Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [218]
Bessie went on to tell Ida that she and Robert had a brief affair shortly after she had married my father, during one of the times when Frank Sr. had left her alone in Sacramento with his mother and estranged son. Bessie had liked Robert, and Robert had liked her, plus the affair had been a way of paying Frank Sr. back for all his abandonments. Bessie had not meant to become pregnant, but when she did, she knew it would be easy enough to convince Frank Sr. that the child was his. Still, my father had always suspected something. Ironically, he thought that Gary might have been Robert’s son, and perhaps that played into his later special dislike for Gary, and the intensity with which he beat him. Perhaps the secret also figured into why Bessie used to beat Frankie when he was a little boy. Maybe every time she looked at him, she remembered the affair. Maybe she felt guilt or shame, maybe she blamed the child. In any event, Frank Jr. was the only one of us that my mother ever beat regularly. Between her and my father, Frank Jr. and Gary paid a lot for that secret.
I had known about this story for some time, but I wanted to try to confirm it with the family in Utah, if possible. I had not yet told my brother Frank. I didn’t know how to. At the same time, Frank and I had made a deal to tell each other whatever truths or rumors we learned. He had told me things that had troubled him deeply to tell me. After Utah—where Vern and Brenda confirmed the rumor as much as possible and filled in some of the details—I realized I had to tell Frank what I knew.
During one of our last visits, I told Frank I had something to tell him.
He took a seat. “Is it a shocker?”
I said yes, it was. And then I told him. He took it in quietly for a while. When he spoke, it was in a low voice. “I’d heard Dad insinuate something like that once or twice with Mom. He was screaming it at her at the time, saying that she and Robert had this thing, and that he had always known about it. I’d heard him, but I thought he was just shooting his mouth off, trying to get at her.
“I guess that explains a few things. I guess it explains why I’m kind of fucked up emotionally. And I guess it explains why Mom was always so hard on me. I mean, after Dad died, Gary and Gaylen were in trouble constantly. They were mining her. But she always had a lot of love for them. I was the one that had to bust my ass to try and keep her going as best I could and in turn I got nothing but just hatred, hatred, hatred.”
Frank paused and looked at me, his face in pain. “So this means Dad wasn’t my father. It means my half brother was my father, and Dad was my grandfather. But what I want to know is, since you and I don’t have the same father, does it mean that you’re still my brother?”
“I will always be your brother,” I said, “and you will always be my brother. Nothing will change that. I’m sorry I had to tell you this. I wondered for a long time whether I should. It’s kind of a hard thing to talk about.”
Frank looked down, trying to blink back his tears. “Everything in our family,” he said, “is hard to talk about.”
I HAVEN’T SEEN FRANK SINCE THAT LAST VISIT. I had to go back to Los Angeles to finish my work, and he preferred to stay in Portland. We rarely talkon the phone, because Frank doesn’t have one. We write each other now and then, though. Frank is the better letter writer.
A while back he sent me a letter in which he tried to fill in some of the things about our family life that he had never gotten around to telling me. I read this letter over and over.
Here is some of what it says:
During