Shades of Eva, page 19
“That’s right. I’ve planned for every contingency. If you follow my lead, nothing is going to go wrong. We’ll get in there, get what we need, learn what we have to learn, and then get the hell out! We need one day—two tops. By the time we’re done with that place, they won’t know what in the hell just happened.”
If I’d ever needed a drink, it was then in the flash-lit eeriness of that attic. My mind was racing. My heart was pounding. I was thirsty as a well digger in hell, and I couldn’t say no.
***
Chapter 20
Shadow Journal entry
August 28, 1995
…They say war is a terrible thing. People come back with all sorts of fucked-up-ness, or can: Combat Fatigue, Battle Stress, post-traumatic stress syndrome. A hundred names for the aftermath of trauma, and I’d never heard of Rape Trauma Syndrome until I met Ben Levantle.
I wondered sometimes what a scar really means. Is it a memento of an event, like a picture? Is it a reminder like a note on one’s palm, or more like a tattoo that never fades? Is it a symbol of something sad and painful on the inside? Or is it a mark of courage? And why don’t people talk about their scars?
Amelia and I decided to get a room just outside of town at the Furley Motel. I immediately pulled the curtains on the place and Amelia turned on the air conditioner and went into the bathroom to shower. I walked in on her and lifted the lid.
“Can’t you wait until I’m out, Jesus,” she said, from behind the curtain.
I laughed. “I’m not Jesus, but I appreciate the compliment.”
“You flush that toilet and I’m coming after you!”
I flushed.
Amelia screamed and yanked the curtain back and sprayed me with cold water. It felt good to laugh. It felt good to be with someone who had purpose.
“Let’s order a pizza,” I hollered from the other room, wiping my arms off with a washcloth.
“I love pizza,” she hollered back.
“What do you want on it?”
“Anchovies, tomatoes, and pineapple!”
I was in the giving mood, so I ordered two: one for her and a meat lover’s for me.
“Don’t tell them your real name,” she hollered. And I didn’t. I put the order under someone named Mike Hunt, which brought about a muffled giggle from the girl on the other end of the line.
I turned on the television and thumbed through the channels. I settled on some outdoor nature channel where two elephants were mating. I swear that the male had an elbow in his penis. He reared up and put his front legs on the female’s back and his penis bent. It looked like the arm of a weightlifter curling a dumbbell, and in it went, bend and all.
Amelia stepped out of the shower. I could see her reflection in the mirror through the doorway. I pretended to watch the elephants. I figured she knew I could see her, but she didn’t seem concerned. Her breasts were beautiful, as was the rest of her body, before hidden by all those clothes. She had abs like an aerobics instructor, and arms to match. She was skinny, but not overly so as I had thought. She was sinewy, but she had curves where she needed them, and lots of them. She reached down to dry her feet. That’s when I saw her scars for the first time, and they nearly took my breath away.
Scars were nothing new to me, but then again I had always scarred myself. Be it scars from brawling or working the trees, or older scars from more intentional incisions, I had my fair share. The scars on Amelia’s back, however, looked like the scars of a flogging or a caning, and they didn’t strike me as self-inflicted. They had dimension to them, as if her skin had healed over by folding outward and onto itself. The thickest of them looked like tiny little snakes crawling just beneath her skin.
I was too timid to ask her then, too embarrassed to admit that I had been studying her. So I kept quiet and turned my attention back to the elephants, one of which was now smoking a cigarette and the other nagging. Wait! Different show.
Amelia came out a minute later in a tee shirt and a pair of shorts and her flip-flops. She sat down on the bed with a toothbrush in her mouth, and mumbled, “Wuh-ta-yoo waht-in?”
“I was watching two elephants having violent intercourse,” I said. “Now it’s two humans arguing.” I scooted toward the foot of the bed and put two hands on Amelia’s shoulders and squeezed. She tensed up as I thought she might, but it didn’t deter me. “Let me give you a massage,” I said. “I give a good one.”
She mumbled something that sounded like I’m brushing my teeth, and then she stood up and went back into the bathroom. “Mitchell, we can’t get involved,” she said, throwing back a mouthful of rinse and then spitting it in the sink. “You wouldn’t want to get mixed up with someone like me. I’m probably not long for this earth.”
Not long for this earth was something my mother used to say about her own fate. Amelia’s expression bore the same despairing quality that my mother’s usage used to evoke. Perhaps it was an omen of things to come, which was an idea I didn’t want to consider. I was just starting to like Amelia, and now she was talking about death.
Amelia’s voice was sad, but genuine. It was also alarming. I was already mixed up with her. I presumed she worried about life expectancy because of her military background. It was probably habit for soldiers to speak candidly about premature death. Maybe she was considering a re-enlistment. I didn’t think she was suicidal, but then again, I didn’t really know her.
I tried to disarm her without getting too serious. “I’m not trying to score with you or start anything. I just thought you could use a backrub, that’s all.”
She came out and she wouldn’t look at me. “You’re kind, but I don’t. Besides, you wouldn’t want to see my back.”
“I saw your back in the mirror.”
I gave her a chance to explain her scars, or feign embarrassment, or act surprised. She did none of that. All she said was, “Well then, now you know.”
Of course I didn’t know. They were Amelia’s scars, and if they held some secret, it was up to her to decide when they weren’t secretive anymore.
We had two beds in the room. Amelia took the one closest to the window, and me, the one closest to the TV and we ate our pizzas, the better part of them at least. We were both ravaged with hunger and we ate like it. When we were finished, Amelia withdrew her whiskey bottle and poured herself a glass. She asked me if I wanted some, smiling a temptress’s smile as she did so while waving the bottle in the air. God, did it smell good. Almost as good as she did.
Between the two of them, I wasn’t sure what I wanted worse—a good long drink or those skimpy little shorts off of her legs.
I shook my head, and said, “No thanks.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. You’re sober now,” she said, laughing at me.
“That’s right. I’m sober, so don’t tempt me.”
“How’s that working out for you anyhow?”
“Not well,” I said. “I’m hearing things. I’m seeing elephants with joints in their penises. I’m having lurid thoughts.”
Amelia laughed. “Hallucinations are common with withdrawal. In a few hours you’re going to be wishing you had some medication. You might not want to do this cold turkey.”
“I’m going straight,” I said. “I don’t want to replace one addiction with another. I need to do this sober. Pills aren’t going to help me.”
She dropped the topic and drank some more. I wondered if she might talk again about the car accident and what she did to those men once she was two sheets to the wind. She was drinking when she confessed the incident in the first place. She was drinking when she said she was in the Army, too. Maybe she used the spirits to help her talk, sort of like I used them to help me shut down.
After we’d long finished our food and she was finding my jokes funny and I was sure she was drunk, I turned the lamp off and muted the television, sat down on the edge of her bed and slid myself over to lie beside her. She didn’t resist. Neither of us said anything. We just lay staring at one another in the flickering light of the television.
I kissed her for the first time, and she kissed me back. I could taste the Jack Daniels on her breath; it was almost as intoxicating as if I had tasted the real thing. And then again, her kiss was intoxicating by itself. After a minute, I stopped. Even I had the scruples to leave a drunken widow alone, despite the images of the elephants mating parading around in my head.
She stared at me with those penetrating eyes, and then asked, “How do you want me?”
I didn’t hesitate. “On your front.”
“On my front?”
“Yes, I want to see your back.”
Amelia seemed surprised by me, and reticent, but she turned over.
It’s easy to feel vulnerable when you’re that close to someone and can’t look them in the eye, especially when you’re a woman and that someone is a man, and obviously one attracted to you. I imagined it had been a little while since Amelia felt that kind of vulnerability.
“Raise your arms,” I said, and she did. I pulled her tee shirt off and she placed her head in her arms and said nothing.
I put a hand on the small of her back and ran it up her spine to her neck and started making small circles there, feeling the stiffness of her muscles and the softness of her skin. The stiffness felt more like tone than tension. I traced the contours of her shoulders and worked my way down her back, tracing the lines of each scar when I encountered one, measuring each with my fingertips, counting each one, wondering where they came from, wondering why they were there, damning whoever put them there, but not asking. I kissed them, each one, kissed them as if I could somehow heal them with my affection.
I finally asked. “Was it the war?”
Amelia seemed to be nodding.
“Who did this to you?”
Amelia took in a long deep breath and let it out. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
I didn’t know what to say. It mattered to me. I wanted to ask why, how, and who—all of those W questions police and social service people like to ask in the middle of the night. I wanted to get the bastards that did that to her. I didn’t want her to feel muted like I used to feel. I wanted her to talk to me like Mom and Dad used to want me to talk to them when I wouldn’t, but Amelia couldn’t, just like I once couldn’t.
“It matters that you lived,” I said.
“It matters,” she said, turning back over to face me, “that I kept my secrets. Sometimes you need to talk, and sometimes you can’t.”
“You can talk to me,” I said, staring longingly into those beautiful green eyes. We kissed again and then I covered her back up. We held one another until we finally fell asleep.
I awoke not long after that thinking about her aunt Emily and this supposed art gallery. When Amelia talked about patient art, I had in mind the sort of Popsicle stick, Styrofoam ball craftwork we did in elementary school. But it wasn’t like that. My little trip to my grandpa’s disappointments room had given me a new opinion of what my mother—and by extension her friend—must have been capable of.
Amelia awakened shortly thereafter. Neither of us could sleep for long. We were energized by each other and by the mission we’d undertaken. I was energized by the possibility of love, and in the possibility of putting together, finally, a semblance of a family tree. I was also racing from the effects of alcohol withdrawal, mentally and physically.
Amelia said the regents at the Asylum had organized a gallery somewhere on the grounds to house decades of patient art. She thought this gallery was likely in one of the many basements—or a series of them—spread over the grounds and connected via an underground tunnel system. This would make it more of an archive than a gallery.
Amelia wasn’t talking about elementary school art, however. She was talking about serious artistry by serious artists. That’s what the institutions encouraged and taught as part of their therapy regime—serious art. They had fully functioning studios imbued with kilns, easels and canvases, pyrographic instruments, and metal presses if metallurgy was your bag. Bead stations. Glass cutting stations. Woodcarving stations. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Since many of the patients in those institutions weren’t patients in the true sense, but fringe-dwellers: the poor, the sometimes gifted, the misunderstood, and yes, the defiant—they often weren’t patients at all, but artisans, and their merit—and sometimes the worth of their creations—could not be underestimated.
Amelia sat up and turned the lamp on and pulled something from a duffle bag. “I was going to show you this in the morning,” she said, “but I sort of can’t wait.”
“What is it?”
“A journal article from 1952.”
Amelia handed me a binder. I opened the front cover. She’d bound a photocopied collection of pages of an article entitled, “Art and the Insane: A Tale of a Depressed Sculptress.” The journal was the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The author’s name was Van Husan.
The sculptress was cited anonymous.
There were ten pages total: four color-pages of photos of sculptures, including two pages of this person’s poetry. The sculptures were those of religious symbols, of people, animals, and plants. There were other more bothersome sculptures. In one, a pony had chewed through its own torso and was eating its intestines. In another, a woman’s breasts were being sawn away by a handless strap saw.
One of the poems printed was titled, “Tiny Grave.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, reflecting on the title. “This is your Aunt Emily’s work, isn’t it?”
“Please read it to me, Mitchell.”
Amelia lay back down and closed her eyes. I read.
Thick layers of gauze,
Its contents, my heart.
A clinical perspective for friends,
Enough so the blood does not drip.
Only at the solitary presence of his tiny grave,
Do I sit and unwind all the layers
And view the deep gash.
It will never heal…I will only wrap it differently with time.
~E.W.
E.W.
There were initials at the end of the poem, barely visible, but they were there. Emily White. “What a way to be immortalized, huh?” Amelia said, grinning despondently. “A depressed sculptress?”
“These are amazing,” I replied, scrolling through the pictures. I was captivated. Even the little wood-carved figurines in my grandfather’s attic, as intricate as they were, were a cry from the pictured detail of Emily’s sculpting. They must have impressed this Dr. Van Husan in the same manner, because from what Amelia told me, he’d spent years studying these kinds of patients and their work.
The next thing Amelia said had me doing double-takes at all of those pictures. She said that some of the artwork her aunt created was created in slumber, that is, in a trance state. She said Emily had no recollection of writing many of her poems, or sculpting some of the busts in those photos—the ravenous pony and handless strap saw bust—to be exact. It was an amnesic behavior that gave substance to Van Husan’s fascination.
“These are hypnotic, like psychic?” I asked, staring at the pictures in wide-eyed disbelief. “How in the world could someone do this if they were asleep?”
“Haven’t you ever sleepwalked?” Amelia asked me. “Same sort of thing. You’re aware, but you aren’t.”
“Little different isn’t it?” I chimed. “Walking versus sculpting the Statue of David?”
Amelia laughed. “That’s the mystery of it. We all crawl before we learn to ride a bike. It’s about practice, and being trained to do things we normally can’t do. People with no musical talent have learned to write music, and eventually compose symphonies. They’ve written poetry, written sermons, painted, and learned to sculpt all in a trance. They also drew beautiful pencil sketches.”
That last reference made me think of my mother’s drawings. “Were my mother’s sketches, like the sketches of Emma, were they hypnotic?”
Amelia sighed. “Some of them probably. I said it’s about practice—or training. Some people already have gifts. I don’t think the Asylum taught your mother how to draw, or my aunt how to sculpt. Your mother was drawing in her diaries before she was ever committed. And my aunt was taught by her mother to sculpt. What the Asylum did was to enhance what they already had to get them to demonstrate their talents entirely under hypnosis. That’s where the interest was with this article. The gallery at Coastal State is a gallery of art created in trance. I know it’s there because I’ve talked to Dr. Van Husan’s research assistant. Her name’s Elizabeth Shaw. She’s in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. She said the institutions kept everything, almost always in what she called on-site warehouses.”
“Galleries, essentially,” I said. “Was this Elizabeth Shaw ever at the Asylum in River Bluff?”
“Yes.”
“I’m just curious, are any of these pieces worth anything—monetarily?”
“Honestly, I’ve asked the same question to Ms. Shaw,” Amelia replied. “She told me that she’s sold individual pieces to New York galleries and they’ve brought as much as seventy-five thousand dollars at auction.”
I had to consider the excavations we were about to undertake: one an art gallery, and the other a grave. It made me wonder what I would feel if I stumbled across a gallery of artifacts like these. Would it be elation? Would it be greed, or would I feel anything at all?
And what would I feel if the end of my shovel ever struck my brother’s tiny, decomposing bones? Would it be sadness? Would it be fear? Would it be regret, or happiness I felt? Or would it be rage?
I was hoping it would be peace.
I had to wonder if I were hunting Elmer’s remains to ensure he had a proper burial, or if Amelia was planning a resurrection, if you will, in order to fulfill my mother’s vengeful predictions. According to her poetry, her two sons were to avenge her and then burn down the place that housed her. That meant burning those galleries.
Those seemed like competing ideas: burning the Institution and simultaneously preserving the art housed there. I didn’t know what Amelia had in store for the place. Not really. I wasn’t sure how she was planning on reconciling the vengeful predictions of Mom’s poem and her want for her aunt’s heirlooms.
