Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [37]
Fay was willing to let Bessie in on some of Frank’s other names—she figured the couple would be living under those names soon enough anyway. Frank, she said, had made equal use of such forenames as Frank, Francis, Franklin, Harry, and Walter. His last names had included Ingram, Seville, Sullivan, Lancton, LaFoe, Collier, and Coffman; he had even sometimes used his real name of Weiss, though Fay had always discouraged that. As to why he had chosen the other names, Bessie would have to ask Frank. And then there were the wives and the children. Frank’s first son, called Christopher, had been born in Baltimore, in 1914 (a year after Bessie). He was born illegitimate—as far as Fay knew, Frank’s only illegitimate child—and had been adopted by a good Baltimore family. Even though the boy was adopted, Frank still kept contact with him over the years and so did Fay. Christopher now worked in show business and wrote Fay occasionally. He had even come to visit her. It was through Christopher, she said, that she managed to keep loose track of Frank in the years after he abandoned Robert.
A couple of years after Christopher’s birth, Frank had a brief, stormy courtship with a famous opera singer in New York, which resulted in a briefer, stormier marriage, and a fast, nasty annulment. Then there had been the marriage to Nan, and after Frank showed up with Robert, he stopped contacting Fay. A few years later she learned from Christopher that, in 1928, under the name Walter Coffman, Frank had married a seventeen-year-old woman named Barbara Solomon, in Greenville, Alabama. They’d had two children, a boy and a girl. After that, Fay thought there might have been a family in Seattle, under the name Lancton, and probably at least one or two childless marriages. As far as she knew, Frank always legitimately married and divorced the women—Robert’s mother, Nan, being a possible exception in the divorce department. At the same time, since he never married any two women under the same name, Fay wasn’t sure what difference all the niceties made, though they seemed to matter to Frank.
But the marriages, said Fay, were only a part of Frank’s story. “You have picked an interesting man to marry,” she told Bessie. “Nobody has ever held him for very long. But I have a better feeling about you than the others.”
WHEN IT CAME TIME FOR FAY TO TALK ABOUT HER OWN PAST, Bessie found the old woman could be just as redeem and mysterious as her son. Fay claimed she had been born in French Canada and that her father had been a descendant of the royal French House of Bourbon. In the 1870s, according to Fay, circumstances had forced her parents to move their family to Lincoln, Nebraska, and change its name to Lancton. Fay would not say what the original family name had been or what had caused the move. Like Bessie, Fay had several sisters, and they had all tired of small-town life. In the late 1880s, they had put together a song and dance act and hit the road. In early 1890, they performed at the Chicago World’s Fair as Iva and the Lancton Sisters. It was there, said Fay, that she had met the man who would be Frank’s father—a man who had gone on to great fame. Fay would not reveal his identity. “If I told you who it was,” she said, “it would shock you.” Fay had briefly loved the man but then soon hated him forever. After she became pregnant with his child, he disavowed knowledge of her, and she returned to Lincoln, disgraced, and delivered Frank, on November 23, 1890.
“Where did the name Gilmore come from?” asked Bessie.
“A man I knew back in Nebraska.”
Suddenly Bessie remembered one of the few things Frank had ever told her about his father: He said that he had been killed by a blow to his stomach. Was that the man named Gilmore, or was that Frank’s real father?
“I’m surprised Frank told you that,” said Fay. “No, that was not Gilmore. He wasn’t in our life for long, and I have no idea what became of him. The man who was killed from being hit