The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

OVERHEARD (#ulink_45ab3e28-e028-53d8-adf3-599eae11d5e8)

“My feeling for Mike is something out of the ordinary,” I overhear my aunt say to my mother one day when I am eight years old. “It’s stronger than I am. I cannot explain it. He’s simply the most marvelous child I have ever known, and I love him beyond life itself.”

Beyond life itself. At first I feel lucky to be so cherished, singled out to receive a love that is so vast … but then I stop to think about it. I am not sure what it means, really, to be loved beyond life itself.

Do I love my own mother that way? Does she me? Is such a thing even possible?

And why me and not my two younger brothers? What do I have that they do not?

“I wish he were mine,” my aunt blurts after a moment.

From where I am crouching on the stairs in the entry hall, I can feel the weather in the room change. A long, tense pause opens up between the two women. I hear them breathing, back and forth, into that pause.

They are sitting at right angles to each other, I know, my aunt on the sofa, my mother in the chair next to it. This is how they always sit in our living room, not face-to-face but perpendicular, so that they don’t have to make eye contact if they don’t want to.

“I wish you had a child of your own,” my mother says carefully. Ever the second fiddle, the third born. The diplomat.

“So do I,” says my aunt in a pitched, emotional voice.

Maybe you would be a different person if you did.

My mother does not say this. She thinks it, though. Everybody in our family does. But that’s not what happened.

This is.

PART I (#ulink_f6493152-fa4d-5339-9aa1-debdc5df70f2)

ONE (#ulink_83311bf7-3be3-5613-8a71-af19d9c2dbb3)

THE APARTMENT (#ulink_83311bf7-3be3-5613-8a71-af19d9c2dbb3)

For a long time I used to wait in the dining room window. I waited in the afternoon, when I returned from school, and I waited on Saturday mornings. Now and then I waited at the edge of the driveway, because from there I could see farther up the hill, almost to the top. When the Buick Riviera appeared, its fender flashing a big toothy metallic grin, I felt happiness wash over me; happiness braided together with anticipation and excitement too, since it meant that within minutes my aunt would be pulling up to take me on one of our adventures.

My aunt was the one person in the world I was always most eager to see. Sometimes she came bearing gifts, special books or treasures related to the special interests she and my uncle and I shared: art and architecture, literature, and, since my aunt and uncle were screenwriters, movies (never “film,” that was the celluloid of which movies were made). But what I loved even more than receiving tangible things was going off with her, alone, without my younger brothers or my parents; being alone with her, with the force of her attention, the contents of her mind. And her talk, which was like an unending river emptying itself into me. Our time together was larky. You really are the best company a person could ever hope for, Mike, she said, bar none. She made me feel clever merely by being with her and listening to her, learning what she had to teach, absorbing some of her spark—her sparkle.

My aunt and I went off alone together often because she and my uncle didn’t have any children of their own, and they lived within minutes of our house, and because we were doubly related. There was a refrain we children learned to recite when people asked us to explain our intertwined family—

Brother and sister married sister and brother.

The older couple have no children, so the younger couple share theirs.

The two families live within three blocks of each other up in Laurel Canyon—

and the grandmothers live in an apartment together at the foot of the hill.

It wasn’t very poetic, but it got the facts across and made the situation seem almost normal, as summaries sometimes do.

The situation was not remotely normal, but naturally I did not understand that at the time.

Our relationship, my aunt said, was special. She called our two families the larky sevensome or, quoting my grandmother, the Mighty Franks. But even within the larger group, she said, you and I, Lovey, are a thing apart. What we have is nearly as unusual as what I have with Mamma. The two of us have pulled our wagons up to a secret campsite. We know how lucky we are. We’re the most fortunate people in the world to have found each other, isn’t it so?

Only we hadn’t found each other. We had been born to each other; to—into—the same family. Did that make a difference? Was a bond this strong meant to grow in this soil, and in this way? I was far too besotted with my aunt to ask any of these questions. My aunt was the sun and I was her planet, held in devotional orbit by forces that felt larger than I was, larger than we were. You could call it gravity. Or alchemy. Or intoxication. Or simply love. But what an unsimple love this was.

I heard the car before I saw it: the familiar motor slowing as it approached Greenvalley Road … the high-pitched squeak the wheels made as they widened into that precise turn that landed the Buick smack-dab in the center of our driveway … and then the horn, whose coloration changed depending on the driver’s frame of mind. The jubilant tap-tap that soon ricocheted across the canyon meant Come along quick-quick, which was my aunt’s preferred pace in all matters always.

I flew out the front door, for a moment forgetting my ever-present Académie sketch pad and pouch of pencils. Halfway down the garden path, I remembered and doubled back to retrieve them from the entry hall. Outside again, something, some sense, made me glance back at the dining room window. My two younger brothers were standing and looking for me in the same place where I had been looking for my aunt. I lingered just long enough to see the confusion in their faces. Then I headed for the car.

Once I had settled into the front seat, but before my aunt had backed us out and on our way, I glanced again at the window, where my mother had now joined my brothers. She had placed a comforting palm on each boy’s shoulder. There was no confusion in her face. It was very clear. To me it said: Why just Mike, why yet again?

It was the cusp of the 1970s, and my mother had cut off all her hair, which until recently her hairdresser used to pile up on top of her head like an elaborate pastry. She’d stopped wearing heavy makeup too. She’d exchanged her dresses and skirts and blouses for blue jeans and T-shirts accessorized with colorful beads, and she’d begun putting strange new music on our record player, albums by Carole King and Joni Mitchell and the Mamas and the Papas, all of whom lived near where we lived in Laurel Canyon. As she cooked and cleaned and took care of my younger brothers she sang—

But you’ve got to make your own kind of music

Sing your own special song

Make your own kind of music

Even if nobody else sings along

Where is the wit? my aunt said when she heard these lyrics. Where is the panache? She and my uncle believed that Brahms was the last composer to belong in what they called the top drawer, though they did open a tiny side compartment for Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, especially when sung by Ella, whom they referred to solely by her first name.

This recent haircutting of my mother’s was the first of many evolutions in her appearance over the decades—her look changed with the times, while my aunt’s remained fixed in 1945, the year she met my uncle at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where they were both young screenwriters.

My mother was short—petite and mignonne, that’s our Merona, my aunt said. Adorable, she said, pronouncing the word àla Française, as if she were speaking about a little girl, or a doll. My mother’s doll-like tendencies—such as they were—had been in slow retreat ever since she had had her children, but to my aunt, Merona was in many ways still the timid thirteen-year-old she first met a few months after she and my uncle had begun going out together.

There was nothing remotely doll-like about my aunt. She was a tall, big-boned, round-faced, incandescent-eyed woman—formidable, people often said of her, though never with the hint of mockery that was conveyed when the word was pronounced with a French accent and certainly never to her face. I considered her quite simply to be the most magical human being I knew. Everything she touched, everything she did, was golden, infused with a special knowledge and a teeming vitality that transformed an ordinary conversation, or meal, or room, or moment, into an enchanted one. Not just to me but to lots of other people, she was a great beauty, part Rosalind Russell, part (brunette) Lucille Ball, though she mockingly—apparently mockingly—described herself as the forever too-tall, too-ugly adolescent with the imperfect nose that her mother had had “revised” as a seventeenth-birthday present. Her hair went up—high—higher even than my mother’s ever did—well before the bunning years. She fastened flowers or, memorably, leaves in these rounded towers, or wrapped them in scarves (bandannas, leopard or zebra prints, plaids), or concealed them behind berets, tams, cloches, or baseball caps she chose for their color, not because of her affinity for any particular team. She colored her eyelids blue or violet and well into the 1990s penciled a flapperish beauty mark at the top of her right cheek. She wore quantities of jewelry, and as she aged, more and more of it, often collated into thematic collections as profuse as the collections of objects in her house, ivory one day, amber the next; coral, gold, silver, crystal, malachite, lapis, pearl, or jet, depending on her mood or outfit. She treated herself, essentially, as a surface to decorate and, like the other surfaces she decorated, the finished effect asked to be noticed, always. Was noticed, always.

Her linguistic powers were inimitable. Intimidating, at times. She commanded torrents of words that merged into impeccable sentences the way raindrops collected into puddles. In story meetings she was a master of the pitch. She sat forward in her chair, elbows on her knees, a Merit smoking itself in one hand, and let fly. In fifteen, twenty minutes, to a hushed room, she would render an entire movie, from FADE IN to FADE OUT, without glancing at a single written note.

Her scent was a Caswell-Massey men’s cologne she bought at I. Magnin. When I climbed into the car its spiciness came gusting up out of her collar as she lowered a rouged cheek down to my height.

I kissed her, and she eased the Buick out of the driveway. “Reach around in back, Lovey,” she said.

I brought forward a wrapped package tied with a bow so crisp it might have been dipped in starch.

“What are you waiting for? Go ahead. Open it.”

The present was a book titled Famous Paintings. I glanced inside. Each chapter was devoted to a different subject: landscape, portraits, people working, children at play.

“Thank you, Auntie Hankie,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

Again the cheek lowered. Again I kissed it.

“A little something to celebrate our Saturday together.” She nudged me with her elbow. “I’m sure that you will be an artist one day, Mike. I’m convinced of it. Everything you do has such style. Really and truly. It’s as if you’ve been immersed in aesthetics your whole entire life.”

I was nine.