Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  * * *

  We’ve had a mini snowstorm, and I am out walking the orchards, hitching up Bob’s wool-lined khaki pants. I roped them as if I were a hillbilly, but I hardly needed to since, at six months, I fill them out nicely. The pants, his flannel shirt, they make me feel restless. This energy, I can’t contain it. I kick up the thin, crusty layer of snow, rhythmic as the chug of a choo-choo train, like William Carlos Williams naked, spiraling round his study. I am doodling in the cornfield, yodeling “La donna è mobile.” The odd apple hangs shriveled on the tree, and the faces of the snowdrifts are pleated like ancient skin.

  Bob’s shirt has his own familiar, yet unfamiliar scent. Sweat … tobacco, maybe. I pat my cheeks. I feel like him. I have borrowed his stately face, his loopy body, his careful footstep. We have remade each other, become a tribal couple. Bob has begun actually putting away his clothes, lining up his comb and brush on the bureau. I have come to own his fear of the ocean.

  Did we both always have the habit of dreaming off, listening to certain people with a glazed eye, and then, when asked to reply, getting rigor mortis of the tongue? I have made his calmness mine, become less volatile, learned to be more subtle, make people fear me. When I don’t like what someone says, I let the person know it, gently. Bob gets excited or silly or mad in a way he never did before. His occasional tantrums befuddle him; he says he hasn’t had one since childhood.

  We still have our moments of puppy love. I call him Tart—short for “Sweetheart”—so he occasionally calls me Tartlette. He is so easy, he would do anything to please me: I have begun to take advantage of it just a bit, like now, wearing his best lined pants over my big belly and messing around in the snow. When two people make a baby, the trust they have is unique.

  I decide to practice my Lamaze breathing and pant until the bracing air turns white. The trees are twins, triplets, quintuplets, each the same, swirling toward the half-light of the sun. Apple trees are the most beautiful of all trees with their short blue-gray trunks and bumpy, curling branches.

  There are the little things where we mimic each other. Bob now washes his hair every day because I do; I used to hate the smell of his once-repugnant cigars, but now I love them, taking in their rich, warm heady smell. If I eat a treat, like an ice cream cone, he has to have one too. Then there are the bigger things. We are adopting each other’s inner thoughts. Bob’s past must play like a movie across his eyes, and though I don’t know what he’s seeing, I’ll shake my head too.

  December 2

  Almost six and a half months and I can’t put my hands in my pockets, for I’ll lose my balance.

  People regard me with such awe, as though I accomplished something like peace with China.

  Bob and I are in dark, aggressive moods. I have the nightmares I had as a child, the Red Wolf chasing me around the Burning Balcony, the Bicycle Race to the Death, and I wake up screaming, and Bob holds me until the terror subsides. He also revisits his childhood, remembering cutting the heads off chickens at the age of six.

  He likes to watch westerns, and he loves Clint Eastwood. “I’m going to teach this child to be tough. I’m not having a weak-kneed child, boy or girl. It’s going to get a hatchet as soon as it’s born.”

  I guess I’ll be raising a Morgenthau whether I like it or not.

  14

  It is when I look like I have swallowed a watermelon that Bob suggests we get on a plane and go to Israel again. How can I maneuver through the Old City alleyways pushing a wheelbarrow? Josh is probably walking up and down my uterus by now. Does my husband care if I pop out a baby in midair? Or zoom through the hairpin roads in an open jeep with the crazy Israelis? I picture the helpless fetus yanked from his placenta and sloshed around in a tidal wave of amniotic fluid.

  I worry that Bob is sixty-four. When our child is eighteen, he will be eighty-two. Will he be able to walk? Think? Talk? Sometimes I have a half-waking vision of his voice being obliterated, the moment he is in fading, and I cannot grab hold of him, his presence becoming tinier and tinier until it is lost in the collapsing stars. I’ve seen this vision since the day we fell in love. Perhaps Bob is also worrying about his age. Though he hides this, there is a new urgency about his love for Israel. Maybe he feels, and maybe it is only unconscious, that this is the only chance he has to bring what will probably be his last son to his own father’s beloved Holy Land. Never mind that this son is not yet realized, sometimes the idea of something is as strong as the reality.

  I have felt fine: confident and busy, walking across the park every day with the movie critic Molly Haskell to our studio in the old Harlem Savings Bank building. Inspired by the Writers Room, six of us share the rent in the communal space, which is so conducive to work that I turn out two to three new pages of my novel daily. I have set to work on the house, wiping off the baseboards, steam cleaning the rugs, sweeping the ceilings, and washing the dogs in preparation for the coming of “Caesar.” Once the baby is born, we won’t be traveling to Israel anytime soon.

  On December 17, 1983, we board a plane to Tel Aviv. I squeeze into the airline seat and feel as if I were incubating a whale. How lucky I am, however. A woman a few seats down has gone into contractions, and another goes into a panic because she thinks the compression in her ears has formed air pockets in her uterus. I shuttle between them, trying to be comforting.

  We arrive and ride to the famously massive King David Hotel, which is decorated in biblical motifs that evoke the palace of its namesake; from our window I can see Mount Zion and the walled Old City, a daydream of illuminated minarets, towers, and domes. But that night, I am so big I can’t sleep on one side and I can’t sleep on the other, so I end up on my back, tracing the stains on the ceiling. Once asleep, I dream that the baby is taking over my body, crawling up my intestinal tract, filling my lungs. I wake up wheezing and have to put a towel over my head and breathe steam from the hot faucet.

  We soon find ourselves traveling through the blooming desert to the Negev, where we sip tea in the living room of the legendary Israeli warrior Ariel Sharon.

  “Arik loves to see pregnant women,” Uri Dan told me, blowing cigarette smoke in my face—something of an Israeli rite. “It makes him think of the future generations he’s fighting for.”

  Sinking into an easy chair in his den, I take in the clutter of photographs ranging from his first wife and son, who were killed in accidents, to him with equally legendary figures like Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter. For two hours, he explains he had to lead Israeli troops all the way up to Beirut in 1982 to root out Palestinian terrorists. For his efforts, he was terminated as defense minister and assigned the post of minister without portfolio. He is so frank that like Arthur’s, my fingers are itching to record his words, but I have promised not to; he still has not spoken to the press since the previous year’s invasion.

  He folds his hands on his substantial ski-jump belly. I love to hear his thick but softly lilting Hebrew accent. His detractors have called him loud and strident, but he seems surprisingly calm, optimistic, and buoyant for a public official—he had been condemned by the Kahan Commission for his role in the Lebanese massacre—who has been humiliated into accepting a job that has no portfolio.

  “I refute the commission’s findings, I absolutely deny them! They are libelous, completely and utterly false. I sued Time magazine for saying I was behind the massacre, and I won.”

  “Arik, you are a revered war hero who has spent his life fighting for Israel. People claim that war is in your blood,” I say, in journalistic mode now. “Do you think that this is what circumstances have forced you to be?”

  “What?” He looks at me quizzically.

  I have forgotten that his English is not fluent, especially when you speak circuitously.

  “Are you what they say you are? A warmonger?”

  He chortles. “I am a peacemonger! People don’t know this, but I secretly negotiated the 1979 treaty with Sadat. I let it go, the Sinai, for peace with Egypt. The entire holy land of
Sinai, this vast historic land that the Israelites crossed against great hardship in order to gain their freedom, this land we gave away is twice the size of the rest of Israel. We have given away miles and miles of land to the Arabs. We must be tough and we also must give way, and we must know when to do one and when to do the other.”

  “Arik, your troops … oh!” I feel a sudden jolt. I had never heard of a baby who kicks so hard it echoes through your body. “When will they withdraw from Lebanon?”

  The general shrugged. “You see, you get peace in different ways. Lebanon is not Egypt, because there’s no sitting down with the PLO.”

  “Of course you had tried to negotiate with the Palestinians, yes?” I ask.

  “Ha!” Sharon tips his head back. “How many times we tried. As many times as the hairs on my head. We tried and for nothing. Yasser Arafat is a liar. A cowardly liar. You can’t deal with someone who has different faces but the real one wants to destroy you.”

  He sighed. “We got rid of eighteen thousand PLO and thirty thousand Syrian troops massed on our border, but then we also got me thrown out of office.” He laughed. “But I’ll be back.”

  “That’s wonderful, the people of Israel need you. But how, after all this, will you return, Arik?” asked Bob.

  “Uri Dan says that one day the people will just have to swallow and accept me as prime minister.”

  His wife, Lily, gives us a lunch of Middle Eastern salads, and then Sharon shows us around his farm, joking with the Arab workers who tend the sheep and the vegetables. I am wearing a red silk top that fits tight around my watermelon belly. He keeps looking at me, smiling slightly, and I wonder if it is because he is confused by the new close-fitting maternity clothes popular in America, so different from the old-fashioned smocks worn in Israel.

  He stops and talks with his Arab workers, and Bob tells Sharon he is impressed by his camaraderie with them.

  Sharon grins. “Now you can see that I don’t eat Arabs for breakfast.”

  A sheepherder snaps a picture of Bob and me with Arik, his arm around me, and Lily leaning against a fence. All of us are laughing; Arik and I are standing belly to belly. When we return to New York, I blow the picture up and hang it in the hall, where anyone who is secretly anti-Semitic can enjoy it.

  When the Dans take us out for a Yemenite feast, I sit up stock-straight because otherwise, with my stomach scrunched into a corner, the food would have no place to go.

  Bob grins at me. “You look regal. The queen!”

  On Christmas Eve, we make a pilgrimage to Bethlehem. It is a fascinating mélange of the honky-tonk and the spiritual. Coming up from Jerusalem, dark and deserted on this particular holiday, we come over the hill to a blast of flashing lights in the shape of crosses on the rooftops, souvenir shops declaring, “Jesus is here—buy him now,” an enormous tree so piled with tinsel that its natural green is rendered invisible. Manger Square is teeming with thousands of people from different cultures—dour-faced monks with hands tucked in sleeves brushing against women from Iowa in fur-collared coats. The nuns bow their heads over rosaries, ignoring the splashes of whiskey that land on their habits from Swedish teenagers happily passing the bottle. I hold Bob’s hand tightly as we push through throngs of Arab Christians pulling tight their burnooses against the bitter wind from the Judaean Hills. We warm ourselves with Turkish coffee from an open flame and buy lamb’s wool hats to protect our ice-red ears.

  “Smell the smells! Lamb roasting and water pipes and that grape alcohol the Israelis drink,” I say, trying to remain cheerful in spite of my disappointment at the tinselly crassness of Christians at this holy time in this holy city.

  “And there’s something else,” Bob says, looking at a woman with a steeple headdress jangling with coins climb out of a limo.

  “That dates back to the Middle Ages. It’s where an engaged woman carried her dowry,” I say.

  “Looks like she’s got another engagement tonight,” Bob snipes.

  I feel humiliated at the defilement of this holy Christian city on this holy day. Would the Jews do this on Rosh Hashanah? Or even on the festival of Sukkoth, where they say blessings every morning in their ceremonial huts, which are covered not with neon lights but with tissue paper leaves?

  Then we make our way to the Church of the Nativity, and for the first time I see Bob, if reluctantly, enter a church. I know he does this for me. We move quietly down to the grotto below the altar. Everything changes. The crush of worshippers kneel before the shepherd’s cave where Mary and Joseph went when there was no room for them at the inn; here is a mystical hush. The cave is lit only by candles, and some people weep; others kiss the silver star embedded in the floor, the exact spot where Jesus was supposedly born. Across the way is the manger, where a procession led by the much-loved mayor Teddy Kollek will lay a Jesus doll swaddled in old clothes. Marble, silver, gold, and mosaics have replaced the humble stable that I was taught to love, but still, as we leave the church, I feel a lightness, the kind of floating feeling I felt when I prayed as a child, as though I were being carried down the basilica on a gentle breeze. I have stood at the place where the son of God was born. I look at Bob, and to my surprise his features have also softened. He looks tenderly at me. A choir echoes forth with “Silent Night.” The church bells peal, and strangers from all corners of the world smile and hug each other. We are joined together, for we have all partaken, on this Christmas Eve, of the belief in miracles.

  At this moment I feel at one with the Lord. I am to be reborn in my own child. A child within a child. I will teach him, or her, the secret that is hidden beneath the bright, wonderful things he loves about Christmas. The joy that is far deeper than the slender pleasures of bells and carols and spiced cider, of the ancestral stories about Great-Grandpa Leavitt in a Santa suit, picking up children in his homemade sleigh, or Great-Grandma Franks sewing sequins on ornaments with her painful arthritic hands.

  We will say prayers together. He will know that the celebration of Christ’s birth occurs not outside him but within; that all goodness comes from Jesus and that he will hold him when he most needs to be held; that his own love of God and the work it takes to attain that love is a feeling that will spread inside him.

  Each year, the ancient story of Holy Week will be imprinted on his mind as it was so long ago on mine. On Good Friday, we will look at images of the cross and talk about the sacrifice of Jesus, so difficult for children, for anyone, to understand. And then, on Easter Sunday, we will celebrate the joy of his resurrection into everlasting life, the hope and victory over death that it brings us. I will teach him about forgiveness and redemption. And if he cannot fully understand, as I don’t, why Jesus had to suffer to save us, he will come to understand it in his heart.

  * * *

  On our way home from Bethlehem to the King David, I scribble in a notebook to try to capture what we’ve experienced for a piece in the Times travel section. “Nothing is working,” I complain to Bob, handing him my lead paragraphs. “It’s totally simplistic.”

  He reads it aloud: “Christmas in Bethlehem. The ancient dream: a cold clear night made brilliant by a glorious star, the smell of incense, shepherds and wise men falling to their knees in adoration of the sweet baby, the incarnation of perfect love.”

  “It’s simple but it’s beautiful,” he says.

  The following Christmas Eve, Cardinal O’Connor, his voice resounding through the magnificent St. Patrick’s Cathedral, starts his sermon by quoting my words.

  * * *

  Back in Tel Aviv, I begin interviewing Moshe Arens, who became minister of defense earlier in 1983. I have no trouble getting entrée because the prospect of appearing in the powerful New York Times makes politicians giddy. I follow Arens around, Bob often with me, riding in his limo, attending his meetings, visiting his haunts.

  We fly home just before New Year’s Eve. I deplane and promptly lose my equilibrium. Everything that looked rosy has turned umber. It is as though I can foresee that our length
y Lamaze training has been a farce and I will suffer a labor both interminable and frightening. I try to write the Arens article, but it is like swimming through a bottle of Robitussin. Poor Bob doesn’t know whether he will come home to a wife in black humor or one in a state of high excitement. I might as well be wearing the two Greek masks of drama: the laughing face of Thalia, the weeping face of Melpomene. I ponder this and wonder if I am somehow acting out my mother’s fitful moods. Am I capriciously, vagrantly greeting my husband in the way that she greeted me?

  My child, like magic, behaves as compliantly as I did in the face of maternal fickleness. When I am fretful, he goes still, as though to soothe me, and when I am happy, he kicks, punches, and plays tap-tap-tap inside my stomach.

  But I do long for her, my poor, unhappy mother. I miss bringing her rare joy, seeing her gaze at her first grandchild; her second chance; the glory of reversing her history, purging her guilt. I miss decorating the nursery with her, shopping for mobiles and crib mirrors. I miss being able to pick up the phone with swollen ankles or scary twinges and hearing her say, “Oh, that’s nothing. That happened to me.”

  It is known that mothers are transformed when presented with the children of their children. Often, from witches emerge indulgent, patient, playful, near-saintly creatures. Thus was my grandma, who was a terrifying mother but understood me when no one else did. Both Bob’s and my mother are dead. This baby will have no grandmothers, no refuge, no place to go when his parents inevitably fail him. How will we compensate for the loss of this right, this gift?