The Mighty Franks: A Memoir. Michael Frank

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      I recognized the voice that asked this question as belonging to Bea Zeiger. Bea and her husband, Irv, lived over the hill from us and had children who were older than we were by half a generation; the kids in that family had helped to radicalize the parents—at least as far as they could be radicalized from the comfort of their rambling midcentury ranch house, which stood up on a flag lot that was unusually large and sunny for the canyon. The Zeigers hosted fundraisers for Daniel Ellsberg and Angela Davis; George McGovern, of course; and Tom Hayden, whose then wife, Jane Fonda, I went to hear speak at their house later on when I was old enough to be invited to such evenings. Bea and Irv had a touch of the wattage of my aunt and uncle, though theirs was of a much more political cast.

      A sound of sipping followed as the women waited for my mother to answer. “Honestly, I cannot say,” she said finally. “Habit. Fear of rocking the boat. It’s a very tricky boat we have here …”

      “Some women are burning their bras,” said a voice I did not recognize. “You might burn the bric-a-brac. Think how liberating it would feel.”

      There was a silence.

      “Merona?”

      “I was just trying to picture the consequences. None of you can understand what it’s like in this family.”

      “Why not try us?” Bea said.

      My toes dug into the carpet. My mother, the rabbi’s daughter, had always been so private and discreet, a secret-keeper par excellence, especially when the secrets—or merely the information—concerned the people my aunt referred to as the inner sanctum or the larky sevensome.

      “Do you really want to hear all this?”

      Please, somebody, say no.

      This was my first impulse. But then my curiosity began to kick in. Because if, after all, my mother was going to say these things, I certainly wanted to hear—to overhear—them.

      “Of course we do,” Bea said. “Every one of our individual stories has something to teach the rest of us.”

      “I don’t know where to begin even.”

      “At the beginning, where else?”

      “The beginning …” The ping of a bottle against glass, the gurgle of Chablis flowing from one to the other. “I suppose that was when I was thirteen. Yes.” She paused. “I was the first girl in Southern California to be bat mitzvahed—that’s what my father always said, anyway. Shalom was leading the service, naturally. We were in the sanctuary at his synagogue, Temple Sinai in Long Beach, the first Saturday in November, 1945. The place was packed. I hated having all that attention on me. I was so nervous my hands were drenched. Father kept his eye on the back door. The waiting was just awful. We were waiting for my brother Irving, who was late. When he finally walked in, he had a woman on his arm who looked like no one else in that room, no one else I had ever seen—except maybe in the movies. She was dressed from head to toe in emerald green, and her hair was piled up on top of her head, and she had stuck leaves in it. Leaves …”

      The woman was my aunt—I had heard this story before. Several times. But I had never heard it offered up like this as a piece of early evidence in support of all that was wrong in my mother’s life.

      Hank, sweeping leafily into the room that November, was an expression of nature—a force of nature. Beautiful, exotic, in carriage and appearance so unfamiliar to the people in the sanctuary that the question Shiksa? flew through the audience.

      Was she foreign? European? Maybe that explained it. Perhaps she was a refugee from overseas, but obviously not one of the struggling ones who appeared at Friday-night services out of nowhere and stood out with their gaunt faces and deep-set haunted eyes. She was other, that much was agreed on, and widely.

      “Friends,” Shalom said. “Come now. Have we never seen a gorgeous woman on my son’s arm?”

      “Actually, Rabbi, we haven’t,” someone called out, and there was laughter.

      “Father, sorry,” Irving mouthed as he and his date sat down. Shalom gestured at his son: no matter. And the service began.

      Afterward the tall beauty joined the line of people congratulating the bat mitzvah girl, my mother, whose legs went weak in the presence of such an impossibly glamorous woman.

      “I’m Harriet, though my friends call me Hank. Which is of course what you are going to call me, since we are going to be the best of friends, you and I.”

       We are going to be the best of friends, you and I.

      “I was simply mesmerized,” Merona told the group of women in our living room. “It started that day and deepened the next time I saw her, which was after she and Irving had become engaged and my parents and I drove up to Brentwood to have dinner with her family. The whole evening was like a story—a movie, really. My parents stopped at Bullocks Wilshire to buy an engagement gift for Hank, an ivory peignoir and nightgown that were on display behind a glass case in the ladies’ intimates department—a place I never knew existed, and at a price, one hundred dollars, I’d never seen my father pay for anything.”

      She paused—to boost all this talk with still more wine? To find the courage to dig deeper? The fact that she didn’t seem to have to dig so very far was almost as disconcerting as hearing her tell these stories to strangers; it was as if she had been waiting years—decades—to speak to the right audience. “From there we drove up to Tigertail Road. My mother kept looking at a map and checking, and double-checking, the slip of paper she held in her hand. We could scarcely believe how these people lived, up high in the Brentwood hills, in a house that had three chimneys and half a dozen dormer windows and space in the garage for five cars. Five! The house impressed us even more in person than in the descriptions we’d had from my brother Herbert, who was at UCLA at the time and had been invited to several Sunday dinners. He would come home to Long Beach and tell my parents how, when they sat down at the table, Huffy would ring a bell for the maid or one of the houseboys—plural—to bring in or clear away the dishes. Herb had met a countess there, from Budapest, who also worked at MGM—and a Russian painter, and actors, and movie directors—and he said everyone always dressed up for dinner like something out of an Edwardian novel. And sure enough, when we rang the doorbell, the door opened and there was Peter, the older brother, in a tie and jacket with a pipe in his hand, and in this deep grand voice he said, ‘Welcome to Tigertail.’ Welcome to Tigertail! I will never forget that. Then I looked over his shoulder and I thought I would die: there was Hank gliding down a spiraling staircase followed by Trudy, who would marry Pete, and there was Baby, whom they introduced as their foster sister, and they were all wearing long hostess gowns, the same as Huffy …”

      I knew the rest by heart; I could have told it in my mother’s place: how young Marty—my future father—was just twenty and back from the war, where he’d been on a demining mission in the Pacific that kept the whole family scared for months and months. He was six feet tall and bronzed and had big, wide shoulders and gleaming teeth. He came bounding, not gliding, down the stairs and, landing in a skid, grinned at the group and said, “So these are the new in-laws, eh, sis?” Then, zeroing in on Merona, he said, “What’s happening, tootz?” And she turned crimson and stuttered, “I’m—I’m pleased to meet you.” “‘Pleased to meet you’! A regular lady.” He pinched her—pinched her—and said, “How old are you anyway, you cute little thing?” “Thirteen and a half.” “As much as that?”

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