Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [143]
For their wedding, they decided to hit Sacramento. It turned out he had a mother lived there who had been in show business all her life.
When Betty asked what his father did, Frank also said show business.
Before they left Salt Lake, they stopped in Provo to see her folks. Having seven girls, her mother and dad weren't going to sit down and cry when they heard the news. On to Sacramento.
6
Frank hadn't told anything about his mother being beautiful. Betty was surprised. Fay had a scintillating smile. She was petite, her hair was white, and her eyes were so blue you couldn't believe it. Her skin was flawless. Her teeth were to perfection. She had no wrinkles.
Even at her advanced age, which must have been close to 70, she acted like a most regal queen.
Her stage name had been Baby Fay. Now she was a medium and rarely left her bed. Just lived in it, in the big bedroom of a big house in Sacramento, and ordered people around. She would command them like she was waving a wand. Never tried it with Betty, however.
All the same, Fay could carry things off. She let it drop that she was connected by blood to a very large and royal family in France, The Bourbons. "When you have children," Fay said, "the royal blood of France will flow in their veins."
Fay's maiden name was another matter. Betty never learned it. She had been in vaudeville around the turn of the century and when she hadn't used Baby Fay, she was Fay La Foe. That was it. Miss La Foe didn't tell you what she didn't want to.
Maybe once a week, Fay would give a séance. Sometimes forty people would gather in chairs around her bed, and pay $5 apiece, Betty didn't go. She didn't want to get too near such things. For that matter, you could be talking to Fay, and there would be a knock on the wall, or a thump on the ceiling. At night, Betty could feel presences walking over her bed. When they were married by Fay (who had a clergyman's license and was called a Spiritualist) Betty always wondered which spirits were in and around Fay's bed.
She and Frank began to travel. At the time she met him, Frank had lived in Salt Lake for more than a year, but that wasn't common. He liked to go state to state selling space in special magazines. They were as-yet-unpublished magazines that often did not get published.
He had different names. Seville and Sullivan and Kaufman and Coffman and Gilmore and La Foe. Once he told her that his father's name was Weiss and he was Jewish on that side although he thought of himself a Catholic since Fay had put him in Catholic schools and brought him up that way. Nonetheless, he had a Jewish wife in Alabama, and wives in other places. They were named Dolly and Nan and Babs and Millie and Barbara and Jacqueline and there was one who had been a famous opera singer. So far as Betty knew, he was divorced from them all.
But he sure had been in show business. Theatre people recognized him everywhere. They had free theatre tickets everywhere they traveled. One day they even drove across Salt Lake City. Never stopped. Just a quick minute across the wide, wide, forever wide streets. They must have traveled over the years through every state but Maine and New York. Stayed in hotels with names like Carillo Hotel and Semoh Hotel, Semoh for Homes spelled backwards. He had several birth certificates, but she never asked why they lived that way. He would have said, "If I thought it was any of your business, I would have told you years ago." Still, she was probably as strange to him as he was to her. She had been raised so root straight down that they never understood each other. No matter. She never tried. She thought you had to love people as they were. If you could change them, you would probably leave them anyway.
Frank drove a big car. Always put his short burly body in clothes where everything was big and loose and comfortable. If he didn't use suspenders, his pants were sure to hit the floor. She thought he looked like Glenn Ford. Years later, considering how chewed up his face had been by the lions, she decided