'My Mother Has Become a Frail'

Years ago I encountered frail used as a noun meaning a woman in some hard-boiled crime novel. I suspected a typo. Seldom has as an adjective-turned-noun seemed less convincing. I’ve known few frail women other than my grandmother in her final years, and the word could be applied only to her physical condition. Cab Calloway in “Minnie the Moocher” sings: “She was the roughest, toughest frail / But Minnie had a heart as big as a whale.” Raymond Chandler uses it in The Big Sleep (1939):

“The bartender leaned beside me watching the cluster of well-dressed people at the middle table. ‘She’s pickin’ ’em tonight, right on the nose,’ he said. ‘That tall, black-headed frail.’”

The OED give fives citations for this use of frail, none of them flattering. A poet about whom I know nothing applies the word to her aged mother and thus reclaims it. Beth Brooke precedes “Leaf Skeleton” with a definition I can’t otherwise find: “Frail (n): the name given to a leaf when the flesh has rotted away and only the network of veins remains.” Here’s the poem:

“aged ninety-four, my mother

has become a frail. her skin,

thinned to the point of disintegration

reveals the map of her veins,

the network of capillary threads

that keep her whole.

her bones have become chalk.

a fragile skeleton, delicate

as the leaves that lie

on the brink of becoming earth.

frail. gently, carefully I

explore the word: frail.

my mother has become a frail.”

[ADDENDUM: Dave Lull found an interesting Twitter thread about frail by the English naturalist and writer Rob Macfarlane.]