Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [92]
IN GARY’S ABSENCE, the family seemed to enjoy an unusual period of quiet. My father’s publishing business was now thriving, and he had expanded it to include a yearly summary of traffic laws in the states of Oregon and Washington. He was now making enough money to run offices in Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma, and he stayed on the road much of the time, supervising the itinerant men he had hired to work as his salesmen. My brother Frank, now a seventeen-year-old junior at Franklin High School, had developed a strong interest in the craft and vocation of magic. His passion had been inspired, in part, by the ongoing family legend that Houdini was our grandfather, but no matter: Frank had a flair all his own. Meantime, Gaylen—now a ten-year-old, in parochial school—seemed to have the makings of a child prodigy. He had already read much of Shakespeare and he could quote Poe’s gloomiest verses at length. He appeared to love poetry more than anything, except for girls, whom he loved even as a child. In the end, he would die in the middle of an unfinished poem, and in the midst of a love affair that had already effectively cost him his life years before.
Only my mother was counting the days until Gary’s release. The more she had watched my father beat him and treat him as if he weren’t his own son, and the more Gary was punished by school and law officials, the more my mother came to feel that Gary was her special son, the one she had to love the most. It wasn’t merely that he was now living the role that she had once held in her own family, as the black sheep. There was something more to it. Like my father, Bessie Gilmore had her dark secrets, and she watched over them with a vigilance all her own.
WHEN GARY CAME HOME, the peace broke. He hadn’t been back a few days before he and my father were engaged in war again, day and night. Every time Gary violated some house rule or showed any insolence, my father threatened him with a swift return to MacLaren’s, and once or twice called in the parole officer to enforce the threat. “It appears that these two people, Gary and his father, can not establish a working basis…” the officer wrote after one of these visits. “[The] two personalities are so suspicious of each other, that a good healthy father and son relationship appears to be beyond their reach. Both the boy and his father wish to be friends, but apparently both have decided that a good offense is the best defense so there is apparently little give and take. It is not an impossible situation, however, and perhaps with Gary seeing [a psychiatrist] regularly, we may bring about an understanding between these two quite hostile people.”
Unfortunately, after one of the many quarrels, my father refused to pay for any more of Gary’s psychological counseling. He couldn’t see where it was benefiting anybody. After that, Gary’s parole officer effectively threw his hands in the air. “Mr. Gilmore appears to be incapable of establishing even a marginal constructive emotional relationship with Gary …” he wrote. “The only hope is that Gary can acquire the necessary maturity through his school relationships that will enable him to continue on parole in spite of these negative factors existing at home. However, the writer realizes this is wishful thinking in a sense, due to Gary’s ambivalence in regard to academic school.”
The renewed enmity had a way of spilling over to the whole house hold. One time, my mother found Gaylen sitting on the back steps, screaming and crying. Gary had just had a row with my father and had stomped out the back. Gaylen was sitting on the back steps and was in Gary’s way. Gary picked