Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [215]
I didn’t say a word. I don’t think I could have. I sat there, looking at my brother and thinking: This may be all the family I have left in the world, but it is family enough. I had never truly understood the depths of this man’s heart or the expanse of his loneliness, but maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe, just maybe, I was ready to learn something worthwhile about the fidelity born of blood.
FOR THE NEXT YEAR, FRANK AND I GOT TOGETHER at my apartment a few times each week and talked about our past. Frank told me many of the stories that I have repeated here, and through him, I managed to come to a fuller and more balanced understanding of our family. As it turned out, Frank has a remarkable memory, and an impressive knack for recalling vivid details. Time and again, he steered me to elements of the family’s story that I had never suspected, and when he couldn’t answer my questions or didn’t know the solutions to all the various mysteries, he simply told me so. In the course of all this, I got to know my brother in a way I had never known him before, and we each found a chance to talk about difficult experiences and legacies in the sort of candid way that probably too few siblings ever get with one another.
I also came to understand, more indelibly than ever, how much Frank had paid over the years for being a son and brother in our family. One day Frank showed up at my door, looking terribly wrought up. He could barely speak for the first half hour or so. As he began to talk, he told me about a phobia that he had been afflicted with for years. It’s a complex phobia—in part, a fear of blushing or self-consciousness, the sort of fear that inevitably only feeds on itself and becomes worse. But it is also a fear of guilt or judgment. On this particular occasion, the phobia had been activated by an incident that had occurred in a grocery store a short while before. The woman behind the counter had said something that caused Frank to suspect that she thought he might be a shoplifter. Apparently he had felt he was being watched by the woman during other visits to the store. “I’m afraid of being judged guilty for things I haven’t done,” he told me. “I’m afraid that people think I’m a thief or a killer. Sometimes I feel like I’m just alone in this fucking life—it’s me against the world.”
This is not a small fear. In part, Frank believes that the phobia derives from his having been the brother of a murderer. I think it probably goes beyond that. From the time he was a child, Frank—like some of the rest of us—believed he was responsible for the unhappiness in our parents’ marriage. That’s a big thing for a child to feel guilty about. Then, as he grew older, every time that Gary got punished by my father for something that he did do, Frank got punished along with him, whether he was innocent or not. Such treatment—especially when administered consistently and brutally over the years—would be enough to give anyone a deep fear of being thought guilty.
As I sat and watched my brother cry that day, I realized how deeply the world’s judgments had been embedded in him. More than any of us, Frank has never stopped paying for what happened in our family. He pays for Gary and my mother and my father every day of his life, and that payment has driven him into a fearful and private place.
IN THE MIDDLE OF 1991, FRANK AND I TOOK A TRIP TO UTAH. I wanted to see firsthand the places where my mother had grown up and where my parents had met, and to see, also, the places where Gary had done all his damage. I also