Shades of Eva (6 page)

It had been a rough day for Mom. It was a
hot summer day in August. It was my fifth birthday, and her
thirty-fourth. We shared the same birthday, and I was proud of
that. Mom was too. She called me the best birthday present she ever
received. Somehow I doubted that, but the sentiment always made me
feel good.

My mother’s name was Eva McGinnis-Rennix.
She was a diffident woman of Bohemian ancestry. Generally
straightlaced, she was prone to bouts of fitful disaffection.
Plagued by a nagging recalcitrance, her personality could best be
described as erratic, a demeanor that appeared to some as ill, and
others, just plain schizoid. She was contemplative most days, and
stricken, I’d say, with an unyielding propensity for introspection
that left her isolated—but she didn’t seem to care. She was an
island, and islands don’t often join the mainland willingly. She
was an anchor, too, and went on about her business as anchors of
families do, providing a semblance of a home for me and my wayward
father, a provision that took all the effort she could muster.

She wasn’t suffering the August heat well. I
suppose the Marlboros weren't helping matters. She was a two pack a
day smoker and seemed perpetually short of breath because of it. As
the heat rose outside, it was steadily rising in the house, and by
midmorning my mother was pining for a smoke. By midday she was
pining for air.

That pining, and the frustration that went
along with it, etched Mom’s face. I could sense her frustration
that day, even at that tender age, but it was nothing abnormal. I
approached her sitting at the kitchen table at a near sprint. She
gave me a sideways glance and put up a hand to halt me. She was
resting for a moment in a chair by our kitchen window where a small
fan was blowing the ninety-degree air in from outside across her
brow. She appeared red from fever. She looked like a woman who’d
just run a race.

I suppose in a way she had.

“Can I have some more Kool-Aid, Mommy?” I
cried out, indifferent to her condition. She tried to ignore my
request. I hollered at least two more times until she finally gave
in to my whining. She always seemed to give in.

In time I began to wonder why it was so easy
to get what I wanted from Mom. That querulous voice didn’t work as
well with Dad. I didn’t realize the difference in how they reacted
to me had something to do with that erratic nature of Mom’s, for
that pining of hers for air, and the presence of a wayward
husband—or absence more like it. But what five-year-old boy cares
about the why of things as long as he gets what he wants? I had the
Kool-Aid I wanted, and with a little more whining, I had Mom
pouring it for me.

Mom had baked us a cake—baked me a cake I
should say. She didn’t want any for herself, and she didn’t eat
any. I think she’d stopped celebrating her birthday.

The truth was: most of the people around her
had stopped celebrating it. At least the people important to her
had stopped. I can see that now. She didn’t believe in baking her
own cake because she thought it vain. I think there were few people
who acknowledged the day she was born—at least in those years. I
didn’t. I hadn’t. I couldn’t buy her anything. I couldn’t bake, and
I couldn’t write out my wishes in a card. No one had ever showed me
how to do such things. I simply never thought about giving at that
age.

“Go get your friends,” Mom said, putting the
Kool-Aid back in the fridge and patting me on the head. “It’s
almost time for lunch.”

I ran out of the kitchen and down the hall
to a back room where my friends were playing, and told them it was
time to eat. Mom had cooked a big meal for us. She’d done so in a
kitchen hot as Hades with no help from anyone. Her head ached and
her heart ached, and I remember her complaining about those pains,
and that there was no aspirin in the house to dull them.

Two of Mom’s doctors came to visit us that
day. I’d seen them quite a few times before. They were the doctors
from the hospital. I didn’t know it then, but the hospital from
which they came was a mental hospital. One of them was Elizabeth
Shurz. Mom called her Beth. She had been, and still was at the
time, Mom’s psychologist. Beth gave my mother a hug, and then burst
over to hug me.

Dr. Anna Norris followed in with the same
level of enthusiasm. Anna and Beth were about the same age, just a
decade older than Mom probably. Anna was something called a
psychiatrist. They visited us quite often. I always thought that a
kind gesture, those visits, and I always looked forward to seeing
them, but Mom didn’t share my excitement, and neither did Dad. They
always grew very quiet when they came.

Anna the psychiatrist had something in her
hand. It was a matchbox car, a metallic blue Dodge Challenger to
add to my collection, and it was awesome. Dr. Shurz was holding
something, too, with an equally magnificent smile, but she was
holding it behind her back.

I tried to run around her to see what it
was, but Mom restrained me. “Be polite, Mitchell,” she admonished,
holding firm to the collar of my shirt until I was standing more
respectfully.

I did my best to wait. Dr. Shurz laughed and
handed me a Frisbee. “Happy birthday little Mitchell,” she said,
and bent over to kiss me on the cheek in exchange for the gift.

I thanked them both and ran out of the room
with my new toys.

Dad referred to the doctors as Tweedle Dee
and Tweedle Dumb. Not respectively. Either one could bare either
title at any time. Mom just referred to them as the doctors from
the hospital, and always seemed happy when they were gone. Looking
back, those women paid more attention to Mom than her immediate
family did. They were, perhaps, the only people outside of Dad and
I that remembered it was Mom’s birthday. And if I recall, I think
Dad told me one time that they even came to their wedding.

I always wondered why Mom was so indifferent
to them, and Dad so cynical. It wasn’t as if we had many visitors.
Neighbors hardly graced our doorway unless they were complaining
about something—usually something I’d done, either to their
property or to one of their kids.

Maybe it was the fighting Mom and Dad
engaged in that kept people away. Maybe it was the shouting and the
breaking of things. It all made the doctors more welcome in my
eyes, and more magnanimous than, perhaps, they deserved.

I remember Anna Norris asking Mom if she’d
seen Ully, a question that seemed to make Mom angry. My uncle never
came over. Mom shook her head and turned away and changed the
subject.

“How about Ellie,” Dr. Shurz asked.

Again, Mom had little to offer in
response.

My mother’s mother—Grandma Ellie—hadn’t
visited us since I was two or three years old. Why Ellie stayed
away, I wasn’t sure. Dad said it was because she had something
called common sense. It was a confusing thing to say, I thought,
and when he said it, it was usually in front of Mom. That comment,
like the question of how Ellie was, always seemed to make Mom
angry.

Amelia would say that Ellie stayed away
because she lived with my uncle Ully, not because she didn’t want
to visit. She was older by then, couldn’t drive, was widowed, maybe
age sixty, and not in good health. She was entirely dependent on
her son for her transportation. They lived a ways away in Gary, and
if Ully wouldn’t visit, Ellie couldn’t, at least she didn’t feel
like she could, Amelia said.

Dad’s parents were deceased, so the doctors
never asked about them. I’d never gotten to meet Grandma Ida or
Grandpa Oren. They had passed long before I was born. Dad said his
father Oren died of cancer, and his mother, Ida, in an automobile
accident. I don’t remember Mom speaking of them.

It was a typical encounter with the doctors:
short and sweet, questions followed by the dispensing of advice,
and maybe some medications, and a couple gifts for the little brat
of the house.

My uncle Ully once told me the docs at
Coastal State advised Mom not to have kids—and for good reason. Mom
used to say she wasn’t long for this earth. The implication: Why
orphan a child if you don’t have to?

Mom, so likely to die at a young age, having
a baby, must have seemed selfish to some people around her. Amelia
would point out, in no uncertain terms, however, that Mom wasn’t
selfish—she was compassionate. She gave me life despite the advice
of those around her, and despite her health. That was, Amelia said,
my mother’s greatest gift to me. 

The late-afternoon sun was giving
way
to dusk. We’d eaten our supper. We had drunk as much Kool-Aid as we
could cajole Mom into giving us, and we were at our heights of
dynamism when Dad finally breeched the door.

Mom had scolded me a few times for running
wild and was doing her best to corral the lot of us when the door
slammed shut behind him. My energy was hitting its peak. Mom,
however, must have been hitting her breaking point. She was as red
as I ever saw her.

She appeared relieved to see Dad, who came
in slightly lumbering, his glasses ajar, a huge smile pasted on his
mustached face as if someone had just told him the world’s best
joke. He smelled like a Milwaukee brewery, though at the time I
didn’t know what a brewery was. It was something Mom said once in a
while. The scent trailed him much like the perpetual dust cloud of
Pig Pen used to trail him in the old Peanuts cartoon. It was Dad’s
smell, an anti-potpourri of barlied fermentation that permeated the
house and everything in it—including me. And he appeared
empty-handed!

I was disappointed. He had promised to bring
me a toy truck or a new football. When I asked him where my present
was and reached a hand wonderingly into one of his pockets, as if
those things would be in a pocket, he slapped me and told my few
remaining friends to take their bratty asses home if they didn’t
want the same.

His smile disappeared, and so did my
friends. I began to cry.

Mom hollered at Dad, but she didn’t holler
in my defense. She closed her eyes, let out a deep, remorseful
sigh, and said, “Go and take care of your son,” as if he hadn’t
done just that.

Looking back, I don’t think she was asking
him to punish me any further, but for him to take me somewhere else
and to entertain me, and to give her a break by doing so. Dad
didn’t hear it that way, though. Taking care of his son typically
meant taking him out behind the toolshed. It wasn’t the present I
wanted, and it wasn’t the end of the party I’d hoped for. For Dad
stood over me as he always did, shaking his head at my insolence,
paying no heed to his own, asking without verbalizing it an age-old
question asked so many times of him: “Why are you so out of
control?”

And then he said, “Come with me!” 

Leaving the house that evening
, Dad’s
face bore a look of perplexity. Funny how you remember things like
that. Facial expressions are so fleeting, yet they live so
permanently in the mind’s eye sometimes. If you could have asked
him why the perplexed look, he’d probably tell you he didn’t
understand how a boy could be so dense. It was only two nights ago
when we’d taken a similar walk out back, and the lesson from that
beating, Dad must have thought, had apparently been lost on me.

I don’t remember what I’d done to deserve
that previous whipping, but I imagine it had something to do with
my hyperactivity, that insolent, sugar-coated nature of mine Dad
seemed so determined to whip out of me. He had taken off his belt,
and I’d panicked. He had grabbed me by the arm to hold me in place
and began the lesson. He was shouting be still and was doing his
best to hold me in place as the leather of his belt worked its
magic on my behind.

But that magic was lost on me; so was the
commandment to be still. Stillness is a difficult task to
master—for anyone—especially for a five-year-old boy. It’s not what
the Psalmist—or God—or whomever you ascribe the origin of such a
Biblical imperative—meant to convey when He said:
Be still and
know that I am God!
It’s not a commandment meant for a
five-year-old boy. Psalms 46:10 is a verse meant for those who
command stillness in others when they, themselves, have yet to
master its fine art, or at all understand its merciful quality or
the subtle undercurrent of its meaning, which has more to do with
listening than bruising the tender flesh of the ear upon which it
falls.

Be still became a sort of proverbial
reminder of the damnation that comes from running wild, something
psychiatry referred to as
uncontrolled passion
in those
days; and uncontrolled passion was something Dad knew something
about. He said they could commit you for it, and by
you
he
meant
me
—and by
they
he meant the
Asylum
. He
said it had happened to him, and that I’m sorry was a coin toss
into a bottomless pit, a useless plea, a weightless stone hurled
against a steel house. An apology hadn’t worked for him, and it
wasn’t going to work for me.

So went the lesson from two night’s
prior.

So I followed Dad into the backyard, once
again, mesmerized by that perplexed look on his face, but this time
we stopped just short of the toolshed. I was trembling. I’d never
been taken into the shed, only behind it. I’d never been allowed
into it. I was expecting more energy from my father, more violent
energy, but Dad was restrained. He didn’t seem angry anymore. He
was calm and that befuddled expression of his had given way to
something resembling pleasure. It was as if he had found an answer
to some age-old riddle on his mind. He put a hand on my shoulder
and we stood there like two old friends having discovered some
long-sought cave entrance we’d been searching for.

He withdrew something from the pocket I
thought was empty. It was an old rusty key. His expression of
sudden pleasure transitioned to something like pride, and he said,
“See son, I did bring you something!”