be a troublesome dispute for a child, let alone a child all
grown up, to have to evaluate. I was not unaware of this
difficulty, or unsympathetic to it. Disputes like that aren’t mere
disputes to a child, nor to a man. These are sides to be taken, and
a child typically doesn’t want to have to take sides on something
like that. I assumed Mitchell hadn’t taken a side, at least not
consciously, but he wasn’t a child anymore. He needed to choose,
and pardon the expression I used, but I told him, “You need to shit
or get off the pot! This office is a safe place to shit!”

Mitchell was unoffended. He simply said,
“I’m trying, but I’m a bit bound up.”

I almost laughed. “Did she say where this
rape occurred?” I tried.

Mitchell took in a deep breath. “There was
more than one.” His reply seemed to stun even himself.

“More than one allegation, or more than one
rape?”

“More than one rape!” He answered,
definitively

“So you believe your mother?”

Mitchell gave me a short, somewhat
uncomfortable pause, and then he said, “Yes. Yes, I guess I do
believe her.”

Mitchell had just shit, and I was very proud
of him.

I thought it was time to address
Mitchell’s take on the second part of this dispute, which was where
this son might be. That involved looking a little deeper into where
the son had been taken from. So I asked Mitchell a few questions
about that place, a place he kept referring to as the Asylum, and
as we sat there, me trying to contain my flood of questions, and
Mitchell staring abysmally into his explanatory fog, it suddenly
dawned on me: Mitchell’s story was beginning to sound a little too
familiar.

“What mental institution was this?” I said,
interrupting his answer, feeling a sudden sharp sting in my back as
if someone had just poked me with the tip of a knife.

He said the words I thought he’d say.
“Coastal State.”

Mitchell said his parents met at the Coastal
State Regional Psychiatric Hospital in River Bluff. Coastal State
is a place that holds some significance to me. I’d dated a girl
from River Bluff who was committed there by her parents. Like
Mitchell’s mother, she also became pregnant while there.

In an office where I believed there were no
coincidences, it seemed decidedly strange that Mitchell’s mother
from River Bluff had had a baby as a teenager in that place, and so
did a girl I once knew—and once loved very much. Her name was
Eva—and she also alleged a rape. She also had suffered the horror
of having a child kidnapped from her.

I never learned much anything about
that abduction, nor of what became of Eva after her baby was taken.
I knew only that her child was a boy, and shortly after he was
born, that he was abducted.

I tried to divorce myself from Eva when she
became pregnant. The year was 1953 and I was just a senior in high
school. I left for the University before she ever gave birth.

Eva was my first love, but she had issues to
say the least. Her primary issue was her father, Virgil. They
fought a lot for reasons that were never clear to me. After her
committal at, yes, the age of fourteen, we saw each other on
occasion, but only on occasion. My parents discouraged me from
socializing, writing or calling Eva after her committal. They
called such an effort a lost energy, since in their minds they’d
given up on Eva as a viable mate to anyone. But I still cared about
her, still loved her, though as the months wore on and our
separation became more routine, that love grew—or regressed more
accurately—into a different kind of love. My love for Eva became a
more pitiful kind of sentiment, I suppose. That’s the word that
comes to mind, pitiful.

I saw Eva about every three months those
first couple years of her stay at Coastal State, those years before
her pregnancy. I watched a slow, downward spiral happen to my
friend.  Between visits, something seemed to be happening to
Eva. She was losing weight. Her eyes seemed to be changing color
even, from a sweet mint green to a darker, fiery emerald color. She
had bruises where she shouldn’t have bruises, and her once
effervescent personality seemed to be withering to something
detached, something distant. By the age of sixteen, her once sunny
disposition had faded to something winterish, something colder and
almost unrecognizable to me.

Yet I still loved her.

And on one of those home visits (her last
one if I recall) when she was just sixteen or so—yes, she was
sixteen—Eva and I made love for the first time.

It happened on a secluded bank
of the
Saint Joseph River running just behind our homes. It was not my
first sexual experience, but I believe it was Eva’s. In my own way,
I thought the sex could heal things between us—that it might spark
the care for Eva that I used to feel for her, and might even heal
whatever secret disease was eating away at her. It was a teenage
boy’s fantasy. What used to be a hopeful I’ll-do-anything-for-you
kind of unconditional love had turned into a pitiful fantasy. And I
could do nothing about it.

The sex did nothing to alter the reality of
her condition, or my feelings for her, which continued to fade,
despite the encounter. I couldn’t look at Eva in the same way as I
once had, as much as I wanted to. The sexual encounter did nothing
but make things worse, because it brought Eva that much closer to
me, and led her that much further down a spiraling path of
desperation.

By the time Eva was three years at Coastal
State, three years away from me, by the time those three backwards
ticking years had passed and I was on my way to my fancy Notre Dame
education, that sane love and any hope for it was gone. It had been
lost by distance and a by a fear of what was going on with her, for
what her parents were doing to her by hospitalizing her.

Mine was a fear of insanity, and it was a
fear of the inevitable difficulty that insanity promised. It wasn’t
logical, I know. Fear shouldn’t contaminate love, but it did—at
least in my case it had.

We simply drifted apart, but wouldn’t you
know that little romp on the bank of the river might have produced
something more than excitement? Six weeks later, I heard that Eva
was pregnant.

She was barely seventeen and I was panicked.
I saw a poor man wheeling a baby stroller through wintry streets
with a poor wife at home with several mouths to feed. I saw my
ambitions arrested by the responsibilities of fatherhood, and I saw
them stilled, if not entirely destroyed, by one stupid mistake, by
a pitiful act of compassion that wasn’t compassionate at all, by
one naïve attempt to recover that which was lost by lying with my
first love at the edge of a river.

That’s what our love affair had become to
me—a teenager’s mistake. That’s what I allowed it to become, and
that’s what it was to me that day sitting there listening to
Mitchell recount a similar tale of rape and possible murder—a
teenager’s mistake.

I wasn’t ready for Eva’s world, and she
wasn’t ready for mine. As much as it pained me to have to see her
leave on those awkward Sunday nights, I chose to break away for
good once I learned of that pregnancy. Virgil made sure of that
anyhow—he never let her come home again.

I talked to him often in those days, if for
no other reason than to get the answer I was so afraid of hearing.
I needed to know if I was the father, and more importantly, I
needed to know if Eva had told him what we’d done.

Not long after the announcement
of
Eva’s pregnancy, I got my answer. The father was a kid from up
north who was also a patient at Coastal State.

I breathed a hesitant sigh of relief.

Virgil thought it best to put a stop to mine
and Eva’s friendship. He told me not to even bother to write to
her, that the doctors there had been instructed to review her mail
and return to him any correspondence I—or any boy—would chose to
offer his daughter. He took my father as an ally in that
separation, and for a while, that was that.

There was no more mention of Eva in our
house for months, and honestly, I was relieved. It never dawned on
me at that point that Eva might have been protecting me during her
pregnancy. That the man who was claiming her baby might have been
lying in order to give an unclaimed child a last name and spare the
infant the inopportune label of a bastard.

I never gave thought to what happened to
illegitimate children born into state insane asylums back then. I
thought Eva would be released at some point, married to this fellow
patient, whoever he was, and they’d take their baby home with them.
I didn’t realize Virgil could prevent all of that; that he was bent
on preventing that. It just never dawned on me that Eva might not
have a say in her own family’s destiny.

When Eva’s baby was abducted, things
changed. Eva renounced all of that. This fellow mental patient
wasn’t her baby’s father. She pointed a retaliatory finger at my
brother, and hers. Her once natural pregnancy was now a pregnancy
forced on her by way of rape, and not just by anybody—by Fred—by my
brother she alleged. She said it had happened in her bedroom, and
he’d tried to rape her at the Institution, and had tried,
unsuccessfully, the night her baby was taken. And furthermore,
sadder still, she said that Ully, her own brother, made money off
these rapes.

It was plain retaliation, at my family and
hers. It had to be. Why would she suddenly change her facts if she
wasn’t mad in every sense of the word? It scared me, and it
saddened me. It angered me. It made me wonder if this patient from
up north was ever a possible father at all, and if his claim was as
big a lie as the one Eva was now lodging against my brother. And
that doubt made me all the more horrified, because if it wasn’t
Fred, and if it wasn’t this mental patient from up north, then that
lost infant’s father was someone else.