Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “You never tell me anything about yourself.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m an open book. What do you want to know?”

  “Why don’t you have a driver’s license?” I asked. “Does it have anything to do with your sister who died?”

  He propped himself up on an elbow. “Mimi told you about that?”

  “Some,” I said, fishing. “Nothing” would have been closer to the truth.

  Xander lay back and stared at the ceiling for a while before he said, “I’m going to go play the piano for a little while.” He pulled on a pair of pants and his T-shirt. “There’s this piece I’ve been trying to get under my belt forever.”

  “Xander,” I said. “What happened to your sister?”

  “Which one?”

  “The dead one.”

  “She died,” he said. “A long time ago. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  After he left I lay there listening for I don’t know how long to Xander play something that I finally realized was the theme from Chariots of Fire. Had Frank asked him to learn that one? I’d never watched that movie with the kid but I imagined he must like the Jazz Age English menswear in it very much.

  YOU COULD COUNT on Xander sometimes as long as you remembered not to make a habit of it. After our first day of The Three Musketeers Cut Class, he disappeared again. No notes, no postcards, nothing. It didn’t seem to worry Frank this time, or even bother him much. I think he was so relieved to be free of school that nothing else mattered. As for me, if I believed Xander wouldn’t vanish again, I was kidding myself.

  Those abbreviated Southern California winter days Frank and I spent wandering through Los Angeles were a recap of our halcyon time last summer before Xander was in the picture. I chased Frank through museum galleries. We went to the little municipal airport and looked for the yellow biplane. We kicked through the freshly raked sand at the playground. We even went to the beach, where Frank rolled up his Tony Curtis yachting chinos and waded into the gray surf. He stood there for a long time with the waves lapping at his ankles and a look of powerful concentration on his face.

  “Let’s go, Frank,” I said finally. “It gets dark by rush hour now and I don’t want to get stuck in that.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “An experiment.”

  “Are you trying to see how long you can stand barefoot in cold ocean water before your toes fall off?”

  “No. I am thinking very hard about Paula. I want to find out if the power of my thoughts, boosted by the naturally occurring electricity found in salt water and the intrinsic energy of the tides, will enable my brain to connect with hers.”

  “Huh. Interesting. Could work I guess. How will you know if it does?”

  Frank looked at me like I wasn’t the sharpest blade in the drawer. “I’ll hear her voice in my brain, answering my question.”

  “I’m sure she misses you a lot, Frank,” I said.

  “I know that. That wasn’t my question. I asked Paula to name her favorite Warner Brothers musical from the 1950s. All those lunches together, and we never talked about that.”

  I DISCOVERED THAT walking around with a school-aged child on a school day outside of school is a nerve-wracking adventure. Particularly if you don’t have a flair for truancy and the kid you’re with is as high visibility as Frank. People asked questions. I had to have my excuses lined up.

  “Parent-teacher conferences,” I used when people were paying attention to my answer. Also “doctor’s appointment.” “Religious holiday” required checking a calendar before we left in the morning. When I could see people were more interested in staring at Frank than in listening to what I said, I trotted out “Power outage.” “Measles outbreak.” “Fire in the canyon.” “Coyotes on the playground.”

  I also fielded a lot of the questions like the ones I used to ask. “Is he from another country?” “Is he on his way to a film set?” And of course, “Does he always dress like that?” Now that I knew more of the answers I found myself falling back on Mimi’s “Some version of it.” I didn’t know how else to explain Frank in twenty-five words or less.

  ONE AFTERNOON A week or so after Frank went AWOL, we were parked around the corner from the house while he changed into his I’m-just-a-regular-California-school-kid mufti in the backseat. I stood on the curb with my back to him to give Frank his privacy. A blond woman carrying a cardboard box and leading a little boy by the hand walked past us. I know this is the kind of thing that happens in neighborhoods across America every millisecond, but seeing a pedestrian in the hills of Bel Air in the middle of the afternoon is an event worth noting. Nobody walks anywhere in that neighborhood, particularly at that time of day.

  “Hi,” I said when she passed. I was so busy trying to study her discreetly that I hardly saw the kid. She was very pretty, but that wasn’t why I was staring. Something was so familiar about her.

  “Hi,” she said, smiled and kept walking. I inspected my cuticles until she was halfway up the block, then looked again. She had a choppy haircut, either expensive or self-inflicted over the kitchen sink, and a tattoo on her neck. Something jarred loose in my head. Was she the “friend” from Xander’s photograph? I kicked myself for not getting a better look at her face.

  After Frank finished changing, we rounded the corner and drove up to the gate. I could see somebody waiting in the driveway. As we got closer I saw it was the same girl, facing the entry keypad as if she expected to be buzzed in any minute. Her little boy was on the sidewalk, cuddled up against the wall in a piece of shade.

  I pulled into the drive and rolled down the window. She turned around and gave me a dazzling smile. “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Oh, you live here,” she said. “I saw you around the corner. If I had known, I could have given you this box back there.”

  “What’s in the box?” I asked.

  “Something for Frank. From Xander. Not to be opened before Frank’s birthday. Xander didn’t want to send it through the mail.”

  Frank was leaning out the window now with his arms outstretched.

  “Sit down, Frank,” I said. I told the girl, “You’d better give that to me.”

  “Sure thing.” She handed it over, then turned and held her hand out to the little boy. “Come on, Alec,” she said. “We don’t want to miss our bus.”

  I had never seen a picture of Xander as a child, but after seeing that kid’s face, I didn’t need to.

  ( 21 )

  I MADE SURE Frank was asleep before I crept out to the Dream House with Xander’s box under my arm. Mimi still set the burglar alarm every night at dusk even though Xander had never gotten around to reconnecting it after he replaced the sliding glass door. Once I started opening my bathroom window before I went to bed I stopped reminding him to do it because the night air smelled like heaven. It was the one thing I’d imagined about California that was actually true. If I ever create my own fragrance, I will call that fragrance “Nuit de Bel Air.”

  I knew by then the main house was no place to hide anything from Frank. I found that out when I asked him where the zoot suit came from. “From a box under my mother’s bed,” he said. “Given the antic paper the box was wrapped in, I suspect she got it for my birthday. But I’m growing so fast now that I decided I should wear it while the wearing was good. I was very careful loosening the tape so I can slip the suit box back inside the wrapping. As long as she doesn’t see me in it, my mother will be none the wiser.”

  Inside his antic wrapping, sometimes Frank could be like any other kid. “What were you doing looking under your mother’s bed?” I asked.

  “Trying to ascertain where she’s sleeping these days,” he said. “When she forgot to lock her office door, I found her asleep in there. As you know.”

  “That’s when you took your grandfather’s letter opener.”

  “Indeedy.”

  Did I mention what Xander thought was an appropriate birthday p
resent for a ten-year-old boy? Roman candles. As in fireworks. Small handheld ones named “Silent but Deadly.” How thoughtful! Xander had taken into consideration Frank’s aversion to loud noises when he picked a bouquet of explosives for the birthday boy.

  Xander was also kind enough to include a package of non-Roman birthday candles, the joke kind with magnesium-laced wicks you can’t blow out.

  I thought about putting the box straight in the trash, but given the incendiary nature of the package and inquisitive raccoons and the grocery-cart-pushing deposit reapers who dug through the cans in the wee hours I thought that might not end well, either. Instead, I hid Xander’s gift in the Dream House fridge. I figured the only person who would find it there was Xander. If he ever came back.

  While I was there I dropped in at Frank’s gallery to check out the photo of the girl in front of the mural. Bingo. Tattoo Girl. Using the magnifying glass to examine the photo, I noticed now in the corner of the frame a small foot that at first seemed to belong to an abandoned doll. But with my new information plus a shadow cast by a childish head full of ringlets, I guessed that foot belonged to Alec.

  “WHAT DO YOU want for your birthday, Frank?” I asked the next morning. I was folding one of his detested T-shirts into a cardboard box we kept on the backseat of the wagon for his quick-change cache. Frank had just wriggled into his Teddy Roosevelt trousers and puttees, which he wore today with a plain white shirt and his pith helmet. The look was more safari than San Juan Hill.

  “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” I said when I saw what he was wearing.

  “Dr. Livingstone died without realizing his dream of locating the source of the Nile,” Frank said as he climbed into the backseat and strapped himself in. “When the British government asked for his body to be sent home, the tribe he had been living with cut his heart out and buried it under a tree because they believed his heart belonged in Africa. For my birthday I would like to have a bow and arrows.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “It’s true,” Frank said. “Dr. Livingstone was born in Scotland but had been living in Africa for a very long time.”

  “I believe that,” I said. “But I’m not getting you a bow and arrows. You could put somebody’s eye out with an arrow.”

  “I want the arrows fitted with suction cups in place of arrowheads.”

  “Oh. Those. Okay then.”

  “I would also like an outfit like the one Robin Hood wore, circa Errol Flynn.”

  “Let’s go find one,” I said.

  “Dr. Livingstone might not have found the source of the Nile,” Frank mused as we pulled away from the curb, “but he did find Victoria Falls. Which he named after the queen of England at the time. Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” I echoed.

  “The indigenous people of the area knew about the falls already, of course. They called it ‘The Smoke That Thunders.’ I wonder whether you could pull out somebody’s eyeball with a suction-cup arrow.”

  See? Just like any other kid.

  THE COSTUME STORE Frank decided we should go to turned out to be in one of the seedier parts of Los Angeles. The store windows on Hollywood Boulevard were filled with flashing lights and mannequins wearing the barest suggestions of clothing, costumes for more unsavory adventures than Frank had in mind. “This neighborhood was once the epicenter of all things glamorous,” he said. “Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Egyptian. Cocktails at Musso and Frank’s. Strobe lights for premieres and limos lined up around the block. Now look at it. I can’t.” He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Frank’s eyes were shut tight and he walked with a hand on my shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off the curb. No idear.

  He relaxed a little when we reached our destination, though I did have to stand between Frank and the rack of rubber zombie masks. As it turned out, the store didn’t carry Robin Hood circa Errol Flynn or circa anybody else. “But,” the woman working the counter said, “we do have Peter Pan.”

  Frank tried it on and assessed himself in the mirror. “This will do nicely,” he said. “And should we ever return to the hospital, I can wear this to take my friend Tinkerbell out to lunch.”

  On the way home, Frank asked, “By the way, what happened to that box from Xander?”

  TO DISTRACT FRANK from the question of Xander’s box I decided to let him use his birthday bow and arrow set as soon as we got home. As it turns out, there is nowhere more fun to live when you have a high-quality suction-cup bow and arrow set than a house made of glass.

  Most afternoons when Frank “came home from school” he’d rush in, change into the Robin Hood/Peter Pan ensemble, and run out hoisting his quiver to his shoulder. He figured out pretty quickly that height improved trajectory, so he created an imaginary parapet by opening the moon roof of the station wagon and standing on the backseat. After opening and closing it a few thousand times, the roof got stuck open. I didn’t want to bother Mimi with matters that weren’t life-and-death, so we took it to a mechanic without mentioning it to her. The mechanic told us the repair would cost more money than I had to front for it, so I told him we’d have to wait. “You sure?” he asked. “I don’t want to be the voice of doom, but February is square in the middle of the rainy season.”

  “We have a garage,” I said. Even if we never put the car inside it.

  Aside from his imaginary parapet, Frank also favored a perch among the branches of the shade tree just outside his mother’s office window. He’d discovered that he almost always hit his target if he drew a bead on the window through the Hula-Hoop hanging there. I decided not to stop him after I helped gather up his arrows and noticed that he’d used a red Sharpie to draw a heart inside all the suction cups.

  I’d been so sure I’d put those Sharpies where he’d never find them, in a Ziploc taped inside the toilet tank above water level. The kid couldn’t be trusted with permanent markers. He drew on everything, including the soles of his mother’s socks. Also hearts. I discovered that sorting laundry. Mimi had taken to leaving hers in a bag outside her door every few days with a note attached. Wash. The only way we knew she was still alive in there were the bags of laundry and remains of meals on trays she left outside her door. And the typing. Typing, typing, typing.

  “WHEN IS YOUR birthday, anyway, Frank?” I asked at breakfast one day.

  He stared a full minute before asking me, “Are you going to say ‘knock knock’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must be joking. You know when my birthday is.”

  “How would I know?” I said. “Nobody ever told me.”

  “You know my birthday. You know it by heart.”

  “No I don’t,” I insisted.

  “Yes you do,” he said. “You just don’t know that you know it.”

  “If you don’t tell me when your birthday is, how will I make arrangements?” I asked.

  “My mother will take care of everything.”

  My mother would have taken care of everything. She might not have been able to give us a glass mansion on a hilltop, but every year on my birthday, without fail, she made me a beautiful cake. Some kind of chocolate. I can close my eyes and smell it right now. Forget “Nuit de Bel Air.” Make my fragrance “Toujours Chocolat.”

  What if Mimi forgot Frank’s birthday? A kid needs cake on his birthday. “What kind of cake will she make?” I asked.

  “Chocolate, of course,” Frank said. “Coconut is not the most delicious cake in the world.”

  NOW I GUESS I should tell you what happened to that box from Xander.

  In many ways I blame myself.

  PART VI

  THE FIRE

  ( 22 )

  ALICE, WAKE UP.”

  I opened my eyes and turned on my lamp. Frank. Wearing the zoot suit. In the house. I sat up. “What are you doing wearing that? I thought you didn’t want your mother to know you’d found it.”

  “It’s okay. It’s my birthday.”

  “It is? Happy birthday! What’s today?”

 
“February twelfth.”

  “Abe Lincoln’s birthday,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

  “Also Charles Darwin’s. Also mine.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Three A.M.”

  “And you woke me up at three A.M. to tell me it’s your birthday?”

  “I woke you up because I need your help.”

  That got my attention. “What’s going on?”

  “It was raining a little bit,” he said. “And you’ll recall that the moon roof of the station wagon is stuck open.”

  I swung my legs out of the bed and felt around with my feet for my tennis shoes. “I’ll go put it in the garage.”

  “I did already.”

  “You drove the car?”

  “Xander showed me how. Up and down the driveway, remember? I don’t need a license to do that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good, I guess.”

  “Not entirely good.”

  Oh, no. “Did you wreck it?”

  “I think I may have. But not in the way you’d imagine.”

  That’s when the explosions started. They sounded more like gunshots, really. Four gunshots. One, two. Threefour. I smelled something that wasn’t Nuit de Bel Air wafting through my bathroom window. Smoke. The Smoke That Thunders.

  “What did you do, Frank?” When he didn’t answer right away I took him by the shoulders and gave him a shake. “What did you do?”

  “I seem to have set the station wagon on fire.”

  I ran down the hall. The sliding glass doors were wide open and I could see the station wagon in flames. Also on fire? The Dream House.

  Frank bumped into me when I stopped running. “Oh,” he said. “It’s all burning now. I tried so hard to blow out all those birthday candles. I kept trying and trying but they wouldn’t go out and then I got scared because flames were coming out of the moon roof. I decided it wouldn’t hurt if I left a few birthday candles burning and I ran.”

  “You found Xander’s box,” I said.

  TO GET TECHNICAL, unless you open the gas tank and start a fire in that, cars don’t actually blow up like they do in the movies. Gas tanks are designed not to explode. Fire needs air to flourish, which it doesn’t get in a sealed-off gas tank. If, however, you aim a Roman candle at a cardboard box of clothing you’ve sighted through the open moon roof, the incendiary material in the candle will set those clothes on fire. The cardboard will catch, then the upholstery, next the foam inside the seat. Once all that gets going, the heat will shatter the windshield and expand the air in the tires until they blow. When tires explode, those explosions sound like gunshots. One, two, threefour.