Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  It would mark a major change in our marriage-with-child. We had sentimental candlelight dinners at Gino’s, where we had had our first date, and if we took Josh, he let us alone, amusing himself by making concoctions of salt, pepper, and shreds of napkin in his water glass. We collected art catalogs and went to Sotheby’s auctions just for fun. Bob loved to go back in time; he was still stirred when he saw paintings similar to those that had hung on his parents’ wall.

  * * *

  When Josh was about four, we watched the Oedipal phase draw to a close. He now saw me in a more human light—giving me some sass—and transferred his affections to a little blond, blossom-cheeked playmate named Ariel. Most of all, he began to emulate his father. He started getting down on the floor and flinging his arms up and pumping his legs. “What’s this?” I asked. “I’m doin’ Daddy’s Canadun Air Foss exercises!”

  Unfortunately, his father couldn’t do them as well as he used to. Once, Bob, as always, was carrying Josh, now a big five-year-old, in a big metal-framed backpack, when he suddenly put him down. “You’ll have to take him,” he said, and from then on I did. I had been dreading those words. I had been dreading seeing my husband walk up the lawn to our house so much more slowly. He was seventy now, and though he had the health and stamina of someone much younger, every little glimpse of his mortality still haunted me.

  I was not the only one. When he was about to turn six, choosing just the right moment, as children do, Josh asked a heart-stopping question. I was hurrying into the elevator, already late for an interview. “Why did you marry Dad?” he asked. I stopped short and let the elevator go. “Why do you want to know?” I asked as casually as I could. “But why did you marry an old man? Why do I have to have a father who looks like a grandfather?” he replied.

  “Because sometimes,” I said, “love just catches you by surprise and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  I knew he adored his father, but he was clearly being teased at school. I supposed I had blocked it out until now, but our children would also grow up in the shadow of our achievements. It was chilling to think of the many kids of exalted families, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, who had had problems because they feared living up to their forebears. We worried about this but then we considered our children both independent and persevering souls, and after all, we were just their parents.

  * * *

  My father was coming to visit from Massachusetts more often because somehow, at only five years of age, Josh got hold of his number—was it from my Rolodex?—and invited his grandfather himself. At night, they would put a moth trap up in the yard that my dad had made from a washbasin and two ultraviolet light tubes. Josh would come running out in the morning to find big green lunas, white arctics, and brownish noctuids. Grandpop, having reassured Josh that the moths would feel no pain and that they only had a two-week life span, would put a pin through them. Then they would both mount the specimens on cork and label them in tiny black writing. The two kept a meticulous moth log.

  Josh slept curled up to his father now. Once he kept pinching him. “Josh, stop pinching me. I don’t like it,” Bob said. “Well, I like it,” Josh replied. “What did you just say?” Bob asked. “I really don’t know. The words came out so fast I can’t remember,” Josh said. “Josh, you are a character,” said Bob, and Josh, slapping his hand on his forehead, replied, “Let’s just go to sleep, Dad.”

  18

  And then I decided I wanted another child. On August 20, 1990, Amy Elinor Morgenthau was born. We were elated. She was so lovely, with brown eyes so deep and contemplative, it was as though she were trying to fathom her universe. Josh was beside himself—a new playmate delivered right to his door. Bob was fascinated by her uncanny awareness; having a new baby to fall in love with met his profound need to cultivate and watch the blossoms unfold.

  December 14, 1990

  My baby girl, you are as serious as a judge, you are the DA reincarnated. You have that scowl, which mirrors your dad’s, it makes all of us laugh.

  It thrills me: after living with two men, I have a little girl! It thrills me—to be made of the same stuff, just us acting alike, thinking alike, getting our feelings hurt, leaping for joy, being all the things women will be. You have pale skin and chubby cheeks, like me, but your mouth, the shape of a perfect heart, is all yours.

  The world can wonder why you haven’t yet smiled, but I see that you are too busy. Your hands play across my face as if it were a piano. Will we be artists together? You are precocious. You have been on earth just four months and you do not say a word, but you point to the moon every time you see it. You stare at the shadows and the light it casts, I’m sure of it, trying to figure out what it is and where it belongs in the world.

  * * *

  At six months, Bob leaned over Amy’s crib and did his unique trick that had worked on every one of his children. He made a sound like an airplane and shook his head back and forth so fast his wide elastic mouth slapped from side to side. Amy’s eyes widened, as though she might have been afraid. He did it again. Then, for the first time in her life, she smiled this huge smile and bubbled with laughter.

  “Aah!” Bob’s voice echoed throughout the apartment. From then on, Amy would laugh at the littlest provocation. At Josh blowing his cheeks up with air, at Peter Rabbit, the cat, leaping from a chair, and at herself when she put her hands on my antique washstand pitcher, squealed, and hoisted herself up to stand. The fact that Amy was such an observer, rather than a doer, made it especially poignant to witness her first step, her first word, the first time she brought a spoon of food to her mouth. The more independent she became, the happier she seemed.

  But not all the time.

  From the beginning, Josh thought Amy was the most fascinating toy he had ever owned. He would toss her up in the air and catch her. He would smother her, tickle her. But she adored him, so she took being treated like a pet gerbil in stride. It was only when he began to mercilessly scare her that she rebelled. At night, when she was about three, she would be cuddled up in her little bed, sucking her thumb and drifting off to sleep, when she felt a series of thumps beneath her. “I’m a dinosaur and I’ve come to eat you,” Josh would say in a haunting whisper. She would scream, and in I would come, soothing her after what I thought was a nightmare. Even when she was much older, Josh enjoyed playing a good joke. He was especially thrilled when he took string and draped her room with morels he had dug up on the farm.

  She never tattled on Josh, but one day she figured out a way to return his favors. They would be playing, and for no reason she would suddenly begin bawling in a startling Wagnerian contralto. Then she would falsely accuse Josh of hitting her; I would believe her and send him off to his room for confinement. Once, when he was nine and she was four, he spent weeks building a complicated Lego city; she took it apart piece by piece so that when he came home from school, he found his city had become a miniature quarry. He detested cockroaches, so for his sixteenth birthday she presented him with a nicely wrapped jar in which one of the giant bloated insects crawled.

  Still, they never stopped being close. By the time she went off to nursery school, she was a true beauty—silky light brown hair, huge eyes, a perfect radiant smile. Once Josh began staring at her with complete awe. “Mom, she is so cute, how can somebody be so cute!” he breathed as though E.T. had arrived and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  As the kids grew, we became a close foursome in more ways than one. At night, Bob and I would be drifting off when two little bodies came wriggling in between us. We didn’t have the heart to kick them out, much to the disapproval of my friend Jill Comins, who by now had become not only a therapist but a psychoanalyst. She argued that it was inappropriate, and I countered that in southern Europe they did it all the time.

  Josh and Amy fought to get a place beside me. One time, we were all settled down when Josh reached over Amy and tickled Bob’s head. “Stop it!” he said in such an absurd growl that the mischievo
us child in me popped out and I reached over both kids to tickle him myself. Assuming the culprit was Amy, he got up to carry her to her own bed. “No, no, Daddy, please!” we both wailed. “You promise not to do it anymore?” asked Bob as he gently put her back in the middle of the bed. “I never did it, Daddy,” she replied.

  * * *

  Amy was an old soul, wise beyond her years; she never did the expected. When she was three and we were walking down the sidewalk, she abruptly ran out in the street. I grabbed her up, held her by the arms, and sternly told her she could get hit by a car and never to do that again. She cocked her head. “It must be hard to be a mom,” she said, before she began to cry.

  The love I had for each of my children was almost overwhelming. When she was little, Amy and I did things only girls could do together—we danced around half naked in the rain, we wrote poetry together, reveling in each other’s imagination. On Easter morning, we would take a walk through the orchards looking for signs of spring. Soft, mild air, a medley of squeaks and creaks and trills, Amy saw a rabbit chewing the head off a dead dandelion, I pointed out a formation of geese clattering back from the south, Amy said it looked as if a magician took off the winter rug of brown and slipped on a green one instead. When we reached the second row of McIntoshes sprouting their baby leaves, she would begin to hunt for the little gifts I had left there nestled against the trees. Then we would sit on the dewy grass and watch for fairies hidden in the twirling leaves.

  With Josh’s help, she painted a watercolor of a Venice canal in fluid salmons and blues that has hung on the wall for years. Some people asked if we got it at a gallery.

  Susan and Bobby’s children, Harry and Martha, were close in age to our kids, and they formed a lively bond, often visiting the farm for weekends. Harry and Joshua would troll the stream at the bottom of the farmhouse, catching small fish with their hands and sometimes purposely slipping into the water. Amy and Martha were a duo, loyal and unwavering; they confided in each other, they had each other’s backs. When they were navigating the tricky currents of adolescence, you could hear whispering and peals of laughter from upstairs. Susan’s sense of blithe mischief captivated them. Susan loved to organize games of hopscotch down our long hall. And if she and Bobby babysat while we went away, I’d more than likely come home to find my furniture rearranged and covered with sheets, the kids squealing delightedly within.

  Amy entered kindergarten at the challenging primary school Nightingale-Bamford. We went roller blading together to school every morning, with Amy doing complicated jumps, and garnered dubious smiles from some of the stuffier educators there. Tutors helped her with what they diagnosed as dyslexia, a learning difference that often occurs in bright children.

  Bob thought the whole thing was hokum. He simply didn’t believe she had any learning issues, just a lack of confidence. He would cite the evidence of her power of observance over and over: one evening, she could see both the sun and the moon, a faint foggy ball, when no one else could. In nursery school, the teachers had said she didn’t know her colors, so Bob had read her a book; he pointed to a purple balloon and said, “Look at that pretty yellow balloon,” and she said, “Dad, that’s a purple balloon, silly.”

  Getting Amy to do her homework was a challenge. Everyone agreed how smart she was. But she was turned on by the arts, and dry factual essays were not her thing. And what she didn’t like she often blanked out on. She got nervous during tests and hated them. When she was diagnosed with dyslexia, I put her into a plethora of learning programs and got a range of tutors. The pressure on her must have been great and probably canceled out my attempts to reassure her that she was bright and wonderful and we were going to prove it.

  I was furious that in third grade the children had to write papers that contained a thesis, several backup examples, and a conclusion. With increased competition to get into the leading colleges, the curricula of private schools in New York were advancing so fast that grade-schoolers were forced to learn college-level material.

  I tried to help her with a “thesis” paper and was caught out; her teacher nearly accused us of committing plagiarism. After that, Amy played a game of psychological chess with me. I nagged her to do her English essay, she said she was doing it, I offered to help her, she said not on your life, I asked how she was doing, she said she was done, I came in to look at it, and off she stalked with a handful of blank pages. Checkmate. She was so sly and canny—a bit like her father—that at times I felt as if I wanted to run my fingernails down a chalkboard. Nevertheless, her struggle to live up to her teacher’s expectations, and her frequent success in doing that, made me proud of her. I still hurt for her, for her sense of frustration and disappointment at school, but I had to smile at how it had built her character. She had become persevering and stubborn.

  When she began to go on the school stage, she impressed even the sternest teacher. In junior high, the whole family, including my stepchildren, came to see her play the important role of Puck, the mischievous, quick-witted, and capricious sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She frolicked and swept her arms up magically and charmed the audience into a standing ovation, as she did when she played a disturbed girl in a two-person show. The way she walked, fell on her knees, imbued her words with misery, was haunting. Everyone was impressed, with the possible exception of the director, who nearly went crazy when she altered her lines, rendering it impossible for him to direct.

  That director thought her brazen, but the word did not fit. She might have put on an air of detachment—for instance, when her classmates laughed at her for misusing words, instead of retreating, she laughed along with them—but behind it all she hid an acute sensitivity.

  Amy was so attuned to her environment that she would pick up people’s feelings before they knew they were feeling them. “That person’s unhappy,” she’d say, looking at a smiling neighbor who we later found out had just lost her job. On the other hand, sometimes she saw emotions that weren’t there. Especially with me, her mother, who had changeable and occasionally unfathomable facial expressions. “What’s the matter, Mommy?” she’d ask in alarm when I was in fact pondering some entirely pleasant memory.

  I first discovered the painful acuteness of her senses when she entered pre–nursery school. She refused to participate in a class band, with the boys banging the drums and the girls blowing kazoos, and instead went into a corner and put her fingers in her ears. The concerned teacher thought it was a psychological issue, but I knew my daughter.

  I would always see her writing, and one day, while tidying her room, I caught sight of a plethora of journals she had secretly written, stacked up as high as the old Encyclopaedia Britannica might have been.

  I wanted Amy to feel that unquestioning attachment to Jesus that I felt as a little girl. We began to go to a small Episcopal church near the farm, where she could kneel and be blessed at the rail, and at night we said prayers together and then sang hymns; our favorite was “O Savior Sweet.”

  We liked to play “the switch-off story game”; I would begin a narrative and then stop in the middle so she had to continue it. But if she saw Nerissa, the Caribbean housekeeper who had replaced Renia when she retired, she’d stop whatever she was doing. There was nothing she liked better than to lie in wait and then leap out when Nerissa came round the corner. Nerissa obliged by collapsing on the floor, moaning with terror, while Ivan the Terrible barked gleefully.

  When she was little, Amy would write me love notes like this one: “Dear Mommy, Every time I look at you your eyes make me giggle. I would never trade you for a billion dollars. You’re my mommy, no one else. I love you so much, Amy.”

  When she reached twelve, she was already developing her father’s wry sense of humor. One handmade card had a dog barking, “What is she doing?!” Across the top, Amy had written, “Sometimes you can act way beyond weird…,” and inside it read, “But there’s no one better than you to cheer me up!” On the opposite side, sharks and dolphins swam around laughing
, “Haar, harr! Ha hoo ha!”

  I’m glad I saved all the notes, tacking them on my bedside wall, because in what seemed like a few weeks but was only a few years, I had fallen from grace. Just as Josh’s adolescent rebellion was ending, allowing me at last to let out my breath, hers began.

  She came home one day—she was about fourteen—and announced that God wasn’t real. “You deceived me, Mom. Now that I’ve grown up, I can see it clearly. There’s no god. I believe in a random universe without intelligent design. If there was a god, how could he let children starve to death in Ethiopia? How could he let poachers nearly wipe out the black rhino?”

  “Some kind of higher power, some god had to make the world,” I said, and she huffily replied, “Then who made God, Mom, who?”

  We debated the issue endlessly until I noticed the prayer books we had made were no longer visible in her room. Her Bible had vanished. She refused to accompany me to church. The closer you are with your children, the more rigorous their separation from you has to be. Amy’s was difficult for both of us until one day, an eon later, she came to the table, mature, sweet, newly achieved. Bob and I had regained our stature as passable human beings.

  * * *

  The very thought of the death penalty had always made me ill. In 1974, when Bob first ran for DA, a good many New Yorkers disagreed. Homicides were at a record high, and the polls showed that the majority supported the New York State statute providing for the electric chair. In fact, the death penalty was hardly an issue; the public use of obscenity by entertainers and the frequent power blackouts were far more crucial to the sophisticated people of New York City.