Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  “Look at that,” he points at the silvery crescent on the horizon. “See the new moon? See how it has a faint blue ball around it as if it was full?”

  “That’s called earthshine,” I reply. “I learned it from my dad. It usually happens in April or May; this is unusual for August. When sunlight is reflected from the earth to the moon, which is beamed back to the earth and then up to the moon again, the light is sometimes powerful enough that you can see a faint whole moon, even when only a sliver is bright.” We stroll up toward his detective driver, who is waiting with a city-issued Chrysler. “It’s called the new moon holding the old moon in her arms.”

  He gives me one of his half-moon smiles, and then he surprises me, as he is apt to do. “I think we’re like earthshine,” he says, with feeling. “We reflect light onto each other. I might be the old moon, but I’ll always hold you in my arms.”

  * * *

  Before the boat trip, Bob had held my wanderlust at bay, so hating to fly that he naturally hated to travel. But because of his international cases, invitations had flowed in for him to visit foreign countries. The one that most interested him was the country that his father had raised millions of dollars for, the one he himself had always helped by being active in huge charity organizations. Israel. I had watched Bob develop a deep respect for this little country, built by the kinds of Jewish Holocaust refugees that his father helped to save.

  “We have to go to Israel someday,” he remarks idly, as he’s reading a book about the Yom Kippur War by Chaim Herzog. I believe windows of transformation open suddenly in our lives, and if we don’t go through them, if we put them off, they never open again. The things we have waited to do are often the things we have lost. Thus, the day after Bob’s idle remark, I purchase two tickets to Tel Aviv. I also buy Bob a book that contains statistics about how it is rarer to die in a plane accident than it is to die from a bee sting.

  His passion for Israel heightened the day in December 1979 when he met the man who captured Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler’s Final Solution. Peter Malkin, a former Mossad agent and accomplished artist, had wrestled the Nazi war criminal off a bus in Argentina and spent days in a hotel sketching him, befriending him, and trying to find out what had motivated this nice guy to harbor such evil.

  Malkin, a tall, battle-worn man, was also a magician who delighted children by taking quarters from behind their ears. He became a good friend and would regale us with stories about trapping other war criminals and thwarting Palestinian terrorists. Peter had also helped Bob make a sting on an international arms terrorist, Frank Terpil. Bob arrested and turned Terpil over to the feds, who injudiciously pushed the judge to let him out on bail. The arms dealer had fled and disappeared into the Middle East.

  We leave for Israel in the fall of 1981. During the flight, I hold Bob’s clammy hand; he has read my optimistic material, but like a moth drawn to flame, he has also collected articles on plane crashes and knows that takeoff is the time when the plane is most in danger.

  The air in Tel Aviv is balmy, sweet. We are met at Ben Gurion Airport by Uri Dan, the international journalist, as well as Malkin and Rafi Eitan, who was part of the team that captured Eichmann. Peter gives us a party with a guest list that includes the present and former heads of the secret intelligence agency Mossad.

  There is hardly a day during this visit when we’re not moved by the plight of these extraordinary people who have made such sacrifices in the face of their terrible histories. We see the incarnation of their post-Holocaust ideals; they have developed strong, dynamic, and ingenious Jews who will never again fail to fight for their lives. We see barren deserts blooming, and the kibbutzim and moshavim that are built by diverse self-sufficient communities that grow their own food and engender national spirit.

  In Jerusalem, I walk the rough stone path of the stations of the cross, feeling awestruck as I put my sandaled foot where Jesus did when he walked, stoned and jeered, to his death. Meanwhile, Bob pushes a note of gratitude between the stones of the Wailing Wall. Is it a prayer to the Jewish God? He won’t tell me.

  We stand on the Arab West Bank, looking down, imagining PLO terrorists aiming rocket launchers from this spot at the Israeli towns up and down the coast. We go to the southern end of the West Bank, which overlooks Ben Gurion Airport, whose planes are also vulnerable to attack. We visit some of the controversial newly built kibbutzim in the occupied West Bank and meet the nervous but tenacious inhabitants, who endure constant attack by terrorists. Many of them are young. Many were born in Israel and are called Sabras, after the prickly cactus that is rough on the outside but soft and sweet within.

  We travel ten kilometers into turbulent Lebanon, where terrorists, operating from Palestinian refugee camps, regularly launch rockets at Israeli kibbutzim. We enter a pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian enclave to meet a family who lives in a bare whitewashed home with bullet holes in the plaster. Outside, men are sitting on benches smoking hookahs, and inside children are arrayed on pallets. Terrorists use explosives to attack the enclave, and a baby in a crib is covered with heavy mattress material to protect it from grenades. On the walls are bandoliers filled with ammunition. They are excited to see us, for they love Americans and insist on giving us cup after cup of bracing bitter tea from their one valuable possession, an old etched samovar.

  We drive south and meet up with our Israeli guides, who take us deep into the Sinai. As we bump along in their jeep, they are silent, solemn, suspicious. I guess that this is because they don’t know why we have been given special permission to climb Mount Sinai, which is now closed to most people. Much to the resentment of many Israelis, the Sinai Peninsula, which was seized by Israel during the 1967 war, is in the process of being returned to Egypt as stipulated by the 1979 peace treaty between them.

  We arrive at the fourth-century Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Catherine’s, where we will spend the night in separate monks’ cells before we climb Mount Sinai the next morning. This granite monastery, one of the oldest in the world, which owns codices and manuscripts dating back to the fifth century, is in a gorge at the foot of the mountain. The beds are hardly wider than our bodies and we don’t sleep well apart, so we begin our ascent the next morning bleary-eyed. But soon into the rocky journey, we feel the pull of this sacred peak and stride past our surprised Sherpa, who scurries after us.

  Reaching the top more than two hours later, we stand speechless, breathing thin air but beholding mountain ranges for miles, even glimpsing what we think is the Red Sea way back in Israeli territory. We walk to the cave where the Ten Commandments were given. It is cold up here, but that’s not why I’m shivering. I am standing in the place where God is said to have spoken to Moses, and the sunrise has turned the sky into a flag of bleeding yellow and blue and orange.

  How I wish Bob could share the wonder of this moment with me. But I had asked him so many times whether he believed in God, in prayer, and he had skillfully avoided answering me. I didn’t know anything about his relationship or lack of relationship with God, and I was afraid I never would.

  “Remember that beautiful passage in Exodus, when God’s voice comes from the burning bush, commanding Moses to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt?” I ask hopefully.

  “God made a good decision,” he said, standing behind me.

  “You’re being flip. Bob, we’re on holy ground, Hebrew ground. Have you read Exodus?”

  “I certainly have.” He is taking in the glowing rock formations and the dry cypress trees and the dirt beneath our feet. His eyes are welling up. I feel a terrible sinking inside. I have again missed who Bob really is. What Israel has done to him. It comes back in flashes: how shaken he had been in the West Bank, imagining Arab rockets obliterating Jewish cities below, how thrilled he was riding in the fighter planes, how astonished by the moshavim and their young farmers who had devised a way to irrigate the parched desert. This man’s religion was based on Moses-given commandments. How could I have assumed he was still the
old wisecracking Bob? I saw now that the passions he never showed in life, he was putting into this precious land of resurrection. Here, he had met survivors and Sabras and boy soldiers ready to give their lives. And most of all, he had met his father.

  I take his hand.

  He strokes mine tenderly. “Do you remember when Moses asks God his name? That’s in Exodus 3. God replies, ‘I am who I am.’ That’s something to think about.”

  * * *

  We travel several miles down the Red Sea for our final adventure and camp out in the middle of a Bedouin tent community on the bank. I wake in the morning to a long, bumpy nose almost touching mine; the Arab has ruddy brown skin layered with sand particles, cracked lips, uneven teeth, and a beautiful red-and-white tasseled kaffiyeh over his head. He seems to be studying my long, uncovered hair curiously. I give out a startled scream and he flees the tent. Then I want him back, want to look at him, talk with him, for I know that it is not the fragile ivory-skinned image in the churches that really depicts Jesus, but this, this rough, unbathed Bedouin. He could have been living two thousand years ago, a holy rabbi who wandered with the coarse and the poor and the outcast and slept under a roof of goatskin.

  I never see my Bedouin visitor again, but he has touched me. As a child, I discovered an old Christian songbook in Gram Leavitt’s house, and I would go into a grove, where I thought no one could hear me, and sing “He walks with me, and he talks with me” over and over. Now, every once in a while, when I’m alone, I get both a comforting and an unsettling sensation that someone is behind me, watching. Sometimes I think I feel a warm breath on my shoulder.

  We then hike for miles until we finally see a stream and gaze at it thirstily. Our guide says it is perfectly clean. I decide not to partake, but Bob dips his cup in and drinks it down, eyeing me cheekily. A minute later, we see a goat defecating in the water. We leave the next day, and on the plane Bob is struck down with a mercifully short-term abdominal malady.

  When we return home, we feel like different people. I have been touched by the trip, but Bob has been transformed. The survival of Israel has become and will remain one of the most urgent things in his life.

  It has made its way into my heart too. I have flashes of memory that explain to me the depth of my feelings about the Holocaust.

  * * *

  I am eleven. My friend opens a book she has hidden under her bed. On the pages are children who are so skinny their bones stick out, and they have horrible huge heads. My friend makes me promise not to tell anyone. “A bad man starved them. They’re real, it really happened.” I go home and cry for a week; I tell no one and then forget what I saw.

  I am fourteen, already a raving liberal, and I am in my bedroom, arguing with my father. “It’s in the Bible, Daddy, the Arabs are the sons of Ishmael, Abraham’s firstborn son. They have as much right to be in Israel as the Jews!”

  “You don’t know anything. What the Jewish people have gone through,” he says. “You will never, ever be able to imagine it.” His cheeks are slick with tears I’ve never seen before. When he leaves, he leaves a stranger. I cry.

  I am eighteen. If I had ever met a Jew, I didn’t know it. Yet at the mention of the Holocaust, something unsettling occurs. My father’s angst has worked its way into me. He has seen the real children. Their eyes too big, their dug-out faces, squatting grimy and sour-smelling, in the first concentration camp discovered by the Allies. He never told me he had been a liberator, but he has given me his sorrow anyway.

  * * *

  Bob and I talk endlessly to our ultraliberal friends, many of them Jews, but they won’t be parted from their self-hatred, their conviction that Israel is an aggressive militaristic state that has seized Arab land out of greed rather than self-defense. They won’t budge, even refusing to believe in the historical fact that the Arabs have started the wars. When they claim the PLO manifesto to drive the Israelis into the sea is just empty rhetoric, I give up on them in disgust.

  One night, we go to a party and meet Francis T. P. Plimpton and his wife, parents of the celebrated writer and editor of The Paris Review, George Plimpton. The event is full of dignitaries, and, intimidated, I cling to Bob. He seems to like it when I do. But after I consume quite a few glasses of fine Côtes du Rhône, the rich and famous seem to shrink as I get bigger. I am feeling almost cocky when I hear Mrs. Francis T. P. Plimpton say, “Why must the rest of us support Israel when all those rich Jews should be the ones to give them money?”

  Now, Mrs. Francis T. P. Plimpton, the wife of the U.S. representative to the UN, is old society, the daughter of the aristocratic botanist Oakes Ames from Boston, the land where “the Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.”

  She is settled in a wing chair, legs elegantly crossed. I’m sitting Indian-style on her carpet. Bob is somewhere behind me. I look at her stony face that tilts slightly skyward, clear my throat, and say, “I’m a Christian and I support Israel. That’s because I’ve read about the Holocaust. I think it’s everybody’s duty to help build a homeland for those who’ve suffered so much.” Thus begins a bitter argument, with a number of guests apparently drinking it in as though we were a peep show. Bob is just a yard away. A guest who is the director of the FBI steps in, but retreats when he sees this blood feud.

  “Do you know how tiny Israel is? It’s a fingernail in a fist of Arabs. It’s littler than New Jersey, and it’s surrounded by enormous Arab countries that fire rockets on the kibbutzim and farms,” I declare, and she rebuts: “What concern is that of ours?” I go on and on, about social responsibility and political compassion. Eventually, she closes her mouth and doesn’t say another word. Bob raises his eyebrows at me, the signal we use if one of us wants to leave. I feel suddenly sober and mortified. I shake Mrs. Plimpton’s limp hand and we get in the elevator.

  Who was I back there? When I step outside my reporter’s persona and into the public, I still never know what will happen. But I normally don’t pick a fight with the hostess of a party. I can’t see Bob’s face—he is getting our coats now—but I can hear my mother’s voice saying, “Shame on you.”

  I finger my earlobe nervously and suddenly notice, with horror, the absence of one of the emerald earrings Bob had given me. It is probably irretrievably lost in the thick pile of the Plimpton carpet, justice for my crude behavior. I will never have the nerve to call and ask Mrs. Plimpton to look for it. I will not even tell Bob. As soon as we leave the apartment building, I peek up at him. I see a proud grin. “That,” he exclaims, “was your finest moment.”

  “How Lucinda put Mrs. Francis T. P. Plimpton in her place” becomes one of his favorite stories. I imagine his love for Israel blinded him to the deficit of refinement in me—until I found out that refinement wasn’t what he wanted at all.

  12

  By the early 1980s, the old Morgenthau homestead, which had been in the family for half a century, had been sold. The relationship between Bob and Henry, who had been so close as children, temporarily soured around the decision to sell the house and divide the property. Henry was the only one of the three siblings for selling, and only when he himself found buyers. Then the apple orchards were divided into three parcels of about three hundred acres each. Joan, keeping her share of the orchard for her children, let it go to seed, and Henry sold his for development. Bob, the farmer at heart, kept the property that included the store, the barns, the tractors, and all the other farm equipment.

  When it came time to empty the homestead, Bob shrank from the trauma of dividing his parents’ possessions and sent me up as his representative. Asserting what they believe belongs to them is always acrimonious among siblings, but less so for a sister-in-law. So off I went alone, his surrogate.

  Joan and Henry were waiting inside the cavernous hall among a plethora of needlepoint rugs, four-poster beds, popcorn bedspreads, Henry junior’s time-honored desk, Windsor chairs, fine old lithographs, and furniture made at Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s little furniture factory in Hyde
Park. To my relief, we divvied things up with equanimity. Only a few items were debated, one of which was a big fur lap rug that was used in the days of open carriages. I knew Bobby loved that. When I gave it to him, he was so pleased I had shown concern for him that he was never again simply tolerant of me; he became my friend.

  And so the other children followed. In the words of Yeats, the widening gyre had been turning, but instead of falling apart, the center held. After five years, the children had gradually made peace with our marriage. It didn’t hurt that I had written a humorous and tender article for the Times about my husband, the cook, who never looked at a recipe but poured farm-pressed cider over everything; each weekend we ate his invention, Chicken and Apples in the Pot, which bubbled in a cast-iron cauldron over our open fireplace. “How could your stepkids doubt that you really love him after that?” asked Susan Sarnoff, one of Barbara’s closest friends.

  My stepchildren and I now smiled, even laughed together. At least once, Jenny, two years older than me, had the courage to introduce me as her stepmother. Annie and her husband, Paul, and I would joke around. After my father died, Paul wrote me a poignant letter about what it was like losing his own dad.

  * * *

  There were many reasons I loved my youngest stepdaughter. I loved Barbara’s irrepressible laugh. I admired her quick wit and her independence and courage—surviving and thriving in spite of losing her mother so young. I loved her fine sensibility, the integrity her father undoubtedly passed on to her. I was grateful for the way she affectionately called me Lucille and bought me some handsome journals to write in. She didn’t mind at all if I was moved to do a turkey walk around the house, singing, “Alley oop, oop, oop, oop oop.” She decided both her father and I were weird and relished telling us so.

  Barbara could crack me up. One day at dinner, Bob was subjecting her to complicated family history—how the Lehmans related to the Fatmans and the Morgenthaus to the Strauses and the Wertheims to the Guggenheims. “Now, Mayer Lehman had eight children, four girls and four boys,” Bob explained. “There was Harriet and Herbert…”