"Be Frank With Me"

Julia Claiborne Johnson must know how irresistible young, eccentric geniuses are to read about. The other half of the pleasure of this book is listening to narrator Tavia Gilbert doing Frank's young Spock voice.

• “You realize now,” my professor commented drily, “that youth isn’t wasted on the young. Literature is.”
• but I’ve found the best way to handle anyone difficult—rich worrywart moms, the famished Manhattan vegan ordering a late lunch—is to exude the bland calm of the heavily medicated and go about my business.
• “I have uncanny intuition unencumbered by the editorial reflex,” he said. “I heard Dr. Abrams explain it that way to my mother when I pressed my ear to the door during one of their marathon discussions. My mother’s response was, ‘Where I come from we call that tactless.’ Can you tell me what she meant by that? I have tacks. Quite a nice collection, in many colors.
• 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.”
• “My mother says my brain is so full of facts that there’s no room for nuance.
• I decided then that the kid was not so much evil as a clumsy, sweet-natured boy whose whole body seemed to be made of thumbs.
• “As Webster’s Third is taken, I will call my book I Shall Commute by Submarine.”
• Bedtime Story as Destiny, I used to call it. And here we had another case in point: Frank, a snappy little dresser given to mood swings, scarves, and non sequiturs, just visiting our world from a small, eccentric planet of his own. ("The Little Prince")
• Happiness, I’d noticed, was a facial expression that almost came naturally to him. Fear, discomfort, confusion—those made him roll down the shades and bar the door. Which said a lot for Frank, if you ask me. Say you had to pick just one emotion you could convey to others easily. I’d like to think I’d go with happiness, too.
• “I have an idea,” Frank said. He disappeared down the hall. I gave chase as he beelined to the laundry room drawers where—Eureka!—he found a nine-volt battery and a roll of wire. Then he beat it back to the living room, where he took the round-tipped scissors from his bathrobe pocket—when did he palm those?—and cut a couple of pieces of wire, wrapped one around each of the batteries’ terminals, and touched the loose ends against each other. The touch produced a spark that made the paper catch fire. “You’re a genius, Frank,” I said. “How did you think of doing that?” “Oh, I do it in my room all the time,” he said.
• “That’s why Xander calls me ‘Jeopardy,’” Frank was telling Dr. Abrams forty-five minutes later, when the two of them emerged from the inner office. “Because you know all the answers.” “Yes. Also because I am dangerous to be around. That’s what is known as a double entendre, a French term meaning ‘a word or phrase that can be taken two ways.’ If he were referring only to the scope of my knowledge, Xander said he’d just call me ‘Quiz Show.’”
• the Norton Simon Museum, which brought us to the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Gettys Bel Air and Malibu, the Adamson Tile House, the Gamble House, the Jesse Lasky Hollywood Heritage Museum,
• “Xander looks like this guy, ‘In the Manner of Apollo, Greek, 300 to 100 B.C.’ Except Xander isn’t missing any of his fingers. His hair is blond, like yours. He isn’t made out of stone. He’s wearing more clothes.”
• back in Manhattan. I missed the unpredictable cocktail of people everywhere you looked.
• “Don’t do that, Frank. It worries people. What’s wrong with you?” “The jury’s still out on that one,” Frank said.


• If you raise one eyebrow on the angry face like this”—he demonstrated—“you’re ‘skeptical.’ ‘Pleased’ looks like this.” He relaxed his eyebrows, crinkled his eyes, and shaped his mouth into a smile. “I thought the whole exercise tedious until Dr. Abrams pointed out that the greats of the silent era were masters of these subtleties of facial expression.”
• What you’re doing now,” Frank told his mother, tipping his head to one side as she had, “turns ‘pleased’ into ‘tender.’”
• “He’s getting pretty big himself,” I said. “You say that like it’s a good thing.” “Isn’t it?” “Not for someone like Frank. Kids like him have their charm when they’re little. But they grow up, the magic wears off, and they’re just bigger and lonelier and living in their mother’s basement.
• If my mother should ask, Alice, please tell her the only thing I threw today was my body onto the floor.”
• “Hey, what did the skeleton say when he walked into the bar?” “I don’t know.” “I’ll have a beer and a mop.”
• “I’ve been observing your technique and have come to the conclusion that oils are not your first love,” he said. “I thought you might be more comfortable doing something more impressionistic, maybe along the lines of this sketch writ large and brightened with a watercolor wash. There are some Auguste Rodin portraits done that way that I’m very fond of.”
• Everything except for the mustaches. Those she wrapped very nicely, adding a typed tag that read: “For Frank, With Love, From Alice.” Frank was so delighted with the mustaches that he put on three right away. One on his lip and the other two over his eyebrows. After that he said he would like for me to hug him and he stood there without flinching while I did it.
• “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”
• He was a beautiful child, really. Just handsome enough to catch a few extra breaks in life, but not handsome enough to be hamstrung by it. It was the way Frank packaged himself that pushed him over into the spectacular. That nobody could take from him, no matter how many small-minded men in horrible shoes might try.
• “Frank couldn’t wear his armor today,” Xander said. “Facts were all the protection he had. Facts were his force field.”
• “She’s fond of it because it belonged to Uncle Julian. She says the illustrations are the best thing about it anyway. Her capsule review of the story is ‘Waiting for Godot, le Junior Edition. Snore.’ She says the word snore because sometimes loud noises like actual snores can startle me.”
• Just as I turned to sneak a look, Mr. Vargas said, “You could never disappoint me, Mimi. Look at you. You’re just the same as ever. Except for this.” He touched her one white eyebrow with a fingertip. Instead of answering, she reached up, closed her hand over his, and held it against her cheek.
• “For once, it’s a good thing you were wearing shorts, Alice,” he said. “Because if you’d had on long pants, they’d be torn all to pieces. That would have been bad. Pants don’t heal the way skin does.”
• “I may not have stayed here as long as Dr. Livingstone lived in Africa,” I said to Frank as he pushed the dirt back in the hole with a triangular pie server and used that to pat it smooth, “but this heart of mine still belongs here with you. Since, you know, I’m still using the real one.” Frank sat back on his heels and stared at the ground so long that I worried he was tuning up to cry. Until he said, “We need to put something heavy over this so the raccoons don’t dig that heart up.”
• Mimi and Frank gave him broken things to fix so he could feel like he was taking care of them. He had them to circle back to when his life felt like it didn’t add up to all that much. Mimi and Frank would keep Xander from disappearing, and he’d do the same for them.
• That, and the fact that Thomas Edison would send out flunkies to bust up your cameras if you tried to set up shop on the East Coast in violation of one of his thousand or so movie patents.
• I always made Frank swear to wait for me in the kitchen, but he’d trail me in the hall like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, pressing himself into doorways to hide if I happened to look over my shoulder. After I put the tray down and knocked, I’d hear a mad scramble behind me as Frank hotfooted it back to the kitchen. I’d count to ten before I returned to give him time to arrange himself under the table with a book and catch his breath. Then we’d have a cookie.