Shades of Eva (37 page)

There was an ethereal finger pointing dead
at me. I could sense it back then, and I could sense it sitting in
that office, listening to Mitchell rattle on.

My father was enraged. So was Virgil. No one
believed Fred could do such a thing—or Ully—and neither did I,
frankly. To accuse Fred of rape was one thing; but Eva was now
accusing him of kidnapping her infant son. A son she said was his.
My brother: a standout athlete, a member of the church choir, an
honor-roll student and a recent enlistee into the US Army, was not
a rapist. Nor was he a child-abductor. He had seldom mentioned Eva
in conversation. I only twice saw them ever talking together. Eva
had never so much as mentioned his name to me, other than to ask me
once in a while how he was.

It broke my mother’s heart to hear such an
accusation. It all must have broken Eva’s heart, too. Someone had
done this terrible thing to her baby. She lost her child and her
dignity because no one seemed to believe her, and she had lost me.
I hadn’t protested the separation, which must have compounded her
indignity.

Her allegations were also convenient for me.
If I had abandoned Eva and the growing life inside her, this was
the straw I needed to break the camel’s back. Eva must have felt
used by me, if not utterly abandoned. We’d made love, one time. One
time only. And I never called again. For that selfish neglect of
Eva’s feelings, I had never forgiven myself. I could have called
her.  I could have written her and defied her father. I could
have been honest and I could have been a friend. I could have
claimed Eva’s child as my own. Maybe then Fred might not have done
what he did, which was to up and vanish.

I never once gave consideration to the
thought that Eva might have been telling the truth. What my
selfishness and sheer cowardice did to Eva, or to her child, or to
my brother, I could never quite know, for I never visited her, even
when I reached the age of majority. I just never did.

I sat there staring at Mitchell, measuring
myself against whatever scale betrayal is measured by, nearly
oblivious to what he was saying. It was a measure I computed as I
tried to listen to Mitchell’s sad story. He was talking about
police asking him questions. Why was he in the shed? Why was he
outside that late at night? Why hadn’t he obeyed his mother and
come in when she called him?

The police came to my house as a boy, too. I
was midway through that freshman year at Notre Dame when they came.
I feared what would happen to my reputation if our intercourse ever
became public, but even then—even after the abduction—Eva kept our
affair a secret from everyone—including police. She must have. They
never asked me about it. And I always wondered why.

I didn’t believe my brother had raped her. I
thought the baby was mine. I feared it was mine. I thought her
allegation that Fred had impregnated her was some
passive-aggressive way to try and manipulate me back into her life.
I thought her mad in every sense of the word, and it cemented the
already festering indifference I felt for her at the
time. 

Police asked only about my brother, who had
just left to return to Korea. He never did have to answer to
police, for he never came home again.

For Fred’s leaving, I blamed Eva as much as
I blamed myself. It couldn’t be true—his raping her—and if telling
police he did so because her baby had been taken was a mere attempt
to get back at me, it backfired terribly. I missed my brother! The
problem was: I would not do what I felt it would take to get him
back. To get Fred back, I thought, I’d have to tell everyone that
Elmer was mine.

Why didn’t Eva just tell the truth? Why
didn’t she just implicate me—admit our transgression? Why did she
have to leave that burden to me? Why did she have to lie about my
brother just to get me back, or worse, just to get back at me?

I spent a lot of long nights trying to
answer those questions. It occurred to me, however, on some
occasions, that maybe, just maybe, there was some truth to what Eva
was saying. Had my brother taken advantage of her somehow? Did
they, too, have sex? Had she concealed all of that from me in an
effort to protect me, or protect Fred from me, or to protect what
she hoped would be our reunion?

The police said nothing about any
back-bending sex by the water. They asked only how close Eva and I
were (not very) and what I knew of her allegations (nothing). They
asked if I’d spoken to Eva recently (no sir), and if I’d heard from
my brother (No I haven’t)—and I hadn’t. They asked if my brother
Fred had ever said anything to me about sex with Eva (No sir, he
didn’t)—and he didn’t. That was the truth. I knew nothing of any
rape, and if I ever expected foul play, I simply couldn’t bring
myself to believe it.

Eva would have said something to me…wouldn’t
she have? I would have sensed something at the dinner table from my
brother’s quirky demeanor…wouldn’t I? I would have heard something
in the neighborhood: boys talking, or worse, girls talking. But I
hadn’t. Had I?

And then I remembered something very obvious
to anyone listening to this sad tale—I quit taking Eva’s calls. And
she did call. If she had ever reached out to me from Coastal State,
I was a vacuum into which she must have been screaming.

My parents didn’t answer every phone call.
They didn’t confiscate the mail every day. Some days I was there to
answer the phone. Some days I was there to get the mail. Sometimes
I heard her cries over the wire as I stood there, frozen, listening
to her plead with me. Sometimes I read her letters. I read her
poems. I read her songs and saw her pictures.

I could have written to her. I could have
visited her. I could have responded to her when she spoke into the
phone to me. I could have questioned her. I could have asked her
why she was protecting me—if she was protecting me—or why she was
trying to hurt me! I could have asked her why she accused Fred of
what she had, and I could have asked her if it were true. I could
have kept the torch of our friendship lit, regardless. I could have
admitted our little romp by the water to police, and to my parents,
and I could have given that little lost boy a last name, something
that child may have never had.

Maybe then Fred might have come home. Maybe
then he might have forgiven me. Maybe then Eva might have found one
night of peaceful sleep.

But I did none of that. I answered the
questions I was asked by police, offered little, knew little more,
and I returned on my not-so-merry way back to Notre Dame. I never
looked back, but as I sat across the desk from Mitchell that day in
April, 1995, a man who—I tremble to admit—bore Eva’s resemblance
like no other person I’d ever met—I was forced to look back. The
eerie similarity between his tale and that of my first love was too
much to overlook.

I’m forced now into looking back—back to the
dismal realization that Eva was a better person than I was, and as
much as I ever gained by leaving her: my priceless education, the
cars of my dreams, travel, professional renown, and Allie, my
college sweetheart and the best wife a man could hope for—as much
as those things were worth to me, I had lost just as much by
abandoning Eva and possibly the only child I’d ever come to father,
by abandoning my first love.

I couldn’t be mad at her. Eva spared me the
responsibilities of shouldering that teenager’s mistake by not
outing me. For all intents and purposes, Eva McGinnis gave me what
I have now, without consequence, without impugning me, and without
punishing me, save taking my brother from me—and in truth, she
didn’t take him—he left of his own volition.

She let me run, just as Fred had run,
without compelling either of us to do anything at all, and in a
sense I’ve been running ever since—from Eva, from myself, and from
the awful truth that may well have consumed her. In that sense, Eva
has been a ligature around my heart for many years that’s gone
ignored and untied, and here, sitting before me, was a reminder of
her, and of that shame that binds.

But this woman, this stranger’s mother, she
couldn’t be Eva, could she? The world was too large. There must be
something called coincidence. To consider anything else threatened
the very core of my being and my lasting happiness—my life with
Allie and my dreams of a peaceful retirement. To loosen or
otherwise bother that ligature threatened that peace.

Eva remained my secret, but sometimes
secrets aren’t meant to persist.

Allie would find out about Eva in a matter
of hours. In a day or two the police would come knocking, looking
for Fred all over again. I had just a few hours’ peace left in my
life, though I didn’t know it at the time.

The breakup with Eva and the manner in which
it happened, even the sexual relations that Eva and I shared, were
forgivable offenses. Allie was that big. But the one thing she
wouldn’t forgive was the failure to address Eva as a mother. If
there was a child born of me who went unclaimed, then that was the
cruelest and most unforgivable of secrets to harbor, and she’d have
none of it.

I took another good look at my client. I
heard Eva in his story, and I saw her in his eyes. I even heard me
somewhere in there.

Did I dare ask him outright? Is your mother
Eva Fay McGinnis? Are you not the grandson of Virgil McGinnis of
River Bluff? Are you not here to force me to revisit the brutal
secrecy that’s been my insurance against the misery of
institutional life, a misery I’d dabble in vicariously through my
patients for many years, but so successfully avoid in my own
existence?

The best I could do without betraying the
McGinnis confidence was to listen to Mitchell’s story and wait,
wait and see if this was indeed a son of my first love, and even
more alarming, if not the son I’d failed by never having
claimed.

As Mitchell spoke, I glanced down at his
intake form to take note of his date of birth. The month was
inconsequential. The year he gave me was 1965. Mitchell couldn’t be
mine. The years didn’t line up. I wouldn’t let them. He was too
young. Of course if he was lying about not knowing his
grandfather’s name, he could be lying about his date of birth.

I was at that fork in the road. I had to
make a choice. Did I tell him who he reminded me of, or did I just
forget it and see where his story went from there?

I chose a third option, which to Mitchell
was an offensive one. Instead of challenging his honesty, I
challenged his presumed ignorance by reverting back to the issue of
his mother’s maiden name.

“There aren’t a lot of people who don’t know
their mother’s maiden name,” I said.

Mitchell gave me a look of contempt. I would
catch that look quite often in our brief time together. This time
he followed it with a look of regret, and said, “You’re right,
doctor. There aren’t a lot of people who don’t know such basic
facts. For that, I apologize.”

And for that, I was ashamed. I didn’t mean
to insult him. I apologized in return. To presume Mitchell was
privy to such basic information as maiden names was an error I
shouldn’t have made, as I said earlier—but in my haste, I had to
try something.

I had to remember that it was still possible
that this wasn’t Eva’s son. It was possible that all this was mere
coincidence, and he might not be related to her at all. His
mother’s story, and that of my childhood friend’s, was coincidence.
It had to be! Coastal State was a residence for almost 500,000
people in its time. I’m sure there were more than two teenage girls
from River Bluff committed there, and probably several who found
their soul mates on its grounds, and had even given birth
there.

So I digressed, safe in Mitchell’s
ignorance, adopting it as my own. I took a mental picture of my
story and burned it. Set it on fire and watched the flames build to
a crescendo and then smolder, its ashes dispersing like dust in
imaginary wind. I let Eva’s story wither much like the ashen
remnant of that burning picture. I erased things to make room for
Mitchell’s story, one I needed to process without sifting it
through the filter of Eva McGinnis.

“Start from the beginning,” I said. “Where
does the story of Mitchell really begin?”

“My story,” he said, staring down at clasped
hands and twiddling thumbs, “begins in a toolshed with a bottle of
whiskey.”

***

I can’t think of a more heinous act than
rape. In my practice I’ve found it interesting how patients who are
victims of rape often minimize the act. Some even go so far as to
take responsibility for it. They call it by other names like
molestation, or fondling, or sex even, as if minimizing the act can
somehow sterilize, if not erase the trauma. They may equate it to
being taken advantage of, as if rape was akin to being fooled in
some way. Some deny they were victims altogether: they were dressed
too seductively, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,
or hadn’t heeded some prior warning, or hadn’t trusted their better
sense.

In these ways victims of rape often rob the
rapist of responsibility. I wanted Mitchell to recognize the
brutality of his rape, and call it by its true name. When I asked
him what he thought that right name was, he didn’t answer me. I
looked him square in the eye, and said, “Mitchell, I want you to
listen to me very closely.” His eyes grew wide, as did mine, and we
stared at each other intently.

“Mitchell, you were raped.”

The statement made him blink twice, and take
in a deep breath as if I’d just told him his father had died. And
then came that all too familiar expression I’d seen about one too
many times before when I called things by their true
name—disgust.

There are lots of places a patient might
center that disgust. Sometimes it’s on the counselor for having
verbalized the word. Typically, it’s attributed to its true
villain: the rapist. Sometimes, however, disgust falls upon the
backs of friends and family, those special people who may have
excused or denied the act, who ultimately failed (a failure as
sensed by the patient) in their basic duty to protect him or her
from such an act. Sometimes, as I said, victims blame themselves.
It’s often a mix of all of these things.