The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

“She said she did not need to think it over for even one minute. She wanted to stay with us forever. Which, until she was married, she did.”

Looking through the windshield, she said, “It’s important to be able to decide matters for yourself sometimes. Even when you are still a child.”

She saw that as the point of the story. I saw something else: a child entrusted to parents who were not her own, as I was so often entrusted to my uncle and my aunt.

Precisely an hour after we climbed into our beds with our books, my grandmother announced that it was time for us to sleep. She turned off her light, and I obediently turned off mine. Then she arranged her pillows, centering herself between the bedposts with the leaping flames, and within minutes was definitively, snufflingly, out. I, instead, took what felt like hours to find a way to put myself to sleep. Everything in The Apartment was just so humming and unfamiliar and alive, from the bursts of traffic up on Hollywood Boulevard to the sound of Sylvia, who had returned from her concert, puttering busily (once Huffy’s light went off, she began walking from room to room), to the rumblings that originated from deep in my grandmother’s chest and didn’t seem able to decide whether they should come out through her mouth or nose. Every now and then there would be a raspy explosion, half snore and half shout, that would send me flying down under the blankets; I came up again afterward even more awake, with nothing to keep me company other than the wallpaper, whose embossed wreaths and urns I traced with my finger over and over and over. When that didn’t help I returned to Doré’s terrifying renditions of Adam, Moses, Jonah, et al., which were even more alarming when examined, squinting, in the dark of the night, or else I studied the bust of Madame de Sévigné that stood up on an onyx column and had been chosen, my aunt said, because she adored her daughter and wrote some of the most memorable letters in all of literature. In front of the bust a small, armless rocking chair moved back and forth on its own, very slightly, as if it were being rocked by a ghost.

And then suddenly, somehow, it was morning, a day awash with eyeball-stinging Southern California sunlight, and Sylvia was bringing me a glass of hand-squeezed orange juice strained of its pulp, which, wasting nothing, she herself ate with a teaspoon. “Drink, Michaelah,” she said. “Good health is built on vitamin C. Every day a dose.”

Huffy was already up and dressed, a rarity and something that happened only on the days I slept over, since normally she waited in bed, reading, until my aunt came for Morning Time.

After I finished the orange juice, Sylvia asked if I’d like to help make the bed. “I can show you how to miter the corners the way they do in a hospital,” she said.

A bed with hospital corners? It sounded exciting, a nifty trick, something to be good at. I loved tricks and I loved learning. I got up eagerly.

First we angled the mattress frame slightly away from the wall. Then we pulled up the crisp white sheet and the blanket. She lifted up the mattress, folded one sandwich of sheet and blanket underneath, held it there firmly, then reached around for the other flap.

“It’s like wrapping a package,” I said.

“Yes, exactly,” she said with a smile.

Suddenly from the doorway a sharp voice: “But whatever are you doing?”

Sylvia stiffened. “Teaching him how to make a bed with hospital corners,” she explained.

“Oh, please, the boy is never going to need to know how to do anything remotely like that.”

Sylvia, her shoulders deflating, abandoned the bed-making where it was and hurried off to the kitchen.

I was still holding the edge of the blanket. I watched her go, paralyzed. Even though Sylvia was walking away from me, I could feel the upset pouring out of her whole body. I turned to look at Huffy’s face to see if there was any clue there, any hint that she knew what she had done. There was nothing.

“Leave that nonsense and go get dressed now,” Huffy commanded. “It’s time for breakfast.”

In the bathroom the washcloth was already prepared with toothpaste, the face soap smelled of gardenias, and there was a thick, soft towel to dry myself with afterward. I put on the clothes I had worn the day before, and then I opened the door and stopped to listen. I often stopped to listen before I left one room and walked into another.

I could hear the sounds of utensils touching metal, then glass. I approached the kitchen door. My grandmothers were not speaking to each other, but they were cooking. They were standing at the same stove, working over separate burners. In silence each was preparing her own version of the same dish for me to eat, a thin crepe-like pancake. Sylvia was making hers, ostensibly, as the wrappers for the cheese blintzes that were one of her specialties: light, fluffy rolls of sweetened hoop cheese wrapped in these nearly translucent covers. Her pancake barely rubbed up against the pan; she siphoned one off for me and served it with strawberry jam and a dollop of sour cream. Huffy’s was browned and glistening from its immersion in a puddle of butter and offered with a tiny pitcher of golden maple syrup.

Two plates, two pancakes, two women waiting expectantly for my verdict: What was a child to do with all this—choose? Declare one tastier than the other, one woman more capable, more lovable, more loved? All I could think to do was eat both, completely, alternating bite by bite between the two versions.

“Are you still hungry?” Huffy asked slyly when I finished.

How did I know not to give myself to the trap? From looking at Sylvia’s face, with its well-proportioned nose, small and round and with a spiderweb of wrinkles in-filling around it; and its too-perfect front teeth, which were dropped into a glass of blue effervescence at night, leaving behind a silent, sunk-in mouth; and its faded watchful eyes, which so vividly showed a registry of pain.

“I’m done,” I said. “But thank you. They were both delicious.”

Before she dropped me at home after Morning Time, my aunt pulled over to the side of Lookout Mountain Avenue.

“There’s something I wish to say to you, Mike,” she declared ominously, or in a way that sounded ominous to me.

I thought I had done something wrong during my stay at The Apartment, something worse than drawing ineptly or being receptive to the idea of Sylvia teaching me how to make hospital corners.

She removed her dark glasses. “I just want to thank you for being such a good friend to Mamma.” She took my hand and squeezed it forcefully.

“Your visits lift her spirits in countless ways,” she continued. “You know what I wish? I wish it could just be the three of us forever, living far away, on an island somewhere, or in Yurp …”

The three of us? On an island? In Europe? I wasn’t quite sure what my aunt was saying, but just as confusing, even more so, was the way she was saying it, with an odd lilting voice and a far-off look in her eyes.

“You mean … without my parents and Danny and Steve? Without Uncle Irving or Grandma Sylvia?”

“The four of us, I should have said. Puddy and I are symbiotic. I’ve told you that before.” She paused. “Sylvia,” she said her name, only her name. It was followed by a dismissive shrug. A whole human being dispatched, just like that.

She did not say anything about my brothers or my parents. The air in the car suddenly felt humid, the Caswell-Massey suffocatingly sweet.

“I don’t know if you realize what a remarkable woman Grandma Huffy is. She’s the most independent woman I have ever known. A freethinker. It’s her religion, really, the only one she believes in. Free, bold thinking—it’s at the very core of what it means to be a Mighty Frank. Mamma is its perfect embodiment. She thought for herself, she lived on her brains, she followed her heart wherever it took her, even when it took her to unconventional places.”

Unconventional places? My face must have asked the question I would not have dared to put into words.

“It’s never too soon to learn about the ways of the heart. Your grandmother,” she said, turning to face me, “married young and, you might as well know, for the wrong reasons. She was one person at twenty, another at thirty. Portland, Oregon? For Harriet Frank senior? She had been to Reed, to Berkeley. She had brains, and pluck. And ambition, that most of all. But ambition did not get you very far in the Depression, did it? There was nowhere to go. She outgrew that dreary city, she outgrew the shabby little house we lived in, she outgrew your grandfather. He was a decent man, hardworking, moral, I might as well say, blah and blah. He was not in her league, not intellectually, not emotionally. And so she took it upon herself to find love elsewhere …”

Again she glanced at my face. “Don’t be so conventional, Mike.” Her eyes began to glitter. “I was not much older than you are when I guessed. He was the rabbi at our temple. It started there, the opening up of her life. With Henry. Why, I was half, more than half, in love with him myself, in the way you can be when you are twelve and a charismatic man comes along who is everything that your father is not …”

I tried to picture my grandmother with a man other than my grandfather. And a rabbi. The rabbi at their temple. There seemed to be rabbis everywhere in this family, yet we rarely went to synagogue. But a rabbi with whom my grandmother found love elsewhere? What did that mean, exactly?

I did not, at that point, know the specifics of what it was that a man and a woman did with each other, aside from raise children. Or yearn for the children they did not have.

My aunt emitted a long sigh, then started the car again. “These talks of ours make me feel so much better. You help me in countless ways, Lovey. I wonder if you realize that?”

She adjusted her head scarf, then leaned over. “Of course what we say to each other stays between thee and me, understood?”

When I didn’t immediately answer she said, “Mike?”

I nodded. She nodded back at me conspiratorially. Then she pulled the Riviera away from the curb.

At Greenvalley Road she lowered her cheek for me to kiss goodbye. I collected my treasures and waited until she backed out of our driveway. Then I made my way along the curved walkway that led to our front door.

That spring my mother had planted white daisies on the uphill side of this path, and they had grown into thick bushes that gave off a strong spicy scent when I brushed by them. The daisies were notable because they were lush and perfumed but also because they were one of the few independent domestic gestures my mother had made in her own house and garden, the decoration and landscaping having been otherwise commandeered by my grandmother and my aunt.

The style of our house—a white clapboard Cape Cod—my parents had chosen jointly. My father contracted and supervised the construction of the house himself while my mother was pregnant with my next-youngest brother, Danny, but that seemed to have been the last independent decision my parents made with regard to their own surroundings.

Very American, my aunt said in that assessing voice of hers. At least it’s not mo-derne. Traditional we can work with.

“We,” naturally, were the two Harriets, who had submitted our garden to a rigorous Gallic symmetry: two pairs of ball-shaped topiary trees flanked the two front windows and were separated by a low boxwood hedge that was kept crisply clipped on my aunt’s instructions to the gardener shared by both families. The front door was framed by stone urns, and the central flowerbed was anchored with a matching gray stone cherub because every garden needs a classic figure to set the atmosphere just so. Most of the flowers, those daisies included, were white.

Inside the house almost all the furniture and pictures had been chosen by my grandmother and my aunt, who had sent over containers from Yurp or otherwise outfitted the rooms with discoveries made during their Saturday excursions or castoffs from their own homes. The furniture was arranged in the rigid, formal groupings my aunt favored. She and my grandmother would often come over at the end of their Saturdays, and even, maybe especially, if my mother wasn’t home they would introduce a new table or print or vase, readjust or rearrange several other pieces, and sometimes rehang the pictures, with the result that our house looked like a somewhat sparser cross between my grandmother’s apartment and my aunt’s house.

My mother, while raising three young boys and at the same time helping to take care of her mother, did not have so much time for interior decoration. In these early years she appeared to tolerate these ferpitzings of her in-laws. Sometimes she would walk in and say, opaquely, “Ah, I see they’ve been here again”; sometimes she was so busy that it took her a day or two to notice that there had been a change. I was not like her. I noticed the most minute shift in any interior anywhere.

Upstairs alone in the quiet of my room I took special pleasure in unwrapping my new treasures. It was like receiving them all over again. Methodically I laid out on my desk my new art book, my pencil box and bookends, the copy of How Green Was My Valley that my aunt decided, after all, might be a better choice for me to borrow from my grandmother’s library, and the set of colored pencils that she stopped to buy me at an art supply store on our way up the hill that morning, since mine, she had noted critically, were used practically down to the nub.