The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

Even as she was laying out the rules of the evening, I was already planning how to break them. Since the time of my uncle’s daily visits during Huffy’s illness, I had further honed my eavesdropping skills. I had learned that it was never wise to start listening at the beginning of a conversation, because that was when people (= my mother) were most suspicious. I had learned that a good time to slip down a few stairs was when someone had gotten up to, say, pour wine or go to the bathroom, since one bit of unusual noise easily masked another. And I had learned to be patient, endlessly patient, since much of what I overheard was dull and some of it wasn’t even comprehensible to me; sometimes all that patience led nowhere, yet sometimes …

“So, Merona, last week you were talking about how you don’t always feel at home in your own house. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.”

“Really? What have you been thinking?”

“Well,” this speaker continued, “it occurred to me that our homes are a kind of metaphor for where many of us find ourselves as women. We’ve arranged them for everybody but ourselves. For our husbands, our parents, our social circle. In your case, your in-laws.”

“Except in my case I didn’t even do the arranging.”

“More of a metaphor—more of a problem. It’s all part of the same issue. People dictating to us what we should be deciding for ourselves. The covering on a sofa can be just as important, in this sense, as the clothes we wear, the books we read, our ideas. When are we going to say what we really mean, wear—whatever we like? Throw out the old—the old—”

“Bronzes. Miniature Greco-Roman statues that have nothing to do with me. Views of French châteaus—when I’ve never even been to France.”

I did not have to peer into the living room to know what the scene looked like. There were eight women sitting in a circle around our coffee table. I knew about half of them. My mother was likely sitting on a low stool, since it was a house rule, or until recently it had been a house rule, that the more comfortable seats went to guests. Across from her and doing much of the talking was Linda Berg, the most outspoken of these women and, as it happened, the mother of Barrie and Wendy, our almost cousins. Linda had recently cut off all her hair and had traded her skirts and sweaters for jeans and T-shirts—she was the first mother in the canyon to alter her appearance almost overnight. My mother’s change had been more gradual. While it had been some time since she had relaxed the shellacked towers of hair she wore when I was a young child, she recently had begun going down to the Hair Palace on Beverly Boulevard where Bobby (whose tight low-riding jeans and flouncy scarf marked him as an antecedent to Warren Beatty in Shampoo) gave her a regular perm that produced a cascade of tightly whorled ringlets. This, together with the lightening up of her makeup, and the jeans and chambray shirts she had begun wearing, distanced her ever further from my aunt, whose bunned hair, bright lipstick, emphatic beauty mark, and proliferation of jewelry remained as entrenched as ever.

But now the changes in my mother seemed to be about more than her appearance.

“What’s to stop you from getting rid of it all—just clearing out the place in one fell swoop?”

I recognized the voice that asked this question as belonging to Bea Zeiger. Bea and her husband, Irv, lived over the hill from us and had children who were older than we were by half a generation; the kids in that family had helped to radicalize the parents—at least as far as they could be radicalized from the comfort of their rambling midcentury ranch house, which stood up on a flag lot that was unusually large and sunny for the canyon. The Zeigers hosted fundraisers for Daniel Ellsberg and Angela Davis; George McGovern, of course; and Tom Hayden, whose then wife, Jane Fonda, I went to hear speak at their house later on when I was old enough to be invited to such evenings. Bea and Irv had a touch of the wattage of my aunt and uncle, though theirs was of a much more political cast.

A sound of sipping followed as the women waited for my mother to answer. “Honestly, I cannot say,” she said finally. “Habit. Fear of rocking the boat. It’s a very tricky boat we have here …”

“Some women are burning their bras,” said a voice I did not recognize. “You might burn the bric-a-brac. Think how liberating it would feel.”

There was a silence.

“Merona?”

“I was just trying to picture the consequences. None of you can understand what it’s like in this family.”

“Why not try us?” Bea said.

My toes dug into the carpet. My mother, the rabbi’s daughter, had always been so private and discreet, a secret-keeper par excellence, especially when the secrets—or merely the information—concerned the people my aunt referred to as the inner sanctum or the larky sevensome.

“Do you really want to hear all this?”

Please, somebody, say no.

This was my first impulse. But then my curiosity began to kick in. Because if, after all, my mother was going to say these things, I certainly wanted to hear—to overhear—them.

“Of course we do,” Bea said. “Every one of our individual stories has something to teach the rest of us.”

“I don’t know where to begin even.”

“At the beginning, where else?”

“The beginning …” The ping of a bottle against glass, the gurgle of Chablis flowing from one to the other. “I suppose that was when I was thirteen. Yes.” She paused. “I was the first girl in Southern California to be bat mitzvahed—that’s what my father always said, anyway. Shalom was leading the service, naturally. We were in the sanctuary at his synagogue, Temple Sinai in Long Beach, the first Saturday in November, 1945. The place was packed. I hated having all that attention on me. I was so nervous my hands were drenched. Father kept his eye on the back door. The waiting was just awful. We were waiting for my brother Irving, who was late. When he finally walked in, he had a woman on his arm who looked like no one else in that room, no one else I had ever seen—except maybe in the movies. She was dressed from head to toe in emerald green, and her hair was piled up on top of her head, and she had stuck leaves in it. Leaves …”

The woman was my aunt—I had heard this story before. Several times. But I had never heard it offered up like this as a piece of early evidence in support of all that was wrong in my mother’s life.

Hank, sweeping leafily into the room that November, was an expression of nature—a force of nature. Beautiful, exotic, in carriage and appearance so unfamiliar to the people in the sanctuary that the question Shiksa? flew through the audience.

Was she foreign? European? Maybe that explained it. Perhaps she was a refugee from overseas, but obviously not one of the struggling ones who appeared at Friday-night services out of nowhere and stood out with their gaunt faces and deep-set haunted eyes. She was other, that much was agreed on, and widely.

“Friends,” Shalom said. “Come now. Have we never seen a gorgeous woman on my son’s arm?”

“Actually, Rabbi, we haven’t,” someone called out, and there was laughter.

“Father, sorry,” Irving mouthed as he and his date sat down. Shalom gestured at his son: no matter. And the service began.

Afterward the tall beauty joined the line of people congratulating the bat mitzvah girl, my mother, whose legs went weak in the presence of such an impossibly glamorous woman.

“I’m Harriet, though my friends call me Hank. Which is of course what you are going to call me, since we are going to be the best of friends, you and I.”

We are going to be the best of friends, you and I.

“I was simply mesmerized,” Merona told the group of women in our living room. “It started that day and deepened the next time I saw her, which was after she and Irving had become engaged and my parents and I drove up to Brentwood to have dinner with her family. The whole evening was like a story—a movie, really. My parents stopped at Bullocks Wilshire to buy an engagement gift for Hank, an ivory peignoir and nightgown that were on display behind a glass case in the ladies’ intimates department—a place I never knew existed, and at a price, one hundred dollars, I’d never seen my father pay for anything.”

She paused—to boost all this talk with still more wine? To find the courage to dig deeper? The fact that she didn’t seem to have to dig so very far was almost as disconcerting as hearing her tell these stories to strangers; it was as if she had been waiting years—decades—to speak to the right audience. “From there we drove up to Tigertail Road. My mother kept looking at a map and checking, and double-checking, the slip of paper she held in her hand. We could scarcely believe how these people lived, up high in the Brentwood hills, in a house that had three chimneys and half a dozen dormer windows and space in the garage for five cars. Five! The house impressed us even more in person than in the descriptions we’d had from my brother Herbert, who was at UCLA at the time and had been invited to several Sunday dinners. He would come home to Long Beach and tell my parents how, when they sat down at the table, Huffy would ring a bell for the maid or one of the houseboys—plural—to bring in or clear away the dishes. Herb had met a countess there, from Budapest, who also worked at MGM—and a Russian painter, and actors, and movie directors—and he said everyone always dressed up for dinner like something out of an Edwardian novel. And sure enough, when we rang the doorbell, the door opened and there was Peter, the older brother, in a tie and jacket with a pipe in his hand, and in this deep grand voice he said, ‘Welcome to Tigertail.’ Welcome to Tigertail! I will never forget that. Then I looked over his shoulder and I thought I would die: there was Hank gliding down a spiraling staircase followed by Trudy, who would marry Pete, and there was Baby, whom they introduced as their foster sister, and they were all wearing long hostess gowns, the same as Huffy …”

I knew the rest by heart; I could have told it in my mother’s place: how young Marty—my future father—was just twenty and back from the war, where he’d been on a demining mission in the Pacific that kept the whole family scared for months and months. He was six feet tall and bronzed and had big, wide shoulders and gleaming teeth. He came bounding, not gliding, down the stairs and, landing in a skid, grinned at the group and said, “So these are the new in-laws, eh, sis?” Then, zeroing in on Merona, he said, “What’s happening, tootz?” And she turned crimson and stuttered, “I’m—I’m pleased to meet you.” “‘Pleased to meet you’! A regular lady.” He pinched her—pinched her—and said, “How old are you anyway, you cute little thing?” “Thirteen and a half.” “As much as that?”

For years Merona did not see Marty except in passing at family affairs, where he was typically accompanied by a different girl every time. She did see a lot of Hank, though: Hank and Irving. She started coming to Los Angeles on her own, riding the Red Car line up from Long Beach and then taking a bus to their apartment so that she could spend the weekend with her new “sister,” as Hank insisted on being called. “I would go anywhere with her. Even buying milk was an adventure. She and Irving took me to the movies and gave me books to read, ideas to think about. Hank changed the way I dressed, the way I wore my hair and makeup. The way I spoke. She had such high energy and so much assurance and style and … and verve. Yes, that’s probably the best word. She had verve, and she was enchanting, or I was enchanted with her. I suppose it was a combination of the two …”

One of the women I did not know said, “You were young. It sounds like you were infatuated.”

“My heart used to race when I saw her,” Merona said in a quiet voice. Then: “That kind of infatuation—it blinds you. To a lot of things, and for a long time.”

Another of the women asked the inevitable question: How was it that she went from being tootz to being married to her brother’s brother-in-law?

This, too, was a story I knew, because pretty much since the day I understood that these two sets of siblings had married each other, I had been asking how that had happened—everyone who met our family wondered the same thing. Sometimes my mother made it sound like a comedy (“There was no one else, and I was an old maid of twenty-three”). But sometimes she told the story as though she were looking at it herself … not for the first time, exactly, but with a kind of first-time curiosity or bewilderment, as if even she, after all these years, had not quite understood how it came about.

In the serious versions she began with her mother’s illness. After Sylvia was diagnosed with breast cancer, Shalom asked Merona to come home from school to help out. Merona took a leave from UCLA and returned to Long Beach. It was not an easy time for her. She had left behind her studies, her independent life. Now she was back in the world of her parents, the congregation, the temple. Huffy, watching all this from a distance, and acting as a conjurer once again, came up with the idea that Marty and his best friend, Murray, should invite her out, just to distract her for an evening or two, to let a little air into her life. And so on two successive weekends Merona rode up to Hank and Irv’s apartment and went out first with Murray, then with Marty. She was eighteen; Marty was twenty-five. “He was charismatic and intelligent and more grown up than any of the other boys I’d gone out with, and once I worked up the courage to ask him to stop calling me tootz, we actually started to talk to each other and, what with all the people we already had in common, we found we had things to say to each other and, well, it was a long time ago now, dear …”

That was how she had put it to me. To the women in our living room she said, “I was attracted to Marty—very. I was also asleep. Weren’t we all? I suppose part of me thought that it worked for my brother with his sister. My mother’s illness scared me … and my father liked and trusted Marty, which was important to me … and it’s not as if we hurried to get married. We got to know each other over time, several years actually, and we kept on going together even after our siblings made their disapproval known. They were so worried. ‘What if something goes wrong? How will that affect us?’ Irving said. ‘Have you thought about that?’ But I think there was more to it than their selfishness. I think Hank felt I somehow wasn’t enough for Marty, smart enough or pretty enough or powerful enough to become one of the Mighty Franks, or maybe it was just simply that I wasn’t Hank-like, or Huff-like, enough. Yes, it was probably that most of all …”

She paused. “The secret conversations—you would not believe how many there were. I would go up to Marty’s house on Lookout, and by the chair in the living room there would be an ashtray full of cigarette butts with lipstick on them. I recognized the color. Salmon Ice. Hank’s color. She had been there, talking and smoking and trying to convince him that it was a terrible mistake—that I was a mistake. It was one thing for me to be her husband’s kid sister but something else entirely for me to be her brother’s wife.”

From her audience, murmuring, digesting.

“It’s no wonder that we could only become engaged when they were away in Europe,” my mother continued. “I’ll never forget the letter she wrote to me from France: ‘Sister-in-law twice over, hurrah!’ it began. ‘I think this has to be one of the happiest moments in my life.’”

The room was silent for a moment … then another …

“From the woman with the ashtray full of cigarette butts?”

“The very same,” said my mother. “Welcome to my world.”