Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  Bob did everything to help me in my quest. He got Dad’s military records through Congressman Charlie Rangel to see if he had been assigned to the areas where recorded sabotage missions took place. Then, armed with information, I would try to find evidence of his spy activities in the National Archives.

  I eventually found out he had been an intelligence agent attached to different spy agencies, mainly the OSS, the nation’s chief World War II intelligence agency. He had taught the French Resistance about guns and explosives, posed as a Nazi and shot a German guard, broke into Gestapo headquarters and stole secret documents, and, another little detail that shocked me, was an assassin. When he finally forgot that he was supposed to forget, the missions tumbled out of him, and we sat side by side, my head on his shoulder, as I scribbled away.

  I was flabbergasted. How could my father ever have gotten over doing what he did during the war? He had been made to witness and even commit atrocities no human being should. He kept it all a secret, protecting his family as well as his oath of silence. Those guns around the house were not the work of a paranoid but a way of safeguarding his family from threats of reprisal.

  I visited him nearly every weekend as he descended into Alzheimer’s, ministering to him, cuddling up to him. It was the first time since I was thirteen that we had been this close, shared the love we had missed all those years. Our alienation from each other, which had lasted from my adolescence through my adulthood, slowly fell away. I became that child in his arms watching the stars through his big white telescope, falling in love with him all over again. Starved of my respect for so long, he eagerly embraced my attentions. We spent the last two years of his life together. It was more than just a resolution of our relationship; it was a resurrection, too spirit-driven, too circular, to be accidental. My early passion for Jesus Christ, the gentle friend of children, the maker of miracles, rose up from the weakness of my faith. He had been buried deep within me, much as my father had. When Dad finally became real, almost sacred to me, so God did in a way he never had before.

  * * *

  When, in 2001, Dad finally entered a hospital and then a nursing home, Amy, eleven, and Joshua, seventeen, visited him often, talking to him tenderly, responding respectfully to his nonsense sentences. At the end, besides me, they were the only ones he recognized, the ones for whom he clumsily tried to flap his hands like wings. How could he forget the little girl who could persuade him to do anything, who now would bring him her teddy bears, or the little boy who every morning raced with him out to his washtub moth trap to see if they’d caught a great willow-green luna? Josh was a talented art major at Yale, and he did a series of line drawings of him that so brilliantly captured Daddy’s confusion and pain, as well as his love for us, that the best one still hangs on my study wall.

  When he died, God must not have cared a whit about his atheism. His eyes were a hauntingly bright blue, and they were trained on something in the distance. I had never seen him look so surprised. And after he drew his last breath, the hint of a smile, a trace of happy irony, settled on his inscrutable face.

  On the phone, my sister and I decided that Dad would not have wanted a funeral, just a simple cremation. When I hung up, my husband gave me a grave look. “We’re going to give him a proper send-off.” So, as I looked on in surprise, Bob called up the commander of the Intrepid navy carrier, docked in New York Harbor, and planned a full military funeral on the ship.

  Penny came out for the service, and we had a rabbi say Kaddish—I thought my father would like that. There were pictures of him in dress uniform and wearing fatigues in various combat zones. Patriotic songs were taped in, and at the end the mourners, composed of our friends and a few of Dad’s, stepped outside on the windy deck. Salute rifles were slowly fired by marines ten times, report after report echoing off the water, a bugle played a rich, poignant taps, and the American flag was folded and presented to me. I turned and gave it to Penny. Tears were streaming down our faces as a wreath of flowers was hurled overboard and made its way out to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Bob’s love for my dad was never more abundantly or publicly expressed. He had even arranged a burial at sea. A Coast Guard boat took us out to the Statue of Liberty, where we opened a bottle of champagne and toasted him for the last time. We said our goodbyes, and then Josh and my nephew Luke emptied the urn over the turbulent water. My father, stubborn to the last, came sailing right back, covering the boys in a gritty gray powder. Once our horror abated, we began to laugh. Daddy’s humor, still at work.

  Earlier, I watched as his still-warm body was zipped into a rubbery black bag and hoisted over the funeral men’s shoulders like a sack of potatoes. I began to feel an agonizing wave of remorse for all those years I shunned him; my lazy failure to give him a second chance, to find out who he really was until it was almost too late. Walking to my car, I thought what a waste it was—I would never see him again.

  I got into my Volvo, turned on the ignition, and my CD of Bob Dylan came on. He was singing “Girl from the North Country,” a ballad about lost love that was Dad’s favorite. As I pulled out of the hospital parking lot, gulping back tears, all at once I slammed on the brakes. There was Dad, incorporeal, sitting in the passenger’s seat, rhythmically tapping his knee. He grinned at me, and I heard him say, “Remember how I used to play this song over and over? Until I couldn’t work my tape player anymore?”

  An indescribable warmth spread through me. He had returned, or at least that’s how it felt. For several weeks, Penny and I both felt his presence, and we were inexplicably happy, oddly forgiven. We had the sense he wasn’t letting us mourn him. The very opposite of the anger and guilt we felt when our mother died.

  Now, more than a decade later, sometimes when I’m driving—an activity Dad and I both found relaxing—I feel, rather than see, a rainbow at the left corner of my windshield. It is always followed by the impression of a smile, a voice: “Don’t worry, I’m watching over you.”

  Are these visions spiritual? My father really talking from the beyond? Or are they the voice of Bob, his earthly presence beside me? For nearly half my life, Bob had schooled me in accepting myself, in trying to purge the useless remorse that comes from looking back. It has been through him that I grew to recognize my father, to listen and learn from him as Bob had done.

  As time clutters the mind, cause and effect are blurred. You forget why you hate, why what happened, happened. Is the voice of my dad a dream, a salmagundi of memory, a commingling of the living and the dead? Or do I even need to know?

  * * *

  “Wow, look at this!” I held up an old blue letter, tissue thin, sent to my mother from abroad. “He did love her after all! See, the whole page is covered with ‘I love you, I love you.’” I was beside myself at the discovery of a bundle of war correspondence to Mom hidden in his closet. When a child, in vain, I had made prayer books promising God perfect behavior if he would bring them together. Though a little late, my prayers had been answered.

  I couldn’t stop reading the letters aloud to my husband. “He’s a different person in these letters! I think this shows that Dad had some kind of post-traumatic disorder after the war. He was totally different before—jolly, full of ambition, playing pranks. He even carried an iguana named Oscar on his shoulder! The war! World War II! That’s why he disappeared inside a shell, like you, except his was a lot more severe.”

  “Okay, I’m trying to eat my oatmeal without a lot of talk,” Bob said.

  “But don’t you see that this proves the war changed him? It took away that joyousness that is in these letters.”

  “I have a project for you. Write a book about him.”

  I smiled and nodded. I had already thought of this. I had decided over time that I could turn this very private discovery into something that might help people understand the veterans of World War II who had never talked about their crippling experiences and lived repressed, often haunted lives. I had even asked Dad to give me his blessing. “Why me?” was h
is response. “I didn’t do anything more than what others did.” It was the stock answer of these humble World War II veterans who had sacrificed everything for their country. I argued with him until finally he gave in. “Oh, all right,” he said with a half smile. “You’ll do what you want to do anyway.” He was right.

  24

  On September 11, 2001, at 5:15 in the evening, Bob walked through the door and time stopped. Smudged with smoke and soot, he dropped his pile of files, and I put my arms around his shoulders. We held on to each other in silence.

  “There was a cloud of debris and dust just sitting in the middle of our street, I don’t know why,” Bob began. “Sid Asch had come in with debris in his hair, in his eyebrows … he was completely disoriented. We put him in the shower, cleaned him up, and had the detectives drive him home.” Poor Sid, he was the man who had married us.

  I peeled off his coat as Bob talked incessantly, so unlike him. The state courthouse was only a third of a mile from the Twin Towers, as were the federal courts. “The feds ordered the courts closed, but we got air purifiers and we stayed open, that’s why I’m so late. I wanted to send a message to looters. It wasn’t going to be open season.”

  “You must be exhausted,” I said, giving him a glass of water. “Sit down, sweetheart. Tell me everything.”

  And so he did. Story after story of heroism that emerged from the disaster.

  “A great ADA named Karen Friedman, she was trapped on the fourth floor of her apartment building directly across from the towers, with her two four-year-old twin boys. The electricity was off, the elevator stopped, the staircases blocked. The air was thick with debris; there was the sound of explosions. She called the fire and the police departments, who couldn’t help her, and then she called her father in Oregon to say goodbye,” Bob said, close to tears. “Her father was a Holocaust survivor and told her not to give up, the family were survivors. Then she thought of calling another ADA, Micki Shulman, who rushed over through the blinding white smoke and got her and the children out. Micki is not much taller than about five feet.”

  If Bob was seeing redemption, I was seeing death and destruction. Like so many Americans, I remained upset for weeks about the mind-numbing event in lower Manhattan. At first, I was fixated on images of big planes coming in droves to topple apartment buildings. I volunteered at the Compassion Center, comforting families, some of them Muslims, even helping them tack pictures of their kin on telephone poles in the vain hope someone had seen them wandering about dazed. Though the people of the city had made it a gentler place, at least for now I felt sick and anxious most of the time. Nothing helped.

  Until one day when I was on the Lower East Side buying the chewy homemade bialys Bob loved and saw a man in black robes. Suddenly I remembered the case of the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, who was murdered by an anti-Israeli terrorist. I remembered Bob told me something about the World Trade Center in that case, something that had been suppressed, that the public didn’t even know about. I hurried home and took out of my file cabinet the journals I had filled for years, peeling off the rubber bands that held them together, spreading them out, and finally locating a notebook labeled “Terrorism—1989–1991.”

  I began skimming and stopped when I came to two entries.

  December 1991

  Bob has lost an important slam-dunk case. An Arab terrorist named El Sayyid Nosair killed Meir Kahane, the crazy ultraconservative rabbi, on a street in plain sight and was acquitted of murder. Bob is complaining bitterly about the FBI and the police department. Apparently, in Nosair’s apartment, they found dozens of boxes full of really damning documents and tapes indicating a big Islamic conspiracy, including vitriolic anti-American tapes by a blind sheikh named Rahman who’s a big leader in the conspiracy. There are blueprints and plans of how to bomb U.S. landmarks, including maybe the Twin Towers. But the FBI seized the boxes and wouldn’t allow the DA’s Office to put them in evidence at Nosair’s trial. The police and the FBI kept saying he was just a “lone gunman,” and Bob says that’s absurd.

  The FBI is playing down the significance of all this incredible material in the boxes. Bob has been trying to get the feds to at least listen to the Rahman tapes, but they’re dismissing them, and they haven’t even had them translated. The up-to-date DA’s Office has an Arabic translator, of course, but the FBI says it doesn’t. Bob is furious.

  February 1993

  It’s happened. The World Trade Center has been bombed. A nightmare. A van in the garage of one of the towers exploded, and six people were killed and many others injured. And the horror is that if the FBI had ever looked in Nosair’s boxes and found all the blueprints of places they wanted to blow up like the World Trade Center, this could have been prevented. Unbelievable. Is our government just incompetent, or did we have it right in the 1960s? Maybe we weren’t silly and paranoid; maybe there really is some dark multinational conspiracy. The FBI should be exposed. Would love to write an article, but of course I can’t, with Bob’s involvement.

  Goose bumps on my arms. I put the notebook down. Had the same terrorists who did the 1993 bombing also committed the mayhem on September 11? Had they upped the ante over the years, systematically exploding targets around the world until, with visions of the Evil Empire collapsing, they carried out their supreme act? I did some research and found that the violent Arab bombers and terrorists during the last decade of jihad were all linked. Different groups in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries sometimes fought each other, but mostly they were a united front against America, the baton passing from uncles to nephews, cousins to cousins, fathers to sons. The terrorists who had made the deadly attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 were also involved in the 1993 garage bombing at the World Trade Center. Nosair, though acquitted of murder but convicted on weapons charges in connection with the Kahane assassination, helped plan the bombing from his jail cell.

  Most people knew little back then about al-Qaeda and the number and passion of anti-American Muslims. But guess who did? The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It started when the agencies gave millions of dollars to Islamic extremists, many from Saudi Arabia, who were supporting the mujahideen trying to oust the Russian-backed regime in Afghanistan. The Islamists were told by the Saudis that if they did a good job, they would be admitted to the United States. When they came to America in the 1980s, still carrying some of the intelligence agency money, the Islamists used the al-Kifah Refugee Center in the al-Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn to build a terrorist cell. Meanwhile, the CIA and the DIA recruited a mounting number of them as informers. The only problem was that many of those informants were to participate in the very bombing attacks they informed the CIA about. The al-Kifah cell grew wiser and more powerful until it had the wherewithal to carry out the 1993 World Trade Center attack. You could say that the U.S. intelligence agencies had become inadvertently complicit in the terrorism they were supposed to be preventing.

  What exactly was in those early Nosair boxes? I was flipping through magazines at the library, trying to find articles on terrorism, when I did a double take: here was the most damning of revelations—made by my husband. When he came home, I told him what I had found.

  “Of course, if they had listened to you, the Twin Towers tragedies might never have happened,” I said to him.

  He stared at me, puzzled.

  “Remember the Nosair case?” I asked as we sat down to dinner. “Those boxes in his apartment the FBI ignored, the ones that had tapes of the leader of that Egyptian terrorist organization Omar Abdel-Rahman, who urged the bombing of the World Trade Center?

  “It was the CIA that ordered the police and the FBI to suppress that evidence, right?” I added.

  He shook his head. “The FBI didn’t need any encouragement to ignore the boxes. They weren’t focused on domestic terrorism. They didn’t even have any agent who spoke Arabic. We had hired an Israeli Arab policeman who translated the material.”

  “I spent two hours researching it, and
my head is reeling. I keep imagining this chilling thought. Maybe there are as many terrorists reporting to the CIA as there are to Rahman.”

  Bob, bent over his soup, kept eating, and I leaned toward him, like the lonely hypotenuse of a right angle, straining for answers he didn’t want to give me, a tableau not uncharacteristic of our marriage. He knew his silence would just get me more and more agitated until I gave up.

  Why couldn’t I just keep my cool? “In fact,” I said, steely. “There are hints that Rahman himself was cooperating or pretending to cooperate with the CIA!

  “Really, Bob, tell me, didn’t the CIA influence the FBI not to examine those boxes in Nosair’s apartment? And to put out the false story that Nosair was a lone gunman instead of part of a larger terrorist conspiracy?”

  “I don’t think the CIA had anything to do with it,” he replied dismissively.

  “Well,” I said quietly, picking up a printout of an article in New York magazine of March 1995. “Here you were quoted as saying, ‘The FBI lied to me. They’re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can’t be trusted to do the job.’ Then you went on to suggest that the CIA put pressure on the FBI to divert attention away from the terrorists.”

  “I don’t remember saying that.” Was he prevaricating or suppressing? Then he added, “I remember the interview; they never even checked the quotes with me.”

  “The magazine didn’t fact-check your quotes?”

  I had stumbled on a scoop of mammoth proportions, and I couldn’t write about it. In fact, to my knowledge it was never written about, at least not in the mainstream media.