Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “There you are,” she said when she took the tray. “Finally.”

  Busted. “I made you eggs,” I said.

  Mimi eyeballed me at length, which I only mention because she hardly ever looked at me at all. “I’ve never seen you with your hair down,” she said. “Why are you so flushed?”

  Had she looked out her window and seen me running across the yard from the Dream House, giggling? “I was exercising,” I said.

  “I guess that’s why your hair is wet,” she said.

  “Yes. I took a shower after. I lost track of time. I’m sorry.”

  Mimi stared at me so long I worried she would fire me on the spot. Had she sent me packing even yesterday I might have been excited. Getting kicked off the mountain today would have been more of a mixed bag.

  “I’m so happy,” Mimi said.

  I hadn’t seen that coming. “I can make you eggs more often if you like.”

  “It’s not the eggs, Alice. I just got a call from Frank.”

  “Oh, no. What’s wrong? Do I need to go pick him up?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. He called to ask if he could stay after school. He’s made a friend, and they want to play.”

  “That’s wonderful, Ms. Banning,” I said. I meant it, too. If she had been Mr. Vargas and hadn’t been holding her lunch tray, I would have hugged her.

  “Isn’t it?” Mimi said. “One friend is what he needs. One friend is enough for anybody.” Mimi’s hair had grown out to a ragged pixie by then, and her face was doing something that almost suggested smiling. If you covered up the eyebrow that was growing back in white, she looked like Book Jacket Mimi again. “Alice,” she added. “Ms. Banning sounds like some mean old lady who calls the police on the neighborhood kids if they cut across her lawn. Call me Mimi.”

  I was so shocked and pleased I couldn’t answer. Not that she gave me the chance. Her hands were busy with the tray so she kicked the door shut in my face.

  “SO, HOW DID you meet your friend?” I asked when I picked Frank up after school. I checked him in the rearview mirror to gauge his mood. His facial expression was as inscrutable as ever, but the outfit he was wearing—a navy blazer with a gold insignia over the pocket, shirt plus cravat, captain’s hat and owlish horn-rimmed glasses—made him look as jaunty as Tony Curtis pretending to be the rich yachting guy wooing Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.

  “I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes,” Frank said, “pretending to be Captain Edward Smith on the bridge of the Titanic.”

  “Ah.”

  “Did you know that the Internal Revenue Service, more commonly identified by its monogram, IRS, selected April fifteenth as the date for the annual filing of personal income taxes as a tribute to all the wealthy individuals who died in that tragic event?”

  “Is that true?”

  “One of the richest men in America at the time, John Jacob Astor IV, age forty-seven, went down with the ship. As did Ida Straus, sixty-three, and her husband, Isador Straus, sixty-seven, a co-owner of the Macy’s department store. Also dry-goods retailer and Omaha resident Emil Brandeis, forty-eight. As a fellow native of Nebraska, I thought you might be interested in that fact. When Mr. Brandeis’s remains were fished from the ocean, he was still wearing his diamond cuff links. I have often wondered what became of those cuff links.”

  “I bet you have. But that thing you said about the IRS choosing April fifteenth to commemorate all the dead rich people. Is that true?”

  “It’s held by many experts that the imposition of the graduated income tax in 1913, hard on the heels of the sinking of the Titanic, also sank the ordinary American’s ability to amass great personal fortunes. So I imagine it’s true.”

  “You didn’t tell me how you met your friend yet.”

  “As I said, I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes, reimagining the last moments aboard the Titanic. She asked if she could join in.”

  “What did she want to do?” I asked. “Rearrange the deck chairs?”

  “I don’t understand. The deck chairs were about to be swept out to sea, so what would be the point of rearranging them?”

  “Knock knock.”

  “Oh. Ha-ha. At any rate, my new friend asked to join in and I told her she would be most welcome if she could hum the melody the orchestra was playing when the ship went down. She asked, ‘Song of Autumn’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee’? I opted for ‘Song of Autumn’ of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “There’s some controversy about which the orchestra played. A wistful, minor-key waltz wildly popular in the day? Or the rather too on-the-nose hymn? When I said ‘Song of Autumn,’ my friend answered, ‘Correct!’ She knew both and understood which was the better choice. It shows her to be a person of unusual intellect.”

  Of all the gin joints, she walks into his.

  “Anyway, we enjoyed ourselves so much that she asked if we might have another sinking after the school day ended.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “What’s your new friend’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “I can tell you that my friend broke her arm the first day of school. She is still wearing a cast and a sling, though the cast is supposed to come off in a day or so. She intends to keep wearing the sling after that because she feels it lends her an air of tragedy. Also she can hide snacks in it.”

  “Fiona,” I said, experiencing the kind of exhilaration Frank must feel every time he unearthed a shiny fact he’d squirrelled away in his vast mental warehouse. “I think your new friend is named Fiona.”

  “That sounds right.”

  I was dying to meet Fiona. “Invite your friend over to play sometime,” I said without thinking. I couldn’t imagine Mimi’s reaction to a strange child in the house. But a child who was willing to be Frank’s friend? I had to think Mimi would be as eager to meet her as I was.

  AFTER I RETIRED to my stateroom that night, I fired up my computer and checked the roster of the passengers who did and didn’t survive the wreck of the Titanic. I’m sort of embarrassed to say it, but I choked up scrolling through the list. I guess I’d never thought about the real people much. For one thing, it happened about a century ago so everybody alive then would be dead already anyway. For another, I’d seen the movie with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, who had zero chemistry if you ask me, so despite all the hoo-ha over it when I was just entering my teens, the film hadn’t moved me.

  But that list! Just the victims’ names, ages, and hometowns. It told you almost nothing, yet so eloquently. Here are the facts, the list seemed to say. Break your heart on them as you will. When I finally went to bed I couldn’t stop thinking about Mrs. May Fortune, sixty, and her daughters, the Misses Ethel, twenty-eight, Alice, twenty-four, and Mabel, twenty-three. They survived. Mark Fortune, sixty-four, and Charles, nineteen, didn’t.

  In the middle of the night I woke up just as Xander or the player piano was working through “Nearer My God to Thee.” I decided I had to be dreaming. I didn’t know what “Song of Autumn” sounded like, so my unconscious, obviously, had to go with the too on-the-nose hymn. When I closed my eyes again I saw Miss Alice Fortune bobbing in the current in her lifeboat, wondering if she’d ever see her father again and whether her only brother would swim to safety or be swallowed up by the sea.

  IN RETROSPECT, I wonder if the whole madness with Xander was my way of rearranging the deck chairs at Mimi’s house. The two of us had nothing in common but Mimi and Frank, about whom we talked endlessly in a way I’d like to think neither of us would have talked to anybody outside the wall. I learned from Xander that in the old days before Frank, Mimi was freer with her chitchat than I could imagine her being with anybody. Even with Mr. Vargas.

  From the way Xander told it, their “music lessons” consisted of Mimi sitting by him on the piano bench with her hands in her lap, staring at the book of scales on the music rack and talking. Part of it, I guess, was tha
t for such a handsome guy, Xander was an unusually good listener. But the rest of it I attribute to Lonesome-Highway Syndrome, a condition familiar to long-range truckers, Greyhound ticket holders, and regular travelers of endless, underpopulated flatlands. That’s when two unacquainted people sit by each other long enough to be hypnotized by the white line cleaving highway or the vinyl back of a bus seat and say more than they might have otherwise. Same with two strangers lying next to each other, staring at the rafters.

  Which is where we were when Xander told me the story of how as a kid Mimi would ride all over town behind her brother Julian on his gray-white gelding Zephyr. How when they got older and bullies made Julian’s life a living hell, Mimi had chalked a target on the side of the barn and taught him to throw. Julian turned out to be a natural, with good speed and dead aim. Mimi took the rap the first time Julian got in trouble for chipping a bully’s tooth with a rock, even though Julian was her older brother and all the kids knew she hadn’t thrown the stone. The upside of that incident was that nobody bothered Julian anymore, and when he started pitching for the high school teams he became a local hero, even if people still found him impossible to talk to.

  There was also the story of how Mimi’s mother Banning insisted Zephyr walk in Julian’s funeral cortege, saddled but riderless, as if her son were dead Abraham Lincoln or President Kennedy, and how Mimi was so mortified she sat with her head between her knees so nobody would see her in the backseat of her parents’ car. Or at least that’s what Mimi told herself was the reason she couldn’t hold her head up that day.

  But sadder than that to me was how Mimi called her mother months after she’d run away from the funeral and college and the rest of it to tell Banning that everything was going to be okay and that she was living in New York City. “Nothing will ever be okay again,” her mother said. “Have you forgotten Julian already?” Mimi thought that was the perfect time to tell her she’d written a novel that was but mostly wasn’t based on Julian. That, moreover, the novel had been bought by a prestigious New York publisher and was coming out in the fall. She thought the news of her dead son immortalized might make Banning a little happier. Instead she asked, “A book? How could you? Haven’t we suffered enough?” Mimi told her mother she’d used a pen name so no one would know she’d written it, unless Banning wanted people to know. When Banning didn’t respond, Mimi told her the name she’d chosen. “But Banning’s my name,” her mother said. “Mine.” Then she hung up on Mimi. It was the last conversation they had.

  Xander was my Scheherazade. I went to him as much for the stories as anything.

  “Frank’s not adopted, is he?” I asked him.

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then who’s his father?”

  Xander shrugged.

  “Do you think Hanes might be Frank’s dad?”

  “I met Mimi before there was a Frank. I don’t think she’s seen Hanes since I’ve known her.”

  “What was the story with Mimi and that guy, anyway?”

  “Hanes Fuller was irresistible as long as he was working from her script. Has Frank showed you Public Enemy yet?”

  “With James Cagney? Of course.”

  “Remember the scene where Cagney shoves a halved grapefruit into his girl’s face because she won’t shut up? Hanes unscripted was like that girl. Mimi has a soft spot for lots of human frailties, but being stupid and boring aren’t among them.”

  “I wonder what she hates me for,” I said.

  “She doesn’t hate you. How could she? You’re perfect.”

  Later, Xander said, “It’s not about you, you know. What Mimi hates is how her life has turned out. It isn’t how she thought it would be back when she was your age and on the top of the world.”

  PART IV

  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH XANDER?

  ( 14 )

  SO WE FOUR bobbed along through the fall and winter. Our days went something like this: I delivered Frank to school each morning. Sometimes he said “I don’t belong here” and refused to get out of the car. “Sure you do,” I said, unbuckled his seat belt for him, pried his fingers free of the car door, and aimed him in the direction of the schoolyard. After breakfast, Mimi disappeared into her office and banged away on her typewriter but never showed me anything. Xander puttered around the yard and house, trimming and painting and hammering and doing whatever else gave him an excuse for being there until I was done with my chores. Then quite by accident the two of us would end up together at the Dream House.

  When I went to school to fetch Frank, per his instructions I’d stand by the station wagon in the parking lot, waiting for him to cross the playground and climb into the backseat. Even though the schoolyard was a swirl of kids in bright T-shirts and shorts, dresses and skirts, flip-flops and sneakers, you could spot Frank coming from a mile away. He looked like a peacock in a barnyard full of chickens.

  I kept hoping to meet the famous Fiona. “So,” I’d ask as casually as I could manage, “what do you and Fiona do when you stay late at school to play?”

  “We talk,” he said. “Then we join hands and run from our enemies.”

  Though I kept angling for an introduction, I never got one. “So, what does Fiona look like?” I tried another afternoon.

  “She wears argyle knee socks and saddle shoes,” he said.

  “And?”

  “Cardigan sweaters with little pearl buttons. Kilts that look like wool but are actually made of rayon, a wood-based fiber invented in 1855 but not popularized until the 1920s because until then it was highly combustible. Her rayon kilt feels like cashmere but is more suitable for playground wear as it is machine washable.”

  “Her kilt feels like cashmere? You touched her kilt?”

  “Of course not. She let me try on the sling that matches the tartan of one of her kilts. She alternates that one with another she has, in houndstooth. I liked her sling very much. I never realized before what a responsibility it is for the forearm to support the wrist and hand.”

  “What does Fiona’s face look like?”

  “She wears oversized hair bows,” he said. “I believe they’re made of taffeta.”

  I thought about pressing for more details but doubted Frank could fill me in on the color of her eyes or even her hair. Besides, how many little Los Angelenos who looked like they’d stepped off the set of Brigadoon could there be on that playground?

  I was proud of summoning that reference from my mental warehouse. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, Brigadoon is a 1954 film starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse that’s about some town in Scotland that doesn’t really exist. I’d fallen asleep watching it with Frank back in July.

  When we got home in the afternoons, Frank leapt from the car and ran to Xander. The two of them would go indoors to sit side by side on the piano bench, galloping through scales and melodies until it was time for dinner.

  NONE OF THE stories Xander told were about Xander. For example, when I asked him what he did for fun when he was a kid, he said, “It was a small town in Vermont. I helped my dad fix things around the house. There wasn’t much else to do.”

  “Is that why you ended up playing the piano? Your parents trying to keep you out of trouble?”

  He said, “You want to see trouble? I’ll show you trouble.” Xander put his mouth over mine and after that I was too distracted to ask him anything else.

  Another time I asked how he came to have a long thin scar down his right arm. “I broke my arm. In a couple of places. I needed surgery to fix it.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “When I was a senior at Julliard. I never finished school because of it. It hurt too bad.”

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “Every day. Not as much out here.”

  “Does it hurt when you play the piano?”

  “Especially when I play the piano.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was doing something stupid and I
broke my arm. I really don’t want to talk about it.” He sat up and put his T-shirt back on.

  “I didn’t realize you never graduated,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s not the kind of thing you brag about.”

  “Mimi never graduated from college either, you know,” I said.

  “I know. I guess that’s one reason we hit it off.”

  “How did you meet Mimi, anyway?”

  “I was on the crew that put the wall up around the house. After the crew left, she decided she needed a handyman. I’m handy. I needed money. Simple as that. Any more questions?” He pulled on a pair of shorts, slung his jump rope over his shoulder, and headed for the ladder.

  IT HAS BEEN over four months, Genius. Still nothing?

  I had just gotten out of the teacup shower and was sitting on the edge of the yellow bed, braiding my hair, when I noticed the message light flashing on my cell. I bound my braid with an elastic I had around my wrist and hunched over my phone. Xander was still in bed, running his fingers slowly up and down my naked back.

  Zilch, I typed.

  Xander’s fingers crept along the crease where my left leg met my torso. “Stop it,” I said to him. “I’m texting my boss.”

  Xander sat up. “Mimi?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m just telling her where we both are in case she’s looking for one of us.”

  His hand fell away. “You’re kidding.”

  I turned around and looked at him. “Are you kidding? Of course I’m kidding. It’s Mr. Vargas.”

  “I was kidding, too,” he said. He got up and went to the Lilliputian loo.

  My phone flashed again. How is boy?

  Frank? Speaking of genius. Never met anyone with so much random knowledge at fingertips. Unlike anybody. Have decided he’s next rung on evolutionary ladder.

  Genius not everything cracked up to be. Intellectual prodigies not known for getting dates to prom. Stumbling block to becoming next rung on evolutionary ladder.