Chapter 19

KIN TO THE MAGICIAN

1

Shortly after Gary got out of Marion, and was living in Provo with Vern and Ida, he sent Bessie an eleven-pound box of chocolates for Mother’s Day. Then, a letter arrived. “I didn’t know I could be this happy. I have the most beautiful girl in Utah. Mom, I’m making more money than I could take in stealing.”

Bessie wrote back, “This is what I always wanted for you. I’m glad you have this girl. I hope someday to meet your beautiful Nicole.”

Then she didn’t hear any more, and phoned Ida, who told her Gary had gotten in a little trouble by walking out of a store with a few things. Bessie asked Ida to tell him to call, and began to worry. Gary never got in touch when he was in trouble.

The day she found out about the murders, she had been out on the porch of her trailer taking the sun. Her phone rang and it was a woman. Quick as she heard the tone of voice. Bess said, “It’s you, Brenda. Something’s happened to Gary.” She thought he had robbed a bank.

Brenda told her they were holding Gary on Murder One. “I don’t believe that, Brenda. Gary wouldn’t kill anybody.” “Oh, yes,” said Brenda, “he killed two people and shot one of his thumbs off.” That was how Bessie got it.

She said, “Well, there has to be a mistake. Gary did not do this. No matter what else, he is not a killer.” She hung up, and the phone rang again, and it was Ida to tell her that the blood kept spurting out of Mr. Bushnell and she and Vern had seen it. Bess felt she would never get over that description. Then Vern got on the phone and said, “They have a death penalty here. They’re going to kill Gary.” It was all Bess could take. Execution had always been a phobia to her. She couldn’t go near the thought. When she was a little girl growing up in Utah, she would hide if she heard they were having an execution.

After Vern’s message, she kept the news to herself. She told Frank Jr., when he came into town, but not Mikal, her youngest son. One morning he called, and said. You sound like you’ve been crying, and Bess said, I have a cold. He said, I’m going to come out and spend the day with you. She said, You read about Gary, and he said, Yes, he had heard about it.

She kept thinking of the time in the fall of ’72 when they let Gary out of OSP to study in art school. He was going to live in a halfway house up at Eugene, and be given furloughs. The first day, right out, Gary dropped in on Bess for the afternoon, and spent the evening. The next morning he went to the store to get eggs for breakfast, and asked her if it was all right to bring back a six-pack. She said sure. So he sat there and talked through the morning while drinking the beer. They felt very close. She fixed his breakfast and said, “That’s the first time we spent the night under the same roof for a long time, Gary.” He said, “Sure is.” In fact, it was close to ten years. He drank his beer and said he had to leave. Had to get to the art school in Eugene.

After he was gone, she remembered that last time ten years ago in 1962 when they had been alone together. She and Gary were Johnny Cash fans, and so he brought all his records down from upstairs and they listened all day long. Now the records made her too sad, and she would turn off the radio when a song by Johnny Cash came on.

A few nights later in that same fall of ’72, Gary pulled in with a car, and said he’d like to take her to dinner. She told him she was not dressed and it was pretty late, so he stayed and talked a long time. A couple of nights later, she noticed the police were sitting outside her trailer, and wouldn’t say anything to her. That was when she knew a lot had gone wrong.

Next morning, a neighbor gave a buzz and asked, “Was that your son they picked up for armed robbery?” “No,” Bessie replied, “but what paper was it in?” The woman told her and Bess said, “I’ll look it up.” When she found the story, she cried till she was sick. One more river in the million tears she had cried over Gary.

Now, in the summer of ’76, it was a nightmare. She kept thinking that if she had been able to get to Provo, Gary would never have killed those men. That first night in April when he called from Ida’s house he had said, “I’m going to get a car, Mom, and get up to Portland, and bring you back.” Bess had laughed, “Oh, Gary,” she had said, “by now, I’m such a decrepit piece of work that they play the band when I get out to the street.”

A few months before, while Gary was still in Marion, she had been sitting one night with her son Frank Jr., and started to cough up blood. They came for her in an ambulance and took her to surgery. Half of her stomach was removed. The aspirin she took to relieve her arthritis had perforated her ulcer. “The faster I fixed one end,” she told a friend, “the more I was scraping on the other.” Now she never passed through her door unless it was to walk the few steps to her landlady’s trailer and pick up the mail. Still, she let Gary speak of how nice it would be to keep house in Provo, and she dreamed of it, until he wrote her about living with Nicole.

It had all been, she decided, part of the pleasures of thought, no more. She couldn’t even keep the trailer in order. It looked as old and moldering as herself.

Just a week ahead of the murders, she had written a letter to Gary He must have received it just a day or two before those Mormon boys were killed. She had mentioned the house on Crystal Springs Boulevard that he liked living in when he was nine years old. That was the year he kept saying he wanted to be a priest. In the letter, she told him that they had torn down the house and put up an apartment building. One more memory you would not find.

Still, it was in the house on Crystal Springs Boulevard that Gary developed his fear of being beheaded. He was a daring kid, but he had this fear. There was a bedroom in that house he shared with Frank Jr., and the previous occupants must have put luminous paint on the wall because something would shine out pale green at night. Gary would holler, “Mom, I see that thing again.” She would try to explain that it was paint and all right but they finally had to do the walls over. Then his dreams of being executed had begun. They had caused such fear. “He’s been a frightened man,” Bessie said to herself, “all his life.”

Yes, Gary was a sad and lonely man, one of the most sad and one of the most lonely. “Oh, God,” thought Bessie, “he was in prison so long, he didn’t know how to work for a living or pay a bill. All the while he should have been learning, he was locked up.”

It was hot in the trailer. Living with her news at the end of July, she felt she was breathing in a steam bath. One could sit still in Portland and lose weight. “When it’s real hot in my trailer,” she said aloud, “I can lose five pounds an hour.” Of course, she only weighed 110. This shouldn’t be Portland, she told the walls, but Africa. She felt like Portland would soon overgrow itself and wipe it all out. The heat was strong and terrible, a jungle. “I always knew it was too green when I first came here,” she said to the walls.

There was a suction-type feeling inside the trailer. If anybody made the wrong move, it would all disintegrate.

2

One day when Gary was 22, in the year after his father had died, in that brief half-year of freedom and liberty when he was out of Oregon State Correctional Institute but not yet in Oregon State Prison to serve the twelve and a half years he would be sentenced for armed robbery; in that same brief half-year when they had spent a day listening to Johnny Cash, Bess came back to the house one afternoon, the house on Oakhill Road with the small circle driveway that Frank had bought when their life was prosperous and settled, and there was Gary rooting in her desk. “I want to show you something,” he said. He had found his birth certificate. His mother’s name was on it, and his own birthdate, but he and his father were there in plain sight as Fay Robert Coffman and Walt Coffman.

It was ironic because Frank had given the name to Gary. Fay for Frank’s mother and Robert for Frank’s son by an earlier marriage. Coffman came from not being born in Frank Gilmore territory, but rather in Walt Coffman land, which in this case was Texas; McCamey, Texas. Crossing certain state lines, Frank used to change his name. Bessie never knew if that was to get rid of an old trail or pick up a new one.

Of course, Bessie didn’t allow Fay Robert for long. The people in the hotel suggested they rename him Doyle. Bess liked that, but Gary was better. She loved Gary Cooper. She and Frank had arguments over it. Gary was a name to remind him of Grady, and Grady was an ex-brother-in-law who had cheated him once.

Now, she and Gary didn’t even raise their voices, but when he started to get unpleasant, Bessie said, “Don’t you dare! You were in my desk without permission.”

Gary said, “I never would have gotten this news with permission, would I?” When he said next, “No wonder the old man never liked me,” Bessie replied, “Don’t you ever, ever intimate that you are illegitimate.”

It was only years later that Bessie found out Gary had known about his birth certificate for a year and a half before she found him sitting at the desk in her green leather chair. His institutional counselor at Oregon State Correctional (for boys too old for Reform School and too young for prison) had asked why his birth record in Texas showed his father’s name to be Coffman not Gilmore. It got him pretty upset. Two weeks later, they gave him an electroencephalogram for severe headaches. He kept receiving write-ups for refusing to work and provoking fights. He complained to his psychiatrist of strange dreams. He had a hell of a time controlling his temper. Thought people were saying derogatory things behind his back. Then his father died. He was in Isolation at the time and they wouldn’t give him a furlough for the funeral.

All this had happened before the day Gary sat at her desk and handed his birth certificate over.

She did not like to think of how that ridiculous misunderstanding ate at him. Gary had been getting in enough trouble for enough years not to blame it on a birth certificate, especially when he knew his father had traveled with a number of names. Still, she could never be certain that piece of paper had nothing to do with the armed robbery he did next and the terrible sentence of fifteen years at the age of twenty-two. Soon after, Bess’s gall bladder went so bad, it had to be removed. What with complications in her convalescence, a few months went by before she could even visit Gary at the prison. It was the longest she’d ever gone without seeing him. She was shockproof by then or she would have screamed when he came into the visiting room. There he stood at the age of twenty-two without any teeth, but for two in his lower jaw—looked like fangs. “They’re working on the plates,” he said.

By the next visit, he told her that he liked his new set. “I can pick up an apple and really eat it without getting a toothache,” he stated. His headaches seemed better too.

“Well,” she said to herself then, “I am the daughter of the very first people who settled in Provo. I am the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of pioneers on both sides. If they could live through it, I can live through it.” She had to say it to herself again after the phone calls from Brenda and Ida and Vern.

3

Bessie could see the old blacksmith shop down by the creek where she grew up. Smell it, too. She could sniff the steam of horses when the manure flew out of them in fear, and catch again the bottom-rind stink that came up from the parings of the horses’ hooves. That was worse than an old man’s feet, and the awful reek of charred hooves on the hot horseshoe followed—she always knew what hell was planning to offer. It was so bad that she almost liked the strong air of red-hot iron when it mixed with the odor of burning coal. She thought it had to be the way a tomb would smell if a strong man was buried in it.

Outside the blacksmith shop, there was grass and some fruit trees, and the fall-into-heaven of a fresh breeze. Of course, there was also the desert that had no smell at all, but was dry in the nose and left you for dust. In the background were the mountains high as a wall when you stood next to a wall and looked up.

She lived in a big family of seven girls and two sons that came out of two big families. Her mother was the eldest of thirteen children; her father of nine. The mother’s family name was Kerby, like the vacuum cleaner company, but with an “e” not an “i,” and at one time Kerbys owned the Isle of Wales, so they would tell her, but her great-grandfather joined the Mormon Church in 1850, and was disowned by his family, so he came to America without a cent, and moved on to Utah with the Goddard Handcart Company, pushed a cart across the plains with all his belongings, one of an army of Mormons pushing their little wagons up the canyons of the Rockies because there was not enough money in the Church that year for prairie-wagons, and Brigham Young had told them, Come anyway, come with handcarts to the new Zion in the Kingdom of Deseret. Hardy, healthy people, Bessie always said, and knew what they were doing.

Her great-grandmother was Mary Ellen Murphy, the only Irish in the Kerby family. The rest was English and one dot of French. Bessie was 98 percent English and could never understand why Gary told people he was Irish. He was about as Irish as Texan, considering that he was not only born in Texas but lived there for six weeks.

Bessie had seventy-eight cousins. They couldn’t move. They were the kings and clods of Provo, everybody cut out of the same pattern. Later, she would say to people, “Do you know how we are raised? You can’t even believe it. If the head of our Church says, Walk on the right-hand side of the street, then you would in no way walk over on the left, even if the rain was pouring down… we are almost ridiculous.”

That childhood might exist no longer, but she tried to live in it now. It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics.

Bess had an early memory of Provo in World War One. She was five years old and there was no telephone, no electricity in their house, and a telegram was rare. The roads were dirt paved carefully with dust. Newspapers had to be a week old by the time you read them. Their house held two rooms with a lean-to on the back, and they used to go over the hill to the spring and carry water back two buckets at a time, in summer on a small wagon, in winter by sleigh. One November, she remembered, the sky looked like snow, and they heard terrible whistles blowing in town two miles away. Her mother kept saying in a small dark fearsome mood, “Oh, the Germans are coming, the Germans are coming,” but instead her dad came up on a horse over the hill, and that was how they received the news that war had ended.

She thought Bessie was the ugliest name. People named cows and horses Bessie. She told everybody to call her Betty and told it to them again while picking potatoes, picking cucumbers, picking bush beans, and taking turns pushing the washer handle back and forth. At night around the table, their mother would read to them by the illumination of an oil lamp. “Betty,” Bessie would say when her name was called. She would feel the same way fifty years later. When she had the name Betty, which was what Frank always called her, they had money. Somehow it was Bessie again after he died, and she felt poor as a church mouse.

She sat in her chair in that superheated trailer, breathing the heated air, hot as the blacksmith shop, and the old smell of a frightened horse was in her heart and lungs forever. Thinking of Ida’s voice on the phone, describing the blood she had seen on the face and head of Mr. Bushnell, Bess felt vertigo at the fall through space of all those years since Ida was born with her twin Ada.

Those twins had been ten years younger than Bessie, and Ida was her favorite. Bootie, Bess would call her. Little Bootie, like little boots. Now she was married to a man with fists as large as horses’ hooves, and he had worked all his life on shoes and boots. It tore through Bess like a treachery, for she had always liked Vern, that he had chosen to say to her on the phone, “They’re going to kill Gary.” She tried to think instead of the extra room her father built on the house when the twins were born, and the tin tubs on Saturday night.

She felt so raw that agreeable memories were more than agreeable and felt like salve on a small wound. So she thought of the dancing teacher who came down from Salt Lake every Friday to teach ballet. In high-school gym, Bessie would never play basketball, or march, and even had the nerve to sit there and say, Give me Grade E, no excuse. They all talked about her already. She was a farm girl who wouldn’t work in the sun and wore large sun hats and long gloves.

The dancing teacher changed everything. Bessie started getting A+ for Dance, and the teacher moved her up to the front row, said she was a natural-born ballerina. Wish I could have gotten hold of her when she was four, said the teacher.

Bessie also listened to the radio and tried to sing, but nobody in the family could even hum. All used the same tune for everything. Later, it was worse when Frank and she and the boys would try. Every Christmas Eve, Frank would get into “Giddyap, Napoleon, it looks like rain.” Every Christmas Eve they would suffer through that. Gary would say aloud, “It’s enough to make you give up Christmas.” When it came his turn, however, Gary had a worse voice. Nothing but grunts and a girlish soprano. He sounded like a Country-and-Western singer who had swallowed a brick.

Now it came over her that Gary would spend the rest of his life in jail. If he was not executed.

4

Maybe she couldn’t sing, but she was Queen of the Golden Green Ball at Church. There were fifteen girls eligible from the ten or twelve families in Grandview Ward north of Provo, south of Orem, but Bessie was chosen, and college students came out from Brigham Young to teach them ballroom dancing. It was like a film.

Bess never liked the movies, however. She would walk in with her parents, and the picture would flicker over her eyes like a moth in a closet, except it was high up on the wall at the end of a long dismal hall, and an organ was racing away in the dark. You had to become a speed reader or you’d miss what the actors were saying. Being rushed gave her the shivers.

The darkness of the movies would remind her of the long-gone Christmas when her sister Alta was killed after her horse bolted and her sleigh hit a tree. They buried Alta with the snow deep on the ground, and had to leave her up in the cemetery under the snow. The family never really did have another happy Christmas. Melancholy kept coming into the celebration like memories out of the ground.

That was the worst Christmas, until she thought of the one in ’55 when Gary was away at MacLaren, and they tried to get the juvenile authorities to let him home for a couple of days. First they said they would, then he had an infraction and they wouldn’t. Since Bess and Frank couldn’t get out to MacLaren Christmas Day because of the other kids, there was Gary with nothing. On December 26 they took over his gifts.

The only thing to be said for these present hours under the heat of the sun and the airless night of the trailer was that heat never made her feel as alone as the winter damp. Winter was the time when she felt so cold she had need of all the life she had lived. But now at the age of 63, Bessie could feel old as 83 in the cold snowbound cemetery of all those feelings that had frozen in the middle of July by the word that Gary had killed two boys. She kept seeing the face of Mr. Bushnell whose face she did not know, but it did not matter, for his head was covered with blood.

“Oh, Gary,” whispered the child that never ceased to live in the remains of her operations and twisted joints, “Oh, Gary, how could you?”

Yes, the memory of one’s life might be one’s best and only friend. It was certainly the only touch to soothe those outraged bones that would chafe in the flesh until they were a skeleton free of the flesh.

So she thought often of sweet evenings in the past and breezes along the hill on warm summer twilights, thought of how she loved Provo once, and could sit for hours looking at the beautiful peak she called Y Mountain because the first settlers had put down flat white stones on its flank to make a great big white “Y” for old Brigham Young. Once, when she was a child, she was looking at Y Mountain and her father came over and Bess said, “Dad, I’m going to claim that for my very own,” and he said, “Well, honey, you’ve got just as much right as anyone else, I guess,” and walked off, and she thought, “He gave me his consent. That mountain belongs to me.” Sitting in the trailer, she said to the good friend who was her memory. “That mountain still belongs to me.”

5

Bessie studied dresses in the rotogravure before sewing her own, and went ballroom dancing at the Utahma Dance Hall in Provo when they brought orchestras in. She had a girl friend, Ruby Hills, and Ruby’s brother drove them in a Model A Ford. He drove carefully. The roads had ruts as deep as the cracks in a rock.

She had girl friends whose names after marriage would become Afton Davies Atkins and Eva Daball Brickey. Bess dated a boy who went to Brigham Young and gave every promise of being the big boat to catch, but she couldn’t stand him. Bess was interested in whatever else it was.

Others saw her as restless. She was on her way. She went hitchhiking with girl friends to Salt Lake City and beyond. She went hitching, at last, to California. She would go and work awhile and then come back. Her parents did not ask that many questions, there were so many girls. You were raised to know what was right, and then free to do wrong. Since you were a Mormon, you had been taught exactly how to act, but Christ gave you free will to work out your destiny. Bess would do what she wanted to do, and she left home more and more.

Those were years that belonged to her, and she would never tell anybody about them. It irked her that she became the subject of gossip in Grandview Ward, where they would talk of how she came back from long trips with fine dresses and jewelry. It gave her no pleasure that most of those fine dresses had been cut and sewed by Bessie Brown herself, and if she had a little jewelry, it was on the strength of her fine fingers that could model rings. So she told them.

She was in love with a man, and lived in Salt Lake because he lived there, and did housework for an old lady who kept a large house, and lived in a small hotel room by herself. When the love affair was over, she didn’t date. It was a year when she lived alone and was still too young to suffer from being alone. She rather liked it.

She had a friend named Ava Rodgers who drank too much and lived around, and was staying with a man she called Daddy. Daddy sold ads for Utah Magazine for $100 a page and got 25-percent commission. Ava was very much in love with him, she said. He had something that sure got women.

“Daddy bought me a new typewriter today,” Ava told Bessie, and invited her to their room. Bessie didn’t drink—“one of those,” she would always say—but Ava had a couple of beers while waiting for Daddy. Then she tried to pick up the typewriter, only it slipped, and bounced on the floor, and of course it broke. A brand-new typewriter. This happened just as Daddy walked in. He was not tall, but he was rugged, and he wore spats. He sure had confidence, and he sure had a temper. Poor Ava. It was not her typewriter, Bess soon learned. Just another lie, just another sob. Daddy had a look on his face like Ava had ninety-five items on her unpaid bill, and this was the ninety-sixth. “Pack your things, and get out,” he said.

The next time Bess met Daddy was on the street and his name, she learned, was Frank Gilmore. “I’m getting married tomorrow,” he said.

“Congratulations,” she said.

When she saw him next in the street, she asked, “How’s married life?”

“It’s over with,” he said.

She liked him. He was worldly-wise, and she was just a farmerette. He always knew where he was going. They could shop in a dime store or an expensive place, they could even have stood in a soup line, what with it being ’37, but she felt comfortable. Even felt comfortable when she was yelling at him.

He was a very factual man and tough. He told her he had been a lion tamer and had scars on his face. Had been an acrobat and a tightrope walker, he said, and had a limp. Once, in vaudeville, he told her, he had been so drunk while doing his act that he fell into the orchestra pit from a height. Broke his ankle. Now he was in his late forties, and had gray hair but he still had a look that seemed to assume every woman he met was carrying his mattress on her back. Betty loved the way women were attracted. First man she ever wanted to chase.

She never knew that he really proposed to her. One day they were walking out of a movie, and he said, “Let’s get married.” To get down on his knees would have killed him. He would have died right there. So he asked her coming out of Captains Courageous.

He was sober, too. The kind of man who stayed that way until he decided to take a drink. Then he went on until petrified. A few years later, in their travels, he would get kicked out of a hotel or two.

For their wedding, they decided to hit Sacramento. It turned out he had a mother lived there who had been in show business all her life.

When Betty asked what his father did, Frank also said show business.

Before they left Salt Lake, they stopped in Provo to see her folks. Having seven girls, her mother and dad weren’t going to sit down and cry when they heard the news. On to Sacramento.

6

Frank hadn’t told anything about his mother being beautiful. Betty was surprised. Fay had a scintillating smile. She was petite, her hair was white, and her eyes were so blue you couldn’t believe it. Her skin was flawless. Her teeth were to perfection. She had no wrinkles. Even at her advanced age, which must have been close to 70, she acted like a most regal queen.

Her stage name had been Baby Fay. Now she was a medium and rarely left her bed. Just lived in it, in the big bedroom of a big house in Sacramento, and ordered people around. She would command them like she was waving a wand. Never tried it with Betty, however.

All the same, Fay could carry things off. She let it drop that she was connected by blood to a very large and royal family in France. The Bourbons. “When you have children,” Fay said, “the royal blood of France will flow in their veins.”

Fay’s maiden name was another matter. Betty never learned it. She had been in vaudeville around the turn of the century and when she hadn’t used Baby Fay, she was Fay La Foe. That was it. Miss La Foe didn’t tell you what she didn’t want to.

Maybe once a week, Fay would give a séance. Sometimes forty people would gather in chairs around her bed, and pay $5 apiece. Betty didn’t go. She didn’t want to get too near such things. For that matter, you could be talking to Fay, and there would be a knock on the wall, or a thump on the ceiling. At night, Betty could feel presences walking over her bed. When they were married by Fay (who had a clergyman’s license and was called a Spiritualist) Betty always wondered which spirits were in and around Fay’s bed.

She and Frank began to travel. At the time she met him, Frank had lived in Salt Lake for more than a year, but that wasn’t common. He liked to go state to state selling space in special magazines. They were as-yet-unpublished magazines that often did not get published.

He had different names. Seville and Sullivan and Kaufman and Coffman and Gilmore and La Foe. Once he told her that his father’s name was Weiss and he was Jewish on that side although he thought of himself as a Catholic since Fay had put him in Catholic schools and brought him up that way. Nonetheless, he had a Jewish wife in Alabama, and wives in other places. They were named Dolly and Nan and Babs and Millie and Barbara and Jacqueline and there was one who had been a famous opera singer. So far as Betty knew, he was divorced from them all.

But he sure had been in show business. Theatre people recognized him everywhere. They had free theatre tickets everywhere they traveled. One day they even drove across Salt Lake City. Never stopped. Just a quick minute across the wide, wide, forever wide streets. They must have traveled over the years through every state but Maine and New York. Stayed in hotels with names like Carillo Hotel and Semoh Hotel, Semoh for Homes spelled backwards. He had several birth certificates, but she never asked why they lived that way. He would have said, “If I thought it was any of your business, I would have told you years ago.” Still, she was probably as strange to him as he was to her. She had been raised so root straight down that they never understood each other. No matter. She never tried. She thought you had to love people as they were. If you could change them, you would probably leave them anyway.

Frank drove a big car. Always put his short burly body in clothes where everything was big and loose and comfortable. If he didn’t use suspenders, his pants were sure to hit the floor. She thought he looked like Glenn Ford. Years later, considering how chewed up his face had been by the lions, she decided he looked more like Charles Bronson. Short of the devil, he was certainly afraid of no one.

He also spoke the Jewish language. Had a knack for making friends with Jewish people. Spoke their language. He could Jew them down and they loved it. One time Betty was in this place and bought something expensive. When Frank found out what it cost, he said, “You mean he charged you the full price?” “Well, of course.” Took Betty over to the owner and the Jewish man apologized because he didn’t know Betty was Frank’s wife.

7

That visit where Fay married them was the first Frank had seen of his mother in twenty years. Now, he and Betty would go back to Sacramento once in a while. On such trips, Betty couldn’t help noticing how often Frank and Fay got to talking about Houdini. He was a favorite topic. They sure hated the man, and could get their blood up calling him ugly names. He had been dead for more than ten years, but they labeled Houdini a pip-squeak and a cheap tramp. It didn’t upset Betty. She had never enjoyed reading about Houdini in the newspapers anyway. In fact, when Houdini had pulled his favorite stunt of escaping from a sealed casket underwater while wearing handcuffs and chains, it had given Betty an uncomfortable, even a frightening feeling.

Fay and Frank talked about the man, however, like they knew him intimately. Listening to their conversation. Betty had to conclude that Houdini had given Fay the money to send Frank to private school. Then she remembered that Houdini was killed by a boy who hit him in the stomach with a baseball bat, and Frank had told her that his Jewish father, whose name was Weiss, had been killed by a blow to the belly. Then she learned that Houdini’s original name was Weiss, and he was Jewish too.

By then, Fay didn’t bother to conceal it. Frank was out of wedlock, of course. Before Fay died, she showed Betty where a lot of papers were locked in her desk, and said they would prove Frank’s parentage. Of course, she didn’t take them out and show them. Just told Betty to be sure to be around her deathbed. “I don’t want anybody else to get them,” Fay said mysteriously.

They were in San Diego, when Fay passed away in Sacramento. Somebody back east was notified. The papers went east. Before Frank and Betty even received the news, the funeral was over.

The boys grew up, however, knowing something of the subject. Gaylen, the third son, didn’t like Houdini exactly, but he sure was fascinated, for he used to celebrate the anniversary of his death on October 31, Halloween. He lit candles and had a little ceremony. It always came the day after Frank Jr.’s birthday on October 30. Frank Jr. became an amateur magician and, at 15, belonged to the Portland Magician Society. Gary never made much of it.

Sitting in the trailer through the heat of July and August, Bessie could hear Brenda teasing him. “Well, cousin, here you are in jail. Houdini should have taught you how to escape!”