Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  In mid-flight, Bob woke. “Hello, my love,” I said. “Would you like my pillow, my blanket, my shoulder … my body?”

  “I want gum,” he said, and took two sticks of Dentyne from my hand. “Thanks. You’re a lady and a scholar,” he murmured, his favorite rejoinder.

  As the Swiss Alps appeared below, I told him to lean over me and look out the window. He wouldn’t; he was afraid to look down.

  “Not me. I love danger,” I teased him. “Okay, I’ll tell you what they look like. Veins of white are running through the valleys, veins pulsing white blood, and the peaks are sticking up like knives, so close it looks like they could puncture the plane.” His chin went down, and his pupils rolled up to the tops of his eyes, a particularly murderous look I had not seen before. “I’m joking, I’m joking, we are miles above the mountains,” I said quickly.

  “But it is so vast out there,” I went on, “the universe is so vast, and we are so little, but with these little brains we can imagine, we can deconstruct the universe. Sometimes I think, ‘What are we, anyway?’ Have you ever wondered, ‘Hey, what am I?’”

  “This is a big plane, isn’t it?” he said, apparently ignoring me. “It’s a McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Three engines, that’s good.”

  After we landed in Athens, we went to Nick Gage’s house and were so tired, he showed us straight to the guest room. We sat down on the intricately carved antique bed, and it promptly collapsed beneath us. Nick came running in, saw us on the floor, and started laughing uncontrollably. For years, he dined out on various ribald renditions of our dramatic arrival at his home.

  I was discovering new things about my man: he could get as crazy as I could. We were trying to find our way about Athens, driving moderately slowly, when a car started riding our bumper. Finally, Bob revved up and got ahead and then just stopped our car. He stopped the rental car in the middle of a little rotary and took out his city map. “Sweetheart!!” I yelled at him as the driver behind us leaned on his horn.

  “I’m tired of these Frogs crawling up my tail,” he said calmly, studying the roads.

  “They’re not Frogs; that’s the French. Please, start up the damn car!”

  So he did, and we didn’t speak for ten minutes. To break the tension, I began exclaiming over the scenery. “Look, they tie their cows to poles!”

  “Yes, I suggested that the last time I was here,” he replied. “I said, ‘Look, you’ve got all these telephone poles, why don’t you do something with them?’”

  “Sweetheart,” I said, giggling. “You’re mad.” Bob’s sense of humor struck when you least expected it. I loved how his extraordinary mind worked.

  One day we discovered a deserted beach with fine gold sand that slipped through our fingers. The sky was soft white, and palms bent toward the silvery-blue Aegean. The gentle waves broke like bodies somersaulting, melting into yards and yards of sugar foam. “Come on.” Bob took my hand and trotted into the ocean, stopping at his waist so he wouldn’t get water in his fragile ears. I was paddling around his legs when he shouted, “Stop pinching me!”

  “What? Oh my God, run!” I yelled, seeing a swarm of red-dotted jellyfish.

  When we got to shore, I saw what we had missed before—the dead blobs lying on the sand. Bob tiptoed through them as if he were mounted on hooves, making me giggle.

  “That’s why there’s no one on this beach,” he said, laughing. “Now what shall we do?”

  “Something that’s perfect,” I said, getting out the camera and telling him my idea. “It’s for posterity. A record we wouldn’t have any other way.”

  “What I do to please you,” he grumbled.

  “Smile!” I snapped a couple of gorgeous shots of him au naturel.

  “I figure that if you leave me for another woman,” I said coolly, knowing that he was constitutionally unable to do such a thing, “I can sell them to the Post.”

  * * *

  We loved to linger in the tavernas, eating taramasalata, homemade yogurt, mullet, calamari, and Mediterranean lobsters grilled with olive oil. We sipped deadly shots of ouzo or mixed it with water and watched the anise-flavored liqueur turn white. We asked to sit side by side because we couldn’t bear to be more than a foot away from each other, and the waiters obliged, peeking and smiling indulgently when we sneaked kisses.

  One night, thoughts were like sparrows fluttering around my head, keeping me up. When Bob sleeps, he hibernates. I snuggled up to him but couldn’t even get under his arm. Finally, at midnight, I got up, opened a window, took in the salt air, and wrote a poem to Bob and put it on his bedside table:

  When you wake

  See me, a squash blossom

  Lying obediently

  Inside your palm.

  The next day, we drove through fields of fat melons and almond trees in Delphi and climbed the road through hazy blue hills laced with waterfalls. Then we sneaked through a restricted area to make the long climb up to the holy sanctuary of Apollo, the god of truth. Far from the modern Athenians, honking, drilling, shouting for their dollars, we stood in the holiest place of ancient Greece, where the oracle prophesied to commoners and kings. I felt a ripple of awe as I ran my fingers down a huge Doric column, standing lonely on the horizon. The sun sparkled off its smooth pink stone. I am actually touching the work of men who lived four hundred years before Christ, I thought. I looked at the mountains rising up like Praetorian guards, and I felt the infinite presence of the only civilization ruled by the intellectual elite, the state that inspired Sophocles, Plutarch, the giant Socrates, his brilliant student, Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle, the short-bearded, long-winded scientist-philosopher. I hadn’t prayed for a long time, but at that moment I got on my knees in the sanctuary ruins and prayed for peace that passeth all understanding. In the middle of my prayer, I heard a voice boom, “I wonder where they parked their chariots?”

  I stood up slowly. “Isn’t anything serious for you?” I said quietly. “Is everything meat for a wisecrack? This is a sacred place, a spiritual one. I wouldn’t blame Zeus if he struck you down.”

  Bob lowered his head. “I’m sorry. You’re right. But I do feel it. It gives me … ah … a feeling of the endurance and expanse of the human mind. It’s hard for me to put into words. I’m not like you.”

  “All you have to do is imagine. Imagine the statue of Apollo, so grand and white and beautiful…”

  “I don’t know that I can do that,” he said. “The only thing that’s beautiful to me is you. When I imagine beauty, you are all I can see.”

  Back at the hotel, we cuddled up in the middle of our sagging bed. Suddenly he began to emit a mock moan and laid his head on my chest. “Tell me I’m a good boy.”

  “What?”

  “You got mad at me today,” he said plaintively. “Tell me I’m a good boy.”

  I looked at him, startled. I didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t my stoical husband. It was a strange child I didn’t know. But where had it come from? I had a flash of his upbringing, how he had once thought that no one gave a damn about him. How little he must have been coddled and praised. Did his parents ever notice that he was a good boy indeed?

  I brushed away his wisps of gray hair. “You are a good boy,” I said, kissing his forehead, “a very good boy.”

  Then I reached for my cigarettes. “Why don’t you think you’re good? Tell me about it.” I was eager to seize this opportunity to know him better.

  He took my cigarette away and ran his finger over my mouth. “I’m jealous of those things. They take your lips away from me.” Then he distracted me by undressing us both.

  Afterward, he studied me in the bright light coming through the arched window, looking for freckles, noticing the vaccination scar on my arm.

  “Don’t look at me, I’m too plump.”

  “Mine is on my thigh,” he said, twisting around so I could see it. “My mother didn’t want me to have a scar.

  “I don’t want you to lose weight,” he added. “I love you
the way you are.”

  He put kisses that were barely kisses on my nose, eyes, hair. He gently rubbed his cheek against mine. “We’re going to be side by side, two as one.”

  “Oh yes,” I answered, with a little smile.

  * * *

  On the plane back to New York, Bob lay back in his seat, holding my hand loosely, easily. Away from the haranguing world, we had become inextricably tethered. In the clarity of the Greek sun, air, water, we had stood exposed to each other, stripped down. His hard exterior had given way to the poetic, and I had received the intimacy I craved. He had become an uncertain child in my arms. He had studied the geography of my body, as though by knowing my identifying marks, he could claim me as his. We knew the intensity of the problems that lay ahead, but we knew we could handle them together, that they would no longer unravel us. We were married now, if not yet wed. We experienced even short separations as unsettling.

  Unsettling, and perilously irresistible. Love had made me blossom and wither at the same time. Until then, I had mightily resisted what I knew would tempt me, obsession with the concrete reality of another that would overwhelm the urgent obsession I had for my own abstract perfection. Love had undoubtedly empowered Bob, but the female capacity for sympathetic identification, for total absorption, threatened to erase those boundaries for which I had fought so hard. For me, a dangerous state of bliss lay ahead.

  “I’m so happy,” I said as the plane floated up into the sky. “I’ve never been this happy in my life.”

  He nodded. “Never happier.”

  * * *

  Once back in New York, Bob suggested that when we were staying in Riverdale, I use the dressing room of his master bedroom to write in. Bob was not known for being foolish, but there were exceptions to any rule. The room had been Martha’s. Her things were everywhere. How different she had been from my mother, how secretive about her illness. Mother had announced her cancer to everyone. A dynamic, outgoing woman, she had a stream of visitors, little trips to Cape Cod, the finest chocolates, back rubs, gourmet casseroles. Most important, she had my estranged father, who came back to nurse her for the last two years of her life. Shortly after she died, we cleaned out her wardrobe and her drawers and her desk until all visible signs of her were gone.

  But Martha’s possessions—and such a private woman she was—had been left out for any workman, any passing girlfriend, to see. Her dresses, surely bearing her particular scent, hung in the closet still. The closet had double sliding doors, and one door was not quite closed, a beige satin sleeve sticking out. I set up my electric typewriter on a little table next to her desk, my back to the sleeve. One day, worrying over a sentence, I got up and paced. Back and forth, past the sleeve, back and forth, past the sleeve. Finally, I took a peek inside the closet. Beautiful brocade jackets, paisley blouses, chiffon dresses with pleated skirts. Clunky pumps. A mother’s garments.

  On the floor were boxes and stacks of papers—amid the paraphernalia, a folded piece of light blue stationery stood out. I returned to my electric portable typewriter and typed out a couple of lines on my short story. Then I went downstairs to see if Barbara had gotten home from school yet. Even if she was being a moody teenager, I thought it was important that a living, breathing being was there when she came home.

  The days went by, and each time I sat down to write, I gazed at what I assumed was a letter and then quickly gazed away. Reporters, I’m afraid, are born snoops with searing curiosities, and on the fifth day smoke was coming out of my manuscript. I strode over, picked up the letter, and unfolded it. I looked at the salutation: “Dear Bob.” I dropped the letter. The writing was uncannily similar to my mother’s: not too small and not too large, perfectly legible, perfectly conventional, each line ruler straight.

  A day later, I picked up the letter again and discovered it was dated about a month before Martha died. I put it back, wondering if it would still be there the next day. It was, and with rain blowing about so hard it rattled the windows, with my chest going up and down, with visions of being found in a dead faint, the letter on my breast, I started reading. As I recall, it said something like this:

  You will want a wife and you should have one. Then you can finally have a complete marriage. She should be a nice woman, who is attentive to you. She should be someone who fills the house with people, your friends and neighbors, because you need people around you.

  The children won’t like her, at least not at first, because they won’t have chosen her. She will be a stranger, but she should be someone who is good to them.

  I sat on the floor, the letter shaking in my hand. Bob had never talked about Martha, never shared any stories, never told me what it was like to lose her. I hadn’t pressed him, because I thought it forbidden territory.

  And now I was hearing her very voice. I read the letter over and over so that I could get a sense of her. She had given Bob permission to love someone else, but she might as well have chosen the woman herself.

  Could she have chosen me? Could I be what Bob needed? Would I fill my house with people? Cocktail parties spilling out onto the patio? Dinners with guests balancing plates on their knees? Friends dropping in uninvited?

  Would the fact that I couldn’t meet Martha’s criteria set in play some metaphysical justice? Would I suffer the misery of the new bride in Rebecca, haunted by the ghost of her husband’s former wife?

  I heard Bob arrive, bags bulging with press clips, indictments, and unread mail bumping against the front door.

  After we sat down and were sipping wine, he asked me why I looked as if I’d been crying.

  “Do you love me for who I am or for what you think I’m going to be?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “If our home is not full of people, will you still be glad you married me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I took a deep breath and gave him the letter. “I found it in her dressing room. It was sticking out of a box. I’m sorry for reading it.”

  He perused it. “Well, I haven’t seen it.”

  “No?”

  He folded it up and put it in his pocket. “She must have written it and just never given it to me.”

  “Or left it for you to find,” I said.

  * * *

  A week later, a month before we were to be married, he was still wearing Martha’s wedding ring. “It’s for the children,” he explained. “I don’t want to upset them.”

  “What are you going to do, wear two rings at our wedding?” I asked. “Bob, please…”

  He nodded and pushed back a strand of my messy hair. “Don’t worry.”

  But on the next day and the day after that, it was still on his finger.

  I told him it hurt me.

  The next day, his left finger was bare. And the day after that, he called his children to empty Martha’s wardrobe.

  While the children sorted through the dressing room upstairs, Bob called downstairs to me more than once: “Lucinda, what do you think they should take?”

  At first, I couldn’t answer. Why was he asking me this? “They should take whatever they would like,” I called out, unable to think of anything else to say. I realized at that moment that to some degree Bob had switched his allegiance. His late wife’s closet now disassembled, he had moved from being protective of her and her children to being overly protective of me. I felt happy, a bit guilty, and nervous all at once. I didn’t know if I wanted anyone, even my true love, to lie prostrate at my feet.

  We set the wedding for November 19, 1977, a year and a half after we fell in love.

  * * *

  “I want a small one,” I said, curling up to Bob in the living room. Earlier that summer, I’d fantasized about the wedding: “Maybe we could go to Provence! We could take our vows in a field full of lavender.”

  “That’s—that’s not possible, love. I have too many people here that really have to be invited. Colleagues, friends, acquaintances. It’s the kind of situation where if you invite
one person you have to invite another.”

  “But I haven’t the foggiest idea how to do a big wedding. And I don’t even have a mother to help me!”

  “We’ll have it at Charlton Street,” he said definitively.

  During one of our jaunts to the West Village, we had fallen in love with a three-story Federal house from the mid-nineteenth century that had wide floorboards, elaborate double doors, and a sweet, rather large garden in back. Before we knew it, we had put a deposit on the lovely grandam. We would put the Riverdale house on the market and move out of my rental apartment. He would be able to give up Central Park West, the apartment that provided him with the Manhattan residence required for the DA. Charlton Street was to be our first and perhaps only home.

  Bob immediately picked up the phone and dialed Marina. Like so many people, she would do anything for Bob Morgenthau. The wife of Stephen Kaufman, she was a Moroccan-born woman with a unique forcefulness and such trademark abundant hair grazing her ribs that she mesmerized people. As Steve, a forceful lawyer in his own right, joked, “I’m known as Marina’s husband.” She was a rescuer, always there for people in crisis, and within a few weeks she had organized virtually every detail of our traditional ceremony—the flowers, the decorations, the wedding cake, the food. She spared Bob not a penny. Workmen lumbered laden around the house as windows were turned into French doors and a wooden spiral staircase was erected from the parlor to the garden so that I would have someplace to walk down the aisle.

  Sweet little eighty-year-old Miss Wais, our secretary, wrote out the invitations on creamy Strathmore watermark paper, and to my horror Bob had them mailed to a list of 250 people. I knew only 30 of them—Mary Breasted and a few other friends from the Times, a couple of broad-minded radical friends, and seven near strangers from my new woman’s group, invited to swell my little camp.

  Thankfully, in flew my loyal sister from Chicago, complete with an elegant maid of honor dress. From overseas, Irona and Greg Jensen, my good friends and surrogate parents, came and forthwith obtained a supply of sentimental Valpolicella. UPI London, with its drinking culture, had inspired us to consume magnums of this vino ordinario together on many a cold gray evening.