Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  “The judge had. He’d moved back his reservation. And it was the birthday of the pilot of this American Airlines Convair, and he wanted to get home. He got home all right, but not the way he had planned. The plane crashed into a building in Elizabeth, New Jersey. No one survived.”

  I felt sick at the thought he might have been dead instead of walking beside me. He had turned his face away. Perhaps he didn’t want me to see the grief that still came over him almost fifty years after Patterson’s death.

  Then, suddenly, we were jolted out of our somber mood. A man came up, smiling widely, sticking out his hand. “Mr. Morgenthau? Is that Mr. Morgenthau?” an older man asked, stopping in front of us. “I just want to thank you, sir, for the wonderful years of service you’ve given this city.”

  Three more strangers waved or nodded at Bob, and he gave them big smiles and sometimes stuck out his hand.

  “Who do you think you are, Bruce Springsteen?” I asked, trying to lighten his mood.

  “Who is he?”

  “The best rock singer in the world, that’s all. You’ve got a lot in common. They call him the Boss. You know, I think people think you’ve just enjoyed success after success. They idealize you; they don’t realize you haven’t had a charmed life.”

  “I’d been so used to getting bad news I began to harden myself. Now I just skip over it.

  “People asked me if I missed the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and I really didn’t. They ask me if I’m upset at losing a big case, but I’m never upset for long.

  “You know what I say when these writers, editors, publishers, have asked me to write a book. I’ll never do it. I just don’t have what it takes to pull it all up again and again, editing and adding and going back over my life.”

  “You’re too sensitive underneath to do that; I think you couldn’t take it. You’re so like my dad. So determined not to be laid open, not to let yourself go.

  “I understand now why you sweep things under the rug,” I added.

  “I don’t want to hurt people, be a burden. I don’t want them to have to live with my problems. I also think if you bring things up when people have tried to stop thinking about them, you’re liable to hurt them all over again.”

  “As well as hurt yourself,” I said, smiling. “How do you maintain the discipline?”

  “I did get pretty good at suppressing things,” he replied. “I’ve been in the war, lost friends, my mother and father and Martha were sick for so long … I’ve learned never to look back. I don’t have anything at stake anymore.”

  “So you’ve eliminated the possibility of your suffering, and you try to stop others from suffering. You sound like the Dalai Lama.”

  “I thought you said I was like Bruce Springsteen.”

  “Ha. You’re both. A public star and a private Buddhist.”

  I thought about his habit of removing himself from an emotional argument, putting away unsolvable problems, forgetting the complaints and resentments that others harbored against him. That is why he could call me a nasty word one minute and then the next sweetly designate me his “pet.” He had disciplined himself into an ancient Eastern state of mind—live in this present moment and obliterate the one that came before.

  I put my arm around his waist and looked up at him.

  “What?” he asked, smiling back and smoothing down my hair.

  “Oh, nothing. Just this moment, that’s all.”

  * * *

  I breathe in, and the air, as though trapped, is propelled out of me. Is it the first spring pollen? The perplexing beauty of your confessions? Or my own regret? I’ve not known you before. You’ve sat maddeningly silent beside me, and until now, I never knew why.

  Lord, let me always remember his suffering.

  It feels as if our marriage has shifted today, for you have finally been explained to me. After two decades, you risked taking me to a place you’ve kept hidden, sometimes even from yourself. It was a place where you did look back, where you did relive the wounds of the past, where your truest self prevailed and your grief was deeply felt.

  * * *

  On September 11, 1997, John Cardinal O’Connor, trailing brilliant red robes, arrived to address a thousand people before the soaring hexagonal Museum of Jewish Heritage that Bob had worked for years to create. Bitter winds came off the Hudson, whipped past the Statue of Liberty, and set the great tent bucking. From the moment he took the first step to the podium, the cardinal’s head was bowed, his back curved, bent almost to a right angle. I was afraid for him. I was afraid something was wrong with him.

  The decision to invite the cardinal to open the museum had been controversial. Now there were some grumbles and polite but less than enthusiastic applause. Nobody in the audience seemed to notice he wasn’t looking up at them but kept his head so low that he might have been paying obeisance to the pope. Then he softly uttered the words that had never been heard from a Catholic leader before. “I am grateful,” he said, head still bowed, “to have the highest honor of seventy-seven and a half years of life on this earth: the humbling privilege, publicly, as a Christian, to ask forgiveness for all Christians who helped in any way to make the horrors of the Shoah possible.”

  Many in the crowd gasped. It was the first apology from a church official since Pope Pius XII signed a concordat with Hitler and let two thousand Roman Jews at the foot of Vatican Hill be taken to Nazi death camps.

  It was tantamount to the pope himself standing before a representation of Jews, many of them survivors, and saying he was sorry. In fact, O’Connor surely had the pope’s blessing, for some time later John Paul II himself issued an official church apology.

  When the cardinal finished his speech and walked off the stage, standing upright now, the applause this time was considerable.

  That Morgenthau had chosen a representative of the ecclesiastical Goliath that collaborated with the Nazis outraged some of his board members on this historic occasion. They said the beautiful new museum in Battery Park deserved someone better.

  One of the four founders slapped his hand on the table and said, “Disinvite him!”

  “No, this is who we are going to have,” insisted Bob. “We don’t want to be talking to ourselves. It’s important to have a broad range of people of all religions visiting the museum. The cardinal is the Vatican’s figurative liaison in the Middle East, and he’s very sensitive to Jewish affairs.”

  Governor Pataki, Mayor Giuliani, and Elie Wiesel, the author who was a survivor of Auschwitz, all spoke passionately. Then Bob got up and told the story of his grandmother’s first cousin who could not be saved from the gas chambers, even though the influential governor Herbert Lehman and his brother Chief Judge Irving Lehman intervened. Eva Lehman Thalheimer, told she was going to a retirement home, was gassed in Treblinka at the age of eighty-six.

  “This museum is important for young people to understand what happens when criminals take over the government,” Bob told the audience.

  Then the six-sided, eighty-five-foot-tall museum, designed by the prominent architect Kevin Roche, was opened to the guests. The sides represented the six million in the Nazi genocide and the six points of the Star of David.

  “God in heaven,” said a survivor of Dachau, holding her cheeks as she saw an exhibit of the album that she kept at the camp. There were ancient photographs, kiddush cups, wedding dresses, children’s shoes, and videotaped testimonies by some of the last survivors still living. All together, they described the rich Jewish life before the Holocaust, the resistance during it, and the renewal afterward. Some survivors wore placards with the names of their ghettos or concentration camps in hopes of connecting with friends and relatives. Many danced to the music played by a Yiddish folk band. In the entry hall were etched the words REMEMBER … NEVER FORGET. THERE IS HOPE FOR YOUR FUTURE.

  “You did wonderful,” I said as we gazed up at the towering edifice on the water. I knew he was thinking of his father: the museum was his private tribute to Henry junior, who had not b
een fully appreciated for helping to win the war against Hitler. I asked him how his dad would feel today.

  “He would be pleased, proud,” Bob said, a catch in his voice. Fifteen years earlier, Bob had agreed to help lead the Koch commission to build the city’s only Holocaust museum. Indeed, he had been thinking of his dad: “I wanted to complete what he had started.

  “He would have wanted this museum so that succeeding generations will always know about what the Nazis had done,” Bob said.

  He added that it wasn’t widely appreciated that Henry’s Treasury Department had been responsible for the gigantic preparation of America for war: the building up of the military and the creative decision to issue war bonds to let ordinary Americans participate in its financing. But perhaps when the war was won, guilt was mixed with his relief.

  “He did what he could to save Jewish refugees, but he couldn’t do all that he wanted to do, because we needed to win the war first,” Bob said.

  It was the government’s discovery of the extent of the Nazi genocide that inspired Henry junior to propose the controversial Morgenthau Plan. I had thought the proposal had been rejected from the start, but it was actually greeted enthusiastically by FDR and other cabinet officials. I’d found an obscure book that Henry junior had written, Germany Is Our Problem, in 1945 after the Nazis’ unconditional surrender. I had read about the final war conference in Potsdam, where Truman, Stalin, and Churchill had signed off on the plan that Germany be deindustrialized and turned into an agricultural country. My own research showed that indeed this deindustrialization had been implemented—shipyards were blown up, and heavy manufacturing was converted—and continued for several years until it was gradually ended by pressure from the new German leaders. Truman, who finally fired Henry junior, argued that the United States needed Germany to be an armed bulwark against Communist Russia. The incarnation of Henry junior’s plan for Germany was quickly reversed.

  Bob saw his father as a visionary: one of the first American politicians to realize, or admit, what Germany was doing to the Jews. “In August 1938, Daddy took Henry and me to Europe. When we got to the Swiss side of the Rhine, across from the Black Forest, Henry said to my father, ‘Bob and I want to cross the bridge to see Germany,’ and my father said, ‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’ Henry replied, ‘So we can say we’ve been on German soil.’ Daddy said, ‘Henry, you are never going to want to say you’ve been in Germany.’”

  * * *

  The completion of the museum in September was a beacon in the horrible year of 1997. It was a celebration of triumph over tragedy in more ways than one. Publicly, the beautiful museum, as it grew over the next months, hailed the defeat of Nazism and the continuation of the rich life of Jews, and secretly it represented Bob’s and my triumph over cancer and the near ruin of our marriage. After Bob recognized that he had had the symptoms of PTSD, we talked about it many times, and I think it gave him some relief. Now we stood reconciled, hand in hand at the fence as the breeze from the Hudson aimed itself at our backs. “We fought hard, didn’t we, Tart?” I said, putting my head on his shoulder. “Nobody will ever find us eating on trays in separate rooms.”

  “No, they won’t,” he replied, putting his arm around me, shielding me from the cold, “because fortunately for me, you never run out of things to say.”

  * * *

  “Where’s my wife?” he would invariably ask as soon as he walked in the door, even if he had been gone for an hour. “Lucinda! Where are you?”

  “Here,” I would shout, and he would impatiently reply, “Where is here? I don’t know where here is!” I would stride quickly out of some room and welcome him home.

  When I talked to my friends, that was a signal for him to claim ownership. He’d make noise, make faces. One night Lila Meade and I were talking excitedly about the runaway success of the Vassar Haiti Project founded by her husband, Andrew, and her. They had been buying paintings and crafts from Haitian artists, selling them at fairs in New York, and then using the profits to help a village in the ravaged country.

  “We’ve built them a school, and now we’ve raised so much we’ll be able to start on a medical clinic!” Lila exclaimed.

  I giggled. Bob, sitting on the couch across from us, was wiggling his eyebrows at me.

  “You look so handsome, Tart!” I couldn’t ignore his attentions any longer.

  Lila looked at him. He looked back straight-faced.

  “Do you think I’m handsome?” I asked him.

  “You’re very cute,” he said.

  “Well, you’re very, very cute,” I replied.

  “You’re very, very, very cute,” he said, grinning now.

  Every so often, he suggested we go out to a nightclub and dance. So off we went to Doubles, had a glass of wine, and hit the floor. I had tried to teach him to dance, and what he could do was pick up one foot and then the other, but with perfect respect for the rhythm, thus providing me with a foil to let go, hair flying, hands clapping to the hot beat of “Disco Inferno” or the cool one of “Little Red Corvette.”

  Still, underneath all the jollity we consciously worked to create, we felt beaten down by the events of the last two years. And then, one day, the head deity, undoubtedly getting tired of our obsession with ourselves, engineered a series of exciting and sometimes bizarre twists in our lives that must have amused him and certainly woke up our fighting natures.

  This is what would happen to Bob: he would wage a lonely fight for restitution of Nazi loot to Jewish owners and turn the international art world on its head; he would convict two murderers where there was no body; and he would indict a rapist who was not present or even identified. Each of these cases made legal precedent.

  This would happen to me: for The New Yorker, I would write about my sister’s baby, who had serious birth defects but the mind of a genius; I would fly through Africa with Hillary Clinton and get an exclusive interview with the First Lady about the Monica Lewinsky affair, revealing that the president’s weakness for infidelity was connected to his abuse as a child; I would finally persuade my father to tell me the details of his work as an undercover agent and write a memoir that became a modest bestseller and broke my writer’s block for good.

  And so came our years of plenty. They began in 1998 and lasted more than a decade. One moment we were sunk in bleak gravity, and the next we were whirling through a rush of stars. Though we were taken over and thrust in different directions, we no longer felt responsible for each other’s every mood. At last, as in my everlasting dreams, we were on parallel paths, knowing that our lives would intersect, and often.

  21

  On January 7, 1998, Bob got a strange call from the niece of a Holocaust survivor who said the Nazis had stolen an Egon Schiele from her aunt; the family had been trying to get it back for more than half a century. Within a day, Bob had retrieved it from the Museum of Modern Art. What was fascinating to me, as the case unfolded in our dining room, was the story behind the story.

  The fallout began with Ronald Lauder, the genteel billionaire who had been a Pentagon official, a Middle East negotiator, and an ambassador to Austria and was a cosmetics heir and a real estate mogul with his name on buildings throughout Manhattan. Now he was the august chairman of the city’s Museum of Modern Art, and after the seizure of the Schiele, he strode awkwardly into Bob’s office, chin thrust forward, jutting brows casting a shadow over eyes luminous with indignation.

  The DA, having no precedent, had seized the exquisite Portrait of Wally, which was a star in the museum’s exhibition of the works of Egon Schiele. The DA had, in fact, slapped a subpoena on Lauder’s museum a day before it planned to ship the painting, which was a rendering of Schiele’s mistress, out of the country. Lauder was in shock. The work had been a particular favorite of his and one destined to skyrocket in value.

  “It doesn’t even belong to us!” Lauder said during this private meeting. “We borrowed it from the Austrian government, and we have to give it back.”<
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  “It doesn’t appear to belong to Austria,” Bob replied evenly. “It appears to have been stolen by Nazi looters from a Jew.”

  That Jew was one Lea Bondi, Schiele’s supporter and dealer, who, after the war ended, had been trying for much of her life to get back the exceptional canvas.

  Lent by the state-owned Leopold Museum, this work of the artist, who was the harbinger of Expressionism in the early twentieth century, had had a journey through time as twisted, grotesque, and deathly as one of Schiele’s figurative portraits. If Lauder loved the work, it had also been cherished by Bondi, who had hung it in her living room before it was confiscated by a Nazi and eventually passed on to the government of Austria.

  Lauder was a passionate Zionist, an active supporter of the right-wing leadership in Israel, but on this day he was less an advocate of Jewish rights than a collector of famous paintings.

  “Austria would have returned the Schiele painting to its rightful owners, but you have now made it much more difficult,” said Lauder, the son of Estée Lauder.

  “Austria would never have returned the Schiele,” Bob countered coolly. “Their laws favor the buyer, and you know this.

  “It seems to me you have a conflict of interest in this case,” Bob added, referring to the MoMA board’s dismissive treatment of the Bondi heirs, who had pleaded with them not to ship off the Schiele.

  “Well, I guess I do wear two hats,” Lauder admitted, suddenly subdued.

  “I’d say you wore four,” Bob replied. “You are a collector of Schiele paintings that have no provenance, you are the chairman of MoMA, and being its former U.S. ambassador, you are a friend of Austria. You even chair the Commission for Art Recovery that confines itself to persuading governments and museums alone to make restitution.”

  “You’re going to ruin the art world,” Lauder said. “People won’t be able to enjoy art exhibitions without lending between museums, and no museum will turn over their best art if they might not get it back. There are rules of lending between museums worldwide. Are we supposed to break them because you decide we should?”