When I recently asked Frank Jr. if he remembered the sounds in that hallway, he said: “Yes, I remember them well. I’ve given those noises a lot of thought over the years. I finally realized there was probably some sort of crawl space between the walls that an animal of some sort—maybe a bird or a rodent, maybe even a cat—had managed to enter and couldn’t escape, probably by crawling through a hole somewhere in the eaves of the house. I think what we were hearing was the sound of that poor trapped creature as it was trying to escape and was slowly dying.”
Frank’s explanation sounds reasonable, except that if something was dying in those walls, then it took several years for it to finish the task. That, or there were a lot of dumb animals that wandered into our walls over the years. No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I know this: There were rooms in that house—like that downstairs sunporch, which always felt horribly chilly and uncomfortable to me—that I did not like entering, and whenever I walked through the upstairs hallway, I walked as quickly as possible. It always felt like something was at the back of my neck when I was moving through that space.
MY FATHER KEPT TRAVELING TO SEATTLE for business, and I kept going with him. By this time, my leaving no longer resulted in fights between my parents. I think my mother had grown to accept the condition. Also, she had her new home to keep her increasingly busy. She worked constantly on furnishing its central rooms with fine Victorian-era furniture—marble-topped tables, velvet-covered easy chairs, coffee tables with Moroccan leather inlays imprinted with gold leaf. She also spent countless hours landscaping the yard, planting rare Japanese trees out front, and cultivating a lovely flower garden in the driveway’s island bed. I guess all this work must have given her pleasure, but it never quite felt that way. A slight imperfection or blemish in a new item of furniture was enough to send my mother into one of her enraged depressions, and if a flower pattern in the garden didn’t turn out the way she planned, she would rip up the offending plants and trounce them, then stomp inside the house. She would slam a few doors and then sit at her table in the kitchen, crying. Anybody who was smart learned to stay away from her when she was gardening.
In Seattle, my father and I settled into an older district, not far from Queen Anne Hill. Down on the corner was a general store with a good diner attached, and next door was a well-stocked bookstore that also carried all the newest comics. We lived only a mile or two from down town, and as usual. I was free to come and go as I liked. This was during the time when Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, and I visited the grounds several times a week. One day, astronaut John Glenn was touring the site, and I got to shake hands with him. I hurried home and told my father. He was proud of me. We both had watched TV the whole day when Glenn made his historic orbits of the earth.
In an apartment building next to ours lived a middle-aged couple with a teenage son. My father took a special liking to this family, and we would visit with them several evenings a week. My father was always taking them presents. Sometimes he would sit around with Walt—the husband—and have a beer or two and play draw poker. The son’s name was Larry, and he took a kind interest in me. In fact, he treated me as I had always wanted my brothers to treat me. Whenever a classic old movie was on television—like The Sea Wolf, or The Last of the Mohicans, or The Heiress—Larry would have me over and make popcorn for us, and then he would try to explain to me some of the movie’s finer meanings. Larry also took me to theaters and museums, and bought me several books. He gave me an illustrated, hardcover copy of Moby Dick and tried to help me grasp the idea that the story’s whale was something more than a whale.
I did not know it then, but I now believe that Walt was one of my father’s hidden sons, which would have made Larry my nephew. It was years before this would become apparent to me. I have tried to find that family in recent seasons, but like so many other people we once loved or hated or were related to, they have disappeared.
BACK AT HOME IN MILWAUKIE, life was heating up. My brother Gaylen had dropped out of high school—he felt there was nothing the teachers could really teach him—and the school officials were happy to see him go. He joined the. U.S. Navy, but the adventure lasted less than a month. After he had gone AWOL five times and had turned up drunk even more times, the base’s commanders surmised that Gaylen did not have much of a military career in store, and shipped him back home, with an honorable discharge.
Then, in the fall of 1961, Gary came home from Oregon State Correctional Institution. His stay at the facility had proved rough. He got into constant fights with the authorities, and the guards noted on several occasions that Gary was particularly vicious toward older men—sometimes threatening their lives. The anger in Gary became so strong that he repeatedly blew whatever good time he had accrued and ended up adding time to his sentence.
The counselor who wrote my brother’s post-OSCI evaluation noted that Gary had experienced a poor custodial adjustment during his imprisonment. “He received a total of 23 disciplinary reports, most of major proportion, the counselor wrote. “Fighting, refusing to work, disobedience, disrespect were characteristic of the inmate’s reaction toward authority and toward incarceration … At no time did Gilmore show any interest in vocational goals or vocational planning… The inmate did not participate in any educational programs, although his intellectual capacity indicated he was capable of functioning at a higher level than at which he was presently operating … Gilmore indicated that he had no interest in leisure time activities, seeing no need to alter his past behavior in this area. As his disciplinary record indicates, the subject was unable to relate to any staff members or any authoritarian figures. Outside relationships and contact were solely limited to subject’s mother and father who continued to excuse, condone, and indulge their son without end. Gilmore had no release plans at the time of his discharge, and from statements of the inmate’s, it was assumed he was not planning on working when he was released but [would] just live off his parents.” Another counselor noted: “Gilmore … substitutes his own pleasure principles for a moral code of any adequacy and is used to gratifying his desires immediately. Has great fund of hostility toward other individuals which has led him to [a] somewhat paranoid isolated approach [to] life … and he has a good deal of difficulty controlling his temper.”
Indeed, the Gary who came out of OSCI was a changed person—a boy only in his infantile needs, a deadly man in every other respect. “He was brutal in those days,” my brother Frank remembered. “He got mad at you, and his terms were that he could kill you or hurt you or injure and ruin you. You could not reason with him and he could not punish you enough. It was like being around Mussolini. Sometimes, I felt like he was just looking for reasons to hurt somebody.”
This is the Gary I remember best from my childhood. He was twenty-one years old, but he dressed like a man at the end of middle age, in a shabby black raincoat and curl-brim porkpie hat—junkie wear. He eyed all persons around him with an appraising and wary leer, like a man who knew that everything on the outside of his skin amounted to a threat. Interestingly, Gary also came out of OSCI with his artistic talents blooming like mad. When I say that Gary was an artist, I don’t mean simply that he could draw well, or that he had pretensions. The truth is, he could draw and paint with remarkable clarity and empathy; the best of his work had the high-lonesome, evocative power of Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper, though in Gary’s case, the themes tended to drift toward two concerns: death and childhood. Perhaps the most haunting thing he ever drew—a piece that many of his prison friends later commented on—was a sketch of the faces of children as they watch a scene of horror in a movie. You never see the horror they are viewing, but you see what is on their faces—the fear and fascination that comes from learning that there are monsters in the world that will rip you apart and that there is nothing you can do to prevent it.
Yet Gary’s artistic gift never really seemed to mean that much to him. Why did he prefer a life in crime over a life in art? I can’t say, but I’ve wondered ab
out it more times than I care to remember.
One afternoon, when it was just Gary and me sitting around the house, I tried to get him to show me some basics about drawing. He was drinking cough syrup that day, and he laughed in a polite but firm way that announced: No dice. I tried cracking Gary’s indifference, telling him I thought he could be a notable and successful artist if he wanted to. He chased his cough syrup with a swig of beer, then looked at me and smiled. “You want to learn how to be an artist?” he said. “Then learn how to eat pussy. That’s the only art you’ll ever need to learn.”
SOMEHOW, DESPITE ALL THESE SIGNS, we managed to have a nice Christmas at the end of 1961. My father went all out that year, outfitting the house and yard in beautiful lights from top to bottom, and my mother decorated the prettiest tree I had ever seen. Blue ornaments and blue bulbs.
My parents bought everybody nice presents—both Gary and Gaylen, I believe, received cars—and for once, we had a peaceful holiday dinner. My father and Gary were good to each other this day. I remember Gary telling my father: “I appreciate the things you’ve done for me. It’s nice to be back home.” My father said: “You know I love you, son. I want good things for you, and I’m here to help you.” The day ended with my mother playing her new upright piano, which she had pushed up against a wall in the dining room. The whole family sat around her as her talented fingers played carol after carol, all of us singing along. Six horrible voices, filling the year’s most holy night with our discordant harmonies. It was the first time we had ever done anything like that.
It was also the last. Neither my father nor Gary would ever spend Christmas with the family again.
MY MOTHER USED TO COME VISIT my father and me during our stay in Seattle, and she began staying for longer periods of time. In the first few months of 1962, that was the only way she would get to see us.
That’s because, during this time, my father began to feel unusually tired and sick. One day he found a lump on his neck, the size of a half dollar. He took me with him when he went to the doctor’s office. The doctor told my father that he couldn’t make an immediate diagnosis of the problem and that my father would have to enter the hospital to have the lump removed and tested. My mother came up to be with my father for this process, and to look after me while he was laid up in the hospital.
The day after the surgery, my mother and I took the bus to Seattle’s Swedish Hospital. It was an overcast spring day on Puget Sound—one of those days when an ocean breeze covers the city, like the smell of an oldness that can’t be lost. When we entered my father’s room, he was sitting up in bed. He was dressed in a bluish-white smock, and he was looking frailer than I had ever seen him, but he seemed happy to see us. He told my mother that he thought the surgery had been a success, that he was already feeling better. He expected to be back to work in a matter of days. The doctor—a tall, husky German man—came in to see how my father was doing and then asked if he could see my mother in his office.
He took my mother across the hall, then told her that my father had cancer of the colon and had no chance of living. The doctor thought it would be best for my father to hear this news from her, rather than from a medical person. My mother said no, she would not tell him. She also insisted that the doctor not tell my father about his condition. “He has no way of surviving that knowledge,” she said.
Meantime, I stayed seated next to my father’s bed. He tried carrying on a conversation, but I could tell he was distracted. He kept studying the door, waiting for my mother to come back.
After a few minutes, my mother returned.
“What did the doctor say to you, Bessie?” my father asked.
“Oh, not much, Frank. He just told me that he thought I should stay around for a few days, to give you a hand when you got back to your place. He’s afraid you might try to push yourself a little too hard after the surgery.”
My father seemed relieved by my mother’s words, and we talked for a while longer. My father told us a few of his corny jokes and we laughed at all of them. Then my mother said it was time for her and me to start back home. “You know I don’t like to be out too late,” she said, and leaned over to kiss my father on the forehead. It was then, in the awful, dark look that briefly crossed her face, that I saw what was coming.
As soon as my mother and I hit the lobby of the hospital, she sank into a chair. She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Your father’s going to die. He has a form of cancer, and the doctors can’t cure it. We’ll only have him for a few more months.”
I try to remember, as honestly or vividly as I can, how I felt in the moments after I heard this. I know that I remained calm. I did not feel scared, I did not feel panic, I did not cry. I did, however, feel terribly sorry for what my mother was going through. For a few moments, it seemed as if she might not be able to survive this knowledge herself. Beyond that, I think my first thought was that I would be more alone now, but that would be okay. I had already learned how to live with a certain detachment from much of the world around me, and I had already come to accept my distance from my brothers. But about the actual knowledge that my father was now dying—I don’t remember feeling grief or anguish. In fact, I think I felt a certain relief for him. Over the years, in the times when he and I lived together, I had sometimes found him sitting alone, his head lowered to his desk as he pounded his fist on the tabletop and said, over and over: “I wish I was dead.” I think, in truth, he feared death, but I also think that life was a constant trial for him. Soon, all those trials would be over.
In any event, I knew that my life was now changing. I would be on my own. I felt ready for it, for some reason. If my father taught me anything, that was probably his greatest lesson: how to live alone in this world.
That night, I went next door to visit our friends. My mother had already called them and given them the news. Walt, the man who was probably my half brother, was sitting at the dining table with a glass of whiskey in his hands. I could tell from his reddened eyes that he had been crying for a long time.
THAT SAME NIGHT MY MOTHER called our home back in Milwaukie. Gary was the only one there when she called. She gave him the news. She told him that under no circumstances was anybody to let on to my father that he was dying. She thought he had the right to die without fear and worry. This didn’t seem right to me; I thought my father had the right to know that he was dying. I thought nobody should have to enter death without the chance to make peace for his soul. My brother Frank agreed with me on this issue, but it didn’t matter. My mother was firm: My father would not know he was going to die.
My brother Frank had not been there when my mother called because he had taken a job down the street at a nearby car wash. That night, when he came home, the house was dark. He went up to his room, lay down on his bed, and turned on his small black-and-white television. A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. It was Gary. “He had tears in his eyes,” Frank told me later. “He said, ‘I don’t like to tell you this, but, you know, Dad’s got cancer and he’s going to die.’ He was real broke up about it. He sat there and cried for a long time.”
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER HIS SURGERY, my father was released from the hospital. My mother and I went to help him make the trip back to the apartment. He was still too weak to drive, so we took a taxi back to our apartment. The taxi pulled up across the street from our home, and my mother gave me the keys so I could run ahead and open the doors for my father. As I started up the steps to the building, I heard a raw growl. I turned around to find a large dog—a German shepherd, I believe— facing me from about six feet away. He had followed me up the stairs without my seeing him, and for some reason, this dog did not like me. He was baring his teeth, growling louder and moving steadily toward me. In a moment, he had me backed into a corner. My father, climbing out of the taxi and leaning on my mother for support, saw the dog closing in. Quick as an acrobat, he bounded across the str
eet and up the stairs, then grabbed the startled animal by the neck and hurled it down to the sidewalk. It ran off, yelping. My mother came rushing up to my father. “Frank,” she said, “you shouldn’t be exerting yourself like this. You could have yelled at the damn thing or thrown something at it.”
“That dog,” said my father, almost windless, “was going to hurt my son. As long as I have a breath of life in me, nothing will ever hurt him.”
A WEEK OR SO LATER, MY FATHER was strong enough to drive the three of us back to Milwaukie. At home, my mother rearranged their bedroom so that my father would have easy access to his medicine and a television. Their bedroom was right next to the room I shared with Gaylen, upstairs, at the front of the house. Down the upstairs hallway, at the back of the house, was a second sunporch, which my father had turned into his home office. Next to that was the bathroom and, just a few feet in front of that, the staircase. At the bottom of the staircase was a pair of French doors that opened into the downstairs sunporch—the room, we understood, where the doctor had died.
One night, about 3 A.M., we were all settled in bed, asleep. My father woke up, feeling the need to use the bathroom, and began making his way down the hall. The noise that awakened us a few moments later was horrible. It was the sound of my father screaming my mother’s name in absolute fear, followed by a terrible crashing. Next, I heard my mother running down the hallway, pounding on all our doors. “Get up, boys,” she yelled. “Your father’s fallen down the stairs.” We rushed to the top of stairs and looked down. My father was sprawled on the downstairs floor, lying halfway through the entrance to the sunporch, as if he had crawled or been dragged there. There was blood on the wallpaper above him, from where his head had hit the wall during his fall. Gary and Frank Jr. were the first down the stairs to get to him, and they carried him around to the green leather sofa in the front room. My mother wanted to call a doctor, but my father said he’d had enough of doctors.
Shot in the Heart Page 28