Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [64]
My father later used the incident as an excuse to renege on his promise that my mother could raise me as a Mormon. “The day he’s baptized a Mormon, I’d throw you both out on the street.”
“And the day you make him into another Catholic,” my mother said, “I’ll knife your evil heart in your sleep.” Between those two arguments, I never saw the inside of a church until well past my father’s death.
FRANK’S BUILDING CODES DIGEST WAS A SUCCESS in Portland for two years running, and then he published a profitable Seattle edition. But even though he was dividing his time between two cities, the regularity of it all probably felt too much like capitulation to him. Frank wanted to pull up roots one more time and move back to the place where he and Bessie had first started: Salt Lake City. Bessie was furious at the idea. The family was finally settled, the kids were in school and had good friends— why disrupt all that? Besides, she had no desire to return to Utah. She didn’t want to live around her snotty sisters and deal with all their talk of one-upmanship regarding their husbands and fine homes, and she had no desire to be subject again to her parents’ judgments.
Frank didn’t care. He had an old partner back in Salt Lake that he thought could really make Utah sales soar. Also, he thought all the bad blood between him and Bessie’s parents would be in the past, now that he had a successful and legitimate business.
Bessie thought the truth was something else: Frank had simply not stopped running from his past yet. Sitting in one spot too long, he got sore from looking over his shoulder to see who might be catching up.
In the spring after my birth, my parents sold the home on Crystal Springs Boulevard and packed the car for the trip to Utah. At Frank’s insistence, Bessie placed Queen with some next-door neighbors. She knew that the woman drank heavily and could act mean, so Bessie warned her that she should never whip the dog. Queen gave my mother a rueful look when she walked away, and bayed at her. It tore Bessie’s heart. She hated leaving Queen. She had never loved an animal before.
Frank and Bessie fought the entire way to Salt Lake City—so persistently that Frankie, Gary, and Gaylen would sit in the back seat with their fingers in their ears, making mocking faces. Then my father would catch them from the rearview mirror and turn around and slap the laughs off their faces. A thousand miles of arguing and slapping.
My mother, however, did get one advantage out of the trip. On June 7,1951, my family pulled into Elko, Nevada, and on that day, in a simple ceremony with a township justice of the peace, my parents were finally, lawfully married. They never let on to any of the kids about the belated event until my mother told Frank about it in the last few months of her life. When Frank told me, I was skeptical—I couldn’t imagine my mother as somebody who could have so long tolerated an “unlawful” marriage— and then I located a copy of the marriage certificate. “It looks like we were all born bastards,” I told Frank, when I showed him the document. We had a good laugh over that one.
“Jesus,” said Frank, “what a thing to realize about your life, this far along.”
IN SALT LAKE, MY PARENTS SETTLED INTO a small three-bedroom house on the fringe of the city. It lay close to the train tracks, which more or less divided the city. On the north side lived the good people—the Mormons and the acceptable Gentiles. South of the tracks was where the vagrants, immigrants, minorities, and hopelessly poor settled—in those days, a spacious, bleak no-man’s-land. My family lived just a few blocks north of the tracks. I think my father liked the idea of living on borders. Maybe it gave him the sense that all he had to do was cross the train tracks and he would be again safely lost in America’s hinterlands. The family settled in, and promptly my father hit the road, selling advertising