Shades of Eva (9 page)

I was staring at Amelia like she’d just
flicked my ear. There was a school boy’s rage in my eyes and I’m
sure Amelia could see it.

I did blame Dad. I blamed everybody but
myself for my ignorance, and I had never thought about that. I had
a role in remembering, in learning about Mom, and it was a role I
had failed to exercise. My school boy indignation subsequently
turned to disappointment, and then to shame, and I hung my head in
according phases. I could only laugh at myself, however, trying to
sort through that mixed bag of emotions. It was the same old thing
day in, day out: the same old mixed bag of affect and guilt that
never seemed to let up.

Mentioning Dad in the context of Mom’s
illness made me remember another poem, this one a poem that Dad
concocted for Mom. It wasn’t written down, and it wasn’t
necessarily given to her. It was just a rhyme, really, something
Dad used to mumble to his self, or to me, typically when Mom was
having one of her crying jags.

“Dad used to call my mother triple-D,” I
told Amelia, “but the nickname had nothing to do with the size of
her tits.”

“Have some respect!”

“He said she was triple-D, and he turned her
nickname into a poem. You want to hear it?”

Amelia didn’t answer, so I took her silence
as a yes, and echoed that maniacal chant from so many years ago
whispered so many times before under my father’s breath to me:
 

Defiant as a child,

Deluded as a wife!

Demented from birth to the end of her
life!

“It was the only poem he ever came up with
as far as I know,” I said. “Get it? Triple-D?
Deluded…demented…defiant?”

“Yeah, that sounds like Brad,” Amelia
rejoined. “He was an asshole when he was young, too!”

“Oh, you know something about my dad’s
youth, do you?”

“Something,” Amelia said, taking in more
smoke.

“Then you know he was a drunk.”

“Also like you!” Again she blew smoke at me.
She had me there.

“So you didn’t just break into his place—or
rent it for a night? You actually talked to my old man?”

“We talked.”

“And what about Ully? You talk to my uncle
Ully, too?”

“Someone did.”

“One of your contacts?” Amelia ignored the
question like she’d ignored me earlier when I asked about the
contact who found me.

“Maybe I can guess,” I pressed. “Your
mother—or your aunt—knew what happened to my brother. You’re here
because he might have some money, right? Or you think you know
where he might be.”

Amelia just shook her head. “So full of
presumption, aren’t you? Your brother had a name, Mitchell. Didn’t
your daddy ever tell you that?”

I shook my head. He hadn’t. No one had ever
mentioned this baby’s name. I didn’t even think he had a name.

“Your mother called him Elmer,” Amelia
explained, “and he’s dead! He never had any money, Mitchell! He was
murdered when he was just a baby!” 

I never knew my brother’s name.
Mom
didn’t remember it, and Dad said he was dead anyway, so what
difference did a name make in the grand scheme of things. The
inference: dead babies are just a pile of nameless bones.

I used to press my father as to what this
baby’s name was, feeling deep within that he did know, but was just
withholding it. Dad just said it wasn’t worth talking about.

Mom must have sensed Dad’s withholding, just
as I did, and it infuriated her. I think what infuriated her more
was that she’d forgotten Elmer’s name, and also who’d named him in
the first place. Whatever his name, Mom said he was alive, and
furthermore would return to her someday and avenge his
abduction.

I, of course, was left to choose the truth
on my own. Was he alive or was he dead? And whose baby was he in
the first place? Dad’s, or some unnamed rapist’s?

I chose to believe Dad’s side of things,
that this baby was a dead baby, and his. I chose to believe this
because Dad said he was dead, and he said he was his. That
sounded…noble. And I believed in Dad’s poem. Mom was triple-D, and
she was also sentimental to use another of Dad’s words. Not a bad
thing in and of itself: sentiment. On my best days I wax
sentimental; on my worst I wish that I could. But back then,
sentiment was unappreciated in our house, and worse, ridiculed.

“What mother wouldn’t want her baby to come
back?” Dad was musing, painting Mom’s wish for reunification with
her firstborn son as if it was evidence of her so-called dementia.
“That’s a woman’s nature,” he claimed. “They always want what they
can’t have. They’re sentimental like that.”

I remember recounting that disaffected
rationale to Amelia. I remember her shaking her head. I remember
her blowing smoke straight at me with a pace of enhanced velocity,
as if I was the incarnation of Dad’s misogynistic logic, as if my
restating of my father’s opinion was but a lame attempt to detract
from my own indifference. 

I used to think that Dad was somehow
protecting my mother in a weird sort of way, by telling her that
her baby’s disappearance had ended fatally, by withholding his name
and all those other small, yet important details that make a person
a person. I thought he was prompting her to move on and to stop
dreaming of…of some sort of reunion. In that sense, the sense that
Mom needed to accept her baby’s disappearance, I couldn’t fault Dad
for his withholding. It was almost…merciful.

In response to Dad’s silence, though—or
mercy, or to whatever you want to call it—Mom responded as she
always did—with invective. She called Dad abusive. She then called
him a murderer. She called him cruel, sadistic, and a killer.

I remember the words.  She called me a
killer too, one day, I think on the day she sensed that I had sided
with Dad. I’ll never forget it. She looked me square in the eyes
and said, “If you believe your father, then you’re a killer,
too!”

She believed forgetting someone was
tantamount to killing someone. “What could be crueler than
forgetting a person?” Mom said. “Outside of pulling the switch on a
man, there’s not much more you can do to hurt someone!”

And she called her brother, Ully, a killer,
too, because he wouldn’t visit us. He wouldn’t visit her. She
called her mother the same for her absence. She’d accused them both
of forgetting—all of us—and more importantly of forgetting her
firstborn baby—accused them each, therefore, of murder.

“Do you want to know what happened to
Elmer?” Amelia said, standing up to pace the floor in front of me
as if she were about to deliver a lecture.

I turned my head away. “If he’s dead, what
difference does it make? Dad was right and Mom was deluded.”

Amelia shook her head and flicked some ash
into a cup. “He was murdered, Mitchell. And what if I told you that
your uncle Ully knows who murdered him, and that he was probably
there when it happened? What if I told you that your grandmother
Ida and your mother’s sister were trying to stop your grandfather
Virgil from transferring Elmer away from your mother to the
Marquette Institution?”

I gaped at Amelia, and then I shook my head.
Ida was my father’s mother. I hadn’t heard Ida’s name in many
moons. And I had never heard of any maternal aunt that I might have
had. I knew my mother had a brother, but I’d never heard of any
sister.

“Ida died in 1965,” Amelia went on, as if I
hadn’t just left the conversation. “Same year you were born.
Dorothy died two years after that.”

“Dorothy?” I murmured.

“Your aunt’s name was Dorothy Biggs. She was
a half-sister to your mother, anyway. You haven’t heard of
her?”

I shook my head. I sat in stunned silence,
and also a good bit of embarrassment. I should have known these
things. First of all, I hadn’t given pause to consider my
grandfather’s opinion of what happened with my mother’s baby. In my
world, a child, and what happened to that child, was up to its
mother—but that wasn’t my mother’s world. She apparently had no say
in her baby’s fate!

Amelia then asked me, “How about Oren’s
suicide?”

Again, I just gaped at her. Oren was my
father’s father, and if I could recall, Dad said he died of cancer.
“Grandpa Oren died of bone cancer—not suicide!” I spoke heatedly,
almost hopefully.

Amelia just laughed and said, “Did your
Daddy tell you that, too?”

I nodded, weakly. He had.

“Well he’s a liar! His father killed himself
after Ida died. It’s on his autopsy report!” Amelia blew more smoke
at me and stood there smiling as if she were somehow enjoying the
lesson she was giving me.

I was still shaking my head. “Dad said his
father died of cancer,” I repeated, stubbornly.

“Not unless they’re calling a shotgun blast
under the chin cancer these days!” 

“You’re telling me my grandfather Oren
committed suicide after his wife died, after my mother’s brother
helped a friend kill her baby? What the hell does all this have to
do with an inheritance?”

“I think you have a right to know what
happened to your family, and who slaughtered your brother and your
mother—and you have a responsibility to them. That’s part of your
inheritance, Mitchell; although, you might not want to accept
that.”

She was right about that last part. That
information was something most sons might want to know about—but I
wasn’t in the most receptive of moods—and did she just say that I
needed to know who killed my mother? Mom wasn’t killed! She died in
her sleep, and I found her! That much I knew for sure.

“Mom was not killed!” I said, fervently.

“Your mother was most definitely killed,
Mitchell.”

Amelia spoke as if she’d been there in the
room with me when I found my mother’s body, and then extinguished a
half-smoked cigarette in a cup as if to punctuate her statement
with the sizzle it made. “The sooner you come to admit that, the
sooner you can start healing.”

She took her seat again and sat there
staring at me.

I was starting to think Amelia was as crazy
as her aunt probably was. I was beginning to think she was as bad a
liar as she just told me my father was. Hell, did Dad even tell her
Elmer’s name, or had she just pulled the name Elmer out of the
air?

“I didn’t ask you to come here!” I said.
“And as for responsibility, I don’t have a responsibility to
anybody!”

“Your mother didn’t deserve to be thrown
into that snake pit for seven years, either!” Amelia replied,
tossing her cup of ashes into the garbage.

I thought about it. Mom may not have
deserved to be institutionalized, but then again, I didn’t know why
Mom was put there. I didn’t know why Mom cried so much. Maybe
Amelia was talking about a metaphorical killing—a killing in the
proverbial snake pit.

Before I could respond, Amelia added, “And
she didn’t deserve to have her baby taken from her, either. And she
didn’t deserve to be raped!”

There it was! All I could do was all I had
ever done, just close my eyes and endure this stranger like I used
to have to endure everyone from back home.

I should have been appreciative. Amelia did
just save my life. But I wasn’t. Not right then. You see rape was a
hard fact of my childhood—and Mom’s, too, if her side of the story
was the correct side. Family meant rape—not just pain and complex,
and rape wasn’t a subject I wanted to revisit having just been
laced up like a football, no matter what happened to us, no matter
what Amelia knew.

Amelia, however, didn’t seem to care what I
wanted. “I know about the toolshed, Mitchell. I know that your
mother shot and killed a man who was raping you there. And I know
it was traumatic for you. It must have been traumatic for your
mother, too. These aren’t secrets, and neither of you have anything
to be ashamed of. You deserve a chance to get even and to reclaim
your proper station in your family. Isn’t that what you’re really
trying to do in these stupid bar fights—claim some station within
your little fighter family?”

Get even? Get even with whom?—
I was
thinking.

I never had the sense that I was
bar-fighting for anything noble, like status, but maybe I was.
Maybe I did, deep down, want respect—or deeper still—answers. Maybe
I’d made Jake Meade and all of the other goons I’d been using and
abusing since River Bluff a sort of pseudo-family. Fighting might
have been nothing more than a distraction from remembering, from
seating myself at their dysfunctional table, an ignorant attempt to
belong and to ignore making sense of the world, sense of my life,
and Mom’s life.

And then again, maybe I was just trying to
kill myself. Maybe Amelia knew me better than I knew myself.

But if she understood me so well, then she
couldn’t condemn me for getting the hell out of Dodge, and I told
her so. Of course she told me that my time for running was
over.

“You have a place at the Rennix family
table, Mitchell. Your family isn’t in Washington. Your name is at
stake. You have decent people in your ancestry who deserve justice.
Their spirits are depending on you. You need to come home.”

I laughed a nervous laugh. The only spirits
I knew were a congregation of faceless sadists who rang in my ear
if I didn’t drink, and I wanted no part of them, their
pseudo-inheritance, or their hometown.

What Amelia was suggesting was far more than
I could handle at the time. In one breath she was suggesting that
my family was not only a family of misfits and gatekeepers—she was
suggesting I had a family of kidnappers, killers, and whatever the
noun is for people who shoot themselves under the chin. In another
breath she was suggesting I had decent people back there, people
who were counting on me. Problem was the decent folk were dead and
I didn’t believe in ghosts, at least not decent ones, let alone
feel any obligation to any dead people, family or otherwise.