Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [60]
Fay’s death was apparently one of the hardest passages in my father’s life. “It took him weeks to adjust to it,” my brother Frank recalled. “He immediately went off on a crying and drinking binge, and he quit working. He would sit and drink and tell stories about her and call her name. Then he would sit and drink some more. I think there were a lot of things coming to the surface for him then. He felt he had always been refused by her, and he felt he had even been shut out of her death and funeral.”
It was the longest drunk anybody had ever seen my father on. My mother and brothers would find him on the street, sprawled underneath a lamp, a bottle in his hand and other unopened bottles bulging in his coat pockets. They would help him stagger back to the apartment, him drinking the whole way. It went on so long that Frank spent all his money on liquor and the family had to eat each night at the Salvation Army. “He had normally been a tough man,” my brother said, “but during that time he just drank and drank, and cried all the time. He had been disappointed in Fay a lot, but he really did care about her. He just couldn’t handle losing her for good, is what it came down to.”
One night, after coming out of a liquor store, with his wife and kids waiting outside, my father stumbled drunk on the sidewalk and, as he fell, hit his head on a steel pole. The impact cut his face up bad, and Bessie and the boys took him home and put him to bed. Three days later, when he was still lying in bed, Bessie called in a doctor. She was worried that he had hurt himself from the fall, or maybe had poisoned himself from all the alcohol. The doctor took some urine and blood samples and came back with his report: If Frank Gilmore kept drinking at this rate, he would be dead within a year or two. He had destroyed too much of his liver to remain a regular user of alcohol.
The advice managed to take hold on my father. He stopped drinking more or less on that day, and though there were a few lapses in the years that followed, he never returned to the heavy binges that had been a hallmark of his behavior for so long. This should have been good news, but there was a drawback: For all his clumsiness and stupidity as a drunk, Frank had also always been fairly kind-spirited during his binges. Those were the times he would tell stories about people in show business, about making and losing money, about his days with the circus and his feats as an acrobatic clown and lion tamer. He was also ridiculously generous during those bouts. He’d give his sons money for whatever toy they wanted, and he would magnanimously tell them and my mother that he had forgiven them all for whatever had been their most recent offenses against his rules and pride. It was when he was drying up that he could be a real monster. Those were the times he would beat his boys with a belt over any infraction. He was like Jekyll and Hyde, my brother recalled, except it was the drunken Frank Gilmore who seemed more civilized.
Now that my father was sober all the time, he was also meaner and more violent. Bessie had long been the object of his anger, but for the next few years, their bouts became nightmarish and brutal. My brother recalls: “I don’t think we ever went two weeks during that time without some sort of wild, fist-banging fights. Many times I saw Mom with black eyes and a horribly swollen face. Man, she looked like she had been in a prizefight sometimes, battered and bruised, her lips all swollen. I saw that so many times. He would just really pound on her.
“I remember once, when I was about nine, stepping in and telling him to stop. I don’t know if I must have been crazy or what, but for some reason it startled him. He just looked at me really funny that day. He couldn’t believe somebody would say something. And he actually stopped hitting her and turned around and went back to his desk, or whatever he was doing.”
Through it all, the children would watch and scream and cry.