Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  “I know what you mean, Ray,” said Bob. My husband was a good cook who used no recipes.

  “Well, it was a time of a great low for me,” he replied. “This was the last straw.”

  “How is your novel coming, Lucinda?” asked Joyce. “Are you still in the grasp of writer’s block? She reassured me that she too suffered from this paralyzing condition, which I took as a well-intentioned prevarication. At age forty-four, the woman was as prolific as Simenon, having published more than two dozen books by 1982, with many more stacked in a chest; her publishers simply couldn’t keep up with her. She had even written a number of other books under a pseudonym.

  Suddenly the Siamese seal point I had given Barbara jumped up on Joyce’s lap.

  “Peter, get down,” Bob said, but Joyce was delighted.

  “Actually, we do have to get back to Princeton now,” she said, stroking Peter Rabbit.

  “We have the five cats at home.”

  Ray nodded. “They’ll be fretting about us. And they’ll want their meal.”

  “And I have to vacuum,” added Joyce with a glint in her eye. “I love housework, it makes you feel like you’ve really done something…”

  * * *

  The next time they visited, the elevator was broken, so they took the freight elevator and walked smack into Renia taking out the garbage. They wandered around calling us, but we had just gotten out of the shower. Bob padded out in his bathrobe to apologetically greet them. I threw on my clothes and followed. Bob was standing there staring at Joyce, and I did a double take. She was as transformed as a character in one of her novels; far from falling into the abyss, however, she looked almost Olympian. A mass of becoming curls now framed her face, brightened with eye shadow and lip gloss. Gone were the sweet flowered dresses made by her mother upstate in Lockport. Instead, she was wearing a rakish blue pleated blouse from Issey Miyake. When I complimented her, she looked away modestly, but her voice was more sonorous, more definite: “Oh, well, it’s only that Gloria Vanderbilt has become a friend, and she sends me all these clothes.”

  * * *

  A few years before, I had persuaded my adolescent hero, Eudora Welty, to come up from Jackson, Mississippi, to speak at the first fund-raiser of the nonprofit Writers Room, which I had helped found. It provided communal space for professional writers who couldn’t afford private offices; it allowed them to work in a peaceful, silent atmosphere far more conducive to creativity than noisy home environments full of phones, doorbells, and family talking or walking over their manuscripts.

  I had first met Ms. Welty when she had visited my senior creative writing class at Vassar, which was taught by her friend the college’s legendary English professor Bill Gifford. She was as quirky as Sister in my favorite Welty story, “Why I Live at the P.O.” Professor Gifford had picked her up at the Poughkeepsie train station, and on the way to the college she had cried, “Oh! There’s a squirrel leaning on its elbow.” During class she advised us that if a tornado struck, stand under the lintel of the doorway and you won’t get blown away.

  Though much different from Joyce, she had the same diffidence. But when she smiled, she did so with such an inviting radiance you felt as if she had brought you home. She lived and wrote alone, in the quietude of her late mother’s house, and in her talk to the crowd she gave a hearty salute to our big space full of desks and dividers and freedom from chaos.

  * * *

  Bob liked to have parties, so since I was not writing at the time, I kept having them. There were the occasional faux pas and near disasters. Once I seated Teddy White, author of the distinguished Making of the President books, next to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who had just panned his new book in The New York Times. On another occasion I asked Mayor Koch, whom I had sat next to me, what he was doing about the homeless. “Let’s talk about serious issues,” he replied dismissively. “Most of them don’t help themselves.”

  Koch began to wax passionate on the need to fix the city’s potholes. I, on the other hand, was passionate about the need to help America’s destitute. “What about the families who’ve been evicted, Ed?” I interrupted, a little too loudly. “Hungry children, overcrowded placement offices, shelters so violent the homeless would rather sleep on the street!” A smiling Bob was egging me on; he still loved to see me get publicly feisty about a cause he believed in. But the mayor clearly did not; he abruptly turned to chat with his other dinner partner.

  And then, on January 28, 1982, President and Nancy Reagan invited us to a formal dinner. The White House! But Ronald Reagan’s White House? I worried over the hypocrisy of shaking the hand of the man who was against gun control, abortion, universal health care—and the general well-being of the people. Jack Newfield of The Village Voice would kill me. Yet it would be my first time in the presidential mansion. The old conflict. My political principles versus the social splendor Mother tried to groom me for. When Bob booked us into the Hay-Adams, the oldest, most exclusive hotel in the city, I crossed the line.

  On that memorable night, we were welcomed to the White House by a brass band as we processed down a red carpet that was flanked by marines in full uniform. Nancy’s much criticized formal redecoration of the rooms—“so that all Americans could be proud”—was elegant, cool, and immaculate, like Nancy herself. As she received her guests, however, she seemed less gracious than tired, resigned to shaking hands with an assembly line. Every smile has a message, and hers said, “You’re below my element.” Behind her highly designed veneer, though, I thought she seemed like a minor factotum in the Junior League.

  The marine officers were eyeing everyone, shadowing those who peeked in closed rooms, accompanying others to the bathroom. I thought how Mother would have savored all these details if she had been alive for me to tell her. We strolled through the crowds and came across Alistair Cooke and other British journalists I had known in London. I stood with them, fascinated by Cooke’s stories, and before I knew it, Bob was gone. I went looking for him, but then a marine hooked my arm and ushered me to my table.

  I was, to my surprise, at a table of heavyweights, undoubtedly seated there for variety. Joseph Alsop, the former dean of conservative columnists, was giving the table a sharply enunciated monologue about our cowardice in Vietnam. My unusually quiet dinner partner, Teddy Kennedy, who had just gone through both a divorce and a defeat in the presidential primary, took Alsop on and I joined in. The argument was getting heated when Bob came up and squeezed my arm, hard. “I’m tired. I want to go home,” he whispered. I excused myself and followed him into the hallway.

  He didn’t look happy. “I don’t think it was a good idea to attack someone as influential in your profession as Joseph Alsop,” he said in a cool tone.

  “But everyone agrees Vietnam was a terrible mistake,” I declared. “Alsop was arguing as if we were back in the Stone Age. I think he’s past his prime, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t make personal remarks about people.”

  Something was clearly wrong. It was usually Bob who was surrounded by admirers. Maybe he had felt left out. “Why did you leave me when I was talking to Alistair Cooke? Why didn’t you just stay and join the conversation?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear you—or anyone else.”

  “Sweetheart,” I said, steeling myself, “you need a hearing aid.”

  “Don’t start, just don’t start.”

  “You act like a stubborn little boy who doesn’t want to wear his galoshes. And all I’m trying to do is help you.

  “I would think you’d want to listen to what people are saying to you,” I added.

  “Then I’d have to listen to you. Harassing me.”

  I kept my temper. I didn’t want to spoil his evening, our evening.

  I hugged his arm as we walked out together: “I wish we had been at the same table. I missed you. You’re my anchor.”

  He patted my hand, and we talked about the evening as we crossed Lafayette Square to the Hay-Adams.

&nb
sp; “I like Ronnie. He’s smart, you know,” Bob said. “He remembered meeting my father in July 1943 at a war bonds rally.

  “I couldn’t believe he could call up that brief meeting, with the date, forty years ago,” he continued. “People who call him senile are just ignorant. He has a better memory than me.”

  “Impossible,” I exclaimed. Of course, I was one of the people who had called Ronnie senile, not once, but many times.

  “Well, sweetheart, this was an unexpected pleasure, to be at the White House. Just so long as this is the last we see of Ronald Reagan. We’re Democrats, Bob, we have no business with a die-hard Republican like him.”

  “You’re right.”

  Back at the hotel, we went right to sleep, exhausted by the events of the evening.

  When I awoke the next morning, Bob was gone. I saw a note propped on the bedroom mirror: “Sweetheart, gone to see the President—8:10.” I stared at it, unbelieving. Then I looked at my watch: 8:11. He must have just left. I rushed out the door and down the hall, but the elevator was cold and unmoving. When did he get an appointment with Reagan, and why didn’t he tell me? I went back to the room. Still clad in T-shirt and boxers, I found that of course I had locked myself out. “Oh, damn it to hell!” I shouted.

  The door opened. “What are you doing out there?” asked Bob quaintly, shaving brush in hand.

  “But, but … oh you, you … you!” I took in his little smile. “You knew exactly what I’d do when I read that note. Someone could have caught me out there half-naked!”

  “I was watching you. Why didn’t you think to look for me in the bathroom? You always have to rush into things.”

  I crumpled up his note and threw it at him. “One of these days I’m going to stop believing your little teases.”

  “Who says I was teasing?” he replied innocently.

  13

  In the 1980s, the same politics that had brought us together now separated us. Bob had become more and more of an independent, and sometimes conservative, Democrat. Like so many Americans, he was affected by the malaise of the country: low economic growth and high inflation, poor foreign policy, the spectacle of our servicemen being paraded through the streets of Tehran with bags over their heads. He joined the majority of Americans who thought President Carter had botched the Iran hostage crisis, and Bob personally thought him anti-Semitic. Thus, as the presidential election loomed, the polls rose for Carter’s opponent, Reagan, who was promising to bring a new conservatism into the country.

  But, faced with circumstances beyond his control, Carter, in his leadership, seemed almost valiant to me: He hadn’t lost his liberal values under the pressures of realpolitik. He had remained a humanitarian, and he was a leader who had inherited the problems with Iran from previous administrations.

  Bob and I usually went to PS 6 holding hands, but on the morning of November 4, 1980, we entered the voting booths hardly speaking and emerged looking at each other with superiority.

  I knew Bob, though characteristically secretive about his vote, had pulled the lever for Reagan, who was strongly pro-Israel. Bob had come to put almost all other national issues aside for the sake of supporting this tragically beautiful land, encircled by enemies; its children, fathers, grandfathers, lifting guns to save the only homeland their people had ever known. Most of us repress the impact of the state-ordered Jewish genocide; its multitude of horrors can hardly be comprehended. But the continued suffering and struggle of the survivors in the Middle East was a cataclysm never far from Bob’s mind. Or mine. We had shared this from the beginning: deep anger and sorrow over Hitler’s Final Solution. The concentration camps only had to be mentioned and we would both well up.

  Bob was seldom impressed by eminent people, but meeting Holocaust survivors was an exception for him; he was gentle, awed. His living heroes were people like Peter Malkin, whom he asked again and again to recount his capture of Eichmann. He refused to buy anything German: cars, coffeemakers, even the Rieslings that he secretly loved. When we went to Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum and saw the vast pile of shoes taken from Jews at the camps, his face stayed set, but inside I could see his anguish.

  Not that I really understood how this led him to love Reagan. I sat down to breakfast one morning, and on my plate was the Times, folded to a column that mocked the thinking of those who rejected Reagan’s draconian economic plan as undeveloped. I was exactly such a thinker. I believed in keeping Social Security intact, giving ample unemployment benefits, subsidizing housing for the poor, protecting the environment. And to deem these the rights of all people, a philosophy that was good enough for one of our greatest presidents, FDR, seemed to have no value to my husband, who dismissed my opinions as if they were the dreams of a child.

  “What’s happened to your concern for the underdog?” I asked Bob one morning, slapping down the paper. “Who do you think his trickle-down economy has trickled down to? To the rich, so they can get richer. Not the families who are destitute.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, all you know is what you think you know,” I replied. “All you care about is how many F-16s are sent to Tel Aviv, not the quality of the leaders who send them.”

  He picked up the paper and pretended not to hear me.

  This weapon of his infuriated me. “I give up all my radical beliefs and my radical friends and my lifestyle to stand by you, because I believe that at bottom you share my beliefs! But now I find you supporting mediocre ultraconservative politicians.

  “Have you forgotten the liberal legacy your father left you?” I kept on. The more he ignored me, the more excited I became.

  “Your father believed in taxing the rich for the sake of the poor. He helped FDR build the New Deal! He gave people back their dignity and self-worth. What would he think if he saw you now? Letting your vision shrink to a fraction of his! Betraying what he believed.”

  The air seemed to go out of the room. I had brought the father whom Bob revered into our dispute, not a good idea. I had accused Bob of not living up to his father’s high ideals. Words I couldn’t take back.

  Bob’s father had in fact suffered greatly for his ideals, and no one was more sensitive to his father’s pain than Bob. The only Jew in the cabinet and in FDR’s group of principal advisers, Henry Morgenthau Jr. never believed his efforts had saved enough Jewish refugees. After the Morgenthau Plan was rejected, even by Jews, he left Washington an exhausted and depressed man.

  The experiences of Henry junior’s father, Henry senior, were eerily similar to his son’s. So driven was Henry senior in publicly condemning the Ottomans for the Armenian genocide—which resulted in the massacre of two million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—that he irritated the Wilson government, jeopardized relations between the Ottoman Empire and America, and left his ambassadorship defeated.

  And I had been utterly unfair. Bob, in fact, cared deeply about the poor. He believed that they should receive the same opportunities as the more privileged, that they should have avenues that kept them away from the law. Like his father and grandfather, he wanted to give back some of what he had received. He had a special feeling for young people and for those who had struggled to make it. Once, an African American boy, a ten-year-old whom PAL had rescued from the streets, opened a fund-raiser by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in notes so pure and resonant, Bob’s eyes glistened.

  As long as I had known him, Bob had been active in Jewish organizations and soon began meeting regularly with Sharon and the Mossad, joining them in making cases against terrorists who wanted to topple the little country. He was appointed to lead a commission by Mayor Koch to build a memorial to the Holocaust in New York. And when other members of the commission finally became discouraged as the project failed to raise money—many Jews thought it destructive for Jewish persecution to be publicized—Bob stepped in. One weekend, I watched him make cold calls to millionaires—some he knew, like Steve Ross of Time Warner, and some he didn’t,
like Steven Spielberg. One of the moguls left an important investor to take his call. “I was so happy I wasn’t going to be investigated,” he said, “that I immediately sent a contribution.” By Monday, Bob had raised several million dollars, and plans for the museum suddenly took life.

  I wondered if Bob was unconsciously trying to save the Jewish people whom his father, his hero, was unable to. The museum would forever remind people of the Jewish genocide so that it would never again creep up, disguised and hidden, to overwhelm a nation.

  Now Bob got up to leave the table. I said “Wait” very faintly, but he had already gone into the bedroom and almost but not quite slammed the door.

  When he came home that evening, I was afraid to even mention the morning’s fight. But he wasn’t. He told me I was naive; I said he was a stuffed shirt; and on it went. Finally, we got tired and a little ashamed of thinking up vitriolic things to say. We became very polite with each other. But something was different. Being in the same room with him was like being alone.

  The only time we were close was in bed, and even then I felt a little as if we were mechanical dolls in a sex education class. You see, there was another simmering issue dividing us. We had tried for two years now and hadn’t gotten pregnant.

  * * *

  I was not alone. My doctor said urban women in the 1980s were simply not getting pregnant. Not in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway. They worried too much, worked too hard. Their fallopian tubes must have shrunk with the tension, their frightened eggs hiding from the tide of agitation. Bantu or East Indian women who whiled away the day under a lazy sun had babies they didn’t want, and desperate working women in London or New York City didn’t have them at all. Why else would men have invented in vitro fertilization? Why would clinics devoted to infertility be opening all over the place?

  Each month of barrenness had pulled us further apart. Failure permeated our marriage. We were embarrassed. I hid the nakedness that was once so natural. I forsook the intimacy of my husband’s T-shirts and wore my own nightclothes. Making love became akin to paying a tariff.