People are quiet, moved. Until they are rudely interrupted by Josh’s climbing off the pedestal and running around, waving at one and all. Before I know it, he’s at the other side of the oval, wandering about, looking like a boy from a Renoir painting. Some people giggle, but afterward others soundly criticize me for not controlling my son. Ahh, laissez-faire, how wonderful it is.
Alas, my favorite stepson, Bobby, delivers the unkindest cut of all. “Would you please stop dressing my brother like Little Lord Fauntleroy?” he asks, looking at Joshua’s lavender velour suit.
For Bob and me, the election victory has a Pyrrhic quality, for although Bob won by a substantial two-thirds of the vote, Mason, his first challenger since he was elected, took a big chunk. And we will not soon forget the unprecedented viciousness of the press.
As for Mason, he never again ran for public office and in fact was eventually disbarred for misconduct as a lawyer. He became a social worker and, ironically, later offered to help Bob with the black community in any way he wanted.
* * *
Tired out after the November election, we set off to rest up in Provence with Josh and Renia in tow. We stay in a spectacular old, semi-crumbling mansion with a huge park in back. The hills of light lavender, van Gogh’s magical sunlight, snails slithering up the front steps, with Joshua the only one daring to pick them up, all of us walking up a hill of sunflowers to peek at the home of Picasso’s daughter. Everything is glorious, but beneath it all Bob and I feel somber.
Finally, I bring it into the open. “We should be high as kites, but do you feel scared? All that nastiness about your age. Does it mean it’ll be even worse the next election?”
“I don’t know. I’ll be a septuagenarian.”
“But, sweetheart, you couldn’t lose, could you?”
“Yes, I could lose.”
“But not really lose. In the end, given who you are and what you’ve done, you’d win, wouldn’t you?” I am taking in as much air as I can, but I can’t seem to get enough. “Who could possibly be as good as you?” My heart is beating in bunches. Gurgling. A drumroll so loud, how can he not hear it? Am I having some kind of heart attack?
“Bob, I think I’m having a heart attack,” I say, and he tells me not to be dramatic.
How could Robert Morgenthau, the DA of the World—that’s what newspapers have called him—be virtually wiped out! He’s been in law enforcement all his life. What else could he do? It was impossible; it was terrifying.
He turns away. Oh no, if I saw a tear, just one, roll down his cheek! All these years I’ve complained about his silence, his stoicism, but I have also counted on it. If his power was taken away, how could I keep his spirits up? I’d become one of those wives of early retirees who have nervous breakdowns. And he would walk about with eyes of glass.
“Do you think you could do something else?” I try to sound calm. “Take up some other job?”
“I guess I could stay home and read the Times and the Post and the News and The Wall Street Journal,” he says. I smile in spite of myself. He knows how much I hate his mess of papers that creep over every surface of the house.
He also knows I’m the one who worries for us both, who takes the pressure off him so that his only concern is to comfort me: “I could scatter them around the house so you could easily find them,” he adds. “And I’d never throw any out, that is, if you didn’t want me to.”
17
The “Boss” returned from our French vacation to cheers from the office staff and ADAs. The twelve hundred men and women he had hired loved him. He had expanded staff and crime bureaus, hired scores of women and minorities, instituted paternity leave, still rare in the 1980s, and extended maternity leave. He delighted his lawyers and staff by drifting into federal jurisdiction, pursuing impossible cases that the U.S. Attorney’s Office ignored; he would often win these cases and create new legal paradigms.
The DA’s Office approved of Bob’s quirky ways. He was known for having the best group of ADAs in New York City—from celebrated figures like John F. Kennedy Jr. to less celebrated ones like the boy who wore sneakers with holes. He chose his lawyers by shunning boilerplate interviews about hypothetical cases and instead asking the applicants about life in their hometowns, their sisters and brothers, their pets. And uncannily, his judgment was almost always right. He often overruled his hiring committee. Once, it rejected a new young lawyer because he was sloppily dressed with ratty sneakers. Bob called him in, and he arrived at the interview similarly dressed. After a few questions, Bob hired him on the spot. He turned out to be one of the best lawyers in the office.
Back in early 1982, seven years after he took office, Bob was feeling particularly daring. He decided to sue the chief judge of the highest court of New York. He deemed that Judge Lawrence Cooke, who set up a rotation system that effectively stripped the supreme court (where most of Bob’s cases were tried) of its best judges, had violated the constitution and laws of New York State. Suing Cooke, in the community of lawyers, was like suing the pope.
I was usually a cheerleader when he had these brash brainstorms, but this time I was nervous. Ida Van Lindt, who he always said knew more than his ADAs, was not particularly reassuring. “It’s just never been done, anywhere, must less thought of. He’s got a lot of chutzpah, the Boss.”
So many lawyers warned him off it that one night he simply said, “You know, if nobody thinks the case can be won, I better try it myself.” I said, “Well, okay, great,” fully aware that he had never tried a case as DA.
But on May 4, 1982, after poring over documents spread out on the dining table for about eight weeks, he did. Before going into court, he grinned and said, “This is the kind of fight I love. It brings me back to my roots, to the days when I bucked the Bronx Democratic machine.”
Ostensibly, Cooke had hatched his plan to move judges around between the lower and the higher courts to promote fairness and reduce overcrowding in the Manhattan court system, but in effect he was playing politics. Judges would be assigned no longer on the basis of merit but on a basis that would benefit the Democratic organization. The illegality that Bob homed in on was that Cooke had not gotten the approval of the panel of administrative judges required under the constitution and the laws of the state. The autocratic chief judge had simply made this dramatic change by fiat.
When Bob began arguing his case in front of the court of appeals, he looked up and was startled. There, staring down sternly at him, was his uncle Irving Lehman, once the chief judge himself. “It was a formidable oil painting, and I asked myself, would Uncle Irving have approved of what I was doing? I decided he would and I proceeded.”
Watching him in his trim gray suit stand before the panel of black-robed judges, his voice hitting every resonating word, I felt my heart turn over.
“Supposing a judge named Benjamin Nathan Cardozo assigned to the supreme court had been rotated down to a lower court that handled misdemeanors!” Bob boomed, referring to the eminent judge who eventually became justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Supposing the judge was a DA named Morgenthau and the court was the sidewalk, I thought, noticing that my knuckles were turning white from gripping the spectators’ bench. I recalled the public remark of one of Cooke’s assistants that “if it had been anybody but Morgenthau who brought this case, they would have been laughed out of court.”
The verdict was returned. All six judges on the court of appeals—the seat of the seventh, Cooke, being vacant—had voted for Morgenthau.
I wanted to jump up and hug Bob when he left the court, but I patted the sweat off his forehead instead. “Whew,” he said. “If I’d lost that case, I’d have been up the river without a paddle. The criticism and the repercussions would have been enormous.” I was thinking that maybe the repercussions would be enormous anyway, Cooke being such a powerful figure. But then I thought, maybe not so powerful anymore.
As time went on, his ADAs saw him become more relaxed, more quirky, and more inclined
to sophisticated but outlandish humor. “People sometimes don’t know how to respond when he says something because they can’t believe he’s said it,” the ADA Peter Kougasian told me one day when I was visiting the office. “For instance, this data-processing guy from outside came in to give the Boss and our computer expert instructions in using a new processor. The guy went on forever, using such arcane, incomprehensible terms that even our computer expert was confused. After he left, everyone was silent. And then the Boss nonchalantly said, ‘What I want to know is, is it good for the Jews?’”
* * *
After the election, I was the beneficiary of Bob’s happy relief. I could do no wrong. I could burn his soup and he would smile indulgently and give me a cooking lesson. I could be a half hour late and he wouldn’t complain. He would smile if I had a little fit of temper over something. My temper. Only if I touched his ten belongings did I have to beware.
Although we could have won a contest for bickering, we would laugh and make up within hours. We had become more honest, and we saw our periodic two-week estrangements as thoroughly pointless since we usually forgot what caused them. “We’re never going to do it again,” I pronounced. “Never.” He agreed: “That’s a promise.”
We passed into a slow, sweet togetherness. Sometimes we missed the passion of our early years, but now that desperate longing seemed pointlessly thin. Now being together was more profound, more complex, for we had time to take in the idiosyncrasies of our bodies: the poignant curve of spine, cool breath against flushed skin, the fragile honeyed fragrance of a woman, the man’s loamy smells, the beauty of constancy.
* * *
With the excitement of the election behind us, I got restless.
“I’m lonely, sweetheart,” I said one night. I had gotten so bored that I had started to live on the edge, flirting with disaster: I had begun to cook. That day I had made veal scaloppine, which Bob loved and which, to my delight, didn’t turn out too rubbery. I also put tulips on the table and lit candles all over the house.
“I don’t have any adults to talk to until you get home,” I complained. “And you know how I get when I’m not doing something useful, and currently I’m not, unless you count the odd magazine article and a dozen Popsicle-stick houses.”
“Watch that Val-Kill piece!” Bob exclaimed. “Let’s put all this fire out now; it’s dangerous.” Red wax was about to drip over his heirloom end table, the one Eleanor Roosevelt had made at her little furniture factory. I blew out the candles and sat with arms folded.
“Why don’t you get out more, make some women friends?” he suggested.
“But I do have friends. I was elected president of the Writers Room board! I’m good friends with Nancy Milford. We’ve been there for dinner; you gave their son a summer internship.”
“Nancy is not your friend.”
“Well, it’s true I don’t see much of her, but I don’t see much of anyone. I’ve crawled into this shell with you and Josh.”
“I repeat, Nancy Milford is not your friend.”
Crickets gather in our terrace garden, and now their rhythmic sound is like an execution drumroll. “Why do you say that?”
He looks down. “At the Writers Room fund-raiser, your welcoming speech was great. I saw Arthur Gelb giving you a big hug afterward. But Nancy and that Andrea woman were rolling their eyes the whole time. I think they’re envious of you.”
“Oh.” The old childhood tune begins to play in my head: Nobody likes me. “Well, I’m shy with people. I never know whether they really like me or they’re just pretending, just sucking up to me because of you.”
We undress for bed and I surprise him by rubbing his back with olive oil. He has wide shoulders, shiny, flickering with candlelight.
“Mmm, that feels nice,” he says, and drifts off to sleep.
I go to the living room and do some yoga, resting in Child’s Pose. I most always do what Bob advises, but this time I’m nervous. How am I to find a loyal friend? By megaphone in Central Park? I don’t even want to leave my apartment. My astrological sign is a crab, and a crab is a homebody. Bob could never putter about inside like me. He exists in the universe, his family a backdrop behind which he can retreat.
* * *
Writers are like bucks. They generally have their horns at the ready. Before you can see it coming, they ram you in the back. More than once I have been robbed of an assignment by some ambitious, politically skilled operator. At the Times, I had friends, but our connections, though they could be close, mostly revolved around office gossip: who was on Abe’s shit list today; who Arthur would pick to do the death of Nelson Rockefeller “in flagrante delicto.” Journalists are more interested in cultivating their professional stature than in companionship. And they were always being transferred to different cities, different countries, or different positions above you. Even the deepest of our friendships were fungible.
Worse than journalists are authors. Rivalry is often the left arm of comradeship. Wendy Gimbel, a fine writer, a soul mate who seasoned me with her intellect and her humor, once imparted this piece of wisdom: “They may not admit it, or even know it, but not all your friends wish you well.”
Still, I had to move away from my tiny nuclear family, and ironically it was through Josh that I finally did. Jill Comins, a cheery, outgoing blonde, and I were the only two mothers who lingered to watch our children through the viewing window at a music program for tots. As they waved around colored scarves and tambourines, we chattered away about everything from the dangers of being too attached to your children, to the absurdity of President Reagan, shot by a mail-order gun, coming out in favor of them. As our children grew, so did our comfortable and intimate friendship. Jill had helped me solve problems with my stepchildren, and her advice was so good that I persuaded her to go back to school and become a therapist. We even shared confidences about the eccentricities of our husbands. For the first time, I was secure in a friend whose loyalty and honesty I could count on.
That it should have amazed me how complex women were was testament to my naïveté and solitude. They were such cogent thinkers, intuitive analysts, emotionally sensitive, multifaceted beings! Once I really knew them, I realized it was no fun living without them. I needed women to go places where most men did not or, more precisely, could not.
As time passed, I became rather particular about choosing my friends, avoiding those who wooed me not for who I was but for what Bob and I could give them.
* * *
Bob was happy about my connections with women, even if he didn’t understand them. He was accustomed to female friends who conducted themselves with a modicum of restraint and decorum. The first time he overheard me telling Blair Hoyt, “I love you too … I’m going to miss you so much,” he was startled. I didn’t explain why I used such tender words on Blair, words he had laid claim to. I much preferred to tease him. Then, one day, he saw Lila Meade, who is a hugger like me, come into the house and hold me in a long embrace. He gazed at us, looking confused.
“We haven’t seen each other in a week,” I explained over her shoulder. He turned away.
Once happily possessed by him, I had found an undiscovered capacity in myself—that I could have loving liaisons with people of the same sex. I knew he was pleased that I had gotten out of the house and found friends, but I suspected he was also uneasy. Finally, as we were resting after playing tennis at the farm, I turned to him and said, “Sweetheart, I’m not gay.”
He scowled at a can of tennis balls.
“Women can love each other in a way men don’t.” I pointed out the passionate attachment in the letters between his mother and Mrs. Roosevelt. “You’ve told me that you think those letters indicate an affectionate friendship, nothing sexual.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, if you don’t think your mother was a lesbian, why would you wonder about me?”
“I don’t,” he said. “C’mon, let’s go down and get some lunch.”
And we neve
r talked about it again.
* * *
Meanwhile, to our amusement, Josh was growing up to be as eccentric as we were. He was sensitive and proud. He had learned to talk in Renia’s Jamaican lilt, punctuating his sentences with “Listen here, mahn.”
He was loving and without judgment. One morning, I was complaining that I was getting fat, and he piped up, “Well, if you’re fat, fat is beautiful.” He disliked my singing, however. When I took up my guitar and sang mournful folk songs, the same ones that had brought me applause and a few pounds a night at a London pub long ago, he would say “Stop!” and put his hands over his ears. “It makes me feel like I’m dead.”
* * *
When it came time to send Josh to nursery school, which was just around the corner, I panicked. The room was cramped, the teachers looked like teenagers, and the kids were running around like mice in a maze.
I was unable to leave him. I mean, I didn’t budge from the room. Initially, the teachers allowed me to sit in a corner of the classroom, then they had me move back toward the door a few feet each day. I was the only mother in the room, and finally Josh came over, patted my arm, and said, “Try going out for five minutes, Mama. Just try it.” So I did and I never came back inside.
But I missed him. I could hear the children at Dalton out in the playstreet. I was sure I could hear his voice, echoing like his father’s. And inside, the silence resounded. In order to exorcise, and understand, my lingering emptiness, I decided to write about the embarrassing problems I had in relinquishing Josh to the teachers.
To my surprise, this slim little tale became a classic, reprinted and distributed each fall in nursery schools throughout the country. It seems that although much had been written about the effect of school separation on children, nothing had quite brought out the distress of mothers like the chronicle of my sorry display at Dalton.
When Bob laughed and talked about the piece, to me and to others, I was moved. Between Josh, my new girlfriends, my passion for jogging, and my writing, I had lost sight of my husband. But he had not lost sight of me. He had been watching. I looked back at the trips abroad we had taken in the last few years; they had always been Bob’s suggestion. He began to make unilateral decisions to take me to a museum or the movies—without our son.
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