The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

“Leave that nonsense and go get dressed now,” Huffy commanded. “It’s time for breakfast.”

In the bathroom the washcloth was already prepared with toothpaste, the face soap smelled of gardenias, and there was a thick, soft towel to dry myself with afterward. I put on the clothes I had worn the day before, and then I opened the door and stopped to listen. I often stopped to listen before I left one room and walked into another.

I could hear the sounds of utensils touching metal, then glass. I approached the kitchen door. My grandmothers were not speaking to each other, but they were cooking. They were standing at the same stove, working over separate burners. In silence each was preparing her own version of the same dish for me to eat, a thin crepe-like pancake. Sylvia was making hers, ostensibly, as the wrappers for the cheese blintzes that were one of her specialties: light, fluffy rolls of sweetened hoop cheese wrapped in these nearly translucent covers. Her pancake barely rubbed up against the pan; she siphoned one off for me and served it with strawberry jam and a dollop of sour cream. Huffy’s was browned and glistening from its immersion in a puddle of butter and offered with a tiny pitcher of golden maple syrup.

Two plates, two pancakes, two women waiting expectantly for my verdict: What was a child to do with all this—choose? Declare one tastier than the other, one woman more capable, more lovable, more loved? All I could think to do was eat both, completely, alternating bite by bite between the two versions.

“Are you still hungry?” Huffy asked slyly when I finished.

How did I know not to give myself to the trap? From looking at Sylvia’s face, with its well-proportioned nose, small and round and with a spiderweb of wrinkles in-filling around it; and its too-perfect front teeth, which were dropped into a glass of blue effervescence at night, leaving behind a silent, sunk-in mouth; and its faded watchful eyes, which so vividly showed a registry of pain.

“I’m done,” I said. “But thank you. They were both delicious.”

Before she dropped me at home after Morning Time, my aunt pulled over to the side of Lookout Mountain Avenue.

“There’s something I wish to say to you, Mike,” she declared ominously, or in a way that sounded ominous to me.

I thought I had done something wrong during my stay at The Apartment, something worse than drawing ineptly or being receptive to the idea of Sylvia teaching me how to make hospital corners.

She removed her dark glasses. “I just want to thank you for being such a good friend to Mamma.” She took my hand and squeezed it forcefully.

“Your visits lift her spirits in countless ways,” she continued. “You know what I wish? I wish it could just be the three of us forever, living far away, on an island somewhere, or in Yurp …”

The three of us? On an island? In Europe? I wasn’t quite sure what my aunt was saying, but just as confusing, even more so, was the way she was saying it, with an odd lilting voice and a far-off look in her eyes.

“You mean … without my parents and Danny and Steve? Without Uncle Irving or Grandma Sylvia?”

“The four of us, I should have said. Puddy and I are symbiotic. I’ve told you that before.” She paused. “Sylvia,” she said her name, only her name. It was followed by a dismissive shrug. A whole human being dispatched, just like that.

She did not say anything about my brothers or my parents. The air in the car suddenly felt humid, the Caswell-Massey suffocatingly sweet.

“I don’t know if you realize what a remarkable woman Grandma Huffy is. She’s the most independent woman I have ever known. A freethinker. It’s her religion, really, the only one she believes in. Free, bold thinking—it’s at the very core of what it means to be a Mighty Frank. Mamma is its perfect embodiment. She thought for herself, she lived on her brains, she followed her heart wherever it took her, even when it took her to unconventional places.”

Unconventional places? My face must have asked the question I would not have dared to put into words.

“It’s never too soon to learn about the ways of the heart. Your grandmother,” she said, turning to face me, “married young and, you might as well know, for the wrong reasons. She was one person at twenty, another at thirty. Portland, Oregon? For Harriet Frank senior? She had been to Reed, to Berkeley. She had brains, and pluck. And ambition, that most of all. But ambition did not get you very far in the Depression, did it? There was nowhere to go. She outgrew that dreary city, she outgrew the shabby little house we lived in, she outgrew your grandfather. He was a decent man, hardworking, moral, I might as well say, blah and blah. He was not in her league, not intellectually, not emotionally. And so she took it upon herself to find love elsewhere …”

Again she glanced at my face. “Don’t be so conventional, Mike.” Her eyes began to glitter. “I was not much older than you are when I guessed. He was the rabbi at our temple. It started there, the opening up of her life. With Henry. Why, I was half, more than half, in love with him myself, in the way you can be when you are twelve and a charismatic man comes along who is everything that your father is not …”

I tried to picture my grandmother with a man other than my grandfather. And a rabbi. The rabbi at their temple. There seemed to be rabbis everywhere in this family, yet we rarely went to synagogue. But a rabbi with whom my grandmother found love elsewhere? What did that mean, exactly?

I did not, at that point, know the specifics of what it was that a man and a woman did with each other, aside from raise children. Or yearn for the children they did not have.

My aunt emitted a long sigh, then started the car again. “These talks of ours make me feel so much better. You help me in countless ways, Lovey. I wonder if you realize that?”

She adjusted her head scarf, then leaned over. “Of course what we say to each other stays between thee and me, understood?”

When I didn’t immediately answer she said, “Mike?”

I nodded. She nodded back at me conspiratorially. Then she pulled the Riviera away from the curb.

At Greenvalley Road she lowered her cheek for me to kiss goodbye. I collected my treasures and waited until she backed out of our driveway. Then I made my way along the curved walkway that led to our front door.

That spring my mother had planted white daisies on the uphill side of this path, and they had grown into thick bushes that gave off a strong spicy scent when I brushed by them. The daisies were notable because they were lush and perfumed but also because they were one of the few independent domestic gestures my mother had made in her own house and garden, the decoration and landscaping having been otherwise commandeered by my grandmother and my aunt.

The style of our house—a white clapboard Cape Cod—my parents had chosen jointly. My father contracted and supervised the construction of the house himself while my mother was pregnant with my next-youngest brother, Danny, but that seemed to have been the last independent decision my parents made with regard to their own surroundings.

Very American, my aunt said in that assessing voice of hers. At least it’s not mo-derne. Traditional we can work with.

“We,” naturally, were the two Harriets, who had submitted our garden to a rigorous Gallic symmetry: two pairs of ball-shaped topiary trees flanked the two front windows and were separated by a low boxwood hedge that was kept crisply clipped on my aunt’s instructions to the gardener shared by both families. The front door was framed by stone urns, and the central flowerbed was anchored with a matching gray stone cherub because every garden needs a classic figure to set the atmosphere just so. Most of the flowers, those daisies included, were white.

Inside the house almost all the furniture and pictures had been chosen by my grandmother and my aunt, who had sent over containers from Yurp or otherwise outfitted the rooms with discoveries made during their Saturday excursions or castoffs from their own homes. The furniture was arranged in the rigid, formal groupings my aunt favored. She and my grandmother would often come over at the end of their Saturdays, and even, maybe especially, if my mother wasn’t home they would introduce a new table or print or vase, readjust or rearrange several other pieces, and sometimes rehang the pictures, with the result that our house looked like a somewhat sparser cross between my grandmother’s apartment and my aunt’s house.

My mother, while raising three young boys and at the same time helping to take care of her mother, did not have so much time for interior decoration. In these early years she appeared to tolerate these ferpitzings of her in-laws. Sometimes she would walk in and say, opaquely, “Ah, I see they’ve been here again”; sometimes she was so busy that it took her a day or two to notice that there had been a change. I was not like her. I noticed the most minute shift in any interior anywhere.

Upstairs alone in the quiet of my room I took special pleasure in unwrapping my new treasures. It was like receiving them all over again. Methodically I laid out on my desk my new art book, my pencil box and bookends, the copy of How Green Was My Valley that my aunt decided, after all, might be a better choice for me to borrow from my grandmother’s library, and the set of colored pencils that she stopped to buy me at an art supply store on our way up the hill that morning, since mine, she had noted critically, were used practically down to the nub.

I put the diary that Grandma Huffy gave me in the drawer of the table by my bed and soon became so absorbed in Famous Paintings, which was my favorite of all the gifts my aunt gave me that weekend, that I was unaware of the door to my room cracking open to allow eyes, two sets of them—my brothers’ two sets—to observe me.

The door cracked, then creaked. I looked up. It opened wider, and first Danny, then Steve, stepped in.

The three of us were graduated in size. I was the tallest and, in these years before adolescence hit, had thick, silky hair that I had recently begun wearing longer over my ears. I had a version of my aunt’s botched nose, though I had been born with mine, which angled off slightly to the left; my eyes were green and often, even then, set within dark black circles that my mother said I had inherited from her father, my rabbi grandfather, but my aunt said were a sign of having an active, curious mind that was difficult to slow down even in sleep. Danny came next in line. His hair, also longer now, had a reddish tinge, and his face looked as if someone had taken an enormous pepper shaker and sprinkled freckles across it. His eyes were not circled in black; instead they went in and out of focus, as if he were intermittently listening to some piece of private music or following a conversation that he had no intention of sharing with anyone, ever. Steve was the “little one”; compact, wiry, athletic (as my aunt often said), he had a sly sense of humor and agate-like gray-green eyes that, even from the doorway, took rapid inventory of the new things on my desk.

“What’re you doing, Mike?” asked Danny.

“Reading,” I said.

“Is that book new?”

I nodded. “It’s a book about art.”

He approached my desk. Steve followed.

“You went to a bookstore without me?” Danny loved bookstores. The books he loved were simply different from the ones I loved. The ones my aunt and uncle and I loved.

I shook my head. “It’s something Auntie Hankie bought for me.”

He shrugged, too casually. “What’s that one?”

“I’m borrowing it from Grandma’s house. It’s a novel. Auntie Hankie read it when she was about my age. It’s for grown-up kids,” I added.

“You’re a grown-up kid?”

When I didn’t answer, Danny moved closer.

“I read novels too, you know.”

“You read science fiction. That’s different.”

“It’s still made-up. It’s still a story,” Danny said.

He picked up the pencil box and asked what it was for. I explained its purpose. I used the words artist, tool of an artist. Patina. Fragile. I said it wasn’t anything he would be interested in. He was the scientist in the family, I reminded him.

The phrase was so expertly parroted I didn’t realize I hadn’t thought it up by myself.

Steve reached over and picked up the box Danny had put down.

“Be careful,” I told him as he opened and closed the lid. “It’s old. It’s not a toy.”

The hinges on the pencil box were fragile. The lid snapped off.

“Sorry,” Steve said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Sure you didn’t,” I said impatiently.

“I just wanted to see what was inside.”

“I’ll fix it,” I said, grabbing it away from him.

There was another set of eyes at the door now. My mother’s. She took in the scene as much through her pores as through her eyes.

She came in and made her own inventory. Then she looked out the window at the fold of canyon that enclosed our house in a green and brown ravine. The sky overhead was bright and nearly leached of all its color.

“Boys,” she said to my brothers more than to me, “I’ve told you before, I know I have, that things aren’t always equal, with siblings. They can’t be.”

She might not have always looked so carefully at the rest of our house, but in my room just then she was tracking sharply.

“Sometimes it might feel like it’s more unequal than others, but …”

The books, the bookends. The now-damaged pencil box. The pencils. The paper wrapping and bags left from the day’s loot in a hillock on the floor.

“But it all evens out in the end,” she said without much conviction. Without, from what I could tell, much accuracy either.

I found her later in the kitchen before dinner. She was pricking potatoes before putting them into the oven to bake—stabbing them was more accurate.

At dusk, when the lights were on in our kitchen, the window over the sink turned into a mirror. Our eyes met there.

“It’s not my fault if Auntie Hankie likes to buy me things,” I said.

My mother did not turn around to face me. She spoke to the window instead. “I know that,” she said.

She put the potatoes in the oven.

“Or tells me things …”

She closed the oven door. She turned to face me. “What kinds of things?”

I felt my skin redden. But I had started, so I had to finish. Or try to finish. So I repeated to her, as best I could, as best I understood, what my aunt had told me about my grandparents and their marriage.

I felt so … weighted down after that moment in the car. Telling my mother was like taking a huge rock out of my pocket.

My mother’s eyebrows drew close together. “Your aunt is a screenwriter. A dramatist. She is always making up things, making them more—”

“But is it true, what she said?”

With some difficulty my mother regained control of her face. “Not everyone—not every marriage—is like every other,” she said cautiously.

“So it is true, then.”

Her intake of breath made a wheezing sound. “Yes,” she said. “Your grandparents were not—happy together. But there’s no reason for a child to know anything about all that. I don’t know what your aunt was thinking. Really it’s best put out of your mind, Mike. It’s a story for later on.”

My father was a large man, and as different from my uncle as my mother was from my aunt. He had a version of his mother’s forceful, emphatic features, though he was darker and physically more powerful. A former high school football player, he skied and played tennis. He did everything hard. He worked hard at his own medical equipment business. He played sports hard. He chewed his food hard. He trod the stairs with a hard, loud step. When he became ill, which was rare, he became ill hard, spiking outrageous fevers or coming down with stomach bugs that would have landed other men in the hospital. He pruned trees and painted the house hard; he even washed cars hard.

My uncle was softer in every sense. He was brainy, bookish, and gentle. Curious, endlessly curious, about us children. He spoke quietly and with dry humor. He never raised his voice, at least to us, which distinguished him dramatically from my father, who had a terrific, terrifying temper. The Bergman Temper, my mother called it. In our family my father’s temper was assumed to be as elemental, and as unpredictable, as a winter storm. And as natural: he inherited it from his mother; he shared it with his sister and older brother. His rages came on suddenly and were loud and fierce; when he got going there was no reaching him, not ever. “It’s in his genes,” my mother said, trying to explain away what she was powerless to change.

Many different things could set my father off. A dropped egg in the kitchen while he was cooking. An unruly child and (later) an adolescent who gave lip. Traffic. A traffic ticket. Republicans. Criminals. A scratch on the car. A minor loss at gin.

His wife, naturally. My mother. Who now and then, even in these early days, when she was still the good girl, would introduce a dissenting point of view, a request. That morning, a concern.

“It’s breaking my heart, Marty, to see them treated so differently …”

These weren’t the words that started their argument. They came along somewhere in the middle, after my brothers and I were already listening in.

It started when my father returned from his Sunday tennis game. He was in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Nothing unusual there. My mother joined him. Not so unusual either. She was always going back downstairs for more coffee. More and more coffee.

What was unusual were the voices, raised so suddenly and to such a decibel that they came up through the floorboards. I was poring over Famous Paintings in my room, my hard-won room of my own, which about a year earlier I had convinced my parents to let me have, arguing that with my reading and drawing and my interest in the visual, and being after all the eldest, it only made sense.

My brothers were in their shared room next door. We came to our respective doorways at the same moment. We looked at one another and then together, in silent agreement, we slipped down the stairs, which were open to the entry hall, which was open to the dining room, which led to the kitchen …

“She’s your sister. You need to speak to her.”

“He’s your brother. Why don’t you speak to him? Go ahead, damn it.”

“She’s the one driving. You know that. She’s the one taking him out nearly every week now, buying him things, never thinking of the other boys. It’s as though they don’t exist. You should have seen their faces. It doesn’t matter what she buys him—the mere fact of it, week after week. It’s breaking my heart, Marty.”

“There is no reaching Hank. You know that.”

There was a pause.

“She told him about your mother and her … exploits. He’s nine years old, for God’s sake. Nine!”

My father was silent.

“You have nothing to say to that?”

“There’s no reaching Hank,” he repeated.

“You don’t try hard enough!”

“I do try! I have tried!”

“Not forcefully enough.”

“I can’t make her do anything. You know her as well as I do. You can’t make that woman—”

“I think you’re afraid to stand up to her. I think you’re afraid, period, of your own sis—”

Loud at his end. High-pitched at hers. I did not need to see my father to know that his nostrils were flaring, his head shaking, as from a tremor.

Our parents had fought before, but not like this. Usually it was in their bedroom, with music on—and turned high. That was our mother’s trick. Crank up the Mamas and the Papas, the children won’t hear. Or they won’t understand if they do.

The children heard. They understood. Their voices, the content. Next: objects. A spatula—a spoon? Had he thrown something? At her? We heard it clattering to the ground.

“I cannot live with this kind of frustration—”

Then we heard a fist, our father’s fist, coming down. Hard. On what? We could not see. Not our mother. Something solid. It sounded like wood.

This sound was followed by another sound: something breaking, then falling to the ground.

There was a pause. A silence. As if even he was surprised at what he had done.

He had banged his fist on the kitchen table. Being an antique—with patina, a story, a treasure brought over from Yurp, all that—it had split in two (we saw the disjointed pieces later, lying there on the floor), scarring the wall as it went down.

“Marty, my God—”

“Don’t you dare—”

“Don’t you say ‘Don’t you dare’—”

My brothers looked at me, the oldest, to do something.

“I’m scared,” whispered Steve.

“So am I,” whispered Danny.

“Get your shoes,” I whispered back. “Come on.”

I could leave a house as stealthily as I could enter it, even with my little brothers following—tiptoeing—down the stairs and out through the glass door in the guest room, then around through the backyard, down the ivy slope, and onto the street.

On the street I noticed that Steve’s shoe was not properly tied. I bent down and knotted it. Double knotted it.

“Is Dad going to hurt Mom?” he asked.

He never had before. He tended to hurt objects, feelings, souls—not people.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

“Where are we going?” Steve asked.

Geographically, Wonderland Park Avenue was a continuation of Greenvalley Road, the reverse side of a loop that wound around the hill the way a string did on its spool; only where Greenvalley was open and sunbaked, Wonderland Park was shady, hidden, mysterious, and at one particular address simply magical. Halfway down the block on the right and bordered by a long row of cypress trees, number 8930 was a formal, symmetrically planned, pale gray stucco house that stood high above its garden (also formal of course, with clipped topiaries and white flowers exclusively) and was so markedly different from all its neighbors that it looked like it had been picked up in Paris and dropped down in Laurel Canyon.

Everything about the house evoked another place, another time, a special sensibility; my aunt’s special sensibility. The curtains in the windows, edged in a brown-and-white Greek meander trim and tied back just so … the crystal chandeliers that even by day winked through the glass and were reflected in tall gilded mirrors … the iron urns out of which English ivy spilled elegantly downward … the eight semicircular steps that drew you up, up, up to the front doors. The doors themselves: tall and made to look like French boiserie, they were punctuated with two brass knobs the size of grapefruit that were so bright and gleaming they seemed to be lit from within.

I led my brothers up the steps and to these doors. Even the doors had their own distinct fragrance, as if they had absorbed and mingled years’ worth of potpourri, bayberry candles, and butcher’s wax and emitted this brew as a kind of prologue to the rooms inside.

I rang the bell. We waited and waited. When I heard the gradually thickening sound of footsteps crossing the long hall (black-and-white checkerboard marble set, always, on the diagonal), I began to feel uneasy for having brought my brothers here, at this time of all times. But where else were we to go?

There was a pause as whoever it was stopped to look, I imagined, through the peephole. Then the left-hand door opened. My aunt, seeing us there, at first lit up. “My darlings, what a surprise.”

It took her a moment to realize that Steve was still in his pajamas. Then she looked, really looked, at our faces. “But what’s wrong?”