Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [142]
Others saw her as restless. She was on her way. She went hitchhiking with girl friends to Salt Lake City and beyond. She went hitching, at last, to California. She would go and work awhile and then come back. Her parents did not ask that many questions, there were so many gifts. You were raised to know what was right, and then free to do wrong. Since you were a Mormon, you had been taught exactly how to act, but Christ gave you free will to work out your destiny. Bess would do what she wanted to do, and she left home more and more.
Those were years that belonged to her, and she would never tell anybody about them. It irked her that she became the subject of gossip in Grandview Ward, where they would talk of how she came back from long trips with fine dresses and jewelry. It gave her no pleasure that most of those fine dresses had been cut and sewed by Bessie Brown herself, and if she had a little jewelry, it was on the strength of her fine fingers that could model rings. So she told them.
She was in love with a man, and lived in Salt Lake because he lived there, and did housework for an old lady who kept a large house, and lived in a small hotel room by herself. When the love affair was over, she didn't date. It was a year when she lived alone and was still too young to suffer from being alone. She rather liked it.
She had a friend named Ava Rodgers who drank too much and lived around, and was staying with a man she called Daddy. Daddy sold ads for Utah Magazine for $100 a page and got 25 percent commission. Ava was very much in love with him, she said. He had something that sure got women.
"Daddy bought me a new typewriter today," Ava told Bessie and invited her to their room. Bessie didn't drink-"one of those," she would always say-but Ava had a couple of beers while waiting for Daddy. Then she tried to pick up the typewriter and bounced it on the floor, and of course it broke. A brand-new typewriter. This happened just as Daddy walked in. He was not tall, but he was rugged, and he wore spats. He sure had confidence, and he sure had a temper. Poor Ava. It was not her typewriter, Bess soon learned. Just another lie, just another sob. Daddy had a look on his face like Ava had ninety-five items on her unpaid bill, and this was the ninety-sixth. "Pack your things, and get out," he said.
The next time Bess met Daddy was on the street and his name, she learned, was Frank Gilmore. "I'm getting married tomorrow," he said.
"Congratulations," she said.
When she saw him next in the street, she asked, "How's married life?"
"It's over with," he said.
She liked him. He was worldly-wise, and she was just a farmerette. He always knew where he was going. They could shop in a dime store or an expensive place, they could even have stood in a soup line, what with it being '37, but she felt comfortable. Even felt comfortable when she was yelling at him.
He was a very factual man and tough. He told her he had been a lion tamer and had scars on his face. Had been an acrobat and a tightrope walker, he said, and had a limp. Once, in vaudeville, he told her, he had been so drunk while doing his act that he fell into the orchestra pit from a height. Broke his ankle. Now he was in his late forties, and had gray hair but he still had a look that seemed to assume every woman he met was carrying his mattress on her back. Betty loved the way women were attracted. First man she ever wanted to chase.
She never knew that he really proposed to her. One day they were walking out of a movie, and he said, "Let's get married." To get down on his knees would have killed him. He would have died right there. So he asked her coming out of Captains Courageous.
He was sober, too. The kind of man who stayed that way until he decided to take a drink. Then he went on until petrified. A few years later, in their travels,