Shades of Eva (26 page)

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.

It was easier to walk blindly back then. It
was safer for me. It was all I could do, because as much as I
wanted to plan, I was still a drunk and it had only been
twenty-four hours since my last drink, and the spirits were,
indeed, calling.

As the night wore on, neither
of us
were able to sleep. We did little but toss and turn. I was restless
for obvious reasons: I was thirsty, I was bunkside to a female MP,
I was anxious as all hell to get our so-called mission going, and I
was just plain curious about what Amelia did to those men who
killed Joe and Amy. I finally mustered the courage between a toss
and a turn to inquire, again, about those men.

“I was just wondering…about those guys in
the car…the ones who—"

Amelia turned over, turned toward me and
offered me the smile her daughter and her husband must have loved.
“Three of them are in prison,” she said, interrupting me before I
could finish. “I tracked them down. I turned three of them in.”

There was an awkward silence because there
was an awkward omission. “I thought you said there were four
men.”

“There were four.”

“Did you find them all?”

“Yes. I found them all.”

“The three you turned in didn’t do the
shooting, then, did they?”

Amelia shook her head.

“You did something else to the fourth man,
the shooter, didn’t you?”

Amelia rolled over and turned her scars to
me, affirming my suspicion, somewhat, by her silence. Perhaps I’d
asked one too many questions.

Amelia had a profound sense of fairness, and
just like the men who abused my mother, and perhaps killed my
brother, prison was too good for the man who killed Joe and Amy. Of
that I was sure.

I just wasn’t sure what punishment fit such
crimes, particularly when the punisher had the bias Amelia had. It
was just one night ago when I had a conversation with Scotty the
bartender in the Scorpion’s Den about such things. I was thinking
back to amputations of things like pasts, of plucking out offending
things from my life. I could still hear Scotty saying just get a
lobotomy, as if justice and peace and healing were that simple.

I could feel myself nodding at the idea of
an eye for an eye. It was frontier justice. A life for a life! But
I’d never met anyone who’d actually adjudicated such a matter. I’d
never met a killer or an executioner, and then again, I’d never
slept beside a soldier.

“Your scars. Are they from the Army, or
somewhere else?” I asked, changing the subject for the moment.

I could sense Amelia wrestling with her
past, and almost felt guilty for inquiring of it. But wasn’t that
what we were doing with each other? Probing? Not sexually, but
psychically? Prodding each other to release something pent up,
something akin to sexual energy yet far more diabolical?

“I was a POW, Mitchell. I have my scars, and
you have yours. Thank you for asking about them.”

And then she closed her eyes. Within minutes
she was asleep.

In the wee hours of the night
when
darkness is its most intense and quiet its loudest, when the pangs
of withdrawal and the longing for healing most salient, sometimes
it’s best to write. That night I wrote, but all I could manage to
write was a short poem—I had no attention span to write anything
longer. It went something like this:

I wish I could tell you who I am,

Or who I’m going to be.

I wish I could tell you what I’ve done,

And I wish you could tell me!

Any alcoholic will tell you that the tremors
are the worst. Your body shakes uncontrollably. You sweat with
first fever, and then chills. You feel as if your body is seizing,
as if you’ve been poisoned in every cell of your being. Then comes
the nausea, and then the headaches, then the hallucinations.

And then comes the rain.

The clock turned to 3 a.m. and I stood
there, staring out the window toward a streetlamp in the distance,
shivering watching the downpour, the reflection of the clock’s
bright orange numbering in the window, and Amelia’s restless sleep.
I looked around the room watching the shifting shadows on the walls
around us, and the curtains swaying mystically in the breeze.

She’d been a POW. Amelia’s scars were
mementos of her imprisonment, I was sure. They seemed to me to be
intersections, not just mementos, inevitable collision points
between opposing spirits. Incarnations of good versus evil. The old
narrative of innocence meets guilt and the older still questions of
which is which, born tactile and sadly palpable on the beautiful
back of my new friend. A POW.

Those intersections leave scars. I thought
maybe that Amelia was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,
thus her scars. But the more I thought about it, good people didn’t
let time pass. Amelia didn’t quit college by accident. She wasn’t
in Iraq by accident. She didn’t trust her next location to the toss
of coin as I did. She’d put herself somewhere specific to clean
something up—to right something wrong in the universe—and for that
she paid a price.

I didn’t want that to happen again. I didn’t
want River Bluff to be the next Fallujah. In a way, we were
entering a war. I just didn’t realize how risky a war it would be
that night. Amelia had set out to find me, to right something else,
and she was risking it all again—and for what? For me? For my
mother? For family heirlooms and a body?

I was shaking, I was sweating, and I was
remembering, and I couldn’t turn any of it off. I didn’t put the
pen down; it fell from my hand by its own volition. I didn’t know
what to do about those risks: Amelia’s or mine, or what to do about
the shaking that was overtaking my body. I just knew I had to
move.

So I stood up and shivered, my abdomen
stinging, my stitches burning, and all because of the liquor.
Invisible scars, I thought. I wondered if I could open up my
abdomen and somehow take a peek at my liver if I wouldn’t see the
actual scars I’d inflicted on it from my drinking, snakelike scars
like those on Amelia’s back, maybe, just tinier.

Amelia hadn’t offered everything to me, but
the bits of information she had given me formed a large offering.
She had trusted me with a portion of her past, of her life, of some
of the truths behind her scars, some visible and some not so
visible. Maybe that sharing was one way to heal some of those
scars, at least the invisible ones. It was more than enough for me
that night, because it was more than I had ever had.

I’d like to tell you that there
was
never anyone in that shed that night when Mom killed a man there.
I’d like to tell you that my parents’ marriage was okay, but that
would be a lie. I’d like to tell you that at age five, whiskey
turned my stomach. I would love to tell you that I threw it up when
I took a drink, or never took it to begin with. But I can’t say any
of that! Drinking in that rotten shed with my father was the only
happy memory of him that I have. That’s when he smiled. That’s when
he asked me what I did that day. That’s when he asked me what I
wanted to be when I grew up.