Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [63]
I was born on February 9, 1951, at Portland’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. My father was sixty-one, and my mother was thirty-eight. (By the way, I was born as Michael, not Mikal. I changed the spelling in high school, and it became an affectation that stuck. For the sake of consistency, I’ll keep the spelling in its current form throughout this story.)
“I remember the day you were born,” my brother Frank told me a while back. “Dad came running upstairs in his shorts and said, ‘Boys, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you got another little brother.’ I never saw him that happy, before or after.”
The joy was short-lived. One day, during the time I was doing the research for this book and was talking almost daily with my brother about his memories of the past, Frank arrived at my door with a troubled look on his face. “I have something I need to tell you,” he said. “I think about telling you every time I come over here. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I have to find a way to say this.”
This is the story that my brother told me:
“When they brought you home from the hospital, at first everybody was real happy, and all that. But a few weeks later, things changed. Mom was always reading these stupid medical books, and she didn’t know how to interpret them. This one particular book said that if you take a new born baby and toss it up playfully in the air, it’s supposed to have a certain reaction. Move its arms in a certain way, smile and laugh in a certain way. But of course, what happens is that every baby reacts a little differently. Mom would take you and she’d toss you in the air and you wouldn’t react the way that she thought you were supposed to. You were probably already so accustomed to all the hell around there that somebody tossing you in air and saying stuff wasn’t likely to faze you. Anyway, Mom began to carry on. ‘There’s something wrong with this baby. It’s not right. It’s damaged.’ She went on and on about this, until Dad told her to shut up about it.
“Well, one day we found her standing over your crib with a pillow. She was getting ready to put the pillow over the top of you. She was going to smother you. Dad grabbed her. She was all worked up and said something like, ‘We can’t let this baby live.’ And Dad… he just knocked the hell out of her. He beat her up real bad and told her never to try it again. We were all there when it happened, me, Gary, and Gaylen.
“I have to admit, from that day on, I never felt quite the same toward her.”
When Frank got to the end of his story, I could see that the telling of it had shaken him. It was hard for me, though, to connect to the instance emotionally. It seems almost certain that what was tormenting my mother at the time of this episode was postpartum depression—the chemically-based form of severe depression that can sometimes follow a pregnancy. But given the era, and given my father’s inclinations, there wasn’t much chance that Bessie would get the proper diagnosis or help. Instead, she got a savage beating.
I realize now that this episode was crucial to much of what would follow and the relations that I would form to my parents. It was a large part of the reason that my father kept me close to him over the years, and it turned me into a central issue in the growing war between my parents. And though I feel nothing specifically about that moment—I do not feel horrified or angry that my mother might have smothered me—I realize that much of the fear I would later feel about her had been created by the possibilities of that moment. I remember that my father often accused my mother of some shameful form of craziness and that these accusations would hurt her so visibly that I felt sorry for her. But the charges would