Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “That’s your old night-light,” I heard Mimi say. “I put that away when you started kindergarten.”

  I peeked around the corner to see what was going on in there. Frank had closed the piano and put his night-light on top. It was one of those old-fashioned paper carousels with a lightbulb inside that gradually warmed the air above it and made its pinwheel vents spin the shade with its cutout stars faster and faster.

  “I stumbled across it when I was looking for my marbles so that Fiona and I could play a high stakes game of Ringer at recess. I realized the night-light was just the thing I needed for my presentation.”

  “It belonged to your uncle when he was a baby,” Mimi said. “It’s older than I am. Please be careful with it.”

  “You told me all that when you were packing it for storage.”

  “I did?”

  “You said we’d better put it away so we’d still have it to use when my little boy came along. It was a fragile old thing, you said, so we’d better put it in a box on the top shelf to keep it safe. That’s where I found it.”

  “We used to watch it together for hours,” Mimi said.

  “Every night for half my life. I’ve missed that fragile old thing, but I understand the necessity of thoughtful preservation. Ninety percent of the films made during the silent era have been lost to history. Their negatives were printed on unstable and highly flammable cellulose nitrate film and were destroyed in vault fires, tossed to make room for newer movies, or stored so carelessly that they crumbled to dust.”

  “You’re almost ten years old, Frank,” Mimi said. “I can’t believe it.”

  I had to make myself leave. Otherwise I would have had to admit that I was eavesdropping.

  AS IT TURNED out, neither Mimi nor Xander made it to Frank’s presentation.

  Though I wasn’t on the guest list, I knew it was slated for Friday at 2:00 P.M. on the last day of school before winter break, to be followed by nondenominational refreshments and lively discussion. According to Frank. Which is why he nixed my idea of baking Christmas cookies. That morning I made brownies for Mimi to take and let it go at that. But I started to worry when Mimi didn’t mention the presentation or how she planned to get there. When I delivered her lunch I knocked and waited. She didn’t come to the door but I didn’t leave her tray like I normally would have. I steeled myself and knocked again.

  When she opened the door she didn’t look happy. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But I wanted to tell you that I made brownies for you to take to Frank’s presentation. And to ask if you want me to drive you, or if you want to go on your own. His presentation is at two.” I could tell she wanted to close the door on me so I edged forward and angled my foot against it.

  “Don’t come in here,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I just need to know what time you want to leave.”

  “I’m not going. He gave me the gist of it last night so I don’t need to be there.”

  “But he’s expecting you.”

  “I’m working,” she said. “That’s what I was doing until you felt like you had to pound on my door and remind me of what you think my responsibilities are. Let me tell you what my responsibilities are. I need to sit at my typewriter until my book is done so that Frank and I don’t end up living in a refrigerator box. Now go away.”

  I went. I didn’t want to stop going until I got back to New York. I think the only thing that stopped me was the idea of Frank standing in front of his class, no entourage in attendance, getting an ovation from nobody. So I boxed up the brownies, got in the car, and drove to school.

  THE VISITOR’S LOG in the office was turned to a fresh page, so I flipped back to the one before it to see if Xander had signed in. He hadn’t, but I was early so he might make it yet.

  “I think this pen is out of ink,” I said to the student working behind the desk.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll find another.” She started rifling drawers.

  “Fiona,” the office lady I didn’t know said. “Stop making such a racket. Pens, top left drawer.”

  Fiona. The girl was tall enough to be a third-grader, and skinny. A cute but fairly average-looking kid with blond hair and huge blue eyes that would seem less arresting once her face grew big enough to accommodate them. She wasn’t wearing a sling or a kilt or a cardigan or a bow in her hair. But how many Fionas could there be at one school? “You’re Fiona?” I said. “Will you be at Frank’s presentation?”

  She handed me the pen. “I’m Fiona. What presentation?”

  “Frank is student of the week. He’s giving his presentation this afternoon. He said you might be able to get a pass and come to it.”

  “Who’s Frank?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There must be another Fiona at this school.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Frank has a friend named Fiona. She’s in the third grade.”

  “I’m in the third grade,” she said. “If there is another Fiona, she isn’t in the third grade. I would know.”

  “I must have the details wrong then. This Fiona broke her arm the first day of school.”

  “I broke my arm the first day of school,” she said. “But I don’t know anybody named Frank.”

  Paula brushed past on her way into the principal’s office. “She’s talking about the fourth grader who dresses up,” she said. “My little friend who eats lunch with me every day.” She disappeared down the hallway.

  Fiona wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that kid. He asked me if he could try my sling on once. He’s weird.” She drifted away from the counter, which I was glad of, because otherwise I might have lunged across it and grabbed her neck and used my thumb to wipe those contemptuous wrinkles off her nose. And I might have pushed her septum through to the other side of her skull while I was at it. Then we’d talk about the difference between weird and one-in-a-million.

  FRANK’S PRESENTATION BEGAN with the night-light and the bit about mankind’s fascination with the planets and stars. I hadn’t thought much about how all that was supposed to tie in with the story of Frank’s origins and his life until the present day. Here’s how: Frank’s story was that his father was a rocket scientist and a pioneer of unmanned travel to Mars.

  The kid didn’t get any further than that. He said, “I don’t belong here,” and just stood there while the stars rotated on his axis. Then he lay down on the floor and went stiff. Miss Peppe turned on the lights and unplugged the night-light and thanked him for sharing. A couple of the kids applauded weakly and one raised his hand and asked if Frank’s dad was R2-D2 or C-3PO. Miss Peppe shushed him and I hoisted Frank over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, grabbed the night-light, and got out of there.

  I left the brownies on the desk where I’d been sitting. I hoped that the kid who raised his hand would eat one and choke on it.

  “IT WASN’T MY best performance,” Frank said on the drive home. “I’m sorry you came.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Why wasn’t my mother there?”

  “Your mother had to work. She had a deadline.” I didn’t mention that she’d missed every deadline in the schedule Mr. Vargas drew up before I left New York.

  “Ah. Well. She heard the chapter about her last night anyway.”

  “Yeah, what happened to that part today?”

  “I noticed that she wasn’t there to hear it, so what was the point? I suppose Xander couldn’t make it, either.”

  “No,” I said, and left it at that.

  “I understand. My father missed my birth because he was working out a glitch with the Mars Odyssey before liftoff. Xander must have had a deadline, too. The thing that’s great about Xander is that sometimes you can count on him to be there when you really need him. For example, when we needed to replace the sliding glass door. Also, the night I was born he drove my mother to the hospital and stayed with her while I made my entrance into this world.”

  The
rearview mirror wasn’t big enough to encompass this conversation. I pulled to the side of the road and turned around to look at him. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that Xander was there when you were born?” I asked.

  “In the delivery room, holding my mother’s hand,” he said. “Feeding her ice chips. Encouraging her to push. Apparently it was quite dramatic. There was lots of blood, plus screaming of bad words that anyone with a soul would consider forgivable under the circumstances. Xander tells me that I was a little jaundiced when I emerged, so he sat beside me in a rocking chair in the nursery while they finished baking me under a heat lamp. I often wonder how differently the famously jaundiced Algonquin wits might have turned out if there had been heat lamps in their day to finish baking them at birth. It’s too bad Fiona wasn’t able to make it to my presentation.”

  I was so rattled by what he’d just told me that I said without thinking, “I met Fiona in the office.”

  Frank didn’t say anything and I could see that he was folding up inside himself.

  “Are you okay, Frank?” I asked.

  When he didn’t respond I got out of the car and came around to sit with him in the back. “Can I put my arm around you?” I asked.

  “No.” After a while Frank pressed his face against my shoulder. “I met Fiona once, too,” he said. “I heard that her injury came about thanks to a surfeit of imagination and then her name was so lovely and full of promise that I decided I really ought to introduce myself. I was terribly frightened at the thought of doing that but I hoped we might be friends so I was brave. But as it turned out she was just like all the others.”

  ( 16 )

  WINTER BREAK SAVED Frank from the hell of other children for almost a month.

  The rainy season had started, so we didn’t go much of anywhere. I was unprepared for the forty-days-and-forty-nights quality of rain in Los Angeles. Insane apocalyptic downpours that went on steadily for hours without interruption, as if some celestial somebody had turned on a tap in the heavens full blast and forgotten about it. Sometimes at night I’d open my curtains just to watch the waterfall outside and listen to its monsoonal roar. You could smell the dampness of the earth inside the house, even with all the windows closed. I thanked god for the stucco wall that would, I hope, save us from sliding down the hillside or at least cushion our fall if we did.

  Most mornings Frank and I would suit up in big black oilskin raincoats and wellies and struggle giant mortician’s umbrellas through the deluge out to the Dream House to work on our project. The portrait wasn’t going so well. The air was wet and heavy, the oil paint refused to dry even with three portable fans pointed at it, and there was no accelerant in the Dream House that I could find. Instead of waiting out the wet paint I pressed on, which meant the portrait gradually took on a queasy muddiness of blurred pigments and smudged lines that reminded me of how hog slop looks on hot days when it smells so bad that even the pigs are put off their feed.

  Frank, bless his heart, hovered and offered pointers. But it was hopeless. I should have put the canvas aside and played Clue with the kid until the weather or my head cleared, but I was on a deadline. I hated to disappoint Frank, and now his disappointment seemed inevitable.

  “I don’t understand why you’re having so much trouble,” Frank said to me a few mornings before Christmas. “Your sketches are utterly charming.”

  “Thanks,” I said. We were across from each other at the yellow table. I felt so dejected I closed my eyes and put my forehead on the table and left it there. The air was so full of moisture, even that paint felt damp.

  I heard the kid get up to rummage around the Dream House. There were no big sharp knives in the joint. If he wandered too close to the edge, the creaky floorboards would give him away in time for me to stop him from going over. I couldn’t open my eyes. I needed a break from seeing.

  I listened to him open one of the flat files, rustle some paper and bang around this and that. It was sort of like listening to a radio play. Despite myself, I was enjoying trying to figure out what he was up to. After he was done with whatever it was, he came and pressed his cheek against my shoulder blade. “Alice,” he said, “wake up.”

  When I raised my head and looked I saw that Frank had plucked my soggy canvas from the easel and clipped a big piece of watercolor paper in its place. To the upper-right corner he’d pinned a sketch I’d done of him in his Little Prince outfit with binoculars in his hands and scarf billowing behind him. “I’ve been observing your technique and have come to the conclusion that oils are not your first love,” he said. “I thought you might be more comfortable doing something more impressionistic, maybe along the lines of this sketch writ large and brightened with a watercolor wash. There are some Auguste Rodin portraits done that way that I’m very fond of.”

  I was willing to try anything. “Watercolor drips, so the paper needs to be flat,” I said.

  “Is that so?” Before I could scrape my chair back Frank had fetched the paper and smoothed it out on the table in front of me. “I don’t know much about watercolor other than it’s sometimes undervalued in comparison to oils as it is easily damaged, hard to preserve, and pooh-poohed by critics as the province of hobbyists and Victorian ladies, despite being one of the most vital yet difficult mediums to work in. I hadn’t considered the dripping, although of course it makes perfect sense. Alice, I learn something from you every day.”

  I was done with the thing in the hour. It was dry by dinnertime. The hardest part of the whole business was getting the portrait back inside the house without tearing it or crumpling it or getting it soaked in the downpour.

  The most outstanding characteristic of my finished piece, I thought, was that it was big enough to cover the unfaded square over the mantel. There wasn’t time to frame it, so we didn’t. Frank and I stole into the living room as Christmas Eve flipped over into Christmas day and tacked it up there. As we did I saw that his stocking—one of his argyle socks, actually—hung from the lip of the mantel, lank and empty. I hoped Frank hadn’t noticed, too. After I herded him back to bed I gathered up whatever I could find to stuff in it. A pair of scissors. A roll of tape. A pack of chewing gum. My hairbrush. A set of fake mustaches I had planned to wrap for him and put under the tree. Anything to fill the void.

  Christmas morning, Frank’s sock bulged with nothing I’d put in it. I found my contributions tossed in a mixing bowl outside my bedroom door, with a note from Mimi that read: “I believe these things are yours.”

  Everything except for the mustaches. Those she wrapped very nicely, adding a typed tag that read: “For Frank, With Love, From Alice.” Frank was so delighted with the mustaches that he put on three right away. One on his lip and the other two over his eyebrows. After that he said he would like for me to hug him and he stood there without flinching while I did it.

  MIMI SEEMED GENUINELY surprised when Frank took the T-shirt blindfold off her head and swept up a hand to indicate the watercolor. “Ta-da,” he said. “Merry Christmas, Mama.”

  I have to admit, the watercolor looked pretty good up there. The light was hitting it just right and my tight deadline had kept me from overworking it. You wouldn’t be able to pick the kid out of a lineup with it by any means, but you could see Frank in it if you really looked.

  Mimi sat on the couch for a long time, really looking. When she finally said something, it was, “Where did you get that?”

  “Alice,” Frank said.

  “Where did she get it?” she asked, as if I weren’t standing right there.

  “She painted it,” Frank said. “I wish you had been there to see her do it. It only took her about an hour, start to finish. Maybe less. It was like magic.”

  Mimi nodded. I could see her eyes fill with tears.

  “What do you think of it?” Frank asked.

  “I think it absolutely captures you,” she said.

  THAT NIGHT AFTER I’d gone to bed somebody knocked at my door. My heart started thumping. Had Mimi come to thank me? More l
ikely it was Frank. “Come in,” I said.

  It was Mimi. “Do you have to take everything that belongs to me?” she asked. I couldn’t believe I’d been foolish enough to think she’d have anything nice to say.

  I WOKE UP a few nights after Christmas because of the piano. The thing I noticed about it right away that I don’t think I’d ever understood before was that it didn’t sound like it was playing itself. I looked at my alarm clock. It was after midnight. I stumbled into the living room and found Xander planted on the piano bench, giving the keys a good going-over with as much uncomplicated joy as ever. Mimi was right. You really could tell the difference.

  I stood in the doorway listening for a while before I said, “What’s that you’re playing?”

  He smiled at me angelically, as if he hadn’t been MIA for a minute. Then he said, “It’s a song by Frank Loesser.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?’”

  “You’re pathetic,” I said, and went back to bed.

  PART V

  AFTER THE RAINS CAME

  January 2010

  ( 17 )

  THE DELUGES ENDED suddenly, without sending the glass house sliding off the cliff and onto the 405 freeway; but for those of us inside, things went downhill fast anyway.

  Having Xander around didn’t improve Mimi’s temperament much that I could see. Frank, of course, was delighted to have his itinerant male role model back. For belated Christmas Xander had given Frank a hula dancer you stick to a car’s dashboard. He let Frank sit up front while they backed the station wagon down the driveway and drove back up again, over and over, all the while watching the hula girl shimmy. Frank invited me along for the ride, but the last thing I wanted was to be in close quarters with Xander, even if only for a few hundred feet.

  With Xander on-site again, I was forced to play the heavy, always prying Frank free to eat or take a shower or brush his teeth and go to bed. Although Xander looked well fed, flossed, and rested, none of us were witness to the effort that went into any of that anymore. Xander didn’t eat with us, I didn’t sleep with him, and if the walls of the Dream House bathroom were closing in on him while he brushed his teeth, Xander wasn’t sharing his pain.