Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States in 2017 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2017 by Michael Frank

Cover image shows author aged 6

Designed by Jonathon D. Lippincott

Michael Frank asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: Excerpt from “Make Your Own Kind of Music.” Words and music by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Copyright © 1968 Screen Gems–EMI Music Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, Tennessee 37219. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

Excerpt from “Our House.” Words and music by Graham Nash. Copyright © 1970 (renewed) Nash Notes. All rights for Nash Notes controlled and administered by Spirit One Music (BMI). All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

Epigraph to Maxine Kumin’s poem “Looking Back in My Eighty-First year” by Hilma Wolitzer. Courtesy of Hilma Wolitzer.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008215224

Ebook Edition © 2018 ISBN: 9780008215217

Version: 2018-04-27

Dedication

To my parents and (how not?) my aunt

and in memory of my uncle

Epigraph

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

(Everything changes, nothing is lost.)

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Overheard

PART I

1. The Apartment

2. Ogden, Continued

3. On Greenvalley Road

4. Safe House

PART II

5. My Uncle’s Closet (in My Aunt’s House)

6. Off the Hill

7. Five Places, Six Scenes

8. Last Room

9. Goodbye to the Closet

10. Fall and Decline

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

OVERHEARD

“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. “It’s stronger than I am. I cannot explain it. He’s 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 don’t have to make eye contact if they don’t 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 that’s not what happened.

This is.

PART I

ONE
THE APARTMENT

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 spark—her sparkle.

My aunt and I went off alone together often because she and my uncle didn’t 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 wasn’t 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. We’re the most fortunate people in the world to have found each other, isn’t it so?

Only we hadn’t found each other. We had been born to each other; to—into—the 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 driver’s frame of mind. The jubilant tap-tap that soon ricocheted across the canyon meant Come along quick-quick, which was my aunt’s preferred pace in all matters always.

I flew out the front door, for a moment forgetting my ever-present Académie 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 boy’s 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. She’d stopped wearing heavy makeup too. She’d exchanged her dresses and skirts and blouses for blue jeans and T-shirts accessorized with colorful beads, and she’d 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 you’ve 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.

This recent haircutting of my mother’s was the first of many evolutions in her appearance over the decades—her look changed with the times, while my aunt’s remained fixed in 1945, the year she met my uncle at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where they were both young screenwriters.

My mother was short—petite and mignonne, that’s our Merona, my aunt said. Adorable, she said, pronouncing the word à la Française, as if she were speaking about a little girl, or a doll. My mother’s doll-like tendencies—such as they were—had been in slow retreat ever since she had had her children, but to my aunt, Merona was in many ways still the timid thirteen-year-old she first met a few months after she and my uncle had begun going out together.

There was nothing remotely doll-like about my aunt. She was a tall, big-boned, round-faced, incandescent-eyed woman—formidable, people often said of her, though never with the hint of mockery that was conveyed when the word was pronounced with a French accent and certainly never to her face. I considered her quite simply to be the most magical human being I knew. Everything she touched, everything she did, was golden, infused with a special knowledge and a teeming vitality that transformed an ordinary conversation, or meal, or room, or moment, into an enchanted one. Not just to me but to lots of other people, she was a great beauty, part Rosalind Russell, part (brunette) Lucille Ball, though she mockingly—apparently mockingly—described herself as the forever too-tall, too-ugly adolescent with the imperfect nose that her mother had had “revised” as a seventeenth-birthday present. Her hair went up—high—higher even than my mother’s ever did—well before the bunning years. She fastened flowers or, memorably, leaves in these rounded towers, or wrapped them in scarves (bandannas, leopard or zebra prints, plaids), or concealed them behind berets, tams, cloches, or baseball caps she chose for their color, not because of her affinity for any particular team. She colored her eyelids blue or violet and well into the 1990s penciled a flapperish beauty mark at the top of her right cheek. She wore quantities of jewelry, and as she aged, more and more of it, often collated into thematic collections as profuse as the collections of objects in her house, ivory one day, amber the next; coral, gold, silver, crystal, malachite, lapis, pearl, or jet, depending on her mood or outfit. She treated herself, essentially, as a surface to decorate and, like the other surfaces she decorated, the finished effect asked to be noticed, always. Was noticed, always.

Her linguistic powers were inimitable. Intimidating, at times. She commanded torrents of words that merged into impeccable sentences the way raindrops collected into puddles. In story meetings she was a master of the pitch. She sat forward in her chair, elbows on her knees, a Merit smoking itself in one hand, and let fly. In fifteen, twenty minutes, to a hushed room, she would render an entire movie, from FADE IN to FADE OUT, without glancing at a single written note.

Her scent was a Caswell-Massey men’s cologne she bought at I. Magnin. When I climbed into the car its spiciness came gusting up out of her collar as she lowered a rouged cheek down to my height.

I kissed her, and she eased the Buick out of the driveway. “Reach around in back, Lovey,” she said.

I brought forward a wrapped package tied with a bow so crisp it might have been dipped in starch.

“What are you waiting for? Go ahead. Open it.”

The present was a book titled Famous Paintings. I glanced inside. Each chapter was devoted to a different subject: landscape, portraits, people working, children at play.

“Thank you, Auntie Hankie,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

Again the cheek lowered. Again I kissed it.

“A little something to celebrate our Saturday together.” She nudged me with her elbow. “I’m sure that you will be an artist one day, Mike. I’m convinced of it. Everything you do has such style. Really and truly. It’s as if you’ve been immersed in aesthetics your whole entire life.”

I was nine.

“Make beauty at all times. It’s one of our family tenets, you know.”

“What’s a tenet?”

“A rule you live by. You build your life by.”

“Make beauty. At all times.”

“Yes. In what you draw or paint, in the houses you inhabit. In the way you speak too. And write. And of course be fast about it. Quick-quick. You’ve heard me say that before.”

I nodded.

“There’s plenty of time to sleep in the grave.”

I must have seemed puzzled, because she added, “It means no stopping, no roadblocks allowed. No naps.”

My mother took one every day.

“You must make every moment count,” she went on. “And you must never be afraid to dare. Imagine if Huffy had not dared—imagine if after ten long, horrible years of the Depression in Portland she had not seized the opportunity when Mayer granted her an interview. She piled your father and me and Pups Frank into the Nash and drove straight to Los Angeles, and she knocked the socks off old L.B.M. Everything changed after that. Everything, all of it, everything that makes us the Mighty Franks, comes from that moment, from Huffy, because of her boldness and her courage. Do you understand?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you will. One day. I’ll make sure of that.”

We had glided down out of the canyon. As she turned right onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, she continued, “Follow your heart wherever it takes you. And always give away whatever possession is most precious to you.”

I looked down at the pages of my new book.

“You mean I have to give this to Danny or Steve one day?”

She cocked her head. “I would say not in this particular case, Lovey. Your brothers’ interests are so markedly different from yours, wouldn’t you agree? Danny—now he is a budding scientist. A logistician. It’s written all over him. He’s going to be a man of facts. I’m as sure of it as I am of my own breath. As for the little one … I see athletics in his future. He’s very skilled physically, just like my brother. Maybe like him he’ll develop a gift for business. Yes, I’m sure he will. We need that in the family, do we not? As a kind of ballast. It’s only practical. Literature, though? Art, architecture? The creative in any and all forms of expression? That’s your purview.”

Purview was like tenet, but I didn’t have to ask. “It means area of expertise. Strength.” She gestured at the book. “No, this one is earmarked for you. As is so much more.”

So much more what? I wondered. As if she could read my mind, my aunt added, “A collector does not spend a lifetime assembling beautiful things merely to have them scattered after she’s gone.”

She turned her face toward me. In her eyes there was that familiar sparkle. It blazed for a moment as she smiled at me, then drove on.

At Hollywood Boulevard we veered left onto a stretch of road that was wholly residential and lined, on the uphill side, with a series of houses that my aunt had previously taught me to identify. Moorish. Tudor. Spanish. Craftsman. Every time I watched these houses flash by the car window I wondered how they could be so different, one from the other, and yet stand next to one another all in an obedient row. Entire streets, entire neighborhoods, were like that in L.A.: mismatched and fantastical, dreamed-up houses for a dreamscape of a city.

At Ogden Drive we turned right, as we always did, and my aunt pulled up in front of number 1648. The Apartment. That is simply how it was known to us: The Apartment. We’re stopping by The Apartment. They need us at The Apartment. Your birthday this year will be at The Apartment. There has been some very bad news at The Apartment.

She never taught me to identify the style of The Apartment, but that was probably because it didn’t have one, particularly. A stucco building from the 1930s, it wrapped around an interior courtyard that was lushly planted with camellias and gardenias and birds-of-paradise, but what mattered most about The Apartment was that, for many years, since well before I was born, my two grandmothers had lived there—together.

“Quick-quick,” my aunt said as she turned off the ignition. “We’re nearly ten minutes late for Morning Time. Huffy will be worried to death.”

Huffy—the older of my two grandmothers, the mother of my aunt and my father—was sitting up in bed, reading calmly, when we hurried into her room. She was in the bed closest to the door. The two beds were a matched pair whose head- and footboards were capped with gold-painted, flame-shaped finials. She looked like she was riding in a boat, a gilded boat that was bobbing in a sea of embossed pink and white urns and wreaths that were papered onto the walls.

“I’m sorry we’re late, Mamma,” my aunt said. “Mike and I were engaged in rapt conversation, and I lost track of the time.”

My grandmother’s hair had come loose in the night, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, but with her erect posture and her dark focused eyes she still, somehow, seemed alert and all-seeing. “It’s Saturday,” she said as she removed her reading glasses. “Today is the one day you are meant to slow down, my darling. I’ve told you that before.”

“There’s plenty of time to slow down in—” my aunt started to say. “Anyway we’re here now.”

“Is the boy going to noodle around with us this morning?” my grandmother asked.

My aunt smiled at me. “We need his eye, don’t we?”

“He does have a good one,” said my grandmother.

“Of course he does. I trained him myself.”

Morning Time was the sacred hour or so during which my aunt brushed her mother’s hair, wound it into a perfect bun, and pinned it to the top of her head before helping her put on her makeup and her clothes. Afterward she made my grandmother breakfast and sat nearby while my grandmother ate, so that they could visit before my aunt drove back up the hill and (on weekdays) sat down with my uncle to write.

This ritual went back to before I was conscious. It began when my grandmother had The Operation—never further detailed or explained—after which, for a while, she needed help dressing and doing up her hair. It had long since evolved into the routine with which the two women began their days, seven days a week without exception.

During the first part of Morning Time, the grooming and dressing part, I was always sent to wait in the living room. Often, as on this morning, I waited until my aunt had closed the door behind me, then I slipped down the hall to Sylvia’s room. Sylvia was my “other” grandmother, Merona and Irving’s mother.

Her door was closed, as usual. I pressed my ear to it, then knocked.

“Michaelah?”

I opened the door just wide enough to fit myself through, then I closed it again. “I wasn’t even sure you were here,” I said.

“I don’t like to be in Hankie’s way when she’s making breakfast.”

“What about yours?” I asked.

“Later,” she said with a shrug.

She was sitting on the corner of her bed, fully dressed, a folded newspaper in her lap. Her room was half the size of Huffy’s, and had no grand headboard with leaping gold flames. The bed was the only place in the room to sit other than a low, hard cedar hope chest.

Besides the hope chest, there was a high dresser on top of which stood several photographs of Sylvia’s husband, my striking-looking rabbi grandfather who died before I was born; these pictures were the only thing in the entire room—the entire apartment—that was personal to Sylvia, other than the radio by the bed, which was tuned to a near whisper and always to the local classical station.

“Are you coming out with us this morning?” I asked.

Sylvia’s head fell to an angle. It was as though my grandmother—my second grandmother, as I thought of her—was always assessing, or taking careful measure, before she spoke or acted.

“I think not—today.”

Physically Sylvia was smaller and shorter than Huffy, as my mother was smaller and shorter than my aunt; even her nose and eyes were smaller, more delicate and tentative. Dimmer too, you might say, except that they missed very little.

These small noting eyes of hers peered down the hall, or where the hall would have been visible if the door had been open.

“Maybe next week,” she added.

I knew she was lying. She knew I knew she was lying. We’d had a version of this conversation many Saturdays before.

“Monday I’m on the hill,” she said, meaning at our house on Greenvalley Road, where she could cook in our kitchen and eat kumquats off the tree and read in the garden under the Japanese elm in the backyard and let the vigilance drain out of those small eyes. “I’ll make tapioca.”

“Oh, yes, please,” I said. “And a sponge cake?”

“If you like.”

I nodded.

“Michaelah,” she said.

“Yes, Grandma Sylvia?”

“They’ll be impatient if you’re gone too long.”

“It’s only been a few minutes.”

She glanced at the door again. “Best to close the door when you go back out.”

The door to Huffy’s room was still closed. I found my sketch pad and stretched out on the braided rug in the living room.

As I tried to decide what to draw, my eye landed first, as it often did, on the painting that hung just above and to the right of the wing chair where Huffy preferred to sit during family gatherings. If there had been a fireplace, the painting would have hung over the mantelpiece, but there wasn’t, and this picture didn’t need that extra emphasis. It was already italicized—underlined. The painting was a portrait of my aunt, the epicenter of the room as she was of our family.

Harriet—Harriet Frank, Jr.—was her public name, her professional name. At home she was known as Hank or Hankie, therefore Auntie Hankie, or sometimes Harriatsky or, later, Tantie.

There was quite a confusion around the nomenclature of these women. Huffy had been born Edith Frances Bergman in Helena, Montana. She discarded the Edith early on because she disliked it. She went by Frances as a girl in Spokane and a young married woman in Portland. She remained Frances Goldstein—her married name—until in the mid-1930s she hosted a local radio program, which she called Frances Frank, Frankly Speaking; soon afterward she became reborn as Frances Frank, changing her last name and persuading her husband to change his and the children’s too. Several years later, in 1939, when she remade her life again, moving from Portland to Los Angeles, she appropriated her daughter’s name, a new name for a new life. She became Harriet senior, and my aunt, therefore undergoing a name change of her own, became Harriet junior.

No one thought this was strange: a mother taking her daughter’s name so that they could become a matched set.

“Harriet is an interesting name,” my grandmother declared. “Harriet is a writer’s name.”

Harriet junior became a writer—a screenwriter. No one thought this was strange either.

Or this: “Huffy and I know each other’s most intimate secrets. There’s nothing really that we don’t know about each other. Not one stitch of a thing.”

Or: “We’ve never had a cross word in our lives. Not a single one.”

Or: “Hankie and I are not merely mother and daughter. We’re best friends. We’re beyond best friends.”

They loved their pronouncements, my grandmother and my aunt, almost as much as they loved their nicknames. My uncle was Dover (his middle name bumped forward), Puddy, Corky. Another aunt was Frankie or Baby. My father was Martoon, Magoofus, Magoof.

I was Lovey or Mike.

Harriet senior was Huffy (as in: HF + y), always. Sylvia, my other grandmother, never had a nickname. Sometimes she might be shortened to Syl, but that was all. My mother, Merona, sometimes became Meron. But never anything more affectionate than that.

It was California. Blazing, sun-bleached Southern California: most any other nine-year-old boy would have spent his time outdoors playing under all that sun and sky. I spent mine lying on the braided rug, looking up at the painting of my aunt—my sun, my sky.

The portrait had been painted by a Russian cousin of my grandmother’s called Mara, who during the war had been banished to Siberia, where she was sent to a gulag and forced to paint pictures of Stalin for the government. “Your aunt and I went to Yurp together in 1964,” Huffy told me—Yurp being, like Puddy or Hankie or Magoof, a nickname, though for an entire continent instead of a person. “It was a dream of ours forever. Mara’s sister, Senta, who survived by hiding in an attic, had spent nearly twenty years trying to get her out of the Soviet Union. We found them living together in an apartment in Brussels. Every morning after breakfast your aunt and I went to their house and sat for her until dinner. We made up for a lot of lost time on that visit. And while I sat there, can you guess what I thought about?”

I shook my head.

“How grateful I was to my parents for deciding to come to America when they did. Do you know what I mean by that?”

I shook my head again.

“I mean that otherwise I might well have perished, like so many people in our family.”

My grandmother focused her dark eyes on me. “That’s what would have happened to me for no reason other than I had been born a Jew,” she said. “And if I had been murdered, that means your father would not be here, which means you would not be here.”

“Not Auntie Hankie either?” No Auntie Hankie was almost more difficult to conceive of than no me.

“No, not even our darling Hankie would be here …”

Her dark eyes shone. She was quiet for a moment. “That is very difficult to imagine, is it not?”

“It’s impossible,” I said.

My grandmother smiled enigmatically. “Yes, impossible. I quite agree.”

My aunt and my grandmother each had the other’s portrait hanging in her house. The portrait of my aunt was the larger of the two and darker, both in its palette and in the way it hinted at my aunt’s lurking black moods. How this distant cousin—a painter of Stalin—got at this in my aunt, and after knowing her for only a week, was a mystery.

Then there were her eyes. It was the kind of thing people made jokes about in portraits, but my aunt’s eyes truly did seem to follow me wherever I went. This may have had to do with the fact that her eyes weren’t merely in the painting but reflected in several other places in the room at the same time: in the reverse paintings on mirrored glass of Chinese ladies that hung over the bookshelves and, more prominently, on the wall opposite the portrait, where there was a mirror, very old, as in seventeenth-century old, Flemish, with a thick Old Master frame made out of alternating strips of ebonized and gilded wood. Its dim spotted glass showed my aunt back to herself, so that when I came between the painting and the mirror, I felt my aunt was looking at me from two directions, or else that I was interrupting a secret conversation, self unto self unto self, into infinity.

The mirror also made it possible for my grandmother, from her customary place in the wing chair, to look across the room at the mirror image of the painting of her daughter, who was therefore never out of her sight.

I decided that for my drawing I would try to capture the mirror capturing the picture of my aunt. Clever! I started with the frame, and then I moved toward the shape of Auntie Hankie’s head. It wasn’t easy to get right; not easy at all.

After half an hour the door swung open, and in an explosion of sound and shifting currents of air my aunt came barreling toward the kitchen like a fighter stepping into the ring. She busied herself there for several minutes, then just as the smell of toasting bread began to reach the living room, she poked her head in to check on me. With a rapid glance at my sketchbook she said, “But, Lovey, is doodling the absolute best use of your time when right over your shoulder a whole library is just waiting for you to explore?”

I looked down at my drawing. A doodle? I felt my cheeks burn with shame for being such a failure. How was I ever going to be an artist if I couldn’t draw one of the subjects I knew best in the world? I quietly folded the drawing in two and closed my sketch pad.

My aunt approached the bookshelves and bent down. She ran her fingers along the spines of novels by Dickens … then Thackeray … then Trollope. She stopped at How Green Was My Valley. “This was an absolute favorite of mine when I was a girl,” she said, before moving on to two other books, which she lifted down from the shelf and handed to me. “Take my word for it, Lovey, between Of Human Bondage and Sons and Lovers you’ll learn everything you need to know about what it feels like to be a certain kind of young person. Your kind, if I may say.”

I let the books fall open in my lap and peered dubiously at the river of dense print. My aunt said, “But you have a sharp mind, Mike, do you not? Of course you do. It’s time to get started, quick-quick, on reading grown-up novels …”

When I didn’t say anything, she added, “You don’t want to be average, do you? To fit in? Fitting in is death. Remember that. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.”

Thanks to my aunt—my aunt and uncle—I was as far from fitting in with my peers as it was possible for a nine-year-old to be. I didn’t even know what fitting in felt like. And I was proud of that. Ridiculously proud, at times.

Nearly as sacrosanct as Morning Time were my aunt and grandmother’s Saturday antiquing excursions. These were mental health days, but they also had a clear purpose, since a static room is a dead room, and living in a dead room wreaks havoc on the spirit (—Harriet junior).

Senior and junior both approached shopping, this kind of shopping, with a connoisseurial rigor. Setting off with them on a Saturday was similar, I imagined, to what it must have felt like to travel with them to Yurp, which was in a way what these excursions of theirs were like, mini voyages across time, history, and culture, to distant worlds—worlds reconstituted by the past as contained in things.

Only they weren’t merely looking for a pair of candlesticks or a charger or another piece of Chinese lacquer; they were also training “the boy” in what was authentic or a repro, g. or n.g., period or—heaven forbid—mo-derne, a word whose second syllable was drawn out and pronounced with an exaggerated sneer.

I found these Saturdays to be alternately thrilling and unnerving. Heaven help me if I picked up something, even merely to investigate, and heard that piercing sotto voce n.g.—for “not good.” It was the equivalent of being told that I was n.g., or that I was an idiot. Of course I was an idiot. What could a kid know about Lewey Schmooey (as he, or it?, was described in a lighter spirit); how could he tell vermeil from ormolu, Palladio from Piranesi? It was as hard (almost as hard) as being read a paragraph of Dickens and another of Austen and being asked to say which was which. A boy who wanted to remain in this school (this family) made it a point to learn. The names and dates, the facts and figures, the periods, the styles (in prose, the voices; in movies, the look). The techniques: dovetailing over mitering, chamfering and pegging, feather-versus sponge-painting … before long it would be showing versus telling, the active versus the passive voice, plain transparent Tolstoyan prose versus Faulknerian flourishes versus Proustian discursions …

My aunt had several places she liked to noodle around—in Pasadena and out along Main Street in Venice and, when she was feeling particularly ambitious (or flush), in Montecito or down near San Juan Capistrano, where some of the more top drawer dealers did business. Today we were staying local, though—our destination was a cluster of shops way down on Sunset Boulevard near Western Avenue.

In the first shop we came to I picked up a lacquer tray that had two Chinese figures on it. This looked like it would fit into my grandmother’s apartment, and so it felt like a safe choice. No sooner had I reached for it than my aunt’s hand shot out. “No, not that, Mike. It’s repro. N.g.”

It was all in the tone, an icy dismissal that made an already small me feel like an even smaller me. And yet I kept trying, I kept yearning to be one of them, to know what they knew, to see what, and how, they saw; to win, and keep, their approval, their acceptance, their love.

Again and again my aunt’s head shook dismissively. Again and again I would try.

“That’s better. There you go.”

And again.

“Better still.”

But why? The why always came from my grandmother. Why is this good, why do we care? “Discernment is about judgment. It’s about knowledge. This is a good desk because it has good lines. Because no one has put garbage on it to make it look new, or fake. Because it makes you imagine.”

“Imagine what?”

We were standing in front of a tall piece of furniture. A secretary. I knew that much at least. It had a drop front, behind which there were many secret compartments. Some of them with tiny keyholes so that they could be locked.

“The man—no, the woman—who sat here, and wrote letters. Secret letters. Or in her diary. Imagine writing it two hundred years ago.” My grandmother opened one of the compartments. “And keeping it here.”

“And this ink stain,” said my aunt, joining in. “It’s from when she was disturbed at her work.”

“Disturbed?” I asked, confused.

“By her husband,” said my aunt. “Think of the painting by Vermeer. The woman writing a letter? It’s in your book. She looks up with a start, just like in the painting. She knocks over the bottle. The ink, just a few drops, sinks into the wood as a human fate is being decided, and quickly …”

My aunt and my grandmother exchanged one of those glances—I knew them well—that suggested they had sidestepped into their own private communication, the equivalent of a compartment in the desk I did not have access to.

“She doesn’t want him to know what she’s writing,” said my grandmother. “She has to choose between protecting her diary and protecting the table. She chooses the diary, of course. Because of her secret life. Do you understand?”

I nodded, because that was what was expected. But I had no idea what they were talking about. None at all.

Better had turned out to be a pencil box; even though it was Victorian (which like mo-derne usually received a crisp, definitive n.g.), it had two figures painted on its lid—in the Chinese manner, of course—and was useful what’s more. “You can keep the tools of your trade in it,” my aunt said jovially. “We can do away with that ordinary little pouch of yours. What do you think, Lovey? Would you allow me to make you a present of it?”

The suspensefully anticipated question. It came along at one point, sometimes at several points, on each antiquing excursion.

“Oh, yes, Auntie Hankie.”

“And what about these bookends?” she said, taking down from a shelf two bronze bookends in the shape of small Greek temples. “They would help organize your library at home.”

“They’re beautiful, Auntie Hankie.”

“We don’t mind if there’s a small scratch on one of them, do we?”

I shook my head. “It’s a sign of age,” I said.

“A sign of age!” said my grandmother, delighted. “The boy truly is a quick study.”

A very special treat after one of these Saturdays was being invited to spend the night on Ogden Drive. The invitation would emit from the wing chair, which was hard not to think of as my grandmother’s throne. (Sylvia’s chair, which stood across from it, was smaller, its seat closer to the ground.) If my mother had not been alerted ahead of time and had not prepared a suitable bag, there would be a flurry of discussion: What will the boy sleep in? (“His underpants?”—the very word, spoken by my grandmothers, caused my cheeks to leap into flame.) How will he wash his teeth? (With toothpaste spread on a cloth wrapped around an index finger.) What will he read? (The big Doré edition of the English Bible? Surely not yet the leather-bound Balzac that had belonged to Huffy’s mother, Rosa …) Who would return me to the canyon was never a concern, since everyone knew the answer to that: aunt would drive nephew back up the hill following Morning Time the next day.

The invitation came soon after we had returned from our antiquing excursion that afternoon, when Huffy realized that Sylvia was out for the evening, at one of her concerts downtown. “We’ll keep each other company tonight,” she said to me. Auntie Hankie made sure that there was enough food in the house for dinner and then headed home.

After she left, Huffy said, “How about if we just have two large bowls of ice cream and then get into bed and read?”

“Is there chocolate sauce?”

She laughed. “There can be.”

When we finished our “dinner,” Huffy said, “I have something for you. I bought it for you last week.”

She went into her room and then returned with a small package in a brown paper bag. Inside there was a blank book bound in orange leather. Its paper was ruled, and it closed with a tiny brass lock and key. On the cover, embossed in gold, was a single word: Diary.

“I keep one,” she said. “I have since I was a young woman in Portland. When you’re older you’ll read it. You and your brothers. You’ll be able to know me in a way that you cannot possibly now.” She looked at me. “That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”

I shook my head.

“You’re old enough to begin writing about your own life.”

“Write?” I asked, confused. “What kinds of things?”

“You can write about the world you’ve been born into. It’s always interesting, no matter when you are born into it. And you can put down a record of who you are to yourself.”

Who. You. Are. To. Yourself. These words meant nothing to me.

“And what the people around you are like.”

This I understood better. Or was beginning to understand better.

Grandma Huffy often gave me guidance like this. They weren’t rules exactly; they were more like principles to live by, sized down and age-appropriate—most of the time.

During the long, tedious, full-out Haggadah Seder at our cousins’ house in the deep Valley, for instance, after every few prayers she would whisper, “Spirituality has nothing to do with this excruciating tedium, remember that.”

If we were in a shop and she picked up an object and saw the words Made in Germany stamped on the bottom, she would set it down with a decisive thud and declare, “Never as long as I live—or you do either.”

“You must always be a Democrat,” she said to me one day. “In this family that is what we are.”

In this case there was no explanation—only the edict.

She told me stories too, some of which I could not stop replaying over and over in my head, like the one about the painting or Aunt Baby.

We were driving in her blue Oldsmobile one afternoon when I had asked her where Aunt Baby got her nickname. “It’s very simple. She’s the baby of the family.”

“But she’s not your baby”—even I grasped that much already.

“No, she’s not. But that doesn’t make any difference to me. To me she is another of my children. Would you like to hear how she came to live with us?”

I nodded.

“Her mother died when she was a small girl. Her father was a friend of your grandfather Sam’s from Portland,” she began, saying the name of her dead husband, my grandfather, for the first and, I believe, only time in the whole ten years I knew her. (There were no photographs of him standing on the top of her dresser, no sign of his existence anywhere at all in The Apartment.) “He was a decent man, but he was an alcoholic. An alcoholic is someone who cannot stop himself from drinking, and when he drinks is not, shall we say, at his most worthy. A father who drinks like that is not a good father. He cannot be. It is not possible. I saw this, and it disturbed me. Deeply. So one summer I invited Baby to come stay with us. She was thirteen, and she had a wonderful time. Your aunt was like a sister to her, your father a brother.”

She paused. “At the end of the summer I took her for a walk. Just the two of us alone. And I said to her, ‘Baby, I would like to make you an offer. But I want you to know first that my feelings will not be hurt if you say no to me. Do you understand?’ And she let me know she understood that, which was important. Then I said, ‘I would like to invite you to come live with us here in Los Angeles. To make your home with us for good. I want you to think it over, and let me know when you have.’”

“And what did she say?”

“She said she did not need to think it over for even one minute. She wanted to stay with us forever. Which, until she was married, she did.”

Looking through the windshield, she said, “It’s important to be able to decide matters for yourself sometimes. Even when you are still a child.”

She saw that as the point of the story. I saw something else: a child entrusted to parents who were not her own, as I was so often entrusted to my uncle and my aunt.

Precisely an hour after we climbed into our beds with our books, my grandmother announced that it was time for us to sleep. She turned off her light, and I obediently turned off mine. Then she arranged her pillows, centering herself between the bedposts with the leaping flames, and within minutes was definitively, snufflingly, out. I, instead, took what felt like hours to find a way to put myself to sleep. Everything in The Apartment was just so humming and unfamiliar and alive, from the bursts of traffic up on Hollywood Boulevard to the sound of Sylvia, who had returned from her concert, puttering busily (once Huffy’s light went off, she began walking from room to room), to the rumblings that originated from deep in my grandmother’s chest and didn’t seem able to decide whether they should come out through her mouth or nose. Every now and then there would be a raspy explosion, half snore and half shout, that would send me flying down under the blankets; I came up again afterward even more awake, with nothing to keep me company other than the wallpaper, whose embossed wreaths and urns I traced with my finger over and over and over. When that didn’t help I returned to Doré’s terrifying renditions of Adam, Moses, Jonah, et al., which were even more alarming when examined, squinting, in the dark of the night, or else I studied the bust of Madame de Sévigné that stood up on an onyx column and had been chosen, my aunt said, because she adored her daughter and wrote some of the most memorable letters in all of literature. In front of the bust a small, armless rocking chair moved back and forth on its own, very slightly, as if it were being rocked by a ghost.

And then suddenly, somehow, it was morning, a day awash with eyeball-stinging Southern California sunlight, and Sylvia was bringing me a glass of hand-squeezed orange juice strained of its pulp, which, wasting nothing, she herself ate with a teaspoon. “Drink, Michaelah,” she said. “Good health is built on vitamin C. Every day a dose.”

Huffy was already up and dressed, a rarity and something that happened only on the days I slept over, since normally she waited in bed, reading, until my aunt came for Morning Time.

After I finished the orange juice, Sylvia asked if I’d like to help make the bed. “I can show you how to miter the corners the way they do in a hospital,” she said.

A bed with hospital corners? It sounded exciting, a nifty trick, something to be good at. I loved tricks and I loved learning. I got up eagerly.

First we angled the mattress frame slightly away from the wall. Then we pulled up the crisp white sheet and the blanket. She lifted up the mattress, folded one sandwich of sheet and blanket underneath, held it there firmly, then reached around for the other flap.

“It’s like wrapping a package,” I said.

“Yes, exactly,” she said with a smile.

Suddenly from the doorway a sharp voice: “But whatever are you doing?”

Sylvia stiffened. “Teaching him how to make a bed with hospital corners,” she explained.

“Oh, please, the boy is never going to need to know how to do anything remotely like that.”

Sylvia, her shoulders deflating, abandoned the bed-making where it was and hurried off to the kitchen.

I was still holding the edge of the blanket. I watched her go, paralyzed. Even though Sylvia was walking away from me, I could feel the upset pouring out of her whole body. I turned to look at Huffy’s face to see if there was any clue there, any hint that she knew what she had done. There was nothing.

“Leave that nonsense and go get dressed now,” Huffy commanded. “It’s time for breakfast.”

In the bathroom the washcloth was already prepared with toothpaste, the face soap smelled of gardenias, and there was a thick, soft towel to dry myself with afterward. I put on the clothes I had worn the day before, and then I opened the door and stopped to listen. I often stopped to listen before I left one room and walked into another.

I could hear the sounds of utensils touching metal, then glass. I approached the kitchen door. My grandmothers were not speaking to each other, but they were cooking. They were standing at the same stove, working over separate burners. In silence each was preparing her own version of the same dish for me to eat, a thin crepe-like pancake. Sylvia was making hers, ostensibly, as the wrappers for the cheese blintzes that were one of her specialties: light, fluffy rolls of sweetened hoop cheese wrapped in these nearly translucent covers. Her pancake barely rubbed up against the pan; she siphoned one off for me and served it with strawberry jam and a dollop of sour cream. Huffy’s was browned and glistening from its immersion in a puddle of butter and offered with a tiny pitcher of golden maple syrup.

Two plates, two pancakes, two women waiting expectantly for my verdict: What was a child to do with all this—choose? Declare one tastier than the other, one woman more capable, more lovable, more loved? All I could think to do was eat both, completely, alternating bite by bite between the two versions.

“Are you still hungry?” Huffy asked slyly when I finished.

How did I know not to give myself to the trap? From looking at Sylvia’s face, with its well-proportioned nose, small and round and with a spiderweb of wrinkles in-filling around it; and its too-perfect front teeth, which were dropped into a glass of blue effervescence at night, leaving behind a silent, sunk-in mouth; and its faded watchful eyes, which so vividly showed a registry of pain.

“I’m done,” I said. “But thank you. They were both delicious.”

Before she dropped me at home after Morning Time, my aunt pulled over to the side of Lookout Mountain Avenue.

“There’s something I wish to say to you, Mike,” she declared ominously, or in a way that sounded ominous to me.

I thought I had done something wrong during my stay at The Apartment, something worse than drawing ineptly or being receptive to the idea of Sylvia teaching me how to make hospital corners.

She removed her dark glasses. “I just want to thank you for being such a good friend to Mamma.” She took my hand and squeezed it forcefully.

“Your visits lift her spirits in countless ways,” she continued. “You know what I wish? I wish it could just be the three of us forever, living far away, on an island somewhere, or in Yurp …”

The three of us? On an island? In Europe? I wasn’t quite sure what my aunt was saying, but just as confusing, even more so, was the way she was saying it, with an odd lilting voice and a far-off look in her eyes.

“You mean … without my parents and Danny and Steve? Without Uncle Irving or Grandma Sylvia?”

“The four of us, I should have said. Puddy and I are symbiotic. I’ve told you that before.” She paused. “Sylvia,” she said her name, only her name. It was followed by a dismissive shrug. A whole human being dispatched, just like that.

She did not say anything about my brothers or my parents. The air in the car suddenly felt humid, the Caswell-Massey suffocatingly sweet.

“I don’t know if you realize what a remarkable woman Grandma Huffy is. She’s the most independent woman I have ever known. A freethinker. It’s her religion, really, the only one she believes in. Free, bold thinking—it’s at the very core of what it means to be a Mighty Frank. Mamma is its perfect embodiment. She thought for herself, she lived on her brains, she followed her heart wherever it took her, even when it took her to unconventional places.”

Unconventional places? My face must have asked the question I would not have dared to put into words.

“It’s never too soon to learn about the ways of the heart. Your grandmother,” she said, turning to face me, “married young and, you might as well know, for the wrong reasons. She was one person at twenty, another at thirty. Portland, Oregon? For Harriet Frank senior? She had been to Reed, to Berkeley. She had brains, and pluck. And ambition, that most of all. But ambition did not get you very far in the Depression, did it? There was nowhere to go. She outgrew that dreary city, she outgrew the shabby little house we lived in, she outgrew your grandfather. He was a decent man, hardworking, moral, I might as well say, blah and blah. He was not in her league, not intellectually, not emotionally. And so she took it upon herself to find love elsewhere …”

Again she glanced at my face. “Don’t be so conventional, Mike.” Her eyes began to glitter. “I was not much older than you are when I guessed. He was the rabbi at our temple. It started there, the opening up of her life. With Henry. Why, I was half, more than half, in love with him myself, in the way you can be when you are twelve and a charismatic man comes along who is everything that your father is not …”

I tried to picture my grandmother with a man other than my grandfather. And a rabbi. The rabbi at their temple. There seemed to be rabbis everywhere in this family, yet we rarely went to synagogue. But a rabbi with whom my grandmother found love elsewhere? What did that mean, exactly?

I did not, at that point, know the specifics of what it was that a man and a woman did with each other, aside from raise children. Or yearn for the children they did not have.

My aunt emitted a long sigh, then started the car again. “These talks of ours make me feel so much better. You help me in countless ways, Lovey. I wonder if you realize that?”

She adjusted her head scarf, then leaned over. “Of course what we say to each other stays between thee and me, understood?”

When I didn’t immediately answer she said, “Mike?”

I nodded. She nodded back at me conspiratorially. Then she pulled the Riviera away from the curb.

At Greenvalley Road she lowered her cheek for me to kiss goodbye. I collected my treasures and waited until she backed out of our driveway. Then I made my way along the curved walkway that led to our front door.

That spring my mother had planted white daisies on the uphill side of this path, and they had grown into thick bushes that gave off a strong spicy scent when I brushed by them. The daisies were notable because they were lush and perfumed but also because they were one of the few independent domestic gestures my mother had made in her own house and garden, the decoration and landscaping having been otherwise commandeered by my grandmother and my aunt.

The style of our house—a white clapboard Cape Cod—my parents had chosen jointly. My father contracted and supervised the construction of the house himself while my mother was pregnant with my next-youngest brother, Danny, but that seemed to have been the last independent decision my parents made with regard to their own surroundings.

Very American, my aunt said in that assessing voice of hers. At least it’s not mo-derne. Traditional we can work with.

“We,” naturally, were the two Harriets, who had submitted our garden to a rigorous Gallic symmetry: two pairs of ball-shaped topiary trees flanked the two front windows and were separated by a low boxwood hedge that was kept crisply clipped on my aunt’s instructions to the gardener shared by both families. The front door was framed by stone urns, and the central flowerbed was anchored with a matching gray stone cherub because every garden needs a classic figure to set the atmosphere just so. Most of the flowers, those daisies included, were white.

Inside the house almost all the furniture and pictures had been chosen by my grandmother and my aunt, who had sent over containers from Yurp or otherwise outfitted the rooms with discoveries made during their Saturday excursions or castoffs from their own homes. The furniture was arranged in the rigid, formal groupings my aunt favored. She and my grandmother would often come over at the end of their Saturdays, and even, maybe especially, if my mother wasn’t home they would introduce a new table or print or vase, readjust or rearrange several other pieces, and sometimes rehang the pictures, with the result that our house looked like a somewhat sparser cross between my grandmother’s apartment and my aunt’s house.

My mother, while raising three young boys and at the same time helping to take care of her mother, did not have so much time for interior decoration. In these early years she appeared to tolerate these ferpitzings of her in-laws. Sometimes she would walk in and say, opaquely, “Ah, I see they’ve been here again”; sometimes she was so busy that it took her a day or two to notice that there had been a change. I was not like her. I noticed the most minute shift in any interior anywhere.

Upstairs alone in the quiet of my room I took special pleasure in unwrapping my new treasures. It was like receiving them all over again. Methodically I laid out on my desk my new art book, my pencil box and bookends, the copy of How Green Was My Valley that my aunt decided, after all, might be a better choice for me to borrow from my grandmother’s library, and the set of colored pencils that she stopped to buy me at an art supply store on our way up the hill that morning, since mine, she had noted critically, were used practically down to the nub.

I put the diary that Grandma Huffy gave me in the drawer of the table by my bed and soon became so absorbed in Famous Paintings, which was my favorite of all the gifts my aunt gave me that weekend, that I was unaware of the door to my room cracking open to allow eyes, two sets of them—my brothers’ two sets—to observe me.

The door cracked, then creaked. I looked up. It opened wider, and first Danny, then Steve, stepped in.

The three of us were graduated in size. I was the tallest and, in these years before adolescence hit, had thick, silky hair that I had recently begun wearing longer over my ears. I had a version of my aunt’s botched nose, though I had been born with mine, which angled off slightly to the left; my eyes were green and often, even then, set within dark black circles that my mother said I had inherited from her father, my rabbi grandfather, but my aunt said were a sign of having an active, curious mind that was difficult to slow down even in sleep. Danny came next in line. His hair, also longer now, had a reddish tinge, and his face looked as if someone had taken an enormous pepper shaker and sprinkled freckles across it. His eyes were not circled in black; instead they went in and out of focus, as if he were intermittently listening to some piece of private music or following a conversation that he had no intention of sharing with anyone, ever. Steve was the “little one”; compact, wiry, athletic (as my aunt often said), he had a sly sense of humor and agate-like gray-green eyes that, even from the doorway, took rapid inventory of the new things on my desk.

“What’re you doing, Mike?” asked Danny.

“Reading,” I said.

“Is that book new?”

I nodded. “It’s a book about art.”

He approached my desk. Steve followed.

“You went to a bookstore without me?” Danny loved bookstores. The books he loved were simply different from the ones I loved. The ones my aunt and uncle and I loved.

I shook my head. “It’s something Auntie Hankie bought for me.”

He shrugged, too casually. “What’s that one?”

“I’m borrowing it from Grandma’s house. It’s a novel. Auntie Hankie read it when she was about my age. It’s for grown-up kids,” I added.

“You’re a grown-up kid?”

When I didn’t answer, Danny moved closer.

“I read novels too, you know.”

“You read science fiction. That’s different.”

“It’s still made-up. It’s still a story,” Danny said.

He picked up the pencil box and asked what it was for. I explained its purpose. I used the words artist, tool of an artist. Patina. Fragile. I said it wasn’t anything he would be interested in. He was the scientist in the family, I reminded him.

The phrase was so expertly parroted I didn’t realize I hadn’t thought it up by myself.

Steve reached over and picked up the box Danny had put down.

“Be careful,” I told him as he opened and closed the lid. “It’s old. It’s not a toy.”

The hinges on the pencil box were fragile. The lid snapped off.

“Sorry,” Steve said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Sure you didn’t,” I said impatiently.

“I just wanted to see what was inside.”

“I’ll fix it,” I said, grabbing it away from him.

There was another set of eyes at the door now. My mother’s. She took in the scene as much through her pores as through her eyes.

She came in and made her own inventory. Then she looked out the window at the fold of canyon that enclosed our house in a green and brown ravine. The sky overhead was bright and nearly leached of all its color.

“Boys,” she said to my brothers more than to me, “I’ve told you before, I know I have, that things aren’t always equal, with siblings. They can’t be.”

She might not have always looked so carefully at the rest of our house, but in my room just then she was tracking sharply.

“Sometimes it might feel like it’s more unequal than others, but …”

The books, the bookends. The now-damaged pencil box. The pencils. The paper wrapping and bags left from the day’s loot in a hillock on the floor.

“But it all evens out in the end,” she said without much conviction. Without, from what I could tell, much accuracy either.

I found her later in the kitchen before dinner. She was pricking potatoes before putting them into the oven to bake—stabbing them was more accurate.

At dusk, when the lights were on in our kitchen, the window over the sink turned into a mirror. Our eyes met there.

“It’s not my fault if Auntie Hankie likes to buy me things,” I said.

My mother did not turn around to face me. She spoke to the window instead. “I know that,” she said.

She put the potatoes in the oven.

“Or tells me things …”

She closed the oven door. She turned to face me. “What kinds of things?”

I felt my skin redden. But I had started, so I had to finish. Or try to finish. So I repeated to her, as best I could, as best I understood, what my aunt had told me about my grandparents and their marriage.

I felt so … weighted down after that moment in the car. Telling my mother was like taking a huge rock out of my pocket.

My mother’s eyebrows drew close together. “Your aunt is a screenwriter. A dramatist. She is always making up things, making them more—”

“But is it true, what she said?”

With some difficulty my mother regained control of her face. “Not everyone—not every marriage—is like every other,” she said cautiously.

“So it is true, then.”

Her intake of breath made a wheezing sound. “Yes,” she said. “Your grandparents were not—happy together. But there’s no reason for a child to know anything about all that. I don’t know what your aunt was thinking. Really it’s best put out of your mind, Mike. It’s a story for later on.”

My father was a large man, and as different from my uncle as my mother was from my aunt. He had a version of his mother’s forceful, emphatic features, though he was darker and physically more powerful. A former high school football player, he skied and played tennis. He did everything hard. He worked hard at his own medical equipment business. He played sports hard. He chewed his food hard. He trod the stairs with a hard, loud step. When he became ill, which was rare, he became ill hard, spiking outrageous fevers or coming down with stomach bugs that would have landed other men in the hospital. He pruned trees and painted the house hard; he even washed cars hard.

My uncle was softer in every sense. He was brainy, bookish, and gentle. Curious, endlessly curious, about us children. He spoke quietly and with dry humor. He never raised his voice, at least to us, which distinguished him dramatically from my father, who had a terrific, terrifying temper. The Bergman Temper, my mother called it. In our family my father’s temper was assumed to be as elemental, and as unpredictable, as a winter storm. And as natural: he inherited it from his mother; he shared it with his sister and older brother. His rages came on suddenly and were loud and fierce; when he got going there was no reaching him, not ever. “It’s in his genes,” my mother said, trying to explain away what she was powerless to change.

Many different things could set my father off. A dropped egg in the kitchen while he was cooking. An unruly child and (later) an adolescent who gave lip. Traffic. A traffic ticket. Republicans. Criminals. A scratch on the car. A minor loss at gin.

His wife, naturally. My mother. Who now and then, even in these early days, when she was still the good girl, would introduce a dissenting point of view, a request. That morning, a concern.

“It’s breaking my heart, Marty, to see them treated so differently …”

These weren’t the words that started their argument. They came along somewhere in the middle, after my brothers and I were already listening in.

It started when my father returned from his Sunday tennis game. He was in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Nothing unusual there. My mother joined him. Not so unusual either. She was always going back downstairs for more coffee. More and more coffee.

What was unusual were the voices, raised so suddenly and to such a decibel that they came up through the floorboards. I was poring over Famous Paintings in my room, my hard-won room of my own, which about a year earlier I had convinced my parents to let me have, arguing that with my reading and drawing and my interest in the visual, and being after all the eldest, it only made sense.

My brothers were in their shared room next door. We came to our respective doorways at the same moment. We looked at one another and then together, in silent agreement, we slipped down the stairs, which were open to the entry hall, which was open to the dining room, which led to the kitchen …

“She’s your sister. You need to speak to her.”

“He’s your brother. Why don’t you speak to him? Go ahead, damn it.”

“She’s the one driving. You know that. She’s the one taking him out nearly every week now, buying him things, never thinking of the other boys. It’s as though they don’t exist. You should have seen their faces. It doesn’t matter what she buys him—the mere fact of it, week after week. It’s breaking my heart, Marty.”

“There is no reaching Hank. You know that.”

There was a pause.

“She told him about your mother and her … exploits. He’s nine years old, for God’s sake. Nine!”

My father was silent.

“You have nothing to say to that?”

“There’s no reaching Hank,” he repeated.

“You don’t try hard enough!”

“I do try! I have tried!”

“Not forcefully enough.”

“I can’t make her do anything. You know her as well as I do. You can’t make that woman—”

“I think you’re afraid to stand up to her. I think you’re afraid, period, of your own sis—”

Loud at his end. High-pitched at hers. I did not need to see my father to know that his nostrils were flaring, his head shaking, as from a tremor.

Our parents had fought before, but not like this. Usually it was in their bedroom, with music on—and turned high. That was our mother’s trick. Crank up the Mamas and the Papas, the children won’t hear. Or they won’t understand if they do.

The children heard. They understood. Their voices, the content. Next: objects. A spatula—a spoon? Had he thrown something? At her? We heard it clattering to the ground.

“I cannot live with this kind of frustration—”

Then we heard a fist, our father’s fist, coming down. Hard. On what? We could not see. Not our mother. Something solid. It sounded like wood.

This sound was followed by another sound: something breaking, then falling to the ground.

There was a pause. A silence. As if even he was surprised at what he had done.

He had banged his fist on the kitchen table. Being an antique—with patina, a story, a treasure brought over from Yurp, all that—it had split in two (we saw the disjointed pieces later, lying there on the floor), scarring the wall as it went down.

“Marty, my God—”

“Don’t you dare—”

“Don’t you say ‘Don’t you dare’—”

My brothers looked at me, the oldest, to do something.

“I’m scared,” whispered Steve.

“So am I,” whispered Danny.

“Get your shoes,” I whispered back. “Come on.”

I could leave a house as stealthily as I could enter it, even with my little brothers following—tiptoeing—down the stairs and out through the glass door in the guest room, then around through the backyard, down the ivy slope, and onto the street.

On the street I noticed that Steve’s shoe was not properly tied. I bent down and knotted it. Double knotted it.

“Is Dad going to hurt Mom?” he asked.

He never had before. He tended to hurt objects, feelings, souls—not people.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

“Where are we going?” Steve asked.

Geographically, Wonderland Park Avenue was a continuation of Greenvalley Road, the reverse side of a loop that wound around the hill the way a string did on its spool; only where Greenvalley was open and sunbaked, Wonderland Park was shady, hidden, mysterious, and at one particular address simply magical. Halfway down the block on the right and bordered by a long row of cypress trees, number 8930 was a formal, symmetrically planned, pale gray stucco house that stood high above its garden (also formal of course, with clipped topiaries and white flowers exclusively) and was so markedly different from all its neighbors that it looked like it had been picked up in Paris and dropped down in Laurel Canyon.

Everything about the house evoked another place, another time, a special sensibility; my aunt’s special sensibility. The curtains in the windows, edged in a brown-and-white Greek meander trim and tied back just so … the crystal chandeliers that even by day winked through the glass and were reflected in tall gilded mirrors … the iron urns out of which English ivy spilled elegantly downward … the eight semicircular steps that drew you up, up, up to the front doors. The doors themselves: tall and made to look like French boiserie, they were punctuated with two brass knobs the size of grapefruit that were so bright and gleaming they seemed to be lit from within.

I led my brothers up the steps and to these doors. Even the doors had their own distinct fragrance, as if they had absorbed and mingled years’ worth of potpourri, bayberry candles, and butcher’s wax and emitted this brew as a kind of prologue to the rooms inside.

I rang the bell. We waited and waited. When I heard the gradually thickening sound of footsteps crossing the long hall (black-and-white checkerboard marble set, always, on the diagonal), I began to feel uneasy for having brought my brothers here, at this time of all times. But where else were we to go?

There was a pause as whoever it was stopped to look, I imagined, through the peephole. Then the left-hand door opened. My aunt, seeing us there, at first lit up. “My darlings, what a surprise.”

It took her a moment to realize that Steve was still in his pajamas. Then she looked, really looked, at our faces. “But what’s wrong?”

“Mom and Dad are having a fight, a terrible, terrible fight,” Danny said, his lower lip turning to Jell-O.

She called back over her shoulder, “Irving—come, come quick.”

Then she knelt down and drew my younger brothers into her arms. “Not to worry, darlings. Everything will be all right.”

Those eyes of hers. Two lanterns, set on high cheekbones. Wicks untrimmed and flaming.

Auntie Hankie sat us down in the kitchen and insisted on making us hot chocolate, even though it was already pushing eighty degrees. She found cookies in a tin too, and brought in from the living room our beloved jar of foil-covered chocolate Easter eggs, which she kept there to entice us all year long.

She brought us a deck of cards, a jar of coins from her recent European travels. My uncle rustled up some pencils and some shirt cardboards to draw on.

Then she sat down with us. “Now tell me. Tell us both.”

My brothers looked at each other, then at me.

“Mom and Dad were fighting,” I said.

“Yes, you said. But what about?”

My brothers looked at each other, then into their laps.

I felt my face burning. “I don’t know. We were upstairs. It was loud.”

“Very loud,” Danny said.

“So loud,” she asked, “that you couldn’t hear what they were talking about?”

My brothers shook their heads. My aunt looked at me, but I didn’t say anything.

“I know this may be hard for you to understand,” she said, “but everyone fights sometimes—even mothers and fathers.”

“Your aunt and I fight, sometimes,” said my uncle.

“Puddy, we do not. We’ve never had a cross word in our lives.”

“Well, not this week,” my uncle said drily.

“Not any week that I know of,” she said tartly.

My uncle emitted one of his trademark six-step sighs, a cascade of diminishing breaths that generally alerted us to his not-quite-silent dissent.

“It’ll blow over, children,” he said. “These things always do.”

Steve said, “Dad has the Bergman Temper.”

My aunt stiffened as she said, “The Bergman Temper? Now what would that be, exactly?”

The sharpness in her voice caused Steve’s eyes to return to his lap.

“Do you even know who the Bergmans are—were?”

“Grandma is a Bergman,” he said. “And Dad. You are and I am too.” He looked up. “It’s my middle name,” he added.

“Yes, that’s right, partially right,” she said. “The Bergmans were Huffy’s people,” she added. And then she waited.

When none of us said anything further, she continued, “Well, your father is passionate about things, the way I am. And Mamma too. If it’s passion you mean, I’ll concede that, yes, it runs in our side of the family. It always has.” She paused. “I’m just curious. That term, the ‘Bergman Temper.’ Who came up with it?”

Both my brothers looked at me. My stomach tightened.

“Was it your mother, by chance?”

“No,” I lied. My skin, giving away my lie, began to burn red.

My aunt nodded, not to us, or to herself, so much as to some invisible off-screen observer or camera. She often did that: she pretended, or maybe assumed, that there was an audience following her—tracking her—at all times. She did not say, I know perfectly well that it was your mother. I do honestly believe that woman sometimes hates us, me and Mamma both. She did not need to say this, at least to me. I knew what she was thinking, and because I knew, or believed I knew, I began to feel uneasy all over again for having brought my brothers here. But I was scared. My father had never smashed a piece of furniture in anger before.

“We should probably call over there,” said my uncle. “They’ll be concerned.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of that,” my aunt said to my uncle. The lift in her voice told me that the prospect of making that call did not displease her.

My uncle emitted another one of his sighs. He said, “Maybe it would be a better idea if I—”

But she was already on her feet. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, heading into the study so that we couldn’t hear.

Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Its sound was amplified by all that marble.

My aunt hurried off to answer the door. We could hear murmuring from the hall—hers and his, sister’s and brother’s, back and forth. Then quiet. Then footsteps. Loud footsteps, familiar footsteps. My father’s loud, familiar footsteps.

He was still in his tennis clothes. His shirt was damp with sweat. With anger. One of his shoelaces had come untied, like Steve’s had earlier.

“Let’s go, boys,” he said.

Our father was no longer angry. He was steely and quiet. This was new. New to me, anyway. And almost worse.

He asked Danny and Steve to go into the house ahead of me. We sat in the car in the garage: his space with his vehicles, his tools and tool bench, his disorder. His scent: no bayberry or potpourri here; instead grease, car oil, rubbing compound, sweat. It stank.

He sat for a minute, several minutes, in silence, with the motor turned off and the keys dangling in the ignition. The car engine produced sigh-like, crackling sounds as it cooled down.

I thought my heart would punch a hole in my chest.

“Never do that again, Mike,” he said finally. “Not ever.”

His voice was firm, deep, forceful. Steady.

“I—I was scared,” I said, scared all over again. “So were they. Danny and Steve.”

“I have the Bergman Temper. You know that. I inherited it from my mother. But it blows over, and when it blows over, it’s over.”

“You broke something.”

“The kitchen table,” he said. “I’ll glue it back.”

There was no apology. Only facts.

We thought you might hurt Mom, I did not say. I did not say, We’re all scared of you. We hate your temper. It makes us hate you, sometimes. It makes us feel unsafe and it makes us—me—want to be with Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving.

“You’re old enough to know better, Mike. You’re old enough to know what stays in this family, our family. Our part of the rest of the family.”

He looked at me. His voice may have been level, but his eyes expressed something unnerving: his temper under control.

“You understand, don’t you, that it was wrong—very wrong—to take this to your aunt and uncle’s?”

I nodded.

“Very, very wrong,” he said. “You must promise me that you will never do anything like that ever again.”

When I didn’t say anything, he repeated, “You must promise. Out loud. Go ahead, say it.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Even if your mother and I fight.”

“Even if you and Mom fight.”

“Even if I break something.”

“Even if you break something,” I said.

“Or several things.”

“Or several things.”

He paused. “You may go inside,” he said.

As I got out of the car I said, “Aren’t you coming?”

“In a bit,” he said. His eyes were focused on the windshield. They were still there when I left the garage.

On my way to the front door I passed the dining room window. My brothers were standing there waiting for me. My mother was standing behind them. Her eyes were red. I looked at Danny, then at Steve, then I went upstairs to my room. I closed the door, climbed into bed, and burst into tears.

TWO
OGDEN, CONTINUED

The rhythms on Ogden Drive began to change. I still accompanied my aunt to Morning Time, but often—as often—we went to The Apartment together as a family, the five of us, my parents, my brothers, and me. We went on Sunday mornings after my father’s tennis game, and we went on Friday nights after dinner. “Let’s pop down to The Apartment for a few minutes,” my father would say. He was not a great instigator of plans; that job tended to fall to my mother or my aunt and uncle. It seemed to mean something, something significant, that he started directing us to The Apartment in this way.

Always, almost always, we found Huffy in bed, those gold flames leaping on the bedposts, books in tall uneven stacks on the table nearby. We would all pile into the second bed or sprawl on the floor or sit in the self-rocking rocking chair and tell her about our day or our week.

I found myself waiting for an invitation to sleep over, and when it didn’t come I finally took my mother aside one evening and asked her if it would be all right if I spent the night. She thought for a moment, then answered, “You’ll have to ask your grandmother.”

Her answer puzzled me. It was backward. Usually my grandmother asked me to stay, and then I had to ask my mother for permission.

When I approached Huffy’s bed, for no reason I could then explain, my face began to burn with embarrassment, and after I got the words out—with a stutter accompanying my hot red face—Huffy said, “Darling, perhaps not tonight. I think I may be too tired. But another time, certainly.”

I saw my parents exchange a look, and I saw my mother glance at her mother, who had come to join us but kept her distance, standing in the doorway as she often did, a dish towel in hand. Something was going on, but I had no idea what.

In the car as we drove back up into the canyon we were all quiet. Sad is what I was—sad and confused about why I appeared to have been cast out from the special protected garden that was Ogden Drive.

When my mother tucked me into bed that night, there seemed to be a glistening in her eyes, the very beginning of tears, as she said, “Huffy really was very sorry that she couldn’t have you stay. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded, but I didn’t understand at all.

I didn’t understand, but I did go on noting the things that I did not know how to put together. They were like scenes from a movie that had not yet been edited, or from a grown-up or foreign movie of the kind that my aunt and uncle preferred, only without the subtitles to help decipher their meaning.

I noted that on Saturdays now Sylvia began spending more time up in the canyon with us. This Sylvia was a different person from the Sylvia of The Apartment. She moved through our kitchen unmonitored, unjudged, unwatched, without competition and therefore at ease.

I noted that there was a change, too, in my grandmother’s—both my grandmothers’—midweek habits.

One of the few things that these two such disparate women had in common was that they had both begun working when they were very young and continued to work until they were very old. Twice a week, Sylvia took two long bus rides, first down Fairfax Avenue, then west along Pico, to a synagogue on the west side of the city, where she gave Hebrew lessons to bar and bat mitzvah students, thereby winding up in life as she had set out, as a teacher of her native tongue.

Most every weekday afternoon Huffy would drive herself to my father’s medical equipment business on South La Cienega Boulevard. She had a desk there and a job that my father had made—made up—for her in the early fifties after Louis B. Mayer had been fired as the production chief of MGM and was replaced by Dore Schary, who had a different approach that did not include giving story editors like Harriet senior so much power over the kind of material that was adapted into movies. My grandmother went from helping Katharine Hepburn try to persuade Mayer to let her appear opposite Garbo in Mourning Becomes Electra to keeping my father’s books, paying his bills, and answering his phone. This was quite a dramatic change of professional milieu and stature, but the point was to allow Huffy to maintain her financial independence and, perhaps more important, to keep her occupied.

Now when we went to visit my father at work, however, my grandmother was more and more often missing from her desk, until eventually her desk stopped being her desk and became a catchall for the flood of paperwork that came in and out of 1920 South La Cienega Boulevard. The only remaining trace of her in this workplace was the pencil cup I had made for her as an art project in school, its pens and pencils disappearing week by week as they were appropriated by other, more present employees.

Back on Ogden Drive I noticed that for the first time Huffy began to defer to Sylvia in the kitchen, handing over the responsibility for whole meals that, formerly, she would supervise down to the last thickened drop of gravy. Meanwhile she left her bed less and less. She spent much of her day reading, though her reading changed from the big classic novels that lined the shelves in her living room to paperback mysteries that it fell to my uncle Peter, my father and aunt’s older brother, who also read them, to bring her, a dozen at a time.

One book appeared by Huffy’s bed and never left: Adelle Davis’s Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, which had scraps of paper poking out of its pages, marking important passages that contributed to the change in my grandmother’s diet. Now for breakfast in place of her own German pancakes (or Sylvia’s paler version) or scrambled eggs with bacon and toast, she ate wheat germ and yogurt. Or pungent cereals made of bran, lots of fruit, and weak tea. Lunches were simplified to clear broths. Dinners became lighter and packed with vegetables as she ate less and less meat, less and less period.

Instead of antiquing with my aunt, Huffy began shopping in her own house, as she put it, by rummaging around in cupboards and closets to introduce an object that had long been out of view. One day, more curiously still, I arrived at The Apartment and saw at once that all kinds of things were missing, a pair of lamps, two jade birds, even the Chinese ladies painted on mirrored glass. My grandmother noticed me noticing. “I’ve sent some things up the hill with your aunt,” she explained. “I don’t need them here anymore.”

“But when you sit in your chair, you won’t be able to see the portrait of Auntie Hankie reflected in the mirror behind the Chinese ladies,” I said, confused and also, for no reason I understood, unsettled by these changes.

“Ah, but I know so well what your aunt looks like all I have to do is close my eyes, and there she is.”

She demonstrated. Then smiled—half smiled.

Even Morning Time underwent a change. I was no longer banished while my aunt brushed and pinned my grandmother’s hair. Was it because I was a year older? Or because she was taking less care with the job now that my grandmother wasn’t going out as much as she had been before?

On these mornings I often sat on the floor, bent over my ever-present Académie sketch pad, the one with the brown cover on which there was the depiction of a hand holding a pencil (a right hand; I was a leftie), poised and ready, as I was, to draw. On one particular morning I decided to capture the scene playing out in front of me: my grandmother sitting up in bed over her breakfast tray, my aunt seated across from her in the self-rocking rocking chair, with her back to me. As I drew, the atmosphere in the room changed: the two hot-tempered Bergman women, despite never having a cross word between them, were exchanging many.

The subject was one of my aunt and uncle’s screenplays, which my grandmother had read and, evidently deploying some of her well-honed story editor’s skills, had found wanting. She was not hesitant to express her opinion, and my aunt, her voice rising higher and higher, was similarly unafraid to express hers in powerful contradiction.

“But you’re not following. If you cut all that backstory, you’ll never believe his behavior in the third act,” Hankie said in a voice whose firmness I had never before heard her use in conversation with her mother.

This voice was accompanied by a fist, raised and punching the air.

“There is too much static material in the story already,” my grandmother said. “Too much exposition. It’s confusing and slow. Your audience is sharp. You have to move them forward.”

“You haven’t read the original material. The suggestion is too radical.”

“It’s my take. A reasonable take, I would argue.”

They moved on conversationally, but the room still felt sharpened, anxious.

In my drawing I depicted my aunt’s right arm and clenched fist at four different heights, to indicate that it was gesticulating. A cloud of spark-like pencil strokes near her mouth suggested her raised voice. I thought the effect was very clever, and when it was finished I carefully tore the page out of the sketchbook and stood up to show it to her.

She looked at it for a moment. “It’s clear that your skills as an artist are continuing to develop, Mike,” she said flatly. “I’ll give you that.”

My grandmother asked to see the drawing. I took it from my aunt and presented it to her. She held it between both her hands and looked at it, then at me, then at my aunt. “This is a very accurate piece of work indeed,” she said. “The boy is so very perceptive, don’t you think?”

“Of course,” my aunt replied.

Later, when she went to clear away the tray, I saw that she had crumpled up the page and added it to the leavings of my grandmother’s breakfast. By accident, I told myself.

Around this time there was also a shift in daily life in the canyon. It started up so gradually that I could not say exactly when it happened that my uncle Irving began coming to our house to speak to my mother every single weekday afternoon at exactly four o’clock.

I would be sitting at my desk in my bedroom, well into my homework, when the scent of freshly brewed coffee floated up the stairs. Five or ten minutes later there would be the sound of a car parking out front, and just after that the front door would swing open as my uncle stepped into the house.

At first my brothers and I bounded down the stairs or in from the yard to see him. Irving was one of our favorite people, and it always felt like an event when he paid a visit. Not because, like my aunt, he came bearing presents or treats or had big plans but because of his attention and his spirit, the lightness of his spirit. Our uncle was avidly interested in whatever we boys had to say. From the moment he stepped out of his shoes (a lifelong habit of his whenever he walked through the front door—I am convinced your unc was Japanese in a former life!), he peppered us with questions about our day, our games, our friends, and later our reading and our schoolwork; he didn’t ask in order to evaluate or criticize or advise, as my aunt so often did, but simply because he was curious about us and entertained by us. And he loved us. The power of his attention was like a portable sunbeam, our own source of avuncular light.

But on these new afternoon visits Irving had not come to see us; or not to see only us. At the end of his time with my mother we would be invited to join them, but at the beginning he and my mother gave us strict orders to make ourselves scarce. They had grown-up matters to discuss, they said. Boring matters, they always added, that were not of any interest to children.

Danny and Steve obeyed agreeably—innocently, you might say—disappearing back into their schoolwork or their games. I was not so compliant. I was becoming experienced enough to understand that when grown-up matters were described as not being of interest to children, they were most probably the exact opposite. Also, for me, observing was beginning to evolve into something more active, more like eavesdropping, if not (yet) deliberate spying, though that would come with time.

The design of our house, with the staircase halfway open to the entry hall and the living room beyond, was a great help to me. I had heard interesting things from the stairs before. I always waited until I detected the murmuring coming up through the floorboards, his-hers, hers-his, back and forth in somber, subdued tones, before I slipped out into our carpeted upstairs hall, first along the landing, then slowly, very slowly, down the first step … then the second … then the third. I had learned early on that when you inched along you were less likely to cause the stairs to produce a revealing creak.

The murmuring clarified into recognizable words, then phrases.

I don’t know how much more of this she can take. I don’t know how much more of it I can take—

Dr. Irvine says there is a connection between the tension and the pressure in his eyes. He says Marty has to watch the glaucoma extra closely right now. I worry he’s going to go blind—

I’m concerned she’s going to have a heart attack. Or a car accident. She hasn’t slept through the night in more than six months. She screams whenever a spatula drops to the floor. Sometimes she wails in her sleep—

He doesn’t wail. He roars, like when he’s angry, but—

A creaking stair or a sound from the garden produced a sharp Red nisht, di kinder darfn nisht hern. But it was no good resorting to Yiddish, not that Yiddish, since I knew it meant they suspected someone—a kind—was there and were alerting each other to stop talking.

That’s when we would be invited to join them. I always waited a few minutes before hurrying, pretending, that is, to hurry down the stairs. When I skidded to a stop near my uncle’s chair he would look over at me with raised eyebrows that said, I know what you’ve been up to, Mike. But did he, really?

One evening in the middle of July 1969, all nine of us assembled at The Apartment. The living room had been transformed into a little theater: Huffy’s wing chair had been turned around to face the Zenith, and so had Sylvia’s low-slung Victorian chair. The dining room chairs had been brought in and lined up in rows for my parents and aunt and uncle. Open space was left for us children on the braided rug.

This, all this, created a sense of suspense. A Major World Event, my uncle called it; but he might as easily have said A Major Family Event, since it was the first time in a long time we had all gathered together in The Apartment.

We watched with the rest of America, the rest of the world. We watched and we waited. The screen was gray and granular, alternately dancing with lines and spotted, or pulsing. “It’s like when you have motes in your eyes,” my mother said. Time seemed to move very slowly as we listened to Walter Cronkite and waited patiently, then less patiently, for the hatch of the Eagle module to swing open. It seemed to take forever, yet no one got up for a drink of water or to stretch. We sat where we were, transfixed.

And then, finally, just like that, it happened. The hatch opened, and Neil Armstrong backed down the ladder and set his foot right there, on the white surface of the moon. We all watched in silence for several minutes. Everyone, and everything, grew even more still. It was as though all the eyes in the room were watching with us—the eyes in the portraits and in the Flemish mirror, the eyes of all the Chinese figures in the lacquer and on the porcelain …

Afterward Huffy angled around to face us children, and with a strong but also strangely glazed light in her eyes she said, “When I was born, boys, we still traveled by horse and buggy. Ice was delivered by a man in a cart. Radios and telephones were still newfangled inventions. Televisions—no one had even imagined them. Women couldn’t even vote—we couldn’t—” She made a small sweeping gesture in the air with her right hand. “I wonder if you can understand what it feels like for me to have lived long enough to see an astronaut walk on the moon.”

She turned her perfectly combed and pinned silver head back to the television screen. “The moon …”

At three o’clock in the afternoon on the first Friday in October the school bus dropped us as usual at the bottom of our hill, and as my brothers and I walked up to our house I saw that cars were parked in our driveway and all along the street nearby. It was the weekend our new dog was supposed to come live with us in the canyon. Something must have happened to the dog, I remember thinking. Something bad.

It’s a wonder how quickly the human mind—a child’s mind—can conjure a plausible story out of implausible facts, how the waking mind can think as magically as the dreaming mind; or—more simply—what a thick ten-year-old I was.

As we made our way along the path to the front door I saw Sylvia standing in the guest room window, peering around the curtain.

I saw my mother come out the front door and down the steps.

Behind her I saw a room full of people. Some I recognized as members of our extended family.

My mother led us to the backyard, where my father was standing next to our yellow kitchen chairs, which in my mind had jumped all by themselves from the kitchen to the garden, where they had arranged themselves in a semicircle on the lawn. This itself was dreamlike, or like something on a movie set. But no one was dreaming, or filming, or writing, now. My father was holding on to the back of one of the chairs; gripping it, as though the chair were keeping him upright.

“Boys,” he said, his voice breaking. “I have something to tell you.”

He paused to steady himself because his legs were shaking under his strong torso. My brothers had already dropped down into the yellow chairs, which had been placed there for this very purpose.

“Your grandmother—my mother—Huffy—”

That was as far as he got before his face liquefied.

For some time it was difficult to breathe. I was being held so tightly by my aunt and I was being rocked by her so vigorously, back and forth on the sofa in the guest room, that I had to steal gulps of air whenever I could. She was rocking herself, and me with her, and she was emitting wild howls, animal howls, that came up from somewhere so deep in her, so bottomless and broken, that I was afraid she was going to choke. She kept howling and sobbing and saying, “Huffy wouldn’t want us to cry, she would want us to be brave. That’s what she would want …”

I did not know what to feel, what I felt. It was impossible to find my own sensations in the face of all this raging grief of my aunt’s. Instead I became all eye, one big Cyclopsian eye; a dry eye, because how could any tears I might produce approach Hankie’s, how could they come anywhere near the sight of my father, the man who never cried, dissolving in the garden, becoming an un-father, a non-father, a creature I had never seen before?

Locked in my aunt’s embrace, I became aware of my mother standing in the doorway. On her face there was a look of alarm tinged with dismay. She was there, and then she disappeared.

Soon afterward my uncle came and detached me from my aunt’s grip.

My dry unblinking eye was free now to prowl over all the surfaces on Greenvalley Road, registering every detail that underlined the inside-outness of the day. It had started with the cars, and Sylvia in the window, and the yellow chairs in the garden; now it moved on to the chicken roasting in a stew of carrots and onions and beef consommé, a familiar scent that, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was as wrong as the dining room table covered in a good linen cloth and piled with pink bakery boxes from Benês’s. It was as wrong as the platter of deli meats nearby mummified under layers of plastic; as wrong as the vases of flowers jammed into water unarranged and still wrapped in their cellophane cones; as wrong as Aunt Baby and Aunt Trudy, Uncle Peter’s wife, sitting together on the sofa and holding hands, their legs crossed in opposite directions, their shoes shed onto the carpet beneath them; as wrong as our dark stairwell, which I climbed alone, leaving behind the living room full of people whispering and murmuring and crying; as wrong as my parents’ room, where even though it was still light out the door was closed (as wrong as that too) and where, when I cracked it ever so slightly open (wrong), I saw a body lying (wrong) in my parents’ bed, not on the left, which was my father’s side, or the right, which was my mother’s, but precisely in the center, a body, covered in a blanket and seen, as I was seeing it, severely foreshortened, like the Andrea Mantegna Christ in Famous Paintings, so that it was all chin and nose and nostril, to me a familiar chin and nose and nostril, my grandmother’s chin and nose and nostril, I would know them anywhere, at any time and from any angle; but why, why would they bring her body here, to this house, this room, this bed—

The nose exhaled, the chin ever so minutely quivered. Wrong!

I thought my chest would crack open and my heart bounce onto the floor. I scrambled down the stairs three at a time to find my mother and, choking on the words, asked her what—who—that was lying in her bed.

It took her a moment to absorb what I had said. Then she explained that it was my uncle Peter.

My uncle Peter, who shared some of his mother’s physiognomy. Her nose, her chin.

“He was up so early,” she added. “He went to deal with—matters.”

“Which matters?”

If my mother found it difficult to have a child who asked questions like this, she did not give any indication. Not usually; not then.

“With Huffy’s body,” she answered simply.

“What did he do with it? To it?”

“He arranged for it to be taken away and …”

“And?”

“My father did not believe it was what Jews should do. He believed their bodies should be buried.”

“I don’t understand.”

She put her hand on mine. “He arranged for your grandmother to be cremated.”

I looked at her, confused.

“That means incinerated. Burned instead of buried.”

I shuddered. “All of her?”

“All of her.”

“Has it happened—already?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. He took care of it. The logistics. That’s all I know.”

It was a lot to take in, a lot to put together. “When is the funeral?” I asked.

“Your grandmother didn’t want a funeral. Your aunt doesn’t want one either. And what your aunt wants …” She paused. “Huffy wished to be cremated, and then—then I don’t know what. It’s like she’s still here. I have a feeling it will be like that for a long time.”

If I was so very perceptive, how did I miss so much, how did I miss the central thing?

Was it because I was still just a child? Was it that? Or was it because the central thing had been hidden—purposefully, and with great care—from Huffy herself?

The central thing: this, too, was shared by my two grandmothers.

I had seen Sylvia’s chest deflate—her bra that is, under her dress. And I had seen her reach in to inflate it again, meaning arrange the pad bulked up with crumpled tissues that stood in for her flesh. And I had seen her bra on the hope chest, folded over on itself, its aggregation of padding and tissues peeking out from behind the skin-colored fabric.

No one had ever explained who had taken away a part (two parts) of her body, or why.

What with all that dressing and undressing happening behind closed doors, I had not seen anything equivalent to Sylvia’s deflating chest in Huffy, and nor had I put together all the signs of her changing habits and diminishing energies. What I learned I learned later. The Operation—the mysterious operation that established the ritual of Morning Time—turned out to be a double mastectomy that Huffy had had in October 1965. In 1968 she had a recurrence of the cancer and another surgery, after which the doctor came out from the operating room and told my father, my aunt, and my uncle Peter that he had been unable to remove it all; the disease had spread too far into her body.

“He shook his head,” my mother told me, shaking her own head as she conveyed this scene to me long after the fact. “With that one sentence everything was different … forever different …”

Improbable though it seems now, absurd, really, in view of who this woman was and what her mind and character were like, her children, working in collaboration with the surgeon and our family doctor, agreed—plotted—that very afternoon not to tell my grandmother the truth about herself, about her body, about her body’s fate. Instead they invented a diagnosis, rheumatoid arthritis, that would serve to explain her intermittent pain and weakening and require her to stay in bed for long stretches at a time, like one of her favorite writers, Colette.

For a brief time a stack of Colette’s novels appeared by my grandmother’s bed, in beautiful patterned-paper dust jackets, and my aunt talked about dear, darling Sido—Colette’s mother—and how she and Colette, like Madame de Sévigné and Françoise, were connected in the way that the two Harriets were, beyond mother and daughter, best friends; best friends for all time.

Yet there was something even stranger than this fabrication, this pretend diagnosis that my aunt and my uncle and my father and the doctors devised, and that was the fact that my grandmother went along with it, acting as though she weren’t dying so that her children could act as though she weren’t dying, even though she told a friend of hers, who later told my mother—who was like a great fishing net collecting all the stray, and many of the essential, pieces of information that helped convey the truth of these lives, or a far truer truth than the rest of these people lived by—that Huffy knew perfectly well that the cancer had metastasized and that she was mortally ill.

Everyone was acting, everyone was pretending; too many books had been read, too many movies seen (or conceived, or made). A family that had quite literally written, or story-analyzed, itself into a better, sunnier life, a life where everyone went by new names (and nicknames) and lived in a new or newly done, or redone, house in a new neighborhood in a new city, was unable to write itself out of death. No, not even the Mighty Franks could manage that.

The house filled up with more people.

I went upstairs and changed into a black turtleneck sweater, an article of clothing I wore only when we went skiing. Being unable to cry, I felt I had to find some way to participate, to show people, my aunt above all, that I, too, was upset. When I came downstairs again my mother took one look at me and said, “We don’t dress in black just because someone has died. That’s not who we are or what we do in this family.”

I was ashamed to have been seen through so clearly. I returned to my room and changed back into my school clothes.

I was coming down the stairs again when the doorbell rang. It was Barrie and Wendy, the girls who lived across the street and were our oldest and closest friends. They had come to see if my brothers and I were all right. Their eyes were red and swollen. They called Grandma Huffy “Grandma Huffy” too. But then we were practically related—that’s how we explained it when people asked what we were to each other, since we were so obviously something.

Barrie and Wendy nestled between my brothers and me chronologically, boy-girl-boy-girl-boy, oldest to youngest, tallest to shortest. We sometimes broke down into different pairs and configurations; sometimes we fought with one another, but mostly we adored each other. After school and during the summer, we were often inseparable, playing games and doing art projects and putting on shows together or playing handball or building forts up on the hill—my time with them constituted altogether the most, virtually the only, “normal” time in my childhood.

What practically related us was marriage. Trudy, their aunt, was married to Peter, my father and aunt’s brother and our “outlying” uncle (Herbert was the outlying uncle on my uncle and mother’s side but brought no parallel interlacing into our world); this meant that we had first cousins in common. It was a very Mighty Franks sort of situation and had not come about by accident, either. Trudy had worked as Huffy’s secretary for a time at MGM and had made a good enough impression on my grandmother that when Huffy finally became exasperated by Peter’s taste in women, who inevitably fell short, way short, of The Standard, she invited Trudy to dinner one Sunday and seated her next to her firstborn son. By dessert she had already nicknamed her Beaky, on account of her being tiny, birdlike, and apparently unthreatening, and declared her to be full of clever insights and perceptive conversation. And voilà: this, one of the earliest of my grandmother’s many stabs at matchmaking, became also the most easily realized.

Beaky, it turned out, had a younger brother, Norm, whom Huffy looked up when she traveled to New York on one of her scouting trips for the studio; finding Norm bright and congenial, she convinced him to move to Los Angeles after he finished high school, and she absorbed him, too, into the family, moving him into a spare bedroom for a while until she got him enrolled at UCLA and on his feet. Norm and my father became great friends; after my father moved to Greenvalley Road, he convinced Norm and Linda, his new wife, to move across the street; as before with Aunt Baby, my grandmother’s conjuring yet again expanded and tightened the family weave. And the girls and their parents would have been fully absorbed into our extended family except for one thing: for reasons we never understood, my aunt developed a seething dislike of Norm, Linda, and—especially—the girls. Even on this day of all days, all she had to do for her face to turn black with disapproval was take one look at Barrie and Wendy as they stepped tentatively into the living room to pay a sympathy call.

As the oldest of the five of us kids, I felt very protective of the girls, but there was no way I could shield them from my aunt’s dark look other than trying, and failing, to stand where I could block her view of them and theirs of her.

The girls seemed uncertain whether they should approach Hank or not. They went for not and received an embrace from Trudy, their aunt, instead.

Hank had moved into an armchair. She was no longer rocking back and forth, but then she didn’t have anyone to rock with her. She was still a magnet for everyone’s attention—she had no need for a black turtleneck, or a black anything else. The grief was just pouring off her, like rain. Was grief always like this? My aunt was undergoing a very private experience in a very public setting. Everyone was keeping an eye on her, wondering when she would again erupt. The room was taut with anticipation.

In the armchair she was sitting upright, talking to our family doctor. Her eyes had vanished behind her largest pair of sunglasses. My uncle was standing behind her with one steadying hand resting on her shoulder.

Dr. Derwin said, “I have never had a patient, or known a woman, quite like Senior. It’s hard to think of your family without her …”

From behind my aunt’s sunglasses tears began to shower across her cheeks as a sound formed itself deep in her chest. A moan came up out of her, and another, and soon she was howling again and trembling so violently that she slipped out of the chair. My uncle and the doctor drew in to catch her before she hit the floor.

Barrie came over to me and whispered, “I think we should go now.”

“Maybe you should,” I whispered back.

I walked them out. When I returned, my aunt was back in the chair, but she was still shaking.

In the kitchen my mother was on the phone speaking to Dr. Coleman, our pediatrician. “I don’t think it’s healthy for the children to witness such extreme grief,” she was saying into her hand, which was cupped around the mouthpiece.

Later that night, on Dr. Coleman’s advice, she would dispatch me for several days to the deep Valley, to my cousins. My brothers would be sent elsewhere, to similarly far-removed relatives.

“If you want me out of the house, why can’t I just stay at Barrie and Wendy’s?” I asked when she told me where I was to go.

“It’s not far enough away,” my mother said firmly.

I would never forgive my parents for that, for cutting me off from my own private source of oxygen, which was knowing. Knowing and noting.

My father had not yet come inside. I saw him through the large windows, standing at the edge of the lawn, looking out over the canyon, where daylight was slowly leaking from the sky.

I found Sylvia in the guest room. She was sitting patiently on the sofa, as if she had been waiting for me all this time. I sat down next to her, and she gathered me up in her arms. In her arms I could breathe.

“Are you going to die soon, Grandma?” I asked.

She gave me one of those knowing smiles of hers. “Not soon, my darling,” she said. “No, I’m not.”

“You promise?”

“Yes,” she said, “I promise.”

THREE
ON GREENVALLEY ROAD

“Hey, you wanna see what Suzie has in her backpack today?”

The backpack is sent flying and soon disgorges, and bruises, the cherished Académie sketch pad. Pencils bounce and scatter. Jane (as in Austen, yes) skitters across the asphalt.

“Suzie’s reading a girl’s book,” observes Alfred, the ringleader. “What a faggot.”

“Suzie is a girl,” says Jared, his sidekick. “Are you a girl, Suzie?”

“Can you guys just leave me alone,” I say firmly. My version of firmly. But my voice—I can’t help it—goes up at the end of the sentence.

“Can us guys just leave you alone?” Alfred echoes. “Sure we can, sweetie. But there’s something we need to check out first.”

Lunch hour at Wonderland Avenue Elementary School, fall semester, fourth grade. Jared wraps his ample arms around me and drags me behind the ball shed—a dreaded, even more unsupervised corner of the school yard. Before I know it I’m flat on the ground, looking up at the giant eucalyptus trees that tower over parts of the canyon and perfume it with their spicy, pungent scent. I will loathe that scent for years—forever.

Jared is a large, heavyset specimen with oily skin. His bottom smashes onto my face; he plants his feet on my hands. Alfred sits on my legs.

“If Suzie is a girl, why is she wearing boys’ clothes?” Alfred muses. “Hey, Suze, why are you wearing those boys’ clothes?”

Before I can answer, think how to answer, he adds, “Why don’t we see what she’s got down there?”

I try to kick them off me, but they settle in like two boulders.

“I’m not touching her down there. No way.”

“You could do it with your foot,” says Alfred. “Your shoe.”

“You can’t be sure what you’re feeling with your shoe,” says Jared.

“We could use a stick,” says Alfred.

“Same problem,” says Jared.

They ponder for a moment while I try to breathe.

“I’ll just do it. I’ll hold my breath or something,” says Alfred. “Here. Take her feet.”

The two of them change places. If I’d had a chance to eat any lunch, it would have come up out of me. Instead a foul taste fills my mouth, and it goes dry.

Alfred reaches for my belt buckle and yanks it open. His eyes glitter (why do they glitter?) as his hand shoots in … and down. And grips. Hard. The pain is sudden and deep, as if there were a live wire running between my groin and my stomach.

Only later does it occur to me to think, If I am the faggot, why is Alfred going beyond grip to exploration?

“She’s got one all right,” Alfred informs Jared. “A small one.”

He makes a show of wiping his hand off on his jeans.

“Maybe she’s a hermaphrodite,” Jared says.

“What’s that?”

“A boy with titties. Or a girl with a dick. I saw it in a book. There’s a sculpture, some ancient Roman thing, of a he-she.” He turns to Alfred. “Should I look?”

Alfred nods. Jared reaches for my shirt.

“No titties.” He kicks me in the chest. “But maybe this’ll make a nice little bump.”

“A dick and barely any titties. What is she, then?” wonders Alfred.

“Hell if I know,” says Jared.

Suzie. Sissy. Faggot. Latent homosexual (that one I had to look up). Was I what they said, what they called me? What was I? All I knew was that I wasn’t a boy the way they were boys. I certainly wasn’t a girl. And I didn’t feel an attraction to anyone at that age. I had only one matter on my mind, one goal: to make it through the school day without these thugs or their minions (and they had them, many of them) going after me.

I honed my approach over the years. After the incident behind the ball shed, I kept myself covered up. I buckled my belt so tightly that the clasp (brass, two-pronged) bit into my flesh, leaving indentations that were visible in a certain light for days afterward. I wore layers of T-shirts, short sleeve over long sleeve, though sometimes the other way around, to help insulate my body, even on seventy-, eighty-degree days. Of course I kept my distance, sitting off in a corner of the school yard bent over my reading or my sketching, as inward-turning and balled-up as it was possible for a tall, gangly, vigilant boy to be.

My technique didn’t always work. Well into middle school there was scarcely a season, outside of summer, when my body was without bruises in different evolving shades: blue-black, purple-blue, greenish-yellow, yellowish-beige.

My self—my inner self—was a different matter. From Alfred, my experience of Alfred, I trained myself to go dead. I went through a kind of ritual every morning as soon as I stepped out our front door. It lasted for the amount of time it took me to walk from our house to the bus stop. I began with my feet and worked my way up my entire body, stiffening and hardening it from within. Going dead inside in this way, deep inside, made me strong, impermeable. A warrior. That was how I thought of it: I was a warrior who every day went to do battle at Wonderland Avenue Elementary and later Bancroft Junior High. To be a target while other people did battle, though, was more accurate.

You don’t want to be ordinary, do you, Lovey? To fit in? Fitting in is a form of living death. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always.

I always did.

Alfred was a dead ringer for Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine mascot that was Danny’s preferred reading material in these years. He even had his freckles, a version of his unorthodontured teeth, and a similar if slightly less exaggerated dead, mal-shaped left eye.

His modus operandi was to lie in wait, coiled and cobra-like, in all the interstitial spaces in the day where bullies tend to thrive. At the bus stop in the morning and again in the afternoon. On the playground at recess. Or at lunch hour, where he was often assisted in his machinations by his greasy, rotund sidekick, Jared.

But Alfred’s deepest, strangest power was his Janus-like changeability. At school he was a combination of demon and ringmaster. On the bus ride he liked to finish off the day’s work by digging his nails into the backs of my hands, gouging out tiny crescent-shaped bits of flesh into which a few drops of blood would rise up afterward. Yet as soon as the bus pulled away and the other neighborhood kids scattered, often, as often as not, he would turn to me and say, “So do you want to come over and play?” Or trade baseball cards (an early shared interest)? Or stamps (a later one)?

Absurdly to me now, I would answer, “Sure.” I would go home and change out of my school clothes, pick up my handball or my trading cards or my stamp collection, and I would cross the street to his house, or else he would cross the street with his things and come to mine. We played for hours together, in relative peace. I suppose I thought, or hoped, that these companionable afternoons of ours would work like goodwill in a savings account that I could draw on when we were back at school, but that turned out to be a particularly naive form of wishful thinking. The next day Alfred would greet me at the bus stop and look me over with those hard eyes of his: “Good morning, Suzie.” Then clack! Toe of shoe—penny loafer, cheap hard leather—striking shin or knee. I hoped for shin, since it was hard to hold yourself rigidly dead with a swollen knee.

When I cast the eye of memory over these scenes, inevitably I wonder, Where were the teachers, the principal? Did the bus driver never glance in the rearview mirror? Was the yard supervisor, under whose watch (whose lack of watch) so many excruciating moments played out, oblivious?

Where were my parents, my aunt and uncle?

My aunt and uncle are simpler to explain. For them, school was where I, all three of us boys, disappeared while they were writing. Once we stepped off the stage of the theater that was their lives, we were offstage in the most absolute sense, non-players, non-characters, simply non.

My parents are trickier. I did everything in my power to make sure they didn’t know what was happening to me at school. If they didn’t know, then at home I didn’t have to acknowledge how grueling and miserable my days were. School was a dream or (more accurately) a nightmare and therefore not real, not happening, not a place of affliction, embarrassment, and shame; or, alternatively, if it was happening, it was happening to a dead person, and therefore had no lasting effect. Home was different. The bookend to going dead at the beginning of the day, after all, was coming back to life at the end of it. When I climbed the hill from the bus stop to our house, I could feel the stiffness thawing and melting away from me as I resumed my more natural self, my regular shape. Home—Greenvalley Road—was my refuge, my retreat, and I did everything I could to keep it that way.

But even the best-maintained refuges can sometimes be breached.

My parents’ attention was often elsewhere in these years. My father was expanding his business and responsible for his brother, for whom he’d created a job in that growing business; his mother, until her death; and afterward his mother-in-law. There were days, many days, when he came home late from work and fell asleep early after dinner; weekends he disappeared into sports and card games. His idea of parenting, for the most part, consisted of providing for us, disciplining us (typically by erupting at us), and trying to engage us in his passion for cars, tennis, and skiing; if we weren’t as captivated by these things as he was, we did not see much of him.

My mother was far more present, but as we grew older and her attention was loosened from having to juggle the logistics of our lives, it began to turn inward, and soon she started to undergo a change of her own, which accelerated in late 1972 and early 1973, around the time Ms. magazine published an article on the subject of consciousness-raising groups. This article lit a fire under a handful of Laurel Canyon mothers, who began meeting in one another’s living rooms on Tuesday evenings at six o’clock to talk about their lives and what they wanted to alter about them and how best to go about it. The husbands were asked—in some houses, instructed—to take the children out to dinner as the wives uncorked bottles of Chablis and opened up runny wedges of Brie that were paired with bunches of green grapes (unless there was a Cesar Chavez–led protest in progress) and plates of Triscuit crackers fanned out just so.

Whenever I saw my mother assemble this array of food and arrange a circle of chairs in our living room, I immediately felt a sense of agitation that I in no way understood. On these and most Tuesday evenings I peppered her with questions: Did she talk about us boys? Dad? Grandma? Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving? I worried about them—about Auntie Hankie—most of all. “One of the rules of the CR group,” my mother answered, “is that we keep everything private. It’s the only way to sustain one another and ourselves. We have to be supportive, non-judging, and discreet. So I’m afraid I can’t answer these questions, dear. Any questions, really.”

My mother said these words lightly, but they did not sound like her—was that because they were lifted from the magazine? A dog-eared copy of the March 1973 issue appeared alongside the Brie and Chablis in the first months the group met; after that, apparently, the women knew what they were doing without such tangible editorial guidance.

What were they doing? It took me a while—months—before a Tuesday rolled around on which my mother was hosting and my father was kept late at work. When she received this news by telephone, my mother very solemnly gathered us boys together and, as she assembled a tray of sandwiches for us to take upstairs, explained that we were in no uncertain terms to think of leaving our rooms until she called up to us to say that the group had disbanded and the coast was clear.

Even as she was laying out the rules of the evening, I was already planning how to break them. Since the time of my uncle’s daily visits during Huffy’s illness, I had further honed my eavesdropping skills. I had learned that it was never wise to start listening at the beginning of a conversation, because that was when people (= my mother) were most suspicious. I had learned that a good time to slip down a few stairs was when someone had gotten up to, say, pour wine or go to the bathroom, since one bit of unusual noise easily masked another. And I had learned to be patient, endlessly patient, since much of what I overheard was dull and some of it wasn’t even comprehensible to me; sometimes all that patience led nowhere, yet sometimes …

“So, Merona, last week you were talking about how you don’t always feel at home in your own house. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.”

“Really? What have you been thinking?”

“Well,” this speaker continued, “it occurred to me that our homes are a kind of metaphor for where many of us find ourselves as women. We’ve arranged them for everybody but ourselves. For our husbands, our parents, our social circle. In your case, your in-laws.”

“Except in my case I didn’t even do the arranging.”

“More of a metaphor—more of a problem. It’s all part of the same issue. People dictating to us what we should be deciding for ourselves. The covering on a sofa can be just as important, in this sense, as the clothes we wear, the books we read, our ideas. When are we going to say what we really mean, wear—whatever we like? Throw out the old—the old—”

“Bronzes. Miniature Greco-Roman statues that have nothing to do with me. Views of French châteaus—when I’ve never even been to France.”

I did not have to peer into the living room to know what the scene looked like. There were eight women sitting in a circle around our coffee table. I knew about half of them. My mother was likely sitting on a low stool, since it was a house rule, or until recently it had been a house rule, that the more comfortable seats went to guests. Across from her and doing much of the talking was Linda Berg, the most outspoken of these women and, as it happened, the mother of Barrie and Wendy, our almost cousins. Linda had recently cut off all her hair and had traded her skirts and sweaters for jeans and T-shirts—she was the first mother in the canyon to alter her appearance almost overnight. My mother’s change had been more gradual. While it had been some time since she had relaxed the shellacked towers of hair she wore when I was a young child, she recently had begun going down to the Hair Palace on Beverly Boulevard where Bobby (whose tight low-riding jeans and flouncy scarf marked him as an antecedent to Warren Beatty in Shampoo) gave her a regular perm that produced a cascade of tightly whorled ringlets. This, together with the lightening up of her makeup, and the jeans and chambray shirts she had begun wearing, distanced her ever further from my aunt, whose bunned hair, bright lipstick, emphatic beauty mark, and proliferation of jewelry remained as entrenched as ever.

But now the changes in my mother seemed to be about more than her appearance.

“What’s to stop you from getting rid of it all—just clearing out the place in one fell swoop?”

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?”

For years Merona did not see Marty except in passing at family affairs, where he was typically accompanied by a different girl every time. She did see a lot of Hank, though: Hank and Irving. She started coming to Los Angeles on her own, riding the Red Car line up from Long Beach and then taking a bus to their apartment so that she could spend the weekend with her new “sister,” as Hank insisted on being called. “I would go anywhere with her. Even buying milk was an adventure. She and Irving took me to the movies and gave me books to read, ideas to think about. Hank changed the way I dressed, the way I wore my hair and makeup. The way I spoke. She had such high energy and so much assurance and style and … and verve. Yes, that’s probably the best word. She had verve, and she was enchanting, or I was enchanted with her. I suppose it was a combination of the two …”

One of the women I did not know said, “You were young. It sounds like you were infatuated.”

“My heart used to race when I saw her,” Merona said in a quiet voice. Then: “That kind of infatuation—it blinds you. To a lot of things, and for a long time.”

Another of the women asked the inevitable question: How was it that she went from being tootz to being married to her brother’s brother-in-law?

This, too, was a story I knew, because pretty much since the day I understood that these two sets of siblings had married each other, I had been asking how that had happened—everyone who met our family wondered the same thing. Sometimes my mother made it sound like a comedy (“There was no one else, and I was an old maid of twenty-three”). But sometimes she told the story as though she were looking at it herself … not for the first time, exactly, but with a kind of first-time curiosity or bewilderment, as if even she, after all these years, had not quite understood how it came about.

In the serious versions she began with her mother’s illness. After Sylvia was diagnosed with breast cancer, Shalom asked Merona to come home from school to help out. Merona took a leave from UCLA and returned to Long Beach. It was not an easy time for her. She had left behind her studies, her independent life. Now she was back in the world of her parents, the congregation, the temple. Huffy, watching all this from a distance, and acting as a conjurer once again, came up with the idea that Marty and his best friend, Murray, should invite her out, just to distract her for an evening or two, to let a little air into her life. And so on two successive weekends Merona rode up to Hank and Irv’s apartment and went out first with Murray, then with Marty. She was eighteen; Marty was twenty-five. “He was charismatic and intelligent and more grown up than any of the other boys I’d gone out with, and once I worked up the courage to ask him to stop calling me tootz, we actually started to talk to each other and, what with all the people we already had in common, we found we had things to say to each other and, well, it was a long time ago now, dear …”

That was how she had put it to me. To the women in our living room she said, “I was attracted to Marty—very. I was also asleep. Weren’t we all? I suppose part of me thought that it worked for my brother with his sister. My mother’s illness scared me … and my father liked and trusted Marty, which was important to me … and it’s not as if we hurried to get married. We got to know each other over time, several years actually, and we kept on going together even after our siblings made their disapproval known. They were so worried. ‘What if something goes wrong? How will that affect us?’ Irving said. ‘Have you thought about that?’ But I think there was more to it than their selfishness. I think Hank felt I somehow wasn’t enough for Marty, smart enough or pretty enough or powerful enough to become one of the Mighty Franks, or maybe it was just simply that I wasn’t Hank-like, or Huff-like, enough. Yes, it was probably that most of all …”

She paused. “The secret conversations—you would not believe how many there were. I would go up to Marty’s house on Lookout, and by the chair in the living room there would be an ashtray full of cigarette butts with lipstick on them. I recognized the color. Salmon Ice. Hank’s color. She had been there, talking and smoking and trying to convince him that it was a terrible mistake—that I was a mistake. It was one thing for me to be her husband’s kid sister but something else entirely for me to be her brother’s wife.”

From her audience, murmuring, digesting.

“It’s no wonder that we could only become engaged when they were away in Europe,” my mother continued. “I’ll never forget the letter she wrote to me from France: ‘Sister-in-law twice over, hurrah!’ it began. ‘I think this has to be one of the happiest moments in my life.’”

The room was silent for a moment … then another …

“From the woman with the ashtray full of cigarette butts?”

“The very same,” said my mother. “Welcome to my world.”

Greenvalley Road: From the beginning of my consciousness it was as alive to me as certain people. I knew the house, our house, better than I knew most human beings. I knew its scents, its sounds. I knew when the light or the changing currents of air suggested dramas about to build, moods about to shift. My father’s temper—I could feel it gathering steam five rooms away. I could feel it leveling off afterward too. I knew where everyone was by the way sounds carried. I knew who was awake and who was asleep. I knew from the depressions in the seat cushions which chairs or sofas had been recently vacated, and I knew who had eaten what, and often when, from the trace scents that lingered in the kitchen and elsewhere. I knew what each room looked like from the outside, the downstairs rooms anyway, because ever since I had been a child I loved to slip away, especially at night when the lights were on, and peer in through each of the windows. It was an old, old game: I would pretend that I did not live on Greenvalley, that I had happened upon it the way you happened upon an unknown house, and I would try to figure out who these people were and what their lives were like.

Even when I was inside I tried to find ways to alter my perspective. I used to play a different game when I was a very small child. I would lie on the floor on Greenvalley, in the living room or the dining room or my bedroom or even at the top of the stairs, and I would imagine the house turned upside down, and I would imagine myself walking on the ceiling-turned-floor, with its soffits and beams and thresholds underfoot altering the familiar configuration of the spaces I had known forever.

That was what listening to my mother tell her stories to the women in her consciousness-raising group was like. It was as if the house I knew and loved so well had changed shape before my very eyes, not turned upside down so much as inside out.

Where would all this storytelling lead? Nowhere simple—that one thing seemed pretty clear.

After the women took a break to go to the bathroom and replenish the Triscuits, they sat down again, and instead of moving on, as I prayed they would, one of them asked my mother the other inevitable question that came up when people got to know our family. Not Linda, who must have known, but one of the others wondered how it was that these two such different mothers, these grandmothers, ended up living together.

This story, too, I never before heard laid out the way my mother put it that night. She described the suddenness of her father’s death—at fifty-seven, of a heart attack, just a year after he’d been “invited” to retire from the congregation that he and her mother had spent twenty years of their lives building. Sylvia and Shalom had so recently moved out to Tujunga to be near one of Sylvia’s sisters that they had not yet unpacked his books. They had no life out in the deep Valley and no friends other than Sylvia’s one sister—my grandmother barely knew where to buy a decent loaf of bread. Shalom, my mother told the women, had died “most inconveniently for my brother and sister-in-law”—just two weeks before Hank and Irving were due to go on location with a movie. Without consulting Merona, who had adored her father and was utterly unprepared for his death and was so grief-stricken, as she described it, that she had scarcely gotten out of bed for ten days, her brother and sister-in-law took it upon themselves to rent Sylvia a smaller place to live in Tujunga, a “little doll’s house” of an apartment that Hank and Huff dived into and did up, lickety-split, down to the last curtain ruffle. They stocked Sylvia’s pantry, set two pots of African violets in the windowsill, and left.

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