The Mighty Franks: A Memoir. Michael Frank
my aunt drove back up the hill and (on weekdays) sat down with my uncle to write.
This ritual went back to before I was conscious. It began when my grandmother had The Operation—never further detailed or explained—after which, for a while, she needed help dressing and doing up her hair. It had long since evolved into the routine with which the two women began their days, seven days a week without exception.
During the first part of Morning Time, the grooming and dressing part, I was always sent to wait in the living room. Often, as on this morning, I waited until my aunt had closed the door behind me, then I slipped down the hall to Sylvia’s room. Sylvia was my “other” grandmother, Merona and Irving’s mother.
Her door was closed, as usual. I pressed my ear to it, then knocked.
“Michaelah?”
I opened the door just wide enough to fit myself through, then I closed it again. “I wasn’t even sure you were here,” I said.
“I don’t like to be in Hankie’s way when she’s making breakfast.”
“What about yours?” I asked.
“Later,” she said with a shrug.
She was sitting on the corner of her bed, fully dressed, a folded newspaper in her lap. Her room was half the size of Huffy’s, and had no grand headboard with leaping gold flames. The bed was the only place in the room to sit other than a low, hard cedar hope chest.
Besides the hope chest, there was a high dresser on top of which stood several photographs of Sylvia’s husband, my striking-looking rabbi grandfather who died before I was born; these pictures were the only thing in the entire room—the entire apartment—that was personal to Sylvia, other than the radio by the bed, which was tuned to a near whisper and always to the local classical station.
“Are you coming out with us this morning?” I asked.
Sylvia’s head fell to an angle. It was as though my grandmother—my second grandmother, as I thought of her—was always assessing, or taking careful measure, before she spoke or acted.
“I think not—today.”
Physically Sylvia was smaller and shorter than Huffy, as my mother was smaller and shorter than my aunt; even her nose and eyes were smaller, more delicate and tentative. Dimmer too, you might say, except that they missed very little.
These small noting eyes of hers peered down the hall, or where the hall would have been visible if the door had been open.
“Maybe next week,” she added.
I knew she was lying. She knew I knew she was lying. We’d had a version of this conversation many Saturdays before.
“Monday I’m on the hill,” she said, meaning at our house on Greenvalley Road, where she could cook in our kitchen and eat kumquats off the tree and read in the garden under the Japanese elm in the backyard and let the vigilance drain out of those small eyes. “I’ll make tapioca.”
“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