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
