The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

Greenvalley Road: From the beginning of my consciousness it was as alive to me as certain people. I knew the house, our house, better than I knew most human beings. I knew its scents, its sounds. I knew when the light or the changing currents of air suggested dramas about to build, moods about to shift. My father’s temper—I could feel it gathering steam five rooms away. I could feel it leveling off afterward too. I knew where everyone was by the way sounds carried. I knew who was awake and who was asleep. I knew from the depressions in the seat cushions which chairs or sofas had been recently vacated, and I knew who had eaten what, and often when, from the trace scents that lingered in the kitchen and elsewhere. I knew what each room looked like from the outside, the downstairs rooms anyway, because ever since I had been a child I loved to slip away, especially at night when the lights were on, and peer in through each of the windows. It was an old, old game: I would pretend that I did not live on Greenvalley, that I had happened upon it the way you happened upon an unknown house, and I would try to figure out who these people were and what their lives were like.

Even when I was inside I tried to find ways to alter my perspective. I used to play a different game when I was a very small child. I would lie on the floor on Greenvalley, in the living room or the dining room or my bedroom or even at the top of the stairs, and I would imagine the house turned upside down, and I would imagine myself walking on the ceiling-turned-floor, with its soffits and beams and thresholds underfoot altering the familiar configuration of the spaces I had known forever.

That was what listening to my mother tell her stories to the women in her consciousness-raising group was like. It was as if the house I knew and loved so well had changed shape before my very eyes, not turned upside down so much as inside out.

Where would all this storytelling lead? Nowhere simple—that one thing seemed pretty clear.

After the women took a break to go to the bathroom and replenish the Triscuits, they sat down again, and instead of moving on, as I prayed they would, one of them asked my mother the other inevitable question that came up when people got to know our family. Not Linda, who must have known, but one of the others wondered how it was that these two such different mothers, these grandmothers, ended up living together.

This story, too, I never before heard laid out the way my mother put it that night. She described the suddenness of her father’s death—at fifty-seven, of a heart attack, just a year after he’d been “invited” to retire from the congregation that he and her mother had spent twenty years of their lives building. Sylvia and Shalom had so recently moved out to Tujunga to be near one of Sylvia’s sisters that they had not yet unpacked his books. They had no life out in the deep Valley and no friends other than Sylvia’s one sister—my grandmother barely knew where to buy a decent loaf of bread. Shalom, my mother told the women, had died “most inconveniently for my brother and sister-in-law”—just two weeks before Hank and Irving were due to go on location with a movie. Without consulting Merona, who had adored her father and was utterly unprepared for his death and was so grief-stricken, as she described it, that she had scarcely gotten out of bed for ten days, her brother and sister-in-law took it upon themselves to rent Sylvia a smaller place to live in Tujunga, a “little doll’s house” of an apartment that Hank and Huff dived into and did up, lickety-split, down to the last curtain ruffle. They stocked Sylvia’s pantry, set two pots of African violets in the windowsill, and left.