The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

“Oh, yes, please,” I said. “And a sponge cake?”

“If you like.”

I nodded.

“Michaelah,” she said.

“Yes, Grandma Sylvia?”

“They’ll be impatient if you’re gone too long.”

“It’s only been a few minutes.”

She glanced at the door again. “Best to close the door when you go back out.”

The door to Huffy’s room was still closed. I found my sketch pad and stretched out on the braided rug in the living room.

As I tried to decide what to draw, my eye landed first, as it often did, on the painting that hung just above and to the right of the wing chair where Huffy preferred to sit during family gatherings. If there had been a fireplace, the painting would have hung over the mantelpiece, but there wasn’t, and this picture didn’t need that extra emphasis. It was already italicized—underlined. The painting was a portrait of my aunt, the epicenter of the room as she was of our family.

Harriet—Harriet Frank, Jr.—was her public name, her professional name. At home she was known as Hank or Hankie, therefore Auntie Hankie, or sometimes Harriatsky or, later, Tantie.

There was quite a confusion around the nomenclature of these women. Huffy had been born Edith Frances Bergman in Helena, Montana. She discarded the Edith early on because she disliked it. She went by Frances as a girl in Spokane and a young married woman in Portland. She remained Frances Goldstein—her married name—until in the mid-1930s she hosted a local radio program, which she called Frances Frank, Frankly Speaking; soon afterward she became reborn as Frances Frank, changing her last name and persuading her husband to change his and the children’s too. Several years later, in 1939, when she remade her life again, moving from Portland to Los Angeles, she appropriated her daughter’s name, a new name for a new life. She became Harriet senior, and my aunt, therefore undergoing a name change of her own, became Harriet junior.

No one thought this was strange: a mother taking her daughter’s name so that they could become a matched set.

“Harriet is an interesting name,” my grandmother declared. “Harriet is a writer’s name.”

Harriet junior became a writer—a screenwriter. No one thought this was strange either.

Or this: “Huffy and I know each other’s most intimate secrets. There’s nothing really that we don’t know about each other. Not one stitch of a thing.”

Or: “We’ve never had a cross word in our lives. Not a single one.”

Or: “Hankie and I are not merely mother and daughter. We’re best friends. We’re beyond best friends.”

They loved their pronouncements, my grandmother and my aunt, almost as much as they loved their nicknames. My uncle was Dover (his middle name bumped forward), Puddy, Corky. Another aunt was Frankie or Baby. My father was Martoon, Magoofus, Magoof.

I was Lovey or Mike.

Harriet senior was Huffy (as in: HF + y), always. Sylvia, my other grandmother, never had a nickname. Sometimes she might be shortened to Syl, but that was all. My mother, Merona, sometimes became Meron. But never anything more affectionate than that.

It was California. Blazing, sun-bleached Southern California: most any other nine-year-old boy would have spent his time outdoors playing under all that sun and sky. I spent mine lying on the braided rug, looking up at the painting of my aunt—my sun, my sky.

The portrait had been painted by a Russian cousin of my grandmother’s called Mara, who during the war had been banished to Siberia, where she was sent to a gulag and forced to paint pictures of Stalin for the government. “Your aunt and I went to Yurp together in 1964,” Huffy told me—Yurp being, like Puddy or Hankie or Magoof, a nickname, though for an entire continent instead of a person. “It was a dream of ours forever. Mara’s sister, Senta, who survived by hiding in an attic, had spent nearly twenty years trying to get her out of the Soviet Union. We found them living together in an apartment in Brussels. Every morning after breakfast your aunt and I went to their house and sat for her until dinner. We made up for a lot of lost time on that visit. And while I sat there, can you guess what I thought about?”

I shook my head.

“How grateful I was to my parents for deciding to come to America when they did. Do you know what I mean by that?”

I shook my head again.

“I mean that otherwise I might well have perished, like so many people in our family.”

My grandmother focused her dark eyes on me. “That’s what would have happened to me for no reason other than I had been born a Jew,” she said. “And if I had been murdered, that means your father would not be here, which means you would not be here.”

“Not Auntie Hankie either?” No Auntie Hankie was almost more difficult to conceive of than no me.

“No, not even our darling Hankie would be here …”

Her dark eyes shone. She was quiet for a moment. “That is very difficult to imagine, is it not?”

“It’s impossible,” I said.

My grandmother smiled enigmatically. “Yes, impossible. I quite agree.”

My aunt and my grandmother each had the other’s portrait hanging in her house. The portrait of my aunt was the larger of the two and darker, both in its palette and in the way it hinted at my aunt’s lurking black moods. How this distant cousin—a painter of Stalin—got at this in my aunt, and after knowing her for only a week, was a mystery.

Then there were her eyes. It was the kind of thing people made jokes about in portraits, but my aunt’s eyes truly did seem to follow me wherever I went. This may have had to do with the fact that her eyes weren’t merely in the painting but reflected in several other places in the room at the same time: in the reverse paintings on mirrored glass of Chinese ladies that hung over the bookshelves and, more prominently, on the wall opposite the portrait, where there was a mirror, very old, as in seventeenth-century old, Flemish, with a thick Old Master frame made out of alternating strips of ebonized and gilded wood. Its dim spotted glass showed my aunt back to herself, so that when I came between the painting and the mirror, I felt my aunt was looking at me from two directions, or else that I was interrupting a secret conversation, self unto self unto self, into infinity.

The mirror also made it possible for my grandmother, from her customary place in the wing chair, to look across the room at the mirror image of the painting of her daughter, who was therefore never out of her sight.

I decided that for my drawing I would try to capture the mirror capturing the picture of my aunt. Clever! I started with the frame, and then I moved toward the shape of Auntie Hankie’s head. It wasn’t easy to get right; not easy at all.

After half an hour the door swung open, and in an explosion of sound and shifting currents of air my aunt came barreling toward the kitchen like a fighter stepping into the ring. She busied herself there for several minutes, then just as the smell of toasting bread began to reach the living room, she poked her head in to check on me. With a rapid glance at my sketchbook she said, “But, Lovey, is doodling the absolute best use of your time when right over your shoulder a whole library is just waiting for you to explore?”

I looked down at my drawing. A doodle? I felt my cheeks burn with shame for being such a failure. How was I ever going to be an artist if I couldn’t draw one of the subjects I knew best in the world? I quietly folded the drawing in two and closed my sketch pad.

My aunt approached the bookshelves and bent down. She ran her fingers along the spines of novels by Dickens … then Thackeray … then Trollope. She stopped at How Green Was My Valley. “This was an absolute favorite of mine when I was a girl,” she said, before moving on to two other books, which she lifted down from the shelf and handed to me. “Take my word for it, Lovey, between Of Human Bondage and Sons and Lovers you’ll learn everything you need to know about what it feels like to be a certain kind of young person. Your kind, if I may say.”

I let the books fall open in my lap and peered dubiously at the river of dense print. My aunt said, “But you have a sharp mind, Mike, do you not? Of course you do. It’s time to get started, quick-quick, on reading grown-up novels …”

When I didn’t say anything, she added, “You don’t want to be average, do you? To fit in? Fitting in is death. Remember that. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.”

Thanks to my aunt—my aunt and uncle—I was as far from fitting in with my peers as it was possible for a nine-year-old to be. I didn’t even know what fitting in felt like. And I was proud of that. Ridiculously proud, at times.

Nearly as sacrosanct as Morning Time were my aunt and grandmother’s Saturday antiquing excursions. These were mental health days, but they also had a clear purpose, since a static room is a dead room, and living in a dead room wreaks havoc on the spirit (—Harriet junior).

Senior and junior both approached shopping, this kind of shopping, with a connoisseurial rigor. Setting off with them on a Saturday was similar, I imagined, to what it must have felt like to travel with them to Yurp, which was in a way what these excursions of theirs were like, mini voyages across time, history, and culture, to distant worlds—worlds reconstituted by the past as contained in things.

Only they weren’t merely looking for a pair of candlesticks or a charger or another piece of Chinese lacquer; they were also training “the boy” in what was authentic or a repro, g. or n.g., period or—heaven forbid—mo-derne, a word whose second syllable was drawn out and pronounced with an exaggerated sneer.

I found these Saturdays to be alternately thrilling and unnerving. Heaven help me if I picked up something, even merely to investigate, and heard that piercing sotto voce n.g.—for “not good.” It was the equivalent of being told that I was n.g., or that I was an idiot. Of course I was an idiot. What could a kid know about Lewey Schmooey (as he, or it?, was described in a lighter spirit); how could he tell vermeil from ormolu, Palladio from Piranesi? It was as hard (almost as hard) as being read a paragraph of Dickens and another of Austen and being asked to say which was which. A boy who wanted to remain in this school (this family) made it a point to learn. The names and dates, the facts and figures, the periods, the styles (in prose, the voices; in movies, the look). The techniques: dovetailing over mitering, chamfering and pegging, feather-versus sponge-painting … before long it would be showing versus telling, the active versus the passive voice, plain transparent Tolstoyan prose versus Faulknerian flourishes versus Proustian discursions …

My aunt had several places she liked to noodle around—in Pasadena and out along Main Street in Venice and, when she was feeling particularly ambitious (or flush), in Montecito or down near San Juan Capistrano, where some of the more top drawer dealers did business. Today we were staying local, though—our destination was a cluster of shops way down on Sunset Boulevard near Western Avenue.

In the first shop we came to I picked up a lacquer tray that had two Chinese figures on it. This looked like it would fit into my grandmother’s apartment, and so it felt like a safe choice. No sooner had I reached for it than my aunt’s hand shot out. “No, not that, Mike. It’s repro. N.g.”

It was all in the tone, an icy dismissal that made an already small me feel like an even smaller me. And yet I kept trying, I kept yearning to be one of them, to know what they knew, to see what, and how, they saw; to win, and keep, their approval, their acceptance, their love.