Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [136]
“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,