Boy, Snow, Bird(73)

I shuffled through all the photos of my glamorously disheveled bluestocking mother, hair as long as Lady Godiva’s at a time when short hair was all the rage. She had the look of someone who sings inside themselves, silently and continually; at least I hope that’s what people mean when they say someone has a twinkle in their eye. Hers was there even when she was playing possessive, her arms tangled around the woman on her lap. “What happened to her, Mia?”

“This is exactly what Frances’s girlfriends wanted to know. They all showed up hoping I could tell them. She was twenty-nine and that was supposed to be the year she got her doctorate, but she skipped campus and the apartment on Morningside that she shared with two other women. She was there on a Tuesday—spotted in the library—she asked one of the women I met with to loan her some money, but her friend was just as broke as she was. Then on Wednesday she didn’t show up to a talk she’d agreed to give to some undergraduates. She’d never done anything like that; she was the kind who showed up to lectures even when she was ill. Nobody seems to remember her as being particularly highly strung, either. By Friday her friends were making active efforts to track her down. Then other friends suggested she didn’t want to be tracked down, that she was just working hard on her paper. But working where? She hadn’t returned to the Morningside apartment since Tuesday evening. Her roommates wanted to call the police but everybody said they were overreacting. Her parents ended up reporting her missing in April 1933.”

“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—”