Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [52]
Beyond that, the records are of value to me for two other reasons. First, these are not merely the earliest documents I have been able to find regarding Frank Gilmore; they are, in fact—aside from his death certificate and listings in various city and telephone directories—the only hard information I have ever been able to find regarding my father’s life on this earth. None of his school records survived, he never served in the military, and his employment history cannot be verified. Not even his tax or Social Security records can be found.
The other value of these prison files for me is that they contain the earliest photo I have ever seen of my father’s face. It is not a particularly young face. He was about fifty-one when this mug shot was taken (Colorado State Prison #22470), and with his false teeth missing and his ruffled, prematurely gray hair, he looks much older, more like a man of sixty. I try to read what’s in his face. I can’t learn much, of course, about his secrets or the source of his dread from this picture, but I can plainly see that deep sorrow and a difficult courage were fighting for possession of him on that day in early 1942. He looks like a guilty man who cannot understand his own crimes and who fears that worse consequences are coming his way.
My brother Frank thinks that I have my father’s looks, but I have never seen the resemblance. When I see this photo, though, I am reminded of something I would like to forget: I recall seeing my face in the mirror one evening a few years ago, after several hours of drinking and probably crying. I believed on that night that I had lost my last chance for the sort of happiness that I might gain from having my own family—that I had lost my heart for such a dream and would now have to live without the dream. If I did have kids at this point, I feared I would end up committing the same arrogant error my father had committed: waiting too late in life to have children that I would never live long enough to love and protect properly. I hated realizing that truth about my life and I hated seeing knowledge of it on my face—it made me look empty and old and ugly—and I never wanted anyone in the world to see me with that look.
That is close to the look that the prison photographer caught on Frank Gilmore’s broken face the day he was taken away from his family and, for all he knew, cut off from his future as well. He had no idea, of course, that fifty years later one of his sons would see that photograph and discover something of himself and his inheritance in it.
It is funny. For years I think I was as close to my father as anybody has ever been—as my mother said, I was the only one in the family who still loved him at his death. Though I would spend my adolescent years living with my mother, it was my father—more than anybody else—who raised me, and it was my father I felt safe with. But now when I look at this picture of his face, I think of the things he did to my mother and brothers during this time and the time to come. I try to reconcile my sense of him, and the sanctuary I felt in his presence, with his brutality and his abandonments of his other children. I cannot understand how a man who could be so loving could also leave a baby of his on a park bench while he went off to try and pass a bad check—because that is what truly happened on that day in Atlantic, Iowa, when he lost custody of Gary to a state orphanage. I cannot believe that man was my father, that I once loved him more than anybody else in my world. That I still love him, because I don’t know how not to.
My father feels so close, and yet so far. He’s the biggest enigma in this history, and I’m worried that if I can’t solve him—if I can’t uncover his secrets and explain his fears—I have no right telling this story. Maybe to know my father, I’m going to have to examine my own