Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  “Oh!” interrupted Barbara, aged thirteen. “If Grandpa and Grandma hadn’t spent so much time fornicating, it would be easier to understand this family.”

  Barbara’s graduation from Fieldston came all too soon. I cried when she stepped up in the spring of 1981 to get her diploma. As she went off to Amherst, her father and brother’s alma mater, I reflected on the last five years with her. Bob loved her with a deep, transcendent love unique to them. If I had taken away some of her time with him, it was just a matter of time before she took herself away from him. Strong, self-sufficient, and nineteen, she had been taught well by her father. I had loved her, laughed with her; she had given me both delight and exasperation. Hopefully, I had brought some noise and laughter, some light, into the dusky place where she had lived.

  * * *

  The Vineyard in August 1981. Barbara and I, shoulder to shoulder, making a mean tuna niçoise. Hot, humid. The smell of boiling water. Steam coating already sweaty faces. Scrabbling about in a sink full of olive pits, celery stalks, a fountain of scallions. The tick of the clock above the stove: intervals calm, predictable, dreamy.

  One night after dinner at the Kaufmans’ home, Barbara and I were clearing the table when she whispered, “I have a boyfriend. Serious.” The leftovers nearly slid off the plate I was holding. Barbara had never confided in me about anything so personal. I responded casually, and the confidences kept coming. She hardly needed my advice, but the boy was professing his love, so I told her to be cautious. I was happy for her, and happy that she had felt comfortable letting me into her life.

  Bobby had also acquired a summer girlfriend; I caught glimpses of them hand in hand, faraway little figures guarding their privacy. I think they knew I had seen them. Nan, Margie, and assorted relations and friends pumped me about the liaison, but I held them off, claiming that the two were just friends. Bobby was a very private individual, and I had absorbed some of the family’s restraint. One weekend, when he went to visit friends off island, he gave me a grateful peck on the cheek.

  At last, I felt included and was the mistress of my home. That summer, I could hardly remember the time when I wasn’t a part of anything or anyone. When I simply tried to survive.

  * * *

  The mind is tissue paper on which experience is written with a shaky hand. What a difference in your perception of things, when everyone seems just beyond your reach. Every little gesture is greater than itself, everything a symbol that re-creates your past or predicts the future. Rejected, you walk stiffly, measuring each sentence, hearing every word resound as though you had never said it.

  Then, one day, you find you have come unstuck. You climb off the flat black line you’ve drawn in mid-nowhere, penetrate the membrane of the circle, and float now and forever through its streaming dimensions.

  * * *

  Our rental was a little clapboard house at Stonewall Beach in Chilmark, so close to the bluff it looked as if it might fall off at any moment. Barbara and her friends wandered in and out, leaving empty Coke cans and bikini tops everywhere. I loved an orderly house, but I loved this more, having signs of her being around us. I tried to do my writing in the cellar, but it was too dark, so word of my predicament traveled, and before I knew it, a lady from one of the old island families was offering me her fishing shack as a studio.

  Bob loved the village atmosphere of the island. He loved people. That summer, I got a new appreciation for the way Bob cared for them. If the sea was too choppy to sail, we sometimes lounged around the boat with guests or family. He would slip down the dock to the Galley and suddenly reappear toting big bags of lobster rolls, crab cakes, clam chowder, just when people were suddenly hungry for lunch. He liked passing out the food. “Does everyone have what they want? Noah? Lila? Paul? No clam chowder, Annie? Here.” He would give up something he loved to eat so he knew everyone was satisfied.

  When he was free from the stress of work, Bob’s aloofness would melt away. He would grin at me mischievously, as though he were letting me in on a secret that had surprised him as well.

  One night, we went to a dinner party at the home of John Hersey. People were talking to him about his historic piece on the bombing of Hiroshima that had taken up a whole issue of The New Yorker after the war. But I was sneaking looks at Bob, observing the happy creases in his cheeks, the flash of a smile in his eyes. “He’s sooooo cute,” I said to Margie Lang. “Adorable,” she replied.

  Finally, one day I couldn’t help asking, “Why are you smiling all the time?” My husband wasn’t one to bring me flowers or bend me over in a fervent embrace. But I would have traded all of that for the answer he gave me.

  “When you’re happy, so am I,” he said.

  There was another reason. That summer we decided to have a child. Before we married, Bob had agreed to this, and after four years together we figured it would be nice to add another. We had stopped birth control, and I had stopped smoking, for we expected to become pregnant soon.

  At the thought of becoming a father again at age sixty-two, he behaved like a youngster, leaping toward the waves and riding them in, not caring about the water flooding his delicate ears, hair slicked down like a wet cat, wanting only to have fun and show off for his delightedly clapping wife. The sand was golden white, and by the end of the summer it would look old and rusty, streaked with iron red and black, the stones having washed down to cover the beach. But now they were banked, and we would gaze at the frothing high tide crawl toward them, moving like fingers into the crevices, stretching for that extra inch. Their rumble was mesmerizing, like the clattering of herons and gulls, a thousand voices at once, the muffled screams of people trapped in a tunnel.

  We would emerge from the beach sun dazed and pickled with salt, and then we would hop into our whites and play tennis with a friend whose spouse was as poor a player as I was. We didn’t win any competitions, but we had a jolly time of it.

  Noah, Annie’s second child, asked Bob, whom the grandkids called Hoppa, and me to watch him take his first tennis lesson at age six. We cheered him on and then tossed balls across the net to him. Life was a round of Humphreys fresh doughnuts, trips to the red-and-gray-clay Gay Head cliffs for breakfast, antiquing, fishing trips, catching crabs, eating lobsters, buying slabs of pink swordfish that had come right off a trawler just returned from sea.

  City dwellers love their anonymity, but the price they pay is the loss of spontaneity. Here, on this bygone island of gnarled scrubby oak, full of apple-green pastures rolling down to the sea and trails fragrant with horse buns, anyone anytime can arrive at your door. Bob, for instance, became renowned for delivering a couple of bluefish he’d caught to his cousins and friends; the only one who cared whether the fish bled all over the fridge was me.

  Community flourished, even community you didn’t want. People you hardly know and you will never see in the city press you to come to dinner. Exhausted by four parties in a row, you can still be lured to a fifth with the dangled bait of distinguished people you’ve always wanted to meet. Bob needed to see charitable people who would donate to the Police Athletic League (PAL). I was excited by the prospect of simply laying eyes on redoubtable writers like Lillian Hellman or John Hersey or William Styron.

  When Lillian Hellman asked me to sit down beside her, I was terrified. She had the reputation of being an irascible, scathing person who, it sounded, could cut you down faster than my mother. She was having a nasty feud with the writer Diana Trilling on the other end of the island, and people had to be careful not to ask both of them to the same party. “So I hear you’re a fan,” she said. “Tell me how you liked Maybe,” a story that had just been published. I told her I hadn’t read it. “Well, some fan you are!” she replied. I quickly started talking about her play The Children’s Hour, and she rasped, “Everyone’s read that. I’ve heard too much about it. Tell me something interesting.” I blanched, and she began to laugh. “Don’t get upset. I’ll tell you a secret. People think I’m a bitch, but I’m just pretending. If you
’re going to be a writer, you have to be bitchy. You’ve got to scare the reviewers!”

  Years afterward, one party I attended was to have a major impact on my life. In August 1997, Bill and Hillary Clinton began coming to the Vineyard. One night, we went to a party given by Bill Rollnick, a founder of the Mattel toy company, and his wife, Nancy Ellison, a talented photographer of Vineyard scenes. We sat at round tables near their beach, and I was surprised to see that I had been put one seat away from the First Lady, whom I had never met. She was warm and charming, without pretension. She made me feel as if we had known each other before. At the table, two newsmen of some repute were loudly dominating the conversation, discussing television politics, when an aide came and spoke into Hillary’s ear. I saw her eyes fill. I thought I saw her hand shake, and finally I put my hand on hers and whispered, “Is everything all right?” She shook her head and, looking unsteady, rose from the table. I took her arm and walked her inside. We went into the Rollnicks’ television room. Bill Clinton was gazing at the set, at flashes of Princess Diana, fresh-faced and smiling, on her wedding day. “She’s dead,” he said numbly. Hillary sat down. She watched, in shock, as we all were, while newscasters gave the bloody details of the car crash that had killed their friend.

  “You’ve been very kind,” she told me before she left. And she never forgot it.

  * * *

  By the fall of 1982, I had gotten used to leaving Bob’s side at large functions. Through our popularity in the Vineyard and my presence at his political and charity events, I had lost my habitual frozen stare and learned the art of bonhomie. It wasn’t easy. Bob was a pro, so socially relaxed he could talk to anyone about anything. And everyone knew him, and if they didn’t, they pretended they did. I, however, had to concentrate in order to shake each hand vigorously, to dare give a bold, shining smile to anyone, to look into people’s eyes with such interest they felt important. It was kind of exciting, but at the end of the evening I was often depleted.

  We began to owe hospitality to the political and cultural czars of the city, but could I pull off a party, and would they even come? “We can ask anyone we want; they’ll come,” replied Bob. “Don’t forget, you’re also famous.” I told him he was off-the-wall.

  It was early October 1982, and in the city was Israel’s defense minister, Ariel Sharon, who had caused an international outrage in June by invading Lebanon and allowing a right-wing Lebanese militia to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where they massacred some eight hundred Palestinian women, children, and the elderly. I thought it would be interesting to begin by giving a party for him.

  Sharon’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon had wiped out the infrastructure of the PLO, which had long been shelling settlements in northern Israel. He had thus become a hero to pro-Israeli conservatives and a criminal to liberals. I love a good brawl, so I invited prominent people from both sides of the controversy. There was Iphigene Sulzberger, the elderly mother of the publisher of the Times, who recounted that she had been in Palestine in 1937; Robert Semple, the paper’s evenhanded Op-Ed editor; Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Bros., and his wife, Courtney Sale, who at the time was an art dealer; Uri Dan, Israeli correspondent for the New York Post and Sharon’s good friend, who had been such a dynamic host to us in Israel; Victor Temkin and his wife, Susie; and Arthur and Barbara Gelb—Barbara was a fine writer and a blunt, outspoken, and occasionally oppositional personality.

  Most of the guests were sipping wine in the living room when Sharon walked in like a jolly Santa Claus, leading with his big belly. Barbara, who wrote for The New York Times Magazine, was not charmed, however, and started right in on him: “Minister Sharon, I mean General, can you tell me why you ordered your allies, the Christian Phalangists, to go into those refugee camps and murder men, women, and children?”

  Sharon smiled indulgently at her. “Call me Arik. We were on the perimeter of Sabra and Shatila. We thought they were rooting out terrorists; we didn’t know that they were killing non-terrorist elements.”

  “Elements?” Barbara replied, her eyes hard as marbles. “You mean the boys who got scalped and castrated? The women whose throats were slit, who were found lying in their tents with their skirts up and their legs spread?”

  “Let the man sit down and have a drink,” Uri Dan said in his slow, insinuating drawl.

  I hurried to get Arik and his protective wife, Lily, comfortably seated on the couch and poured him a glass of wine made at Tal Shahar. “This was made at a moshav that’s named after Bob’s father, they…”

  Barbara interrupted me. “The invasion has only enhanced Israel’s reputation as a militaristic state,” she said in a gravelly voice.

  “Why did you really invade Lebanon anyway?” asked Arthur, who could often be found deferring to his wife. “I think the murder of your ambassador in the U.K. was a weak pretext. He wasn’t even killed by the PLO. It was the PLO’s enemy Abu Nidal.”

  “Abu Nidal, PLO, PLF, PIJ, they are all the same. All of them are committed to shedding Israeli blood,” Sharon said quietly, his English becoming more heavily accented. “The murder of our ambassador was the last straw in many aggressions toward us. What if Mr. Dan here started to throw Molotov cocktails in your window? Would you sit on your hands and say there is no pretext here for retaliation?”

  “But you killed thousands of innocent refugees in Lebanon for what, twenty-four Israelis killed by bombs in the kibbutzim?”

  “Twenty-six,” Sharon corrected her. “They were busily tilling their land, hugging their children, and, poof, they were gone.”

  Bob uncharacteristically cut in with his resonant voice. “Barbara, there are a lot of American Jew-hating Jews who criticize Israel for not just securing a buffer zone but going all the way up to Beirut. But wiping out the whole PLO was the only way to ensure that they wouldn’t start up again. Alexander Haig gave Arik the go-ahead. The American government was behind him. It was a great achievement.”

  Sharon nodded. “I’m proud of it. I just wish I had killed that rat Arafat on the way.”

  “Oh!” Barbara closed her eyes and groaned in disgust.

  I looked at Bob, horrified, wondering whether I should do something to shut Barbara up. But he was just sitting there, smiling.

  Sharon looked pointedly at the Times people. “This is off the record. I have not spoken about the Lebanon War before, and I don’t intend to. But we found underground tunnels dug by the PLO filled with more large weapons than they would ever need. Huge numbers of tanks and rifles of Soviet manufacture. Next, they would have stockpiled long-range missiles.”

  Arthur was listening closely, looking as though he would give anything for a notebook and pencil. Sharon said, “Mr. Gelb, remember, you can’t write about this. No, no, not for background, not for anything at all.”

  Bob had an impeccable sense of timing, whereas I had none, so he was the one who stood up and subtly ushered everyone into the dining room. Once they were digging into Renia’s roast quail, which was tender as butter, Sharon was left in peace. He ate heartily and laughed often.

  Then, after people had stopped eating, he took out maps of Israel and used a knife to point out the Golan Heights, where Syria had shelled Israeli territory below, and how close the Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon had inched down to Israel. “See this castle on the border. It was built by the crusaders, and now it’s a PLO headquarters.”

  As the Gelbs were leaving, Barbara, looking chastened, turned to Sharon: “I apologize for hounding you. I was out of line.”

  “Not to worry,” said Uri Dan, carrying a roll of the defense minister’s maps, “he’s used to answering all kinds of questions.”

  “It is important that people understand us,” Sharon said, smiling flirtatiously at Barbara. “You see, my job is to defend Israel not only from those who would annihilate us but from beautiful American women who like to argue.”

  As Lily was going through the door, however, she looked over her shoulder at Barbara as if she were an
agent provocateur from the PLO.

  * * *

  Joyce Carol Oates sat shyly in our living room with her husband, Ray Smith. They had enviably straight posture. Joyce and I had become friends after I did a story for The New York Times Magazine on her new novel Bellefleur, which moved her into the popular culture. She had come from Detroit and was teaching at Princeton.

  Ray was a gentle man who ran their literary magazine, The Ontario Review, while Joyce, striking with her dark bobbed hair and huge brown eyes, had to sometimes discipline herself not to write.

  Conversation was stalled until Bob came to the rescue. “These Tylenol deaths are very odd,” he said as if he had a window into her mind. “They still don’t know if it was accidental or the work of a criminal.”

  And indeed, he hit the right note. “Oh, I think it was murder!” she said. “Someone injected poison into the pills, I’m quite sure. I just received the galleys about this new book on the jilted boy from Yale who killed his girlfriend with a hammer,” she said, shaking her head, “but I can’t bear to look at them. It’s so tragic, so gory…”

  “Were you a detective in a prior life?” quipped Bob. “You have the imagination of a sleuth.”

  “Well, I have so many hypnagogic experiences, seeing images between sleep and waking…”

  Ray cut in. “The night Joyce was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I asked Howard Nemerov what he thought of Ted Weiss’s new epic poem and he threw up in his soup!”

  “Oh, Ray,” she said with a tilt of her head. “It was only that he had had too much to drink.

  “Ray makes delicious bread,” she said, changing the subject. Yesterday, I walked into the kitchen and he was covered in runny dough and his bread—he’s very sweet about his bread—had fallen, and he acted like he just didn’t want to live anymore.”