This had been the shameful secret he’d told her that night, the secret that had been so hard for him to utter that he’d bitten through his lip trying to get it out. The sex with his roommate. She and Joe had been getting high on the roof of Lehman Hall on the small Barnard campus when he’d told her. He’d taken a hit off the joint, inhaled, exhaled, posed. Then he’d come out with it. He’d never told anyone else about it, he said. He teared up a little as he told her, not only because he was ashamed, but because he was relieved. And as he confessed, his front teeth tore into his lip and the blood dribbled into his lip beard, turning a few strands a deep, sticky mahogany. She blamed those mingy tears — the tears of saline, the tears of hemoglobin — for her accepting his proposal that night.
He had draped his arm over her shoulders. He had begged her to keep his secret. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” he said.
“Of course not,” she said. “Who would I tell?”
He cut her a look. They both knew perfectly well who’d she tell.
“My sisters wouldn’t care. Don’t lots of boys experiment that way?”
“I wasn’t experimenting,” he muttered. “I was doing what I had to do.” He looked grim and resolute, as if recalling a march into battle. “It wasn’t homo sex,” he said. “It was prison sex.”
Lady took the white clothesline to the long table where tenants folded warm clothes fresh out of the dryers. Sitting on the metal folding chair that she planned to stand on in a few minutes, she began to coil the rope, this time not a flat coil but a three-dimensional coil, a cobra-rising-from-a-basket coil, and not merely a pretty coil, but a coil with a purpose, a function, a goal.
When she was done, she looked at her creation and was pleased. At the same time she couldn’t squelch the thought: no noose is good news.
Our father, the aforementioned Natan Frankl, was born in Munich to a family of scholars. Like the rest of them, he was an excessively educated man, fluent in numerous languages. He loved language the way other little boys love dogs or yo-yos. He liked to play with language, he liked to make it do amusing tricks. English, he told Lady, was the best language to play with. Next came French. Italian was good, too, especially for poetry, since all the words rhymed. The worst was his native German. In fact, he told Lady, he could no longer stand the sound of it. He blanched even when he heard someone say gesundheit.
Our point is this: we know no one likes the puns and wordplay. We’re sorry about them. But we can’t help it. They’re Natan Frankl’s fault.
He’d been a chemist, too, our father. That’s how he’d known the Alters. But while our mother’s family left Germany early, our father’s remained until there was no getting out. He’d been a scientist unable to interpret the data all around him — there was a lot of that going around — and he ended up in one of the camps. We don’t even know which one. That’s how little any of this was discussed.
We do know that after liberation he was moved to a displaced persons center, and that when he subsequently managed to get to America — not easy; America didn’t want any of the displaced persons — he looked up his old friend Richard Alter, i.e., our grandfather. But, given that our grandfather had already killed himself — that window in the Dead and Dying Room — he met only our mother.
That’s their meet-cute story.
In New York the only work he could find was among the other Jews on Seventh Avenue. He sold clothing fasteners to the trade: buttons and snaps, hooks and eyes, frogs and kilt pins. He used to bring discontinued samples home for Lady to play with. She turned them into little families. Brass peacoat buttons embossed with anchors were the fathers. Silk-covered buttons were the mothers. The tiny white buttons you find on collars were the babies, unnecessary and largely decorative, but cute.
He’d been an observant Jew before the camps; he was a cynical atheist after. On Saturday mornings he took Lady and Vee to the Central Park Zoo. Vee doesn’t remember this at all — she was still in her carriage — but Lady does, though vaguely. Lady is Vee and Delph’s sole conduit to our paterfamilias. She’s the one who remembers what he looked like: fair and blue-eyed and nothing like us. She’s the keeper of his puns. She used to do an impression of his impression of the Central Park polar bear, our father and the bear lolling their big heads this way and that. “It’s as if he’s swaying to secret bear music,” our father would say. “He can bear-ly restrain himself.” She told us how hard the two of them laughed at that. Bear-ly restrain himself. They’d thought it was the funniest thing.
In one of her dresser drawers — the same one in which she keeps the rubbery blue screwdriver — she has an old business card of his, soft and cottony from handling, and at the bottom, beneath his useless contact information, it says:
The fastener invented after the button
was a snap
So when Lady says our father gave her plenty a closure, but never any closure, she can’t be scorned. When Vee says that the reason Natan Frankl left us may have been his palindromic first name (“Coming or going, it was all the same to him”) or maybe his German surname (“He probably left to find the missing e”) or that maybe the reason had nothing to do with his name at all, that maybe the reason he left was all those months he spent in that relocation camp before coming to New York (“Looks like relocating became his thing”), she must not be judged harshly.
And when each of us — Vee upon her marriage, and Lady after her separation, and Delph as soon as she came of age — ditched his surname to go by our matronymic, and Delph repeatedly described the name change as no big deal, just a slight Alter-ation, you can’t punish her for being punnish. You can’t roll your eyes when we’re speaking Frankly. It’s all that the man who left us left us. In no other way did he provide for us or, apparently, care about us. In fact, you might say that Frankl, our dad, didn’t give a damn.
All right, all right; we’ll stop. That’s our entire repertoire anyway. We have nothing more to say about him, no idea where he went. A business trip, our mother told Lady, the others too young to ask, but after a while, because even kids know that business trips end and the businessman comes home, often with presents, our mother had to admit the unsatisfying truth, or at least what she maintained was the truth: she hadn’t a clue where he’d gone. One day he never came home from work, and the next day, the same thing happened, then etcetera, etcetera, until she stopped expecting him. She called the cops — a good citizen, she did that much, or so she said — and they nosed around a bit and reported that nothing untoward had befallen him, that wherever he was, it was where he, a grown man, wished to be, and it was no longer their, or, we supposed, our, business.
Even so, over the years Lady continued to press. Soon Vee and Delph joined in. Then our mother would offer up possibilities. Maybe he sailed back to Germany. Maybe he was still living in New York, but with a different wife, tidier daughters who didn’t have to be nagged to make their beds. He might be dead, you never knew, the cops could have been wrong. It’s not like cops weren’t wrong all the time. Or he could be alive somewhere and — again, who knew? — he might decide to come home someday. When we least expected it, he might walk right back through that door.
“Which would you prefer?” she asked, as if his fate could be determined by popular vote.
We won’t deny that we grew up father-hungry. But over the years we’ve come out the other side. No one has had more therapy than the three of us, that ineffectual if gratifying institution — me! for fifty whole minutes let’s talk about me! — but really, we didn’t need therapy when it came to our father. At a certain point when we were still children, each of us cycled through the kiddie version of the five stages of grief, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and crazy-ass conspiracy theories.