Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [208]
The day they left, Mrs. Cohen and she cried as they said goodbye, and Mrs. Cohen said, "You're lucky not to stay in that house. It's an evil house."
7
Frank was never good with the boys again, and Gary certainly changed, and later they would fight all the time.
Back in Porttland, Gary used profane language in abundance. It came out of him in a sulfurous streak. It sounded to Bessie as if some foul and abomidable demon was just walking out of his mouth. So she started a family game-"You won't have to use such language," she told the boys, "if you have a big vocabulary."
One of them would open the dictionary and pick a word. Then another would give the meaning and spell it. Through the years they developed a knowledge of words to stump their teachers.
She was a lenient mother. If she promised they could go to the show on Saturday they got to go, even if they had knocked the house down. Their father was the opposite. Tip over a glass of milk, that did it. So they lived under two systems.
Of course, more than half of Frank's business was in Seattle. He would come back only every other weekend to fight with Gary.
It would start over nothing. Shut the door behind you, Frank would say. Shut it yourself, Gary would reply. They would be up and yelling. You could cut the air with a knife. Bess knew the meaning of those words.
Yet the first tine Gary got in trouble, Frank was there to bail him out. Hired a private detective a couple of times to prove that Gary hadn't done what Bess knew very well he had done. She spoiled Gary on his good side, and Frank on the bad.
After Gary was caught stealing a car, they put him in Reform School. Once a month Bessie and Frank went to visit, and would picnic on the grass. MacLaren didn't seem any worse from the outside than a couple of private schools she'd seen on her travels, nice red tile roofs and yellow stucco two-story buildings. A large green campus.
He had been a bad boy when he went in, he was a hard young man when he came out. It was like a void had entered the house. His teachers reported that he had no interest in studying. Slept through the days. At night, Bessie would ask him, "Where are you going?" "Out to find trouble," Gary would reply, "find some trouble."
Once or twice he came back badly beaten up. He had a very bad temper, and it screeched right at you. She just prayed he would learn to curb it. He got so scarred in his fights she couldn't stand it. Came home one night at dawn and collapsed on the doorstep. His eye was almost out of his head. They had to take him to the hospital.
He was twenty years old before he came close to being actually violent with his father. By then Frank was too sick to pursue it. Bess had to ask Gary to leave the house for the night.
8
One year, there were riots in Oregon State, and Gary took part in them, and was interviewed on TV. A girl saw the show, started corresponding, and liked him enough to visit. According to Gary she was 26, her name was Becky and she was very fat. Nonetheless, she wrote beautiful letters. He told Bessie he was going to marry her and adopt her little boy.
Becky, however, had an ulcer, and went into surgery, and came home from the operation, and died.
The prison would not let Gary go to the funeral. He was not a relative. Bessie sent flowers in his name.
Not too long after this, Gary and four other convicts in Isolation slashed their wrists. The next time Grace saw him, he was on Prolixin. Looked as if he had left