if he wished he could follow it there. After that he spun around a few times, staring up at the sky, before sauntering to the driveway, where he stepped onto a skateboard and sailed to the porch, arms extended for balance and swallowtails flapping behind him. He hopped off with a certain rubber-kneed grace and waltzed past both of us as if we weren’t there.
“What were you doing out there with the station wagon?” M. M. Banning asked him.
“Oh, you mean the stagecoach. I was robbing it. That’s why I called you ‘Ma.’ For historical verisimilitude. That’s what people called their mothers in stagecoach days. Ma.”
“I’d rather not be ‘Ma’ if you don’t mind. I don’t see a ‘Ma’ as a woman with all her teeth.” Frank edged around his mother but she caught him by the shoulder and turned him to face me. “Hold on, cowboy. Notice anything?”
“The door’s working again.”
“What about her?”
“That her?” He pointed an accusatory finger in my direction but couldn’t seem to focus on me exactly. I wondered if he needed glasses. “Who’s her?”
“Who’s she. She’s Penny.”
“Alice,” I said. “My name is Alice.”
“Who’s Alice?” Frank asked. He fixed his eyes on the grand piano, maybe thinking “Alice” might be the invisible presence manipulating its keys.
“I’m Alice,” I said.
“What’s she doing here?”
“She’s doing everything around here that I don’t have time to do anymore.”
“Staff? Splendid. It’s so hard to get good help these days.” Frank shot his grimy cuffs and I saw he had silver links in them shaped like the masks of Comedy and Tragedy. He extended his hand palm up, as if he meant to take mine in his and kiss it.
“Frank. Look how dirty your hands are. Go clean up. Use soap. Scrub your filthy nails. And come straight back when you’re done. What did I just say?”
“Frank. Look how dirty your hands are. Go clean up. Use soap. Scrub your filthy nails. And come straight back when you’re done. What did I just say?” Frank hustled down the hall.
“If you can believe it, he took a bath this morning,” M. M. Banning said.
I shrugged. “He’s a kid.”
“Young Noël Coward in there was never a kid. Wait till he starts telling jokes. F.D.R. is in a lot of them.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. Once I took Frank to Disneyland with a boy from his class. We passed through a rough part of town down by the freeway, and the kid pointed to some guy on the street who looked like a drug dealer and said, ‘Look, a gangsta!’ Frank said, ‘Where? Is it Jimmy Cagney?’ White Heat was Frank’s favorite movie back then. For a while his idea of fun was sneaking up on me and yelling ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!’” Off my blank look she added, “That’s what Jimmy Cagney’s character shouts right before the cops blow him to kingdom come. It took Frank a couple of years to get tired of White Heat. I was glad when he moved on to Broadway Melody of 1940. Fred Astaire’s in that one. Eleanor Powell. That led him to My Man Godfrey with William Powell, who Frank likes to imagine is Eleanor Powell’s brother. After that, the Park Avenue accent started.”
“The kids at the private school where I taught in New York lived on Park Avenue but tried to talk like they were dealing crack on a corner in Bed-Stuy,” I said.
“I guess you’re trying to tell me to count my blessings. Where has Frank gotten off to? I’d better find him.” She hurried down the hall, leaving me to fend for myself.
I was glad to have a break. By then the piano had abandoned Scott Joplin for Rhapsody in Blue. I sat on the bench and became so entranced by the ghostly fingers working the keyboard that I was startled when Frank appeared at my elbow, smelling of soap and hair tonic, a combination I hadn’t smelled since I was a kid visiting my grandfather at an old folks home.
Frank’s face was shining and he wore a cravat and smoking jacket over a pair of flannel pajama pants with rockets on them. “My piano instructor is on vacation,” he said. He addressed this to my left eyebrow.
“I see,” I said. “So, Frank, you looked like you were having fun out there in the yard.”
“I like playing by myself. This piano plays by itself, too, did you notice? There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I think people pay extra for pianos that play by themselves,”