Frank’s mother was M. M. Banning, the famous literary recluse.
Long before she’d become famous or a recluse, Frank’s mother or my boss, the nineteen-year-old version of M. M. Banning, a college dropout from Nowheresville, Alabama, wrote Pitched, a novel that won her a Pulitzer and a National Book Award by the time she turned twenty. It became the rare book—there must be only a handful—that still sells about a million copies a year, thirty years after its publication. Pitched revolved around a handsome, enigmatic, and unnamed baseball player who dazzled the world before going off his nut. It was short, simply written, and ended with someone dying, a magic combination that made it a fixture on every junior high school reading list in America. Over time the book became a touchstone for disaster, too, a handy symbol for anyone with a story about a failed athlete or other cursed soul. Toss a copy of Pitched on that character’s bedside table and the audience knows to think uh-oh.
After Pitched, M. M. Banning never wrote another word as far as anybody knew.
PART I
WHO IS FRANK?
June 2009
( 1 )
MIMI’S PRICKLY,” ISAAC Vargas told me when he asked if I’d go to California to work for M. M. Banning while she wrote her long-awaited second novel. I’d been his assistant for the past year at the publishing house in New York City that had brought out her literary blockbuster back in the late 1970s. As a junior editor, Mr. Vargas had pulled Pitched from a pile of unsolicited manuscripts and had been M. M. Banning’s editor ever since. In theory, anyway, since there had been no more manuscripts to edit after that first one. Or even much communication between the two of them. When she’d called, Mr. Vargas hadn’t talked to M. M. Banning since before I was born.
“Mimi’s in a tight spot. She has to get this novel written, and she has to do it fast,” he explained. She wanted an assistant to help her navigate computers and keep her household running until the book was finished. “She needs somebody smart and capable, someone we can trust. I thought of you, Alice.”
It was a lot to take in. Pitched had been my mother’s favorite book in the world. If I closed my eyes I could still see her girlhood copy of it. She’d handled that paperback so much its covers felt like they were made of cloth. Its yellowed pages had stiffened and were missing little triangles of paper that had gone brittle and broken off where she’d turned down corners. The blurb on the back cover read: A sensitive work of incredible insight, a writer of startling gifts. One of the premiere voices of this or any generation. An instant classic!
Underneath that was a photo of young M. M. Banning. Cropped carrot-red hair, big chocolate eyes behind heavy masculine glasses, wearing a cardigan sweater that engulfed her, looking more like a scrawny preteen boy in Dad’s clothes than a young woman on the cusp of her twenties. My mother was such a fan that she stole her father’s cardigans and glasses every Halloween in junior high so she could trick-or-treat as M. M. Banning. I think she would have dressed me in my father’s sweaters and eyeglasses, too, except by junior high my father wasn’t around for us to steal from.
“Ha!” Mr. Vargas said when I told him about my mother. “What’s funny is that Mimi borrowed my glasses and sweater for that photo shoot because she didn’t like anything the stylist brought for her to wear. She told the hair and makeup person to give her a crew cut. ‘What you want is a pixie,’ the woman told her. ‘No. What I want is to look like a writer,’ Mimi said. ‘Not like some girl who got elected to homecoming court to make the prom queen look prettier.’ When I told her I loved the photograph, Mimi said, ‘You know who’ll hate it? My mother. That’s what I like best about it.’”
“Did her mother hate it?”
“I don’t think her mother ever saw it,” Mr. Vargas said. He stroked the stubble on his chin and looked out the window. “Listen, don’t tell Mimi any of that business about your mother. She has a complicated relationship with her fans. And her mom. I think there are times when she wishes she’d never written that novel. Which reminds me. Did I tell you Mimi has a kid now? Named Frank. First I’ve heard of him. Imagine that.”
In the foreword of the latest edition of Pitched that I bought at the airport bookstore to reread on the plane to California, scholars floated many theories about what had silenced one of the premiere voices of this or any generation. M. M. Banning hated writing. Loved writing, but hated critics. Felt suffocated by her sudden, outsized fame and wanted no more of it. Had stored up a trove of manuscripts to be published after her death, when she’d be past caring what anybody else thought about her. Hadn’t written the book in the first place—that it had been a sort of long-form suicide note penned by her brilliant, dead brother.