Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [203]
We both know he is wrong, but now that he has found my mother, he is obviously embarrassed by her and doesn’t want to jeopardize his chances with this younger woman. I turn to my mother. She smiles at me politely, timidly, an almost fragile smile. She looks old and frail, as if she would crumble if I put my arm around her, but she also looks happy and grateful that I have found her. In her eyes I see unimaginable sadness and fear, as if she is afraid of what I might say, or how I too might reject her. I put my arm around her, even though I know she’ll crumble, and then the dream ends.
WITH MY MOTHER DEAD AND FRANK DISAPPEARED, I felt like I no longer had a family. Blues singers will tell you about what an awful condition it can be to end up as a motherless child in this world—how devastating it can feel to be cut off from not just the love and solace that a mother can give, but also the wellsprings of your own history. To lose your mother, the singer says, is to lose your anchor in this world. Everything that made and protected you is now gone. You are adrift, and even if you find your place, you will have forever lost your most vital link to your ancestry. You will have lost something sacred.
I always liked those songs, but I don’t think that’s how I felt. Yes, I mourned my mother. I felt heartbroken and outraged for the pains she had suffered in her life, and it is true that in experiencing the knowledge of her death, I felt a sense of loss and severance—a feeling of absolutely piercing and inconsolable pain—that I did not feel with any of the other deaths in my family. In the seasons to come, I would miss talking to her and I’d miss the hope that someday I might be able to bring her good news that could help make up for all the decades of bad news that she had endured. In addition, I had now lost track of Frank, and I worried what might become of him, with his shyness and depression, in such an unkind land.
But the truth is, I did not feel lost in the world when I lost my family. If anything, I felt a relief: I was no longer tied to the wreckage that had been my family’s spirit, and whatever undoing might come in my life, at least now it would be my own. I would no longer have to sit around and dread the next kindred disaster.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, I met a young woman with eyes that I thought needed loving. Her name was Erin.
Like me, Erin had come from a family with a history of death and other troubles, and we each believed we might be able to help make up for some of the losses in the other person’s life. We fell in love, and in August 1982 we were married in Tucson, Arizona.
Around this same time, I learned that Larry Schiller was finishing a four-hour TV-film adaptation of The Executioner’s Song, for broadcast in November 1982. Schiller and I had not been on good terms in a long time. In 1977, right before Gary’s execution, I left Utah without talking to Schiller again or taking his calls. I had come to feel that his involvement in the whole affair had helped turn Gary’s execution into a media commodity and an invasive reality in my family’s life.
Later, after I’d moved to L.A., Schiller called me to say that he had convinced Norman Mailer to write a book about Gary’s life and death, and he asked me to contribute an interview to the work in progress. I declined. I respected Mailer, but I had too many doubts about Schiller’s credibility to participate in such a project. Also, I simply did not want to keep retelling and reliving the tragedy of my family.
When The Executioner’s Song was published in 1979, I realized that Schiller—who had conducted most of the interviews for Mailer’s book— had served his material more scrupulously than I might have imagined. Mailer did not attempt to make myth or discourse of Gary