I was about to put myself to bed when I heard the rustling that meant Frank had started to roam. I switched the piano light on. He was drawn to it like Gloria Swanson looking for her close-up.
“What are you doing?” Frank asked. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I could ask the same of you.” I scooted over on the bench. “Sit. Hey, I remember these pajamas.”
“Yes. I wore them the day we met.”
“Do you remember what we were listening to that day?”
“Of course. Rhapsody in Blue. We discussed Gershwin and Charles Foster Kane and Fred Astaire.”
“Can you play that song, but quietly so we don’t wake up Mr. Vargas? I still don’t know how to turn this thing on.”
While he was fiddling with the player mechanism, Frank said, “In Casablanca, nobody asks Dooley Wilson to play ‘As Time Goes By’ using the words ‘Play it again, Sam.’ People always get that wrong. Ingrid Bergman comes the closest. She says, ‘Play it, Sam.’”
Once the piano got going he sat down beside me again. “I miss my mother,” he said.
“I know you do, Frank.”
“It’s stressful for me to be without her for so long.”
“You’re being really brave, Frank.”
“She’ll be home soon.”
“I hope so.”
“Oh, I know so,” Frank said. “I don’t suppose you and I will have much time together after she comes back. I expect you and Mr. Vargas will go back to New York.”
I made my hands into such tight fists my nails cut into my palms. “That’s the plan.” I hesitated, then said, “You know that I love you, Frank. No matter what happens. No matter where I am.”
“I love you, too,” Frank said. “We’ll always have Paris.” He pressed his face to my shoulder and we sat there listening for what seemed like a hundred years. “Can I ask you something, Alice?” he said at last.
“Sure thing, Frank.”
“My mother hasn’t known you long and yet she named the only female character in her book Alice. There are a number of male characters and though she has known me for a decade, not one of them is named Frank. Why?”
( 26 )
FRANK ROLLED BACK the Oriental runner in his closet—the only nice rug in the whole house really—to show me the trapdoor underneath. It had hinges sunk flush with the floorboards and was fitted with a brass ring in a square brass housing like they use building yachts and Frank’s closet and maybe even the Titanic. Here’s where I confess that I never once rolled that rug back to vacuum underneath it.
“This is my place for special treasures,” Frank said. “I think it was built as a bomb shelter or somewhere to store sweaters or the family jewels or a place to hide out from the Nazis.” He opened the trapdoor and locked the hinges so the door wouldn’t come crashing down on our heads.
The cedar-lined cavity had a five-step ladder leading down to it and deep shelves full of boxes and bundles and things, all laid out with a curator’s zeal. “Can I borrow your flashlight?” I asked. Frank shook his head and flipped a switch under the lip of the space. A system of bright spotlights and footlights came on inside. I recognized it as the beacon from Frank’s closet that Mr. Vargas and I saw that night in the yard.
Frank and I peered into the cavity, our craniums almost touching in the middle. There was a low wooden stool at one end with a lidded cardboard manuscript box resting on it. I couldn’t quite make out what was scrawled across its top.
“That’s her book,” Frank said. “There, on the stool I stand on to reach things on the top shelves. Sometimes I sit on it, too, while contemplating the relics of my ancestors’ pasts and my own.”
“I’m not sure I believe it,” I said. “How did it end up down there?”
“You may remember that the night of the fire I’d been looking all over for my mother. That’s how I happened to find Xander’s box.”
“Yes.”
“Well, before that I tried my mother’s office door and it was unlocked. While searching for her I stumbled onto that box. I tucked it under my arm to investigate later and planned to return it the next day, but by the next day there was no desk to return it to. So I put it in here for safekeeping.” He hopped down into the space and I climbed down the ladder after him. During our six-step journey from one end of the cavity to the other Frank gestured to its laden shelves. “This is the top-secret repository of my childhood,” he explained. “As you are a student of all things Frank Banning, I give you carte blanche to examine whatever interests you.” He handed me the box Mimi had labeled Draft 2/11/10. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed now.”
“Going to bed? Where?” We were, after all, standing shoulder-deep beneath his closet floor, which was serving as Frank’s current bedroom while I slept in his bed.
“In your bed. Which is actually my bed. With your permission. Feel free to come to me with any questions.”
“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”
In less than a minute he was asleep and I was on that stool with the box in my lap. I took the lid off and saw the real title of Draft 2/11/10 typed on its cover sheet. Alice and Julian.
I turned the page over and read the paragraph: “My IQ is higher than 99.7% of the American public, but you’d have no way to know that since I fell against the curb. I’m a smart kid made dumb in the classic sense of the word: speechless, not thoughtless. Alice is a lovely person who isn’t much to look at, so my accident has made us perfect companions. I never had a friend before Alice.”
There I stopped. I took the box to Mr. Vargas.
MR. VARGAS RACED through the first few pages on the love seat in his room that used to be my room, then put the manuscript down and went to the bathroom. He came back with his eyebrows dripping.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine. I was splashing water on my face. I needed to know I wasn’t dreaming.”
I made Mr. Vargas a pot of coffee and went to check on Frank. He was out cold. The cavity was open with the lights still on. I was surprised to see I’d left it open. I guess I wasn’t the careful person I’d always imagined myself to be. I was someone who forgot her phone on the kitchen counter on the way to pick up a patient from the psych ward. One who left Roman candles where kids could find them and trapdoors open for anybody to tumble into. Maybe I wasn’t the one people should be calling Jeopardy, but I might be imperfect enough for somebody to love me someday.
Somebody aside from Frank, or Mr. Vargas, or my mother, I mean.
Before I shut the hatch I knelt for one last look into the abyss.
Frank did give me carte blanche.
I hopped down into what I’d started to think of as the Dream Bunker. I wandered its miniature aisle, examining the bounty of little hats and shoes that Frank must have outgrown ages ago. The clothes I’d purged from his closet, stuffed under my bed and forgotten, were now folded neatly. The plastic machete was there, Frank’s skateboard, the paper bag top hat he had made at the playground. The pink plaid ice pack and the burgundy Hermès scarf that had once belonged to Banning. The three chocolate hearts he’d bought the day his mother disappeared. A beagle pull toy with a big smile and sad eyes and a tail made out of a spring finished with a green bead that looked like it had been made about the time that guy in The Graduate put his arm around Dustin Hoffman’s shoulder and murmured to him, “Plastics.”
The beagle’s flat plastic ears were screwed to its head so they could swing when it moved and its plastic wheels were uneven on purpose so the thing would wobble from side to side, swinging those ears as it dogged a toddler’s footsteps. I picked it up and turned it over. On its belly someone had written “Mimi” in marker in a girly hand definitely not Mimi’s. Banning’s maybe? It was hard to imagine Mimi stuffing the beagle into her suitcase along with Julian’s typewriter when she ran away to New York and literary fame and misfortune. But here it was.
There were envelopes of drugstore-developed photos spilling over with snapshots and negative
s. A frame made of Popsicle sticks with a photo of a much younger Frank inside it, just as dressed up then as now and as unsmiling as a Civil War soldier setting out for the front. The big, heavy photo album Frank had shown me way back when. I sat down on the stool and flipped through its pages again. The photographs looked very different now that I knew more about the cast of players. Especially the ones of Julian. With his long hair cut off in a golden halo I couldn’t help noticing that he looked an awful lot like a young Xander, the Mr. Fix-it I hadn’t met when I saw those pictures the first time around. No wonder Mimi had stood at the glass staring at the crew building her wall. When Xander rapped on the glass she looked like she’d just seen a ghost because she kind of had.
I put the album back where I’d found it alongside Ziplocs of newspaper articles, big bundles of typing paper tied up with string, bulging manila envelopes and file folders neatly lined up in a rack. I ran a fingertip along Mimi’s file-folder labels and froze on one that read DONORS.
AS HARD AS it is to imagine picking a person with whom you’d like to spend an evening based on some stats and personal essays, now I know it has to be lots harder to choose a man to sire the child who will be with you forever.
There were four packets, three with résumés of guys who seemed virtually identical. Those three were over six feet tall and noted in staff interviews to be “devastatingly handsome,” “a real James Bond type,” and “easygoing, with charm and movie-star good looks.” All claimed high IQs and were either college students or graduates or graduate students. Who’d written essays that said things like “I love animals and sports and building cool stuff with my hands.” “I would like to travel to some European countries or other foreign places because that is where you can find lots of history and culture and other things like that.” “With each new day I derive joy from the knowledge that everything I do makes the world a better place for myself.”
Then there was Guy Four. What got to me was his answer to the essay question, “Why do you want to be a sperm donor?”
First, let me say that I don’t need the money. I am an aerospace engineer—what wags might call a “rocket scientist—”
My hands started shaking.
—with an exciting career working at a prestigious lab known for sending unmanned probes to Mars and beyond. I work long hours and when I get home I like to sit in my favorite armchair and watch my favorite movies over and over. I don’t think of myself as a “loner” because I enjoy the camaraderie of my coworkers at the lunch table and get as much of a kick out of swapping interesting facts I find in the scientific publications we read at our meals as the next guy does. But I confess I’m not a fan of unfamiliar “gourmet” foods and for that matter I don’t much like change or needless disruptions in my schedule. Although I had a college girlfriend in college, I don’t meet a lot of women in my line of work. I will be forty years old on my next birthday, which I understand to be the cutoff age for sperm donation. Having recently learned that bit of trivia from an acquaintance, I’ve begun to wonder whether I’ll meet a woman I would like to have a family with while my sperm is still at its most viable. Moreover, a single mother raised me so I grew up without a male—
At this point he’d turned the paper over and finished his answer on the back.
—role model and while I think that worked out fine for me, I am not convinced I would be an exemplary father in all the ways a father should be. I am hopeless at sports and other “manly pursuits.” I can be impatient and short-tempered. Living with a child would invite chaos into my life at a time when I’m not sure I’m equipped to deal with chaos. But my mother always wanted grandchildren and I like the idea of creating a child for her sake, even if I never get to see that child, ever. My mother isn’t alive anymore, so she would never get to see a child of mine ever, either. But to put a child or children out there, for my mother—that would be wonderful. She was the best. I miss her every single day.
Somebody—probably Mimi—had drawn a red arrow to that first line on the flip side. Clipped to a new sheet with CHILDHOOD PHOTOGRAPHS typed across the top—a page not included in the other packets—was a photograph of a little boy with smooth red hair and huge brown eyes magnified to lemur size by Buddy Holly glasses. He wore a round-necked striped T-shirt and shorts and sat on a lawn chair holding a birthday cake on his knees that was decorated with five candles and a rocket ship. “May * 1965” appeared in tiny type along one fluted white edge of the photograph.
I read his form again from the top. He was five foot eight, nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, allergic to shellfish and cats. The other donors had their own issues: one was colorblind, the second a smoker and prone to keloids, and bachelor number three had some moderate acne scarring and had once struggled with alcohol addiction. There were hypertensive grandparents, a father dead at forty in a car accident, a mother with early-onset diabetes, an aunt who committed suicide, siblings with scoliosis or arrhythmias or hearing impairments. At the end of the stats section I found a line that read, “Donors who provide consent will be open to having their contact information released to any resulting progeny when a child or children reach the age of eighteen. Donors who do not agree to release that information prefer to remain anonymous.”
That line of type was followed by two boxes. The first three donors had checked “Consent to Contact.” The rocket scientist had checked the second one, the one that said “Anonymous Donor.” Alongside that, in Mimi’s handwriting, one word. Him.
I LOOKED AT that snapshot of the little boy with the rocket cake for a long time before I put it away.
Frank’s sleeping bag was on a shelf nearby, and I rolled it out on the bunker floor, turned off the lights, and crawled in. At that moment the skylight perfectly framed the moon on its voyage across the night sky. When it traveled out of sight over some European countries or other foreign places with lots of history and culture and other things like that, it was way darker in the bunker than I had thought it would be. I got worried the hinges of the bunker’s hatch would fatigue and allow the trapdoor to do its worst. I would die an awful, solitary death down there and it would only occur to somebody to check the Dream Bunker for all that was left of Alice after they smelled a horrible odor coming from under the floorboards in Frank’s closet.
So I crawled out of the sleeping bag and wedged a couple of Frank’s outgrown wool trousers in where the hinge hinged so the hatch couldn’t close all the way no matter what. While I was looking for something that would survive the wedgie undamaged I found a couple of nice little cashmere argyle sweaters and took those back to the floor with me to use as a pillow.
( 27 )
THE NEXT MORNING Frank wanted to give his new best friend a tour of the Dream Bunker. Even though Mr. Vargas was also my favorite person in the world, the two of them were so tight already that I’ll admit I was a little jealous.
“I’ll be eager to discuss what you find in there when I get back,” I said to Mr. Vargas. I’d volunteered to drive the manuscript to a copy shop to have it scanned and sent to New York before it could disappear on us again. I could see Frank ricocheting down the hall toward us, so I left it at that. “Don’t have any fun without me,” I said to Mr. Vargas as he handed over the keys to his rental car
It was pretty clear my boys had been having at least a little fun when I came home because I found the two of them wearing tweedy jackets with bow ties and pocket squares, watching Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and that other guy whose name nobody ever remembers trying to see all of New York in a day in On the Town.
“So, in New York City you just raise your hand and a cab appears?” Frank asked Mr. Vargas as I walked in.
“That’s right.”
“New York sounds like a magical place.”
“It can be sometimes,” Mr. Vargas said.
“I miss it,” I said. “Is that a new jacket, Frank?”
“Oh, this? I’d forgotten about this old thing until I saw what he was wearing.” Frank e
lbowed Mr. Vargas, making me suspect I should re-Sharpie his new best friend’s name on Frank’s hand. “Then I remembered my mother bought a similar one for me long ago. It was such a delicious shade of loden that we couldn’t pass it up. It was always too big for me before now.”
It hit me then that all the outfits I’d come to love would end up folded on shelves in the repository of his childhood before very long. Frank would outgrow them, and then what? Would he continue on in his natty path or take to baseball jerseys and tennis shoes like a regular teenager? Assume a uniform of T-shirts and jeans worn into butter-soft tatters, like Xander? His life might be easier for it, but Frank would be so much less Frank then. It broke my heart to think of it.
I handed Mr. Vargas his car keys and said to Frank, “Scoot over.” Frank moved himself and the three bundles of yellowing typing paper tied up with string he’d been using as a footstool over, and plastered himself against Mr. Vargas the way the kid used to cuddle up to me. I dropped onto the couch beside him and touched the bundles with my toe. “What have we here?” I asked.
Mr. Vargas used the remote to snap off the movie and blinked at me a couple of times. “Aren’t these the things you wanted to discuss with me?”
“No,” I said. “What are they?”
“These,” he said, “are other manuscripts Mimi wrote over the years and then decided to throw away.”
“What?” I asked. And here I thought I’d found the biggest bombshell in that bunker.
“In my role as family archivist, I fished those out of the trash,” Frank said. “My mother had spent so much time with them that I knew they had to be worth something. There may have been other manuscripts before I was tall enough to see into her office wastebasket. We won’t know the answer to that question until I crack the code of time travel. It never ceases to amaze me what treasures Mama throws away. My gravel collection, for example. I still miss it.”
Be Frank With Me Page 25