Alberta Gay—who had filed for divorce on the day of the shooting—later told biographers that her husband had initially shown no remorse, that he “wasn’t apologetic or repentant” in the immediate aftermath. The statements he made at sentencing, she suggested, came later, when the reality of legal consequences had had time to work on him.
The divorce proceedings resulted in a legal separation rather than a full divorce.
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PART SEVENTEEN: ALBERTA, JEANNE, AND THE FAMILY LEFT BEHIND
The ripple effects of April 1 moved through the Gaye family in different directions.
Alberta Gay had spent more than four decades with a man who had beaten her children, who had never kept steady employment, who had drunk and frightened and controlled. She filed for divorce on the day her son was killed. The marriage was never formally dissolved—a legal separation was the eventual outcome—but the emotional break had happened long before the shooting.
Alberta outlived both her husband and her most famous son. She gave interviews to biographers and spoke with remarkable candor about the dynamics of the family she had raised. What she disclosed about her husband’s feelings toward Marvin—that he never wanted the boy, that he never loved him, that he discouraged her from loving him too—are among the most devastating single sentences in Gaye’s biographical record.
Her son Frankie carried what he had witnessed on April 1 for the rest of his life. He wrote a memoir in which he tried to set down his experience of growing up with Marvin, of losing him, of what Marvin may or may not have said in his final moments. The memoir is a document of grief as much as a document of fact—an attempt to make meaning out of something that resists meaning.