Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  Whereas the other Brown children learned how to make a peace with their parents’ house rules—or to sneak around them without getting caught—Bessie liked to make a point of flouting authority. Of course, this was seen as a bad example for the other children. Then, after Alta’s death, Bessie got worse. It seemed to others in the family as if some restraint inside Bess had died along with her sister. It was like she had turned her mourning into outright rebellion—or as if she held her parents or the farm itself to blame for what had happened that day. She started staying out later, and when she came home, the fights with her parents got louder and nastier. Will and Melissa accused her of immoral behavior with the boys she dated. Bessie never came out and said it was true—it probably wasn’t—but she liked the leverage the suspicion gave her, the way it drove her parents nuts when she said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Still, it was a dangerous game. Short of murder or betraying one’s testimony of God, there was no greater sin in the Mormon world than sexual vice. By taunting her parents on this point, Bessie was risking exclusion from the family. A generation or two before, she might have been risking the discipline of the Danites.

  One night, in fact, Bessie came close to such a judgment. For a couple of weeks she had been dating a young man from Salt Lake. He was rumored to be a drinker and somebody who led a fast life. This was in the middle of Prohibition, and though Provo had a speakeasy or two, no Mormon family could afford to have its daughter found in one. Bessie’s parents told her that she should no longer see this young man, and that he wasn’t welcome at their house. But Bessie kept seeing the boy anyway, and in the period of a single week she came home past her parents’ curfew on three occasions, resulting in the ugliest arguments anybody had ever witnessed in the Brown household. On the fourth occasion, Bessie was standing on the front porch of her house at about 3 A.M., giving her boyfriend a good-night kiss, when the door was flung open. Will Brown stood there with a shotgun, and he leveled it at his daughter. His face was full of fear and insanity. “I’m going to blow your whore soul to hell,” Will said, and pulled back the hammer on one of the barrels. At that moment George stepped up from behind his father and grabbed the rifle. “You aren’t shooting anybody,” he said. In the fight that followed, George and Bessie got whipped badly by their father, while the other children stood around crying, begging for the violence to stop. Meantime, Bessie’s boyfriend got his little Mormon ass the hell off the crazy Brown farm, never to bring it back.

  I HAVE A HANDFUL OF PICTURES OF MY MOTHER TAKEN, I believe, by my Uncle George, in about 1933, when Bessie was around twenty years of age. I never saw these photographs while my mother was alive—they were given to me by Larry Schiller, who interviewed my family extensively, a short time after her death. The first time I saw them they bothered me so much that I put them away immediately and didn’t pull them out again for years. It took me a while to figure out my reaction. I had never before seen my mother’s image when she was a young woman. The face is unmistakably hers, and yet it appeared so different, stripped of everything that age and pain and the experiences of death would later bring to it.

  My mother was always a courageous woman—even on those days when the world utterly terrified her—for without courage she could not have endured what she endured until the end of her life. She was not, however, always a hopeful woman. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing unadulterated hope in her expression the entire time I knew her. So what shocked me about these pictures was that there was hope in her face on the day that they were taken. Not a bounty of it (not as much as there was pride), just enough to make plain what the lack of it for nearly fifty years can do to a person’s look. Seeing these pictures, I realized that my mother could have died with a different face. That not only made me fed a new sadness for her, it also made me worry about my own face in its closing days.

  My mother had a way of looking at a camera that could tell you everything about how she was looking at life. In my favorite of these pictures, Bessie Brown is seated in a chair. She is looking toward her left, in a three-quarter profile, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, her hands meeting calmly in her lap. She is wearing a simple, floor-length white dress—it fits perfectly and looks stunning—and around her neck rests a string of pearls. She has tied her long black hair up in back, and wears the rest of it in a flourish of curl that emphasizes her intelligence as much as her beauty.

  The picture was taken outdoors. Bessie is seated in a chair on the farm, in front of her favorite mountain. Next to her stands a woman (a sister or a friend) holding a purse. She looks fine, but the picture belongs to Bessie, who knows the wonderful incongruity of her own pose: the exquisite beauty in a rustic setting. There’s a faint smile on her face. It says she knows too much about herself, and about life, to stay in this setting. It is a small smile, bemused and a bit impatient, and in her eyes there is the steady, dark stare of hope.

  In 1933, despite everything that had already happened, my mother had not yet learned to hate what a camera could reveal about her mind and soul.

  THE PHOTOGRAPH TURNED OUT TO BE BESSIE’S FAREWELL to the Brown farm. As my cousin Brenda once told me, “Your mother had a longing for the finer life.” In this case, the finer life meant Salt Lake City, fifty miles to Provo’s north. In the mid 1930s, Bessie left home and moved to Salt Lake with three friends. They all rented an apartment not far from the city center, and all four took housekeeping jobs. They hadn’t been there a month when one of the women returned to her family’s home in Provo and told her folks she didn’t like the way Bessie and the others were living in Salt Lake. They had all quit their jobs, she said, but nobody had trouble paying the rent.

  The Browns didn’t hear much from Bessie for a while, and they never made the trip up north to see her. Occasionally, Bessie would go back home, mainly to see her youngest sister, Ida. When she did, she made a point of wearing her fine new clothes and her new jewelry. She now wore a ring on each finger. Her parents asked her how she could afford such things, and she told them she had taken a job modeling jewelry. They had trouble believing her, and then the fights would start again. Finally, Bessie would stomp out in a rage, and her father would go down the hill to a tavern in the valley. Will Brown, the good Mormon patriarch, was learning how to drink.

  RUMORS FOLLOWED BESSIE LIKE AN UNWANTED DOG. In 1936, she disappeared for a while. Later, there was talk that she had hitchhiked to California with a friend, and while she was there, she had fallen deeply in love with a serviceman. But the romance went bad, and Bessie came home, brokenhearted and compromised. After that, she lived by herself and began to keep a distance from her old friends.

  All the gossip had its effect on her. Insofar as the rumors were a kind of judgment, a dismissal of her worth and goodness, Bessie felt deeply hurt and enraged by all the talk. But on the surface, she managed to wear her image with the pride of the outcast. She had too much dignity to surrender to the displays of repentance and humiliation that her parents and others wanted from her. All she could do was push on, the wayward daughter, moving into a prohibited frontier.

  Bessie Brown was about to become the first child in three generations of her family’s lineage to leave the refuge of Mormon Utah.

  I AM GOING TO MAKE A CONFESSION.

  I never knew anything about how my parents met, or much about the early life of my family, until after my brother Gary had died. I suppose it says something about my detachment, but all I really knew much about were the family’s legends of mystery and death. I knew about the violence of Mormon history, and about the haunted death of Alta, because these were stories my mother told me, time and again. I knew also that my father had a shadowy past—that his own father had wronged him beyond repair, and he had fled some deadly secret for nearly half a century—because these stories, too, were part of our active mythology.

  But what I did not know, and what nobody ever told me, was this: I did not know how my parents came to know each other, or how they came to love each other (I
never even actively thought they had once loved each other, since all I ever saw between them was distance or anger). I did not know what went on in the years that my brothers were born; I knew the names of various towns the family had lived in, but almost nothing about the family’s life in those places—why my parents moved so frequently, and to such far-flung locales, or what my father did to support everybody in those towns. Mostly, I did not know if my family had ever been a real family. Had my father played sports with his sons? Had they all gone to church together, or to movies or a picnic on the weekend? Did my parents read stories to my brothers when they were small? (I don’t remember anybody ever reading to me.) Did these people love each other—was there any cohesion to the unit beyond the habit of fear or the power of hatred?

  The first glimpse I had of what that life may have been like was in 1979, when Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song was published. Larry Schiller and Mailer had interviewed my mother at great length about Gary’s childhood—a core period of the family’s past—and in the book’s latter half, Mailer laid out an intriguing sketch of the family’s background. In a few pages he revealed more than I had been told in twenty-five years. To be honest, though, almost none of it sank in for me. The first few times I read the book, I let my eyes skim over those passages. I didn’t linger on the details of my father’s earlier marriages, or the mention of his criminal trouble, and I didn’t accommodate any of it to the landscape of my own memory. It seemed too much like somebody else’s world—a world you might read about in a book.

  When the time came to try to dispel the secrecy of my family’s past for the purposes of this story, Schiller was enormously generous, and offered to loan me the tapes of the interviews that he and Mailer had conducted fifteen years before with my mother and my brother Gary. Somehow, hearing about the family’s hidden past in my mother’s voice helped make that past palpable for me. I had not heard her voice, of course, since she had died; I had never heard her voice tell stories like these. But for every new revelation, there were now many new questions. Schiller and Mailer tried their best, but as often as not, my mother answered their inquiries with maddening riddles and outright avoidance.

  At one point, Schiller asked her why she feared telling him and Mailer too much. With my father and Gary dead, he said, who was there left to protect by preserving old secrets? She replied that she was doing it for me. “Mikal doesn’t know any of these things,” my mother said. “I’m afraid he’ll hate me when he learns all this. Or I’m afraid he’ll hate his father, which would be horrible. He was the only one of the boys who ever truly loved his father, and I would hate to take that love away from him.”

  With the help of Schiller and Mailer’s tapes, and with the invaluable assistance of a few other people—primarily my brother Frank, after I finally found him—the true story began to take shape for me. Or at least some of it did. For better or worse, much of the truth of our past was lost for good when my parents and brothers died.

  THIS, THEN, IS HOW MY MOTHER MET MY FATHER:

  It was summer, 1937. By this time, Bessie Brown was living alone in a small hotel room in downtown Salt Lake City. She made enough money to support herself with a little housework, and with part-time hand-modeling of jewelry for ads.

  In those days, as today, Salt Lake City was the largest and liveliest city in Utah. Still, when it comes to Utah, lively is a relative term. There is more to do in Salt Lake than in much of the state, provided you do most of it before nightfall. When my mother lived there, as a twenty-four-year-old woman, she found the city’s streets impossibly wide and the blocks eternally long. Since she had little money, Bessie walked those streets every day. She would walk up to the old library, across from the county courthouse, and she would sit in its reading room, where she liked to pore over books about astrology and medical science, and other matters that she had learned little about back in Provo. Some days, she walked over to the city’s vast Liberty Park. She sat near its lake, watching couples ride in blithe circles in paddleboats, or she bought popcorn or bread slices and fed the ducks. She liked the ducks because they seemed to know their place. They would pay attention to you but never try to get too close.

  Most of the city closed at dusk, and as the sun started to set, Bessie would walk the many blocks back to her hotel room. Sometimes she would have dinner with a girlfriend or take in a dance at a local ballroom, where touring big bands sometimes played.

  Largely, though, this was a season of being alone. Bessie was a little wary of men after the debacle in California. She was in no hurry for true love, and unlike most young Mormon women, she was not anxious to find herself a husband.

  One of Bessie’s best friends during this time was a woman named Anita, a waitress at a local seafood restaurant. Anita had just come out of a bad marriage and was a serious drinker, which made for natural limitations in the relationship. Bessie was no drinker—she didn’t like the dizzy, stupid feeling it gave her the one or two times she’d had a few drinks— but she also didn’t have much appetite for judging another person’s weaknesses. Anita wasn’t the most high-class person, but Bessie liked her just the same. Maybe she felt a little sorry for her.

  One day, Bessie met Anita at the Utah Hotel, just off Temple Street, where Anita lived with her boyfriend, a man she called Daddy. The two women were supposed to go shopping, but Anita had already had a few drinks that morning—actually, one too many. “Look, Bessie,” she said. “Look at the typewriter my Daddy gave me.” Anita lifted the typewriter proudly, but it fell from her hands and broke on the floor. Just then, Daddy walked in. He was a well-dressed man, in his late forties—Bessie recognized his pride immediately—and he was not looking pleased. Anita tried to sputter an apology and an introduction to Bessie at the same time. Daddy glanced momentarily at Bessie and said: “Hello. I’m Frank Gilmore.” To Anita, he said: “I asked you not to touch my typewriter. Now you’ve broken it. This is it. Pack your things and leave.”

  Bessie saw that this was no time to stick around. “I’ll talk to you later, Anita,” she said, and left. Bessie could hear Anita crying by the time she got to the elevator.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, BESSIE WAS WALKING along Temple to the library when she ran into Frank Gilmore. He was standing in front of the Utah Hotel, wearing a brown sport coat and a string tie over a sky-blue shirt. A dirty-white fedora hat covered his slightly longish, graying hair. Bessie hadn’t heard from Anita since the scene in the hotel room and was a little concerned. “Hey,” she said, “did you and Anita ever make up?”

  “No, no, no,” said Frank. “She’s probably got somebody else by now.” Frank looked at Bessie for a long second, then said: “Care to get a cup of coffee?”

  They went to a diner around the corner and had a cup of coffee, then another. Bessie told Frank a little about herself, and in turn learned a little about him. He was an ad salesman for Utah Magazine and had been a salesman all around the country. Someday, he said, he wanted to have a magazine of his own. He had a confident, intelligent way of talking, Bessie thought, plus he was deeply attractive. The thought came on Bessie suddenly that she liked this man. She remembered an old saying: You meet the right man and you throw caution to the aside. Sitting there in the Salt Lake diner, drinking coffee with Frank Gilmore, Bessie thought: Here’s a man I might be willing to throw caution aside for.

  Frank must have sensed something about the thought, because he found a way to drop a bombshell into the conversation. He said: “I’m getting married tomorrow.”

  Bessie sat there, stunned. Here she was, liking a man who only three days before had broken up with one of her best friends, and who was already preparing to marry another woman. She had never experienced anything like it before.

  Bessie didn’t ask for any explanations, and Frank Gilmore didn’t offer any. He wasn’t that way.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  ALMOST A YEAR LATER, BESSIE RAN INTO FRANK AGAIN, standing in front of the same hotel. “Well, how’s your marr
iage?” she asked.

  “Oh, that didn’t last,” Frank said. “It broke up.” He shrugged like it was already a forgotten mistake. Then he smiled at her. “I was planning on going to a movie tonight,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”

  Bessie thought about the first boy who had ever caught her fancy, an Italian kid by the name of Joe, who worked at a candy factory with her back in Provo. To Bessie he was perfection: tall, with a good build and brown eyes. Working on the assembly line, where several people worked together, wrapping the hot candy and placing it in packages, Bessie saw a cute little routine develop. Every once in a while, one of the girls would “accidentally” leave one of her tools on the factory belt and then act flustered. When the tool got down to Joe at the end of the belt, he would retrieve it and graciously bring it back to them. Bessie decided to try the same trick. One day, she shoved her candy pan onto the belt and let it get away from her. When Joe brought it back to her she was so self-conscious she couldn’t even look at him and couldn’t say thank you. She spent the rest of the day hating herself. After that, she decided: If I want to win a fellow over, I’m going to look at him and smile; I’m going to really make him think he is outstanding and something very special and wonderful. No more do I just take my pan and walk away and ignore him.

  Standing outside the Utah Hotel, Bessie Brown gave Frank Gilmore her best smile. “I’d love to go to the movie with you,” she said.

  ACTUALLY, BESSIE DIDN’T MUCH LIKE GOING TO MOVIES. Something about the vast darkness of a theater reminded her of a tomb. But she felt better about the experience, sitting next to Frank. He was a strong man, and she felt less afraid of the darkness with him close by. Years later, she would remember that feeling and wonder where it had gone.