“I was born in November 1933,” I volunteered.
“Yeah.”
“So what have you found out?”
Mia looked out of the window and braced herself, then looked back at me. “Frank told me this himself. Frances was raped. It was an acquaintance of hers; a male friend’s younger brother. He was an undergrad at Columbia who thought that all lesbianism meant was that you were holding out for the man who really got you excited. Frances had warned him to stop airing this view. He’d also, I don’t know, grabbed at a friend of hers and called her a tease and so on. Frances had issued her warning to this guy in front of other people and I guess that had humiliated him and — don’t let me rationalize what he did anymore, Boy. He caught her coming out of the library that night in February, seemed contrite, told her he was just a boy trying to grow into a man and that his motto was live and let live, and he urged her to visit a speakeasy he’d heard about. And she went with him, to show him there was no longer any quarrel between them. He bought her three drinks. They went for a drive along the Hudson. He said, ‘What do you say we drive all night?’ She said sure. Being in motion helped her get a lot of good thinking done. His parents were out of town and he drove up to their house in Westchester, drove into the garage, shut the doors, and broke her life in two.”
“What was his name?”
“Steven.”
“Steven what?”
“Steven Hamilton.”
“Is he alive?”
“Screw him. I didn’t check. It’s Frances I followed, and she didn’t encounter him again.”
“So where did she go?”
“There was a women’s shelter she knew of, run by a Harlem heiress out of her own home. Mainly for nonwhite women, but they didn’t automatically turn you away if you were white. She stayed there for three months under the name Francine Stone, but they eventually asked her to leave. She was… uh, demoralizing the other women who ‘had suffered their own violations but were determined to continue their lives as women in spite of them,’ I think the note said. Frances understood and admired that, but it wasn’t her way. Her distress had hardened. You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. Frances washed her face and fixed her hair and looked again, and the man was still there, wearing an exact copy of her skirt and sweater. He said one word to her to announce his arrival. What he did was, he flicked the surface of his side of the mirror with his finger and thumb and he said: ‘Hi.’ After that he acted just like a normal reflection; otherwise she would’ve felt like she had to go to a psychiatrist and complain about him. Once she’d established that he was there to stay, she named him Frank and stopped off at a barbershop and got a short back and sides — she felt that haircut suited Frank’s personality. She went around in heavy boots, and a high-collared shirt… maybe you’ll remember the rat catcher’s collared shirts and the way he’d wear them even in the summer, to hide the fact that he didn’t have an Adam’s apple… she took to speaking in an artificially deep, gruff voice. The people around her didn’t know what to do about her and frankly they didn’t like her. To them it was as if she’d been bitten by something vile and that in some way she was becoming the thing that had bitten her. She left the shelter, found a room that she shared with a girl on a strict twelve-hour basis — from six in the morning to six in the evening the room was Frank’s, and from six in the evening to six in the morning the room belonged to the other girl and Frank had to get out.”
“I take it the roommate was a hooker?”
“Maybe. However it was she made her living, she knew all kinds of people, and hooked Frank up with a physician who was willing to turn criminal for a reasonable fee. Frank made two appointments, and ended up breaking them both. He was afraid of dying on the physician’s table. He’d heard stories, and he wanted to live. He worked jobs that didn’t require documentation — an extermination company that had a high turnover of illegal immigrant employees turned out to be the job he lasted longest at, but it was a job he lost when he had you. You were premature and he said he had to take a lot of time off. He remembered his father’s rat-catching methods and started working for himself—”
“Stop calling her ‘him.’ You’re telling me my mother has been desperately ill for decades and I’m fighting like hell to take it in, but you’ve got to stop calling her ‘him.’”
“I don’t know that I can. As it stands right now he’s been Frank longer than he was Frances. It’s gone beyond alter egos. Boy, I’ve been reading medical monographs about people whose alleged alter egos have different blood types from theirs — one guy’s alter ego was diabetic, and he wasn’t — or he was the alter ego and the diabetic was the ‘true’ personality — who’s to say? When those kinds of biological facts start coming in, you have to ask if becoming someone else is more than some delusion or some dysfunction of the mind. What I mean to say is that Frank’s personality is pretty awful — he tried to hit me when I told him I was going to tell this story, but he wasn’t fast enough — but he’s awfully sane. Well, maybe not when it comes to thinking of names. He says he almost named you Pup.”
“Mia.”
She took my hands, and kissed them. “Boy.”
“Please don’t write about this. Find someone else to write about.”
“I’m sorry, cara. I don’t expect you to understand this, but I have to tell. You know, Bird sent me something in the mail a few days ago. Some notes she’d made while Frank was talking to her over lunch.”
“What?”
“He said some stuff to her that’s probably going to upset you — no, he didn’t threaten her. I think he was actually trying to tell. Trying to tell her what he had agreed to come down here and tell you.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” I said.
“I’m sorry it’s like this. You’ve got a daughter who has to know and a friend who would do anything for you apart from not telling. This can’t be what you signed up for.” She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back.
“Do you think Frances is gone forever?”
“Boy… you know I can’t answer that… I never met her.”
I don’t know why that was a comfort, but it was.
2
reading Bird’s notes took the comfort away. Frank’s claim that I’m evil doesn’t shock me so much, partly because I’ve questioned myself on the very same subject before. It’s not my actions that raise the questions, but my inaction, the way I’ve consciously and consistently avoided chances to reduce other people’s unhappiness. I call it a side effect of growing up in a building full of families and thin walls and floors: We all heard everything and did nothing. I heard love going wrong for people, so wrong. The silence for weeks when Mrs. Phillips next door miscarried. Then the weeks of noise that followed — Mr. Phillips came home later and later, and Mrs. Phillips waited up for him, playing records until the small hours, switching off the gramophone and sobbing when he came in through the door. Mr. Kendall on the other side of us kept spending the rent money; his wife kept faking surprise at this. Every month Mrs. Kendall asked, “How could you, Fred? How could you? What are we going to do?” and you could hear her hatred and her boredom; it stayed in her voice even as he hit her. For a few months there was a pretty glamorous-looking couple upstairs — down on their luck, I guess. I remember them particularly because I never found out either of their names, only heard him calling her whore, whore, WHORE. Of course they must have heard the rat catcher knocking me around too. We all got a little less human so we could keep living together.