Shades of Eva (64 page)

Emma was a mystery. I’d ask her in my
journal and in my thoughts who are you, but I could never quite
manage to extract from her spirit a satisfying answer. It was the
same for Dorothy Biggs, whom Anna and Abby had believed was a
half-sister to my mother from that first marriage. My mother’s
writings were never helpful on just who Dorothy was, exactly. It
was a question, perhaps, only Virgil could answer. It was a mystery
I’d resolve some months later when I’d turn my attention to the
cities of Wounded Knee Creek, Chicago, and to a man who penned one
of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time: L. Frank
Baum.

Being a half-sister might explain why
Dorothy Biggs took an interest in my mother’s plight, but it
couldn’t answer the deeper questions that pained me: who were you?
What was your life like? And where did you come from? That possible
relationship didn’t answer the need I felt in those long and
tormented nights in the prison to speak to her and to Grandma Ida,
or to Virgil, and to tell them each thank you—thank you for being
there in any form, and I wish I could have met you because you each
gave my life meaning, even if it was the misunderstood grief that
gave me something to run from.

I gave my uncle Ully a voice, too. I
wrestled with him on paper and swung at him. Ours was a violent
dialogue, each word and each sentence a justification of what
Abigail had done to him for what he had done to Mom and to me. I
continued to write with him as if I were waiting for an apology
that might never come. I tried him; I sentenced him; and I let
Abigail execute him over and over again on paper until at some
point, sentencing was enough. I sentenced him over and over again
until at some point, a trial was enough. Then I tried him over and
over again until the recognition of who he was, and what he had
done, was enough, and when I reached that point, I began to
dialogue with myself.

That’s when the real horror hits. You
realize that things like rage and despair and fear are demons that
enjoy taking hold of the reigns that guide you. You realize that
your demons didn’t steal those reigns—you begin to realize that you
gave those reigns away. It’s then that you realize that the
ancestors who laugh at and pour criticism over your head are as
possessed by these demons as you are. Then you feel a pity for
those ancestors, and then you begin to feel a certain pity for
yourself.

And so in time, grief turns to mourning, and
attention turns from within to without. My thoughts turned
naturally to Abby, who’d taken it upon herself to respond to evil
with what some might call equal evil. She was responding to evil in
the most just way she knew—by putting it out of its misery, and
quickly.

Did she have a right to do what she did? No.
Not any legal right. But did Jackson Greer deserve to live after
taking little Amy Angstrom’s life, or that of Joe’s? Did Ully
deserve to live after allowing Fred Levantle to rape his little
sister countless times? After ordering the cold-blooded
assassination of Sophia Bermicelli in the Cayman Islands? Or in
keeping my mother’s inheritance, long after my father was out of
the picture? Mom could have used that money. It could have bought
her the medical care that she desperately needed. She could have
afforded to move us from that vengeful neighborhood. We could have
at least found the money to replace all of those broken
windows.

I don’t know. It wasn’t up to me to judge,
and that was a dilemma. People do judge. Executioners put people to
death every day in this country, and they do so with the same rules
of engagement that soldiers, like Abigail, are sanctioned to
follow. Abby was trained to kill. It was what she did. I was
trained to run, which was what I was doing. But how do you let go?
How do you begin to let go of all of your addictions? Does grief,
like alcohol, worm its way out of your system, or is your system
perpetually scarred? Are we always alcoholics, or is there
something called sobriety? Are we always grieving, or is there
something else, some other level of healing where things aren’t so
bad, something akin to sobriety?

Dr. Norris called it mourning. Though we
aren’t cured from our grief addiction, we can learn to mourn. It’s
a cooler land, like sobriety, where there’s hope, acceptance, and
forgiveness is possible. She taught this to Emily White, and she
tried to teach this lesson to every person she ever visited, and to
every person who ever stepped through her doors.

So could I ever come to accept my mother’s
premature death? Could I ever accept the ways in which I addressed
her pain? Could I forgive myself for trying to forget her? It would
take time. Things didn’t have to turn out the way they did, but
they did.

***

In 1970, when Mom and I shot Fred Elms in
the toolshed, something happened to my mother. Something snapped. I
don’t say that because of what she did to Fred Elms. I say that
because of why she did what she did to Fred Elms.

She snapped because when she tore the mask
off him that night, she regained something that had been lost to
her for many years—the recognition of who Fred Elms truly was, and
the truth of what he had done. She recognized him, and she
remembered what he did to her baby. She recognized him as the man
who used to rape her, who tore her firstborn son from her arms, and
now he was raping her second born son.

When she was sent to Coastal State for a
re-evaluation after the shooting, she went through several phases.
She was delirious at first, then near catatonic. She was mute and
without emotion. And then she began to cry. And then came the fear,
and the rage. Anna told me that she had been talking in her sleep,
and that Fred Levantle’s name had surfaced in this sleep talk.

Uttering his name in sleep wasn’t a
confession. It certainly wasn’t a statement of fact. It wasn’t even
an accusation. It was circumstantial; it was trancelike
coincidence, Anna had said, but it was something Anna felt she had
to investigate.

She looked for Fred Levantle. She found that
after sixteen years, he was still AWOL from the Army, still
dishonorably discharged. She studied the Elms autopsy photos. She
compared some of them to the Army issued ID photo of Levantle taken
when he was just twenty. She compared them to his high school
yearbook pictures. There was similarity there, but not
conclusively. She needed someone to corroborate her suspicions.

She reported my mother’s sleep talk, and her
suspicions, to police. Surely they would want to confirm if a
person wanted for questioning in a rape and child abduction matter
had been located. And surely, she was wrong.

Here is where my heart sank: police did not
take the matter seriously. After all, my mother was uttering Fred
Levantle’s name in her sleep. And she’d just eviscerated a man.

Fred Elms had been a good man. He had no
police record. Although he had no birth certificate on file, this
was understandable. He was an immigrant to the States by all
records. He had met his wife in Germany in 1956. They married a
year later in Hamburg. He was a native German, they must have
thought. He made infrequent visits to the US for business purposes
in those years. By 1960, he wanted to move to the US. He had fallen
in love with a town called River Bluff in Michigan.

It was coincidental. It was circumstantial.
It was Fred Elms, and the pieces just didn’t fit according to
police. They had little inclination to check with Ben, Fred’s
would-be brother, regarding Anna’s suspicions. They considered it a
disgrace to bother him with such a notion uttered so hypnotically
from within the walls of a mental institution. After all, they’d
bothered the Levantles with all of this before and nothing had ever
come of it. Ben Levantle was a prominent young scholar, a professor
by then at Notre Dame. He didn’t deserve that kind of a scandal
again, public or personal. He had lost his brother in wartime. His
mother had lost a son. Why bother the Levantles with such a hunch
when Eva, herself, had offered no rational accusation? The
Levantles were good cotton, and if Eva wasn’t going to make the
accusation in a waking, coherent state, then they weren’t going to
open that door again.

So they waited. They waited for Mom to wake
up. And she did. Anna was given the responsibility of asking Mom to
be more specific.

But Mom refused. Anna would say she refused
because the incident was over, and it wasn’t something Mom was able
to talk about in a waking state. It never would be. It was one of
those things that evoked such shame, such disgust and such
agonizing panic in her, that the very idea of her neighbor’s true
identity threatened more catatonia, more rage, and more
incapacitation. Fred Levantle’s name became a fist before my
mother’s tormented face. It became a name she never uttered
again.

If only police had questioned Ben. If only
Anna had. If only they’d shown Ben the crime scene photographs back
in 1970 when it was fresh in Anna’s mind. He might have put two and
two together. He would have recognized his brother from the
pictures just as he recognized his brother’s face when those
pictures were finally presented to him at Coastal State three weeks
ago.

Anna expressed remorse for never having
approached Ben, herself, back then. It would be another sixteen
years before she’d make that approach. She would credit Abby for
that approach, and me. She would encourage the district attorney to
credit us, too. For the unfortunateness of this late recognition
was not the fault of Abby or of Ben, or of my mother, even. It was
the fault of the State, Anna would argue, and of men and women like
her and DA Kalwitz and Detective Ramsey, to be exact, who didn’t
have the foresight to ask Ben, personally, when this all could have
been avoided.

Instead of naming Fred Levantle outright, my
mother began asking for a lobotomy. Anna said she did so, so that
she might forget—so that she might forget for me. If it was Fred
Levantle in the toolshed, Anna remarked, he was dead. My mother
didn’t have to fear ever coming across him again and not being able
to recognize him. She didn’t have to fear for any of her kids
anymore.

I could understand her want to forget. She
couldn’t live with the idea that he’d lived next door to her for so
long and she’d never once realized who he truly was. That was
another hovering fist in her face—her own fist of shame. She’d
tried to erase him once before—after he took her baby from her
arms, but that forgetting—a forgetting induced by ECT back then—was
unfortunate. It did little but erase him from her memory, which
wasn’t a smart thing to do. When you can’t remember someone, you
can’t recognize them if they ever return to you—and that’s what
Fred Levantle did! He returned.

And so Anna contacted my father in 1970,
instead of Ben. “I was very upset that day,” my father told me.
“Anna was asking a lot of questions about the neighbor. I didn’t
have any answers. I was exasperated. I was seeing Meryl in those
days. I recognized Elms from the pictures, but I’d never meant Fred
Levantle. I knew this man as Elms, and he was dead.

“Anna told me I needed to be a father to
you,” Dad told me, “—and a husband to my wife. I couldn’t make the
decision to lobotomize your mother. I turned it over to Ully and to
her mother, Ellie.”

Anna met with her colleagues after speaking
with my father. They advised her to go ahead and contact Ully, but
not Ellie, as Ellie was too sick to address the matter. And you
probably know where this is headed.

I was left to sit with the idea that my
mother had asked for a lobotomy…for me. It wasn’t forced on her. No
one had restrained her during the procedure. My picture of her
being dragged to the surgical table was never an accurate one. She
laid down her memory for me.

She wanted to forget things. She wanted to
forget what this monster had done to her, and to me. She wanted to
forget what she’d just done to him. She wanted to come home and
tend to me. She wanted to forget what her forgetting had done to us
all.

Had Mom told Anna—or me—or police who this
monster was that she was fileting, had she told them in a waking,
coherent state, then maybe I would have known. I might never have
ridden the rails to nowhere. Dad might have done as the doctors
advised him to do. He might have moved us away before this ever
happened. He might have recaptured some sympathy for my mother. He
might not have thought her so deluded. He wouldn’t have considered
her the freak of nature he thought she was.

She just wanted to forget.

***

In his opening remarks, District Attorney
William Kalwitz informed us that he’d presided over hundreds of
these hearings regarding crimes of “special interest to the State,”
his words, “but none,” he’d said, “of this level of debasement.” By
debasement
, he said he wasn’t referring to my, or Abigail’s,
actions, but to Ully’s and to Fred Levantle’s--to what they did to
my brother, and to my mother.

His comment brought a moral victory, if
nothing else. It was vindicating.

“Never have I had to color a prosecutorial
decision as carefully as I’ve had to color this one," Kalwitz said,
"but for every crime there must be a just response. It is the
burden of the State to ascertain what those responses are. In this
case, those just responses depend, in part, on the reasons why Fred
Levantle’s true identity was never ascertained in 1970. For if it
was, I fear, than little of this would have transpired.

“It is the testimony of Abigail Angstrom
that on her mother’s deathbed she was asked to look into the matter
of your mother’s allegation, Mitchell, of having been attacked as a
teenager while in residence at this institution, and also while
living in her own home.