Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [39]
In a way, whether any of these tales were true or not hardly mattered. We believed these claims about our lives, and so we acted upon them. Still, when I began this task, I hoped to find as much truth about these legends as I could. I must admit, Fay was adept at covering her tracks— she managed to hide most of her life story and significant parts of her son’s story. But she left one small piece of evidence behind. I suspect it may be one of the sad keys to the whole fucking tragedy.
HERE IS WHAT I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT FAY’S WORLD, and the circumstances of my father’s birth:
On November 7, 1869, Fay’s mother, a seventeen-year-old woman named Josephine St. Louis, married a man named Lewis Lavois, a twenty-seven-year-old shoemaker, in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Both of these people were born in French Canada, but their French origins are largely untraceable. If there’s any royal connection in either lineage, it’s as good as lost. I have never found a birth record for Fay—who reportedly was born January 8, 1871—in either Canada or Massachusetts, though it is probable she was born in the latter place.
Fay’s family next turns up in the 1880 U.S. Census, in Lancaster County, Nebraska. By this time, they have a new surname, Lancton, and the father is now listed as Peter, a forty-six-year-old carpenter. One experienced genealogist who helped me trace these histories believes that the Lewis Lavois who disappeared from Massachusetts in the 1870s and the Peter Lancton of Nebraska in the 1880s (also listed as Peter Lancto in some accounts) were different people. For one thing, Lancton is listed as being ten years older than Lavois. I’m not so sure. Given Fay’s claim that the family had undergone some sort of identity change—and that there was never any mention of a second father—I’m not so sure that Lavois and Lancton weren’t the same man. In any event, this much is certain: In Nebraska in 1880, Josie was living with a man named Peter Lancton, and that is the surname that the family would remain known by.
The Lanctons, like the Browns, were basically poor with several children. They moved frequently during their Lincoln years, usually around the fringes of the city, from one small home to another. Driving through their old neighborhoods recently, I discovered that probably little had changed about the dismal area in which they once lived. It would be a stultifying environment for a young person in any era, then or now. To survive it, you would either have to be as dull as the land around you, or you would need an imagination that could transcend its flatness.
Here’s where Fay’s story starts to break down: From what I can tell, she never went with her sisters to perform at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1890. Instead, on July 31, 1886, Fay—who was known in Lincoln as Fannie—had married a man named Harry Noole Gilmore, in Omaha, Nebraska. Harry, who was born in Illinois, would not prove a man of significant means. According to the Lincoln City Directory’s listings for this period, Harry and Fannie spent much of their time living with her family. Sometimes Harry worked as Peter Lancton’s carpenter’s assistant, and sometimes he worked as a Lincoln City streetcar driver.
A little over a year after their marriage, on August 26, 1887, Fannie and Harry had their first child, a boy named Clarence. Then, on October 31, 1890, Harry and Fannie’s young son Clarence died, and was buried at Lincoln’s Wyuka Cemetery. Three weeks after the burial, on November 23, 1890, my father, Frank Harry Gilmore, was