Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  One night, lost in an article on killer whales, I forgot to join him until an hour had passed. By then he was asleep. I put on my warm Lanz nightgown and gazed out the window at a full moon sending a fountain of light over sea and sky. It was irresistible. There was no choice but to meet the challenge. I went into a hidden pocket of my suitcase and got out a small bag of Nepalese hash, good relaxing stuff. Then I hesitated. I shouldn’t be doing this. I would feel so guilty, it wouldn’t even be fun. But then I thought about “Prufrock” again. My favorite poem, it had taught me not what I should be but what I shouldn’t:

  “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

  I tiptoed downstairs and walked through the backyard until I reached the cliffs. Then I carefully made my way down through the rose hip bushes, dirt sliding, to a flat-headed rock. I lit a joint and inhaled deeply. Bob’s two Border collies were watching me, sniffing curiously, keeping guard from the edge of the bluff. The sand below looked delicate and soft, peach-colored, like a baby’s skin. The loneliness I felt was so profound it was like a dark rapture. I had bodysurfed during the day, and now the same waves had come up so strong they looked as if they could kill you. They rode in like stallions, manes flying, then suddenly broke, spilling over into a million pieces, routed, fooled, disintegrating, their ends a foamy nothingness. I was about to take out my pen and notebook when I heard an angry voice above.

  “What are you doing down there! You’ll fall,” Bob shouted crossly. He was wearing his blue robe with the navy piping.

  I scrambled up to the top.

  “I’ve been looking all over the place!”

  I put my shivering body against his. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know you’d wake up. I wouldn’t have frightened you for anything.”

  He softened and rubbed my shoulders as we climbed the stairs. “You’re a fucking wild woman.”

  “Love your language,” I whispered. The curses of the youth culture had rubbed off on him, at least now and then. Having been formidably fluent with swear words in the navy, he had refrained from bringing the impolite words home. Until now. When we argued, let the house be empty and “asshole!” in a basso profundo issued from the eaves.

  “I suppose I can never expect you to act conventionally,” he sighed.

  My teeth were chattering; I had gotten colder than I thought. My nightgown was streaked with dirt. He wanted to put me in a hot shower, but I shook my head and put my icy hands under his nightshirt. He jumped.

  He scowled but didn’t move a muscle. Did I see a little glint of amusement? We took off our nightclothes, and, with salt on my face, frigid as an ice block, we made love as we never had before.

  * * *

  Wellesley, Massachusetts, had long ago closed its portal to Jews, and in my pure-blood secondary school I had been too intense, too emotional, and too spontaneous to adopt the required air of Waspy indifference. Once in college, I discovered a kinship with my Jewish friends. Mostly born of Eastern European stock, they were intellectual, voluble, clever, antic. I began to think of myself as a Jewish soul in a Gentile body.

  And then one day, in Martha’s Vineyard, where Bob vacationed, I encountered a very different breed: the elite German Jew. Meeting Bob’s extended family—cousins, nieces, nephews—I experienced once again the languid handshake, the drooping palm, the greetings to loved ones that consisted of a grazing of the cheek, a pecking the air. In other words, they were more Waspish than any Wasp I had grown up with. They were often mercurial, sometimes snooty, other times quite interested in me—but always aloof. And there were so many of them of various removes that it felt as if I were meeting the UN General Assembly.

  That summer, I was a curiosity. Martha’s Vineyard was replete with the prominent and the moneyed, and two of Bob’s closest cousins, Nan Werner and Margie Lang—the grandes dames of Chilmark, who had little crushes on Bob—invited him to a stream of dinners and cocktail parties to meet and psych out this young woman who would steal him away. To my surprise, I was declared fit and worthy, and soon found myself at great homes, chatting animatedly with authors such as John Hersey, William and Rose Styron, and Diana Trilling and Lillian Hellman, who had begun their famous literary feud.

  A few people were dubious about me and played picador. “This must be a very heady experience for you,” said Dan Lang, Margie’s husband and a prominent writer for The New Yorker, “being here with Bob Morgenthau and meeting all these famous people.”

  Newly confident, I replied easily, “Oh, not really, I’ve interviewed any number of these people for the Times.”

  * * *

  I suppose the Morgenthau children might not have objected to me because they thought I would come and eventually go; before me, their father had mostly dated women ten or even twenty years younger, but not some thirty years. They probably assumed that this was a pleasant dalliance that would end in my acting sensibly and moving on. They never sensed the danger.

  We were faced with an impossible conundrum: We were in ways as suited to each other as a giraffe to a baby kangaroo. But we loved each other passionately, in every possible way. Bob finally made one of his iron decisions that he would never go back on: that no matter how anyone reacted, there was only one solution. The thought of leaving each other was intolerable, so we decided not to. Instead, several months before we got married, Bob and I began to tell people about our plans. The reaction was swift and acerbic.

  Parents of my friends called their children and declared, “Look what she’s done now!” My friends themselves thought he might drop dead on me at any moment. His relatives thought I might walk out on a whim.

  Cousin Nan urged him to see a psychiatrist.

  Cousin Margie stopped speaking to him.

  Joan, his beloved sister, maintained an eerie silence.

  The names of therapists of various modalities were sent priority mail, some anonymously. Behavioral therapy, hypnotherapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and even Scientology were suggested.

  “You’d think the pope had declared he was marrying Squeaky Fromme!” I remarked to Bob.

  When we were simply dating, eyes were raised, but mostly people smiled at the sight of the sedate DA on the arm of a gay young girl in a peasant blouse. Everyone deserves a little fling, after all.

  But a marriage? Between a public figure of the establishment and an outspoken peacenik some thirty years his junior? It just wasn’t done. The mid-1970s was an era of divisiveness, of ageism, a time when the young still blamed the old for sending them to die in a useless war. We were a walking morality tale, an assault against nature. No matter that we were just normal folk with noble professions, we evoked shibboleths of incest, of dirty old men and moneygrubbing minxes, titans with their trophy wives.

  My phone stopped ringing. I called the operator to find out if there was a problem. There wasn’t, at least not on the lines. I could feel in its silence the contempt of my radical buddies.

  We felt like Romeo and Juliet, albeit a hoarier version. The silly attempts to thwart us only brought us closer together. In fact, they gave me an icy thrill. Iconoclasts that we were, we met our accusers with defiance. We began to plan our wedding. It would be in August of this year, 1977, and we would honeymoon in Greece, because both of us were eager to see the place where intellectual civilization began. Nick Gage, who came from the mountains of Greece, insisted on planning a trip for us.

  Nick and my other friends from the Times were among the minority who gave us their blessings. “I think it’s very cool that you are marrying the district attorney,” said Marty Arnold.

  “I don’t know why he chose me,” I quipped.

  “Are you kidding?” said Joe Lelyveld. “I can just see him running down the street shouting, ‘She said yes, she said yes!’”

  Gloria Emerson waxed lyrical. “Oh, Lucinda, he is a poem. That hair, those lines on his face, that mouth. The sex appeal!”

  Even Mary Breasted was pleased. That was at least in part because I had introduced her
to Ted Smyth, and, in an abundance of irony, he promptly married her.

  In my presence, Arthur told a Times executive, Jimmy Greenfield, that I was marrying Bob, and Jimmy asked if I was going to stop writing. Good old Arthur, the champion of talented women, retorted, “Why don’t you ask Bob if he’s going to quit his job.”

  My father approved of the marriage. Like Bob, he is a master of understatement, yet he knows how to separate what is of value from what isn’t. “I like Bob,” he said in a deep soothing voice. “He’s a nice guy. If you’re happy, then I’m happy. I don’t think the age difference should figure in your considerations at all.”

  Bob broached it with Annie and her husband, Paul, and they were supportive. Paul thought that “kids are seldom wildly excited by their stepparents, but Barbara likes and respects Lucinda.” Always the optimist, Bob thought the other children would accept it, even if it took a little time.

  Meanwhile, on the weekends, we went up the Hudson Valley to the pillared Georgian-style Morgenthau home, with its cracked old tennis court, its brook-fed cement swimming pool, a huge ancient oak, expanses of green, and, in spring, an endless field of daffodils. There, Bob took refuge in the surrounding 960 acres of apple orchards now owned by his siblings and him. It had become a working operation called Fishkill Farms, with a store and a pick-your-own business at harvest time.

  “The best kind of fertilizer is the imprint of the farmer’s boots,” Bob would say with relish as we tramped through the rows of Macs, Paula Reds, Golden Delicious. He told me how his father had taught him to graft a branch onto a tree to get a different variety. “In those days, they would bury dynamite to make a hole to plant new trees, and he’d always let me pull the plunger.”

  When the bloom came, in early May, you would stand up at the farm store and look down into a sweep of white, like snow. I sat among the trees just staring at the blossoms, sometimes writing about them, trying to find words to describe those tiny bunched flowers, as delicate as a baby’s hand.

  Bob loved the Georgian home where he had grown up, with its shabby elegance and multitude of rooms containing canopy beds, Early American furniture, and claw-foot bathtubs. There was even a mural painted across one wall of the large dining room depicting his family—Henry junior, Elinor, Henry III, Bob, and Joan—picnicking in a soft viridian field.

  One Sunday in October 1976 we were sitting in the leather chairs in his father’s cozy den when I heard the crunch of gravel and the slam of a car door. One of his older daughters, Jenny, suddenly appeared, carrying a big bowl of chopped tomatoes and basil. It looked yummy. “Oh, that looks so delicious, Jenny!” I said. She made for the kitchen without a word.

  “I’ll walk you to my car,” Bob replied, uneasily. “You can drive it home.”

  “Why?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Uh, well … it’s a special day. We honor Martha.”

  I quickly made for his old green Volvo. I was just as anxious as he was to get me out of there before the rest of his children arrived. I drove down the Taconic State Parkway, my cheeks burning. Bob’s older girls seldom came to the farmhouse, and it must have been infuriating for Jenny to find me sitting in the den with my legs over the arm of her grandfather’s chair, perfectly willing to horn in on the special day that the family had always spent together, on the private sadness they felt for a mother lost to them. Had I been told of this, I never would have come that weekend.

  This was typical Bob; he seldom tells anyone what is going to happen, until just before it happens; it doesn’t matter whether it’s a major controversial event, like the anniversary of her death, or just a simple political affair. His father had been the same way: for instance, when Henry junior once made a historic trip with the legendary Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, Bob was never even told about it.

  Bob didn’t want to lose his children, and he didn’t want to lose me. In between lay a colossal lack of nerve. It was as though he were dangling somewhere between the prosecution and the defense, unable to do his job, unable to decide who was right, finding himself faltering where he had always had a strong, steady hand. Perhaps he thought he was trying to protect me, but it seemed more likely that he was protecting himself.

  Was he some kind of silent aggressor?

  The next day, he came to my apartment so early I was in my nightie. He sat down at the far end of my couch, forcing me to choose whether or not to sit next to him. I didn’t.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said. “I just forgot.”

  “You forgot that your children were coming to memorialize the death of your wife?”

  “I didn’t mean to put you in that position.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “You told me once that Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” he said hopefully.

  As if on cue, he took out an illegally obtained Cuban Montecristo, clipped off the end, and leaned back, as though he were at his club.

  He took a long puff. I stared at him. “Comfortable? How about a snifter of brandy?”

  “What? At this hour?” he asked, my sarcasm lost on him.

  The room was filling up with smoke. These illegal Cuban cigars he somehow obtained were hideously pungent. I hated the smell. “Look, Bob, I need some time to myself. Let’s do this visit another time. Could you leave, and take your cigar with you?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “I’ll put out the cigar,” he said, but I shook my head and pointed to the door.

  Very slowly, he got up, stood there while I ignored him, and slowly went to the door. He had on my favorite shirt with the purple stripes, but in back it was drooping down his derriere; I wondered whether he was so eager to get here that he had forgotten to tuck it in. He looked so disheveled, it almost made me cry. And when he was gone, I did.

  A week later, I applied for a space at the MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest retreat for artists, in Peterborough, New Hampshire. To my delight, I was accepted, and in March 1977, I packed up for a monthlong stay.

  “I wouldn’t go up there,” Bob said gloomily. But I was determined not to let my love life take over my professional one and felt obliged to show my independence.

  MacDowell was one of the most sought-after retreats for writers, painters, musicians. By day, it separated them and provided a quiet environment for work, free from distractions. But at dinner, they all came together and shared everything from gossip to problems with their works of art. It was an Amalthea’s Horn of disparate creative individuals helping each other along, giving tips, even reading parts of manuscripts in progress.

  I was ushered into a lonely cabin where I was to glue myself to my Olympia electric typewriter, which had been easier to carry than the lead-footed Remington. The only noise in the woods was the thump of the picnic basket, complete with red-checked cloth, delivered at lunchtime. I sat down, and at first the words came faster than I could type them. Then they suddenly stopped. A yellow warbler outside my window resonated louder than the low hum of my Olympia, and its melodious song invited me to move to my little bed and daydream about the story I was working on. Just for a few minutes. Only the minutes turned into hours and the hours into days because I couldn’t think about my writing, only about Bob. I would wrap myself in the patchwork quilt and reenact our moments over and over, as if we were in a play that ran every night. The time his face came peeking out of a row of Chinatown pig carcasses just a block from the offices that knew him as the austere DA; the night we accidentally fell out of his bed; the wry, unhurried way he told his jokes, which made them funny no matter how many times he told them. He was so vividly there in my cabin, with his ironic smile and his deep, echoing voice, that I hardly ever missed him.

  But he missed me and was uneasy about our separation. One weekend, he just showed up. The first night, I took out some weed Roger had left me and dared him to join me in a toke or two. He refused but was eager for me to go ahead. Clearly, he wanted to watch what would happen.

  We soon ended up on the floor doub
led over with laughter. I was too stoned to make love.

  “Meet me halfway!” he complained.

  “I can’t. I can’t move.”

  “Look,” he said, sitting up. “I want you to exercise. Get down on the floor and do butt crunches. You know the stories about older women teaching young men how to have sex? Well, this is a case of an older man teaching a younger woman how to really do it.”

  “How to really do it? Your split infinitives are killing me!” I went into a laughing fit. “And what’s this antiquated ‘have sex.’ Did you mean ‘have a good screw’?”

  The next day I felt like a jerk. “I acted ridiculous, didn’t I?”

  He nodded.

  I teased him for not joining me.

  On Sunday, the author Nora Sayre, who had come to the end of her stay, hitched a ride back to New York with him. As soon as she got home, she called me excitedly. “All he did was brag about your accomplishments the whole way down to New York.”

  If only Bob could see my formidable accomplishments now. I gazed at the rolled-up page in my typewriter, tore it out, crumpled up the twenty other pages I had written, and left the cabin that symbolized my failure. It was too soon after the death of my mother to write about my crazy childhood; I had no distance, no sense of irony. My mother and I had come to a kind of peace, but we had never talked about her erratic mothering, about my explosive teenage rebellion against her, never resolved all that had gone before. As a result, it didn’t matter how successful I had become; I was still trapped, still that somnolent child surrounded by peril.

  * * *

  If I couldn’t write about my childhood, I could certainly try to connect it to the present. Why had I fallen in love with a man who doled out his comfort sparingly instead of one like Roger, who gave me more reassurance than I needed? The answer was obvious. We marry our fathers. They might have given the world to us, but it was never enough; they posed questions they didn’t fully answer; they left us with a sense of never having known them. My father, who adored me, had still drawn away from me when I was about thirteen, and all my life I had been trying to find out why. All my life I had been trying to figure out why he wasn’t there, why he would never reveal himself to me.