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Pennington in
My Darling, Come Hither,
where she played to perfection a spoiled young socialite. It was a veiled come-hither hat that she was well known for wearing when she stood before the microphone, script in hand, performing on
The American Radio Theater,
though she had also been photographed before a radio microphone in slouch-brimmed felts, in pillboxes, in Panama straw hats, and once, when she was a guest on
The Bob Hope Show,
my mother remembered, in a black straw saucer seductively veiled with gossamer silk thread. My mother told us that Eve Frame was six years older than Iron Rinn, that her hair grew an inch a month and she lightened its color for the Broadway stage, that her daughter, Sylphid, was a harpist, a Juilliard graduate, and the offspring of Eve Frame's marriage to Carlton Pennington.
    "Who cares?" my father said. "Nathan does," my mother replied defensively. "Iron Rinn is Mr. Ringold's brother. Mr. Ringold is his
idol.
"
    My parents had seen Eve Frame in silent movies when she was a beautiful girl. And she was still beautiful; I knew because, four years earlier, for my eleventh birthday, I had been taken to see my first Broadway play—
The Late George Apley
by John P. Marquand—and Eve Frame was in it, and afterward my father, whose memories of Eve Frame as a young silent-film actress were still apparently amorously tinged, had said, "That woman speaks the King's English like nobody's business," and my mother, who may or may not have grasped what was fueling his praise, had said, "Yes, but she's let herself go. She speaks beautifully, and she did the part beautifully, and she looked adorable in that short pageboy, but the extra pounds are not becoming on a little thing like Eve Frame, certainly not in a fitted white piqué summer dress, full skirt or no full skirt."
    A discussion as to whether or not Eve Frame was Jewish invariably occurred among the women in my mother's mahjong club when it was my mother's turn to have them for their weekly game, and particularly after the evening a few months later when I had been a guest of Ira's at Eve Frame's dinner table. The starstruck world round the starstruck boy couldn't stop talking about the fact that people said her real name was Fromkin. Chava Fromkin. There were Fromkins in Brooklyn who were supposed to be the family she had disowned when she went to Hollywood and changed her name.
    "Who cares?" my serious-minded father would say whenever the subject came up and he happened to be passing through the living room, where the mahjong game was in progress. "They all change their names in Hollywood. That woman opens her mouth and it's an elocution lesson. She gets up on that stage and portrays a lady, you
know
it's a lady."
    "They say she's from Flatbush," Mrs. Unterberg, who owned the millinery shop, would routinely put in. "They say that her father is a kosher butcher."
    "They say Cary Grant is Jewish," my father reminded the ladies. "The fascists used to say that
Roosevelt
was Jewish. People say everything. That's not what I'm concerned with. I'm concerned with her
acting,
which in my book is superlative."
    "Well," said Mrs. Svirsky, who with her husband owned the dress shop, "Ruth Tunick's brother-in-law is married to a Fromkin, a Newark Fromkin. And she has relatives in Brooklyn, and they swear their cousin is Eve Frame."
    "What does Nathan say?" asked Mrs. Kaufman, a housewife and a girlhood friend of my mother's.
    "He doesn't," my mother replied. I had trained her to say that I didn't. How? Easy. When she had asked, on behalf of the ladies, if I knew whether Eve Frame of
The American Radio Theater
was, in actuality, Chava Fromkin of Brooklyn, I had told her, "Religion is the opiate of the people! Those things don't matter—I don't care. I don't know and I don't care!"
    "What is it like there? What did she wear?" Mrs. Unterberg asked my mother.
    "What did she serve?" Mrs. Kaufman asked.
    "How was her hair done?" Mrs. Unterberg asked.
    "Is he