Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  I liked the Elinor I saw in those letters. Like me, she had exiled all the fancy coats her mother had given her to the back of her closet when she left home. And, like me, she suffered from periodic depression, which might have explained why she appeared gloomy in photographs.

  Although Elinor has been occasionally accused of maneuvering herself into the more powerful Eleanor’s life for the sake of her husband’s career, the letters between the two women are unusually intimate, tender, even romantic. Elinor longed for her friend’s love and reassurance. And although the First Lady expressed genuine concern about Elinor’s health and well-being, she got impatient with her resentment of her other good friends:

  Dearest Elinor,

  … I have always felt that you were hurt often by imaginary things and have wanted to protect you but if one is to have a healthy, normal relationship, I realize it must be on some kind of equal basis, you simply cannot be so easily hurt, life is too short to cope with it!…

  Much, much love, always.

  Eleanor

  February 2nd On board Larovis [?]

  Dearest Elinor,

  … I didn’t say half what I wanted to when we were talking the other day. I’ve grown to love you … tho I can’t take away the feeling you have it makes me unhappy to feel that it is worrying you and I want to put my arms about you and keep away all the disagreeable things which have made you feel this way.

  Dearest Elinor,

  … It worries me to have you say you tire so easily. I wish I could give you some of my toughness!… Your children will all come out of any phases just as Bob has done. They are such grand people but then you and Henry have been wonderful parents!

  My dear love, I must run to some W.P.A. projects!

  Elinor dearest,

  —more love than I can tell you,

  Devotedly, E.R.

  There are only a few letters at the library from Elinor herself. Library archivists speculate that Elinor often used the phone, wanting to hear her friend’s voice. Yet in a note hinting at her insecurity, she apologizes for inundating Eleanor with correspondence. Where this correspondence is and what it contained remains a mystery:

  Eleanor dearest,

  I don’t mean to be deluging you with letters, for I just wrote last night, but I must send another word after reading the wonderful news of Elliott [Roosevelt] receiving the Flying Cross. I can’t tell you how happy I am it is almost as if one of my own boys had been so honored.

  Devotedly,

  Elinor

  The more I learned of Bob’s mother, the more I understood him, and the more I realized that we were both cheated of the maternal nurturing we could have had if our mothers had not been such needy women.

  I wouldn’t have thought my mother had anything in common with Bob’s mother until I compared Elinor’s letters with those that I had found in a shoe box after Mother died. They were uniquely self-pitying but also similarly lacking in self-esteem. Gram Leavitt was clearly a tough mother, short on nurturing. One letter, in fact, confirms the law that the kindness a grandmother shows her grandchild is proportionate to how horrid she has been with her own child.

  October 30, 1934

  Dear Mother,

  I was sorry to hear that you won’t let me come home for Thanksgiving. All the freshmen in my dorm are going home, I imagine the whole of Sweet Briar will be emptying out since it’s a holiday and everybody will want to be with their families. I guess I’ll just have to stay here alone.

  … Have a swell time in Italy.

  Lorraine

  I remember another letter had made my hands go cold.

  April 20, 1952

  Dear Betty,

  How is Kankakee? It is beautiful here, yards bright green framed by yews trimmed into perfect ovals. But did I tell you before? These New Englanders are cold customers. They don’t even return telephone calls …

  I don’t know what’s wrong with Tom. You wouldn’t recognize him. After all these years, he’s still like a zombie. I think it’s the war, he can’t seem to get over it the way other men in Wellesley have. He pays practically no attention to me. But I guess I shouldn’t complain because he loves our daughter, our gift child, our little package who decided to arrive after my six miscarriages. I call her “Daddy’s Little Girl.”

  Fond wishes to you all,

  Lorraine (Mrs. Thomas E. Franks)

  The bitterness behind her words could have curled the paper. She was jealous. My mother was jealous of me. Her own mother had rejected her, and after I was born, once again, the love that belonged to her was taken away and lavished on someone else. She must, in a way, have hated me.

  * * *

  The more I discovered about Bob’s childhood, the more pieces I found that explained our strange attraction. He had been the balance wheel of his family, the peacemaker, and of course this had been my role too. Bob’s political acumen, his sleight of hand, was forged in the house where he grew up. Unlike my voluble environment, however, Bob’s family rarely shouted; they simply stopped speaking to each other. Rather than separating them, as I did, Bob’s mission was to bring his family together.

  Bob had told me that from about twelve years old, Joan didn’t talk to their mother, so their mother didn’t talk to Joan. As a result, his father didn’t talk to Joan either. His father, disappointed that he didn’t play sports and had no interest in the farm, also apparently ignored Henry. Bob tried to get them all to reconcile, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

  One day in the spring of 1937, Bob had gotten a call from his mother. Joan, fifteen, was about to get kicked out of her fancy boarding school, Madeira, for locking a girl who was bothering her in a cold shower. Joan was estranged from her mother, so Bob, eighteen and barely through his freshman year at Amherst, went down to the Virginia boarding school for Parents’ Day and showed his diplomatic best to the principal, Miss Madeira. “She’s sometimes a girl who is a little too enthusiastic, even rambunctious,” he said earnestly, trying to mimic the body language of a man fully mature. “But she is a good girl, and I promise you that she will never ever do something like that again.” Miss Madeira was so impressed with him that she spared Joan. On the way home, Bob was both angry at and amused by Joan. He identified with her rebelliousness and was intrigued that she had clearly come into her own, wild and kicking.

  * * *

  If I was unwittingly looking for someone like the father of my childhood, Bob seemed to be searching for a second wife not like his mother. His first wife, a Smith undergrad whom he began dating when he was at nearby Amherst, was a woman of her generation: as family oriented, reserved, and discriminating as Elinor. But by the time Martha died at the age of fifty-two, sexual stereotypes had changed. Women had careers; they were idiosyncratic and, to men like Bob, startling in their independence. He had his pick of these exotic feminists of the 1970s. Having been an editor of his college newspaper and always a frustrated journalist, he dipped into New York’s vast river of female writers.

  They weren’t always suitable: there was a thirty-year-old scribbler whose conversation consisted of prattling on about friends who told friends things of stunning triviality; a beatnik in her forties with a messy apartment that smelled of old sneakers; a prominent author whose main activity consisted of making cards for her Rolodex containing the names and accomplishments of every person she met (upon which she promptly forgot about them).

  Then he met me.

  * * *

  After our first non-date that blossomed into something of a saturnalia in June 1976, we stayed in my apartment and played house. When he was at work, we began speaking on the phone twice a day, and when he wasn’t, we lit fat colored candles, listened to old Buffy Sainte-Marie albums, debated the Israeli raid in Entebbe, found farm-fresh vegetables, and bought sprigs of lavender so I could put them in the pillows. We liked making fresh hummus, dripping the oil into the blender and watching it whirl through the chickpeas and tahini.

  Love creates itself
from the tiny things that plant themselves in your memory. His sweet awkwardness when he first kissed me; the way he ends his jokes with that infectious laugh; his romance with food—watching him savor every bite long after others have finished and then start eating the leftovers from their plates; his pride in his two excellent baritone notes that make him break out in song at the most surprising moments; how he wakes me up at night by tickling my back; how I turn to see his handsome, mystifying face, his adorable smile like the sliver of a moon, how his dimples deepen and his eyes crinkle, a smile he saves for me, how our love is the love of two eccentrics.

  I love when the sensitivities he hides so well suddenly spring up, the wet streak on his cheek when I recite the Statue of Liberty’s inscription “Give me your tired, your poor…” or he hears a reading of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. I love deeply his devotion to helping the downtrodden not only in words but in life-changing actions, the way he always takes the moral high ground no matter how strong the temptations are to do otherwise.

  What does he love about me? He loves me, he says, because I am beautiful, I am daring, I am unpredictable, I am different and a little bit offbeat. I keep him on his toes and inspire him, and he enjoys the fact that being with me is like going on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

  * * *

  A month after we had started dating, Bob asked me home to dinner. This was perhaps the most significant step he had taken to declare his interest in me. Our common friends had confided in me that he had never brought his other girlfriends home so soon. I realized later that the invitation was primarily to see how his daughter Barbara, fourteen, and I got along.

  I felt as if I were being brought home to meet his parents. Barbara was the most important responsibility in his life, and her opinion of me, though I didn’t realize it then, was crucial.

  His other children were not living at home. Bobby, nineteen, was away at Amherst College, and the two older girls, who were close to my age, had their own houses. Since Martha’s death, he had tried to become all things to his youngest child: he knew the names of her teachers, knew that she talked to an imaginary squirrel, researched the type of skis she needed for their winter holidays together.

  He would always take her calls. “There was this big, important conference at his office, and he suddenly excused himself,” said Ken Conboy, his executive assistant at the DA’s Office. “He was asking her about her new jeans, how they fit, what color they were, did she like them … The mayor was waiting on him. I was amazed.”

  * * *

  The night of the dinner, I found that Barbara was a cute, lively girl, and I immediately took to her. She and her cousin Ellie Hirschhorn giggled helplessly through the London broil and baked potatoes. Even her father’s look of warning could not stop them from cracking up. Initially, I was embarrassed into silence. Then it struck me how funny it must seem to a teenager, her ancient father bringing home a date who looked as if she could have been a college babysitter.

  Well, I could hold my own here. “Why did the banana go out with the prune?” I asked loudly.

  They stared at me as if I were from another planet. Finally, Barbara replied, “Okay, why?”

  “Because he couldn’t find a date!” I went into a paroxysm of laughter, and in spite of themselves they joined in. I could see the look of relief on Bob’s face; he proceeded to smother his potato with sour cream and contentedly demolish his steak.

  * * *

  As the glories of age and youth converged, we had, in a sense, taken custody of each other. I exposed him to my world: concerts in the park, offbeat plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre. He exposed me to the excitement of murder trials and exclusive art auctions, where we looked for the works of painters collected by his forebears and became addicted to the lightning-fast honeybee drone of the auctioneer, taking as a bid the swipe of a fingertip across someone’s nose.

  From the start I wanted to be wherever Bob was, so I went to every political event. They were, at first, horrifying.

  * * *

  The hall smells of perspiration and male pheromones … dark suits scatter like ants, foraging alone. Each ant for himself. Bob comes in, and they line up to devour him. Invisible hands brush my fingers, greeting me invisibly. Who could I be but someone’s girlfriend du jour … an obstacle to men of purpose. The eyes on the tops of their heads scan the room for more important prey. Ah, there’s the light, just beyond. They push past me to get to it, link antennae, make deals, seal them with hearty handshakes.

  Those who have walked away from me do not know that I am the light, the most important predator in the room, the one who with a stroke of the pen could leave their careers in ruins. Yet I stand alone as though the room were empty, a thistle among the birds of paradise.

  Thankfully, Bob’s arm shoots out from the crowd to gather me in. At times, I try to slip away and hide in a waiter’s nook or linger in the ladies’ room, but he always finds me.

  * * *

  “Introduce yourself! Tell people who you are, give them your byline. They’ll talk to you then.”

  “I’d feel like an impostor.”

  “What?”

  “I mean an operator,” I replied. In truth, I could hardly operate myself. Lucinda the hard-driving reporter inevitably became Lucinda the pimply pubescent. These were bigger, more distinguished parties than I had ever been a guest at. I was terrified of what might come out of my mouth. Not that it even mattered, for I made his colleagues uncomfortable with my miserable habit of looking through them instead of at them. I would study the ways their hands moved, the sets of their mouths, the angles they held their hips, anything that told me who they really were. When I was expected to respond to their questions, I just stood there frozen-tongued, because I hadn’t heard a word they’d said. They would drift off, even flee, for I reminded them of someone peeking through the blinds before they were fully dressed.

  “The problem is that I can’t make small talk,” I said.

  “It’s easy. Listen.” He proceeded to arm me with an arsenal of amusing stories that I never could remember. “Then talk about the weather, the ambience, the speakers, the balloons,” he said. If I didn’t know someone, I was to avoid discussing politics, because I could be talking to the man I was talking about. If I did know him, I wasn’t to ask how his work was going, because he might have been fired that morning; nor about his wife, because she could have just asked him for a divorce.

  I gradually learned the rules, reined in my bare face, and acquired the refinements of the superego. That’s when I began to find the events dreadfully boring and simply stopped going.

  * * *

  My turn to help Bob came when we were in jarringly noisy environments. Not only was he deaf in the right ear, but he had diminished hearing in his left; as with my father, the nerves were damaged when big war guns went off beside him. If I thought he had not understood someone, I would whisper or mouth out the words.

  And then I did what no one else could do: I persuaded him to say farewell to the commodious suits of his tall, much larger-boned father. We went to Bloomingdale’s Men’s, and because his attention span for shopping was so limited, we bought four suits in half an hour. To everyone’s astonishment, he showed up more like Maurice Chevalier without a hankie peeking from his pocket. “If you had dressed like that in 1970,” cracked his good friend and gubernatorial campaign manager, Pierre Leval, “you would have been governor now.”

  * * *

  For us, being in love fell wide of sheer enchantment. We suffered anxieties and second thoughts. There was the contradiction in how we lived, for instance. I loved my little rental apartment in Manhattan, my five pairs of jeans, four turtlenecks, three blouses, and two skirts. I loved the fact that this was all I had. Bob, on the other hand, took pleasure in his spacious home in the elite New York neighborhood of Riverdale, his acres of fruit orchards in the Hudson Valley, his Volvo, his thirty-two-foot fishing boat, and his Border collies. He had a six-inch mattress and a maid to tight
en up his linen sheets. I had a comforter wadded up at the end of a futon that Roger found propped up in the street.

  We both knew that life together was a strong possibility, though the complications would be so great, the differences so vast, we avoided talking of it. I went cold even thinking about it.

  * * *

  I will have to wear pumps. Style my hair. Put on relics of my adolescence, like skirts and horrid tight panty hose. My legs, not my finest asset, will get cold. A little pocketbook will dangle from my wrist. I will peek longingly through heavy drapes at marchers passing by, protesting the multitude of things still wrong with our country—the thousands of homeless, the disenfranchised, de facto segregation. They would all leave me behind. The high of a long day yelling myself hoarse would never again be mine. What else would you expect of me, my love? Would my lifestyle turn over on itself? Am I to be a homemaker, a stepmother to five, a decoration on the arm of a public official? Do people become how they act and not in a dinosaur’s age? Does your behavior, if you change it, quite quickly and subtly rework you inside?

  * * *

  When I brought up the possibility of marriage to my closest relatives and friends, they only magnified the things I was most afraid of. “What will you do when he’s seventy-five?” asked my beloved eighty-nine-year-old grandmother. I had visions of pushing wheelchairs and finding lost canes … or one day discovering my deepest love had left forever without being able to say goodbye.