Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  A trove of unpublished manuscripts. So there was one, after all, though Mimi hadn’t exactly tucked them away for publication after her death. Xander had said he’d heard her typing ever since he’d known her, and here was the proof. “Have you looked through them, Mr. Vargas?” I asked.

  “That would be an invasion of her privacy,” he said. “Mimi may not have intended for anyone to read these, ever. We’ll have to ask her permission first. The one you sent today she’d written under contract, though, so that’s a different matter.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “You know what I can’t believe?” Frank asked. “How much time my mother has left in her hiatus. I really want to talk to her right now. I’m sick of being brave about not seeing her. And there are questions I really need to ask her. Questions that have been keeping me up at night.”

  “Nothing would make me happier than talking to Mimi, but I don’t know how to reach her,” Mr. Vargas said. “I’m worried she’s holed up somewhere trying to write the book she promised me all over again.”

  “Is that what she’s doing?” Frank asked. “When she said she needed a month of alone time, I assumed she needed to finish catching up on her sleep. The three days of rest the hospital prescribed for her weren’t nearly enough to make up for all the years I’ve kept her up past her bedtime.”

  “Frank,” I said. “Have you been talking to your mother?”

  “Outside of my head? No.”

  “So how did she tell you she needed a month of alone time?”

  “It was in her note.”

  I swung my knees around so I was facing him, my nose within an inch of his. “What note?”

  “The note I knew she must have left when she couldn’t stick around long enough to see me before she went on hiatus. It was in the back of Le Petit Prince. Which was a much better place to hide it in than inside my birthday cake or one of her shoes, though it took me longer to find it there than it should have. I must be getting old.”

  “Frank,” I said. “We need to see that note.”

  “Why? Didn’t she leave a note for you?”

  I considered several possible responses and settled on, “I guess she was in a hurry.” I tried to keep my voice even. “She must have assumed you’d fill me in.”

  The note said, I need a month of alone time, Monkey. Can you be brave for me just that much longer? If there’s an emergency, Isaac will know where to find me.

  “Is Dr. Einstein Isaac?” Frank asked.

  “I’m Isaac, yes,” Mr. Vargas said.

  “I thought so,” Frank said. “But Alice insists on calling you Mr. Vargas. I was confused.”

  “Isaac Vargas, Frank,” I said. “His name is Isaac Vargas.”

  “So Isaac Vargas,” Frank said. “Tell us. Where is my mother?”

  ( 28 )

  AS IT TURNED out, Mr. Vargas did know where to find Mimi. He just didn’t know he knew it.

  “Well,” Mr. Vargas said, after Frank had turned the note over for us several times and held it up to the light to prove there was nothing else written on it, not even with invisible ink. “There was a place we met the last time I came out here. I thought that if I saw her in person I could talk her out of marrying that preening nitwit and into coming back with me to New York.”

  “What kind of place?” I asked. “A restaurant?”

  “Not a restaurant.”

  “Was it a museum?” Frank asked.

  “No. Not a museum.”

  All Mr. Vargas could remember was that it was in the Valley somewhere, close to the studio where Hanes Fuller was shooting interiors for the ill-starred art-house western that would put a bullet in his career. The place Mimi suggested they meet was a bungalow motel, a series of small blue stucco casitas grouped in a crescent around a gravel courtyard. Each had its own little door-less garage attached, he said, so people could drive in and enter their rooms without being seen from the street. The neon sign over the parking lot had a palm tree on it, he knew that. He just couldn’t come up with its name.

  Frank was so hot to find his mother that he didn’t bother changing his wardrobe before we left. He clamped his deerstalker hat on his head, grabbed his bubble pipe, and lit out for the rental car. “Allons-y!” he shouted over his shoulder. He dropped the bubble pipe then, skidded to a stop, and picked it up. He took that opportunity to explain to us, “Allons-y is what the French Foreign Legion say when what they really mean is ‘Let’s blow this Popsicle stand, my friends!’” He whooped and took off again.

  Mr. Vargas grinned at me. “I love that kid,” he said.

  “Get in line,” I said.

  THE THREE OF us headed east on Sunset Boulevard and then swung left up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, while tour-guide Frank explained to Mr. Vargas that Schwab’s Drugstore had once stood on the corner to our right before it was bulldozed to make way for the minimall there now. You know, Schwab’s, where a sultry young Lana Turner may or may not have been “discovered”—in the rearview mirror I saw Frank making finger quotes—at the soda fountain. Where, in Sunset Boulevard the movie, Joe Gillis hangs out with his cronies, though director Billy Wilder had a replica of Schwab’s built at the Paramount Studios lot so the movie hadn’t actually been shot where the minimall stood now. Did Mr. Vargas also happen to know that Sunset Boulevard, the boulevard we’d just left behind, not the movie, originated as an eighteenth-century cattle path that followed the rim of the Los Angeles Basin and ran from the original Spanish settlement in downtown Los Angeles all the way to the ocean?

  “I didn’t know that, Frank,” Mr. Vargas said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Here’s something else you may not know,” Frank said. I tuned out his monologue as we left the Los Angeles Basin and drove up Lookout Mountain. I needed to focus on the job at hand. Laurel Canyon Boulevard is another of those impossibly narrow, precipitously curvy and overly trafficked two-laners cut through the Santa Monica Mountains. The things you have to go through, driving in Los Angeles. Mountains. Traffic. Flash floods. Mudslides. Wildfires. Coyotes. I’d miss the kid for sure and probably the weather come next February, but I wouldn’t miss the driving. No wonder Mimi didn’t do it anymore.

  We made it to Mulholland Drive without plunging over the edge and coasted down the other side into the San Fernando Valley. Frank directed us to the studio in question, which, he informed us, was once home turf for slapstick silent movie king Mack Sennett before his business went belly-up in 1928 and he sold out. Using the studio as our pivot point, we worked our way through the neighborhood in ever-expanding circles. I’ll say this for the Valley. Proprietors of charming and expensive-looking restaurants close to the studios don’t seem to care if there’s a muffler repair shop next door on one side, a head shop on the other, and an end-of-days-looking convalescent home across the street with ambulances hogging all the good spots out front. I guess they figure the parking valets will keep all the grim reality of drugs and engine failure and eminent death from bursting everybody’s expense-account bubble.

  Frank saw it first, of course. “Neon palm tree! There! Over there!” he shouted, pointing urgently with his elbow. I pulled over in front of a pink motel named “The Sunset.” Other than its color, it fit Mr. Vargas’s description exactly.

  We all got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, looking. “I don’t remember it being called ‘The Sunset,’” Mr. Vargas said. “I think it used to be called ‘The Blue Hawaiian,’ come to think of it. Mimi’s reason for picking this place had something to do with Elvis, though as I remember Elvis was dead by then already.” He leaned through the arch over the driveway entrance and looked around. “Put some money in the parking meter. I think this may be it.”

  While Frank took care of the meter, I put my cell on speakerphone, called the front desk, and asked for Mimi Banning. The desk clerk said there wasn’t anybody registered there under that name. “How about Mimi Gillespie?” I asked. Nada. “M. M. Banning?” I tried after that.

  “We
have no one registered here under that name, either,” the clerk said. She sounded young, maybe too young to have heard of M. M. Banning. Don’t the kids read The Pitcher in junior high school anymore?

  “Do you have a very small woman who’s been staying with you about a week? Middle-aged, pixie haircut, wears cardigan sweaters?” I asked.

  The desk clerk wasn’t too young to think something fishy might be going on when somebody calls and offers up as many aliases as I had. “I’m afraid I can’t share any information about our guests with you,” she said. Then she hung up.

  I said, “I think Mimi’s in there.”

  “Why?” Frank asked. “That woman just said she wasn’t.”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “She didn’t say she wasn’t there. What she said was that she couldn’t share information about their guests.”

  “The unsaid said!” Frank shouted. “Now I get what Dr. Abrams means when she’s trying to explain ‘subtext.’ What would I do without you, Alice? You’re the best Dr. Watson I will ever have.”

  WE HUDDLED IN the shadows just outside the arch, trying to be inconspicuous while we worked out our next move.

  “We can’t knock on every door. The desk clerk will notice us,” I said. “We need to narrow the possibilities a little.”

  “My mother didn’t come in a car, so don’t try a room with one in the garage,” Frank said.

  “Smart,” I said.

  “I know,” Frank said. “My IQ is higher than 99.7 percent of the American public’s.”

  About half of the carports were empty. “Would it be better to wait until after dinner, when all the guests are parked for the night?” I asked.

  “My mother would never open her door for an unexpected guest after dark,” Frank said.

  Mimi wouldn’t open the door for an unexpected guest, ever. “Good point,” I said. “So let’s do it now. Where should we start?”

  “Room Twelve,” Mr. Vargas said. “I can still see those numbers on the door. When I knocked, I knocked once, then twice. One, two. Twelve. For luck. Fat lot of good that did me.”

  Frank took off across the parking lot. I started to go after him, but Mr. Vargas grabbed my arm. “She’s his mother. Let him find her, if she’s in there. If she’s not, well, we’re close enough to rescue him if he needs it.”

  We watched the kid knock on the door, once then twice like Mr. Vargas had. When it didn’t open he stepped into the scruffy plantings under the window and bobbed up and down, trying to see in through the shutters. Then he went back to the door and took out his wallet.

  “He must be looking for something to write on so he can slip a note under the door,” I said. “I wonder if he has a pen? I may have one.” I scrabbled through my Mary Poppins satchel, looking.

  Mr. Vargas started patting down his pockets but didn’t find one either. “Uh-oh,” he said. “What’s he up to now?”

  I looked up from my purse and saw Frank had his orange bus pass in one hand and the handle to Room Twelve in the other. He slid the card into the crack between the door and the jamb and popped it open. For someone who claimed to know it was wrong to indulge in criminal activities, Frank sure seemed to have a knack for it.

  When we nabbed him at the scene of the crime, Frank was spinning with joy. “She’s here!” he said. “But she isn’t here. I’ve already looked under all the furniture.”

  It was obvious Mimi had taken up residence in Room Twelve. There was an open box of her favorite pencils on the desk alongside two stacks of yellow legal pads, one tall and pristine, one shorter and rumpled. We could see that the top page of the short stack was covered with her handwriting. A cardigan hung from the back of the chair at the desk, and the watercolor of Frank I’d painted her for Christmas was stuck in the mirror frame over the dresser.

  “I have a great idea,” Frank said. “We’ll all hide in the closet, and when she comes back in we’ll jump out and yell, ‘Surprise!’”

  “That’s a horrible idea, Frank. She’ll have a heart attack,” I said.

  Honestly, Mr. Vargas looked like he was the one having a heart attack. He stood behind the desk chair. “This sweater,” he said, touching the cardigan. “This was mine.” He sat heavily on the bed.

  “Where’s my mother?” Frank asked. “I’m going out to look for her.” Before I could stop him, he had flung himself out the door. So I flung myself out after him.

  I didn’t notice one of my sneakers had come untied until I tripped over its lace and tumbled down the two concrete steps outside the door. It was a real Mack Sennett pratfall that I’m sorry Frank missed, since it would have made him laugh the way I’d always dreamed of making him laugh. When I stood up again I saw Mimi halfway across the courtyard. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was wearing a baseball hat she couldn’t possibly have stolen from Frank because he wouldn’t be caught dead in one. What I guessed were Julian’s embroidered jeans because they were way too big for her. A white T-shirt, no cardigan, since it’s always so hot in the Valley. It was absolutely Mimi though because she had dropped the plastic laundry basket and gathered Frank up in her arms.

  “Oh, Frank,” Mimi said. “I love you, Monkey. I’ve missed you so much. What are you doing here? Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is all right now, Mama,” Frank said. “You’re here, and so am I. Guess who else is? You’ll never guess so I’ll show you. But first, let’s talk about that hat. Did it belong to Uncle Julian?”

  “No,” Mimi said. “I bought it in a drugstore across the street.”

  “Good,” Frank said. “That means I don’t have to feel bad about demanding you remove it before I surprise you with who’s here.”

  “Is it Alice?” Mimi asked when she pried her eyes off Frank’s face and spotted me.

  Frank took the hat off her head and threw it in her laundry basket. “Of course it isn’t Alice,” he said. “I said you’d never guess.”

  “Alice, your knees are bleeding,” Mimi said. She noticed that before I did. For a second there I thought she might hug me.

  “My knees will be fine,” I said.

  But Mimi had forgotten me. She was staring at Mr. Vargas standing in the doorway of Room Twelve. “Isaac,” Mimi said. “It’s you. Oh, Isaac, I’m sorry. There’s no book. I’ve disappointed you. Again.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Mr. Vargas said. “Your manuscript didn’t burn in the fire. Frank had it all along. He saved it for you. You’re going to love this story, Mimi. Why don’t you tell her, Frank?”

  “Because I’m very busy now,” Frank said. “You tell her.” It was his big moment of victory, but Frank didn’t seem to care. He’d let go of his mother, pulled out his pocket square, and had come to doctor my injuries. Like grandfather, like grandson. “Ooh, there’s a piece of gravel with a sparkly vein of quartz stuck in your knee,” he said. “Where are my doctor’s bag and forceps when I really need them?”

  “Frank,” I said. “Let’s go inside and wash my knees out in the tub.”

  I pulled the kid inside with me so Mr. Vargas and Mimi could talk in private. The funny thing was, they weren’t saying anything yet. The two of them were just standing there, staring at each other. Just as I turned to sneak a look, Mr. Vargas said, “You could never disappoint me, Mimi. Look at you. You’re just the same as ever. Except for this.” He touched her one white eyebrow with a fingertip. Instead of answering, she reached up, closed her hand over his, and held it against her cheek. I shoved the kid in the room and closed the door behind us.

  “I’ll get the Band-Aids from your purse,” Frank said. By then the kid was as familiar with the contents of it as I was. Then he instructed me to sit on the toilet while he took off my shoes and socks. He held my hand while I stepped into the tub and sat down on its edge. “For once, it’s a good thing you were wearing shorts, Alice,” he said. “Because if you’d had on long pants, they’d be torn all to pieces. That would have been bad. Pants don’t heal the way skin does.”

/>   WHEN FRANK, MY bandaged knees, and I emerged from the bathroom, Mr. Vargas and Mimi were gathering up her things. All business. I took Frank with me and went out to recover Mimi’s forgotten laundry basket. It had been upended in all the excitement, so I had to shake things out and refold them before I handed them to Frank to put in the basket again.

  While we were busy with that, Mimi came out with her suitcase, which Mr. Vargas was trying to wrestle from her. “Let me,” he said. “You go check out.”

  “I wish I’d known you were coming,” she said. “They made me pay for my room a week in advance.”

  Well, I thought. Whose fault is that? Take your cell phone with you next time. Don’t make tracking you down into a scavenger hunt.

  Frank carried the laundry to his mother. “Look what a nice job I did putting these back in the basket,” he said. “You know what else I did? I rescued your novel. I saved the old ones, too. Did our good friend Mr. Vargas tell you that?” I guess I wouldn’t need to write that name on Frank’s hand in Sharpie anymore.

  Mimi let go of her suitcase and hugged him. “What would I do without you, Frank?” she said.

  “I ask myself that all the time,” Frank said.

  I hung back, watching. Now that I knew him, it really was amazing how much that kid could convey while hardly moving his face. Too bad he and Buster Keaton had never met. They had so much in common. I bet they would have been friends, even if the guy were as old or older than Frank’s dead grandfather, Dr. Frank.

  Mimi shook me out of my reverie, snapping, “Why are you just standing there, Alice?” She added, “Make yourself useful. Come look under the beds and make sure we’re not leaving anything behind.”

  FRANK SAT UP front with me on the trip home. “Xander says I’m a man now, remember? So I get to sit up front.”

  I was too frazzled to argue. Mimi and Mr. Vargas had to tough it out in the backseat. I suspected that was fine by them.