“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,” I said. “Can I offer you a seat?” I patted the bench. Frank climbed aboard and sat so close that you couldn’t have slipped dental floss between us. I scooted over a little to make more room for him and he scooted after me.
After an awkward silence I said, “I like this song.”
“It’s one of my favorites.”
“Do you play the piano?”
“I do,” he said. “Not like he does, of course.”
“Your teacher?”
“Gershwin. This computer program is based on a piano roll Gershwin cut. He made dozens of piano rolls but very few actual recordings.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It is a fact. I’m very good with facts. I refer, of course, to George Gershwin, not Ira. Ira was his older brother, born in 1896. George was born in 1898. Ira was the lyricist, which means he wrote the words. George composed the music. Friends thought George a hypochondriac until he suddenly died of a brain tumor here in Los Angeles in 1937 in the old Cedars Sinai hospital building, now owned by the Scientologists, who believe themselves to be more advanced humanoids from another planet come to rescue mankind from itself. Ira lived until 1983. Are you familiar with Fred Astaire?”
“I’m from Omaha,” I said.
Frank actually gasped. “Fred’s from Omaha,” he said.
“I know. That’s why I mentioned it.”
“When I was young I thought Fred was from England but my mother explained that actors in the talkies were trained to speak that way. Fred wrote in his memoirs that the last words George Gershwin spoke were his name, ‘Fred Astaire.’ Like Charles Foster Kane saying ‘Rosebud’ as he died in Citizen Kane. I am a devotee of film. Of mathematics, not so much.” Frank had a funny way of talking, as if he were reading off a teleprompter in the middle distance. He slipped his hand into mine then and gave me one of those luminously-trusting little kid smiles that melts the hearts of cynics in Hallmark commercials and makes us believe that, yes, a greeting card can bring the world together again, one family at a time.
He pressed his face against my shoulder and we held hands for a long time before I spoke again. “That’s some wingspan George had,” I said when the composer’s spectral fingers completed an Astaire-worthy tap dance from one end of the keyboard to the other. Then I got the bright idea of following Gershwin’s lead, took my hand from Frank’s, and arched my fingers over the keys.
“No!” M. M. Banning shouted from the hallway.
I snatched my hands away just in time to keep Frank from slamming the lacquered keyboard cover on them. M. M. Banning scuttled to the bench and wrapped herself around Frank, straitjacketing his arms to his sides. “There you are, Monkey,” she said.
“She was going to touch my piano,” Frank said. “We hardly know each other.”