Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “I’m from Omaha,” I said.

  Frank actually gasped. “Fred’s from Omaha,” he said.

  “I know. That’s why I mentioned it.”

  “When I was young I thought Fred was from England but my mother explained that actors in the talkies were trained to speak that way. Fred wrote in his memoirs that the last words George Gershwin spoke were his name, ‘Fred Astaire.’ Like Charles Foster Kane saying ‘Rosebud’ as he died in Citizen Kane. I am a devotee of film. Of mathematics, not so much.” Frank had a funny way of talking, as if he were reading off a teleprompter in the middle distance. He slipped his hand into mine then and gave me one of those luminously-trusting little kid smiles that melts the hearts of cynics in Hallmark commercials and makes us believe that, yes, a greeting card can bring the world together again, one family at a time.

  He pressed his face against my shoulder and we held hands for a long time before I spoke again. “That’s some wingspan George had,” I said when the composer’s spectral fingers completed an Astaire-worthy tap dance from one end of the keyboard to the other. Then I got the bright idea of following Gershwin’s lead, took my hand from Frank’s, and arched my fingers over the keys.

  “No!” M. M. Banning shouted from the hallway.

  I snatched my hands away just in time to keep Frank from slamming the lacquered keyboard cover on them. M. M. Banning scuttled to the bench and wrapped herself around Frank, straitjacketing his arms to his sides. “There you are, Monkey,” she said.

  “She was going to touch my piano,” Frank said. “We hardly know each other.”

  “She doesn’t know the rules yet, Frank.”

  “You and I know each other a little already, though, don’t we, Frank?” I said once I got my heart out of my larynx. “I’m from Omaha, like Fred. You know my first name, Alice. I haven’t told you my last name yet. It’s Whitley.” I offered him my hand again, a little shaky and feeling fresh appreciation for the fingers still attached to it. “I hope you’ll let me in on all the rules around here.”

  Frank twisted away and buried his face in his mother’s shoulder. “Mama,” he said. “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Penny.”

  “Alice,” I insisted. “My name is Alice.”

  “When is she leaving?” he asked.

  “As soon as your mother finishes writing her book, I’ll go,” I said. “I promise.”

  “How long does writing a book take?” he asked his mother. Funny, I’d just been wondering that myself. “It doesn’t take long to read one,” he added.

  M. M. Banning met my eyes over Frank’s head. It was the first time she’d really looked at me. “There are two things you need to know if you’re going to be of any use to us,” she said. “Rule One: No touching Frank’s things. Rule Two: No touching Frank.”

  “No touching Frank? But he was holding my hand just a minute ago.”

  “He can take your hand but you can’t take his,” she explained.

  “Then how do you cross the street?” I asked, feeling uncomfortably like I was setting up a joke about a punk rocker with a chicken stapled to his cheek.

  “I hold his hand, of course. I’m his mother. I don’t have to ask.” She said that with a tenderness that surprised me. Here was the Mimi Mr. Vargas was so fond of.

  He was right. I had this. “So, Frank,” I said, “are you familiar with Jimmy Cagney?” No answer. “White Heat?”

  Frank turned his head a little so he could see me out of one eye. “Cagney won the Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy. His gangsters were tip-top, but those weren’t his favorite roles. He got his start as a song-and-dance man in vaudeville, and was always happiest when hoofing.” Frank pronounced it “vau-de-ville.”

  “Can we watch it sometime?” I asked. “I’ve never seen Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  “Well,” Frank said, untangling himself from his mother and reclaiming my hand. “You are in for a treat then. I have seen it many, many times. I’m Julian Francis Banning, by the way. You may call me Frank. You’ve met my mother. I call her Mother sometimes, Mama mostly, Mom or Mommie occasionally. None of those will do for you, of course. Her brother called her Mimi because he found Mary Margaret to be a mouthful as a toddler.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s right. Mr. Vargas calls your mother Mimi.”

  “That doesn’t mean you get to,” she said.

  “Of course not,” I said, though from that time on I did. In my head.

  “The neighborhood Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino inhabited during the 1920s is called Whitley Heights,” Frank said. “Any relation?”

  “I don’t think so. Sorry. And sorry again about the piano.”

  “What do you say, Frank?” Mimi prompted him.

  “Is that your natural hair color?” he asked.

  ( 3 )

  THAT SON OF hers,” Mr. Vargas said when he saw me off at the Newark airport the day I left for California. “Do you think he’s adopted? Because she got rid of that ridiculous Malibu Ken I told her not to marry ages ago.”

  This wasn’t the kind of conversation Mr. Vargas and I had regularly. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t I ask her?” He looked so horrified I had to say, “Mr. Vargas. I’m joking.”

  “Of course you are. I’m sorry, Genius. I’ve misplaced my sense of humor.” “Genius” was the nickname Mr. Vargas gave me once we’d relaxed enough to kid around with each other. He plunged his hands into his pockets as if he thought he might find his sense of humor there. “Oh,” he said. “I almost forgot. I have something for you.” He handed me a small wrapped package.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing much,” he said. “It’s silly. Open it when you get on the plane. Keep me posted, Alice. Take care of yourself. Take care of Mimi. Take notes.”

  Take notes? Before I could ask Mr. Vargas what he meant by that exactly, he gave me an awkward hug that made me think this must be what it felt like to have your father send you off to college if you happened to have a father to send you off to college. “Go Big Red,” he said, and left me at security without looking back once. I know because I watched him walking away until I lost him in the crowd.

  When I unwrapped the package I found a U-shaped inflatable travel pillow emblazoned with the seal of my college, the University of Nebraska. I got a full scholarship to study accounting with a minor in studio art, receiving an education there equal to anything you’d get at Harvard, though not much of anybody I’d met in New York would agree with me on that. Except Mr. Vargas, SUNY New Paltz class of 1969. We’d bonded at the computer store when he passed this chestnut along to me: “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.”

  Go Big Red. Ah, Mr. Vargas. It said so much about him that he’d know the name of your college team even if he never watched football. Not that I watched football, either.

  For the first time in my life, I slept on an airplane. Of course, before that night I’d never been on an airplane.

  AFTER MIMI SHOWED me to my room, I got in my pajamas and crawled into bed with my laptop to e-mail Mr. Vargas. Her son, I wrote him, has the same brown eyes and auburn hair so I doubt he’s adopted. Frank’s exquisitely handsome but—

  But what? My eyes wandered the room while I considered my next sentence. It was nicer than I’d expected after the fugitive decor of the living room. Beige walls, nubby beige carpet, fluffy white double bed, blond bureau, big closet, minimalist console desk. The one colorful touch, a scarlet love seat arranged in front of the floor-to-ceiling blond curtains, was a bright, true red that stood out like lipstick on a woman so rigorously elegant that she refused all other makeup. There wasn’t a framed photo or a book anywhere. So when I say the place was nice, I mean hotel nice, not homey nice. And way too quiet. Outside as well as in. What kind of city doesn’t grumble to itself at night? Even Omaha was noisier than this.

  Then I heard someone bumping around out in the hall and voices murmuring and, softly, the piano. I got out of bed a
nd crept to the door to listen. I heard Frank’s drone, mostly, interrupted now and then by Mimi. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but by the cadence I was pretty sure she was trying to herd Frank back to bed.

  I felt sleepy and my feet were cold, so I got back in bed myself. I erased Frank’s exquisitely handsome but, pressed “send” and lay back and closed my eyes. What else was there to say? His fingernails are dirty? He stumbled into our century through a wormhole in the space-time continuum? I’m worried he’ll julienne me in my sleep?

  That last bit occurred to me thanks to what Mimi said as she bid me good night. “If you get hungry, help yourself to anything in the kitchen. Plates are in the cabinet by the sink, silverware in the drawer underneath. Big sharp knives in the drawer next to that in case you need to cut something up. Just don’t open an outside door or any windows at night. I set the alarm before I go to bed and I won’t turn it off until morning.”

  I’d been looking forward to opening a window to let in the night breeze. Even the air smelled rich here, with top notes of jasmine and ocean and orange blossom, without bottom notes of garbage and cat urine. “Is this a dangerous neighborhood?” I asked.

  “It’s Frank,” she said. “He sleepwalks. Well, not ‘sleepwalks’ so much as ‘roams the house when he should be sleeping.’”

  Holy Bluebeard’s castle. How could I sleep with the kid wandering the halls swinging his bat or maybe a big sharp knife he’d borrowed from the kitchen drawer? Yes, okay, I confess, too many late-night horror movies when I was old enough for the TV to babysit me while my mother typed legal documents because the night shift paid better than days. When I finally told her why I was having trouble sleeping, she said, “Alice, you’re too smart for that. Learn how to take care of yourself and silly things like zombies and escaped psychopaths won’t scare you quite so much.” I hoped that meant karate lessons, but what I got instead was my own toolbox and electric drill. My mother showed me how to rewire lamps and tighten loose doorknobs and to examine broken things closely to understand how they could be fixed. She trained me to collect random screws and extra buttons in baby food jars so I’d always have extra on hand in a pinch. After that, she taught me how to balance her checkbook and keep track of her tax receipts. Then she tuned our ancient television to the cooking channel, pulled the dial off, and pocketed it, handed me her splattered copy of The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and left for work. From then on I was the family cook, handyman, and accountant. When I was done with my chores I got in bed and went straight to sleep. I was too tired to do anything else.

  So that first wakeful night in California, I unpacked my suitcase. Brushed my teeth and flossed. Made a list of meals I might cook for Mimi and Frank in the next week and ingredients I would need to do it. Filed my nails. Read some more of Mimi’s book. Drew a funny little sketch of Frank on the first page of my unicorn notebook, under the heading I’d scrawled earlier: “Who is Frank?” I had no clue who Frank was yet, but in my drawing he looked like a grade-school Charlie Chaplin who’d misplaced his hat, shoes, and cane.

  After what seemed like an eternity the murmuring stopped and I heard a door click shut. I locked my door then and tucked the notebook under my pillow with my cell phone.

  EVERY BED I’D ever slept in before that night had been a couch, a cot, or a twin bed, so I woke up around 3:00 A.M. disoriented by the wasteland of mattress on either side of me. This time when sleep wouldn’t come I got up and opened the curtains. In my microscopic studio in glamorous Bushwick, Brooklyn, I had a view of an airshaft, its sooty brick opposite so close I could lean out and touch it if I were crazy enough to try. Now I had Los Angeles, serene and twinkling, shot here and there with parti-colored neon signs and snaking lines of red that were taillights of cars crawling home from places exciting enough to make staying up past three in the morning seem worth it.

  I sat on that love seat for what seemed like forever, just looking, the way those old immigrant ladies in the City with black babushkas and hairy moles on their stevedore arms put pillows on their windowsills and park themselves all day to take in everything streaming along the sidewalks of their new world. From that high up, language or the lack of it didn’t matter much. The swirling currents of people were way better than anything on TV. Even on cable. Except, possibly, the Armenian Channel.

  Which made me wonder then if my hotel-ish room came with television. I got up and checked the cabinets. Empty. So I crawled in bed with my cell phone and typed in Fred Astaire Broadway Melody 1940. Fred’s jaunty artistry didn’t translate to a playing-card-sized screen. I remembered that later, when Frank introduced me to Sunset Boulevard, starring Whitley Heights resident Gloria Swanson as washed-up silent film star Norma Desmond. “I’m still big,” she said. “It’s the pictures that got small.”

  I OPENED MY bedroom door the next morning at six and smothered a little shriek. Frank was on the floor in the hallway, staring at his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

  “No, you just surprised me. I didn’t think anybody else would be up. I’m still on East Coast time. Have you been out here long?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “Asleep. Your door was locked.”

  “You tried to come into my bedroom?”

  “I knocked first. You didn’t answer. I got worried.”

  “Why?”

  “The raccoons around here big enough to scramble over a ten-foot wall are notoriously acquisitive and sometimes rabid. Also, there are coyotes. Dangerous to pets and snack-sized people.”

  “I’m from the Midwest,” I said. “Nobody from the Midwest is snack-sized.”

  “There are people out there, too,” he said. “Fanatics. One of them climbed the wall to get at my mother before I was born. Which explains its crown of razor-wire thorns.”

  “These fanatics,” I said. “Are you talking about your mother’s fans?”

  “Fan is a derivation of the word fanatic,” Frank said. “An overzealous follower of a person or thing. She has millions. Maybe billions. My mother says she doesn’t like to drive because the fanatics used to rush the car every time she pulled out of the driveway. There aren’t as many now, but that doesn’t seem to provide her the comfort you would expect.”

  “I don’t think your mother’s fans would hurt her,” I said. “They probably just want to talk, or get her autograph.”

  That didn’t seem to provide him much comfort, either. Frank was wearing a straw boater tipped onto the back of his head, and two pieces of his hair had fallen forward on either side of his part, forming a parenthesis around a forehead gone rumpled with concern. An expression, I realized later, he’d borrowed from the tool kit of Jimmy Stewart, circa It’s a Wonderful Life. I could see his cuff links today were little green and silver shamrocks. The pants of his blue and white seersucker suit, also rumpled, were hiked up so that his yellow and blue argyle socks showed. A navy bow tie with white polka dots dangled untied from his buttoned shirt collar. He looked like he’d been up all night, either policing the perimeter with his yellow bat or hanging off the back of a streetcar with Judy Garland, singing.

  “I was probably sleeping,” I said. “I understand your concern. But no walking into my room uninvited. Ever. Got it?”

  At the private school where I’d taught third grade math after being kicked upstairs from kindergarten when the pretty teacher who’d preceded me ran off with the father of one of her students, I could never get over how many of the children I’d been put in charge of had never had anybody say no to them. One girl used to walk up to my desk during class to go into my purse looking for cough drops. At the age of eight some of them were cheating off other kids’ papers with a sense of entitlement that took my breath away. I could imagine any number of them ending up in the slam. A nice white-collar joint where, after getting over their surprise at being not only caught but also punished for stock fraud or fudging their income taxes, they’d recast the whole jailbird
experience as time well spent polishing their racquetball game and networking. I hadn’t been the least bit surprised to learn that the investment adviser who’d rooked Mimi had a grandchild at that school.

  I’m just saying, you have to set boundaries with these privileged kids or all is lost.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Frank said. He sat up straight and tied his bow tie with impressive quickness and precision. Frank’s eyes couldn’t quite scale the heights to my face so they’d come to roost on my kneecaps. He looked at his hands again and cut his eyes to my nostrils for the briefest of moments before finishing his sentence with “Alice.” I noticed then that he’d written my name on his left hand, spelled Alis. He saw me looking and slipped that hand into his pocket. “As family archivist, I have brought this album of photographs for you to look at,” he said. I hadn’t noticed it propped against the wall, one of those old-fashioned leather-bound volumes that must have weighed twenty pounds.

  “I’d love to see that,” I said. “How did you know I’d want to?”

  “I have uncanny intuition unencumbered by the editorial reflex,” he said. “I heard Dr. Abrams explain it that way to my mother when I pressed my ear to the door during one of their marathon discussions. My mother’s response was, ‘Where I come from we call that tactless.’ Can you tell me what she meant by that? I have tacks. Quite a nice collection, in many colors. I understand that thumbtacks have fallen out of favor since the invention of the Post-it note, but my mother knows I am still a fan. When I asked her why she said I was tackless, all she did was sigh. Can you explain that to me?”

  “I can try,” I said. “The kind of tacks you have are spelled t-a-c-k-s. What your mother was talking about is spelled t-a-c-t.”

  When I paused to think about the most diplomatic way to proceed, Frank said, “Oh. It was a case of homonym confusion. I see. Well, do you want to look at these photographs or not?”