Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  Bob was then a friend, and a news source and I suggested he condemn New York’s death penalty statute. “I know it would take a lot of courage, swimming upstream. Especially when all people want to hear is they’ll get back their supply of electricity.”

  He thought for a minute, then joked, “I’ll do it. I’ll say that I’m against it because of the power shortage.”

  “I think that would be a bad idea,” I said, giggling.

  He did come out against the death penalty—skipping the black humor. It was basically abhorrent to him as well because of the events of World War II. “I saw how easily a civilized government could commit genocide, and I don’t believe we should give the state the power to take away life,” he said publicly on one campaign stop. With that, he became the first public figure in the city to publicly oppose government-sanctioned execution. And when he was elected, he remained at the vanguard.

  New York’s death penalty laws had been abolished and reinstated several times throughout history. The death penalty had even been abolished accidentally in 1860 when the legislature repealed hanging as a method of execution but provided no other means of carrying it out.

  In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court had invalidated all death penalty statutes nationwide, but a year later New York rewrote its statute to get around the Supreme Court’s decision, passing a mandatory death penalty for murdering a police or corrections officer.

  But in October 1976, Bob refused to seek capital punishment for a cop killer, Luis S. Velez. “The death penalty statute,” Bob declared, in explanation, “may be unconstitutional.” This inspired a public outcry from conservatives like the U.S. senator James L. Buckley of New York, who called the DA’s decision “an affront to every policeman.” Thirteen months later, however, New York’s high court of appeals, decided that, as applied in a Westchester County case, the statute was indeed unconstitutional, and a 1984 ruling effectively abolished New York’s death penalty.

  From 1978 to 1994, Governors Carey and Cuomo had vetoed death penalty legislation, but in 1994, George Pataki had run on a promise to reinstate it. Only eleven days after he took office in January 1995, he extradited a New York prisoner to Oklahoma to be executed. Bob and I were outraged.

  “If the officials who sentence people to death got up from their desks, went into the death chamber, and watched an electrocution up close, I wonder how they’d feel then,” Bob said with disgust.

  When the New York legislature began considering Governor George Pataki’s proposal for a strong death penalty bill, Bob decided to write an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times about “the dirty little secret prosecutors know”—that capital punishment actually hinders the fight against crime.

  We brainstormed the editorial together, concentrating on the fallacies of the death penalty law: that statistics showed it did not reduce crime rates; that it cost the government two million dollars to execute a person; that this money took away resources that could root out recidivist career criminals and get the young ones in rehab programs; that innocent people are often executed; and that the dehumanizing effects on society of putting people to death cause more murders than they prevent. In other words, violence begets violence.

  Ironically, Bob was a Jew who increasingly lived by Christ’s tenets more than anyone I knew; he held charity above personal glory, he valued and helped the poor and the afflicted, he was incorruptible, and at bottom he was an unusually humble and kind man who lifted people up. He even appeared to perform miracles, such as single-handedly raising the bulk of money in two days to build a museum and thwarting the victimization of hundreds of immigrants by setting up an unprecedented immigration unit in the DA’s Office.

  When those irritating marketers called in the middle of dinner, he was patient and polite with them where I just peremptorily hung up. He brought to mind Christ’s parable of the tiny mustard seed that grew into a tree so mighty, birds found a resting place in its branches.

  I wondered whether I had found the reason for Bob’s refusal to discuss his religious beliefs. Perhaps he simply didn’t know if there was a God.

  The sermons I had heard in Temple Emanu-El on the High Holidays often talked of the Lord as a concept, the spirit of possibility, for instance, in the heart of man. I felt Judaism was a religion based not on blind faith but on a search for godliness through doing good works. “I think it’s a matter of how you live your life,” Bob once said.

  But in spite of his reticence about his spiritual beliefs, I pressed for him to put God in his piece. “Maybe something about only he has the power to giveth and taketh away?” I suggested.

  “Uh-huh,” he replied thoughtfully. “‘Vengeance,’” he began, then looked with relish at the food on his plate. He took a bite of roast guinea hen. “Mmm, this is good. Renia can cook fowl.”

  “Yes, you were saying ‘vengeance’?”

  He chewed the bite slowly.

  “Bob, finish your sentence!”

  “‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ That’s how I’ll end the piece.”

  And so he did. To my satisfaction, this argument was continually quoted. Though it didn’t stop Pataki, Bob’s piece was one of the most read Op-Eds that he had written. It established him as the only district attorney in the state, save the DA of Erie County, to oppose the governor’s statute before it was enacted.

  The death penalty law was a prime example of how Bob wove in, out, and around the system to get what he wanted. Rob Johnson, the Bronx DA, publicly declared he would not seek the death penalty after the statute was reinstated and was soon embroiled in an ugly confrontation with the governor. Bob did not outright defy him, which could have led the governor to supersede him with a special prosecutor; he just did it quietly. He appointed a committee of six senior assistant DAs to review the case of every murderer eligible for capital punishment. Never once did it recommend a death sentence, because it would find mitigating circumstances or loopholes in the law. In the nine years that the death penalty was in effect—from 1995 until it was struck down in 2004—Bob never sent anyone to the electric chair, even criminals who had shot cops. Moreover, before he made a final decision, he would consult the families of the victims, and most, like Gerald Levin, head of Time Warner, whose son was brutally murdered by students he had tried to help, didn’t want the killer to be put to death. The governor was reportedly reluctant to challenge a politically skilled powerhouse like Bob.

  In 2004, the death penalty in New York State gave a dying gasp when the state’s highest courts declared the 1995 statute patently “unconstitutional.” The ruling freed four death row inmates, though, since the legislation was passed, no one had been executed. This was in part due to Bob’s work for the previous thirty years, both publicly and behind the scenes, against capital punishment.

  “I don’t think any judge or jury dared go near electrocution,” Bob said. “You’d hate to go down in history as the first one to execute a man in New York since 1939.” At public hearings on whether capital punishment should be reinstated, Bob testified that “death is different … it is the most irremediable and unfathomable of penalties.” He talked about the horrors of “hanging” judges condemning innocent men and noted that even though he had imposed no death sentences since he took office in 1975, Manhattan’s crime rate had plummeted by 86 percent.

  In 2008, New York’s death chamber would be padlocked by Governor David Paterson. I remember the day clearly. I remember how Bob and I toasted each other. “To God’s justice,” I said, raising my glass and then putting it down and hugging him tight. I couldn’t remember when I felt more in love with him. He was good and great, and he had allowed me to make him greater. I had brought him a little closer to God. The circle that had started with our talk about death and the Almighty had ended where it began.

  19

  In the late winter of 1996, we gave notice on our rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment, which was put up for sale at an exorbitant price, and bought a smaller place near Central Park. It was a
ctually two contiguous apartments, each with a series of tiny, drab rooms, and you could hear the roaring wheeze of the buses below. Bob was dubious, but he also had a budget—we were land-poor—and this was cheap. I thought it a sleeper with big potential.

  I didn’t have an architect—I wanted to do it myself—but I found a creative Greek contractor, Renos Georgiou, who helped me transform the spaces. The first day, Renos’s son Steve battered the wall between the two apartments with a sledgehammer. I took a swing, and with chunks of plaster flying about, the air snowy, I made a hole into the other side. It was like peering through Alice’s looking glass into a beautiful warren of rooms in the opposite image. Then we took down walls until there were big open spaces.

  I found an independent craftsman in Vermont who made a bed with a headboard that swept to the sky, and carved elaborate double doors between the apartments, replicas of what I remembered in my grandmother’s grand Victorian home. We made closets where there could be no closets, halls too tiny to be even classified as halls; we squeezed every inch of usable space from the relatively small apartment. Mindful of Bob’s having to pay a mortgage and rent at the same time, I went into one of my hyper-focused frenzies, running about the city twelve hours a day, finding just the right light fixtures, choosing moldings, and even discovering a white Georgian marble fireplace that was in pieces at an urban warehouse outlet. I mixed the paint for all the rooms myself. I wanted everything to come right out of my dreams, and I wanted it in three months.

  I met my self-imposed deadline. In March 1997, we packed up and moved. I was exhilarated but so exhausted that for days I just lay on our new velvet viridian sofa and gazed up at the cascading crown moldings made by Renos’s cousin. Everyone was excited about our new apartment that was at once cozy and spacious; we would sit in the living room, which looked like a British don’s study, eating Renia’s shepherd’s pie by the elegant fireplace that the workers had assembled beautifully.

  “Daddy, tell a joke,” Amy said one night. She was six.

  “Yeah, Dad, tell one,” said Josh, now thirteen.

  “I can’t remember any.”

  “What about Pedro, Dad?”

  “I can’t tell that in front of Amy,” Bob said, softly chuckling.

  “Yes, tell it, Daddy, tell it!”

  “She won’t understand it anyway, Dad.”

  “Come on, Dad!” we chanted in unison. We never got tired of hearing Bob tell the same jokes, because he told them in an expressive basso profundo voice, doing his eyebrow trick, moving them up and down for emphasis.

  “Well,” began Bob, with mock resignation, “it was a hot, dusty day in a Mexican village, and Pedro was walking down the street passing the local church, and the padre said, ‘Pedro, where are you going?’ ‘I’m going to the market, Father.’ ‘What do you have there, son?’ ‘Buttercups, Father. I’m going to trade them for a tub of butter.’

  “The padre said, ‘Pedro, you’re a very stupid peon. You can’t get a tub of butter for those buttercups.’ Pedro said, ‘Just wait, Father, I’ll be back.’ About an hour later, Pedro came walking back on the hot, dusty street with a tub of butter over his shoulder. The padre just stared at him. Next day, Pedro was carrying a bunch of flowers, and the padre said, ‘What have you got there, Pedro?’ ‘Father, I have cowslips. I’m going to the market to get a cow.’ The padre said, ‘Pedro, you are a very stupid peon. You can’t get a cow for a bunch of cowslips.’ Pedro said, ‘Wait, Father, you’ll see.’ About an hour later, Pedro came back leading a cow. The padre watched him with disbelief. The next morning Pedro passed by the church with a bunch of flowers, and the padre asked him what he had and where he was going. Pedro said, ‘Father, these are pussy willows, and I’m going to the market.’

  “The padre said, ‘Wait, Pedro, I come with you.’”

  Even Amy laughed, though she could hardly have understood the story. “That’s your best joke, Daddy!”

  * * *

  Life in our new home couldn’t have been more perfect, but perfect is perfect because behind it there’s the unspoken. How can you not resist the rush of pleasure that comes with the belief that at last, at last, everyone has his place, everything is as it should be. We labor under a temporary illusion: happiness when you are happy seems immutable, the natural permanent state of life. We are sewn together; all the bad that is going to happen has already happened. We become children who lose our common sense, who believe the magician’s illusions, believers in the Angel of Light until Satan slips out from behind him. Or the Jesus of ancient Docetic Christians, who passed from Mary’s womb “like water from a tube,” never to be what he appeared to be. We close our eyes to the lessons of history and believe that our good fortune is the essence of our fate. The way God wanted it. Surely he will always hold in his hand the way we are now.

  In April 1997, four weeks later, our perfect world came to an end.

  It happened on a cloudy Monday. Jill and I were having coffee in the kitchen when Bob’s dermatologist called. She was a tough, all-business doctor, but now she sounded upset. “This growth on his nose, I took a routine biopsy, and it came back this morning malignant. I’ve never seen a melanoma look like his.”

  “Oh God,” I said, crumpling onto a chair.

  “Could you call and tell him he has a melanoma?”

  Sure, Doctor, I’d love to. Bob had been worrying about the bump, but I hadn’t. I thought it was some innocent flesh-colored wart. I had forgotten that against all odds, innocence will reveal itself as evil. I felt this sudden wave of fatigue. My coffee cup was as heavy as a bowling ball. Jill left and I called Bob. He was clearly stunned, wordless.

  When Josh was a toddler, he was plagued by hives and hay fever, so when he was stung by a bee, I yelled for Bob to get the epinephrine pen while I watched him for signs of anaphylactic shock. By the time I had tweezered out the stinger, Bob was still standing there, paralyzed. Later, he got on the phone with the pediatrician, investigating all possible reactions, but the parameters were set. I was the quick one in an emergency.

  Now I shook off the weariness and whipped into action, just as my mother would have done. I called around for the best melanoma specialist and persuaded his secretary to schedule a quick examination—as well as a probable surgery. I phoned him: “It’s all fixed, sweetheart. You go in tomorrow, 8:00 a.m.”

  When he came home, I sat him down and rubbed his shoulders. I thought he’d want to talk about it, but he just picked up his Forbes and started reading. I didn’t want to ask him if he was frightened, for fear it would make him so. But when he was taken into surgery two days later, at the age of seventy-seven, not knowing whether the disease had spread, he was placid, even jocular. Jenny and I were walking beside his wheelchair when a Catholic nun appeared and asked to say a prayer over him. “Sure,” said my husband, the passionate Jew, startling me. “I’m happy for any help I can get.” It occurred to me later that he might have enjoyed all the attention. He had been having more trouble hearing, and though he never complained, it must have increased his isolation. If, for instance, one is the honored guest at a party and he can’t hear what people say, they tend to ignore him.

  During the operation, I prayed constantly. I was in the middle of my umpteenth Psalm 21 when the doctor strode out and said his cancer had been contained with no lymph node involvement. It might have been the first time Jenny and I laid hands on each other.

  Bob went to work as soon as the bandages were taken off, having refused entreaties by the plastic surgeon to operate on his somewhat misshapen right nasal lobe. I agreed, for I didn’t want him to go under the knife again and, besides, I thought his new nose looked rather cute. I got him his favorite oysters and soft-shell crabs and generally tried to fill the house with a nice gestalt. I looked for opportunities to reassure him, but if they were offered, I missed them. In fact, he never talked about the experience again, except to say that nobody seemed to have noticed the change in his nose.

  I think I was just relie
ved it had turned out all right. Like the women whose men came home at the close of World War II, I just wanted to get on with our lives.

  Until three months later.

  It was on a sunny Friday morning in late June, while Bob was counting out his vitamins. I found a lump the size of a marble in my breast.

  It had seemed to come from nowhere. I asked Bob to feel it. He did, very gently, and then I probed it more thoroughly, and he yelled for me to stop touching it. “It could just be a cyst,” I said, hyperventilating. “But you think it’s something, don’t you?” We had always reassured each other about the symptoms of our occasional hypochondria, but this time my concern didn’t seem unfounded. He told me to have it checked right away.

  I got an emergency mammogram the same day. I remember that evening clearly, when Bob came home and found me in the kitchen. I was bending over the fridge, and I mumbled to the yogurt that the doctors thought it was breast cancer, maybe mid-stage. “What? How do they know, how can they tell so quickly?” he said almost angrily.

  I was becoming more alarmed, so I told him not to talk to me anymore and retreated to my study. I, myself, was amazingly calm, easily distracted. I took down one of my favorite comfort books, A Moveable Feast, and soon I was sipping crystal glasses of Pernod and ice water in the Café de Flore, flirting with Hemingway, Dos Passos, and my other pals from the Lost Generation. I ignored the banging about Bob was doing in the other room, kind of like a dog who clatters his dish around when he wants you to know he’s hungry. I supposed I should have investigated Bob’s anger, which was an interesting show of emotion under the circumstances. But whatever it was about, I couldn’t deal with it. My eyes got heavy, and before I’d even had dinner, my head went down on the Salvador Dalí that Gertrude Stein had just hung on her wall.

  My lazy equilibrium continued, perhaps because I hung on to the shred of possibility that the tumor would be benign when they operated on Monday. That weekend, we threw our annual Fourth of July bash at the farm, featuring illegal fireworks obtained from the Chinese black market. As he always did, Bob went around quipping, “It’s my responsibility as DA to destroy them by burning.” The party was a tradition that Bob loved, and I wouldn’t let him cancel it. We hung up his father’s flag and put out the picnic tables and the citronella candles, but before the hot dogs and butterfly lamb had been cooked, word of my plight had crackled through the crowd. Word had apparently been spread by Bob, and I could have killed him. This person who was me but didn’t feel like me brushed off the expressions of sympathy, ignored the tactless alarm stories, and put on a nonchalance and a dazzling smile for everyone. I said “Oh, it’s nothing really” so many times my tongue hurt. After the last bottle rocket and Roman candle and lingering guest went off, I collapsed into bed without saying good night.