It might not be true and does not much matter. But I remember him as a boy with curly hair. Frankie, everyone called him then. Brightly in my mind's eye, however, I see him in places we shared. Conversations will not come back because there were few. To ponder these many years later why the boy who became the poet Frank Stanford remembered me is to wonder if our tendencies toward silence were a bond between us I did not realize existed. Nothing could have startled me more than that he dedicated work to me.

In the summer of 1964, 1 was thirty-five and still feeling my way as a writer: inwardly attuned and outwardly coping with being a wife, housekeeper, and the mother of two sons, then eight and nine. Even so young they were my buffers against the world. I travelled behind their lively personalities, keeping my solitude. That summer Frankie was fourteen. With my sons I visited for a month, doing research that became my second novel. In the household also were his sister Ruth, not blood-related, and their adoptive mother, Dorothy. The house was fashioned for informality and, perched at the end of a point of land called Mallard Point, in the Arkansas Ozarks, was surrounded on two sides by a lake. I remember my sons' disappointment at not being able to shoot their BB guns in what seemed country. The lake created activity, swimming, boating and water-skiing. My research consisted of scattered conversations with Dorothy Stanford, something important perhaps surfacing while we were drying dishes. 1 do not remember writing on my book at all, and the only typing was a book review for Life magazine. If I was Frankie's first introduction to a writer, it was not a fair picture. I was not behind closed doors often.

I asked my sons what they remember and they say, Mom! we were kids. Yet in their brief glimpses something is to be learned, for Frankie could well have ignored them as pests. They remember breaking his good guitar and that he didn't get mad, that he took them on his boat and taught them to fish, and that once he had them down on his bed hitting them with a pillow and, swinging it, broke the ceiling light. And that I remember: coming in from an adjoining bedroom at the sound of shattering glass. And I see him again still kneeling, pillow in hand, lightly smiling and afraid I've come angry because of his roughhousing. He had cut his arm, and my youngest son laughs, aping Frankie's thick Southern accent when be asked his sister for a Band-Aid and recalls the natural, healthy carping between them about who was going to get it.

Quiet: but I never once thought of him as an unhappy boy. He would look at me directly though shyly, and usually wearing a little smile that strikes me afterward too as containing something of uncertainty. Only now can I think the smile perhaps indicative that he was listening already to some other, interior self. My impression mostly was of a sturdy, muscular boy, busy with a summer job on the lake. Our memories are scanty because like any boy his age he was not around a lot. I do not recall books in the house, unless there were a few in shelves on either side of a stone fireplace in the large main room. And I do not recall books in Frankie's room. There was nothing to make me expect to receive poems one day with an inscription across the top: You never knew I was in the next room writing too.

Talk was not of writers or writing and no one knew I knew William Faulkner. It would not have occurred to me the boy Frankie would have been interested, or known who the man was, anyway. And it did not occur to me unhappiness would strike us all too soon.

My boys' father came for a short visit. His memory? Frankie met him almost at the front door with a box of elaborate fishing tackle, asking questions Mr. Bowen could not answer. He sensed disappointment, felt Frankie veer off, and does not remember any contact afterward. Ezra was then an editor of Sports Illustrated, and I feel Frankie had an idealized vision not only of a New York editor but particularly one from a sports magazine, being so physical himself. I knew Frankie was adopted, but perhaps Ezra did not know the similarity in their backgrounds. His parents divorced when he was three and his father never saw him again and died when Ezra was eighteen. I had seen the toll that blankness took. And much older, Frankie would think of moving to New York and ask if he could contact Mr. Bowen: whether to ask for a job, or merely about the city I don't know. But I remember being glad that Frankie never made the move. glad he wisely stayed with what he did know had formed him: that land, those mountains, and the people he had known always.

I was a teen-ager when I first heard about a baby named Frank Stanford. I never asked Dorothy until after his death if Frankie knew he was adopted. She had thought he had always known: had made it clear from the beginning that he was a chosen child. and grafted into her familv from the minute he was born. Then. unexpectedly,he came home in high school one day and asked if she'd adopted him. And after that, she said, he never seemed the same again.

The man for whom he was named, the only father he ever knew, was an older friend of my father's. He was called "Mister Frank" by even his peers, out of respect. When he came to our house I was impressed by this tall. spare. silver-haired and soft-spoken gentleman. He was the only friend my father had who I knew had been to college. An engineer, Mister Frank helped build the levee system along the Mississippi River in the Mid-South as we know it today. My father sold him dynamite and did blasting for him. My second novel was to be about my father. and I had come to Dorothy for information about those days. Levee camps were tough places, and people in them rough. Mister Frank seemed the antithesis of his working world. Heat was nearly tropical, and there were tents to live in, mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and a few white faces among many black ones. Into this environment Frankie came as a baby. After his first wife's death, Mister Frank married Dorothy, who already had her two adopted babies, unusual for a single woman in that time. Not many women could have endured camp life the way she did, loved it even. But in the wintertime the Stanfords lived in a fine house in Memphis.

My first memory of Dorothy and of Frankie was when he was nine or ten. The levee camp days were over; mv father was dead; I was visitng in Memphis with thoughts of my novel vague. One evening I went to a Little League game with the Stanfords, and Frankie hit his first home run! Afterward we gathered about him excitedly, and I see that half-smile on the face of a tired, dusty boy, pleased with himself.

Dorothy was such a warm, loving person that that evening she brought me to tears. Simply, she suffused me with a sense of caring that I had missed in my childhood and looked for still. There was the same age difference. between us as between Frankie and me. Gossip had reached my teen-age ears, and I knew she gave Mister Frank a love and warmth he had not had before, either. My voice broke when I tried to congratulate him on having her. 'Dorothy affects everyone that way,' he said in his quiet manner. 'She is a wonderful woman.'

Next I see them all at Mallard Point, on an overnight visit, after Mister Frank has retired there. In that memory Frankie is truly only a boy in the background, coming and going. Not only is Mister Frank old but ill, walking with one foot shuffling ahead of the other, listing slightly backward, and leaning totally for support on Dorothy. She nursed him with wonderful patience. Yet I could feel glad for them, because their love and respect for one another was something to be envied. It was that example Frankie had before him, growing up in a house without strife. I did think, though, ahout my boys and their relationship with their father, and how hard it was for the boy there to have a father not only so old but dying before his eyes.

By the time of my long visit, the next summer, Frankie is the man in the household. Only Mr. Bowen's brief visit gave him respite from taking us out on the boat when anyone wanted to go. One afternoon Mr. Bowen pulled up to a pier and Frankie appeared to pump our gas. The boys and I exclaimed in surprise: meaning, here's where Frankie disappears to everyday! I recall him as saying nothing but wearing his same slight smile, perhaps saying a great deal, but seeming only pleased too by our surprise, and discovery.

In back, there was a patio where Dorothy and I often sat alone in the evenings, watching stars and a light that circled at regular intervals.

Those who lived there and saw it regularly claimed it was a UFO. It was a pleasant time for the adults, when everyone was fed and the house settled. On a wall in my house now there is a picture taken on that patio. Two small brothers have their arms ahout one another and are smiling and holding up fishing rods. Behind them the lake is so intensely blue it seems to be dancing, despite having been stilled permanently in the sunlight by the camera. Ill winds had not yet blown in to touch us. The little boys had no idea that within a few years their parents would divorce rather unthinkingly: lives gone atilt would never right themselves in the same way again. Nothing told us of Frankie's incipient genius, or that tragedy lay ahead for those who knew him. For is it tragedy for him if he chooses to leave us? Those closest knew, aftenward, the times he was saying so painstakingly goodbye.

After Mallard Point I saw him only once again, in the early 1970's. Re-married, I was living on a plantation in Mississippi. With his wife Ginny and a fnend, Frankie came to intenview me while doing a documentary on women writers. He was striking in a white suit and a panama hat, and when he came in I thought that I shouldn't call him Frankie anymore. When my oldest son came downstairs Frankie said, Why, I can't get over Ezra! And I laughed and told him that was the same way I felt about seeing him after so many years. Then it was hot October and intermittently there were shots in the milky air, and a dove hunt was going on nearby. The interview took place outdoors and the visitors could not stay afterward. Ginny and the friend went ahead, and Frankie purposefully lingered so that we were alone. Perhaps in that lingering there was some attempt to recapture that other time, when Mister Frank was alive, and my father, and there were dynamiting days on the levee. He wanted to go and find all the old levee people he could, black and white, and capture their memories on tape before they were gone, and promised to take me with him. Then without prompting he began to tell me how happy he was! That with Ginny he had the relationship with a woman he'd longed for. And I see him moving about as if he needed exertion to tell me the final summation about his life: everything was going well and far better than he could ever have dreamed. When he left I was filled with so much happiness, thinking how far he had come.

I cannot remember whether I heard from him again. But a few years later I was living in Connecticut and opened a letter from Ginny which explained about his death. and enclosed an obituary. Long afterward Dorothy would cry in her mother's anguish, Oh, didn't he know when he killed himself he killed me too!

My God: Frankie, I thought: and felt so much guilt. Had he, in sending me poems and a short story over the years, been asking something which I in my replies did not give? It is a natural reaction to someone's suicide to think, Where did I fail? What could I have done? Though, finally, absolving myself of guilt, and no longer even asking why, I only hope Frank found what he wanted. And maybe that was not even peace, but who he was. At last.

Joan Williams