Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  But when he came into my presence, like sun through a rainfall, these ugly visions would vanish. He was young, vigorous, my savior. He would be supporting me, this man who was able to finally anchor me to the ground. I couldn’t imagine him any other way.

  Ironically, our attraction to each other was related to the chasm of time. Bob had rounded a corner and stumbled into the neoteric, into an existence he thought was no longer attainable: a fresh moment, another chance at surprise. Was he up to it? Would having a young wife befuddle him? The men of his generation were largely servants of their age, impervious to change, too old to start again, even if they wanted to. But Bob was an incongruity. Once we had a gathering of his neighbors, and one of his older daughters, Anne, asked, “How does it feel, Daddy, to be so much younger than all these people who’re your own age?”

  Within his young body was an old soul, and I was drawn to its harmony. What a refreshing change from Roger! He did not try to control or mold me, his credo being that if you told someone not to do something, he or she would go and do it anyway. Of course he followed the credo himself; anybody who tried to tell him what to do or what to say went to hell and back.

  4

  “So tell me about your past, your sex life,” I said as we were walking over the rough cobblestones of SoHo. I cringed. No, it hadn’t seemed the right thing to say just after I’d said it. Was I testing him? Seeing if he would give up his sense of delicacy in order to get with my way of being? The question was simmering; I felt compelled, driven even, to ask it.

  He was taken aback. I probably was too blunt. But how else could I have brought up the subject, which, after several months together, we bloody well should have shared before? And after he, who on a first date that I didn’t even know was a date, had almost pushed down my door to get at me? Hadn’t I waited long enough to find out who else had been the object of his rabid appetites?

  “I mean, let’s start with how many you’ve slept with?”

  He gave me a wintry look.

  “It’s a perfectly legitimate question! At the Times, I was told you had bedroom eyes.” I smiled encouragingly.

  “Pure rumor,” he replied, laughing.

  “I’ve also heard you’ve gone through women like wine.”

  He gazed up at the buildings. “Look at this architecture,” he said, the November winds almost blowing off his tweed cap, surely a relic from some ancestor.

  “Every building different, gargoyles, mansard roofs, gables, pillars. Incidentally, these cobblestones are really Belgian block, they…”

  I squeezed his hand. “Bob, we’ve shared everything else. Why won’t you answer me about sex?”

  “It’s my business.” I saw a hint of a smile. “If you’re so eager to talk lovemaking, why don’t you tell me about yours?” he asked.

  “Okay, sure. Let’s see…” I made a show of counting on my fingers. “I’d say I’ve been to bed with about forty lads.”

  It took a minute for him to get that I was joking.

  “Oh, it hasn’t been a lot really. They’re not worth mentioning. You know about Roger, and maybe I should tell you about the two famous older men I went with.”

  “Yes, you should,” he said, suddenly interested now.

  We were getting near this old café I knew, a remnant of the Beat days. The sun had risen above us, hot. He had taken off his cap, and his hair floated in the air like strands of silver.

  “They were national icons. I think you would have done the same thing in my place.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Bob said. “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  I was feeling brave now, even loving this. Gone was his deadpan expression. He was a challenge unlike any I had encountered; I couldn’t ruffle him, until now.

  I whispered in his good ear. “Nobody, not a single person, has ever made me happier than you do in every way.” And that was the truth.

  * * *

  We had finally reached the literary coffeehouse; trudging up a steep flight of listing stairs, he bounced on ahead of me, taking two steps at a time when he reached the top. Pretty lively for a fifty-seven-year-old.

  We squeezed through the narrow room, taking stools at a little round table. The ceiling was an elaborate design of beige-painted iron, and on the bare plaster hung crooked photographs of poets from the late 1950s.

  “Look, there’s Philip Whalen and William Burroughs, and I think over there, that one is of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I went to his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco once. Have you read A Coney Island of the Mind?” I deepened my voice, rolled out, “I have heard a siren sing at One Fifth Avenue…”

  * * *

  He’s not listening, not even looking at me … he looks disheartened. Shit. I blew it. You’re not like men of my generation, Bob Morgenthau. When I told Roger about my past, he just smirked and tried to one-up me. But you, I can’t tell you about things like sex without your getting offended. What else do you consider so private you can’t talk about? What else can’t I tease you about? Nothing can ruffle you, I thought, but I was wrong. You are sensitive, and I didn’t see it. Why did I have to open my big mouth? I made you feel unsafe with me.

  * * *

  “All those guys … sleeping around … it, it meant nothing,” I said, suppressing the urge to reach out and touch him. I couldn’t stand it if he rebuffed me. “Look, my generation, a lot of people, we felt like we’d grown up in prison cells, and when we were old enough to break out, we just did. We broke every rule we could, including sex. We were drunk on freedom.

  “But I don’t expect you to accept that,” I added. “My generation is not yours … I was insensitive.”

  “You’re young, I’m old,” he said finally. “I’ve never gotten so close to someone so different.”

  “But I’m not that girl anymore. I was sending her up. I’ve changed.”

  “You know, I’m old enough to be your father. Maybe you’ll feel about me like you felt about your parents.”

  “Of course not. You’re not exactly a jailer,” I said, and then laughed. “Well, I guess you are. But not with me.

  “Besides, I’m sick of chaos; I want structure,” I half lied.

  We suddenly heard a trilling voice. Up on the café stage, a slight man with a ponytail and a voice like Tiny Tim got up and read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the intense obscenity-filled poem emblematic of both the 1950s and the 1960s. The reader had passion and, unfortunately, a lisp.

  “Who let themthelfs be fucked in the ath by thaintly motorthyclists and thcreamed with joy.”

  I looked nervously at Bob, but he was suppressing a smile. “I’ll take you to a better place next time,” I said.

  “No, I thought that was a howl.”

  I sighed; he had forgiven me. “You’re always such a good sport. I mean, it wouldn’t matter if I took you to see an aqueduct, you’d think it was great.” We were sharing smoked oysters on saltines.

  “Nothing about you is uninteresting. We’re compatible.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t dissect the reasons.”

  “Try, or I won’t believe you.”

  “Because we both like chocolate,” he said, digging in the bag of truffles we had picked up at Li-Lac, the best chocolatier in the city.

  “No, come on, be serious.”

  “I loved that Indian rug you wore when I met you.”

  “Very funny. It was a white knit poncho!”

  “Whatever it was, you’re different. I like how you think, and I like those fringes and bright colors you wear.”

  “I can’t imagine why. You hate showiness.”

  “And you have a strong sense of morality. I like that.”

  I slipped my fingers between his. To the pulse of a dark Anne Sexton poem, I watched him eyeing the room. Looking for one of the dozens of mafiosi he had jailed? Protecting me as he protected so many others—his family, his employees, the poor and underprivileged.

  People are like the houses they build
. When asked to tell their stories, most stick to the bare beams, but others happily rev themselves up until they are describing elaborate pillared mansions. Bob was a beam man. But I had already done my due diligence and put in the walls. I had parsed out his childhood by looking through the Times “Morgue” and picking up tidbits from friends and acquaintances we had in common. I suspected that he had drawn a similar bead on me.

  But I wanted more. What about his youth, his early career? What kind of a human being had he been? Would he be too modest to tell me about his achievements? Too reticent to admit his failures? Would he talk at all?

  “So,” I said, trying to act blasé. “I hear you pretty much knocked out Tammany Hall when you were first in office.” Which was 1961, when President Kennedy had appointed him U.S. attorney of New York.

  “I’m not that old,” he said, frowning at me over his glasses. “Tammany Hall was gone by that time, only a few remnants left.”

  “But Charlie Buckley was a powerhouse remnant, and I hear you gave him the proverbial finger,” I said with a smile.

  “You know who Charlie Buckley was?” he asked, surprised.

  I gave him a withering look. Since my first embarrassing interview with him in 1973—he didn’t get the courage up to ask me out until three years later—I had done my homework on U.S. political history. “I hear he was a friend of Wright Patman,” I quipped, and was rewarded with an appreciative smile.

  “Then you know Buckley was one of the last bosses in the Democratic machine—Bronx congressman, Bronx Democratic county leader, and head of the congressional Committee on Public Works, and that was a patronage bonanza.

  “A group of us new young Democrats were trying to end the Bronx machine system that was still under the control of powerhouses like Charlie Buckley and crooks like Carmine De Sapio.”

  “You were a social troublemaker. Kind of like me.”

  “Buckley got me back,” he continued. “When Jack Kennedy won the presidency, he used his influence to hold up my appointment as U.S. attorney for three months. Then he tried to move right in. On my first day in office, it was January 1961, I got a call from his crony Jim Healey, another immensely influential congressman, pressuring me to hold up the indictments of two constituents who’d been selling shrimp from China—this was against the Trading with the Enemy Act. He said, ‘Kick it around for six months, Morgenthau. That’s what your predecessor did.’ So I looked the case up, and indeed, just as it was about to go to the grand jury, the former U.S. attorney had pulled it six different times, forcing the investigation to be started all over again.”

  “Don’t tell me, you laughed in his face.”

  “I put the case before the grand jury and got an indictment within forty-eight hours.” He started chuckling. “Healey called me screaming: ‘Damn you, Morgenthau, why couldn’t you have waited thirty days so I could collect my fee!’”

  “Weren’t you afraid of all these Buckleyites? They could have squashed you under their feet.”

  “Huh,” he grunted. “After I’d been hit by German bombs and sunk in the ocean and shot down Japanese suicide pilots, I wasn’t about to let a Charlie Buckley kick me around.”

  I pursed my lips to hide a smile. I had goaded him into it, but still, he was enjoying trying to impress me. He was building the mansion, connecting the crossbeams of his legendary success. And most delightful, he was the kind of storyteller who could keep you enthralled by his own stories simply because he was so enthralled. He was not so different from other men who, no matter what their station, gloried in their victories.

  How could he do all this talking while simultaneously eating? In fact, I thought, he elevated his enjoyment of food to a political skill. I watched, fascinated at his gustatory ballet—bite, bit of story, bite, more of story. I saw how he could command the attention of a table, keeping his listeners in suspense.

  “Even Bobby Kennedy”—chew—“was obligated to Buckley for his support of JFK. He was JFK’s attorney general then”—chew—“and he didn’t dare come to my swearing in.”

  “Amazing. You were close to him; you were with him when he got the news his brother had been assassinated! What was that day like for you, by the way?”

  He pushed his plate away and speared an untouched oyster from mine. “I was stunned. I didn’t know what was happening. There had been nothing like that before in my lifetime. We all thought that it was a conspiracy. It could have been the Russians, the Cubans, the Republicans, the Texans, none of us knew. We were afraid of who would be next. After Oswald was shot, Bobby ran around for months trying to find out who really was behind it.”

  We were both silent, and then I asked, “Did Bobby pressure you on behalf of Buckley?”

  “Shhh. Your voice is too loud.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Guess why?” I felt like saying. Everyone I have loved has been hard of hearing. I had to scream at my beloved grandmother, blast like a bugle at my deaf father, and now here was Bob, with a single working ear. Once again, I sounded like a PA system.

  I mischievously repeated the question in a near whisper.

  “What?”

  I repeated it again, loud and, by now, hoarse. I was destined to go through life sounding like a tree frog.

  “Yes, Kennedy put the arm on me back in 1967,” he said quietly. “He was just a senator from New York at that stage, and he called me about my indictment of Louis Wolfson. Wolfson was a crooked financier and big contributor to the Democratic Party, but Bobby told me, ‘Bob, Stanley High, the mayor of Miami, is a friend of ours, and High is a friend of Louis Wolfson, and Wolfson wants his case transferred to Miami.’ Bob looked at me as he continued his story:

  “And Bobby was firm. ‘You could do that,’ he said.

  “‘No I can’t.’

  “‘Why not?’ Bobby asked. He had gotten a little edgy.

  “‘Because he wouldn’t get a fair trial, he would fix the judge,’ I replied.

  “Then Bobby said, ‘Be serious.’

  “‘I am perfectly serious,’ I said.

  “After that, I began getting calls at least once a week from the assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division, accusing me of ‘abusing’ Wolfson.

  “I ignored them,” Bob said. “And in 1967 and 1968, we ended up convicting Wolfson of security violations, perjury, and obstruction of justice.”

  “That’s amazing, but what I can’t believe is that you were so young and new in the job and you dared defy a Kennedy! Kennedys are known for never forgetting. How did you dare?”

  He thought about it and then he laughed softly and said, “I guess I did have a lot of balls.”

  * * *

  His second order of smoked oysters arrived, and that made him even happier, examining a plump brown mollusk and swiping it up. It made me remember the moment I fell in love with him. I woke to see him bent over a skillet in my Pullman kitchen, ascertaining that the pancakes he was making for me would be perfect.

  And then I suddenly smelled waffles and remembered Daddy’s delight as he lifted the lid and found that the one he’d made for me was perfectly, evenly brown. I was happy on those Sundays, truly happy, because he was happy. The rest of the time he was serious and secretive, as though hiding something. Well, he was. For one thing, screwing another woman. Would Bob do the same to me? How could I know?

  “There’s something I want to ask,” I said hesitantly. “Did you ever do something big on the sly? Something you had to hide from your friends … your wife?”

  He looked at me appraisingly. “I might have.”

  “Some clandestine affair?”

  “Two of them.”

  I could feel the flush creep up my neck. Was he telling me he had cheated on his wife, twice?

  “There was Abe Fortas.”

  “A man!”

  “The Man, one of the greatest men, or so everyone thought. He was revered; he’d been nominated by President Johnson for chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1968. What people don’t
know is that I was the one who discovered that Wolfson was paying him twenty thousand dollars a year for life. I worked hard behind the scenes to get him off the court.”

  I gave a silent sight of relief.

  “Then, the second thing was I found out that Arthur Goldberg was”—Bob stopped to dip his napkin in water and dab a spot off his shirt—“an unwitting spy.

  “During World War II he was a captain in the OSS and had an affair with a female who he didn’t know was a Soviet courier. She became a witness and helped us make a case against Robert Soblen, who was a leading member of the Soviet spy ring.

  “We never made it public. I didn’t think it was right to crucify a man for a crime he didn’t know he was committing.”

  “Very noble,” I said with a tinge of irony not lost on Bob. The truth was I was starting to wonder if I should be amused or put off by the self-congratulatory tone of his anecdotes.

  “Maybe ‘noble’ isn’t the right word. It’s just that I was wondering who influenced you, who made you a man with such high values. Besides your father, of course.”

  “Judge Robert Patterson,” he answered without hesitation. “He had been secretary of war from 1945 to 1947, and later joined the law firm Patterson, Belknap & Webb. He hired me right out of Yale, and I soon went from being his clerk to his right hand. I researched and wrote drafts of letters and briefs.

  “He was an independent Republican, but we took loyalty cases when no big lawyer in New York would touch them—they were too afraid of the McCarthy hearings. We represented Edward G. Robinson, who had been blacklisted by the entertainment industry.”

  Bob gently put down his fork. “Talk about noble, Patterson wouldn’t even take clients if he smelled a whiff of guilt. He’d shun the fancy restaurants and eat at the Automat with the people. I modeled myself after him. He liked me, and he liked to have me travel everywhere with him.

  “Commerce tried to bring a physicist in front of the Loyalty Review Board. I defended that physicist. And I won.”