Shades of Eva, page 18
Amelia saw something remarkable in my mother, and I had to agree. She held to her allegations in the same way Joanne Greenberg’s character, Deborah Blau, held to her fantasies in the Rose Garden book. She held on to the idea that she had a sister out there somewhere, and a stepmother, too. She held on to her dignity by not recanting her allegations against Fred and her brother, allegations no one around her believed.
I had to believe that despite Mom’s pleas for release, what she really wanted was for her mother to believe her. Mom stayed another six years, stubbornly, and with the truest form of grit, I came to believe, because the truth of her beliefs existed despite the ears upon which they fell—deaf or not.
My mother was brave in that regard, just as Amelia said she was, and for that bravery I felt proud.
I also found an old whiskey bottle in that chest, a tin pan, a tin cup, a lace cloth, and a tin spoon wrapped in an old shirt. Then I found an original copy of the book, The Wizard of Oz, whose author I noticed, upon Amelia’s cue, had signed the inside cover, L. Frank Baum, and had written a short, personal note to Grandpa Virgil that read,
Here is that copy I promised you, Virgil. May it bring you and yours
an ounce of the joy that it has brought Maud and I.
I was dumbfounded. The Oz books were treasures to me and to Mom. She read them over and over again to me. And now in my hand lay an original copy of Baum’s turn-of-the-century masterpiece. I also had to wonder how and when my grandfather ever came to know an author as prolific as Baum.
Amelia explained that L. Frank Baum married a woman named Maud Gage in South Dakota. There was that reference to South Dakota again. First, Wounded Knee, and now Aberdeen, where Baum once worked as a newspaper editor, Amelia explained, where he must have met either Virgil or some other descendent of mine.
I dug on. I withdrew what proved to be Elmer’s paternity document, next. On the father line, my father had signed his name—Bradford Addison Rennix.
I held the document in one hand, weighing it as if its truth depended upon some measure of its mass. “Do you think it’s him?” I asked Amelia, referring to my father. “Do you think he fathered Elmer, or was he just saying that because it was the noble thing to do?”
“I think he wanted a life with your mother, and I think it was a noble thing to do. But your father isn’t the father.”
“And how would you know that?” I said.
“Your father told me why he signed this. He was pressured, in part, by his mother. But that’s not all. He said he and your mother didn’t consummate their relationship until after they were married. He can’t be the father, Mitchell. He believes your mother was raped now, for whatever that’s worth to you.”
I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Dad believed Mom? He’d suddenly changed his mind after all these years of calling her deluded? Amelia’s words—supposedly Dad’s words—weren’t quite sinking in.
Amelia was expressing a sort of second-hand confession on behalf of my father, a tardy, heretofore unexpressed confession to me. I didn’t know how to react to it, or if I should believe her for that matter, so it fell on about as deaf an ear as my mother’s teenage pleas for release had.
“Did you hear what I said?” Amelia asked me, pressing me to respond.
“You went to some effort for me,” I said. “I guess I owe you a thank you.”
“That’s not what I meant. You don’t believe what I’m telling you about your father, do you?”
I had to be honest. I didn’t trust my father. So no, I didn’t believe her—or him. It was as if I needed proof. A DNA type of proof.
“You’ll see him in due time,” Amelia said. “Then you can talk to him, yourself.”
I nodded, but I was nowhere near ready to talk to Dad—let alone see him. His triple-D poem was still ringing in my ear and his meanness still resonating in my bones:
Defiant as child, deluded as a wife.
Demented from birth to the end of her life!
Whatever Dad would say to me would have to be backed up by forensic proof! Our family had suffered too much in his absence. We’d suffered too much in his presence. But if Amelia was right, if he had expressed some sort of remorse for denying my mother, for lying about Elmer’s paternity to her, then it was a start. It was something I needed to think about, and it was between my father and me. So I said nothing more of it that night and turned again to the last of the items in the chest.
Amelia directed my attention to a postcard paper-clipped to a newspaper article. I turned the card over. It was addressed to the entire McGinnis family. It read simply, and unapologetically:
Good knowing you!
It bore no signature. The postcard had a San Diego, CA postmark, dated July 12, 1954, the day after Elmer went missing.
“This is the evidence you were talking about, the smoking gun?”
Amelia nodded. Again, I looked to her for an explanation.
“From the message,” Amelia explained, “I can only assume that whoever sent it didn’t have any plans of seeing any McGinnis anytime soon.”
I asked Amelia about what San Diego meant to her.
“Fred Levantle disappeared that day. The last person to see him, according to police reports, was a flight attendant on an outbound flight from San Diego to Osaka that very day. He was heading back to Korea, Mitchell. He was in the Army. But he never made it to base. He went AWOL.” Amelia was shaking her head as she tapped the postcard. “I think Fred sent this to this house just to thumb his nose at everyone.”
Then Amelia told me to turn the card over.
I did. I studied the front image of the old water tower from the Asylum courtyard. It was the courtyard in which my father had first met my mother. That tidbit of information was not withheld from me, because it was a sort of historical proof, in Dad’s eyes, that his marriage was doomed…an insane idea from the get go. Who meets a wife at an insane asylum? He had once asked me. I remember the question because I proffered an answer. I was barely five, but I answered him. "You did, Daddy," I had said, almost as meekly as a mouse, but audible nonetheless. Dad slapped me for answering him and called me insolent, and in that attic, I could almost feel the sting of his palm again as if Father Time, himself, had just reached out and white-gloved me.
“Look very closely, Mitchell. What else do you see on the postcard that’s out of the ordinary?”
I scanned the picture, and sure enough, something else was written on it: two sets of numbers stacked one on top of the other on the postcard’s front. Decimals. Two strings of them. One was a negative decimal, the other positive, each about ten digits long.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s scribbling. It’s arithmetic. Looks like a subtraction problem.”
Amelia told me that it wasn’t scribbling and it wasn’t a math problem. “These are geographic coordinates, Mitchell—and very specific ones.”
“Coordinates to where? Of what?”
“To the Asylum! These are points that converge directly on the Asylum property across town.”
Again, all I could do was shake my head. I stared at the numbers, then at the image behind them of the water tower. Could Elmer’s remains be located at the very place my parents met?
“We used coordinates like this in the Army to radio in certain locations all the time: our location, an enemy location, or other locations of interest or LOIs. Sometimes the LOI was an assassination site. Coordinates were kind of a proof of death, a relay point where ground troops could verify those deaths, destroy the bodies, or confiscate them depending on the order. Sometimes tactical ops would simply order a stealth fighter to drop a cluster bomb on the place to just bury the entire location, bodies and all.”
Amelia explained that there were different ways to indicate latitude, longitude, and altitude, what the military calls a location’s sexigesimal bearing: north-south, east-west, and height or depth relative to the Earth’s surface. The decimal numbers were just that, she said—and they were pretty specific.
“You think Fred wrote these coordinates on this?”
Amelia hesitated. “I’m not sure. He could have, or they could have been added later. Your mother might have found this, and she might have written them there. Or maybe Ully did.”
That was confusing. Mom always said Elmer was alive. “If Mom put them there—then how? How would she know about geographic coordinates anyway?”
“I’m not sure, Mitchell. There are numbers like that written on quite a few of your mother’s drawings. I don’t know if she wrote them, or if someone else wrote them on her things. Regardless, I think it’s a proof of death and a marker for Elmer’s grave.”
“But she said he was alive!” I almost yelled this.
“She wished for a lot of things Mitchell, and she was lobotomized, don’t forget.”
Amelia added, “We won’t know for sure if it’s a burial site until we can find the exact spot and excavate it. We won’t know for sure until we talk to Ully or Fred.”
In that instant this journey became more than an investigation. An excavation, the kind and type Amelia was referring to, was something else altogether. What she was talking about was an exhumation. She was talking about excavating human remains—presumably a little baby’s remains that had been buried at the State’s oldest mental institution—and buried since 1954.
I was a lot of things in 1995, but I wasn’t a grave-robber, or an archeologist. An excavation of that sort simply terrified me. The thought of interrogating my uncle wasn’t sitting well with me either.
Amelia had mentioned that Elmer deserved a proper burial, but I hadn’t fully comprehended what that meant. In my world, people spoke metaphorically. A proper burial for a missing brother meant purchasing a gravesite and erecting a symbolic marker. But symbolism wasn’t what Amelia had in mind! I don’t think she knew what a metaphor was. Most soldiers don’t live their lives by metaphors and simile. Soldiers didn’t leave fellow soldiers to rot in a foreign land, which was exactly what Amelia believed happened to my baby brother. Soldiers haul their own out; they don’t leave them in a foreign land to rot.
A proper burial meant excavation, exhumation, and digging—true digging—not metaphorical surmising. And that terrified me. A proper burial for Elmer meant locating the site of his improper burial, excavating that site and his remains, and then re-burying him in a proper place—in his proper station.
It was literal and straightforward. And all that had to be done outside the law, because the law would never order the exhumation of a missing person without proper cause.
This little postcard with a set of possible coordinates and a cryptic message was not what I would consider proper cause, and neither would police. They would require something a little more tangible than that—like a confession. That meant finding Fred Levantle. Finding Fred Levantle, I would soon learn, meant interrogating Ully McGinnis. It also meant infiltrating Coastal State to get to those remains. It also meant interrogating, so to speak, the brother of my mother’s rapist.
It was a little too much to digest at the time.
And this is where my life turned upside down. Amelia had a plan.
***
Chapter 19
Amelia wanted to break in to the Asylum, and she didn’t just want to break in to burgle the place. She wanted to break in from the inside. But Coastal State wasn’t some arbitrary mental hospital. Amelia wanted, in essence, to infiltrate the state’s oldest insane asylum, a property that spanned four-hundred acres. She wanted the blueprints to the place, details of the Asylum’s tunnel system: passageways, she thought, between Asylum basements, one of which comprised a so-called art gallery where her aunt’s—and some of my mother’s artwork—were purportedly confiscated, and she wanted the gallery raided.
And she wanted my brother’s remains! Heirlooms and a body.
You could apply any of the adjectives Dad and Ully used to describe my mother to describe Amelia’s plan: crazy, fanatical, maniacal. You name it and it applied.
The adjective I gave it was insane. After all, I was many things, but as I said, I wasn’t a grave-robber. I also wasn’t some covert operative in some military scheme. I didn’t believe in ghosts, despite what I had seen in my grandfather’s house, and I didn’t believe in tempting fate by rustling the spirit of dead babies from their graves, either.
The congregation of voices and the specter whose laugh I attributed to my grandfather Virgil were mere mental projections, certainly nothing super-natural. But if there were such things as ghosts, I had always thought they were attached to the bodies they once inhabited, housed, if you will, in the graves those bodies belonged to. Belief in ghosts or not, I didn’t think it wise to open the lid of a coffin for legal reasons any more than it was to withdraw the skeleton of a baby from a simple hole in the earth. In my life, all autopsies brought me were words such as no anatomical cause of death, and the idea that my mother’s body had been disemboweled, disheartened, and eviscerated, mutilated for a conclusion as vague as the one she received, horrified me. Why would I put myself through that kind of inevitable disappointment again?
Each seemed to me an act of betrayal, anyhow—exhumation for legal reasons as well as moral—each akin to popping the cap off a sealed oil well. Once whatever was inside that well, or that grave, was out, you weren’t getting it back in there very easily, and that scared the hell out of me.
I had to ask myself if Elmer’s disappearance was important enough to risk everything, important enough to find the people who possibly murdered him, and to find Fred Levantle, Amelia’s family art, and give Elmer a last name. We had freedom at stake, and our lives, perhaps. As Amelia said, some people don’t want to be found and they’ll sometimes kill to protect their anonymity! This whole trip was a risk, and doing it sober seemed to have compounded things by a factor of ten. The floor of the attic was shaking ten times worse than the floor was downstairs, and even Amelia said she felt like it was shaking; and the butterflies bouncing around in my stomach weren’t helping.
I was thinking of that forensic proof I needed, and all at once regretted having ever mentioned it. “Even if we are able to get in and by chance find a bone, there,” I said, setting the postcard back into the chest, “can we even extract DNA from a bone?”
Amelia was straightforward. “We can extract DNA from bone.”
“What about this gallery?” I said. “Say we get in there. All you want are a few sculptures and some poems? You’re willing to risk everything—arrest, career, reputation, life even, if say one of those wacko guards they probably have roaming that place decides to shoot us?”
“All I want is what’s mine,” Amelia said. “That’s it. All you should want is what’s yours.”
“Okay. How do we get in then? Just walk in?”
“We have to get in from the inside. We hire in.”
“Hire in? As in go to work there?”
“There’s no other way,” Amelia replied.
“Well, I’m a descendant. They probably don’t hire descendants of former patients to work there.”
Amelia smiled. “They don’t. But they will hire a Mark Engram.”
“Are you suggesting that I do this using an alias?”
“You took a plane from Washington as an alias. If you hire in there as—hell, make up a name—if you hire in there as an alias, they won’t know you from Adam. We need to get in to do certain things. We need access to the grounds. We can’t leave Elmer’s grave untended, marked like this!” She pointed to the postcard lying in the chest. “We can’t leave his remains in the Asylum, and I’m quite sure that’s where he was buried. We can’t leave him without an identity and give these guys a pass, and the Asylum isn’t keeping my family’s art.”
I was pacing frantically. “Well then why don’t you do this?” I said. “You’re the Army vet. Your aunt was in there, too.”
Amelia remained calm. “Anna Norris knows my face! She didn’t just visit you and your parents. She’s visited me half my entire life. She’d visit you, now, if she knew where you were. Dr. Norris is a freak of nature. She not only keeps up with her former patients, she keeps up with their children. She went to my wedding for Christ’s sake, and she went to Joe’s and Amy’s funerals, and Aunt Emily’s, and my parents’!”
“And she’s the superintendent, now,” I said. I was thinking back to my mother’s funeral. Hard as it was to recall, I vaguely recalled that Anna was there, and so was Beth Shurz—Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb Go to the Funeral!
But would she remember my face if she saw me now?
I was quite sure I hadn’t ridden any railcars with her in the last twenty years. In fact, that wandering, the same thing that threatened my undoing was also the thing that seemed to be allowing this charade to occur.
“If the only art we take is Emily’s art,” I said, “and maybe my mother’s, if she has anything in there, they’re going to figure it out after a while. They’re going to start looking for us. Aren’t you concerned about that?”
“Mitchell, let me let you in on a little secret: I don’t give a fuck if they look for me, and I’m not handing myself over to them! If we do this my way, by the time the police are done inventorying that place and redistributing those artifacts to their rightful heirs, they’re going to thank us for what we’ve done and we’ll be long gone.”
“And Elmer’s body?” I said. “You’re talking about digging holes in a loony bin based on some hunch this postcard math problem is a set of coordinates to his grave. What if we get caught? What if I get made before we ever have the chance to sink a shovel? What if there’s nothing down there but a few acorns?”
“Mitchell, I spent a lot of hours looking into this. If Ully was involved like I think he was, like your mother wrote that he was—”
Amelia kicked the chest for emphasis.
“—then he’ll verify this one way or the other.”
“Because you’ll demand that he does.”
