The Mighty Franks: A Memoir - Michael Frank

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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.

      “You’re old enough to know better, Mike. You’re old enough to know what stays in this family, our family. Our part of the rest of the family.”

      He looked at me. His voice may have been level, but his eyes expressed something unnerving: his temper under control.

      “You understand, don’t you, that it was wrong—very wrong—to take this to your aunt and uncle’s?”

      I nodded.

      “Very, very wrong,” he said. “You must promise me that you will never do anything like that ever again.”

      When I didn’t say anything, he repeated, “You must promise. Out loud. Go ahead, say it.”

      “I promise,” I said.

      “Even if your mother and I fight.”

      “Even if you and Mom fight.”

      “Even if I break something.”

      “Even if you break something,” I said.

      “Or several things.”

      “Or several things.”

      He paused. “You may go inside,” he said.

      As I got out of the car I said, “Aren’t you coming?”

      “In a bit,” he said. His eyes were focused on the windshield. They were still there when I left the garage.

      On my way to the front door I passed the dining room window. My brothers were standing there waiting for me. My mother was standing behind them. Her eyes were red. I looked at Danny, then at Steve, then I went upstairs to my room. I closed the door, climbed into bed, and burst into tears.

       TWO

       OGDEN, CONTINUED

      The rhythms on Ogden Drive began to change. I still accompanied my aunt to Morning Time, but often—as often—we went to The Apartment together as a family, the five of us, my parents, my brothers, and me. We went on Sunday mornings after my father’s tennis game, and we went on Friday nights after dinner. “Let’s pop down to The Apartment for a few minutes,” my father would say. He was not a great instigator of plans; that job tended to fall to my mother or my aunt and uncle. It seemed to mean something, something significant, that he started directing us to The Apartment in this way.

      Always, almost always, we found Huffy in bed, those gold flames leaping on the bedposts, books in tall uneven stacks on the table nearby. We would all pile into the second bed or sprawl on the floor or sit in the self-rocking rocking chair and tell her about our day or our week.

      I found myself waiting for an invitation to sleep over, and when it didn’t come I finally took my mother aside one evening and asked her if it would be all right if I spent the night. She thought for a moment, then answered, “You’ll have to ask your grandmother.”

      Her answer puzzled me. It was backward. Usually my grandmother asked me to stay, and then I had to ask my mother for permission.

      When I approached Huffy’s bed, for no reason I could then explain, my face began to burn with embarrassment, and after I got the words out—with a stutter accompanying my hot red face—Huffy said, “Darling, perhaps not tonight. I think I may be too tired. But another time, certainly.”

      I saw my parents exchange a look, and I saw my mother glance at her mother, who had come to join us but kept her distance, standing in the doorway as she often did, a dish towel in hand. Something was going on, but I had no idea what.

      In the car as we drove back up into the canyon we were all quiet. Sad is what I was—sad and confused about why I appeared to have been cast out from the special protected garden that was Ogden Drive.

      When my mother tucked me into bed that night, there seemed to be a glistening in her eyes, the very beginning of tears, as she said, “Huffy really was very sorry that she couldn’t have you stay. You understand that, don’t you?”

      I nodded, but I didn’t understand at all.

      I didn’t understand, but I did go on noting the things that I did not know how to put together. They were like scenes from a movie that had not yet been edited, or from a grown-up or foreign movie of the kind that my aunt and uncle preferred, only without the subtitles to help decipher their meaning.

      I noted that on Saturdays now Sylvia began spending more time up in the canyon with us. This Sylvia was a different person from the Sylvia of The Apartment. She moved through our kitchen unmonitored, unjudged, unwatched, without competition and therefore at ease.

      I noted that there was a change, too, in my grandmother’s—both my grandmothers’—midweek habits.

      One of the few things that these two such disparate women had in common was that they had both begun working when they were very young and continued to work until they were very old. Twice a week, Sylvia took two long bus rides, first down Fairfax Avenue, then west along Pico, to a synagogue on the west side of the city, where she gave Hebrew lessons to bar and bat mitzvah students, thereby winding up in life as she had set out, as a teacher of her native tongue.

      Most every weekday afternoon Huffy would drive herself to my father’s medical equipment business on South La Cienega Boulevard. She had a desk there and a job that my father had made—made up—for her in the early fifties after Louis B. Mayer had been fired as the production chief of MGM and was replaced by Dore Schary, who had a different approach that did not include giving story editors like Harriet senior so much power over

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