Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [220]
I go on and I tell what I think will make a difference: I tell the judges how Gary was beaten as a child, how he was forced to watch his mother being beaten, how he was abandoned and abused a thousand times.
Nobody seems to think that what I’m disclosing matters. Gary himself shrugs it off. The judges rule that my testimony is irrelevant. “What happens to the child doesn’t absolve the man,” says one judge.
But then there is a curious flaw in the dream’s logic—or at least in the judges’ logic. The judges learn that Gary has a dark-haired daughter, about three years old. They decide that, as Gary’s offspring, the girl has been too contaminated by him to survive. If Gary wants to die, the judges rule, then his child must die alongside him. Gary accepts this.
I am livid at this decision. I am so angry, I am dragged from the courtroom. I try prevailing on everybody I encounter to see the injustice, the cruelty and the waste of this judgment. But nobody seems unduly bothered by it. Gary is willing to accept the cost of the child’s death to win his own end.
I now no longer care about what happens to my brother. I want to save this child. I try to fight it until the last moment—until somebody comes to me, standing outside the prison in the dark, and tells me: “The child is dead.”
When I learn this, I break down in a crushed, insatiable grief I cannot believe that this has happened. I cannot imagine life going on or being tolerable in the face of this loss. I can’t live with something this unbearable.
I AWAKEN THEN, MY INSIDES RACKED in a sharp pain. I find I am truly crying. I lie there in the dark sobbing, and though I know no child has actually died, I can’t stop crying. It feels like a real loss, and it feels like I can’t live with it.
I get up and look at the clock. It is four-thirty in the morning. I go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of whiskey. I go back and sit up in bed in the darkness. I sit there a long time. I finish my whiskey, slip under the covers, pull a pillow over my head to keep out the horrible morning light I hate so much. I curl up and I tell myself: “It will never be all right. Never. It will never be all right.” I say this to myself over and over, until I find enough comfort in the words that I am able to fall asleep again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY PEOPLE HELPED ME DURING THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERING and telling this story.
Chief among them were my brother, Frank Gilmore, Jr., and Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer.
When I went looking for my brother at the end of 1991, after ten years of absence from each other’s lives, I had no idea what his state of heart or mind might be, and I couldn’t begin to guess how he might feel about the prospect of me writing a book about our family past, which we had both done our best to distance ourselves from. Though Frank had some real misgivings about exhuming that past and putting some of its less pleasant aspects forward for public scrutiny, he was amazingly gracious in his willingness to share with me everything he knew about that difficult history. In the end, Frank and I did something like a hundred hours of interviews—if interviews is the right word to apply to two brothers’ intimate conversations—and over the course of those discussions, my own sense of the story I was telling underwent a dramatic change. Frank had no desire to condemn or rehabilitate anybody in our family’s history—himself included; he simply wanted to tell his stories as plainly and evenhandedly as he remembered them. Time and again, I was astonished at his ability for vivid, detailed recall, and I was constantly humbled by his depth and unaffected eloquence.
This book is dedicated