Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [99]
Whether my mother ever meant her promises of harm or not, she was convincing in her delivery. In those instances, she was the scariest thing I have ever seen. Her eyes fixed on my father with the sort of deadliness that can only come from having been deeply wronged by the person you love most. It was in those moments, when I saw that look of menace on my mother’s face, that I learned to fear anger. In particular, I learned to fear the anger of a hurt woman. Unfortunately, I also learned how to make some of that anger.
When my mother finally became the crazed creature my father accused her of being, it would break the momentum of the battle. It was as if my father felt he had won his point, but also feared what might come of his victory. He would quiet down and withdraw into his office, and my mother would be left standing there with her anger and her humiliation, in an empty room.
What made these scenes especially indelible for me was that the fights were often about the same subject: They were about me. They were about which of my parents would enjoy the custody and company of me, from day to day and place to place.
Maybe my father never fully trusted my mother with my welfare after the incident in my infancy that Frank had told me about. Maybe he felt he had to keep me close to him to assure that no sudden harm would come to me. Or maybe he simply realized he was getting older—he was nearing his late sixties during the period that I am describing here—and perhaps he simply wanted a faithful presence close to him. I suspect I might have been my father’s last chance for love—a love that wouldn’t refuse or betray him, or question his hard ways too much. “That man loved Mike,” my mother told Larry Schiller, years later. “Really loved him. It might be the only person in the world he ever loved, but he loved that kid.” And Gary himself said: “I think Mike was the only one of us that Dad ever really loved.”
Whatever his reason, my father wanted me with him wherever he went. Since he traveled often for his publishing business, this meant he and I would spend a season or two in Portland, then a few months in Seattle or Tacoma, and then back and forth between these various stations. After I turned six, this meant that I would also have to go back and forth between schools, sometimes attending as many as three or four different schools in a single grade year. (With the possible exception of the first grade, I never attended any school for the entire duration of a single year until the sixth grade, the year after my father’s death.)
Neither the local grammar school in Portland nor my mother thought that all this moving was such a good idea, and this is part of what became the core of contention between my parents. My father wanted me to go with him when he would travel, and my mother wanted me to stay on Johnson Creek and remain in our neighborhood school. But the argument went further. My mother also viewed my father’s possessiveness of me as an attempt to keep my love to himself and to turn me against the rest of the family. “He’s my baby boy,” my mother would say. “He needs to be with his mother, he needs to be close to his brothers. You’re doing a horrible thing: You’re turning him against me, you’re making him spurn us.”
I hated these fights. I remember I used to stand among my parents, spreading my arms between them, trying to keep them from hurting each other. I would beg them to stop fighting. It was like I was at the center of two monstrous, clashing forces, and if I could just make plain that I loved and wanted them both, then maybe I could stop their quarrels. Maybe then we could be a family together. Sometimes,