The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

Again and again my aunt’s head shook dismissively. Again and again I would try.

“That’s better. There you go.”

And again.

“Better still.”

But why? The why always came from my grandmother. Why is this good, why do we care? “Discernment is about judgment. It’s about knowledge. This is a good desk because it has good lines. Because no one has put garbage on it to make it look new, or fake. Because it makes you imagine.”

“Imagine what?”

We were standing in front of a tall piece of furniture. A secretary. I knew that much at least. It had a drop front, behind which there were many secret compartments. Some of them with tiny keyholes so that they could be locked.

“The man—no, the woman—who sat here, and wrote letters. Secret letters. Or in her diary. Imagine writing it two hundred years ago.” My grandmother opened one of the compartments. “And keeping it here.”

“And this ink stain,” said my aunt, joining in. “It’s from when she was disturbed at her work.”

“Disturbed?” I asked, confused.

“By her husband,” said my aunt. “Think of the painting by Vermeer. The woman writing a letter? It’s in your book. She looks up with a start, just like in the painting. She knocks over the bottle. The ink, just a few drops, sinks into the wood as a human fate is being decided, and quickly …”

My aunt and my grandmother exchanged one of those glances—I knew them well—that suggested they had sidestepped into their own private communication, the equivalent of a compartment in the desk I did not have access to.

“She doesn’t want him to know what she’s writing,” said my grandmother. “She has to choose between protecting her diary and protecting the table. She chooses the diary, of course. Because of her secret life. Do you understand?”

I nodded, because that was what was expected. But I had no idea what they were talking about. None at all.

Better had turned out to be a pencil box; even though it was Victorian (which like mo-derne usually received a crisp, definitive n.g.), it had two figures painted on its lid—in the Chinese manner, of course—and was useful what’s more. “You can keep the tools of your trade in it,” my aunt said jovially. “We can do away with that ordinary little pouch of yours. What do you think, Lovey? Would you allow me to make you a present of it?”

The suspensefully anticipated question. It came along at one point, sometimes at several points, on each antiquing excursion.

“Oh, yes, Auntie Hankie.”

“And what about these bookends?” she said, taking down from a shelf two bronze bookends in the shape of small Greek temples. “They would help organize your library at home.”

“They’re beautiful, Auntie Hankie.”

“We don’t mind if there’s a small scratch on one of them, do we?”

I shook my head. “It’s a sign of age,” I said.

“A sign of age!” said my grandmother, delighted. “The boy truly is a quick study.”

A very special treat after one of these Saturdays was being invited to spend the night on Ogden Drive. The invitation would emit from the wing chair, which was hard not to think of as my grandmother’s throne. (Sylvia’s chair, which stood across from it, was smaller, its seat closer to the ground.) If my mother had not been alerted ahead of time and had not prepared a suitable bag, there would be a flurry of discussion: What will the boy sleep in? (“His underpants?”—the very word, spoken by my grandmothers, caused my cheeks to leap into flame.) How will he wash his teeth? (With toothpaste spread on a cloth wrapped around an index finger.) What will he read? (The big Doré edition of the English Bible? Surely not yet the leather-bound Balzac that had belonged to Huffy’s mother, Rosa …) Who would return me to the canyon was never a concern, since everyone knew the answer to that: aunt would drive nephew back up the hill following Morning Time the next day.

The invitation came soon after we had returned from our antiquing excursion that afternoon, when Huffy realized that Sylvia was out for the evening, at one of her concerts downtown. “We’ll keep each other company tonight,” she said to me. Auntie Hankie made sure that there was enough food in the house for dinner and then headed home.

After she left, Huffy said, “How about if we just have two large bowls of ice cream and then get into bed and read?”

“Is there chocolate sauce?”

She laughed. “There can be.”

When we finished our “dinner,” Huffy said, “I have something for you. I bought it for you last week.”

She went into her room and then returned with a small package in a brown paper bag. Inside there was a blank book bound in orange leather. Its paper was ruled, and it closed with a tiny brass lock and key. On the cover, embossed in gold, was a single word: Diary.

“I keep one,” she said. “I have since I was a young woman in Portland. When you’re older you’ll read it. You and your brothers. You’ll be able to know me in a way that you cannot possibly now.” She looked at me. “That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”

I shook my head.

“You’re old enough to begin writing about your own life.”

“Write?” I asked, confused. “What kinds of things?”

“You can write about the world you’ve been born into. It’s always interesting, no matter when you are born into it. And you can put down a record of who you are to yourself.”

Who. You. Are. To. Yourself. These words meant nothing to me.

“And what the people around you are like.”

This I understood better. Or was beginning to understand better.

Grandma Huffy often gave me guidance like this. They weren’t rules exactly; they were more like principles to live by, sized down and age-appropriate—most of the time.

During the long, tedious, full-out Haggadah Seder at our cousins’ house in the deep Valley, for instance, after every few prayers she would whisper, “Spirituality has nothing to do with this excruciating tedium, remember that.”

If we were in a shop and she picked up an object and saw the words Made in Germany stamped on the bottom, she would set it down with a decisive thud and declare, “Never as long as I live—or you do either.”

“You must always be a Democrat,” she said to me one day. “In this family that is what we are.”

In this case there was no explanation—only the edict.

She told me stories too, some of which I could not stop replaying over and over in my head, like the one about the painting or Aunt Baby.

We were driving in her blue Oldsmobile one afternoon when I had asked her where Aunt Baby got her nickname. “It’s very simple. She’s the baby of the family.”

“But she’s not your baby”—even I grasped that much already.

“No, she’s not. But that doesn’t make any difference to me. To me she is another of my children. Would you like to hear how she came to live with us?”

I nodded.

“Her mother died when she was a small girl. Her father was a friend of your grandfather Sam’s from Portland,” she began, saying the name of her dead husband, my grandfather, for the first and, I believe, only time in the whole ten years I knew her. (There were no photographs of him standing on the top of her dresser, no sign of his existence anywhere at all in The Apartment.) “He was a decent man, but he was an alcoholic. An alcoholic is someone who cannot stop himself from drinking, and when he drinks is not, shall we say, at his most worthy. A father who drinks like that is not a good father. He cannot be. It is not possible. I saw this, and it disturbed me. Deeply. So one summer I invited Baby to come stay with us. She was thirteen, and she had a wonderful time. Your aunt was like a sister to her, your father a brother.”

She paused. “At the end of the summer I took her for a walk. Just the two of us alone. And I said to her, ‘Baby, I would like to make you an offer. But I want you to know first that my feelings will not be hurt if you say no to me. Do you understand?’ And she let me know she understood that, which was important. Then I said, ‘I would like to invite you to come live with us here in Los Angeles. To make your home with us for good. I want you to think it over, and let me know when you have.’”

“And what did she say?”