I said. “Can I offer you a seat?” I patted the bench. Frank climbed aboard and sat so close that you couldn’t have slipped dental floss between us. I scooted over a little to make more room for him and he scooted after me.
After an awkward silence I said, “I like this song.”
“It’s one of my favorites.”
“Do you play the piano?”
“I do,” he said. “Not like he does, of course.”
“Your teacher?”
“Gershwin. This computer program is based on a piano roll Gershwin cut. He made dozens of piano rolls but very few actual recordings.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It is a fact. I’m very good with facts. I refer, of course, to George Gershwin, not Ira. Ira was his older brother, born in 1896. George was born in 1898. Ira was the lyricist, which means he wrote the words. George composed the music. Friends thought George a hypochondriac until he suddenly died of a brain tumor here in Los Angeles in 1937 in the old Cedars Sinai hospital building, now owned by the Scientologists, who believe themselves to be more advanced humanoids from another planet come to rescue mankind from itself. Ira lived until 1983. Are you familiar with Fred Astaire?”
“I’m from Omaha,” I said.
Frank actually gasped. “Fred’s from Omaha,” he said.
“I know. That’s why I mentioned it.”
“When I was young I thought Fred was from England but my mother explained that actors in the talkies were trained to speak that way. Fred wrote in his memoirs that the last words George Gershwin spoke were his name, ‘Fred Astaire.’ Like Charles Foster Kane saying ‘Rosebud’ as he died in Citizen Kane. I am a devotee of film. Of mathematics, not so much.” Frank had a funny way of talking, as if he were reading off a teleprompter in the middle distance. He slipped his hand into mine then and gave me one of those luminously-trusting little kid smiles that melts the hearts of cynics in Hallmark commercials and makes us believe that, yes, a greeting card can bring the world together again, one family at a time.
He pressed his face against my shoulder and we held hands for a long time before I spoke again. “That’s some wingspan George had,” I said when the composer’s spectral fingers completed an Astaire-worthy tap dance from one end of the keyboard to the other. Then I got the bright idea of following Gershwin’s lead, took my hand from Frank’s, and arched my fingers over the keys.
“No!” M. M. Banning shouted from the hallway.
I snatched my hands away just in time to keep Frank from slamming the lacquered keyboard cover on them. M. M. Banning scuttled to the bench and wrapped herself around Frank, straitjacketing his arms to his sides. “There you are, Monkey,” she said.
“She was going to touch my piano,” Frank said. “We hardly know each other.”
“She doesn’t know the rules yet, Frank.”
“You and I know each other a little already, though, don’t we, Frank?” I said once I got my heart out of my larynx. “I’m from Omaha, like Fred. You know my first name, Alice. I haven’t told you my last name yet. It’s Whitley.” I offered him my hand again, a little shaky and feeling fresh appreciation for the fingers still attached to it. “I hope you’ll let me in on all the rules around here.”
Frank twisted away and buried his face in his mother’s shoulder. “Mama,” he said. “Who is she?”
“Her name is Penny.”
“Alice,” I insisted. “My name is Alice.”
“When is she leaving?” he asked.
“As soon as your mother finishes writing her book, I’ll go,” I said. “I promise.”
“How long does writing a book take?” he asked his mother. Funny, I’d just been wondering that myself. “It doesn’t take long to read one,” he added.
M. M. Banning met my eyes over Frank’s head. It was the first time she’d really looked at me. “There are two things you need to know if you’re going to be of any use to us,” she said. “Rule One: No touching Frank’s things. Rule Two: No touching Frank.”
“No touching Frank? But he was holding my hand just a minute ago.”
“He can take your hand but you can’t take his,” she explained.
“Then how do you cross the street?” I asked, feeling uncomfortably like I was setting up a joke about a punk rocker with a chicken stapled to his cheek.
“I hold his hand, of course. I’m his mother. I don’t have to ask.” She said that with a tenderness that surprised me. Here was the Mimi