Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  Bob was both pleased by the verdict and saddened by the case. “It’s a hidden crime. Elder abuse will still go on without anyone knowing about it. Not every incapacitated old person has friends like Mrs. de la Renta.”

  28

  On a December day in 2008, a gale whirled through the orchards. Our weeping willow was swinging back and forth. “Oh, wow, look, it’s doing hip-hop!” I exclaimed, but Bob, who doesn’t like storms, was sitting looking at the refrigerator. I, who love them, sat facing the bay windows. The wind bent the tree so far to the left, its long leaves puddled like a mass of hair on the ground.

  Suddenly, with a tremendous crack, the old tree broke in two and dangled perilously over the glass. “Get back! It’s going to smash through and land on our heads!” I cried.

  “Do you think I should retire?” Bob asked. I almost tipped over in my chair. I didn’t think it was by accident that he had chosen this tumultuous and distracting moment to blurt out the question that had caused us both to privately agonize for so long. In truth, I thought it was time, but what if he disagreed? I couldn’t make this choice for him. The DA’s election was less than a year away. If he ran, it would be his tenth term. He would have to declare soon. He slowly moved his chair forward to sit next to me.

  “Reporters have been asking me the question for years, and I’ve always said, ‘I’m too old to retire.’ But now I wonder if I really am too old.”

  “I’ll support you whatever you decide,” I said, a lump in my throat. “You must be feeling a lot of pressure.”

  We hashed over the advantages and disadvantages. There was not, of course, anyone out there who could do what he had done—rid the city of terrorists, white-collar and street criminals, and murderers. Would crime skyrocket without him?

  “But I’m going to be ninety. What I don’t want is to be incapacitated in the middle of my term,” he brooded.

  “No, that wouldn’t be good at all. Bob, I think you’ve already made up your mind. I know it’s hard because, ironically, your last years as DA have been your best.”

  He nodded.

  “You want to go out when you’re on top.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  He told no one else of his decision; he didn’t want to be a lame duck. Indeed, as late as six months before, he had quipped to the Daily News, “If I broke both my legs, I might not run; if I broke one, I would run.”

  But his devotees feared what he was thinking, and they didn’t want to lose him. His mind was like a cleaver, and his energy and boldness still embarrassed the younger and the less spry. His campaign committee had already raised $750,000, and its members were urging him to stay on.

  “People have gotten together, asking me to run for DA again.” He chuckled. “They already have a slogan: 90 in ’09.”

  * * *

  On February 27, 2009, Bob and I walked down the long dark hall from his office to the press room. He was calm, even joking, but I felt heavy in body and mind. I tried to brainwash myself, repeating the mantra “You are not going to cry in front of the press.”

  As his top assistants looked on, visibly upset, we sat down. The bulbs flashed wildly, blinding us. Bob stumbled, but then, recovering himself, he gave the press a nervous little smile and told them that this was his last term as district attorney. I just kept smiling.

  The press began yelling out questions, and I whispered the ones he couldn’t hear into his ear.

  “I’ve been the conductor of an extraordinary orchestra,” he said, speaking and gently looking more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him in public. “I’ve served twenty-five years past normal retirement age, and I decided I wouldn’t press my luck any further.”

  Magazines, papers, and blogs rushed to make him the big story, awarding him the moniker “the world’s district attorney.” They filled pages with time lines of his cases and a variety of photographs depicting the last fifty years of his career: Bob with Martin Luther King; Bob with Bobby Kennedy; Bob opening a fire hydrant for underprivileged youths who would play and cool off in the hot streets of New York.

  The New York Times was effusive: great pictures, glowing panegyrics, deferential headlines. The Times lionized him as “a legend … his legacy assured … the last of an era of great men in American history.”

  At first, hearing him called a legend over and over gave me a headache. It smacked of a children’s fairy tale. The Legend: Quasimodo in love with a Gypsy, a Headless Horseman, an Imaginary DA. As for the “end of an era,” I certainly wasn’t ready for that. For sure, there were more eras to come.

  At least once a week, he was honored and roasted at dinners, presented with trophies, some of them nice enough to display—a huge cut-crystal Tiffany bowl, a big bronze copy of the famous Jo Davidson bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the one hand, the attention was exhilarating. Unlike so many great men, who had to wait until after they were gone to be honored, Bob got to enjoy this cascade of accolades in his lifetime.

  * * *

  There was something beautiful and terrible about these endless encomiums, much like attending your own memorial service. “How did I get to be this old?” he would sometimes ask at the end of the evenings. “I don’t feel entitled to all this fuss,” he said. “I haven’t lived half long enough yet for these honors.”

  For me, the parties were transformative, particularly those thrown by his old assistant U.S. attorneys; the funny and adoring stories I couldn’t have imagined. My tears came easily. The bedrock of the man I thought I married was cracking, and I felt myself falling down through the fathoms of his life to meet him anew. I was in love with him all over again. I internalized how the world saw him, dressed not in a tattered undershirt grumping about the house but stepping placidly into his masterful persona with a silk scarf round his neck and a jaunty cap on his head. He had no need to rein in his multitude of assistants for, like the Greek god Argus, he knew exactly what they were up to.

  During his final months as DA, he had become more than ever a prosecutorial swashbuckler. In the last month alone, he had uncovered two European banks engaging in lethal activities. Using Israel’s Mossad and the global intelligence network he had developed long ago, he had caught Credit Suisse and Lloyd’s of London red-handed. Not only had they violated U.S. sanctions against Iran; they had laundered a billion dollars for the enemy, which, incredibly, used the money to buy contraband in the United States designed for building nuclear weapons. Thanks to these “friendly” Western banks conspiring against us, Iran was building the atomic bomb America was trying to prevent—with American components. President Ahmadinejad of Iran must have been laughing all the way to his uranium enrichment facilities.

  The U.S. Treasury Department attempted to impose only civil penalties on the banks, but Bob stepped in and threatened Credit Suisse with a criminal indictment for felonies it had committed in Manhattan. As a result, the Swiss bank settled with the DA’s Office for a $536 million fine. Lloyd’s had agreed to pay $350 million.

  It didn’t surprise many people that Bob had pulled off a settlement unique in the annals of prosecutions. And, as many times before, Bob had been the first, the precedent setter. He recognized long before the U.S. government that Iran had no intention of negotiating or giving up its nuclear advancements. In fact, Bob was the one who alerted the CIA that Iran had terrorist agents all over the world and was giving major funds to anti-Israeli terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. Iran, his sources revealed, was, in actuality, a terrorist nation.

  As retirement nears, we grow closer, lighter; we touch each other and feel only the present moment.

  Feathers fall from nowhere, and we make a pillow of them … then all we know disappears, and what we don’t is here within the gold-blue hollow beneath our heads.

  * * *

  After dinner, we watch movies on the DVR. Tonight, as often happens, Bob stretches out his arm, and I cuddle into his shoulder. We have just seen Margaret Rutherford solve the wealthy uncle’s murder in a delicious Mis
s Marple antique. “After thirty years of marriage,” I say, looking up, “this is pretty sweet, don’t you think?”

  “Someone gave me some chocolate today,” he says and pulls a big box out of his briefcase. It is covered in crinkly gold foil with raised red rosebuds on top. “Who?” I ask. He shrugs. Little mystery gifts often appear on his desk from assistants who imitate his practice of not taking credit for his deeds.

  “Want to share it?” he asks, smiling shyly, as if we were on a first date. I nod, smiling back. His face is soft and open, his body bending toward me like a newly planted scion. “Let’s each have one,” he says, choosing a sugarplum shaped like an unfolding flower. He carefully peels back the wrapper, observes the chocolate, then puts it in my mouth. As we bite into them, we look at each other with surprise, strawberry cream sliding around our tongues but not tasting like strawberry at all. Instead, it manifests itself as a rather odd array of spices and liqueurs. He breaks another in half, popping part in my mouth and part in his own, and we suppress laughs as the rich, uniquely tasty goo slips down his chin.

  * * *

  A few weeks before he was to relinquish a lifetime of power, Bob and I were having one of his favorite meals, Cornish hen with gravy and peas. The meal was sticking in my throat: Would anyone listen to him when he was no longer DA, when he had become an afterthought? What would happen to his ego, his active mind? What could he possibly do at age ninety? Just as the fluttering inside my stomach was reaching a high, his booming voice came through the silence.

  “I’m going to accuse the president of using dope.”

  I stopped eating. Then I waited patiently until he had cleaned the meat off his wing bone. Lately, he had aimed some parting salvos at high public officials. He had, in fact, publicly accused the mayor of not wanting “anybody around who doesn’t kiss his ring or other parts of his body.”

  Bob finally pushed away his plate. “The reason I’m going after Obama is that I’m worried. Iran has the capacity to fire long-range ballistic missiles right into the middle of Jerusalem. Everyone’s dropped the ball on the sanctions. We could be headed for a third world war.

  “Obama thinks he’ll get further if he makes nice to them. Meanwhile, they’ll be firing missiles into Israel. The president must be high on something, and that’s what I’m going to say.”

  “Uh, I don’t think that’s a very good idea, sweetie,” I said, though I’m usually the one who urges him to step out of the box. “You can’t insult the president that way.”

  But he did anyway. On December 26, 2009, he had the president smoking pot in The Wall Street Journal.

  29

  Five days later, on December 31, the last day of his term and well after the clock struck 6:00 p.m., Bob Morgenthau walked out of the DA’s office for the last time.

  On that night and the nights to follow, we sat together, hypnotized by reruns of Law & Order. As I look back, I see that it worked on us as a drug, a dirge, and a perfect channel for emotional displacement. We got furious about the long-departed but still-missed Adam Schiff, the district attorney based on Bob. Why on earth had he been eclipsed by Dianne Wiest, who, oddly enough, reminded us of Leslie Crocker Snyder?

  Everything changes; nothing stays the same.

  * * *

  As ever, we were each other’s counterparts, and I tried not to veer from his side. Sometimes, we were just idle, taking in the smells and sounds of the city: the distant traffic, like the rush of water over stones … the rich aroma of beef bourguignon turned to a simmer … the spine-tingling scream of tires, praying that shattering glass and crumpling metal wouldn’t follow … the bump bump bump of boys’ blocks hurled from the floor above our heads … and the secret setting of the sun, fast obliterating twilight’s glow.

  During the day, he did what has always been his favorite pastime. There was not a room in the apartment where I couldn’t hear his booming voice on the telephone. I adore that voice. And I was grateful that he had this outlet, raising money for charity, brainstorming, or just chatting with Steve Kaufman, Judah Gribetz, his children. Yet when he hung up, even if he had secured a hundred thousand dollars for PAL or the museum or gotten a job for a former ADA, he was subdued.

  He was unwinding. “When I came home from the war, I was physically, mentally, and emotionally shot,” he said. “I slept twenty-two hours a day, would get up to eat, and then go back to sleep. I couldn’t even remember the name of the destroyer that had brought me home. It took me a long time to recover. That’s what this is like.”

  * * *

  Sometimes, I see images floating through your subliminal mind. A paper-thin heart, a hand withdrawn, a rose encased in ice. I laugh at the littlest things to keep you smiling. But my laugh comes out of sorrow. You were a king. You were the creator of justice and peace, the inventor with integrity. And there is nothing, nothing at all, that I can do to get that back.

  * * *

  “Bob,” I said at breakfast one morning, “when I tell you all the great things people are still saying about you, when I tell you how proud I am, right in this moment, it doesn’t seem to affect you.”

  “Huh,” he said and smiled. “Maybe I don’t believe you.”

  “What? You think I’m lying!”

  “No, but it seems unlikely people are paying that much attention now.”

  I put down my spoon on my plate of berries. “You’re very down on yourself.”

  “I’m let down. I’m at odds and ends,” he admitted.

  “This is a bitch, love, I know,” I said, rubbing his arm. “But you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to prove anything. You just have to be. You have accomplished more than a dozen leaders put together, and that’s not an exaggeration.”

  “It certainly is.”

  I swallowed. “You know what they say in chaos theory? If a butterfly flaps its wings in Texas, there will be a hurricane in Japan. You are that butterfly.”

  He gave me a rather indulgent smile.

  * * *

  The days go by uneasily. The leitmotifs that run through our life—habits, phrases, familiar gambols—they keep us steady; I depend on them. But leitmotifs are not always melody; they don’t always reassure us. Lately ours have been dissonant, uneasy. Wagnerian. Wotan gives and Wotan takes. You are up, I am down. I am down, you are up. I have forgotten my vow to keep you cheered and engaged. I have become just a skip in the record. Die Walküre playing over and over on the turntable.

  * * *

  I am too busy. There have been the regular stories for Tina Brown’s online newspaper, The Daily Beast, on Bernard Madoff, the sham money manager to the rich and famous. I had broken a number of exclusives about his Ponzi scheme; for a while, I was the media’s leading Madoff expert, reportedly causing even The New York Times to express frustration. This, of course, had nothing to do with my scant financial acumen and everything to do with the sources I had developed.

  Now my desk is strewn with piles of research on teen bullies for another Beast series, manuscripts from hopeful student grads I taught at Yale, Princeton, and Vassar. On a portable easel is a pastel portrait of Amy and Josh; art has become a hobby. My cell phone keeps ringing, e-mails go unanswered, my calendar is full: lunch with an editor, tea with a news source, theater with Christine Connor, my buddy on European biking trips. Bob’s secretary, Ida Van Lindt, used to tell people who invited us out that I was harder to get than the Boss.

  I need to find a quotation for a novel I’ve started. Standing on a chair, I reach a dusty Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from my top bookshelf, and out fall sheets of yellowed paper. My old poems. Very old. They are not particularly good, but they make me smile at the jelly bean who wrote them. One is dated 1978—a year after our marriage—“For the Duke from the Lost Duchess”:

  Who am I, will you tell me

  After having loved you.

  I am a wide-eyed fly whirling

  Around you, my transparent wings

  Beating in your ear,

 
Tentatively requesting

  An audience.

  Since then, we have done a double psychic somersault. How ironic that Bob, the most independent man in creation, is now so dependent on me. Thirty years earlier, I went from being a high-powered writer to a lovelorn girl, totally subservient to him. I would have given anything to have him home with me all the time. Now, though I love the continual surprise of seeing him during the day, I think sometimes I love my privacy more.

  An unpleasant word from me can leave him hurt. I have more power over him than I ever did before. And I don’t want it.

  * * *

  One night I summoned the courage to bring things to a head. “Sweetheart.” I inched closer to him on the couch. “We’ve been avoiding this for too long. You need to let it out of you. You miss being DA, don’t you?”

  “Not on your life,” he replied. “It’s a relief. I’m glad not to be doing all that work.”

  “Bob, I just don’t believe you. I think if you talk about your loss, you’d feel better, like you did when you talked about the PTSD. Or … is it that you don’t want me to feel lost too?”

  “Up, up, attaboy,” Bob said. Ivan jumped happily into his lap. My competition, the “other woman,” so to speak, was a dog. He was also Bob’s go-to when he wanted to avoid something unpleasant. Once, I asked Mark Doyle, a top farm manager, if Bob had brought Ivan to the farm store. He replied, “Well, actually, there’s a question of whether Bob brought Ivan or Ivan brought Bob.”

  “Forget bloody Ivan and look at me, damn it,” I exclaimed. “Look, you’ve been used to being the Boss—thousands of cases, constant feedback from what, some five hundred ADAs? Reporters writing adoring pieces. And I’ve had the privilege of being the DA’s wife.