Shades of Eva, page 28
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.”
***
Chapter 29
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.
Mitchell’s disgust lay, in part, with his father, who was late coming home that night, whom Mitchell had been waiting to play with when he was attacked.
Mitchell had disgust for his attacker, too; and rightly so. He said that if he could find him, he would be in for a “world of pain”—his words.
Mitchell also had disgust for an uncle, the uncle who took custody of him after his mother died, the uncle whom he said housed him, an uncle who was content, Mitchell said, to have ignored the incident.
This uncle never tried to get Mitchell counseling for the obvious trauma he had endured. This was disgust appropriately centered. This uncle’s silence spoke loudly, as silence often does. To Mitchell, it was a blaming, accusatory silence. Mitchell’s rape was the event that spawned his mother’s death, so went the logic of this silent uncle.
I pointed out the most obvious of the many hundreds of reasons why that logic was so ridiculous—that Mitchell was only five-years-old and in no way responsible for that rape, or anything that followed in its wake. He was only just a boy.
And then Mitchell expressed disgust when considering his mother’s rape. He was disgusted with her attacker, if not more disgusted with him than he was his own rapist. His mother had been victimized in her own bedroom, Mitchell believed. A toolshed is one place, he said, his head hanging in a mixture of sadness and despairing rage: but to be attacked in your own bedroom, now that’s another matter!
It’s not an uncommon sentiment to minimize one’s own suffering in this way, by focusing on the suffering of others. Victims of rape often minimize the brutality of their own experience by magnifying the brutality suffered in others. As I said, it’s one way to cope with an almost unmanageable memory.
This was all shades of Eva again, I thought. She claimed to have been raped in her bedroom, too. I had to take a snapshot of those similarities and then burn it quickly. This wasn’t Eva’s story.
He was disgusted with his mother’s family for not believing her when she finally declared the rape. He thought they might have disbelieved her because she didn’t declare the rape right away. She protected her rapist, he told me, because most likely he’d threatened her!
“Or her child,” I added. Her attacker likely threatened her (or her family) if she didn’t keep the dirty little secret between the two of them. Attackers often do this in an attempt to control their victim and preserve their anonymity. This was more shades of Eva, and another Polaroid burning! Eva’s family didn’t believe her, either. And like Mitchell’s mother, Eva didn’t accuse her attacker until after her baby was born, and only then after he was taken.
Mitchell was disgusted with police, too, for failing to find her rapist, and for failing to prosecute anyone for her suffering. Again, a mental picture burned! Police never found Eva’s assailant, either.
Mitchell finally accepted the term I used. He used the right word once it was out there, despite the disgust it invoked. And after hearing and seeing that disgust, and a good portion of the other fiery emotions the word rape invokes, after seeing the tears that remembering incites, it was readily apparent to us both exactly why it was so hard for Mitchell to sever the tie of perennial mourning that seemed to bind him to his mother. She had become a central figure in his story, and his allowing her to pass away would be the final chapter in his novel, a disloyalty of homicidal proportion, a chapter he wasn’t ready or willing to write—and for good reason. He shouldn’t. He had hardly begun to mourn her loss, even though she’d died a quarter century ago—and her rapist, sadly, was still roaming the planet.
There was every reason to believe that these acts (the rape, the lobotomy, the subsequent separation of his parents, and yes, his mother’s death) were the obstacles he’d been avoiding for many years—those grief hurdles, if you will, still waiting for him, still nagging at for attention at every turn. Waiting they would remain, nagging like a back-talking choir, a parish of vengeful malcontents, until Mitchell could decide to confront them.
The question was not, what are you running from, Mitchell? Those things were obvious. The question was: why have you stopped running? And further to the point, why have you returned home?
Unfinished business and an exorcism of demons were his answers, but if I was looking at what I suspected I was looking at, a not-so-little disorder called Rape Trauma Syndrome, unfinished business and an exorcism were downright alarming reasons to have returned.
Lethality assessments are commonly used with persons who hint at, or otherwise threaten, suicide. We ask pointed questions about specifics: How, what, and when? And Where? The more specific the answers to those questions, the more lethal—or serious—we take the threat of suicide.
The same can be utilized with those who seem to be threatening the life or safety of someone else. So I asked him to clarify, once again, how he thought this exorcism would unfold, and when, and where and with whom.
He answered me, however, with a question of his own. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Now, that could be a vague answer, but then again, it could also be a very pointed one.
Silently, I shrieked. I did have a sibling; I had a brother. And he’d been accused of exactly what Mitchell’s mother was accusing a certain someone of. Another Polaroid burned!
How much we reveal to our clients is a choice we have to make every day in counseling. In this case, Mitchell was dealing with a missing brother, and per chance, my brother was missing, as well. So I told him yes, that I did have a brother, and explained that my brother entered the Army in 1953 and went AWOL a year later. I told him he hadn’t been seen or heard from in 40 years.
“You haven’t seen him in forty years?” Mitchell asked, as if he couldn’t believe what I’d just told him. “He never contacted you?”
“That’s right,” I said. “My brother has been adrift for nearly four decades. It seems we have something in common.”
Mitchell sat back and seemed to smile, though I doubt, looking back, it was happiness he was feeling. “Yes,” he said, nodding uncomfortably. “Forty years ago my mother accused a man of rape and I lost a brother, and forty years ago your brother fled his country! What town did you say you came from?”
It was a sickening, concerning question, a 40-year-old question that left a prescient knot in the pit of my stomach, a painful knot similar to the constricting pain of that ligature around my heart. It was, in essence, a question similar to the one I’d been asking myself for many years. Was it by chance Fred who raped Eva, and subsequently killed her baby? And others. Was Eva correct? Were her words more than allegations? Was it the truth, and the fear of suffering the consequences of that truth, the tick that drove my brother away?
Mitchell still hadn’t answered my question as to how he was going to exorcize his demons, or where, or when. Yet the answer seemed obvious to me at some gut level: he couldn’t answer those questions because he didn’t know where his mother’s rapist was.
So I tried one last time to ascertain, hypothetically, just how lethal Mitchell’s return was going to be. “If this man was sitting here in this office,” I began, leaning forward, fingers interlocked, my eyes locked tightly onto Mitchell’s. “If he was right here where I am, right now, what would be your response to him?”
