Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  I swallowed back the tears. “You say ‘not again’ to me, even in the middle of all this beauty! I thought you were more romantic.”

  “I am a romantic; I’m very romantic in fact.”

  “Could we at least talk about your problem talking to Barbara about us?”

  “I don’t have any problem.”

  “Then you’ve talked to her?”

  “Not yet. Give me some time.”

  “You’ve had lots of time. Listen, I’m a very simple and innocent person.”

  He made an exaggerated cough.

  “I think in equations. One and one make two. If you love someone as deeply as we do, if you want to spend the rest of your life with them like we do, you just say, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ And then take everything else as it comes.”

  He laughed and put a bloom of wisteria in my hair. “You’re right.”

  “You can’t romance me off this topic. It feels like you don’t really care about me.”

  “I do, of course I do. It’s just there’s never been the right moment.”

  “What moment are you waiting for?” I said warmly. “The moment when she sits down and says, ‘So how’s Lucinda, Dad? When are you going to marry her?’” I turned my back so he wouldn’t see my tears and went down the steps to the bright green lawn. He followed. I put my face in the fountain spray.

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said evenly. “Just get off my back.”

  “Get off your back? Get off your back! You know what you are? You know what I never realized? You are an emotional wimp!”

  He looked dumbfounded, as though he hadn’t the least idea what I meant.

  I stormed off: “And I don’t even know if I want to marry you anyway!”

  * * *

  For the next week, the phone rang and rang, and it sounded to me exactly like his ring, so I didn’t answer it. Finally, the intercom buzzed. I picked it up and shouted, not too agreeably, “What!” But to my chagrin it wasn’t Bob at all but an Irishman named Ted Smyth, the head of PR of the Irish consulate. I had met him on a story, and he was killingly handsome—lean, taller than Bob, thick dark hair, a big sexy smile—and he said clever things like “What is public relations? You throw out a bone and see who picks it up.”

  So I let him come in, and he promptly asked me to dinner. “Well, why the hell not?” I thought. The next night he took me to hear Irish music, which I love with a passion, and the following, he took me for a buggy ride in the park. The night after that, having reserved a table near the harpist at the Palm Court, we went to the Plaza for high tea. Afterward, we walked along the park, and he leaned over, his hair lit from the back by an old streetlamp, and kissed me. Then, in his fetching Celtic brogue, he whispered, “You’re a fine thing, Miss Lucinda Franks.”

  For the next two weeks, I dated two Times men, one of whom I asked out myself, but mostly I went out with Ted. He was kind, romantic, and shared my love of Ireland, about which he talked incessantly. He knew things like the best Guinness (double X) and where to get it. And when I was with him, all I could think about was Bob, who had never taken me on a buggy ride or to hear Irish music, who thought the Plaza was for tourists, and who, next to Ted, was a scrawny old man.

  One day, I was sitting chatting away with Mary Breasted when I noticed a cigar butt sticking out between her sofa cushions. It had been smoked down to a mere inch. I knew only one person who did that.

  “Mary, what’s this? Has Bob been here?”

  Mary reddened.

  “You’ve been seeing him, haven’t you?”

  “Just a couple times. It’s nothing. We’re friends.”

  “Right, well, you go right ahead and see him. I couldn’t care less.”

  One lazy Sunday about a week later, I was lying back in my beanbag chair, watching the sun twinkle on my fire escape, morosely daydreaming about whether true love existed, when my five-alarm doorbell jolted me awake. I got up and looked through the peephole. I took a deep breath. It was Bob.

  “I’m not here,” I said.

  “I understand you’ve been dating Ted Smyth,” he replied through the door.

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I talked to her,” he said. I could hardly hear him.

  “Who?… Barbara? You talked to Barbara?”

  “Yes.”

  I threw open the door. “I thought you didn’t love me!”

  He was grinning. “It’s fine with her. She said, ‘Okay, Dad, but if you get married, can I have a horse?’”

  I hugged him. “She can have five horses,” I said.

  When I let him go, his smile dissolved to a frown. “I don’t want any more nonsense with this Ted Smyth.”

  “Okay,” I said, flipping my hand. “Will do … unless I find another cigar butt shoved into Mary Breasted’s couch.”

  6

  If there is anything harder than being the stepmother of children of divorce, it is being stepmother to children whose much-loved mother has died an untimely death.

  Martha Pattridge was the daughter of a trade magazine publisher in Minneapolis and, like me, of Gentile heritage. The pictures placed around the house when I first visited show a handsome woman with the short curly brown hair of her son and a happy, grateful smile. Friends say she was kind and gracious but could also be diffident with those she didn’t know. The family was close, doing the things that normal suburban families do: planting different kinds of roses round their white gabled house, swimming at the neighborhood pool, playing tennis at the Riverdale Yacht Club.

  In 1969 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, had surgery, and was treated with chemotherapy and radiation. During her recovery, she hired Renia Hylton, a Jamaican housekeeper, to help her, and the stalwart woman became almost like a member of the family.

  Barbara was born more than five years after their son, Bobby. Martha was devoted to her last baby, keeping the child close by her side, as if she had a premonition that she wouldn’t have another chance.

  Then, in the summer of 1970, when Barbara was seven years old, Martha’s breast cancer came back. Friends told me she didn’t tell Bob, she didn’t tell the kids, she told no one about the recurrence because she didn’t want to ruin their August vacation in the Vineyard, where they always rented a house. Bob had told me that Martha’s mother had died of cancer and that she thought treatment would be futile.

  When they returned in September, the disease had spread. She fought it for two years, then spent three or four months in the hospital. That is a long time in the life of a little girl. Barbara could not have fully understood what was happening, just that her mother was not there anymore and was very sick. Renia recounted that Martha called her youngest child a week before she died. “She said, ‘You don’t sound so good, Mommy,’” and that was the last time mother and child spoke.

  On October 5, 1972, Martha died. When Bob came home from the hospital, his two youngest children, Barbara, almost ten, and Bobby, fifteen, had been waiting. Bob put his arms around both of them. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice breaking. It was the first time the children, who never forgot that moment, had seen him cry.

  Bob went up to his bedroom, according to Renia, and seldom came out—a workaholic who didn’t go to work, a sociable fellow who didn’t socialize, a telephone addict who seldom answered the ring.

  * * *

  The last few years had been a cascade of misfortune. In 1969 he was fired by Nixon in the middle of investigating the president’s hidden Swiss bank accounts; in 1970 he began to run for governor of New York for the second time but had to drop out when the Liberal Party said it would support Arthur Goldberg instead. After that, he declined a position at Patterson, Belknap & Webb. With his wife’s breast cancer and harrowing posttreatment, he wanted to spend more time with her and the family. So he opened his own law office where he could make his own hours. Then, in October 1972, came the worst blow of all. Martha fi
nally passed away. Some people thought he would never fully recover. A spirit of malaise pervaded the house in Riverdale. Barbara was, of course, stricken and depressed, but Renia wouldn’t let her give in. She got her up every day and took her to her nearby grade school, Fieldston Lower.

  When he finally began to leave the house after his wife’s death, Bob frequently visited the Kaufmans, partly because he knew they would never mention Martha. Steve Kaufman, one of his chief deputies at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, was a more outgoing, openly giving man, but in his avoidance of the personal, the emotional, he was Bob’s twin. Steve knew he didn’t want to talk about Martha and had told his wife, Marina, never to mention her name in front of Bob.

  The only one who seemed open to talking about her, this woman whose loss had almost broken him, was Renia, who had become my best friend in the household. She was a self-deprecating woman in her late forties who referred to herself in the third person. A sterling housekeeper, a fine cook, and an old-fashioned Caribbean woman steeped in her culture’s superstitions, she had been quietly cheering me on since the lily I brought her one Easter kept unaccountably blooming throughout the winter. To her it was a sign that I would be her new mistress.

  As we sat in Riverdale one day, she told me more about the late Mrs. Morgenthau than perhaps I wanted to know: “You listen to me now, there is a ghost walking here, scaring poor Renia half to death. The curtains move, things aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Maybe she’s looking for something, I don’t know.

  “That day, that terrible day for Barbara, it was clear out, completely clear, and suddenly rain came, and then the shower just ended, and I knew this was the moment Mrs. Morgenthau passed.

  “Mr. Morgenthau is a fine man, but,” she said, leaning toward me and lowering her voice, “he wouldn’t let me put sheets over the mirrors. The dead don’t like to see their reflections in the mirrors, you know; you’ve got to cover them for at least three days. Otherwise they never rest.”

  I loved Renia, but I excused myself and left the kitchen, feeling chilled.

  * * *

  I liked to dream about the little nest Bob and I would create, just the two of us, huddled against the cruelties of the world. Then, pop, the dream would disappear as I realized it wouldn’t be that way at all. His twenty-nine-year union with his first wife had kept him busy. There would always be many other people in the nest, children I didn’t choose and who didn’t choose me.

  If Bob had wished for a passel of attractive, intelligent, and talented children, he had gotten them. The third of the five, whom they named Elinor after Bob’s mother, turned out to be severely mentally disabled. She had to be put in a special home in Rome, New York, when she was a toddler, and though Bob still went up to see her, she never recognized him.

  Bob was steadfast, and, like his father and grandfather before him, he expected his children to be forever nearby. When they reached college age, he told them, “You can go anywhere you want, as long as it’s within two hundred miles of New York City.” And they complied. They all had gone to school in the adjacent state of Massachusetts. Jenny, at thirty-one, the oldest and in fact older than me, went to Smith. Annie, twenty-nine, to Radcliffe, and Bobby and Barbara to Amherst, their father’s alma mater. When the two oldest girls got married, they came to the family home for dinner most Sundays, and two out of his four children ended up living nearby in Riverdale.

  Bob often found them jobs, apartments, and even husbands. Annie, who worked for her father in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, had met and married an assistant attorney named Paul Grand. Jenny’s second husband was to be another former assistant U.S. attorney, Gene Anderson. Both men were bright, ambitious, and destined for success. And much older than their wives. Thirteen years older in Annie’s case, and eighteen in Jenny’s. Ironic, I thought, given the two daughters’ later objections to their father’s marrying a younger woman.

  I first met Bob’s oldest two children, Jenny and Annie, at his home in Riverdale, an enclave of the Bronx that reminded me all too well of Wellesley. Annie and Jenny were tall, slender girls, graceful as swans. Jenny had a magnetic, slightly roguish smile, and Annie was a fair-skinned beauty with her father’s prominent aquiline nose. We were of the same generation, but the similarities seemed to end there. They clearly kept their own counsel. They were as self-possessed and contained as I was prone to revealing anything that came into my mind. I went into phobic mode. I had never been able to pull off being cool. Feeling gawky and artless, I chattered away nervously. They must have felt as if they’d entered the subway at rush hour.

  At first, I was a question mark to Bob’s youngest child, Barbara, but we became increasingly fond of each other. She was a delight: smart, honest, funny, with thick ginger hair and her dad’s glowing, mischievous smile. I bought her a Siamese cat, whom she named Peter Rabbit, and we giggled together at his hilarious habit of jumping about the house like a hare. She was careful about being loyal to the mother she still loved, but sometimes she would let me take her shopping or pick her up at school. Much later, in her senior year of high school, we went white-water rafting on the Colorado River with a friend and her mother, crashing through waves by day and lying in the sand watching stars by night.

  As I got to know the older girls, I grew to like them. Jenny, who was newly divorced, worked for underprivileged children in a city job. Annie, the mother of Hilary, five, and Noah, two, had once been freewheeling and independent at Harvard. I came to respect them for their similarities to as well as for their differences from me. Annie and I would talk one-on-one and laugh easily together. One time, she told me, “I’m glad that Daddy is finally dating someone who’s real.”

  Barbara had a superb athletic body. A field hockey player, she fearlessly butted into her opponents and got butted back, scaring Bob, who was afraid she would get knocked out. She was also a runner, and I would sit with her siblings in the school bleachers at track meets, cheering wildly as she rounded the course, her legs spinning like wheels, her chest thrust out, a look of agonized perseverance on her flushed, sweat-drenched face.

  On occasion, we talked about her feelings. She was often insecure—how could she not be, having lost her mother at such a vulnerable age—and complained that she wasn’t any good at running. “You might not have come in first,” I remember telling her, “but I thought you ran better than anyone else. Like a gazelle.”

  The other child based at home, Bobby, nineteen, was a sophomore at Amherst College. Physically, he resembled his mother with her thick brown curly hair, but his gestures and dry wit were all his father’s. I had first seen him when I was a reporter and attended a celebration of Bob’s 1974 DA election victory. Sticking out of the crowd was a voluminous dark Afro belonging to a lean young man with pale skin. I did a double take when I found out who he was; my respect for Bob, clearly a liberal father, grew exponentially. One day, this independent teen finally cut his hair down to a normal length, giving Bob secret relief.

  Bobby had the integrity and sharp, discerning eyes of his ancestors. He was also an athlete, an expert skier who spent time working at the Alta, Utah, ski lodge. I admired his mathematical acuity and his ability to absorb and remember things as arcane as the net drag of a hurricane that occurred a decade before. A faded photograph of him still hangs on our wall; hair rising up three inches or so, he leans back, a contemplative look on his face.

  As the only boy in the family, Bobby had a special status: Bob recounted how he always got the biggest slice of steak or the only ticket to the basketball game. After his mother’s death, he grieved by retreating inside himself, but his father coaxed him out with a new and important responsibility. “Bobby, you’ve got to help me with Barbara,” he said, and Bobby did. The two became close partners.

  And then, suddenly, as if from a genie’s bottle, I materialized and took his place. I was now the one at his father’s side, absorbing all his attention, the one who took the bedroom next to his dad’s, and he must have felt as if he’d been su
mmarily dismissed. He accepted it grudgingly at first but then in time with grace.

  At first, he was cool, but he never shunned me and gradually came to respond to my efforts to engage him. We liked to debate the merits of a news article or a current event, with Bobby automatically taking the opposite side. If I cited an Op-Ed piece giving evidence for Israel’s rightfully belonging to the Israelis, whether he believed it or not, he would argue that it was called Palestine and was the homeland of the Palestinians. Being far more clever than I, to my secret delight, he would usually win the argument. I figured it wouldn’t hurt him to one-up me.

  The summer of 1976, I went to Martha’s Vineyard with Bob and his children for the first time. We shared a big rambling house overlooking Menemsha Bay with the two youngest kids, Bobby and Barbara, and the mother’s helper, who became a close companion to Barbara.

  The house was always full. Jenny and Annie and her family came frequently. Our days were routine—breakfast, work, lunch, beach, showers, dinner. For me, the odd man out, it was rather like J. Alfred Prufrock measuring his life out in coffee spoons. This was Bob’s time with his family; he seemed to have little time for me save an hour every afternoon when I would join him during his “constitutionals,” an old piece of family humor that really meant he was taking a nap.

  At night, the family would sit on the porch and eat lobsters, laugh, chat. I would watch them. They were having such a good time; I felt almost part of the fun, except that I didn’t know what the fun was about: the family mythology, the cast of Vineyard characters. Bob and I had been so close but now he had detached himself.

  On these crisp moonlit nights, one by one, everyone eventually made for their beds while I sat on a wicker chair and listened to the spit of toothpaste, the gargling of mouthwash, the mass flushing of toilets. We didn’t want Barbara to get the wrong, or rather right, idea about us. So my bed (a cot, really) was officially downstairs until the house was silent and I would tiptoe up to join him.