Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  The connection suddenly gets strong, and Bob hears the woman. He knows how difficult she’s been. “I’d get out of there as soon as you can,” he says. “Don’t you already have enough material?”

  “Yes, I’ve got plenty.”

  The next morning, I catch a flight to London and then on to New York. When I arrive, Bob holds on to me tightly and for a long time.

  Weeks later, when the article is published, he acquires a pile of New York Times Magazines and liberally gives them out; my story is on the cover.

  10

  I sit down to dinner one day in the spring of 1978, and though I am thirty-one years old, I learn that I have now reached adulthood. I know Bob loves me deeply, but he has a mind that divides facets of certain individuals’ characters into a number of cabinets, sometimes unjustly. I have, for instance, been locked in one that reads, “Dreamy, innocent, often unable to keep a secret.”

  Therefore, he withholds from me the meatier aspects of his cases, which is partly his fault. Last summer, for instance, we were renting a house in Martha’s Vineyard belonging to John and Margery Oakes. John was the genteel, famous, and rather fusty editor of the Times editorial page, and Margery, his wife, was the woman who had assumed I was Bob’s employee when she met me at the Arthur Schlesinger party. I had just put potatoes on to boil for salad when Bob said, “Hey, let’s take the boat to Cuttyhunk and spend the night.” I was thrilled. Bob didn’t do a lot that he hadn’t prepared for, and when he decided to do something spontaneous, he wanted to do it right then. Bob loved the wooden Bass fishing boat, and when we were here, we went out for blues at dawn. Before he changed his mind, I threw a few things in a duffel bag, and we beat it out the door so we’d get to this quaint little island before dark.

  We were halfway there, I, sitting in my usual place, the tip of the bow, enjoying the spray, and thinking about my husband and how I had brought out the free spirit in him. I mused about whether our marriage had helped peel away his layers of caution, which made me suddenly remember the potatoes. We sped back to port at twenty-five knots, but by the time we reached the little kitchen, it was full of smoke. The pan, the stove, the soot-covered walls, were destroyed. Margery, a woman who hated things to go off plan, was not pleased. It was the way she muttered “That was a very expensive potato salad” and then stalked off that made us both break out laughing, even though we knew a new kitchen would cost Bob a great deal of money indeed.

  Then I made another stupid mistake. We were dining with friends, and, excited with pride in my husband, I was praising his daring as a DA, and before I realized it, out of my mouth came classified details of a murder investigation. Bob looked darkly at me and I stopped short, but the damage was done. As a reporter, I knew that leaking grand jury deliberations was verboten, and if they got out, it could sabotage his trial. As usual, I had been distracted and indiscreet.

  Recently, however, we went to a political fund-raiser, and I covertly watched Bob covertly watching me as I dodged the questions of friends trying to wheedle out information about the indictment of a well-known company CEO. I really hadn’t been as skillful as he thought since I didn’t know anything about it anyway. Still, I hadn’t talked, and this was apparently enough for Bob.

  “So,” he says the next night, after I give him the biggest piece of swordfish on our gold-rimmed wedding platter, “there’s no doubt that this Argentinean banker, Graiver, committed massive bank fraud.”

  This, as though we’ve been talking about old Graiver forever. I sit very still.

  “It’s very confidential, this case. You mustn’t mention it to anyone.”

  “No, no.” I shake my head vigorously.

  “This character, David Graiver, held a controlling interest in American Bank & Trust here in New York, and we think that he transferred, oh, some fifty million dollars to an affiliated Belgian bank. Then he withdrew the money, and pocketed it, and left the American Bank & Trust to collapse.

  “And then he disappeared…”

  “Wow,” I exclaim. “Did he…?”

  “Just listen, let me finish. His associates say he was killed in 1976 when his chartered plane crashed on its way to his home in Acapulco.”

  “Oh, so he’s dead.”

  “I’m not so sure. Actually, I don’t think he is. I think it’s a ruse for him to avoid prosecution. He took that plane shortly after he looted the bank. And then he was reported walking through an airport some time after the crash. But his family insists he is deceased.

  “The point is, can I indict an alleged dead man?”

  I can’t believe he is asking me, but I don’t miss a beat.

  “Well, Bob Morgenthau can do anything, even indict a dead man! But seriously, if you don’t do him now and then he reappears when the statute of limitations has run out, he walks. If he did something wrong, and as far as you can determine, he is not dead, I think you have to go ahead and prosecute him.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought.” He nods appreciatively.

  “Was the plane found?”

  “Yes, in the mountains in Mexico,” says Bob, sweeping up the last of his peas and eating them off his knife. I repress the urge to scold him, as my mother would have done had I ever breached good table manners that way.

  “But his body was not identified,” he added. “Why wouldn’t Graiver have taken a regular airline? Rather than a charter? It would have been more comfortable and quicker. The Mexican authorities haven’t investigated the crash, and Americans combed the area and never found a black box.”

  “So the whole thing is suspicious.”

  “Very damn suspicious. American Bank & Trust was the fourth-largest bank failure in American history. I think I’m going to go ahead and gather evidence to present to a grand jury.”

  “Does the jurisdiction of the New York DA include Belgium?”

  He chuckles. “No. But since it all started here, I think we have a duty to the now-defunct American Bank & Trust to find out where their money went.”

  “You devil. It’s the U.S. attorney’s territory. What are they going to say, or worse, do?”

  “They’ll probably be mad as hell. But if we turn over the case to them, they’ll most likely forget about it.”

  I am witnessing the first of many high dives that my husband will be making as DA. His restless arm has begun this day to stretch into a faraway place where a local DA is not supposed to go. It won’t stop here. White-collar crime incites him. He sees it as the root of society’s evils. He sees the consequences that the little guy suffers—drugs, for instance, imported with laundered money that end up in the school yards of New York. I foresee that he will use any Manhattan connection, no matter how slim, to go after international white-collar crime. He will probably get death threats from feds enraged at his incursions into their territory.

  A few days later, Bob comes home grinning. “We’ve cooked something up, and I want your opinion.”

  He sinks into our cushy sofa for our ritual cocktail hour, which is really Bordeaux hour since he likes to drink different vintages from the region. I wait patiently until he has selected, uncorked, poured out, and savored the wine of the night, a 1974 Pomerol. Only then do I say, “You’ve cooked up what?”

  “We have to get the records of this Belgian bank, and the banks there only hand over their internal accounts to representatives of the U.S. government. So I got Jawn Sandifer of the New York Supreme Court to sign an order—that’s called a letter rogatory—to the bank. The order authorizes Pierre Leval to receive the bank’s records.”

  Bob suppresses a laugh. “We’re going to stamp the seal of New York on it to make the order look more official. Then we can attach a ribbon at the top for good measure.

  “Do you think we should do that?” he asks me. “Or is it overkill?”

  “Hell yes, do it! You could just bull right through and make them think you’re the most powerful law enforcement officer in the city—Le Dernier Cri.”

  “You know, that just
might work.”

  And indeed it does. Pierre goes to Brussels with the fully beautified order, and Bob waits anxiously to hear from him.

  After Pierre calls, Bob tells me of the conversation: “Apparently, the Belgian bank officer was very, very skeptical of the order; he kept insisting he’d been expecting it to come from the U.S. attorney.

  “Then Pierre told him, ‘Oh yes, Mr. Morgenthau was a U.S. attorney when he was a young man.’ Implying that I was more powerful than any U.S. attorney, that being the DA was a step up. The bank manager turned over the records.”

  Armed with the evidence, the assistant DAs persuade a grand jury to indict Graiver, and the judge, Arnold Fraiman, refuses to dismiss it.

  When the bank president finds out Pierre has gone behind the back of the U.S. Justice Department, “the Belgians almost made it an international incident,” Bob tells me.

  “We got that indictment on a wing and a prayer,” he says, chuckling, and then he smiles and adds, “And on your good advice.”

  A frisson of pleasure runs down my back, and I can hardly look at him.

  Unfortunately, however, the following January, with no visible sign that the defendant is still alive, Judge Fraiman reluctantly dismisses the indictment; he encourages the state to reindict if it gets further evidence that Graiver exists. Bob’s fearlessness in bringing the case in the first place has only enhanced his reputation. And I had begun, in a tiny way, to be part of the game.

  In the first two years of a marriage, you discover that you’re not going to conduct your daily life the way you had hoped, or even the way you were used to. Life becomes not only about romance but about survival of the fittest. Rules are set down by each party that remind you of the hated curfews of adolescence. You can no longer smoke in bed or read by lamplight; pity to you if you’re late or forget to shave beneath your chin. There are the struggles over little things. Take the bathroom sink. It has been divided so you have an equal half for your toiletries. Soon, however, your Oil of Olay begins inching toward his half, until one day you find that all your vitamins and creams have been rudely shoved into a corner. You like a cold room, and he likes it hot, so you alternately open and close the window, with the result that neither one gets a good night’s sleep.

  The bigger bids for power, however, can get bloodier. A person married becomes a person unveiled, slouching about in his or her raw authenticity, the facade of utter charm gone. You can be blissfully happier than you’ve ever been in your life and suddenly find yourself in a fight to the death.

  Monday, November 19, 1979, was our second anniversary, and it should have started with a haircut.

  I wanted Bob to look smart for this sentimental day, but there was no place to cut his hair, save the toilet seat. Every other surface in our New York City bedroom was covered with Bob’s bricolage—a mess of old magazines and catalogs he’s never going to read, old mail, new briefs, old briefs, ear drops, eyedrops, books on the destroyers of World War II, unpacked tote bags, and much more. Our bedroom was suggestive of a front yard in Appalachia replete with used refrigerators and the hulks of cars. I begged him to clean it up, for me, and to my delight he agreed.

  Then my sister, Penny, called to wish us happy anniversary, and I put the phone on speaker. “Penny, you should see the mess your sister has made,” Bob called. “Junk strewn everywhere, brassieres drying on the lamp shades. I’ve pleaded with her to clean it up to no avail. I wish you’d speak to her…”

  “That’s a lie! I’m pin neat!” I cried, my husband’s sloppiness having driven me to the opposite extreme. I could hear Penny cracking up. We have cultivated a good-natured teasing that never hurts. “Oh yes, Bob,” she drawled, “it’s been a problem for us for years.”

  Yuk, yuk, Bob and Penny.

  This day had to be wonderful. We liked to haunt antiques stores, thrift shops, auctions, and we had bid on and won a unique lamp, a brass dog in the shape of a wiener with an adorable little buckle collar and dangling name tag. Light was given off by its illuminated torso. One of the younger children saw me polishing it and scoffed, “What a piece of junk.”

  “It’s Lucinda’s,” said Bob, selling me out.

  “I thought so.”

  Now, today, after Bob cleared up his stuff, he volunteered to make good on his rather moldy promise to read my short story. It was a funny piece about order and disorder in a man’s life, and I watched in vain for any sign of appreciation or amusement, but his facial muscles remained frozen.

  “What did you think?” I asked anxiously as he put it down.

  He shrugged. “I don’t understand the point of the story.”

  “But the point is obvious! Did you like the descriptions, the similes, the metaphors?”

  “Well, I just don’t know what you’re trying to do here.”

  It occurred to me then that the kernel of this story had risen from Bob and his sloppiness. Well, that, of course, would be a good reason for him to dislike it. What possessed me to even share it with him?

  A little later he came up behind me, sifted strands of my hair. “I didn’t mean to hurt you; the story was promising, really. I knew if I read it, it wouldn’t be a good idea, husbands just can’t be objective. Arthur Gelb told me he never reads Barbara’s work because if he so much as questions a comma, she gets annoyed.”

  We packed up and set off upstate. Since the vast old mansion at the farm was owned by Bob and his two siblings and often full of family, we decided to go away for our anniversary. We would stay over until Tuesday at an inn in Millbrook, up the valley from the orchards and full of beautiful pastures and horse farms. Someday, I didn’t know when, we would build our own house on Apple Pie Ridge, the highest point in the apple farm. Until then, I would continue to dream about it: I would create a paradise of color, a profusion of buddleias, lilies of the valley, peonies, trumpet lilies, and herbs. Scents would ride on the breezes, and I would watch the buds creep out, changing every day.

  Our room was a sweet Victorian treasure with a canopy bed, located above the front door of the Millbrook inn. It looked out over a pond crowned in burnt-orange leaves, the shade of its green water shifting with the autumn sun. I threw open the window and sat Bob down. Time to cut off his hair. He complained bitterly, as was his custom, but now that his locks were tickling his collar, he grudgingly conceded that my rates were cheaper than a fifteen-dollar barber. As I held the shears over his head, the baby fuzz on his neck sent shivers down me. I had to rub his leg; I loved the feel of smooth khaki against the swell of a man’s thigh. Most particularly, this man’s.

  Because his head was buried in the newspaper, I had to clip away in a hit-or-miss fashion, like painting a mural with my eyes closed. I tried to work carefully, but then I was caught by the shadow of a swan soaring across the white billows in the sky. I loved clouds, and these moved like satin petticoats, length upon length of silk, a woman’s skirt riffling in the gusts. The swan landed and picked its way down to the pond like a cat, sniffing, looking both ways, dipping a webbed foot before the plunge. Then it sank its head into its round white chest like an angel resting on a pillow of clouds.

  “Lucinda, are you paying attention? You’re cutting a hole in my hair. I can feel it.”

  “Oh! Sorry.” There was a little swatch missing. My dreamy nature was not helpful as a hairstylist. I spread Grecian Formula through his new coiffure to darken the white, and he grumbled, as was his custom. “That’s not going to make me any younger,” he said pointedly.

  We dined at a romantic candlelit restaurant, and Bob, who had quickly forgotten his ordeal of emasculation through haircutting, ordered a very expensive Château Latour. I suggested we toast our two years together.

  I looked at him lovingly. “You have touched me with your honesty, and I mean more honest than just saying I won’t lie, steal, cheat, but saying I’m going to help people and do the right thing. Your humanity is global.”

  He clinked his glass against mine and said, “And your humanity is personal
. It’s a part of you. That’s what you have more than I do. You’re loyal and compassionate, the way you come to the aid of friends in trouble, like when Jessica was sick and you were there every day.”

  “Thank you for your stability … your equanimity in the face of my moody humanity,” I replied.

  He raised his glass. “Thank you for bringing adventure and creativity to my life. I couldn’t get bored with you, ever.”

  “I’m remarkably lucky.”

  “I’m remarkably lucky.”

  We ate a sumptuous Dover sole, periodically reaching for each other’s hand under the table. Professing that we would let nothing interfere with our loving each other, Bob ordered a second bottle of fine wine, a 1971 Saint-Émilion.

  Then he wanted to introduce me to Calvados. We had two snifters each, made silly toasts, and clattered our glasses together until we couldn’t stop laughing.

  By the time we got back to the inn, the excessive spirits had made Bob, on the other side of sixty, dizzily tired, while I, half his age, was flying high. “Let’s play in the shower,” I cried, “it’s only ten o’clock, and it would cap off the evening,” but he shook his head.

  “We didn’t exchange presents yet,” I exclaimed.

  He reached over to his carryall and pulled out a silver pin in the shape of a question mark without the dot. I’ve never worn pins, but it was certainly beautiful. I gave him my poem:

  You are a hundred suns lighting the water

  Silver dolphin arcing over me

  From the joining of

  Our minds

  Sea pressing against sea

  From this great power

  Is squeezed the delicate

  Glitter-finned fish.

  I will love you til the end of time,

  Your Sweetheart

  “Nice.” He let the handmade paper I had gotten in Italy waft to the floor.

  “Bob, I know you’re very tired, but is that all you can say?”

  “I’ll read it again tomorrow,” he said, yawning. “Come to bed, silly bill.”

  All day I had suppressed my anger at his reaction to my short story, but now, with his disregard for my poem, it seethed up again. “You won’t like it any better tomorrow.