Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  DURING FRANK’S ABSENCE—WHICH HAD NOW GONE ON FOR A MONTH —Fay’s psychic business got up and running again. Much of this work was what Fay called “daytime spiritualism”: card reading and fortune-telling for those who were worried in love or desperate in business. These clients needed assurance and counseling as much as anything, and Fay was savvy at providing it. In the evenings, Fay did the serious stuff: séances, summonings, materializations. These were the occasions when she gathered those who were anxious to contact a loved one who had gone on the dark side of the veil. Usually, Fay attracted about a dozen people for these sessions, though sometimes she had as many as forty participants sitting in her parlor. Most of these were older folks, around Fay’s age. They were eager to reconcile painful misunderstandings with people they had loved and lost. Or they were desirous of the departed one’s crucial advice on one secular matter or another. Or they simply wanted some sign that there was life and deliverance beyond death. They found these signs in Fay’s living room, under her guidance. Familiar voices came out of the dark, or from Fay’s mouth, in those moments when she would allow herself to be a conduit for the dead. The hands and breaths of the dead brushed up close against the faces of the living, and strange sounds thumped along the floor and the walls. Sometimes, luminous faces floated in the dimness, like an apparition breaking free into the real world.

  My mother would not stick around when Fay invoked the spirits. She was uncomfortable with the atmosphere in the house at those times, plus she was uneasy with what these events implied. Either Fay’s clients were pathetic and needful people who were being duped, or Fay was the genuine article—somebody who could reach into God’s proper realm and talk to the dead—and for Bessie, the latter notion was more disturbing than the first. On the nights of the séances, Bessie would often go visit Robert, who lived in a small room a few blocks away. She had come to like this son of Frank’s, who was now nearly a man in his own right. He was shy and polite, and damn handsome to boot. Plus, the longer Frank’s absence stretched on, the more she began to feel she had in common with Robert, since they had both, in a way, been abandoned by the same man. Bessie could tell there was a deep and confused hurt in Robert. He had been raised in a world of weird psychic shadows, and he had hungered to be claimed by his father. But all he knew of his dad was that he was a man who had grown up in vaudeville and the circus, and who could not come for Robert because some great mystery kept him away. But the idea of the secret mystery didn’t help Robert much. The truth was, Frank Gilmore had found it terribly easy to leave his son, without once calling or writing him. Robert still wanted to get close to his father, but he wasn’t finding it easy.

  Bessie and Robert spent many evenings talking about these and other matters, while the spirits held court in the night at Fay’s house.

  HALFWAY THROUGH FALL, after a six-week absence, Frank returned home. Bessie saw him coming up the walkway to Fay’s and, despite all her agitation, something in her heart surged. He had a way that got to her, something that told her he was the only man she was ever going to really love. Still, she had to let him know that she wasn’t happy being left behind, and that she had learned a few details about his life. She told him that Fay had told her about his other wives and many names. She told him that she had figured out that Ehrich Weiss was his father.

  Frank took all this in without showing much in return. Just like his mother, Bessie thought.

  “What else did Fay tell you?” Frank asked.

  “Nothing else. She told me that if I wanted to know any of your other secrets, I’d have to ask you.”

  Frank seemed relieved by that. He gave my mother a look that told her that revealing anything more was the last thing on his mind.

  Bessie decided to push a little. “Frank, where did you go? What were you doing?”

  “If I thought it was any of your damn business,” Frank said, “I would have told you already. Maybe it’s better if you not know everything. Think of it that way.”

  There was one thing, though, she had to know: Did he have other families in other places? Did he still see any of his other wives or support their children? “I can take a lot of things, but if you are still seeing other women, I’ll leave you.”

  Frank laughed and lifted her chin tenderly. He looked into Bessie’s green eyes and said: “Believe me, you’re more than enough for me. Besides, a man would have to be a damn fool to have more than one wife at the same time. Hell, I’m not a Mormon. Don’t worry, I don’t see any of those other women anymore. Once in a while I get in touch and see one of the kids. That’s about it.”

  Bessie didn’t know why, but she believed him.

  FRANK SURE HAD MADE SOME MONEY while he was away, and he wasn’t shy about spending it. He took Bessie downtown, bought her new clothes and new rings, and gave Robert the money for a used Ford he had wanted. Then he paid up Fay’s rent for the next six months and gave her an envelope with some more cash and told her to use it to live on. He said he was feeling restless and wanted to take Bessie to see some of the country before they started having kids. Told Fay they’d be back in a few months. To Bessie, he explained that he didn’t feel like sticking around Fay’s supernatural antics. He had seen plenty of such stuff over the years, and he had nothing but contempt for all the fools who took her mumbo jumbo to heart. It was all a lot of bunco, he said. Fay installed switches under the table and carpet, he explained, that she could throw with her hands and feet and make things happen in the dark.

  Bessie wasn’t so sure. She knew from her faith that there was only a thin veil that separated the living from the dead. The departed were always close by—closer than you might believe, Bessie said. Besides, how could Fay accomplish all those tricks when she was confined to a wheelchair?

  Frank laughed. “She doesn’t need that damn thing,” he said. “It’s just part of the act. Plus, it’s a good way to get people to wait on her.”

  Bessie decided Frank was kidding. She had seen how helpless Fay was in her chair, and she had seen how dead her legs were. There was little doubt that Fay was a paraplegic.

  Anyway, Frank and Bessie moved on. Frank bought a new wood-paneled station wagon Pontiac—he would always have a great weakness for woodies—threw a few items in a couple of suitcases, and drove the two of them back to Utah. He wanted to collect some money that his employer at Utah Magazine still owed him, and Bessie thought it was time for her family to meet her husband. She had written them from Sacramento, telling them she had married. Her husband, she wrote, was a successful advertising salesman, and he had once worked in silent movies and the circus. She didn’t tell them any of the other stuff—for example, about his being almost twice her age or that he’d had a half dozen other wives and children. She figured she would keep that information to herself, for fear it would become neighborhood scuttlebutt. A couple of weeks later she got back a brief but pleasant letter from her mother. “We had been a little worried about you since you left Utah, but we were happy to receive your news,” Melissa wrote. “As you know, it is only through marriage that a woman can come into the full presence of God and the glory of the celestial kingdom, and we are glad that you have taken this important step. Please come and see us when you get back. We’d like to meet your Frank.”

  Right from the start, the visit did not go well. Both Melissa and Will were upset to see Bess with a man so much older than she—a man only four years younger than her father. Melissa didn’t say as much to my mother’s face, but she let on to her sisters, and the word got back to Bessie. Also, there was something about Frank that just rubbed her parents the wrong way—it was as if they could smell criminal written all over him. Will, in particular, was disappointed that Bessie had married such a character. “This is a man,” he told her one day as they walked in the backyard, “who has been in prison. Why didn’t you tell us that? Why would you marry a man like this?”

  “He has not been in prison,” Bessie said, the old anger returning to her face. “Frank’s had a hard
life. He was abandoned by his father at birth and his mother had to work in show business to keep him in school. He was forced to fend for himself a lot over the years, and he had to grow up tough. But my husband is not a criminal. How dare you say that.”

  Bessie’s protests, though, didn’t count for much. The Browns didn’t warm to Frank, and her younger sisters seemed almost terrified of him. More than ever, Bessie felt the judgment and scorn of her family. In fact, she felt it descend on her in the worst possible way. In the Mormon world, there was nothing more important than the bond of marriage—it was the rock on which you built your family, and it was a key element to eternal blessings. Bessie was now made to feel that she had failed in this matter of utmost consequence. She believed that the disdain she was now experiencing had nothing to do with Frank Gilmore. She could have married Franklin Roosevelt and it would have made no difference. The whole message she had got from her family for years, she thought, was that she was worthless—she counted for nothing in their world, and in God’s estimation. Now, it was as if that message were being sent with the finality of condemnation.

  As Bessie and Frank drove away from the Provo farm, Bessie sat in the front seat of the Pontiac with both hands cupped over her face, crying as hard as she had ever cried. She felt like she didn’t care if she never saw any of those people again. Frank put his arm around her and drew her close to him, pressing her head to his shoulder. “What the hell can you expect,” he said, “from a bunch of damn Mormons.”

  THAT WAS WHEN THE WANDERING STARTED. In the next few months Bessie would see small towns and back highways all over Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. They would move into a place, spend a couple of weeks, then move on. Rarely did they stay anyplace for as long as a month or two. And when the time came to leave, it was almost always in a hurry. Frank would tell Bessie not to bother with packing the things they had accumulated. It was always just get in the car and go. “We’ll buy new things in the next place,” he would say. He wasn’t about to be slowed down by possessions.

  As it turned out, there were often good reasons for moving on quickly. Frank’s main career, Bessie began to see, was scamming. The first thing he would do when they hit a town was get a phone installed in their hotel room or apartment, under one of his names. Then he would make the rounds to various businesses, selling advertising for a forthcoming magazine or specialty publication. He would show a sample of what the magazine would look like, leave a business card, then go back to the hotel and wait for the merchants to call and place their ads. Sometimes, he’d have Bessie answer the phone, posing as his secretary. “Hello, this is Mr. Collier’s office.” Or: “Hello. Miller Publications. Frank Collier’s office.” Then Frank would return to the merchants, collect the material for the ads, and full payment or partial payment for the ad. The publication, of course, would never materialize. Frank would take the money and move on. This approach to ad-selling was called “hundred-percenting,” because the seller took all the profit and ran.

  Activities like that were reason enough for putting a few hundred miles between yesterday and tomorrow, but the scams weren’t the only thing that kept them moving. To Bessie, it seemed that Frank was always trying to keep ahead of some unknown phantom that might be coming up close behind. She could practically feel it in his sleep, the way he would lie tensed, or would sit bolt upright at the sound of late-night footsteps in the hallway. Soon, Bessie took on Frank’s breathing patterns as her own. She began to feel edgy if they stayed in any one place for too long, and would only begin to unwind when they were back in the station wagon, rolling to the next stop, and the next scam.

  For all the running and the risks, Bessie would later describe these as the good days of their marriage, when it was just the two of them, drifting around like small-town criminals in the American West. “We got along fine together in those days, before we ever had any kids. Children weren’t something I ever really wanted or planned for; they were something Frank wanted. It was funny, he would want them, but then he would turn against them. And I, who had never wanted them, would fight to protect them. If only we had stayed that way forever, without kids.”

  It was said to hurt us, and it did. We felt we were to blame for the hell of everything. In our own hearts, the childless family became the ideal family.

  THE GOOD DAYS DIDN’T LAST THAT LONG. Only a few months, really. In early 1939, Bessie became pregnant. The two of them kept traveling for much of her term, and then when the baby was due they settled into a bungalow in the Glendale section of Los Angeles, where my oldest brother, Frank Harry Gilmore, Jr., was born. Contrary to what Bessie expected from Fay’s warnings, Frank appeared eager for fatherhood. He showed up at the hospital nervous and proud and a little drunk, dragging along some old friends of his. He did the whole routine—passed out cigars to everybody in sight, gave the doctor a bottle of whiskey with a ribbon around its neck, sweet-talked every nurse on the floor. First time my mother saw him holding Frank Jr., she thought she had never seen her husband look more pleased with himself, like holding this baby made him feel truly a man. Frank looked down at Frank Jr.’s face and turned to Bessie and said: “Here—I’ve given you a son to take care of you in your old age.”

  One thing was for sure: Frank seemed to know exactly how to handle a baby. He had no misgivings about feeding or changing Frank Jr., or staying up with him late at night when he cried or was sick. Bessie later said it was one of her best memories of him, the way he would handle a baby. Frank would sit in a chair with his baby, cooing at it, talking tenderly to it, singing it a lullaby in his broken voice. Before long, the baby would curl up in Frank’s lap like a little kitten and fall asleep, safe in its father’s presence.

  They stayed in Los Angeles for a few weeks, Frank looking after the baby and Bessie, then went up north to see Fay. Something about seeing Frank fuss over his new baby boy got to Robert, and the two began to argue more frequently. The arguments were almost never expressly about the lack of love that Frank had shown Robert. Instead, Robert began to suspect that his father had not been fair and loving enough to Robert’s mother, Nan, which brought out a nasty streak in Frank. He would say the worst things about his “ex-whore wife,” until Robert would walk out on the discussions, halfway to tears. Then Bessie and Frank would go at it. Bessie felt Frank was in the wrong, the way he demeaned the mother that Robert had never even got to know. Frank would say: “I know you’re soft for Robert, but you’d be better off if you learned to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Well, Frank,” Bessie would say, “I’m too old to learn.”

  Early the following year, Bessie became pregnant again, but this time the development didn’t seem to please Frank. In fact, he went on a drinking binge and checked into a hotel for a few days by himself, in nearby Oakland. When he came back, he was restive and irritable. He announced to Bessie that it was time for the two of them to travel again. Bessie wasn’t thrilled to hear the news. It was almost summer, she had a seven-month-old baby and was almost three months along with another. She didn’t look forward to driving all over the country under those conditions, and when she learned that this time they were heading for Alabama, she liked the idea even less. Didn’t see why they needed to go so damn far, just so Frank could run one of his silly scams. Something felt dead wrong about the whole venture—even the route Frank had planned. Instead of taking the more direct route—swinging south and cutting through Texas—Frank wanted to head over through Utah, so Bessie could show the new baby to her parents. After that, they would drive across Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri, down through Arkansas and Mississippi to Alabama. Bessie knew her husband could care less about Will and Melissa seeing Frank Jr. She suspected there was something else at work in Frank’s reasoning, but whatever it was, he wouldn’t say.

  Things didn’t improve when they hit Alabama. By then it was summertime, and the sticky, palpable heat felt unlike anything Bessie had ever known. Plus, there was something about the place itself that scare
d the hell out of her. Maybe it was all the talk she had heard over the years about the South’s insularity and violence, but she felt the locals were giving her a hard, assessing stare every time she opened her Yankee mouth. One time, ordering in a roadside diner, she was given a nasty look by the waitress, who said: “Where the hell are y’all from?”

  Also, Frank didn’t help her calmness. They had rented a small motel cabin in a little roadside town south of Selma, in the central part of the state. There wasn’t much to do there. A couple of picture shows, a drugstore with a soda fountain, where Bessie could get lunch. Except Frank wanted her to stay inside their room most of the time by herself, and not get too close to any of the neighbors. She especially wasn’t supposed to share much information about them or their lives, or to answer the inquiries of any strangers. “These are curious people,” Frank had said. “They may seem genteel on the surface, but deep down they hate you because you’re different. You’re a Yankee, and Yankees are unwelcome intruders. Leave these people alone, Bessie. They may seem all right by the daylight, but by night they’ll cut your throat and nobody will ever find what’s left of you.”

  One night, Frank got drunk and told Bessie a bit about his earlier stay in Alabama, a decade before, when he had been married to Barbara Solomon, a Jewish woman. They moved into a town called Greenville, and Frank got work as a newspaper ad salesman. One day some local members of the Ku Klux Klan came around and invited him to a rally. Frank declined and when they wanted to know why, he told them that he was a Catholic and his wife was Jewish and he’d got along fine with black people all his life, so he couldn’t really see himself joining the Klan in its various campaigns. A couple of nights later he came home from work and found his wife and baby sitting in the dark. Barbara told Frank that some men had come by, banging on the door and making terrible threats. They fold her that Jews and Catholics weren’t welcome in these parts, and if they were here come the next sunset, they would cut her husband’s balls off in front of her. Frank believed they weren’t bluffing. That night, he and his wife left Greenville before dawn and headed to Montgomery. The marriage only lasted another year or two.