Frank family. - The mighty Franks: a memoir

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To my parents and (how not?) my aunt and in memory of my uncle

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

(Everything changes, nothing is lost.)

Ovid, Metamorphoses

My feeling for Mike is something out of the ordinary, I overhear my aunt say to my mother one day when I am eight years old. Its stronger than I am. I cannot explain it. Hes simply the most marvelous child I have ever known, and I love him beyond life itself.

Beyond life itself . At first I feel lucky to be so cherished, singled out to receive a love that is so vast but then I stop to think about it. I am not sure what it means, really, to be loved beyond life itself .

Do I love my own mother that way? Does she me? Is such a thing even possible?

And why me and not my two younger brothers? What do I have that they do not?

I wish he were mine, my aunt blurts after a moment.

From where I am crouching on the stairs in the entry hall, I can feel the weather in the room change. A long, tense pause opens up between the two women. I hear them breathing, back and forth, into that pause.

They are sitting at right angles to each other, I know, my aunt on the sofa, my mother in the chair next to it. This is how they always sit in our living room, not face-to-face but perpendicular, so that they dont have to make eye contact if they dont want to.

I wish you had a child of your own, my mother says carefully. Ever the second fiddle, the third born. The diplomat.

So do I, says my aunt in a pitched, emotional voice.

Maybe you would be a different person if you did .

My mother does not say this. She thinks it, though. Everybody in our family does. But thats not what happened.

This is.

For a long time I used to wait in the dining room window. I waited in the afternoon, when I returned from school, and I waited on Saturday mornings. Now and then I waited at the edge of the driveway, because from there I could see farther up the hill, almost to the top. When the Buick Riviera appeared, its fender flashing a big toothy metallic grin, I felt happiness wash over me; happiness braided together with anticipation and excitement too, since it meant that within minutes my aunt would be pulling up to take me on one of our adventures.

My aunt was the one person in the world I was always most eager to see. Sometimes she came bearing gifts, special books or treasures related to the special interests she and my uncle and I shared: art and architecture, literature, and, since my aunt and uncle were screenwriters, movies ( never film, that was the celluloid of which movies were made). But what I loved even more than receiving tangible things was going off with her, alone, without my younger brothers or my parents; being alone with her, with the force of her attention, the contents of her mind. And her talk, which was like an unending river emptying itself into me. Our time together was larky . You really are the best company a person could ever hope for, Mike , she said, bar none . She made me feel clever merely by being with her and listening to her, learning what she had to teach, absorbing some of her sparkher sparkle.

My aunt and I went off alone together often because she and my uncle didnt have any children of their own, and they lived within minutes of our house, and because we were doubly related. There was a refrain we children learned to recite when people asked us to explain our intertwined family

Brother and sister married sister and brother.

The older couple have no children, so the younger couple share theirs.

The two families live within three blocks of each other up in Laurel Canyon

and the grandmothers live in an apartment together at the foot of the hill.

It wasnt very poetic, but it got the facts across and made the situation seem almost normal, as summaries sometimes do.

The situation was not remotely normal, but naturally I did not understand that at the time.

Our relationship, my aunt said, was special . She called our two families the larky sevensome or, quoting my grandmother, the Mighty Franks. But even within the larger group, she said, you and I, Lovey, are a thing apart. What we have is nearly as unusual as what I have with Mamma. The two of us have pulled our wagons up to a secret campsite. We know how lucky we are. Were the most fortunate people in the world to have found each other, isnt it so?

Only we hadnt found each other. We had been born to each other; tointothe same family. Did that make a difference? Was a bond this strong meant to grow in this soil, and in this way? I was far too besotted with my aunt to ask any of these questions. My aunt was the sun and I was her planet, held in devotional orbit by forces that felt larger than I was, larger than we were. You could call it gravity. Or alchemy. Or intoxication. Or simply love. But what an unsimple love this was.

* * *

I heard the car before I saw it: the familiar motor slowing as it approached Greenvalley Road the high-pitched squeak the wheels made as they widened into that precise turn that landed the Buick smack-dab in the center of our driveway and then the horn, whose coloration changed depending on the drivers frame of mind. The jubilant tap-tap that soon ricocheted across the canyon meant Come along quick-quick , which was my aunts preferred pace in all matters always.

I flew out the front door, for a moment forgetting my ever-present Acadmie sketch pad and pouch of pencils. Halfway down the garden path, I remembered and doubled back to retrieve them from the entry hall. Outside again, something, some sense, made me glance back at the dining room window. My two younger brothers were standing and looking for me in the same place where I had been looking for my aunt. I lingered just long enough to see the confusion in their faces. Then I headed for the car.

Once I had settled into the front seat, but before my aunt had backed us out and on our way, I glanced again at the window, where my mother had now joined my brothers. She had placed a comforting palm on each boys shoulder. There was no confusion in her face. It was very clear. To me it said: Why just Mike, why yet again?

It was the cusp of the 1970s, and my mother had cut off all her hair, which until recently her hairdresser used to pile up on top of her head like an elaborate pastry. Shed stopped wearing heavy makeup too. Shed exchanged her dresses and skirts and blouses for blue jeans and T-shirts accessorized with colorful beads, and shed begun putting strange new music on our record player, albums by Carole King and Joni Mitchell and the Mamas and the Papas, all of whom lived near where we lived in Laurel Canyon. As she cooked and cleaned and took care of my younger brothers she sang

But youve got to make your own kind of music

Sing your own special song

Make your own kind of music

Even if nobody else sings along

Where is the wit? my aunt said when she heard these lyrics. Where is the panache? She and my uncle believed that Brahms was the last composer to belong in what they called the top drawer, though they did open a tiny side compartment for Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, especially when sung by Ella, whom they referred to solely by her first name.