The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

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.

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.”