“She said if I applied myself I could make good grades like I did in high school when you were doing my homework.”
“She doesn’t know I was doing your homework.”
“No, but I do. It’s hopeless, Mimi. Mother said we aren’t the kind of people who have sons who grow up to play sports and marry movie stars. We’re the kind of people who have sons who make good grades and grow up to be doctors.”
Mimi couldn’t help noticing that no mention was made of what kind of daughters their kind of people had. But in fairness this story wasn’t about her.
“Did she say anything else?”
“She said if she was going to have a son who was going to grow up to be Joe DiMaggio, she might as well have married Elvis.”
Mimi could never quite figure out that line of reasoning. But she couldn’t help wondering if marrying Elvis had ever been an option for Banning. Every time her mother mentioned the splash she’d made with Elvis, which was often, it made Mimi remember overhearing Banning on the telephone, saying to one of her friends what a shame it was that Julian was beautiful and could have his pick of the girls if he’d just show any interest, but Mimi, bless her heart, was such a homely, frowny-faced runt that nobody would ever want her. She’d have to get a job. Banning said “job” like it was “leprosy.”
“You have to help me, Mimi,” Julian said.
“I don’t know,” Mimi said. “Sounds like you may have to figure this one out for yourself. I have a paper to write. Nobody is going to write it for me.”
“I’ve figured this one out already. I want to play baseball. I’ll die if I can’t play.”
Julian was staring at her. Mimi knew that numb look, that posture, that set of the jaw. When he got like that he couldn’t be reasoned with. At least he was still on the chair. Sometimes when he got especially mulish, Julian would lie on the floor and refuse to budge. Mimi was only about half his size now, so that was the last thing she wanted to let happen.
“You’ll be fine. Daddy survived the Marne. You’ll make it through this.”
Julian didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, it seemed like a non sequitur. “Those girls out there didn’t believe I was your brother,” he said. “They said if you had a brother, they would know about it.”
“So? I don’t have to tell everybody everything.”
When Julian didn’t say anything else she picked up her book again and went back to reading. She hoped he’d get bored and leave. If he didn’t, well, he could spend the night on her roommate’s bed and she’d worry about him in the morning.
As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary. After a few minutes of sitting there while Mimi studiously ignored him, Julian got up and left. She didn’t realize he hadn’t left by the door but had chosen instead to step out a window in her suite that looked over a quadrangle six stories below until she heard a tangle of voices far away, and then a siren.
“I never told those girls I had a brother,” Mimi told me. “And then I didn’t have one.”
WHEN MIMI AND I got to the emergency room admissions desk, she tried to tell them why she was there. “My son—” she said, and the rest of the sentence stuck in her throat. It happened over and over. “My son—” she’d say, and choke.
Finally I put my hand on her arm and said, “Our son Frank Banning came here in an ambulance. We just got a call from his school.”
I said that without thinking. I suppose the office lady we didn’t know planted that idea in my head. The way it flowered turned out to be a thing of beauty. At the hospital, of course, they wouldn’t let anybody beyond the swinging doors who wasn’t a member of the immediate family.
The clerk at the admissions desk checked her roster. “You got here fast,” she said. “His ambulance hasn’t arrived yet. You should think about driving ambulances yourself.”
( 19 )
UNTIL HE WAS stabilized, the clerk told us, only one parent could go behind the swinging doors to meet Frank as they wheeled him from the ambulance to the emergency room.
“You go.” Mimi’s lips barely moved when she said it. She was pale and still and had her fists clenched in her lap and her eyes closed.