The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

It’s a wonder how quickly the human mind—a child’s mind—can conjure a plausible story out of implausible facts, how the waking mind can think as magically as the dreaming mind; or—more simply—what a thick ten-year-old I was.

As we made our way along the path to the front door I saw Sylvia standing in the guest room window, peering around the curtain.

I saw my mother come out the front door and down the steps.

Behind her I saw a room full of people. Some I recognized as members of our extended family.

My mother led us to the backyard, where my father was standing next to our yellow kitchen chairs, which in my mind had jumped all by themselves from the kitchen to the garden, where they had arranged themselves in a semicircle on the lawn. This itself was dreamlike, or like something on a movie set. But no one was dreaming, or filming, or writing, now. My father was holding on to the back of one of the chairs; gripping it, as though the chair were keeping him upright.

“Boys,” he said, his voice breaking. “I have something to tell you.”

He paused to steady himself because his legs were shaking under his strong torso. My brothers had already dropped down into the yellow chairs, which had been placed there for this very purpose.

“Your grandmother—my mother—Huffy—”

That was as far as he got before his face liquefied.

For some time it was difficult to breathe. I was being held so tightly by my aunt and I was being rocked by her so vigorously, back and forth on the sofa in the guest room, that I had to steal gulps of air whenever I could. She was rocking herself, and me with her, and she was emitting wild howls, animal howls, that came up from somewhere so deep in her, so bottomless and broken, that I was afraid she was going to choke. She kept howling and sobbing and saying, “Huffy wouldn’t want us to cry, she would want us to be brave. That’s what she would want …”

I did not know what to feel, what I felt. It was impossible to find my own sensations in the face of all this raging grief of my aunt’s. Instead I became all eye, one big Cyclopsian eye; a dry eye, because how could any tears I might produce approach Hankie’s, how could they come anywhere near the sight of my father, the man who never cried, dissolving in the garden, becoming an un-father, a non-father, a creature I had never seen before?

Locked in my aunt’s embrace, I became aware of my mother standing in the doorway. On her face there was a look of alarm tinged with dismay. She was there, and then she disappeared.

Soon afterward my uncle came and detached me from my aunt’s grip.

My dry unblinking eye was free now to prowl over all the surfaces on Greenvalley Road, registering every detail that underlined the inside-outness of the day. It had started with the cars, and Sylvia in the window, and the yellow chairs in the garden; now it moved on to the chicken roasting in a stew of carrots and onions and beef consommé, a familiar scent that, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was as wrong as the dining room table covered in a good linen cloth and piled with pink bakery boxes from Benês’s. It was as wrong as the platter of deli meats nearby mummified under layers of plastic; as wrong as the vases of flowers jammed into water unarranged and still wrapped in their cellophane cones; as wrong as Aunt Baby and Aunt Trudy, Uncle Peter’s wife, sitting together on the sofa and holding hands, their legs crossed in opposite directions, their shoes shed onto the carpet beneath them; as wrong as our dark stairwell, which I climbed alone, leaving behind the living room full of people whispering and murmuring and crying; as wrong as my parents’ room, where even though it was still light out the door was closed (as wrong as that too) and where, when I cracked it ever so slightly open (wrong), I saw a body lying (wrong) in my parents’ bed, not on the left, which was my father’s side, or the right, which was my mother’s, but precisely in the center, a body, covered in a blanket and seen, as I was seeing it, severely foreshortened, like the Andrea Mantegna Christ in Famous Paintings, so that it was all chin and nose and nostril, to me a familiar chin and nose and nostril, my grandmother’s chin and nose and nostril, I would know them anywhere, at any time and from any angle; but why, why would they bring her body here, to this house, this room, this bed—

The nose exhaled, the chin ever so minutely quivered. Wrong!

I thought my chest would crack open and my heart bounce onto the floor. I scrambled down the stairs three at a time to find my mother and, choking on the words, asked her what—who—that was lying in her bed.

It took her a moment to absorb what I had said. Then she explained that it was my uncle Peter.

My uncle Peter, who shared some of his mother’s physiognomy. Her nose, her chin.

“He was up so early,” she added. “He went to deal with—matters.”

“Which matters?”

If my mother found it difficult to have a child who asked questions like this, she did not give any indication. Not usually; not then.

“With Huffy’s body,” she answered simply.

“What did he do with it? To it?”

“He arranged for it to be taken away and …”

“And?”

“My father did not believe it was what Jews should do. He believed their bodies should be buried.”

“I don’t understand.”

She put her hand on mine. “He arranged for your grandmother to be cremated.”

I looked at her, confused.

“That means incinerated. Burned instead of buried.”

I shuddered. “All of her?”

“All of her.”

“Has it happened—already?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. He took care of it. The logistics. That’s all I know.”

It was a lot to take in, a lot to put together. “When is the funeral?” I asked.

“Your grandmother didn’t want a funeral. Your aunt doesn’t want one either. And what your aunt wants …” She paused. “Huffy wished to be cremated, and then—then I don’t know what. It’s like she’s still here. I have a feeling it will be like that for a long time.”

If I was so very perceptive, how did I miss so much, how did I miss the central thing?

Was it because I was still just a child? Was it that? Or was it because the central thing had been hidden—purposefully, and with great care—from Huffy herself?

The central thing: this, too, was shared by my two grandmothers.

I had seen Sylvia’s chest deflate—her bra that is, under her dress. And I had seen her reach in to inflate it again, meaning arrange the pad bulked up with crumpled tissues that stood in for her flesh. And I had seen her bra on the hope chest, folded over on itself, its aggregation of padding and tissues peeking out from behind the skin-colored fabric.

No one had ever explained who had taken away a part (two parts) of her body, or why.

What with all that dressing and undressing happening behind closed doors, I had not seen anything equivalent to Sylvia’s deflating chest in Huffy, and nor had I put together all the signs of her changing habits and diminishing energies. What I learned I learned later. The Operation—the mysterious operation that established the ritual of Morning Time—turned out to be a double mastectomy that Huffy had had in October 1965. In 1968 she had a recurrence of the cancer and another surgery, after which the doctor came out from the operating room and told my father, my aunt, and my uncle Peter that he had been unable to remove it all; the disease had spread too far into her body.

“He shook his head,” my mother told me, shaking her own head as she conveyed this scene to me long after the fact. “With that one sentence everything was different … forever different …”

Improbable though it seems now, absurd, really, in view of who this woman was and what her mind and character were like, her children, working in collaboration with the surgeon and our family doctor, agreed—plotted—that very afternoon not to tell my grandmother the truth about herself, about her body, about her body’s fate. Instead they invented a diagnosis, rheumatoid arthritis, that would serve to explain her intermittent pain and weakening and require her to stay in bed for long stretches at a time, like one of her favorite writers, Colette.

For a brief time a stack of Colette’s novels appeared by my grandmother’s bed, in beautiful patterned-paper dust jackets, and my aunt talked about dear, darling Sido—Colette’s mother—and how she and Colette, like Madame de Sévigné and Françoise, were connected in the way that the two Harriets were, beyond mother and daughter, best friends; best friends for all time.

Yet there was something even stranger than this fabrication, this pretend diagnosis that my aunt and my uncle and my father and the doctors devised, and that was the fact that my grandmother went along with it, acting as though she weren’t dying so that her children could act as though she weren’t dying, even though she told a friend of hers, who later told my mother—who was like a great fishing net collecting all the stray, and many of the essential, pieces of information that helped convey the truth of these lives, or a far truer truth than the rest of these people lived by—that Huffy knew perfectly well that the cancer had metastasized and that she was mortally ill.

Everyone was acting, everyone was pretending; too many books had been read, too many movies seen (or conceived, or made). A family that had quite literally written, or story-analyzed, itself into a better, sunnier life, a life where everyone went by new names (and nicknames) and lived in a new or newly done, or redone, house in a new neighborhood in a new city, was unable to write itself out of death. No, not even the Mighty Franks could manage that.

The house filled up with more people.

I went upstairs and changed into a black turtleneck sweater, an article of clothing I wore only when we went skiing. Being unable to cry, I felt I had to find some way to participate, to show people, my aunt above all, that I, too, was upset. When I came downstairs again my mother took one look at me and said, “We don’t dress in black just because someone has died. That’s not who we are or what we do in this family.”

I was ashamed to have been seen through so clearly. I returned to my room and changed back into my school clothes.

I was coming down the stairs again when the doorbell rang. It was Barrie and Wendy, the girls who lived across the street and were our oldest and closest friends. They had come to see if my brothers and I were all right. Their eyes were red and swollen. They called Grandma Huffy “Grandma Huffy” too. But then we were practically related—that’s how we explained it when people asked what we were to each other, since we were so obviously something.

Barrie and Wendy nestled between my brothers and me chronologically, boy-girl-boy-girl-boy, oldest to youngest, tallest to shortest. We sometimes broke down into different pairs and configurations; sometimes we fought with one another, but mostly we adored each other. After school and during the summer, we were often inseparable, playing games and doing art projects and putting on shows together or playing handball or building forts up on the hill—my time with them constituted altogether the most, virtually the only, “normal” time in my childhood.

What practically related us was marriage. Trudy, their aunt, was married to Peter, my father and aunt’s brother and our “outlying” uncle (Herbert was the outlying uncle on my uncle and mother’s side but brought no parallel interlacing into our world); this meant that we had first cousins in common. It was a very Mighty Franks sort of situation and had not come about by accident, either. Trudy had worked as Huffy’s secretary for a time at MGM and had made a good enough impression on my grandmother that when Huffy finally became exasperated by Peter’s taste in women, who inevitably fell short, way short, of The Standard, she invited Trudy to dinner one Sunday and seated her next to her firstborn son. By dessert she had already nicknamed her Beaky, on account of her being tiny, birdlike, and apparently unthreatening, and declared her to be full of clever insights and perceptive conversation. And voilà: this, one of the earliest of my grandmother’s many stabs at matchmaking, became also the most easily realized.

Beaky, it turned out, had a younger brother, Norm, whom Huffy looked up when she traveled to New York on one of her scouting trips for the studio; finding Norm bright and congenial, she convinced him to move to Los Angeles after he finished high school, and she absorbed him, too, into the family, moving him into a spare bedroom for a while until she got him enrolled at UCLA and on his feet. Norm and my father became great friends; after my father moved to Greenvalley Road, he convinced Norm and Linda, his new wife, to move across the street; as before with Aunt Baby, my grandmother’s conjuring yet again expanded and tightened the family weave. And the girls and their parents would have been fully absorbed into our extended family except for one thing: for reasons we never understood, my aunt developed a seething dislike of Norm, Linda, and—especially—the girls. Even on this day of all days, all she had to do for her face to turn black with disapproval was take one look at Barrie and Wendy as they stepped tentatively into the living room to pay a sympathy call.

As the oldest of the five of us kids, I felt very protective of the girls, but there was no way I could shield them from my aunt’s dark look other than trying, and failing, to stand where I could block her view of them and theirs of her.

The girls seemed uncertain whether they should approach Hank or not. They went for not and received an embrace from Trudy, their aunt, instead.

Hank had moved into an armchair. She was no longer rocking back and forth, but then she didn’t have anyone to rock with her. She was still a magnet for everyone’s attention—she had no need for a black turtleneck, or a black anything else. The grief was just pouring off her, like rain. Was grief always like this? My aunt was undergoing a very private experience in a very public setting. Everyone was keeping an eye on her, wondering when she would again erupt. The room was taut with anticipation.

In the armchair she was sitting upright, talking to our family doctor. Her eyes had vanished behind her largest pair of sunglasses. My uncle was standing behind her with one steadying hand resting on her shoulder.

Dr. Derwin said, “I have never had a patient, or known a woman, quite like Senior. It’s hard to think of your family without her …”

From behind my aunt’s sunglasses tears began to shower across her cheeks as a sound formed itself deep in her chest. A moan came up out of her, and another, and soon she was howling again and trembling so violently that she slipped out of the chair. My uncle and the doctor drew in to catch her before she hit the floor.

Barrie came over to me and whispered, “I think we should go now.”

“Maybe you should,” I whispered back.

I walked them out. When I returned, my aunt was back in the chair, but she was still shaking.

In the kitchen my mother was on the phone speaking to Dr. Coleman, our pediatrician. “I don’t think it’s healthy for the children to witness such extreme grief,” she was saying into her hand, which was cupped around the mouthpiece.

Later that night, on Dr. Coleman’s advice, she would dispatch me for several days to the deep Valley, to my cousins. My brothers would be sent elsewhere, to similarly far-removed relatives.

“If you want me out of the house, why can’t I just stay at Barrie and Wendy’s?” I asked when she told me where I was to go.

“It’s not far enough away,” my mother said firmly.

I would never forgive my parents for that, for cutting me off from my own private source of oxygen, which was knowing. Knowing and noting.

My father had not yet come inside. I saw him through the large windows, standing at the edge of the lawn, looking out over the canyon, where daylight was slowly leaking from the sky.

I found Sylvia in the guest room. She was sitting patiently on the sofa, as if she had been waiting for me all this time. I sat down next to her, and she gathered me up in her arms. In her arms I could breathe.

“Are you going to die soon, Grandma?” I asked.

She gave me one of those knowing smiles of hers. “Not soon, my darling,” she said. “No, I’m not.”

“You promise?”

“Yes,” she said, “I promise.”

THREE

ON GREENVALLEY ROAD

“Hey, you wanna see what Suzie has in her backpack today?”

The backpack is sent flying and soon disgorges, and bruises, the cherished Académie sketch pad. Pencils bounce and scatter. Jane (as in Austen, yes) skitters across the asphalt.

“Suzie’s reading a girl’s book,” observes Alfred, the ringleader. “What a faggot.”

“Suzie is a girl,” says Jared, his sidekick. “Are you a girl, Suzie?”

“Can you guys just leave me alone,” I say firmly. My version of firmly. But my voice—I can’t help it—goes up at the end of the sentence.

“Can us guys just leave you alone?” Alfred echoes. “Sure we can, sweetie. But there’s something we need to check out first.”

Lunch hour at Wonderland Avenue Elementary School, fall semester, fourth grade. Jared wraps his ample arms around me and drags me behind the ball shed—a dreaded, even more unsupervised corner of the school yard. Before I know it I’m flat on the ground, looking up at the giant eucalyptus trees that tower over parts of the canyon and perfume it with their spicy, pungent scent. I will loathe that scent for years—forever.

Jared is a large, heavyset specimen with oily skin. His bottom smashes onto my face; he plants his feet on my hands. Alfred sits on my legs.

“If Suzie is a girl, why is she wearing boys’ clothes?” Alfred muses. “Hey, Suze, why are you wearing those boys’ clothes?”

Before I can answer, think how to answer, he adds, “Why don’t we see what she’s got down there?”

I try to kick them off me, but they settle in like two boulders.

“I’m not touching her down there. No way.”

“You could do it with your foot,” says Alfred. “Your shoe.”

“You can’t be sure what you’re feeling with your shoe,” says Jared.

“We could use a stick,” says Alfred.

“Same problem,” says Jared.

They ponder for a moment while I try to breathe.

“I’ll just do it. I’ll hold my breath or something,” says Alfred. “Here. Take her feet.”

The two of them change places. If I’d had a chance to eat any lunch, it would have come up out of me. Instead a foul taste fills my mouth, and it goes dry.

Alfred reaches for my belt buckle and yanks it open. His eyes glitter (why do they glitter?) as his hand shoots in … and down. And grips. Hard. The pain is sudden and deep, as if there were a live wire running between my groin and my stomach.

Only later does it occur to me to think, If I am the faggot, why is Alfred going beyond grip to exploration?

“She’s got one all right,” Alfred informs Jared. “A small one.”

He makes a show of wiping his hand off on his jeans.

“Maybe she’s a hermaphrodite,” Jared says.

“What’s that?”

“A boy with titties. Or a girl with a dick. I saw it in a book. There’s a sculpture, some ancient Roman thing, of a he-she.” He turns to Alfred. “Should I look?”

Alfred nods. Jared reaches for my shirt.

“No titties.” He kicks me in the chest. “But maybe this’ll make a nice little bump.”

“A dick and barely any titties. What is she, then?” wonders Alfred.

“Hell if I know,” says Jared.

Suzie. Sissy. Faggot. Latent homosexual (that one I had to look up). Was I what they said, what they called me? What was I? All I knew was that I wasn’t a boy the way they were boys. I certainly wasn’t a girl. And I didn’t feel an attraction to anyone at that age. I had only one matter on my mind, one goal: to make it through the school day without these thugs or their minions (and they had them, many of them) going after me.

I honed my approach over the years. After the incident behind the ball shed, I kept myself covered up. I buckled my belt so tightly that the clasp (brass, two-pronged) bit into my flesh, leaving indentations that were visible in a certain light for days afterward. I wore layers of T-shirts, short sleeve over long sleeve, though sometimes the other way around, to help insulate my body, even on seventy-, eighty-degree days. Of course I kept my distance, sitting off in a corner of the school yard bent over my reading or my sketching, as inward-turning and balled-up as it was possible for a tall, gangly, vigilant boy to be.

My technique didn’t always work. Well into middle school there was scarcely a season, outside of summer, when my body was without bruises in different evolving shades: blue-black, purple-blue, greenish-yellow, yellowish-beige.

My self—my inner self—was a different matter. From Alfred, my experience of Alfred, I trained myself to go dead. I went through a kind of ritual every morning as soon as I stepped out our front door. It lasted for the amount of time it took me to walk from our house to the bus stop. I began with my feet and worked my way up my entire body, stiffening and hardening it from within. Going dead inside in this way, deep inside, made me strong, impermeable. A warrior. That was how I thought of it: I was a warrior who every day went to do battle at Wonderland Avenue Elementary and later Bancroft Junior High. To be a target while other people did battle, though, was more accurate.

You don’t want to be ordinary, do you, Lovey? To fit in? Fitting in is a form of living death. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.

I always did.

Alfred was a dead ringer for Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine mascot that was Danny’s preferred reading material in these years. He even had his freckles, a version of his unorthodontured teeth, and a similar if slightly less exaggerated dead, mal-shaped left eye.

His modus operandi was to lie in wait, coiled and cobra-like, in all the interstitial spaces in the day where bullies tend to thrive. At the bus stop in the morning and again in the afternoon. On the playground at recess. Or at lunch hour, where he was often assisted in his machinations by his greasy, rotund sidekick, Jared.

But Alfred’s deepest, strangest power was his Janus-like changeability. At school he was a combination of demon and ringmaster. On the bus ride he liked to finish off the day’s work by digging his nails into the backs of my hands, gouging out tiny crescent-shaped bits of flesh into which a few drops of blood would rise up afterward. Yet as soon as the bus pulled away and the other neighborhood kids scattered, often, as often as not, he would turn to me and say, “So do you want to come over and play?” Or trade baseball cards (an early shared interest)? Or stamps (a later one)?

Absurdly to me now, I would answer, “Sure.” I would go home and change out of my school clothes, pick up my handball or my trading cards or my stamp collection, and I would cross the street to his house, or else he would cross the street with his things and come to mine. We played for hours together, in relative peace. I suppose I thought, or hoped, that these companionable afternoons of ours would work like goodwill in a savings account that I could draw on when we were back at school, but that turned out to be a particularly naive form of wishful thinking. The next day Alfred would greet me at the bus stop and look me over with those hard eyes of his: “Good morning, Suzie.” Then clack! Toe of shoe—penny loafer, cheap hard leather—striking shin or knee. I hoped for shin, since it was hard to hold yourself rigidly dead with a swollen knee.