Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  She introduced herself as Margery Oakes, wife of the Times’s editorial page editor, John Oakes, and looked at me curiously. “I saw that you came with my friend Bob Morgenthau. Do you work for him?”

  I was saved by a commotion at the door. The elusive Jackie Kennedy Onassis had walked in. The general public had seen the president’s widow only through blurry sneak photographs the paparazzi had taken of her on her new husband’s yacht. After JFK’s assassination, she had absented herself from society, fled to Greece, and married a Greek shipping magnate named Ari Onassis who had the money to buy her privacy. Now that she was separated from him, she would make rare appearances.

  This was a debut of sorts. She looked radiant, elegant, understated in a simple white suit. The sophisticated mouths of the society ladies fell open and smiled dumbly at her.

  I looked up at Bob. He was smiling too. But not at Jackie.

  A weight fell through me. I took a deep breath and then another. Then I smiled back at him.

  I was confused, but happily so. Being the kind of obsessive who could fail to notice that my own shadow was leaving without me, I had been blind to the purpose of this evening. Or at least I think I had. I assumed Bob wanted to propose a news story and was irritated that he had chosen this intimidating milieu to do it in.

  Only in passing had I thought of Bob Morgenthau as a romantic figure. We had never socialized, and romance wasn’t a consideration given our ages. But when we left the party early to eat at a restaurant that had zebras on the red walls, I knew it wasn’t a news story that he had on his mind. I felt weird: the tablecloth was like velvet, the ordinary silverware had a peculiar shine, and the salt and pepper shakers made me unaccountably happy. Every time I looked up, he was smiling at me, and that smile caused me to feel a little chiming in my toes.

  He had ordered a good deal of wine, and after dinner I stopped listening to him and just enjoyed the sound of his mellifluous voice swirling in my ears. I knew he was presenting some exegesis on the folly of my departure from New York for Telluride. But I was captivated by the zebras that were now jumping up and down on the walls. How dense I had been! All that attention from Bob at the Times, what had I thought it was about? He could have leaked political stories to any journalist in the city, but he had chosen me. He had, in his own backhanded way, been wooing me. How typical, though, of Bob Morgenthau that he would wait until the last possible moment, the night before I was to leave New York forever, to make his big move.

  He hailed a taxi, and when we got to my street, I said goodbye and climbed out. As I walked down my very dark street, East Eighty-First, I heard footsteps close behind me. I walked more quickly and then raised my hand, as I always did when I felt threatened, shouting, “Butch! Billy! There you are!”

  Suddenly Bob was beside me. “You have friends down there?” he asked.

  “You!” I exclaimed. He had apparently gotten out of the other side of the taxi. “No, I just heard footsteps and got scared. That’s the way I protect myself.”

  “I just run down the curb as fast as I can,” he replied, adding that I shouldn’t be out after dark anyway.

  And then we were at my building entrance. “Well, thank you again, Bob,” I said, this time shaking his hand. But he continued to follow me through the glass doors and into the elevator. I said nothing. He said nothing. I kept my eyes on the industrial carpet beneath our feet, but when the lift reached my floor, I looked up and there was that adorable little smile.

  As he followed me out of the elevator, I thought, “What nerve! I’m not falling for this,” and I began devising a way to outsmart him. Maybe I could lure him down the hall, telling him there was a painting I wanted to show him, and then tear back to my apartment and slam the door. I was different from my generation in this way; I wouldn’t let myself be used, especially after the first date. And then, of course, there was Roger, who was in Telluride waiting for me.

  I put my key into the lock, my heart thumping. Now I suddenly felt excitement, but also a shiver of something else. What if he was a sexual predator? What if behind his ramrod-honest facade, he was kinkier than those scandalous congressmen? A politician who had left a trail of broken women who didn’t dare tell about his secret mess of base, psychopathic desires? I had a passing flash of myself tied spread-eagled upside down from the ceiling. I opened the door just a crack, put my heavy shoulder bag between us, shook his hand with firm finality, slipped in, and closed the door. Somehow, he had slipped in behind me.

  In seconds, he was sitting on my old brown couch, gazing at me hopefully as he pulled a bottle of wine out of his briefcase. “Do you have a corkscrew?” he asked in a small voice. I decided not to scream for help. Instead, I gave an exaggerated sigh, went to my kitchenette, and rustled around until I found a little all-purpose pocketknife.

  He proceeded to talk cheerfully and ceaselessly about everything from the mayor’s budget to the best way to get an illegal cigar from Cuba. This relaxed me, as organ music would, although it felt a little as if I were getting a last meal before execution.

  And then the bottle was empty and then we were in the bedroom on top of my nubbly wool bedspread and then nothing more was said.

  The next morning, I woke to the aroma of pancakes. On the floor of my bedroom lay a man’s belt, some loose change, and a monogrammed handkerchief with a little rip in it. I laughed. For all their revolutionary pronouncements, boys my age, well, any age actually, swooped down on women like raptors. They thought sex was for them. But not this man. What had happened to me last night was a first. I looked through the door to the Pullman kitchen to see Bob at my stove, his nose almost touching the pancakes in order to watch the bubbles form in the batter. The weight of the city’s safety was upon him, but there was nothing more important at that moment than making perfect pancakes, for me. I felt this sensation in the pit of my stomach and then warmth circulating through my body. Of all the bizarre things, I thought I was falling in love with him.

  Once we had eaten, we returned to bed. I dreamily felt every line and curve of him. To think I had known him before only as a commodious suit! What a surprise to discover his narrow hips and flat belly taking cover under his wide, sweeping back. He was surprisingly sensitive. When I ran my fingers down his spine, I made him start. He was slow, affectionate, and careful.

  Afterward, as we lay together, just the two of us, quietly, blissfully, the shadow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt suddenly crept across the bed. My bookshelves were filled with books about FDR and the New Deal, with tapes of his speeches that I had listened to so many times. I did, in fact, have a crush on Franklin Delano Roosevelt—I adored his strong handsome face—though he had lived before my time. I was sobered by how, even though he had saved us from the Nazis, saved the country after the Depression, he was still vilified by people like my parents. On Bob, I saw that monocle, the cigarette holder, the shabbily elegant home in Hyde Park; I heard that man with the warm voice reassuring the country on radio, propped up on trains, on bandstands; I saw that roguish mouth, always cheerful in the face of physical suffering. And now Bob, with his aristocratic accent—vowels stretched, r’s vanishing with a flourish—and his strong handsome face, was giving me my own fireside chat.

  Bob could have been of Yankee stock instead of a native New Yorker. Beside him, I was just a naive girl, born in Illinois and brought up in a rarefied suburb of Boston. I knew, of course, about his father, Henry junior, Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury, but not until later did I realize his ancestors were prominent New Yorkers, that his grandfather had been Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, alerting the world to the Ottoman genocide and saving thousands of Armenians from being massacred. Both his father and his grandfather were located at the epicenter of their presidents’ circles. And here I was, cuddled up to the man whose family would go down in history as one of the most august clans in America.

  * * *

  A few days after the Schlesinger party, I felt obligated to keep my promise to
Roger. I went to Telluride, not only to break the news to him in person, but to be sure I was making the right decision. As I flew over the Colorado Rockies, the Maroon Bells stretched upward, their snowy caps glittering in the sun. The air was thin, crisp, cold … seductive. Here I flew amid God’s pinnacles, a respite from the dark, smoky man-made depths of New York. Since I’d moved there four years before, I’d always had a love-hate relationship with the city; I had never felt the pure well-being that these mountains gave me.

  Roger was not at his apartment, so I climbed the hills to sit and work on my novel. Instead, I found myself watching the aspen leaves spin on their laden branches, catching the sunlight like teardrops on a chandelier. I picked up my pen and wrote poems to Bob. They left little doubt. It wasn’t Roger I loved. I told myself that his feelings for me must also have surely waned. Otherwise why would he have risked losing me by moving away? The antiwar movement had brought us together; indeed, to each other we were the movement. Yet with the movement dead, what we mistook for love had died too.

  When he came home, I suggested a drive in the mountains. As we looked down at the peaceful canyon, sitting together in the faded red Beetle, I drew a deep breath and said, “I’m in love with someone else.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  When I told him, he laughed, incredulous, and said, “You’re shitting me.” I convinced him I wasn’t, and finally he stopped chuckling. His face turned black, he gunned the motor, and at full speed he took our little Bug through the treacherous switchbacks to the airport.

  3

  June 19, 1976

  Dear Gram,

  I think I may be in love, really this time. Let me tell you straight off the man I’ve fallen for is just a few years younger than Daddy. I know, I can hear you saying, “Oh, sweet Jesus, Cindy, couldn’t you have chosen somebody suitable for once?” Well, I had no choice, Gram. This is a man even you would run after. In your time. He’s quite handsome, and he has this to-die-for little half-moon smile. There’s one other thing—he’s Jewish, but the highborn kind. Yes, Grandma, there are Jewish aristocrats back here; his blood is as blue as yours. His name’s Bob Morgenthau, and he’s the famous district attorney here. I was at his office once doing a feature on him, and there were a bunch of cameras and press downstairs waiting to give him free publicity, and I know it’s hard for you to understand this, living in Kankakee, but people in New York will absolutely kill to get in the newspapers. But anyway, instead of going down there, he stopped to talk to a janitor about his home back in Yugoslavia. Bob is that kind and unselfish.

  There’s one more thing; now, don’t have a heart attack. He is a widower and he has five children, well, four really, the fifth one is in an institution for the retarded. The oldest ones, two girls, are around my age, but the youngest are Bobby, nineteen, and Barbara, thirteen. Interesting, no? He also has a wicked, hilarious, really dry sense of humor, and, Gram, you would approve of his moral standards—they’re just like everything you and Mother have ever taught me. Once you get used to the idea of him, you’ll know Mother would be proud. Her friends have told me that she always thought I would be a career woman instead of the traditional kind. Not that I’m going to marry him! But it’s nice, at least for a while, to be truly, really in love. I don’t know that this has ever happened to me before.

  I can just hear you two describe him: “My, he is a man of ‘fine mettle.’”

  Gram, be happy. I think my wild days are numbered. This I know because if there’s one thing Bob is not, it’s wild.

  Love,

  Cindy

  * * *

  I had always distrusted men, even though I kept falling in love with them. My father, when I was small, had been a coffer of ever-changing delights. He taught me to ice-skate, shoot a pistol, ride a bike with no hands, identify butterflies, use a soldering iron, and much more. I would wait by the door at six o’clock, and when his old blue Buick turned in to the driveway, I would run out and jump into his arms.

  I was about thirteen when he suddenly turned away from me. I eventually found out it was less because I had become pubescent than that I had begun to ask him about what he had done in World War II, which was as much a mystery as his behavior was then. That was about the time he took out a post office box and began to answer calls in phone booths in restaurants and disappear on long business trips. He became remote, silent, unreachable, as he was with all adults. I realized later that this was the only way he could keep us from probing into his past, a past that I would have to wait until the final years of his life to find out about, a past that would take my breath away.

  Throughout my childhood, my father warred with my mother, and my mother warred with me. Insecure and sure that others would turn on me, I became an easy target, providing hours of entertainment to the older neighborhood kids who would play with me one minute and hide from me the next.

  My mother figured that my unpopularity was pulling her down. She was as lonely as I was, the family having moved to Kankakee from Chicago when I was three, and she had set out to cultivate friendships with the parents of the kids in my class; to be invited into their bridge club or to be nominated for membership at the prestigious country club was a burning ambition. “What is wrong with you?” she would ask, seething. “What do you do to make your friends act that way?”

  I don’t think I really knew what self-esteem was until the day I was introduced into the world of violence. The older child, I became the rescuer in the family. I always thought Mom a prude, giving Dad dirty looks when he snapped open a beer. I didn’t know that when he got drunk, he changed into another person. I think I was nine when I began to hear the slaps, kicks, groans, coming from their room. I started listening at night, and as soon as their voices rose, I would run in, terrified, throwing my arms around my father’s waist. In truth, I hated him at that moment, hated the feel of his cold belt buckle on my cheek, the smell of the alcohol fumes coming from his angry red face. But I knew that if I told him I loved him, it would jolt him out of his rage. I would feel him relax under my small arms, and the horror would be over. The rescuer again …

  As I grew, I developed other, less stressful methods. I learned to shame them. Pushing open their door, I would coolly inquire whether they wanted me to call the police. They grew afraid of me. The helpless child victim would always live within me, but the exterior toughness I gained then would turn out to be the tool of my success. By the time I was eighteen, I was determined to enter the real world and kick ass.

  Learning how to talk people out of killing each other, I honed the twin arts of diplomacy and artifice.

  * * *

  When I began to earn a living, I would regularly bail out my father, whose alloyed-steel business had failed, forcing him to live on his savings; I continued to send my parents money for the rest of their lives.

  My father rarely focused on what happened in my personal life, didn’t care whether I brought home As or Cs. The only thing that interested him was my safety. If I stood too close to a train platform, he would yank me back. He taught me to use a rolled newspaper to slice an attacker’s throat. When I went off to college, I found little cans of Mace in my coat pockets. He secreted guns under hats in the closet, beneath the kitchen sink, even under my bed. He was a championship pistol shooter right up into his eighties. He insisted Penny and I learn how to shoot and tacked targets on the basement wall. I never came near the target, but Penny was a comfort to him, for by the time she was twelve, she was a crack shot. I thought that this obsession with protecting us was the only way that he could show his love for us. But it was more than that. He wasn’t paranoid, as we thought; he had good reason to believe that people might come after him and his family. But that was one more secret he kept from us.

  One day, his obsession with my physical well-being caused me to be typecast as “the girl with the crazy father.” I was on a bus to Selma, Alabama, to help the freedom fighters when a classmate shouted, “Who is that maniac in back of us? He’s honkin
g and he’s practically on our fender!”

  I knew without even looking that the maniac was my father. I cringed in my seat. He had forbidden me to go on this trip—Martin Luther King’s civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery—fearing that I would be hosed by redneck sheriffs who had used tear gas and nightsticks on King’s demonstrators. I had boarded the bus anyway, and now he was rolling down his window yelling at the bus driver to pull over. Then he swerved right in front of the bus, almost causing the driver to demolish him.

  On the way home, in his Buick with its nauseating smell of new leather, not a word was spoken.

  * * *

  Bob, only six years younger than my father, was in many ways his doppelgänger—stoic, humorously ironic, unrevealing. Both were repressed members of the Silent Generation, muted by the unspeakable traumas of the Great Depression and World War II. At first, I distrusted someone as indecipherable as my father. But I quickly found that Bob was incapable of withdrawing his love and his loyalty. He trusted me, trusted that I could take care of myself.

  I could talk endlessly about my childhood, while Bob would reveal his only in snippets. Yet as we got to know each other, I wanted to find out the arc of his growth, the little accidental revelations missing from family biographies. So I supplemented Bob’s offhand memories with anecdotes about him that I gathered here and there.

  Even though he had two siblings, Joan, three years younger, and Henry III, two years older, I saw him as a lonely child. He was close to his brother but voiced resentment that his mother favored Henry: “She thought he would become a great musician, and she nurtured his musical talent … I think she felt guilty. He had fallen off a pony once, and he might have had a concussion, I don’t know. But from then on she really pampered him. It was ironic because I was really the sickly one,” Bob confided.