Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [41]
I stood there and looked at it for as long as I could take the cold. I tried to imagine what it was like when Fay and Harry buried their son here. Maybe the marriage was already bad, and maybe the child’s death had killed whatever hope had been left for the young couple. I thought of it this way: You have a child, you love it, you put something of the best of yourself and your hope into your efforts for that child. And then the child dies—your hope is wiped out, and your hurt is endless. On top of that, three weeks later, you have another child—the child that would be my father—and the hope and love are supposed to begin again. But what if they don’t—what if it’s too soon? What happens if the emotions that are invested in that child are not emotions of reborn hope but, instead, feelings of great fear and grief, or even resentment? When Fay looked at her new son, so soon after putting her first child in the ground, did she feel comforted by the baby’s face? Or did she feel there was too much risk in loving this child as she had loved the first? Or did she just hurt too damn much over Clarence to give Frank the sense of love and security a young baby requires?
Whatever the answers, the Gilmores’ marriage did not hold. Within a few years it was finished and Fay was gone and Harry was forgotten. I don’t think Fay kept Frank Gilmore close to her heart and life after Nebraska. Instead, she sent him off to a sequence of boarding schools and only shared a home with him occasionally. Better to keep a child distant than to love and bury him. Frank Gilmore was denied all right—by everybody. He grew up without a father and without a mother. Thirty years later, when he brought Robert to Fay’s door, he might well have been saying: Here, I’ve brought myself back to you. And then Frank pushed his son away, into the hands of the mother who had once pushed Frank away.
That helps explain the distance between Fay and Frank, but why the Houdini rumor? I’m not sure. Maybe Fay did have an affair with him. Perhaps she knew him at some point and felt betrayed by something he had done. What could be a better revenge than the scandal of a bastard son? And maybe by making Frank believe the legend, she was just trying to bury the truth of her own sad past a little deeper.
I took another look at Clarence’s headstone and thought: I am probably the only person who has ever visited this particular grave in the last hundred years. That idea was enough to fill me with such immediate despair, I got back in my car and drove away from the site as fast as the narrow roads would take me. Just before I left the graveyard, I stopped at the main office and asked about the empty plot next to the baby’s grave. It seemed odd to find a vacant grave, in the portion of a cemetery that had been filled for nearly a century. The kindly old man at the desk pulled out some ancient books, ran his fingers along the ledgers, and then told me: “That plot belonged to a man named Harry Gilmore. He was Clarence’s father, and bought the grave site for himself a few years after he had buried the child. But he never came back, and he was never buried there.”
Nobody is laid to rest next to Clarence Gilmore’s grave. He stays there alone, a little secret, left behind.
MAYBE AT THIS POINT BESSIE should have said to herself: Oh-oh— looks like I’ve married into a family with more problems than the one I just fled. But she didn’t. Bessie stayed, despite all the terrible secrets, and all the frightening prospects. She even stayed once the drinking and beatings and disappearances began in earnest.
She had her reasons.
And we—the sons—are