Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  I am devil’s advocate: “Bob, put your ear to the ground and listen to the people. Don’t commit the folly of ignoring this great city!” I throw up my arms like Clarence Darrow. “The election will be here before you know it. You’ve run unopposed for ten years, but now you’ve already got at least two candidates denouncing you. You’ve got Catherine Abate talking about becoming the first woman DA and that Vernon Mason guy declaring he will become the first black one. Do you like being district attorney? Well, just picture what will happen if you indict Goetz: the whole city’s gonna carry you out of office at the end of a rope!”

  Bob puts down his head to hide his smile. I tell him not to break character, and when he looks up, his face has become so austere, so unforgiving, so scary, I shiver. “I don’t prosecute on the basis of mobs. I don’t do it for political advantage.”

  “But look at the case. Goetz’s four muggers slam him into a glass door and give him permanent knee injuries. They’re hardly punished. He was angry, and I don’t blame him.”

  “Anger is not self-defense.”

  “This guy is gentle, shy; he won’t even talk to the press. He was just trying to protect himself! Maybe he freaked out a little, but those thugs weren’t panhandling him; I bet you dollars to doughnuts they were going to rob him. You’ve already decided you can’t put them on the witness stand; one of them is up for armed robbery! People are going to riot when they learn this.”

  “I’d rather that than practice bad justice,” he says quietly. Bob pauses. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Goetz was out for revenge. After he shot all four, he stood over Darrell Cabey—and he’d already wounded him—and shot him again, severing his spinal cord. He’ll be a paraplegic the rest of his life.”

  “Wow, a fifth shot? You didn’t tell me that!” I say, a bit too enthusiastically, as if I were going to shout it down Park Avenue.

  “Remember, this is all confidential, Lucinda,” he says, scowling at me. “And if the office presents it to a grand jury, our discussions are finished. Unless you want us to be charged with a felony for leaking grand jury minutes.”

  I already know this. “I’m more and more convinced you should go for the max,” I say. “I mean, it’s so clear what the right thing to do is. You don’t rise up and blast four people nearly to death because they ask you for five dollars. He was already prepared; he had his hand on the gun under his Windbreaker is what you told me.”

  “Yes, but it’s a little worrying, all this hysteria.”

  “The Irish call it common bloodlust,” I remark. “But in this case, the mob happens to be wrong.”

  I hold his hand and smooth down his hair, noticing that it is much whiter, its thinning strands aloft on his head. “You will win, love, just because you are going to indict this shooter. The people know who you are. Even the Goetz supporters have to concede that you’re the real thing amid a bunch of phonies. They know you protect the victim, that you’re someone ethical beyond ethical … incorruptible … fair … scrupulous … honorable…”

  “If I’m all that, lucky I married my alter ego.”

  “Thank you, love. I think we both live by Kant’s categorical imperative: the obligation to do one’s moral duty because it is moral, not because it leads to other ends.”

  He runs his finger down my cheek. “I think that’s right. Except you’re more intellectual than me.”

  On January 25, 1985, the case is presented to a grand jury. The twenty-three jurors indict on three of the weapons counts and dismiss the rest. They have broken the precedent of grand juries doing what the DA wants. Some jurors wait in line afterward to receive Goetz’s autograph. Bob, forced now to put the thuggish victims on the stand, presents it to a second grand jury; after hearing testimony that Goetz, when he fired a fifth shot at Darrell Cabey, said, “You seem to be doing all right, here’s another,” they indict on ten of the most serious charges. Appeals courts affirm the indictment, throw it out, and then reinstate it. The process is grueling, taking two and a half years of the courts’ time and at least that much off Bob’s life. A trial ends the case where it began—with Goetz getting off on all but a weapons count.

  Through it, Bob would often walk through the door as though he were carrying a boulder on his back. I could cheer him up, but Josh saved his sanity. When he saw his dad, he galloped over on his hands and knees. Bob would shed his coat and pick him up, and I would watch the boulder roll off.

  “We’re flying, we’re flying,” he sang in a voice like Ernie the Muppet. As Josh swung back and forth through the air, I don’t know which one of them was laughing louder. The poker face of the city’s district attorney had disappeared. “Look, Mom,” Bob shouts, “we’re flying!”

  16

  Bob was so flustered that after eating his bran flakes, he put on his beloved baseball cap backward and then later proceeded to drop it in the gutter.

  He was mad at The New York Times. C. Vernon Mason, a black lawyer, had come forward to challenge him in the upcoming 1985 campaign for district attorney, and the man had become the press’s darling. Bob felt hurt and abused by the city. He had served its people for a quarter of a century, and Mason was a minor Harlem figure, often criticized for his rashness and questionable ethics. But morale in the city had dipped; street crime and police brutality were high; earlier that year there had been the acquittal of six transit policemen who were said to have beaten to death Michael Stewart, a young subway graffiti artist who became an international symbol of a decaying New York.

  “Robert Morgenthau is neither a leader nor a creator,” Mason proclaimed as he announced his candidacy. He described himself as a man of the people and said his opponent “was born into aristocracy and wealth … and lives in insulation and isolation speaking to the power elite and speaking for the power elite … He takes a limousine to work.” Mason, on the other hand, drove a gray Mercedes.

  Jim Gill, a prominent attorney, echoed much of the white establishment when he wrote to Bob, “I think it was very kind of Mason to remind everyone of … the power which you wield.”

  Bob knew that C. Vernon Mason actually represented drug dealers and often didn’t show up in court at all.

  In recent years, Bob’s pedestal had been shaken, and he was under relentless attack by the media. First there was the bitter rivalry with Rudy Giuliani, who had worked at Bob’s former law firm and in 1983 stepped into Bob’s old job as U.S. attorney. Rudy busted up organized and corporate crime, as Bob had done, but Rudy was flamboyant. “He had cops burst into a brokerage firm and handcuff a bunch of junior managers right in front of their colleagues, and then he paraded them in front of the cameras. They were weeping,” Bob said, seething. “He didn’t care whether they were innocent or guilty. He’s a publicity hound. He’s raised the perp walk to an art form.” Moreover, Rudy would also steal away Bob’s cases, including the bribery charges against the powerful Bronx Democratic leader Stanley M. Friedman, after the DA’s Office had done all the investigation work, on the grounds that federal prosecutions of federal crimes trumped prosecutions by local DA offices. He would often talk about Rudy at the dinner table.

  Ironically, much later, when Rudy became mayor, he praised Bob’s talents effusively. And one day, Bob began speaking fondly of Rudy. “I’m human. I forgive my enemies,” he said with a smile. “And I suppose I’m susceptible to flattery. Especially since the mayor will provide the majority of the DA’s budget.”

  Then there came the racially charged cases, one after another. Though Bob had tried to nail Goetz on murder charges, part of the public was angry at him for the high court’s ultimate acquittal of Goetz on all but gun possession charges. And the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the policemen who manhandled Michael Stewart earlier that year was considered an even worse travesty of justice. Bob was perceived as having twice failed to persuade a jury that black men had been victimized by white ones.

  The Stewart case, a labyrinth of vitriolic contradictions, was bugled throughout the world. Under trem
endous pressure, Bob remained cool and ostensibly above the hullabaloo, declaring to me that Mason didn’t worry him.

  I wanted to believe him, wanted not to recognize the worry in his eyes. I wanted badly for this inconvenient interruption in our lives to go away. I might have subliminally given him that very message—Don’t disappoint me.

  The fact that our August vacation was just a few weeks before the mid-September Democratic primary, which would decide the election, somehow didn’t bother me. It was easy to take advantage of his undemanding nature.

  After eight years of marriage, I still hadn’t learned how to read Bob. I took him at face value. I couldn’t see that subtle tightening of the lips, the flattening of the normally expressive voice—those little signifiers that he was feeling something that perhaps even he didn’t know he felt.

  “Look, if you won’t come to Martha’s Vineyard, I’m going anyway,” I told him in July. “I’m worn out, and the baby needs sun and fresh air.”

  Bob didn’t blink. “That’s fine,” he said. “Go.”

  “Great,” I replied and went off to make ferry reservations to the island.

  * * *

  The Vineyard: as always, a sanctuary of pleasure. Every day, Josh and I climb the little hill to Quansoo Beach and watch the big waves roll in.

  We like to sit alone, so we go far down the shore where Josh’s favorite thing to do is to toddle off and explore. I sit there proudly and watch his chubby little body go farther and farther, picking up handfuls of warm sand. When he becomes too tiny, I go fetch him, ignoring the disapproving looks of the mothers who don’t let their little ones stray from their umbrellas. I wish Bob were here to see this show of Josh’s sovereignty. We decided to give him independence early so he would grow up to be a man with a free and mighty spirit.

  I call my husband every night, and Josh screams “Dada! Dada!” when he hears his voice. Then he gets upset because he can’t also see him. Bob sounds busy when he talks to me, so I pick up the Times in the morning in hopes he’ll be in it. Today he is on the front page of the metro section, affably listing the healthy state of his vital organs—prostate, heart, lungs. He looks buoyant and sexy, and I feel a stirring inside.

  I decide I could do something for the campaign, even here. So I try to put together a Women’s Committee for Morgenthau. I call some of my writer acquaintances—Nancy Milford, Nora Sayre. But Nancy, whose son Bob once hired for a summer job, stumbles about: “Ah, I have some political differences with Bob.” Nora Sayre says she’s too busy: “I’m unfortunately on a deadline.” Mary Breasted says it would compromise her objectivity as a reporter. My cleaning lady, however, obliges. So counting myself, I have a women’s committee of two. I won’t tell Bob of my failed efforts—or the pathetic loyalty of my friends.

  One day, I learn that Bob’s campaign headquarters have been broken into. Though nothing has been taken, his people suspect it’s the work of the other side. This time the photograph of him in the Times is almost pitiful. His cheeks are sunken, and there is something odd in his aspect. As if he were uncomfortable in his suit. Has he seemed this way on the phone? No, he’s just spoken in a clipped voice. Clipped? Suddenly I feel dizzy. What am I doing here, lolling in the warm breezes instead of by his side, pounding out the miles of a political campaign worker. Perhaps I’ve been too selfish or maybe I just couldn’t face the attacks and witness the stress it was putting on him, coward that I am.

  I throw a few things into a suitcase, grab Josh, and then wait in the ferry line for hours to get off the island.

  When I get home to New York, he is getting ready for bed, turning down the covers, in silence. I come up from behind and throw my arms around him, making him jump and whirl around.

  “Sweetheart, it’s me. I’m back! I deserted you. Please forgive me.”

  “Nothing to forgive. I’ve been fine.”

  “I left you alone to fix your own dinner. No one to talk to, to share the day’s events, sleeping every night in a cold, empty bed.”

  “You do warm things up,” he quips. “In fact it’s a little like sleeping with a furnace.” He looks around. “Where’s Josh?”

  I retrieve him from the living room and put him in his father’s arms. “Actually,” he says hesitantly, “I have been a little short on support. Even Charlie Rangel won’t return my calls. I guess his constituents have forgotten me; they’re so excited about having the first black DA. He’s too scared he’ll lose his seat in Harlem.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about him. He’s one person.”

  I recall Charlie’s respect and love for Bob, all the dinners we had with Charlie and his wife, Alma, eating a feast at their home in Washington. One night, we locked ourselves out of the car, and the congressman took a hanger and had it open in two minutes flat. Bob was amazed: “Where’d you learn to do that, Charlie?” Rangel laughed his gravelly laugh: “How do you think I survived growing up in Harlem?”

  All those years of friendship and now Charlie turns his back on Bob … just as I had.

  “I left you too,” I say guiltily.

  He picks up Josh, and the baby excitedly pats his father’s cheeks. “No,” Bob says. “I didn’t particularly like you leaving—and taking Josh with you.” Josh’s little arms were tight around his neck.

  “Bob, you are upset. Will you be straight with me, please, just once?”

  Standing there in his underwear, he suddenly looks unprotected. He falters. “Everyone has turned off me, and you weren’t there,” he says thickly. The words are spilling out slowly. “Even the people I’ve considered my friends—Ed Bradley, Charlayne Hunter-Gault—they’re going over to Mason. You don’t know how it’s affected me. I’ve had no one to talk to.”

  He’s telling me I’ve hurt his feelings?

  “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry. If only you’d told me! I’m so selfish, and I really didn’t think you needed me.”

  “Well, you were wrong. I did.” As I rest my cheek against his lips, I feel a trembling. His chin.

  Don’t move. Don’t say anything. Don’t say it’s okay to be vulnerable. Just hug him, hug him till he can’t breathe and he will know.

  “Daddy, Daddy, what’s the matter?” Josh is staring at him with alarm.

  “Your mother. I can’t breathe!” Bob pries my arms from around his chest.

  The moment has passed.

  “I’m staying right here, by your side,” I say.

  He strokes my hair, but Josh still looks upset.

  I put my arms around the two of them: “Family sandwich! Daddy and I are the bread, and Josh is the ham.” Josh giggles. Everything is all right again.

  * * *

  Dearest love, you must have felt desperate. You are so cautious, shy, secretive, closed, and you turned yourself inside out in front of me.

  But I know that it stops here and now. You will not return to your emotions. You have pried a feeling out like a pearl from an oyster. No more pearls tonight; you are standing safe on your sandbar.

  For such a long time now, I have waited. My hopes have been my expectations. Each time you managed to express a feeling, an emotional need, I would think, “Ah, this is it. Finally, he will become how he feels; I will know his emotional life.” But the big reveal has never come. All I have known, and will know, is emotional moments like these. But how to connect them? To know when they are coming and when they have left and to fill the spaces in between?

  Your philosophy of laissez-faire is a generosity, but it is also a form of tyranny. You have protected me from the tough stuff. Since you won’t bother me with your problems, I don’t bother to ask. I have exploited your reserve, going about with my work and my baby, fulfilling my own needs. I have ignored the fact that beneath your absence of demands lurks a moral imperative. Guilt stirs below the surface of my resolve. No matter what you claim, I really do know what you need. And I believe that somewhere you expect me to act not on what you say but on what you don’t.

  * * *

  Being caught in
the midst of this nasty campaign is hell. Each day, it seems some negative story comes out. The media who yesterday loved him have turned on a dime. They use adjectives to fit the angle of their stories. His hair is not thinning but “wispy”; he’s not thin but “frail.”

  One day as I am reading The New York Observer in the bathroom, I tear out a page declaring that “Morgy is too old, too tired, too washed up” and flush it down the toilet so my incoming husband won’t see it.

  This ageism, inspired by Mason, is poisonous for me and for Bob. It has worsened our mild but mutual hypochondria. “My left ankle is swollen. Think I have heart disease?” or “My head aches; I hope it’s not a brain tumor” is the kind of bedtime conversation we often share.

  As soon as Josh enters the fray, the tide seems to change. Suddenly the incumbent candidate is carrying a little ham who smiles and gives the victory sign for the cameras. It’s as if the baby knows what is needed even when I don’t. The press loves it; now Bob has an aura of youth and vitality, the young-as-you-feel father of an eighteen-month-old.

  I distribute leaflets at subway stops, brazenly making people stop and smile by shouting, “I’m the wife! He’s a powerhouse, I should know!” I go to Democratic clubs, chat up everyone, and earn tender looks from my husband.

  On election night, his campaign workers, wearing “Morgy” pins that display a widely smiling head shot, fill his headquarters. The news trickles through slowly. Morgy is getting a huge two-thirds of the vote, and finally Mason concedes. The phones are ringing with congratulations. Even Charlie Rangel calls.

  His older children and his extended family are present on January 6, 1986, when he is sworn in to his fourth term as New York’s district attorney. It is a solemn ceremony that takes place in the elaborate marble Surrogate Court Building. As Bob raises one hand and puts his other on the Bible, he swears to uphold the law and then adds his own ending: “without fear or favor.”