“Close. Twenty-four. How did you know?”
“Dr. Abrams says that’s when the prefrontal cortex usually finishes developing. That’s the part of your brain that controls impulsivity. According to her forecast, by the time I’m twenty-five I’ll be old enough to know better. If we’re lucky. It might happen later, when I’m thirty. Or never. Some people’s prefrontal cortexes mature earlier than others. Women’s, mostly. Debbie Reynolds was a teenager when she made Singin’ in the Rain, for example. Look at this.” Frank stopped flipping pages to show me a photo of a gray horse. “That’s Zephyr. He belonged to Uncle Julian. My grandmother said that while there was breath in her body Julian would never get behind the wheel of a car, so she got Zephyr to take him everywhere he needed to go. I wish I had a horse. Horses were native to the North American continent until the last Ice Age. The Spanish conquistadors reintroduced them and the Native Americans were glad. Until they got to know the downside of horses.”
“What’s the downside of horses?”
“The Spanish conquistadors.”
“That’s funny,” I said.
“What’s funny?”
“What you just said.”
“Why?”
“I thought you were going to tell me something else about horses. I didn’t see ‘the Spanish conquistadors’ coming.”
“Neither did the Native Americans.”
“Good point. Hey, want to hear a joke my boss in New York told me about a horse?”
“Yes.”
“A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Hey, buddy, why the long face?’”
When I didn’t elaborate, Frank said, “Then what?”
“Then nothing. That’s the whole joke. ‘Hey, buddy, why the long face?’”
“I don’t understand.”
“Horses have long faces.” I motioned with my hands to stretch my own face to a horsier length that ended someplace around my belly button. “Get it?”
“No,” Frank said. “If I had a horse, I would name him Tony.”
So much for jokes. “Tony?” I asked politely.
“Cowboy star Tom Mix’s horse was named Tony. His hoofprints are in the cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre. My grandparents fenced their yard and turned the garage into a stable for Uncle Julian’s horse. Then my grandmother wrecked her car into said fence. She was going fast and wasn’t wearing a safety belt so she went through the windshield and died. Zephyr ran away through the broken place in the fence. They found him the next day standing in somebody’s peony bed all the way across town.” Frank turned another page. “Since he was in a bed I imagine Zephyr asleep and wearing a flannel nightcap. Horses sleep standing up, did you know that? This is my uncle Julian.” He pointed to a photo of a young man in a pair of embroidered jeans and a bead necklace, no shirt, a cigarette tucked behind his ear, sitting on a fence I suspected of being said fence. He had a tooled leather bag strapped across his muscular chest and long blond hair with sideburns like people wore during the Summer of Love, plus an incandescently beautiful face a lot like Frank’s grandmother’s, circa Elvis.
“Wow,” I said. “He’s a handsome guy.”
“Was. He’s dead, too.”
“What happened to him?”
“He fell out of a window when he was visiting my mother at college.”
“Oh,” I said. Ohhh. “How?”
Shrug. “I don’t know. He got kicked out of the college he was going to for making all Fs. He was probably so busy thinking about how he’d tell his mother that he didn’t notice the floor had ended. In my head it plays out kind of like Wile E. Coyote stepping off a cliff he hadn’t seen coming. Do you want to see a picture of my mother’s father? He’s dead, too, just so you know.”
He showed me a picture of a distinguished-looking young man in a military uniform. “My grandfather was a doctor, also named Frank. Which is a nickname for Francis. My mother named me after my grandfather and my uncle because she says she has always had a hard time coming up with names. Dr. Frank volunteered as a field surgeon in World War I before the United States entered that war, then known as the Great War. Because nobody could foresee the Second World War coming yet, although given the enormous reparations the world community forced on Germany after it lost the first war and the resentment that financial burden engendered, the world community should have known.”
“What happened to Dr. Frank?”
“Cerebral hemorrhage. In layman’s parlance, his head exploded. My mom’s whole family died within a year or so of each other, but her father lived the longest. He was born in 1894 and died in 1976. It was a first-in, last-out kind of a thing.”