Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [40]
There isn’t much left to the Nebraska story after that. In early 1893, Fannie sued her husband for divorce—an event novel enough to be noted in the Nebraska State Journal, under the headline: “Divorce Market Good.” The February 28, 1893 story read: “Fannie Gilmore wants the district court to give her a divorce from Harry Gilmore, and to that end she filed a petition yesterday. She states that Harry married her at Omaha, in July, 1886, and that ever since that time, he has neglected to provide any support for her. She adds that she has been compelled to eke out a living by manual labor, and by the assistance which relatives rendered her. The court is requested also to give Mrs. Gilmore the custody of her child.”
Following the divorce, Fannie and her son moved back in with her parents. In 1896, the Lanctons moved to the East, where the sisters worked together for a few years, dancing and singing on the Northeastern vaudeville circuit. Meantime, Harry Gilmore appeared in the Lincoln City Directory until 1895, as a bellboy at the Lincoln Hotel. That was the last anybody heard of him until June 11, 1911, when this item appeared in the Nebraska State Journal: “SCOTTS BLUFF, NEB. JUNE IO—Harry Gilmore, 40 years old, died at the Scotts Bluff hospital yesterday of typhoid fever. Nothing could be found in his effects that could give a clue who his friends or relatives are, or where he came from. He has been working at the sugar factory and the boys at the factory will have charge of the funeral tomorrow.”
After the 1890s, Fay vanished from the family’s records, or from any recorded history for many years after that. The next anybody heard of her was around 1920, when she was in Sacramento, conjuring up spirits under the name Baby Fay LaFoe. Frank Gilmore, meanwhile, went on to lead his own life of hidden history.
THAT IS THE TRUE STORY OF MY FATHER’S ORIGIN, as far as I have been able to determine. I do not believe that he was the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini, though I suspect that my father believed it. If he ever remembered his real father, or knew anything about Harry’s lonely fate, Frank Gilmore never mentioned it. At the same time, not all of Fay’s stories were fictions. There’s enough truth in her narrative of the Lanctons’ early years, for example, to give a hint of possibility to some of her mysteries. Plus, her accounts of Frank’s various marriages and surnames all proved truthful.
Which only makes Fay’s fictions all the more troubling. Why would she have invented the legend of an illegitimate birth for her son, and why would she have kept that myth alive for the rest of her life? Obviously, the cost to Frank Gilmore was immense, and the cost did not end with him. I’ve thought at times that Fay might have devised the story to redeem her own disappointments. Maybe the marriage and its failure had been too banal for a person with an imagination as large and hungry as Fay’s. Maybe she needed a bigger failure to live up to—like the lost love of a great celebrity, who had fathered her bastard son. Maybe she simply enjoyed the importance that such a story gave her—and perhaps she recognized, years later, that the story had now become her best shot at being remembered past her own death.
Perhaps, but then maybe it was something else.
Not long ago, I visited the Wyuka Cemetery, just outside Lincoln, where my father’s older brother, Clarence, was buried at age three. Wyuka is one of Nebraska’s oldest large cemeteries; it has been receiving the dead and their mourners for over a century. It is laid out like a mosaic. Narrow driveways wind around a vast patchwork of lots and gardens, each of them an island of graves. Clarence’s grave lay on the far side of the cemetery, in one of its oldest sections. I parked my car near that section early on a winter morning. It was bitterly cold—there was a