But the marriages, said Fay, were only a part of Frank’s story. “You have picked an interesting man to marry,” she told Bessie. “Nobody has ever held him for very long. But I have a better feeling about you than the others.”
WHEN IT CAME TIME FOR FAY TO TALK ABOUT HER OWN PAST, Bessie found the old woman could be just as redeem and mysterious as her son. Fay claimed she had been born in French Canada and that her father had been a descendant of the royal French House of Bourbon. In the 1870s, according to Fay, circumstances had forced her parents to move their family to Lincoln, Nebraska, and change its name to Lancton. Fay would not say what the original family name had been or what had caused the move. Like Bessie, Fay had several sisters, and they had all tired of small-town life. In the late 1880s, they had put together a song and dance act and hit the road. In early 1890, they performed at the Chicago World’s Fair as Iva and the Lancton Sisters. It was there, said Fay, that she had met the man who would be Frank’s father—a man who had gone on to great fame. Fay would not reveal his identity. “If I told you who it was,” she said, “it would shock you.” Fay had briefly loved the man but then soon hated him forever. After she became pregnant with his child, he disavowed knowledge of her, and she returned to Lincoln, disgraced, and delivered Frank, on November 23, 1890.
“Where did the name Gilmore come from?” asked Bessie.
“A man I knew back in Nebraska.”
Suddenly Bessie remembered one of the few things Frank had ever told her about his father: He said that he had been killed by a blow to his stomach. Was that the man named Gilmore, or was that Frank’s real father?
“I’m surprised Frank told you that,” said Fay. “No, that was not Gilmore. He wasn’t in our life for long, and I have no idea what became of him. The man who was killed from being hit in the belly was Frank’s real father. And that’s all I’m going to say on that.”
In the mid 1890s, Fay’s family left Nebraska and moved to the East. Fay put Frank in an Eastern boarding school and joined her sisters onstage again for a while. They played around Boston and New York, but eventually the act split up, and Fay followed a bad love affair to the West Coast. She settled in Sacramento in the 1920s, she said, because the city had been a haven for the Spiritualist and Theosophy movements, which Fay became active in. Then she married a man named William Ingram, one of the city’s prominent psychologists, and worked for him as his aide. After Ingram died a few years back, Fay continued to see some of his patients. In time, she found herself drifting back into Spiritualism. She believed that what really troubled many people was lack of a connection with the other side—that is, with those who had gone on to the spirit world, by way of death. It could bring great healing to both the living and the departed if they could establish communication through a medium such as Fay. “For example,” said Fay, “I can see that there is a gentle spirit who is around you at all times. She is here even as we speak. I sense that she works to protect you from a darker spirit that also lurks nearby, and often tries to get closer to you.”
“That,” said Bessie, “is enough of that. I don’t care what you do for a living, Fay, but if you want me to stay here with you, don’t bring any spirits knocking against my walls in the dark. I will leave faster than you can believe. When it comes to these matters, I have decided to stay a coward for the rest of my life.”
Fay agreed not to meddle between Bessie and her attendant spirits.
ALL THE BUSINESS ABOUT FRANK’S FAMOUS FATHER had left Bessie intensely curious, and something in Fay’s mess of hints and detail had clicked for my mother. She knew this much: Frank’s real surname, according to Fay, was Weiss, and his father had been killed by a stomach injury. Armed with this information, and her suspicions, Bessie visited the Sacramento Public Library one afternoon and did a little reading. It didn’t take much to give her what she wanted. In 1874, the celebrated magician Harry Houdini—the man so despised by Frank and his mother—had been born as Ehrich Weiss. He later changed his name to Houdini as a tribute to the famed French magician Robert Houdin. In 1926, during a tour, Houdini—who was then forty-eight—allowed an overzealous fan to deliver some hard blows to his midsection as a proof of the magician’s undiminished stamina and strength. The blows did severe damage that could not be repaired, and on October 31, 1926, Houdini died of an advanced form of peritonitis.
According to this information, Bessie surmised, Harry Houdini had been Frank Gilmore’s real father.
When Bessie told Fay what she had learned, Fay confirmed her suspicions. Years before, Fay said, after Houdini’s rise to fame, she had contacted the magician and tried to establish Frank’s claims to paternity. But Houdini, who was bitterly disappointed that his own wife could not have children—and in no mood for a scandal—refused Fay’s request. Still, she had let her son know who his father was; she thought it only fair. “That,” said Fay, “is the great tragedy of Frank’s life. The anger of the man is that he can never claim who he truly is.”
It was this bitter knowledge that his own father had refused him, said Fay, that had turned Frank into a restless man, bound for trouble, and unable to stay true to his own children. “If you have children with him, Bessie, make him stay true to them. That’s the only thing that will ever bring him peace. It’s too late for him to be Houdini’s son. The only thing he can do now is to be a father to his own sons.”
FOR YEARS, FAY HAS FASCINATED AND PERPLEXED me as much as anybody in my family’s history. Clearly, she was a woman who knew the effective force of mystery. The mystery of a powerful past that owns your destiny without giving up its own secrets. The mystery of the world of death.
Fay sowed her lore well. We heard her legends about Houdini’s patrimony and our lost royal lineage throughout our youths. Along with the tales of Mormon ancestors and Blood Atonement, Fay’s mysteries were an important part of our sense of where we had come from. There were secrets and debts in our past, there were birthrights that had been stripped from our hands, there were ghosts on our heels, there was a darkness in the marrow of our history. A darkness that we could not fully understand, except to know that it was the oldest and truest part of ourselves.
In a way, whether any of these tales were true or not hardly mattered. We believed these claims about our lives, and so we acted upon them. Still, when I began this task, I hoped to find as much truth about these legends as I could. I must admit, Fay was adept at covering her tracks— she managed to hide most of her life story and significant parts of her son’s story. But she left one small piece of evidence behind. I suspect it may be one of the sad keys to the whole fucking tragedy.
HERE IS WHAT I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT FAY’S WORLD, and the circumstances of my father’s birth:
On November 7, 1869, Fay’s mother, a seventeen-year-old woman named Josephine St. Louis, married a man named Lewis Lavois, a twenty-seven-year-old shoemaker, in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Both of these people were born in French Canada, but their French origins are largely untraceable. If there’s any royal connection in either lineage, it’s as good as lost. I have never found a birth record for Fay—who reportedly was born January 8, 1871—in either Canada or Massachusetts, though it is probable she was born in the latter place.
Fay’s family next turns up in the 1880 U.S. Census, in Lancaster County, Nebraska. By this time, they have a new surname, Lancton, and the father is now listed as Peter, a forty-six-year-old carpenter. One experienced genealogist who helped me trace these histories believes that the Lewis Lavois who disappeared from Massachusetts in the 1870s and the Peter Lancton of Nebraska in the 1880s (also listed as Peter Lancto in some accounts) were different people. For one thing, Lancton is listed as being ten years older than Lavois. I’m not so sure. Given Fay’s claim that the family had undergone some sort of identity change—and that there was never any mention of a second father—I’m not so sure that Lavois and Lancton weren’t the same man. In any event, this much is certain: In Nebraska in 1880, Josie was living with a man named Peter Lanct
on, and that is the surname that the family would remain known by.
The Lanctons, like the Browns, were basically poor with several children. They moved frequently during their Lincoln years, usually around the fringes of the city, from one small home to another. Driving through their old neighborhoods recently, I discovered that probably little had changed about the dismal area in which they once lived. It would be a stultifying environment for a young person in any era, then or now. To survive it, you would either have to be as dull as the land around you, or you would need an imagination that could transcend its flatness.
Here’s where Fay’s story starts to break down: From what I can tell, she never went with her sisters to perform at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1890. Instead, on July 31, 1886, Fay—who was known in Lincoln as Fannie—had married a man named Harry Noole Gilmore, in Omaha, Nebraska. Harry, who was born in Illinois, would not prove a man of significant means. According to the Lincoln City Directory’s listings for this period, Harry and Fannie spent much of their time living with her family. Sometimes Harry worked as Peter Lancton’s carpenter’s assistant, and sometimes he worked as a Lincoln City streetcar driver.
A little over a year after their marriage, on August 26, 1887, Fannie and Harry had their first child, a boy named Clarence. Then, on October 31, 1890, Harry and Fannie’s young son Clarence died, and was buried at Lincoln’s Wyuka Cemetery. Three weeks after the burial, on November 23, 1890, my father, Frank Harry Gilmore, was born. Or at least I have to assume that is when he was born. Since Nebraska did not keep birth records during this time, I have never been able to locate a birth certificate, or a baptismal or christening record, for Frank Gilmore.
There isn’t much left to the Nebraska story after that. In early 1893, Fannie sued her husband for divorce—an event novel enough to be noted in the Nebraska State Journal, under the headline: “Divorce Market Good.” The February 28, 1893 story read: “Fannie Gilmore wants the district court to give her a divorce from Harry Gilmore, and to that end she filed a petition yesterday. She states that Harry married her at Omaha, in July, 1886, and that ever since that time, he has neglected to provide any support for her. She adds that she has been compelled to eke out a living by manual labor, and by the assistance which relatives rendered her. The court is requested also to give Mrs. Gilmore the custody of her child.”
Following the divorce, Fannie and her son moved back in with her parents. In 1896, the Lanctons moved to the East, where the sisters worked together for a few years, dancing and singing on the Northeastern vaudeville circuit. Meantime, Harry Gilmore appeared in the Lincoln City Directory until 1895, as a bellboy at the Lincoln Hotel. That was the last anybody heard of him until June 11, 1911, when this item appeared in the Nebraska State Journal: “SCOTTS BLUFF, NEB. JUNE IO—Harry Gilmore, 40 years old, died at the Scotts Bluff hospital yesterday of typhoid fever. Nothing could be found in his effects that could give a clue who his friends or relatives are, or where he came from. He has been working at the sugar factory and the boys at the factory will have charge of the funeral tomorrow.”
After the 1890s, Fay vanished from the family’s records, or from any recorded history for many years after that. The next anybody heard of her was around 1920, when she was in Sacramento, conjuring up spirits under the name Baby Fay LaFoe. Frank Gilmore, meanwhile, went on to lead his own life of hidden history.
THAT IS THE TRUE STORY OF MY FATHER’S ORIGIN, as far as I have been able to determine. I do not believe that he was the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini, though I suspect that my father believed it. If he ever remembered his real father, or knew anything about Harry’s lonely fate, Frank Gilmore never mentioned it. At the same time, not all of Fay’s stories were fictions. There’s enough truth in her narrative of the Lanctons’ early years, for example, to give a hint of possibility to some of her mysteries. Plus, her accounts of Frank’s various marriages and surnames all proved truthful.
Which only makes Fay’s fictions all the more troubling. Why would she have invented the legend of an illegitimate birth for her son, and why would she have kept that myth alive for the rest of her life? Obviously, the cost to Frank Gilmore was immense, and the cost did not end with him. I’ve thought at times that Fay might have devised the story to redeem her own disappointments. Maybe the marriage and its failure had been too banal for a person with an imagination as large and hungry as Fay’s. Maybe she needed a bigger failure to live up to—like the lost love of a great celebrity, who had fathered her bastard son. Maybe she simply enjoyed the importance that such a story gave her—and perhaps she recognized, years later, that the story had now become her best shot at being remembered past her own death.
Perhaps, but then maybe it was something else.
Not long ago, I visited the Wyuka Cemetery, just outside Lincoln, where my father’s older brother, Clarence, was buried at age three. Wyuka is one of Nebraska’s oldest large cemeteries; it has been receiving the dead and their mourners for over a century. It is laid out like a mosaic. Narrow driveways wind around a vast patchwork of lots and gardens, each of them an island of graves. Clarence’s grave lay on the far side of the cemetery, in one of its oldest sections. I parked my car near that section early on a winter morning. It was bitterly cold—there was a blizzard watch on the news that morning—and a haze hung over the ground that made it hard to read the markings on the old, timeworn tombstones. I searched for some time before I found it: a small, isolated plot lying next to an empty patch of ground, surrounded by the grave colonies of full families. On a stone lying flat on the earth was all that was left of the Lanctons’ history in Nebraska, and of my father’s first family. The stone read: OUR BABY.
I stood there and looked at it for as long as I could take the cold. I tried to imagine what it was like when Fay and Harry buried their son here. Maybe the marriage was already bad, and maybe the child’s death had killed whatever hope had been left for the young couple. I thought of it this way: You have a child, you love it, you put something of the best of yourself and your hope into your efforts for that child. And then the child dies—your hope is wiped out, and your hurt is endless. On top of that, three weeks later, you have another child—the child that would be my father—and the hope and love are supposed to begin again. But what if they don’t—what if it’s too soon? What happens if the emotions that are invested in that child are not emotions of reborn hope but, instead, feelings of great fear and grief, or even resentment? When Fay looked at her new son, so soon after putting her first child in the ground, did she feel comforted by the baby’s face? Or did she feel there was too much risk in loving this child as she had loved the first? Or did she just hurt too damn much over Clarence to give Frank the sense of love and security a young baby requires?
Whatever the answers, the Gilmores’ marriage did not hold. Within a few years it was finished and Fay was gone and Harry was forgotten. I don’t think Fay kept Frank Gilmore close to her heart and life after Nebraska. Instead, she sent him off to a sequence of boarding schools and only shared a home with him occasionally. Better to keep a child distant than to love and bury him. Frank Gilmore was denied all right—by everybody. He grew up without a father and without a mother. Thirty years later, when he brought Robert to Fay’s door, he might well have been saying: Here, I’ve brought myself back to you. And then Frank pushed his son away, into the hands of the mother who had once pushed Frank away.
That helps explain the distance between Fay and Frank, but why the Houdini rumor? I’m not sure. Maybe Fay did have an affair with him. Perhaps she knew him at some point and felt betrayed by something he had done. What could be a better revenge than the scandal of a bastard son? And maybe by making Frank believe the legend, she was just trying to bury the truth of her own sad past a little deeper.
I took another look at Clarence’s headstone and thought: I am probably the only person who has ever visited this particular grave in the last hundred years. That idea was enough to fill me with such immediate despair, I got
back in my car and drove away from the site as fast as the narrow roads would take me. Just before I left the graveyard, I stopped at the main office and asked about the empty plot next to the baby’s grave. It seemed odd to find a vacant grave, in the portion of a cemetery that had been filled for nearly a century. The kindly old man at the desk pulled out some ancient books, ran his fingers along the ledgers, and then told me: “That plot belonged to a man named Harry Gilmore. He was Clarence’s father, and bought the grave site for himself a few years after he had buried the child. But he never came back, and he was never buried there.”
Nobody is laid to rest next to Clarence Gilmore’s grave. He stays there alone, a little secret, left behind.
MAYBE AT THIS POINT BESSIE should have said to herself: Oh-oh— looks like I’ve married into a family with more problems than the one I just fled. But she didn’t. Bessie stayed, despite all the terrible secrets, and all the frightening prospects. She even stayed once the drinking and beatings and disappearances began in earnest.
She had her reasons.
And we—the sons—are the result of that decision.
Shot in the Heart Page 9
