Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  “Oh, my son,” he says, “I am so happy to see you. How did I ever lose you?” Then, he begins to cry.

  I hold him and I say: “It’s okay, Father. I’ve missed you too. I’m glad to have you back. We’ll be all right.”

  It occurs to me that now I can learn the answers to so many bothersome questions. I can ask my father who he was and what he did, and he will tell me.

  But as I think this, I feel him collapse in my arms, and I feel the life leave him. I am standing there holding my dead father, and finally I can’t help it: I cry.

  MY FATHER WAS DEAD. He had been an often unreasonable and violent man—more so for my brothers than for me—and he had managed to sire and sustain a family at the same time he helped damage the souls and hopes of the people within that family.

  My brother Frank and I have spent many hours in the last few years talking about the complexities of this man. We both suspect that so much of what was awful and strong in his sons came from someplace inside him. We also suspect that there were ways in which we lived out his legacy for him—ways that we carried on his fear and his damnation. But what has stymied us, as we have talked about him, is that we do not know what the sources are for all that ruin. We do not know the secrets that he kept, the secrets that he took with him. Without that knowledge, it’s as if there’s a part of ourselves we can never unlock. And it isn’t a small part. As I said before, it may be the deepest, most essential part: the part of us that has always turned love into ruin.

  “I have never known what Dad’s big secrets were,” Frank told me one evening. “Whenever I would ask him about those things, he would just say: ‘It’s better to keep your nose out of other people’s business.’

  “But even without those secrets, I think Dad would have lived the same life. I think being a drifter was important to him. He was basically in many ways a lonely man, but he also enjoyed being a lonely man at times. He really was a kind of a … I don’t know if you would call it a Jekyll and Hyde, because neither one of his natures were, in my opinion, bad. But he was a dual personality; there were two of him. One was a family man—he didn’t want to be without a family. But after a few weeks of that, the novelty would wear off and he had to go back to being a drifter. And after he was a drifter a while, he would get tired of that and want to come back to the family. So he was grabbing both sides of life, the two things he wanted: a family and independence. That was a large source of the trouble between him and Mom. She would fight with him about having to live that way, and he’d retaliate by hitting the bottle and splitting. There really wasn’t any pretense or mystery about it. He was tired of Mom and tired of the family, and he just had to go. In a way, he did that up until the end of his life. And he left behind him a family of drifters.

  “The funny thing is, the more I’ve thought about him recently, the more I have come to respect him. He made some remarkable changes toward the end of his life. The way he stopped drinking and built a successful business. The way he decided he was going to love and protect you, his last son. I think in time, Mikal, you would have had the same troubles with him the rest of us had. You would have started thinking for yourself or shown a little defiance, and he wouldn’t have liked that. He would have tried to break you. His dying spared you that. As a result, you got to know—and keep—the best part of him that anybody got to know. He was good with you, and I respect him for that.

  “For the rest of us …” Frank paused, and looked back into his past. For a moment, I saw years of agony ripple through his facial muscles. “Well,” he continued, “let’s put it this way: Dad was a bitter man to have to be raised by. He could be hard. He could hurt you when you weren’t prepared for it. He could walk out on you and forget about how you were doing until the next time he saw you or needed you. It wasn’t fun. I remember kids that we grew up with used to tell us they felt sorry for us. I heard that several times. That kind of speaks for itself. He was a bitter man to be raised by.

  “I would not want to go through childhood again. Not for anything. Once was enough.”

  MY FATHER, OF COURSE, WASN’T THE ONLY FORCE for good or bad in my family. My mother was part of what kept the structure intact. On those many occasions when my father walked out on her, leaving her in some bus depot or flophouse in Bumfuck, U.S.A., she would take her boys by the hand and find them a safe place to sleep, or a way to get them all back to the hated refuge of Utah. She protected her children scrupulously at those times, and she did her best to carry them through a world that she could never have expected to find herself in.

  It all had to be a terrible disappointment. There must have been a great gulf between what my mother counted on from tying her fate to my father and what she got. I imagine she had been attracted to Frank Gilmore because he seemed somewhat glamorous, particularly in comparison to the Mormon rubes she had grown up around. She was romantic and young and unrealistic enough to think he was going to take her to a new, exciting, better world. As a friend of mine noted: “Your mother sounds like she was prone to delusions of grandeur, and your father sounds like just the guy to feed those delusions. He probably looked like a pretty slick package, and I’m sure he was the most charming person she’d ever seen outside of a movie.”

  So my mother married him, and entered his vagabond life, traipsing around the country with a bunch of kids and a man who would periodically dump her. I think it’s fair to say that her dreams didn’t work out, yet, in a way that was both heartening and foolhardy, she never lost sight of one or two of those hopes. She kept longing for a grand home to put us all in, and it was her hunger and anger alone that finally got us that home, for whatever it was worth.

  Of course, like my father, my mother failed to do many things she probably should have done. Most important, she failed to leave my father, despite all the beatings, abandonments, and cruelties that he heaped on both her and her sons. I remember Larry Schiller asking my mother, during one of their conversations: Why did she stay with my father? My mother’s reply was matter-of-fact and heartbreaking. “Where would I have gone?” she said. “Who else would have had me? I stayed because that was all I could do. I decided early on, you take the good and the bad with somebody—you can’t change them. Anyway, Frank didn’t have to keep coming back to me. I asked him once why he did, and he said: ‘Ah, hell, I’m too old to find anybody else. Besides, I guess I like your cooking.’”

  My mother’s failure to leave my father was not a unique thing. People stay in bad relationships all the time in the world around us. Women stay with men who hurt them emotionally and physically, and men stay with women who berate them or shut them out. Sometimes you stay because you love the person, and you can’t imagine life without looking into that lover’s face. Maybe you hope things will improve. Maybe the love blinds you—maybe you don’t know you’re being abused. My brother Frank asked my mother once why she put up with all the beatings from my father—especially the ones that left her face knotted with ugly, black lumps and bruises. “Hell,” she said, “I asked for all that. I’d mouth off too much and your father would put me in my place. I deserved it. It’s as simple as that.” Her answer—the idea that she believed she had earned the horrible beatings—makes me angry and sad, but it also makes plain that sometimes we accept the misery of a relationship, and we can’t imagine ourselves outside of that misery. It becomes part of our identity. The idea of leaving the misery becomes more fearful than the prospect of staying with it. You might not know who you were if you left that dynamic—you might have to make yourself all over again. Or, at least, you might have to find somebody else you could make the same mistakes with all over again.

  I think my mother truly loved my father, and I think my father truly loved my mother. Once, during one of their interviews, Schiller remarked to my mother: “It sometimes sounds like you were awestruck by your husband.” She replied: “Well, I could see him as a person with many flaws and everything else. But I still, you know, even to the last day of his life, I would still feel
that little click, that beat of my heart, when he’d drive his car up into the driveway. The way he would be seated behind the wheel, all smiles and confidence, or the way he’d be sitting at his desk. That would really win you over.”

  “How would he sit at his desk?” asked Schiller.

  “Oh, like he just would have to do everything so well, and was so unconcerned that you were even in the same room. Then he would get up and walk across the room for something and he’d reach over and pat you under the chin or something. So you would know he was aware of you, even though he’d acted like he was too busy to notice.”

  I had never known my mother to talk this way about my father. I had never before heard such a tenderness in her voice. Beneath those words, I could tell that her heart was cracking as she spoke.

  I remember the look on my father’s face as he sat and held my mother’s hand that night I found them in the kitchen. I remember my mother hearing the news of his death, and crying out from such an astonishing place of loss and loneliness. Yes, those two people loved each other. It is plainer now in retrospect than it ever was when they were alive. Or maybe I can just see it a little better now, having learned for myself what a bittersweet thing love can be. From my vantage, love—no matter how deep or desperate it may be—is not reason enough to stay in a bad relationship, especially when the badness of it all is damaging or malforming other people. But I didn’t get to make that choice for my parents, any more than I get to make it for you.

  Of course, there were other reasons my mother stayed. For one, she was a woman in a world that did not encourage women to leave their husbands or find their own way. There were few job options, few support systems available for an untrained woman with several children. She was trapped, whether she knew it or not, in a way that many women before and since have been trapped.

  But perhaps the single greatest reason my mother stayed was for the children. Certainly, this is one of the foremost arguments that some people will raise against divorce: the disorienting impact that the separation might have on the children, and how hard it will be for them to find healthy nurturance and a moral paradigm in a single-parent structure. As I think about myself and my brothers, I have to wonder if a divorce would have produced worse results than what the marriage produced: four deeply troubled boys, two of whom helped bring on their own terrible deaths. I hear people argue against separation, and I’m afraid that what is really being said is: Stay together for the sake of the family. Do anything for the sanctity and unity of the family. This is the message that we have heard from history time and time again: There is nothing worse than sundering your family’s integrity. The family—and the privacies of its authority—must be preserved.

  God, I hate families. I see them walking in their clean clusters in a shopping mall, or I hear friends talking about family get-togethers and family problems, or I visit families in their homes, and I inevitably resent them. I resent them for whatever real happiness they may have achieved, and because I didn’t have such a family in my life. And I despise them for the ways in which the notion of the family good is still used to shame or subjugate the children within the family, long past the time when they’ve become adults.

  But perhaps I’m protesting too much here. The truth is, I do not judge my parents harshly at all. I do not feel an ounce of hatred or bitterness toward either of them, though maybe I should. I love my parents. These days, I miss them both terribly. But there is something ironic that I have had to recognize about my act of contemplating my own family: In a better world, I would not be telling this story because this story would never have happened. In a better world, my parents would not have met—or at least they would not have married and had a family. In a better world, I would never have been born.

  What sad and wretched people Frank Gilmore and Bessie Brown were. I love them, but I have to say: It is heartrending they ever had children at all.

  IN HIS LIFE, MY FATHER WAS A SOURCE OF MUCH OF THE HEARTBREAK and violence in the family, but also an able and resourceful provider. We were hardly rich or socially prominent but we lived well. Now, with him dead, we would have to find a way to take care of ourselves.

  My father’s business—his annual compendiums of state and county building codes—was still viable. My mother, as well as all my brothers, had worked with him on the enterprise at one time or another. They all knew how the ads were sold and how copy was gathered and laid out, and they knew how to do billing. They also had two or three salesmen who had remained loyal to my father and were willing to help the family keep the business afloat.

  But things went bad from the start. Frank Jr. had been hoping to leave our house soon—get his own place, maybe start his own family. Now, he thought he should forestall those plans for a year or two and help my mother make the transition to a self-sufficient life. Frank went to Seattle to finish the work on the current edition of Building Codes Digest, and he took Gaylen with him. But as fast as Frank would collect the advertisers’ payments, Gaylen would turn around and draw the cash from the bank. Then he would stay out late, getting drunk, chasing women, and winding up too hungover to do his share of the work. Frank and Gaylen had a couple of fights about this state of affairs, and Frank could see all the good work was going nowhere. He sent Gaylen back home and stayed on in Seattle. In a few weeks, he had collected all the payments, sent the money to my mother, got the book to publication on time, and closed out the Seattle apartment. He didn’t want to continue supervising the business, but he thought he could do a fair job of helping my mother find a good partner to manage the concern. But when Frank arrived back in Milwaukie, he had a grim surprise waiting for him: Gaylen had wrecked the family car and had been arrested for drunk driving. He had also cashed a number of checks on the family’s bank account. All the money Frank had made in Seattle had been eaten up by Gaylen’s fines and legal fees, and repair costs for the car.

  Meantime, a rival salesman in the Portland area began a competitive publication, and several of my father’s older clients had gone his way. The salesman offered to buy out our business and the rights to the name, but my mother refused, and threatened to sue. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but within a year or so of my father’s death, my family lost all control and interest in the Building Codes Digest, and competitors had the field to themselves.

  Still, the family wasn’t without options. Though my father had not carried life insurance, he had left a fair amount of money in the bank. Frank estimates it may have been as much as $30,000 or more—enough to live on for a while in the early 1960s. Frank thought the family should give up the large home on the hill and move to a more moderate and affordable place. After all, he pointed out, Gary was hardly ever around these days, Gaylen couldn’t be counted on, and Frank himself planned on moving out in a couple of years. There was no reason to keep such a big and costly house. If my mother sold it now, he told her, she could profit nicely and put that money into a smaller but still comfortable home and have plenty left to live on.

  Frank’s proposal became the beginning of an ongoing argument between him and my mother that would last for the remainder of their life together. It would also, in an odd way, end up keeping Frank tied to my mother’s fate, when all he wanted was to escape her world. The first time Frank suggested moving into a smaller place, after having gone through all the family’s financial records, my mother exploded bitterly. She did not want a smaller house. “You want me to give up my home and go live in a trailer, like a tramp,” she screamed, and then picked up a plate of food and threw it on the floor. No doubt the thought of giving up our nice new home was hard for her, especially after waiting so many years to have it. Also, I think she held out hope that the beautiful house was the one thing that might still bind us together. She wanted to keep it as a safe harbor for her sons to come home to, and since it was such a big, demanding place, we would all have to remain there to maintain its upkeep and grandeur. In other words, the house was what could save us— or at least keep us
all under the same roof.

  My mother defied Frank’s counsel in a way that she could never have defied my father. When the issue hit a boiling point between them, she finally agreed: She would go find a new house for us to live in. After a few days of searching she had found the place and was having a contract prepared. She wanted us to go see it. It turned out to be an even larger house, on an even grander, more expensive hill. She had made her point. Frank gave in. We would stay in the house on Oatfield.

  After winning the showdown, my mother went out and bought a nice new piano, new furniture, new appliances, and a new television. Within six months of my father’s death, Frank figures she had gone through at least $10,000. But that wasn’t what ended up breaking the family. What broke us was the trouble that was about to happen with Gary and Gaylen.

  IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING OUR FATHER’S DEATH, Gaylen’s life started to grow wilder. He was now drinking more frequently and more openly, and while he was generally a funny or harmless drunk, he would sometimes sit in the dark and glare at the rest of us in ways that frightened me. I could never understand why my mother let my brothers bring liquor into the home and drink while they were still minors. I guess in part it was her belief that you couldn’t force somebody to change their behavior—that you had to allow them to make their own mistakes. Or maybe it was just a practical resignation. They were going to drink anyway, she figured, so why not let them do it in a friendly and safe environment, where they wouldn’t get in trouble or get arrested? I also suspect it may have been plain fear. I think that in some ways, despite all her love and support of Gary and Gaylen, my mother was also afraid of them— she knew that anything that smacked of a mandate or a regulation might produce an ugly reaction on their part. Yet I remember that when I would watch my brothers sit and drink. I sometimes sensed the threat of uncontrollable actions on their part—in particular, the chance of violence. I saw something that was dangerous and mean in Gary and Gaylen’s red, bleary eyes. They may have smiled a lot when they were drunk, but I thought I saw mean thoughts going on behind those smiles—like the idea of stealing something the family could not live without simply because they wanted the money, or maybe just wiping us all out for the hell of it.