The Mighty Franks: A Memoir

Those eyes of hers. Two lanterns, set on high cheekbones. Wicks untrimmed and flaming.

Auntie Hankie sat us down in the kitchen and insisted on making us hot chocolate, even though it was already pushing eighty degrees. She found cookies in a tin too, and brought in from the living room our beloved jar of foil-covered chocolate Easter eggs, which she kept there to entice us all year long.

She brought us a deck of cards, a jar of coins from her recent European travels. My uncle rustled up some pencils and some shirt cardboards to draw on.

Then she sat down with us. “Now tell me. Tell us both.”

My brothers looked at each other, then at me.

“Mom and Dad were fighting,” I said.

“Yes, you said. But what about?”

My brothers looked at each other, then into their laps.

I felt my face burning. “I don’t know. We were upstairs. It was loud.”

“Very loud,” Danny said.

“So loud,” she asked, “that you couldn’t hear what they were talking about?”

My brothers shook their heads. My aunt looked at me, but I didn’t say anything.

“I know this may be hard for you to understand,” she said, “but everyone fights sometimes—even mothers and fathers.”

“Your aunt and I fight, sometimes,” said my uncle.

“Puddy, we do not. We’ve never had a cross word in our lives.”

“Well, not this week,” my uncle said drily.

“Not any week that I know of,” she said tartly.

My uncle emitted one of his trademark six-step sighs, a cascade of diminishing breaths that generally alerted us to his not-quite-silent dissent.

“It’ll blow over, children,” he said. “These things always do.”

Steve said, “Dad has the Bergman Temper.”

My aunt stiffened as she said, “The Bergman Temper? Now what would that be, exactly?”

The sharpness in her voice caused Steve’s eyes to return to his lap.

“Do you even know who the Bergmans are—were?”

“Grandma is a Bergman,” he said. “And Dad. You are and I am too.” He looked up. “It’s my middle name,” he added.

“Yes, that’s right, partially right,” she said. “The Bergmans were Huffy’s people,” she added. And then she waited.

When none of us said anything further, she continued, “Well, your father is passionate about things, the way I am. And Mamma too. If it’s passion you mean, I’ll concede that, yes, it runs in our side of the family. It always has.” She paused. “I’m just curious. That term, the ‘Bergman Temper.’ Who came up with it?”

Both my brothers looked at me. My stomach tightened.

“Was it your mother, by chance?”

“No,” I lied. My skin, giving away my lie, began to burn red.

My aunt nodded, not to us, or to herself, so much as to some invisible off-screen observer or camera. She often did that: she pretended, or maybe assumed, that there was an audience following her—tracking her—at all times. She did not say, I know perfectly well that it was your mother. I do honestly believe that woman sometimes hates us, me and Mamma both. She did not need to say this, at least to me. I knew what she was thinking, and because I knew, or believed I knew, I began to feel uneasy all over again for having brought my brothers here. But I was scared. My father had never smashed a piece of furniture in anger before.

“We should probably call over there,” said my uncle. “They’ll be concerned.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of that,” my aunt said to my uncle. The lift in her voice told me that the prospect of making that call did not displease her.

My uncle emitted another one of his sighs. He said, “Maybe it would be a better idea if I—”

But she was already on her feet. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, heading into the study so that we couldn’t hear.

Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Its sound was amplified by all that marble.

My aunt hurried off to answer the door. We could hear murmuring from the hall—hers and his, sister’s and brother’s, back and forth. Then quiet. Then footsteps. Loud footsteps, familiar footsteps. My father’s loud, familiar footsteps.

He was still in his tennis clothes. His shirt was damp with sweat. With anger. One of his shoelaces had come untied, like Steve’s had earlier.

“Let’s go, boys,” he said.

Our father was no longer angry. He was steely and quiet. This was new. New to me, anyway. And almost worse.

He asked Danny and Steve to go into the house ahead of me. We sat in the car in the garage: his space with his vehicles, his tools and tool bench, his disorder. His scent: no bayberry or potpourri here; instead grease, car oil, rubbing compound, sweat. It stank.

He sat for a minute, several minutes, in silence, with the motor turned off and the keys dangling in the ignition. The car engine produced sigh-like, crackling sounds as it cooled down.

I thought my heart would punch a hole in my chest.

“Never do that again, Mike,” he said finally. “Not ever.”

His voice was firm, deep, forceful. Steady.

“I—I was scared,” I said, scared all over again. “So were they. Danny and Steve.”

“I have the Bergman Temper. You know that. I inherited it from my mother. But it blows over, and when it blows over, it’s over.”

“You broke something.”

“The kitchen table,” he said. “I’ll glue it back.”

There was no apology. Only facts.

We thought you might hurt Mom, I did not say. I did not say, We’re all scared of you. We hate your temper. It makes us hate you, sometimes. It makes us feel unsafe and it makes us—me—want to be with Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving.