Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  * * *

  January 10

  Annie had a New Year’s Eve party, and I have never felt more close to my stepchildren. Bobby kissed me and said I was glowing; Eddie Rothschild kissed me on the lips, whispering, “You look so beautiful”; Bob Ascheim said I had the most beautiful belly in the room; and Bob’s sister, Joan, who is a doctor, said in her aristocratic, nasal voice, “You are much bigger than normal.”

  Daddy calls every day to see how I am. He asks when he should come down or what he should do, trying, I think, to make up for my having no mother.

  Bob has felt him! While he was singing, with his hand on my tummy, he actually saw the baby bulging out toward him. I think Bob’s singing has made him into a musician. Sometimes he plays the xylophone on my placenta, a little rat-a-tat-tat, sometimes a glissando, and then boom, boom, boom, no doubt a timpani of toes. I play Vivaldi and Bach at a high volume these days.

  We visited Bob’s old friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., sixty-nine, on his horse farm in Millbrook. FDR’s son has had four wives and seven children, one of whom is fairly young. Franklin said, “Bob, welcome to the Older Fathers’ Club!” He looked and sounded eerily like his father, long, aristocratic face and voice so plangent it might have been coming out of a radio.

  * * *

  I’m finally up against the clock, with just enough time to put together the Arens piece before the baby comes. This is how I write best: poised on the edge. Looking at my notes, I become excited: I had forgotten that the Israeli defense minister had dropped a gold nugget right in my lap. I had gone into the interview wondering why President Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, virtually leaked hostility toward the tiny Jewish homeland. I found out that Weinberger, though racially Jewish, was a committed Episcopalian and that he had worked for an anti-Semitic company, Bechtel Corporation, before becoming the man who could essentially decide Israel’s fate. I asked Arens if he thought Weinberger harbored a revulsion for Israel, and he rolled his eyes. I asked if he thought him anti-Semitic. He replied that Weinberger was a Jew who denied his own Jewishness. “He needs a psychiatrist,” Arens snapped.

  When the Times hears that Israel’s defense minister has publicly declared the American secretary of defense in need of psychiatric care, it schedules the article for the cover of the magazine.

  * * *

  I have finished the piece three weeks before the baby’s due. Foolishly, I assume I can rest up for the event. A week later, I naughtily eat two chocolate croissants at the Writers Studio, toddle home, and go to bed at 11:00 p.m. Just after dawn, I ignore it when my water breaks; the baby isn’t due for another two weeks. Then I am seized by a strong cramp and grab the phone. “Contractions,” my doctor says, yawning. “Go to the hospital when they’re ten minutes apart.” I shake my husband, who has attended Lamaze classes with me and will be my breathing coach. “I’m having labor pains!” I shout.

  He looks at his watch. Six in the morning. Then he turns over. “Okay, let me get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”

  I sit up, dumbfounded. Well, he has been through it five times, nothing novel. But that the imminent birth of our baby is all about his own sleep? It reminds me of our friend Pierre Leval, who, when his wife, Susana, went into labor, promptly threw out his back.

  The cramps are growing more severe. As they increase, I briefly consider waking Bob with a glass of water in his face.

  * * *

  When we finally arrive at Mount Sinai Hospital, I’m told to walk around with the other women there who circle each other, clutching their stomachs and moaning through their contractions.

  In the middle of a contraction, I am abruptly led away for an “urgent phone call” at the nurses’ station. On the other end of the line, the Times copy editor starts barking away at me. They are putting the story to bed, and they need last-minute clarifications. Through the contractions, I answer his questions crisply, from memory. Finally, he asks me what Arens was wearing when he made the Weinberger comment.

  The cramps are getting more intense. “Gray suit … blue tie.”

  “Do you have that quote on tape?”

  “Nee-yo,” I breathe. An arc of pain is sweeping over me, and I drop the phone.

  “What’d you say? Hello … hello, are you there?” I hear a tinny voice.

  I am half carried and laid out in a single room where my doctor and a resident are watching M*A*S*H on television.

  My doctor comes over and pats my hand while Bob intones, “Breathe, breathe, breathe.” Then they attach me to a fetal heartbeat monitor, which the doctor warns sometimes malfunctions.

  But Bob is fascinated by the wavy line that tells him Josh is healthy. And after ten hours of labor that is getting me nowhere, I have become rather a whinnying bore, even to myself. I finally consent to an epidural injection—giving up the possibility of pure, unmedicated natural childbirth—and I am staring at the ceiling, adrift in my painlessness. At my urging, Bob leaves my side for a more important job.

  He becomes the protector of the heart. Hours go by. I’m still not dilating, and I get more injections. And then, in a blur, Bob moves to the TV and quietly tells the doctors, “The heart has stopped.” They hoist themselves up and shout orders, and I find myself on a gurney being raced to the delivery room. I pass Bob in the hall, and his tawny skin is dead white, a sight I will never forget. Soon, I hear a lusty wail. But there are no announcements. Perhaps it is another woman’s baby. “Is it alive?” I finally whisper.

  “Oh, yes, yes!” A merciful intern comes over. “A nice healthy boy.”

  Bob comes in and rests his damp cheek on mine. “That damn machine malfunctioned,” he mumbles. “But I called our pediatrician, and he’s on his way over.” They bring the baby to us: bronze skin like Bob’s, huge blue eyes, strands of dark hair arranged around his head like a crown. It is a little after 11:00 p.m., March 2, 1984.

  Bob brings bottles of fine French wine, duck pâtés studded with slivers of pistachio, goat cheeses, Saint-Andrés, and caviar for our dinners. To the consternation of the nurses, I won’t let Joshua Franks Morgenthau out of my sight. When he has to be bathed, they do it in the room. Bob looks on happily, content to be the observer he is. Each time I try to put the baby in his arms, he blocks me and shakes his head. Finally, I simply deposit Josh on his lap, pleading for a break. When I return, Bob is holding the baby gingerly, but on his face there is a smile of indescribable delight. Caesar has arrived.

  15

  It takes just a single moment for a journalist, justly or unjustly, to lose her credibility, to watch years of hard work disappear like a balloon in the sky. On Sunday, March 25, with my baby three weeks old, my article on Arens runs in the Times. There is instant outrage from the Defense Department and talk of Weinberger’s holding up a supply of U.S.-made fighter planes to Israel. Arens reacts by denying that he ever said Weinberger needed a psychiatrist. The Times reacts by publishing a front-page story about the controversy. Unluckily, I did not tape the exchange, which took place in a car, but luckily, Bob had been present. “I was there when Arens said it,” he told the newspaper, and The New York Times wrote that it stood by its reporter’s story.

  Just as quickly as I had fallen, I had been redeemed and was able to make my new life with Bob and our son.

  April 6

  Will I ever be the kind of mother he can love? Or will I be the type you read about in the newspapers, whose son holds her off at knifepoint while he eats a box of hidden cookies?

  I have given birth to a night creeper, waking every two hours, wanting to socialize or eat. I say let’s just take him into our bed, but Bob says what if we roll over on him?

  * * *

  Bob and I smile constantly, like idiots. Before you have a child, life is, in large, predictable. Enter a child and nothing is ever predictable again. You are drunk with delight one moment and hungover in despair the next.

  One day, I am bathing Josh, absently trickling water down his back, simultaneously
trying to hold him up, keep the water warm, and maneuver the soap, when without warning comes a thunderbolt, shifting the prism, abruptly stopping the clock, bringing forth a sight such as I’ve never seen before. This baby, this baby unbearably beautiful: you know that you will long for this moment for years after it is over. The soap swirls unattended as he goes absolutely still, like a tableau. Who is this? Where did this marvel come from? His creamy glistening skin, the light coming through his tissue-thin ear, the enormous blue eyes, wide and wishful, fixed on me, his world.

  At one month old, he is like a stand-up comic, expressing frustration by running a hand down his face, curiosity by cupping it under his chin, anger by looking rather like Henry VIII, dangerously displeased with one of his wives.

  Bob has moved Josh’s cradle next to him and tries to solve the sleep problem by holding his hand through the twirled slats. Sometimes he sings “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which makes Josh, who first heard it in utero, flap his arms in recognition. I wake and see my son’s chubby little fist holding tight to my husband’s long, sculpted finger. Yesterday, when we thought the baby asleep, Bob said, “Lucinda, are you scratching my back?” I wasn’t, but Josh, reaching through the cradle, was. When we peered over at him, he had a look of sheer delight.

  April 10, 1984

  Western Union telegram

  Grandma died in sleep Monday. Funeral Kankakee yesterday. Thought you too busy with baby. Buried next to your mother. Inform Penelope. Yours, Bill.

  I crushed the yellow rectangular paper in my hand. Grammy. Gone. Just like that. Without a goodbye from me, without ever seeing her only great-grandchild. Laid in the ground before I even knew it.

  Uncle Billy, my mother’s brother, had disliked all children, but he had particularly loathed Penny and me. Once, under duress, he took me to Kresge’s for a root beer float. He watched me, glowering, as I sipped very carefully; I was sure that if I dribbled once, he would have got up and left me there. Our Waterloo occurred when Penny was six, and I was twelve; we carelessly threw our wet bathing suits over the braided arm of his favorite chair. He told my mother he never wanted to see us again. Still, she perpetuated the myth that deep down this troubled personality, which she must have recognized in herself, loved us with all his heart.

  Gram’s favorite opera was Tosca, so I put it on the record player and call Penny. I haven’t a friend that comes close to her; there is no one who understands me better, no one I know so deeply.

  “He didn’t even phone? He used a telegram!” Penny cries.

  “He might be insensitive to us,” I reply, “but he was devoted to Gram, and she to him, and at least we can be grateful for that.”

  “He let Kathleen take care of her,” Penny says darkly. “He didn’t do a thing.

  “All the friends we know of hers in Kankakee, her bridge club, that woman who taught her Chinese paper weaving, what will they think about us not even coming to her funeral!”

  “I wonder what she thought?” I reply quietly.

  There is a silence. “Cindy, are you going loony on me?”

  I am and I hang up because I hear a faint tremolo above Renata Tebaldi. It gets louder, and my hands go icy. Gram is here, I can hear her, I can feel her. She was an opera singer in Chicago when she was young, and now I see her but don’t. That stolid powdered shape, bosom like the prow of a ship, silky dress of roses, white wispy hair. The smell of lavender. Her spirit taking shape behind a screen. Her mouth is pursed in a little smile, and her eyes are bright. I weep; “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Gram. I never came to see you when you were sick.”

  “You were there,” she intones in her glottal Victorian voice.

  “You didn’t even see your first great-grandchild!”

  “But I did.” She smiles. “I see him now.”

  A gentle wind caresses my forehead and Gram is gone. Her scent lingers in the room.

  * * *

  Not long afterward, Bobby, now living in his own apartment, comes in our front door quietly. Renia peeks into the living room and sees him leaning over the old brass cradle that once rocked his great-grandfather, talking softly to his new brother, letting him suck one of his fingers. This makes me inordinately happy.

  May 5, 1984

  Our lives have been taken over by Joshua. If I go out of the house, I come home in a panic, desperate to see him. Bob works hard as usual, but part of his mind is devoted to making up stories and songs for the baby. He comes home early now to see the spectacle of his son winding up for his evening meal: Josh snorts, makes an O, and crosses his eyes before diving into the nipple. Bob is amused. Delighted that Josh has inherited his big appetite, he holds him and sings, “I am a pig, a very big pig, and I don’t care who knows it. All I do is eat, eat, eat, ’cause I’m a barracuda.”

  * * *

  Bob likes to carry Josh in a blue sling, wearing him proudly, like a medal. We take the baby everywhere, to parties, to workplaces, to restaurants. That August in the Vineyard, we go to a cocktail party at John and Margery Oakes’s. Bob, a man who lives by his own rules, gives the baby sips of his beer. John is horrified: “What are you doing? He’s an infant! That’s got to be bad for him, not to speak of the fact you are breaking the law.” Bob grins and gives him more.

  Not every experience out on the town is so jolly. We go to a trendy Chinese restaurant called Pearl’s with a straitlaced couple—the man, a city official responsible for the DA’s budget—and a Morgenthau cousin who approves of neither our marriage nor our baby. Josh must have sensed her animosity because the spring rolls have barely been served when the baby starts screaming like a mynah bird. Nothing can induce him to stop. Finally, Pearl comes running over and throws us out. We laugh all the way home.

  * * *

  May 10

  He stares at me with his big blue silver-dollar eyes, then runs his hand down me so lightly, it is like a feather blowing past. We are woven together as tightly and as intricately as the threads of a tapestry. When he laughs, so do I, and when he cries, I am close to tears.

  In my arms, he picks the petals off the apple blossoms, crushes them up in his little fist, and offers them to me. Suddenly it begins to drizzle, and we run as the clouds go ashen, light shimmering beneath them over the mountains, grass waving, Josh laughing, silver light borne on the wind.

  When I try to hand him over to Renia, he tilts his head back and closes his eyes and yells, “Mama, Mama,” in deep desperation. I take him back. I am the center of the universe.

  * * *

  Bob smiles when he sees us together. But I should know something else is lurking inside. We used to discuss our days when he got home in the evening, but now we only discuss Josh’s day. Companionable cocktail hours have given way to eating dinner over reruns of Murder, She Wrote with Josh nearby in the cradle or cuddled in my arms.

  We usually go to bed together about eleven, but lately, at eight, he gets up and announces, “Josh and I are going to bed now.” Then he picks him up and processes down the hall like a page bearing the king’s crown. This has been happening for a while.

  “Oh, I’ll come too,” I say the other night.

  “You don’t need to, love, go ahead and watch Angela Lansbury, take a break.”

  I give him an indulgent smile because I’m glad he is asserting his needs. But as the TV drones on, I sit there, feeling deserted. We have not acknowledged this new struggle over ownership of the third person in our marriage: like three young teens, one of whom vies to steal away another, we compete to make the threesome a pair. Our little world of two has been breached: we are not a couple anymore.

  “Bob,” I say one night, “I know how you hate psychologizing, but we’ve got to analyze what’s happening to us.”

  “What?”

  “I think we’re competing over Josh. I think that’s why you take him up and go to bed so early.”

  “You have him all day. I need some time with him too.”

  “But I don’t feel you have any interest in me anymore.
”

  “Well, you have no interest in me.”

  I laugh and put my arm around him. “We’re acting like children. We’re jealous of each other like we used to be jealous if our siblings got more than we did. And maybe we’re even jealous of Josh, which one of us he wants.”

  He nods slowly. “Then maybe we should start acting like grown-ups.”

  “Uh-huh. And start remembering that our first love is for each other, that we’re a team.”

  * * *

  We close ranks sooner than we thought we would, thanks to a loner named Bernhard Goetz. On December 22, 1984, Goetz, who had once been mugged, rode a Manhattan subway, took out an unlicensed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, and shot four black teens who he thought were about to rob him. That some scared, angry New Yorker would take the law into his own hands was inevitable. Even though Bob briefly helped bring it down from 1980 to 1983, violent crime remained a serious problem. Fifteen hundred citizen crime watches have been organized to help quell the fear of a population leery of becoming victims.

  Goetz is quickly lionized as the “subway vigilante,” “Thug-Buster” T-shirts have been produced en masse, the Guardian Angels hold out their red berets for defense fund money, and even CORE, abandoning its mandate to protect black civil rights, is rallying for the thirty-seven-year-old man. The city, three to one in favor of letting Goetz walk, is going crazy. And my husband has to decide the shooter’s fate.

  Murphy’s Law has asserted itself. This all is happening on the eve of Bob’s reelection campaign in the fall. We become as obsessed with Goetz as the rest of the city and give Josh over to Renia so we can concentrate on the case. The District Attorney’s Office has already arraigned Goetz on four counts of attempted murder, four counts of assault, one count of reckless endangerment, and four counts of carrying an illegal weapon. Now, do they go the distance and indict him?

  The assistant DAs are split on the question, so Bob and I systematically pick apart the case. He’s told me the whole story, the undisclosed facts that the public doesn’t yet know. For once we are on the same political side; we don’t think Goetz should get a free ride, as it were. But we decide to role-play.