Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  But they were chatting among themselves now; their witticisms and stories of the past going back and forth like tennis balls. I could barely follow them. But I did notice, at that meal and at ones to come, that the person always absent from their tales was their late mother. How could the whole family not even mention her? Were they trying to guard her memory or keep their own at bay?

  And then it came to me. They were grieving. Of course. That would explain why they had trouble looking at me, listening to me. I was sitting, healthy, full of life, exactly where their mother should have sat.

  I wondered whether they had ever openly and thoroughly mourned Martha. For many years after she died, I certainly hadn’t mourned my own mother.

  I lay awake the night she passed away. I don’t think I was sleeping. I felt my body changing. I panicked. I was becoming my mother. In life, she had smothered me, and now she was trying to take me with her. “I don’t want to go with you,” I cried out, and she left as quickly as she had come. I was wheezing badly, gulping in breaths, but I was myself again.

  The next day, my father and sister sat immobilized. They looked on dumbfounded as I went scurrying about, drunk on denial, arranging the funeral, working the phones, putting death notices in newspapers, and reporting her passing to relatives and friends. “She went quickly,” I would reply reassuringly to all the tears and sympathy.

  Before the week was up, I went back on the presidential campaign trail for the Times, working twelve-hour days covering Sargent Shriver, an eccentric candidate who dished out delicious copy. I hardly thought of my mother at all. Until five years later, when she returned with a vengeance.

  The dead may pass out of this world, but they don’t let go so easily. They wait patiently for their due; for you to ponder what they gave you and what they took away, relive the wonder of their lives, the terrible wonder of their deaths.

  Had the Morgenthaus been dealing with their mother’s loss as I had dealt with mine? Pretending outwardly that it didn’t happen and inwardly unable to express it, hurting that much more?

  I had compassion for them. When my father had started going out with a woman not my mother, I thought she was dreadful; I saw only a sharp freckled nose, a mean mouth, a Boston Irish accent that made me wince.

  When I got used to her, I realized she was attractive and rather nice. Pat’s ability to make Dad happier and less lonely was a God-given gift that made my Oedipal objections look petty. And in the long run, she had lifted me from the burden of being a parent to my parent.

  The Morgenthau family gatherings continued to get more onerous. I was not the only one the children had trouble talking to; they also seldom addressed their father. I knew he must have been suffering, though he never showed it. He’d just trade little smiles with me across the table as though we were the only ones there.

  “I think you and Bob are quite good with Barbara,” Margie Lang remarked one day as we went looking for antiques together. “You know what the problem is, don’t you? If she likes you too much, she feels like she’s betraying her mother. So she gravitates to her older sisters.”

  Teenagers were a puzzle to me, perhaps because I had repressed my own dreary adolescence. One day, Barb would sulkily walk away when I approached her, and the next she’d chatter away with me as though I were her best pal. Instead of taking her moodiness in stride, I got upset and felt I had failed her in some way.

  I broke my nose twice in my first year of marriage. If that had some Freudian significance, I didn’t know it. I only knew that I was in a daze all that year and kept ending up in the hospital. The second time, Barbara sent me a card that read, “My mom keeps breaking her schnoz. What am I going to do?” I smiled and felt miraculously better. I still have the card pinned to my bulletin board.

  My father lived three hours away in Massachusetts. My sister, Penny, who worked as a special assistant to a number of movie stars and producers in Hollywood, hated to fly; thus we were seldom together. I was never happier than when Bob and I went out to dinner with Bobby and Barbara alone. Bob could raise everyone’s spirits by telling old jokes; uttered with perfect timing in a voice like a kettledrum, they sounded uproariously new. Even if silent, we felt peacefully complete, one unit, meshed together in some spiritual way. How I had longed for this! My childhood home had been a place of impending disaster, like the night before the Battle of Gettysburg. When I first met the Morgenthau children, each so different but so much the same, quipping and laughing and delighting in each other like characters from a nineteenth-century novel, I felt a surge of hopeful anticipation.

  Family. A fortress. Faithful and abiding. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The five little Peppers. The dozen Gilbreths. Contented clans gathered by the fire as the icy winds beat against their windows.

  Family. The incarnation of perfect love imagined in an attic on a lonely Sunday afternoon when the mother was in bed and the father wasn’t to be found. The young forever dancing round and round on a Grecian urn that brightened Keats’s drooping heart.

  But if I thought that I would be a link in their chain, a rock in the rampart, that I would even be allowed to enter their lives, I was dreaming the dreams of my youth.

  If only I had been like my aunt Kathleen, my own family’s interloper. She had been through much worse. When my uncle Billy brought home an older middle-class woman named Goldie, my proper Victorian grandmother was horrified. As a condition of their marriage, Gram made Goldie change her name to Kathleen. Well, Goldie simply ignored Gram’s anger and chattered on to her as though she were Gram’s best friend, until finally that is exactly what she became.

  Bob tried to make me feel better by downplaying the tension. “I thought it was a very successful dinner,” he’d say. “Everyone seemed to get along well.”

  I thought Bob the smartest man on earth. He must be right: I always have exaggerated things.

  Then he began to up the ante on me. “You’re imagining it,” he’d say, cross and fed up when I tearfully complained about the kids. “You’re a pessimist; you’re too sensitive.”

  “Well, you’re insensitive!” I said in a voice so loud I thought I might have cracked a glass. He put his hands over his ears. I upped the decibel level. “I see now that you’ve been making me feel worse by not acknowledging I was being hurt. And you’re wrong. Finally, I see through you. You only pretend you’re infallible!”

  He walked away and began to loosen his tie, take off his jacket, examine the receipts stuffed in his pockets. I was history. I went dead calm and regarded him. I had remembered reading that women can easily calm their emotional outbursts; the flush, the tears, the screams, the rapid breathing, are dispatched at meteoric speed. On the other hand, men are left at high pitch: their heart rates take much longer to return to normal. Maybe it was his body rather than his mind that avoided confronting things.

  * * *

  Cousins Margie and Nan, though tough dames, had by now veritably adopted me, fussing over me at their parties. And when Nan, an environmentalist who wrote under the name Anne W. Simon, came out with a new book, I offered to throw her a book party at our Charlton Street house. Nan, a very rich woman, was a rarity who had overcome her plain looks with her glamorous gestures and slow, mesmerizing voice. She was not without arrogance and edge, but I was used to it. At one of her Vineyard extravaganzas she asked me, “Where did your sylphlike body go?” and at another she remarked, “Your sweater is pilling.”

  It seemed appropriate, then, that her new book was called The Thin Edge: Coast and Man in Crisis.

  I had moved the antique furniture given to me by my grandmother into Charlton Street, and the rooms were spare but rich. Nan’s party was the first social gathering I had hosted as Mrs. Morgenthau, and I was nervous. I handwrote invitations to sixty people and arranged to festoon the house with flowers from the flower market. But I didn’t know what to do about the food. Should I make it myself?

  “Lucinda, you’re not a cook,” said Marina, a master of understatemen
t. She was lounging on the worn velvet love seat my grandmother had sent me. The tufts were coming apart, but she looked like a Goya spread out on it, with her flowing cream silk tunic and long, lustrous dark hair.

  “Well, what can I do!” I fretted. “I’ve never given a fancy party.”

  “Have it catered, silly,” she said, giving me an indulgent smile. She was raised in an extravagant Moroccan family where she was treated like a princess. “Call up Giorgio,” she said. “Giorgio DeLuca—he’s just opened a fancy food boutique. He’d die to do a party for you.”

  So I sat down with Giorgio at Dean & DeLuca. He suggested six different hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, including truffle rounds, beluga caviar with crème fraîche, and hand-smoked Scottish salmon. I thought it sounded swell.

  On the night of the party I miraculously felt calm. When Nan entered the room, she immediately looked at my legs and cried, “Boots?!” I didn’t even flinch, much less run upstairs to put on heels. Instead, I smiled and told her this was the latest fashion (if it was, I didn’t know it) and mingled among the guests with ease. I was proud of myself. I had repressed my shyness and acted the perfect hostess. The party was a great success.

  A few days later, I came into Charlton Street and Bob was holding up a bill from Dean & DeLuca. It was for $700, which in 1978 was probably more like $2,513.87 in 2013. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him; his voice thundered so, it sounded like cymbals banging in my ears.

  “What on earth were you thinking of, spending this much on finger food!” he held up the bill, printed on conspicuous eight-by-ten pink paper. “Do you think we have that kind of money?”

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. They just brought the food. I didn’t ask how much it would cost,” I said.

  “Well, that’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard from you.”

  “I’ll pay you back. I’ll go out and sing on the street corner. Anything.”

  “I’m not amused.” He threw the bill on the Queen Anne hall table he had recently bought.

  “But everybody loved the canapés,” I said lamely, “don’t you think?”

  He turned to face me, eyes like stones. “You’re going to go through money like Sherman through Georgia, I can see that. You’ll have me bankrupt in a year.”

  The brass pendulum of the grandfather clock hammered its rods six times, and they felt like Bob’s voice, each gong going through me like electricity. I sat down on the hall stairs and put my head in my hands.

  He went upstairs, and I quickly headed for my study to get my savings account withdrawal slips. I had taken the pink bill off the table. He would never know what happened to it.

  * * *

  When you first marry, you become so emotionally blind you expect your spouse to bend to your every wish. For years you can fail to know him as well as you do the least of your friends. Instead, he becomes a mirror, reflecting all your needs and assumptions. Sometimes it takes years for you to overcome your narcissism and wake to see your loved one as he really is.

  If I assumed that Bob equated money and love, he assumed that I equated money and opportunity. We had joint checking accounts, and although his secretary paid most of the bills, every time the charge card bills came in, I quickly paid them myself. I wanted to drown out his accusatory voice about what I spent on the party. I didn’t spend a nickel more than I had to and shrank from the elegant way the women in Bob’s world lived. I didn’t buy any more suits at Brooks Brothers for Bob. I began shopping for clothes at Alexander’s, trolled the aisles of Kmart for slipcovers, and only occasionally visited the forbidding Saks.

  Still, I obsessed about Bob’s furious response to my spending too much money on the party. He had been unfair and unforgiving of my youth and naïveté. But really, how could I have been that stupid? I, who had hoarded the money I earned at summer jobs so I could move to London after college? Who had been sending part of her paycheck to her parents since her father’s alloyed-steel business collapsed? Who always asked the price of every purchase she made? Had my disgust with conspicuous consumption collapsed under the stature of being Mrs. Robert Morgenthau?

  * * *

  The party for Nan Werner had been our goodbye to Charlton Street. We had rented an apartment on the Upper East Side so Barbara could be nearer her school, Fieldston, in Riverdale.

  The loss of Charlton Street was the loss of my dream house. Its neighborhood had been my hood with its avant-garde culture and funky shops, and it was close to Bob’s office at the courts area in lower Manhattan. The thought of living in a penthouse on Park Avenue and Eighty-Eighth Street, even though, thanks to a real estate friend of Bob’s, it was a rent-stabilized apartment, was stupefying: pretentious bankers, stores that sold baby dresses for a thousand dollars, and of course the formidable ladies who lunched.

  Our new home, in fact, was a rather spectacular dump. The paint was peeling, the floors warped, and the rooms marched one by one around the building in the form of an enormous railroad flat. It was said to have housed the maids of rich tenants a half century earlier, but now the walls of the warren had been knocked down, making way for bigger rooms—a spacious dining room, a living room, a study, three good-sized bedrooms, a maid’s room, and a laundry room. It was quirky to the extreme, though not my kind of quirky. Steel doors and windows reinforced with wire mesh gave off the aura of a minimum-security prison. The hall leading to the rooms was dark and oddly narrow, and outside there was a wraparound industrial terrace where workmen were constantly wandering, peeking into the bedrooms. Bob told me to stop making self-pitying wisecracks because most people would kill for a terrace so large. Well, he was right. And at least it was not some pretentious luxury pit with pillars, sponge-painted walls, and spotlights on the Andy Warhols. And it was located near the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Frick, and many other little cultural gems, which would be good for Barbara, for all of us. It was also a relief to think that Barbara could stay for after-school sports and not come home in the dark.

  It was the summer of 1978, and the time had come to say goodbye to Riverdale as well. It was hard for Barbara to leave the home in which she grew up, and as the movers hauled out the last of the cartons, she lingered. There was only one thing left in her bedroom, and that was a picture of a horse tacked up on the wall. It was so good I had thought of asking her to have it framed. But she wrote a message under the horse, perhaps for the girl who would claim her spot, closed the door, and left her childhood room forever.

  I felt sorrow for her, I wanted to take her in my arms, but she had distanced herself from us.

  When we arrived at our new home, we assumed that Barbara would arrange her room, make it her own. I had bought new sheets and some things to help decorate it. It was a sweet room, and she had her own bathroom with old-fashioned brass fixtures. The movers, however, had hardly gotten the first load of furniture up to the tenth floor when one of the older girls arrived; I can’t remember which one. She looked around. Her nostrils were wide and her eyes pooled.

  She watched us roll out the carpet in the dining room. “Have a nice life,” she called as she ushered Barbara into the elevator.

  I don’t know which one of us felt worse.

  9

  We were standing on the terrace, watching that ephemeral light that precedes sundown set the work of our hands aglow. The petunias and marigolds, the pots of eggplant, the purples, the yellows, the browns, glistening perfection. “Isn’t that a beautiful sight?” Bob said and tenderly brushed a speck of dirt off my nose.

  We had been planting as if our wacky terrace, with the cracked red tiles and fat shingle-topped sides, were a rich black field. The previous year we tried to grow green peppers, but they turned out looking like miniature Quasimodos. We blamed it on the black gusts of smoke that continually blew onto the terrace from some nearby furnace. I looked up fearfully, as I always did, at the huge rickety water tower that sat above our bedroom. If it collapsed, at least the eggplants would be well watered.
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  The sky was so creamy blue and Bob was in such a mellow mood that I wondered if he would open up about the one subject that divided us, that prevented my stepchildren from giving me a chance—the inscrutable woman whose clothes had hung untouched in her closet, whose ring had stayed on Bob’s finger until almost the eve of our wedding, and who lingered still. What you don’t know scares you, and really, I had never known why.

  “Bob,” I said casually, loosening the soil in a pot of petunias. “I wonder what Martha would think of our garden. She liked gardening, no?”

  He nodded. “Flowers.”

  “What was she really like?”

  “She was a very private person, and she would want to stay that way,” he answered emphatically, as though she were standing in the next room. He dripped water into the pots of plants.

  “Look, maybe you don’t get the impact this has on me. It feels like she’s a secret lover that you’re protecting. Or someone whose name you can’t utter or you’ll be struck down.”

  I followed him down the hall, through the bedroom, and into the bathroom, which was so small two people could hardly be in it together.

  He spread shaving cream on his face with an old-fashioned badger-hair shaving brush. Then he took his straight razor, jutted out his chin, and very carefully ran the blade down his cheek.

  “You still must be so much in love with her,” I said quietly.

  “I had five children with her,” he replied.

  I turned around to leave and closed the door behind me. I went into the kitchen and splashed water on my face. Then I felt a hand on my back.

  “Take it easy, Mrs. Morgenthau, take it easy now,” said Renia. She usually didn’t intrude, but she had something to say: “They were feeling bad about themselves in that house, the house in Riverdale, after she passed. I saw it.” She nodded her head. “They were angry too. She was a good person, but no saint, don’t even think that way. Never mind about anybody else. You just take good care of Mr. Morgenthau and you’ll be happy. You can do it. I know you can.” Then she went back into the kitchen and put the London broil under the hot broiler.