The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

“Mom and Dad are having a fight, a terrible, terrible fight,” Danny said, his lower lip turning to Jell-O.

She called back over her shoulder, “Irving—come, come quick.”

Then she knelt down and drew my younger brothers into her arms. “Not to worry, darlings. Everything will be all right.”

Those eyes of hers. Two lanterns, set on high cheekbones. Wicks untrimmed and flaming.

Auntie Hankie sat us down in the kitchen and insisted on making us hot chocolate, even though it was already pushing eighty degrees. She found cookies in a tin too, and brought in from the living room our beloved jar of foil-covered chocolate Easter eggs, which she kept there to entice us all year long.

She brought us a deck of cards, a jar of coins from her recent European travels. My uncle rustled up some pencils and some shirt cardboards to draw on.

Then she sat down with us. “Now tell me. Tell us both.”

My brothers looked at each other, then at me.

“Mom and Dad were fighting,” I said.

“Yes, you said. But what about?”

My brothers looked at each other, then into their laps.

I felt my face burning. “I don’t know. We were upstairs. It was loud.”

“Very loud,” Danny said.

“So loud,” she asked, “that you couldn’t hear what they were talking about?”

My brothers shook their heads. My aunt looked at me, but I didn’t say anything.

“I know this may be hard for you to understand,” she said, “but everyone fights sometimes—even mothers and fathers.”

“Your aunt and I fight, sometimes,” said my uncle.

“Puddy, we do not. We’ve never had a cross word in our lives.”

“Well, not this week,” my uncle said drily.

“Not any week that I know of,” she said tartly.

My uncle emitted one of his trademark six-step sighs, a cascade of diminishing breaths that generally alerted us to his not-quite-silent dissent.

“It’ll blow over, children,” he said. “These things always do.”

Steve said, “Dad has the Bergman Temper.”

My aunt stiffened as she said, “The Bergman Temper? Now what would that be, exactly?”

The sharpness in her voice caused Steve’s eyes to return to his lap.

“Do you even know who the Bergmans are—were?”

“Grandma is a Bergman,” he said. “And Dad. You are and I am too.” He looked up. “It’s my middle name,” he added.

“Yes, that’s right, partially right,” she said. “The Bergmans were Huffy’s people,” she added. And then she waited.

When none of us said anything further, she continued, “Well, your father is passionate about things, the way I am. And Mamma too. If it’s passion you mean, I’ll concede that, yes, it runs in our side of the family. It always has.” She paused. “I’m just curious. That term, the ‘Bergman Temper.’ Who came up with it?”

Both my brothers looked at me. My stomach tightened.

“Was it your mother, by chance?”

“No,” I lied. My skin, giving away my lie, began to burn red.

My aunt nodded, not to us, or to herself, so much as to some invisible off-screen observer or camera. She often did that: she pretended, or maybe assumed, that there was an audience following her—tracking her—at all times. She did not say, I know perfectly well that it was your mother. I do honestly believe that woman sometimes hates us, me and Mamma both. She did not need to say this, at least to me. I knew what she was thinking, and because I knew, or believed I knew, I began to feel uneasy all over again for having brought my brothers here. But I was scared. My father had never smashed a piece of furniture in anger before.

“We should probably call over there,” said my uncle. “They’ll be concerned.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of that,” my aunt said to my uncle. The lift in her voice told me that the prospect of making that call did not displease her.

My uncle emitted another one of his sighs. He said, “Maybe it would be a better idea if I—”

But she was already on her feet. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, heading into the study so that we couldn’t hear.

Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Its sound was amplified by all that marble.

My aunt hurried off to answer the door. We could hear murmuring from the hall—hers and his, sister’s and brother’s, back and forth. Then quiet. Then footsteps. Loud footsteps, familiar footsteps. My father’s loud, familiar footsteps.

He was still in his tennis clothes. His shirt was damp with sweat. With anger. One of his shoelaces had come untied, like Steve’s had earlier.

“Let’s go, boys,” he said.

Our father was no longer angry. He was steely and quiet. This was new. New to me, anyway. And almost worse.

He asked Danny and Steve to go into the house ahead of me. We sat in the car in the garage: his space with his vehicles, his tools and tool bench, his disorder. His scent: no bayberry or potpourri here; instead grease, car oil, rubbing compound, sweat. It stank.

He sat for a minute, several minutes, in silence, with the motor turned off and the keys dangling in the ignition. The car engine produced sigh-like, crackling sounds as it cooled down.

I thought my heart would punch a hole in my chest.

“Never do that again, Mike,” he said finally. “Not ever.”

His voice was firm, deep, forceful. Steady.

“I—I was scared,” I said, scared all over again. “So were they. Danny and Steve.”

“I have the Bergman Temper. You know that. I inherited it from my mother. But it blows over, and when it blows over, it’s over.”

“You broke something.”

“The kitchen table,” he said. “I’ll glue it back.”

There was no apology. Only facts.

We thought you might hurt Mom, I did not say. I did not say, We’re all scared of you. We hate your temper. It makes us hate you, sometimes. It makes us feel unsafe and it makes us—me—want to be with Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving.

“You’re old enough to know better, Mike. You’re old enough to know what stays in this family, our family. Our part of the rest of the family.”

He looked at me. His voice may have been level, but his eyes expressed something unnerving: his temper under control.

“You understand, don’t you, that it was wrong—very wrong—to take this to your aunt and uncle’s?”

I nodded.

“Very, very wrong,” he said. “You must promise me that you will never do anything like that ever again.”

When I didn’t say anything, he repeated, “You must promise. Out loud. Go ahead, say it.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Even if your mother and I fight.”

“Even if you and Mom fight.”

“Even if I break something.”

“Even if you break something,” I said.

“Or several things.”

“Or several things.”

He paused. “You may go inside,” he said.

As I got out of the car I said, “Aren’t you coming?”

“In a bit,” he said. His eyes were focused on the windshield. They were still there when I left the garage.

On my way to the front door I passed the dining room window. My brothers were standing there waiting for me. My mother was standing behind them. Her eyes were red. I looked at Danny, then at Steve, then I went upstairs to my room. I closed the door, climbed into bed, and burst into tears.

TWO

OGDEN, CONTINUED

The rhythms on Ogden Drive began to change. I still accompanied my aunt to Morning Time, but often—as often—we went to The Apartment together as a family, the five of us, my parents, my brothers, and me. We went on Sunday mornings after my father’s tennis game, and we went on Friday nights after dinner. “Let’s pop down to The Apartment for a few minutes,” my father would say. He was not a great instigator of plans; that job tended to fall to my mother or my aunt and uncle. It seemed to mean something, something significant, that he started directing us to The Apartment in this way.

Always, almost always, we found Huffy in bed, those gold flames leaping on the bedposts, books in tall uneven stacks on the table nearby. We would all pile into the second bed or sprawl on the floor or sit in the self-rocking rocking chair and tell her about our day or our week.

I found myself waiting for an invitation to sleep over, and when it didn’t come I finally took my mother aside one evening and asked her if it would be all right if I spent the night. She thought for a moment, then answered, “You’ll have to ask your grandmother.”

Her answer puzzled me. It was backward. Usually my grandmother asked me to stay, and then I had to ask my mother for permission.

When I approached Huffy’s bed, for no reason I could then explain, my face began to burn with embarrassment, and after I got the words out—with a stutter accompanying my hot red face—Huffy said, “Darling, perhaps not tonight. I think I may be too tired. But another time, certainly.”

I saw my parents exchange a look, and I saw my mother glance at her mother, who had come to join us but kept her distance, standing in the doorway as she often did, a dish towel in hand. Something was going on, but I had no idea what.

In the car as we drove back up into the canyon we were all quiet. Sad is what I was—sad and confused about why I appeared to have been cast out from the special protected garden that was Ogden Drive.

When my mother tucked me into bed that night, there seemed to be a glistening in her eyes, the very beginning of tears, as she said, “Huffy really was very sorry that she couldn’t have you stay. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded, but I didn’t understand at all.

I didn’t understand, but I did go on noting the things that I did not know how to put together. They were like scenes from a movie that had not yet been edited, or from a grown-up or foreign movie of the kind that my aunt and uncle preferred, only without the subtitles to help decipher their meaning.

I noted that on Saturdays now Sylvia began spending more time up in the canyon with us. This Sylvia was a different person from the Sylvia of The Apartment. She moved through our kitchen unmonitored, unjudged, unwatched, without competition and therefore at ease.

I noted that there was a change, too, in my grandmother’s—both my grandmothers’—midweek habits.

One of the few things that these two such disparate women had in common was that they had both begun working when they were very young and continued to work until they were very old. Twice a week, Sylvia took two long bus rides, first down Fairfax Avenue, then west along Pico, to a synagogue on the west side of the city, where she gave Hebrew lessons to bar and bat mitzvah students, thereby winding up in life as she had set out, as a teacher of her native tongue.

Most every weekday afternoon Huffy would drive herself to my father’s medical equipment business on South La Cienega Boulevard. She had a desk there and a job that my father had made—made up—for her in the early fifties after Louis B. Mayer had been fired as the production chief of MGM and was replaced by Dore Schary, who had a different approach that did not include giving story editors like Harriet senior so much power over the kind of material that was adapted into movies. My grandmother went from helping Katharine Hepburn try to persuade Mayer to let her appear opposite Garbo in Mourning Becomes Electra to keeping my father’s books, paying his bills, and answering his phone. This was quite a dramatic change of professional milieu and stature, but the point was to allow Huffy to maintain her financial independence and, perhaps more important, to keep her occupied.

Now when we went to visit my father at work, however, my grandmother was more and more often missing from her desk, until eventually her desk stopped being her desk and became a catchall for the flood of paperwork that came in and out of 1920 South La Cienega Boulevard. The only remaining trace of her in this workplace was the pencil cup I had made for her as an art project in school, its pens and pencils disappearing week by week as they were appropriated by other, more present employees.

Back on Ogden Drive I noticed that for the first time Huffy began to defer to Sylvia in the kitchen, handing over the responsibility for whole meals that, formerly, she would supervise down to the last thickened drop of gravy. Meanwhile she left her bed less and less. She spent much of her day reading, though her reading changed from the big classic novels that lined the shelves in her living room to paperback mysteries that it fell to my uncle Peter, my father and aunt’s older brother, who also read them, to bring her, a dozen at a time.

One book appeared by Huffy’s bed and never left: Adelle Davis’s Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, which had scraps of paper poking out of its pages, marking important passages that contributed to the change in my grandmother’s diet. Now for breakfast in place of her own German pancakes (or Sylvia’s paler version) or scrambled eggs with bacon and toast, she ate wheat germ and yogurt. Or pungent cereals made of bran, lots of fruit, and weak tea. Lunches were simplified to clear broths. Dinners became lighter and packed with vegetables as she ate less and less meat, less and less period.

Instead of antiquing with my aunt, Huffy began shopping in her own house, as she put it, by rummaging around in cupboards and closets to introduce an object that had long been out of view. One day, more curiously still, I arrived at The Apartment and saw at once that all kinds of things were missing, a pair of lamps, two jade birds, even the Chinese ladies painted on mirrored glass. My grandmother noticed me noticing. “I’ve sent some things up the hill with your aunt,” she explained. “I don’t need them here anymore.”

“But when you sit in your chair, you won’t be able to see the portrait of Auntie Hankie reflected in the mirror behind the Chinese ladies,” I said, confused and also, for no reason I understood, unsettled by these changes.

“Ah, but I know so well what your aunt looks like all I have to do is close my eyes, and there she is.”

She demonstrated. Then smiled—half smiled.

Even Morning Time underwent a change. I was no longer banished while my aunt brushed and pinned my grandmother’s hair. Was it because I was a year older? Or because she was taking less care with the job now that my grandmother wasn’t going out as much as she had been before?

On these mornings I often sat on the floor, bent over my ever-present Académie sketch pad, the one with the brown cover on which there was the depiction of a hand holding a pencil (a right hand; I was a leftie), poised and ready, as I was, to draw. On one particular morning I decided to capture the scene playing out in front of me: my grandmother sitting up in bed over her breakfast tray, my aunt seated across from her in the self-rocking rocking chair, with her back to me. As I drew, the atmosphere in the room changed: the two hot-tempered Bergman women, despite never having a cross word between them, were exchanging many.

The subject was one of my aunt and uncle’s screenplays, which my grandmother had read and, evidently deploying some of her well-honed story editor’s skills, had found wanting. She was not hesitant to express her opinion, and my aunt, her voice rising higher and higher, was similarly unafraid to express hers in powerful contradiction.

“But you’re not following. If you cut all that backstory, you’ll never believe his behavior in the third act,” Hankie said in a voice whose firmness I had never before heard her use in conversation with her mother.

This voice was accompanied by a fist, raised and punching the air.

“There is too much static material in the story already,” my grandmother said. “Too much exposition. It’s confusing and slow. Your audience is sharp. You have to move them forward.”

“You haven’t read the original material. The suggestion is too radical.”

“It’s my take. A reasonable take, I would argue.”

They moved on conversationally, but the room still felt sharpened, anxious.

In my drawing I depicted my aunt’s right arm and clenched fist at four different heights, to indicate that it was gesticulating. A cloud of spark-like pencil strokes near her mouth suggested her raised voice. I thought the effect was very clever, and when it was finished I carefully tore the page out of the sketchbook and stood up to show it to her.

She looked at it for a moment. “It’s clear that your skills as an artist are continuing to develop, Mike,” she said flatly. “I’ll give you that.”

My grandmother asked to see the drawing. I took it from my aunt and presented it to her. She held it between both her hands and looked at it, then at me, then at my aunt. “This is a very accurate piece of work indeed,” she said. “The boy is so very perceptive, don’t you think?”

“Of course,” my aunt replied.

Later, when she went to clear away the tray, I saw that she had crumpled up the page and added it to the leavings of my grandmother’s breakfast. By accident, I told myself.

Around this time there was also a shift in daily life in the canyon. It started up so gradually that I could not say exactly when it happened that my uncle Irving began coming to our house to speak to my mother every single weekday afternoon at exactly four o’clock.

I would be sitting at my desk in my bedroom, well into my homework, when the scent of freshly brewed coffee floated up the stairs. Five or ten minutes later there would be the sound of a car parking out front, and just after that the front door would swing open as my uncle stepped into the house.

At first my brothers and I bounded down the stairs or in from the yard to see him. Irving was one of our favorite people, and it always felt like an event when he paid a visit. Not because, like my aunt, he came bearing presents or treats or had big plans but because of his attention and his spirit, the lightness of his spirit. Our uncle was avidly interested in whatever we boys had to say. From the moment he stepped out of his shoes (a lifelong habit of his whenever he walked through the front door—I am convinced your unc was Japanese in a former life!), he peppered us with questions about our day, our games, our friends, and later our reading and our schoolwork; he didn’t ask in order to evaluate or criticize or advise, as my aunt so often did, but simply because he was curious about us and entertained by us. And he loved us. The power of his attention was like a portable sunbeam, our own source of avuncular light.

But on these new afternoon visits Irving had not come to see us; or not to see only us. At the end of his time with my mother we would be invited to join them, but at the beginning he and my mother gave us strict orders to make ourselves scarce. They had grown-up matters to discuss, they said. Boring matters, they always added, that were not of any interest to children.

Danny and Steve obeyed agreeably—innocently, you might say—disappearing back into their schoolwork or their games. I was not so compliant. I was becoming experienced enough to understand that when grown-up matters were described as not being of interest to children, they were most probably the exact opposite. Also, for me, observing was beginning to evolve into something more active, more like eavesdropping, if not (yet) deliberate spying, though that would come with time.

The design of our house, with the staircase halfway open to the entry hall and the living room beyond, was a great help to me. I had heard interesting things from the stairs before. I always waited until I detected the murmuring coming up through the floorboards, his-hers, hers-his, back and forth in somber, subdued tones, before I slipped out into our carpeted upstairs hall, first along the landing, then slowly, very slowly, down the first step … then the second … then the third. I had learned early on that when you inched along you were less likely to cause the stairs to produce a revealing creak.

The murmuring clarified into recognizable words, then phrases.

I don’t know how much more of this she can take. I don’t know how much more of it I can take—

Dr. Irvine says there is a connection between the tension and the pressure in his eyes. He says Marty has to watch the glaucoma extra closely right now. I worry he’s going to go blind—

I’m concerned she’s going to have a heart attack. Or a car accident. She hasn’t slept through the night in more than six months. She screams whenever a spatula drops to the floor. Sometimes she wails in her sleep—

He doesn’t wail. He roars, like when he’s angry, but—

A creaking stair or a sound from the garden produced a sharp Red nisht, di kinder darfn nisht hern. But it was no good resorting to Yiddish, not that Yiddish, since I knew it meant they suspected someone—a kind—was there and were alerting each other to stop talking.

That’s when we would be invited to join them. I always waited a few minutes before hurrying, pretending, that is, to hurry down the stairs. When I skidded to a stop near my uncle’s chair he would look over at me with raised eyebrows that said, I know what you’ve been up to, Mike. But did he, really?

One evening in the middle of July 1969, all nine of us assembled at The Apartment. The living room had been transformed into a little theater: Huffy’s wing chair had been turned around to face the Zenith, and so had Sylvia’s low-slung Victorian chair. The dining room chairs had been brought in and lined up in rows for my parents and aunt and uncle. Open space was left for us children on the braided rug.

This, all this, created a sense of suspense. A Major World Event, my uncle called it; but he might as easily have said A Major Family Event, since it was the first time in a long time we had all gathered together in The Apartment.

We watched with the rest of America, the rest of the world. We watched and we waited. The screen was gray and granular, alternately dancing with lines and spotted, or pulsing. “It’s like when you have motes in your eyes,” my mother said. Time seemed to move very slowly as we listened to Walter Cronkite and waited patiently, then less patiently, for the hatch of the Eagle module to swing open. It seemed to take forever, yet no one got up for a drink of water or to stretch. We sat where we were, transfixed.

And then, finally, just like that, it happened. The hatch opened, and Neil Armstrong backed down the ladder and set his foot right there, on the white surface of the moon. We all watched in silence for several minutes. Everyone, and everything, grew even more still. It was as though all the eyes in the room were watching with us—the eyes in the portraits and in the Flemish mirror, the eyes of all the Chinese figures in the lacquer and on the porcelain …

Afterward Huffy angled around to face us children, and with a strong but also strangely glazed light in her eyes she said, “When I was born, boys, we still traveled by horse and buggy. Ice was delivered by a man in a cart. Radios and telephones were still newfangled inventions. Televisions—no one had even imagined them. Women couldn’t even vote—we couldn’t—” She made a small sweeping gesture in the air with her right hand. “I wonder if you can understand what it feels like for me to have lived long enough to see an astronaut walk on the moon.”

She turned her perfectly combed and pinned silver head back to the television screen. “The moon …”

At three o’clock in the afternoon on the first Friday in October the school bus dropped us as usual at the bottom of our hill, and as my brothers and I walked up to our house I saw that cars were parked in our driveway and all along the street nearby. It was the weekend our new dog was supposed to come live with us in the canyon. Something must have happened to the dog, I remember thinking. Something bad.