CHAPTER SEVEN

In the next few months we saw the Brownes with the regularity of a metronome. While Marc usually left our Bacchanalian revelries for bed at reasonable hours, there were times when Frannie, Brad, and I hung on until dawn. What this routine did to Brad's chances of retention by Maclntyre was something none of us dared dwell upon.

There was one Saturday when we all piled into Marc's station wagon at nine in the morning and drove off for a spree in New York. After a mostly liquid lunch at "21" we did the art world. Fifty-Seventh Street had already begun spewing its treasures about the city and the walking distance between galleries was enough to wear our pumps down to sneakers.

Frannie looked marvelous. In black suede spike heels, a narrow gray skirt and matching cashmere sweater, she was an ad out of Seventeen. Slung casually over her shoulders was a nutria coat which seemed to embarrass her inordinately. "I've only got it," she explained carefully, "because my mother made me nag it out of Marc the year we were married. She said even a shop girl wouldn't be caught dead without a fur coat and that it was essential to teach husbands that wives don't Live Naked Like Fish!"

"It's stunning," I told her; and she, borrowing the punchline of the joke about the Negress in Bergdorf's, said, "It’s stunning all right—but do you think it makes me look Jewish?"

"I'm willing it to Marian Deitz," she added. "She needs Wordly Goods to substitute for Lack of Love. Not that nutria would do it. Marian would need wall-to-wall mink; and even then she'd say it wasn't laid right."

"Will it to me," I kidded.

"Do you lack love, Jo?" she asked, suddenly serious.

It was fun looking at contemporary pictures with Frannie and Marc. Marc had the combination of a good eye and a knowledge of history. He could spot a phony a mile away and was able to point out derivatives of earlier schools which failed because too little had been added.

What Frannie's pronouncements missed in soundness, they made up for in originality. "Pure art's gone," she intoned. "It gave up its own identity when it started playing Trilby to psychiatry. There aren't any painting painters anymore. They're all just a bunch of Free Associators stretched out on canvas couches... And" she finished proudly, "that's absolutely mine. I've never read it anywhere!"

"We believe you," Marc said.

Steeped to the ears in culture, we knocked off at four for drinks at the Weylin Bar. Cy Walter was there. He remembered Frannie from other times and played all the things she asked for. There was one she requested twice; and, in a low voice which carried feeling rather than tone, she sang it for us. There were four lines in it which often came (and I suppose always will come) back to me: "Let me love you. Let me show that I do. Let me do a million impossible things—So you'll know that I do..."

We had dinner at Nicholson's; and then we braved an icy wind to the Byline Room and listened to Mabel Mercer. Frannie's records, good as they were, had not prepared me for Mabel in person. It was one thing to hear her tears on plastic and another to have them drip on my arm. We had a table directly beneath the wooden platform on which she sat in a straight-backed chair, hands folded in her lap, singing of: the loneliness of ivory towers; the ends of love affairs; mornings of orange juice for One; lucky stars above, but not for her; telephones that ring (but who's to answer?); summer days that wither away too soon, too soon; plans that would have to be changed; farewells (sweet) and amens; and various other sobbing manifestations of the Universal Female Neurosis which seemed to be her stock in trade.

We stayed for the last show and then taxied back to the car. Brad, Marc, and I fell asleep and Frannie drove. What with a sudden fall of snow on the Henry Hudson Parkway and a staggering case of myopia, she landed us in Westchester at five forty-five on Sunday morning.

There was something else we owed to the Brownes: an invitation to a party in Meade's Manor given by a couple named Sondheim. The evening had been themed A Winter Picnic; and, as picnics go, this was a memorable one. The absence of grassy leas by rippling rivulets or stretches of coral sand was more than made up for by two-inch pile broadloom, the expanse of which, from livingroom to diningroom to library, offered ample sitting-space for over eighty picnickers. After a siege of drinking ("Mother of God," Frannie reported, returning from the bar, "they've got a separate bartender for each brand!") every couple was given a small pink damask tablecloth to spread on the floor and two box suppers. These, it was said, had been imported from Chambord via refrigerated truck, and contained, among other homey-type victuals, a stuffed squab and half a lobster.

"What's the Sondheim guy like?" Brad asked Jeri who was sitting near us. "Rich," she answered.

"And not exactly Liberal," someone else put in.

"Fuck Liberals!" Frannie roared for the edification of twenty surrounding guests. "This is the first square meal we've had in years!"

Towards the end of dinner a man named Fred Sitkin played the piano and a girl named Something Harris sang along. She was excellent. Frannie could barely eat. In a while she got up and went over to make a request. It was the same song she'd done herself with Cy Walter at the Weylin Bar. When Mrs. Harris came to the lines: Let me do a million impossible things—So you'll know that I do—Frannie became rapt enough to stop chewing altogether.

It was interesting to watch Frannie in a group from which she was (or at least kept saying she was) trying to break away. It occurred to me that the emphasis she placed on the difference between these people and herself was a ruse of the mind: a defense against some deeply rooted and distorted fear that she was not acceptable. It was not Meade's Manor alone, I decided, which would play upon this insecurity: it could have been South Philadelphia or Sioux City, Iowa: any locale at all, in fact, which, through the ungrounded cliches of society, had been invested with a connotation of homogeneity. Meade's Manor, for that matter, was probably closer to being her personal milieu than any of the others in which she might try to puddle so anonymously.

While this particular dot on New York's map had somehow gained for itself a reputation for hide-bound Jewish conservatism, its younger generation had attempted, just as Frannie had, to break from old beginnings. Though a few of them were, as Frannie put it, still trying to keep cool with Coolidge, there were many more who were clearly emancipated.

"They're nice," I told her during the evening. "They're smart and interesting and warm and aware..."

"Reverse Racist!" she countered, separating them from me and from herself in one fell swoop. "The perfect love object for you would be a Crippled Communist Jewish Negro!"

"Why do you come to their parties?" I asked. "If they're so impossible why don't you forget it and stay home?" She flushed.

Bill Brecker, an ex-obstetrician turned researcher, overheard us and ambled over. "Frannie comes to take notes," he said with a smile. "One of these days she's going to write a book called Appointment in Meade's Manor and immortalize all of us!... Have you seen the rest of the house?"

While we were upstairs exploring Frannie came up to freshen her lipstick. "Ever run into this period?" she asked through stretched lips. "Authentic Early Mother-in-Law..."

"Love that girl," Bill sighed when she had left. "Someday she'll fork over the twenty-five-an-hour and then there'll be no stopping her."

"Not Frannie," I told him. "Frannie's just an oriented spectator. She'll never join."

"You wait. It's just a matter of time."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Oh, I know Frannie," he answered. "She's an old flame of mine."

"Really?"

"Really. She was seven and I was nine. We used to live across the street from each other in Chicago and both of us had the misfortune to have nurses. They used to sit together in a little park near the Edgewater Beach Hotel and every now and then they'd go back to Frannie's house for coffee. I don't know why I say Frannie's house because it wasn't Frannie's house at all. It, plus everything else, was Frannie's mother's."

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know. It was just a feeling you got. She was quite a dame. Pretty as hell and very busy knocking around; she'd just gotten her divorce. So we'd go up there and she'd be dressing to go out on a date and we'd watch her. We'd watch her watching herself. Lucy Weatherby, at her mirror. You know Lucy? John Brown’s Body? Well, anyway—when she was all done she'd turn around and stand in front of us and say, 'How do I look? Tell me how I look, chickens.' And Frannie'd get this funny little expression on her face and say, 'You look beautiful.' And if I didn't say anything, she'd push it; you know: 'Come on, Billy, don't you think I'm beautiful? Don't you think Frannie's mother is the Cat's Meow?' Well, the truth is: I thought Frannie was a hell of a lot more beautiful than her mother was. I was real sunk when we moved to New York and I couldn't see her anymore; because, to me, Frannie was the most beautiful thing that ever lived. But a kid of nine didn't say things like that out loud in those days. Manners... Mothers had to be respected. Or maybe that's cover-up stuff. Maybe I kind of sensed how sore she'd be if anyone ever told her her daughter was one up on her. This was a dame who had to win, you see..."

Later when we'd gone downstairs again, I bumped into Frannie at the bar, swapping daggers with Marian Deitz "... and if Jeff could afford a swimming pool," she was saying, "you'd simply use it to drown yourself!"

"Hey, Fran," I said, breaking in to forestall bloodshed, "that Brecker guy is made for you!"

"Who, Bill?" she asked. "Love that man. We were kids together in Chicago. Someday he'll get his head shrunk and then there'll be no stopping him!"

We went soon after that. It didn't take long to find Brad. He was in the kitchen with Mrs. Harris, saving George Sondheim and four bartenders the trouble of replenishing the ice cubes.