Mia leaned forward in her chair. “Boy, don’t you get it? When I started searching, I started with the rat catcher. I thought I could find your mother through him, and that turned out to be true. I searched public records for anything connected to Frank Novak and Francis Novak and Frantisek Novak and I found a few, but none that led me to that address on Rutgers Street that my pal mailed that money to years ago. I went down to New York for two weeks and pestered poor innocent Francises and Frantiseks. I stood outside the brownstone you grew up in, trying to switch on X-ray vision. I looked up your birth certificate—”
“I haven’t got a birth certificate.” I’d been proud of that, having to enroll at high school with an affidavit sworn by the rat catcher that he was my father and that I’d been born on the date he said I’d been born on.
“It’s on record that you have. But this is stuff you could’ve looked up if you’d wanted to . . . anyhow, your birth certificate says your mother is Frances Novak and your father is unnamed. The Frank Novak who raised you doesn’t officially exist.”
“Doesn’t exist?”
“Not officially.”
I cackled. I couldn’t help it. She didn’t know what she was saying.
“Keep hearing me out. I’m not just talking out of my ass here. I did a lot of work on this and I can show you all the paperwork. That’s why I haven’t been around much. Maybe you thought I was moping. Maybe I hardly crossed your mind. Anyhow, my earlier searches came to nothing because I’d been looking for men. Frances Amelia Novak was born in Brooklyn in 1902. Her father, Sandor, was a Hungarian immigrant, a concert cellist turned delivery-truck driver, and her mother, Dinah, was an Irish-American seamstress who made these quilts . . . I went to see one of them at the folk art museum, the tiny one in Midtown. It was art, what your grandma made. Frances was a scamp with a knockout smile—”
Mia was showing me a series of xeroxed photographs. Oh, God.
“And she was super, super smart. It was a pretty mixed neighborhood—linguistically, I mean—the warmest reception a colored messenger boy would get around there in those days were questions like ‘Do you think this is Harlem?’ But Frances picked up snippets of Czech and Dutch from the neighbors, as well as speaking Magyar, her father’s first language, fluently. She brought out the best side of her more idealistic teachers, made them feel that she had just the kind of intellect they’d got into teaching to help develop. She’d ask for additional reading and extra assignments. You’d think the other kids would’ve hated her, but they were glad for her, voted her Most Likely to Succeed. She made it into Barnard on a scholarship, got her BS in her chosen field of psychology, embarked on postgraduate research, maybe with a view to becoming a faculty member . . . that’s what she told her friends, anyway. She knew that the first female member of the psych faculty had been taken on less than five years ago, and they’d taken her on as an unpaid lecturer. She knew that she’d need more than just a flair for the subject, more than just curiosity, she’d need to be utterly single-minded in her pursuit of a faculty position, and the research itself meant more to her than that. She was interested in sexuality. More specifically, she was interested in proving that homosexuality isn’t a mental illness. But she never finished her paper—”
“How do you know what she thought and what she was interested in?”
“I met four of her former girlfriends for coffee, and they all brought letters with them. Letters she’d written to them when they were all at Barnard together. I’d thought the friendships were platonic, but the letters get pretty raunchy in places, and all three of the ex-girlfriends said, ‘Yes, yes, we were true friends, but we were lovers as well, you know’—these serene intellectual women who only really get bashful about abstract theory. They brought me photos too. Look at her. Apparently impressionable young woman after impressionable young woman would just up and leave their boyfriends for her. I know she’s your mother, but you get the appeal, right? I don’t know when Frances started expressing a preference for females, but it was most certainly by the time she was in the final year of her BS studies.”
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—”
“Stop calling her ‘him.’ You’re telling me my mother has been desperately ill for decades and I’m fighting like hell to take it in, but you’ve got to stop calling her ‘him.’”
“I don’t know that I can. As it stands right now he’s been Frank longer than he was Frances. It’s gone beyond alter egos. Boy, I’ve been reading medical monographs about people whose alleged alter egos have different blood types from theirs—one guy’s alter ego was diabetic, and he wasn’t—or he was the alter ego and the diabetic was the ‘true’ personality—who’s to say? When those kinds of biological facts start coming in, you have to ask if becoming someone else is more than some delusion or some dysfunction of the mind. What I mean to say is that Frank’s personality is pretty awful—he tried to hit me when I told him I was going to tell this story, but he wasn’t fast enough—but he’s awfully sane. Well, maybe not when it comes to thinking of names. He says he almost named you Pup.”
“Mia.”
She took my hands, and kissed them. “Boy.”
“Please don’t write about this. Find someone else to write about.”
“I’m sorry, cara. I don’t expect you to understand this, but I have to tell. You know, Bird sent me something in the mail a few days ago. Some notes she’d made while Frank was talking to her over lunch.”
“What?”
“He said some stuff to her that’s probably going to upset you—no, he didn’t threaten her. I think he was actually trying to tell. Trying to tell her what he had agreed to come down here and tell you.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” I said.
“I’m sorry it’s like this. You’ve got a daughter who has to know and a friend who would do anything for you apart from not telling. This can’t be what you signed up for.” She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back.
“Do you think Frances is gone forever?”
“Boy . . . you know I can’t answer that . . . I never met her.”
I don’t know why that was a comfort, but it was.