Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  Now that my father was sober all the time, he was also meaner and more violent. Bessie had long been the object of his anger, but for the next few years, their bouts became nightmarish and brutal. My brother recalls: “I don’t think we ever went two weeks during that time without some sort of wild, fist-banging fights. Many times I saw Mom with black eyes and a horribly swollen face. Man, she looked like she had been in a prizefight sometimes, battered and bruised, her lips all swollen. I saw that so many times. He would just really pound on her.

  “I remember once, when I was about nine, stepping in and telling him to stop. I don’t know if I must have been crazy or what, but for some reason it startled him. He just looked at me really funny that day. He couldn’t believe somebody would say something. And he actually stopped hitting her and turned around and went back to his desk, or whatever he was doing.”

  Through it all, the children would watch and scream and cry. Frank recalls that Gary, in particular, developed trouble sleeping. My parents’ fights got tied in with his other dreams about being executed. He would often wet the bed at night and wake up screaming, sitting in his own sweat and urine.

  THERE WAS ANOTHER SIDE EFFECT to my father’s newfound sobriety: He became less agitated about traveling all the time. He now started staying put in one place longer than a few weeks. This was fine with Bessie. She had long been weary from all the migrations. She wanted a home and possessions, like the ones her sisters had back in Utah. She also wanted to see what it would be like for the boys to have a stable life—to spend a whole grade year in the same school and be able to develop some uninterrupted friendships. This became a dream for my mother.

  In 1948, my family moved to Portland, Oregon, and set up residence at a housing project just north of the city. Frank had come up with an idea for a publishing venture: He would collect all the various statutes and regulations regarding the construction and development of residential and commercial property in the city of Portland and the outlying county of Multnomah, rewrite them into a readable language, and then publish them in a handy guide, full of advertising from contractors, builders, and architects. The publication would be distributed by the advertisers to their clients, and by the city and county’s official licensing departments to prospective developers and builders. The idea attracted advertisers quickly, and Frank was raising hundreds of dollars in revenue each week—more steady income than the family had ever seen. After he accumulated several thousand dollars, Frank told Bessie it was time to move on again and try the same idea in another town. They could make a lot of money real fast this way, he said.

  It was one of those times that Bessie Gilmore put her foot down. “No,” she said. “You could actually do this book. You have everything you need to make it work. You have advertisers who trust you, you have the city’s endorsement, and you have the skill. This is your best idea, Frank, and it is your creation. It doesn’t have to be something you do just once: You could publish it every year or every other year and make good, regular money with it. We could finally have a home. If you do this book legitimately here, I’ll help you with it, and if you want to take it to other places later, I’ll support you in that too. But if you hundred-percent on this one and run off with the money so that none of us can ever come back, then I may as well stay here with the boys. I’m tired of all the running.”

  Frank didn’t like ultimatums, but he did like Bessie’s idea of making the book an annual event. In 1949 Frank Gilmore published his first copy of the Building Codes Digest and, with the money he raised, made the down payment on a small house on Crystal Springs Boulevard, in southeast Portland. It wasn’t much of a home: two bedrooms, small yard, on the city’s industrial fringes—more a wasteland than a neighborhood. Not quite the big, handsome house that Bessie dreamed of, but she realized that Frank was still too skittish for anything that ambitious. Frank and Bessie put a fence around the yard, bought a dog, and bought a brand-new Pontiac. They put the boys in school, and come Christmas time, they put up a tree and bought a Nativity scene. It was my family’s first real home, after a decade of marriage and three children, and it was the closest to a conventionally happy time they would ever know.

  Frank’s son Robert was now an army lieutenant, stationed at Ft. Lewis, one hundred and fifty miles away, near Tacoma, Washington. Robert now had a wife of his own and three children—two girls and a boy. He started bringing his family down every couple of weeks to visit his father’s family, and sometimes made the trip alone. Robert liked the changes he saw taking place in his father. The two of them were getting along better these days. They could talk to each other for more than ten minutes without the bitter recriminations and suspicions of a few years before. One day, Robert—who aspired to a career as a professional photographer—gathered my parents and brothers in the backyard of the home on Crystal Springs and took a picture of them all together. It is perhaps my most treasured artifact of my family. Separately, everyone in the picture is in the role that would fit him or her best in life. My father looked no-nonsense, my mother looked like this was not a fun moment, my brother Gaylen wore a darling and irresistible smile, and Gary was already rehearsing his menacing stare. It is my brother Frank, though, who has the most fitting expression of any of them: a goofy, clownish smile that says, Isn’t this ridiculous—all of us posing like a real family? Nobody in the photo is touching anybody else. And of course, I’m not there, I’m not in this picture yet. In fact, I never would be. This is the closest thing to a family portrait we would ever have. There would never be a photo taken of all of us together.

  But not all the family’s changes were good. There was, for example, the matter of the new dog. According to my mother, the dog was half Alaskan husky, one quarter chow, and one quarter German shepherd. It had been bought as Gary’s dog, and he had named it Queen. The dog ended up like its owner, in more ways than one: She started as something small and harmless and became vicious and deadly. Originally, the dog had been one of those things my father wanted and my mother strongly opposed. After it became a part of the family, my father turned against it and began to punish it, while my mother fought to protect it. My father’s favorite disciplinary trick was to roll up a newspaper like a baseball bat and beat the animal with it. “He beat the dog for the same reason he beat anything,” my brother Frank said. “What reason did he need?” The dog took it until it got old enough not to take it, then it turned on my father. It was only my mother’s ability to command Queen that saved Frank Gilmore from being severely hurt.

  Queen kept her distance from my father, but she was devoted to Bessie and my brothers. Frank and Gary used to take the dog for walks all the time in the neighborhood, and if other kids gave them trouble, or any other dogs became threatening, Queen took care of them. By my mother’s count, Queen attacked at least fifteen people—biting some of them savagely—and killed at least two other dogs. One time, Gary and Frank had been in mischief down the road and got a neighborhood man angry. He picked up a meat cleaver and began to chase my brothers down Crystal Springs Boulevard. My mother—who had Queen locked up in the house that day—heard her sons’ cries, and when she looked out the window, she saw the man chasing them. She said that was the only time she ever purposely unleashed Queen on anybody. She opened the front door, pointed at the man, and Queen moved like a cheetah. She knocked the man down from behind, bit him all over his arms and probably would have ripped the man’s throat out if my mother hadn’t called her off.

  It’s a wonder nobody ever shot the damn animal during those days, or the people who owned it. As one of my friends once pointed out to me, the dog wasn’t a pet so much as a weapon—a killer beast, to defend the family in its protective posture and keep the outside world at bay, as my father finally ran the risk of settling down.

  THE DOG HAD TO MOVE INTO THE BACKYARD after I came along.

  A year or two after Gaylen’s birth, my mother had another baby boy, which only lived a few days or weeks and then died. I never knew anything about t
his child until recently, when my brother Frank told me about him. According to Frank, the baby was born, died, and was buried, and nobody ever mentioned him after that. To this day, I do not know this baby’s name, or where it might have been born or died. It was one of those things that was never discussed, and had Frank not had some memory of the event, I would never have known it happened.

  After that, my mother was told she could have no more children. But as she watched my father take each of her sons into the Catholic faith, she began to feel guilt for letting it happen, and she found herself wishing she had stood up more for her own religion. She wanted a child she could raise as a Mormon; my father, meantime, simply wanted another child. The two struck a deal: If my mother could safely bear one more child, my father would let her raise it as a Mormon.

  I was born on February 9, 1951, at Portland’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. My father was sixty-one, and my mother was thirty-eight. (By the way, I was born as Michael, not Mikal. I changed the spelling in high school, and it became an affectation that stuck. For the sake of consistency, I’ll keep the spelling in its current form throughout this story.)

  “I remember the day you were born,” my brother Frank told me a while back. “Dad came running upstairs in his shorts and said, ‘Boys, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you got another little brother.’ I never saw him that happy, before or after.”

  The joy was short-lived. One day, during the time I was doing the research for this book and was talking almost daily with my brother about his memories of the past, Frank arrived at my door with a troubled look on his face. “I have something I need to tell you,” he said. “I think about telling you every time I come over here. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I have to find a way to say this.”

  This is the story that my brother told me:

  “When they brought you home from the hospital, at first everybody was real happy, and all that. But a few weeks later, things changed. Mom was always reading these stupid medical books, and she didn’t know how to interpret them. This one particular book said that if you take a new born baby and toss it up playfully in the air, it’s supposed to have a certain reaction. Move its arms in a certain way, smile and laugh in a certain way. But of course, what happens is that every baby reacts a little differently. Mom would take you and she’d toss you in the air and you wouldn’t react the way that she thought you were supposed to. You were probably already so accustomed to all the hell around there that somebody tossing you in air and saying stuff wasn’t likely to faze you. Anyway, Mom began to carry on. ‘There’s something wrong with this baby. It’s not right. It’s damaged.’ She went on and on about this, until Dad told her to shut up about it.

  “Well, one day we found her standing over your crib with a pillow. She was getting ready to put the pillow over the top of you. She was going to smother you. Dad grabbed her. She was all worked up and said something like, ‘We can’t let this baby live.’ And Dad… he just knocked the hell out of her. He beat her up real bad and told her never to try it again. We were all there when it happened, me, Gary, and Gaylen.

  “I have to admit, from that day on, I never felt quite the same toward her.”

  When Frank got to the end of his story, I could see that the telling of it had shaken him. It was hard for me, though, to connect to the instance emotionally. It seems almost certain that what was tormenting my mother at the time of this episode was postpartum depression—the chemically-based form of severe depression that can sometimes follow a pregnancy. But given the era, and given my father’s inclinations, there wasn’t much chance that Bessie would get the proper diagnosis or help. Instead, she got a savage beating.

  I realize now that this episode was crucial to much of what would follow and the relations that I would form to my parents. It was a large part of the reason that my father kept me close to him over the years, and it turned me into a central issue in the growing war between my parents. And though I feel nothing specifically about that moment—I do not feel horrified or angry that my mother might have smothered me—I realize that much of the fear I would later feel about her had been created by the possibilities of that moment. I remember that my father often accused my mother of some shameful form of craziness and that these accusations would hurt her so visibly that I felt sorry for her. But the charges would also inflame her so much that the rage she displayed seemed to affirm my father’s perceptions, and I became deeply afraid of the madness I thought I saw in her face.

  My father later used the incident as an excuse to renege on his promise that my mother could raise me as a Mormon. “The day he’s baptized a Mormon, I’d throw you both out on the street.”

  “And the day you make him into another Catholic,” my mother said, “I’ll knife your evil heart in your sleep.” Between those two arguments, I never saw the inside of a church until well past my father’s death.

  FRANK’S BUILDING CODES DIGEST WAS A SUCCESS in Portland for two years running, and then he published a profitable Seattle edition. But even though he was dividing his time between two cities, the regularity of it all probably felt too much like capitulation to him. Frank wanted to pull up roots one more time and move back to the place where he and Bessie had first started: Salt Lake City. Bessie was furious at the idea. The family was finally settled, the kids were in school and had good friends— why disrupt all that? Besides, she had no desire to return to Utah. She didn’t want to live around her snotty sisters and deal with all their talk of one-upmanship regarding their husbands and fine homes, and she had no desire to be subject again to her parents’ judgments.

  Frank didn’t care. He had an old partner back in Salt Lake that he thought could really make Utah sales soar. Also, he thought all the bad blood between him and Bessie’s parents would be in the past, now that he had a successful and legitimate business.

  Bessie thought the truth was something else: Frank had simply not stopped running from his past yet. Sitting in one spot too long, he got sore from looking over his shoulder to see who might be catching up.

  In the spring after my birth, my parents sold the home on Crystal Springs Boulevard and packed the car for the trip to Utah. At Frank’s insistence, Bessie placed Queen with some next-door neighbors. She knew that the woman drank heavily and could act mean, so Bessie warned her that she should never whip the dog. Queen gave my mother a rueful look when she walked away, and bayed at her. It tore Bessie’s heart. She hated leaving Queen. She had never loved an animal before.

  Frank and Bessie fought the entire way to Salt Lake City—so persistently that Frankie, Gary, and Gaylen would sit in the back seat with their fingers in their ears, making mocking faces. Then my father would catch them from the rearview mirror and turn around and slap the laughs off their faces. A thousand miles of arguing and slapping.

  My mother, however, did get one advantage out of the trip. On June 7,1951, my family pulled into Elko, Nevada, and on that day, in a simple ceremony with a township justice of the peace, my parents were finally, lawfully married. They never let on to any of the kids about the belated event until my mother told Frank about it in the last few months of her life. When Frank told me, I was skeptical—I couldn’t imagine my mother as somebody who could have so long tolerated an “unlawful” marriage— and then I located a copy of the marriage certificate. “It looks like we were all born bastards,” I told Frank, when I showed him the document. We had a good laugh over that one.

  “Jesus,” said Frank, “what a thing to realize about your life, this far along.”

  IN SALT LAKE, MY PARENTS SETTLED INTO a small three-bedroom house on the fringe of the city. It lay close to the train tracks, which more or less divided the city. On the north side lived the good people—the Mormons and the acceptable Gentiles. South of the tracks was where the vagrants, immigrants, minorities, and hopelessly poor settled—in those days, a spacious, bleak no-man’s-land. My family lived just a few blocks north of the tracks. I think my father liked the idea of living on border
s. Maybe it gave him the sense that all he had to do was cross the train tracks and he would be again safely lost in America’s hinterlands. The family settled in, and promptly my father hit the road, selling advertising throughout Utah and Idaho for his new book.

  It didn’t take long for Bessie to figure out that her new home was haunted. She began to feel malevolent presences near her, and she heard noises, both day and night, that made no sense. She wasn’t the only one; the boys, too, felt these things breathing in their faces in the dark. After a while, my mother noticed that most of the odd occurrences seemed to take place in the rooms and space surrounding the family’s newest and youngest member—me. There were times when I would be alone in the bedroom, I was told later, and my mother and brothers would hear me babbling away, and they could swear they heard somebody talking back to me. But when they came into the room, it was just me, chattering and pointing. This went on for some time, and then one night, when my mother was home by herself with me, she heard the second voice again, this time more distinctly than before. She made her way quietly toward the room, and when she entered, she saw a face much like the one she had seen those years before at Fay’s, and she swore it was reaching out to kiss me. She yelled, and then it was gone. When my father came back to town, my mother tried to tell him about these things, but he wouldn’t take any of it seriously. He’d been around “hauntings” his whole life, he said, and he had never seen or known of an instance that could be called the real thing.