Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  Bobby, who spoke for Barbara and himself, talked of his mother’s last words. “She said, ‘Could I have some of Renia’s applesauce?’ … She gathered us up and shepherded us into adulthood. That’s how I think of her now. More than anything, Renia was a shepherd.”

  * * *

  On July 4, 2008, we were looking forward to our annual Fourth of July barbecue. Bob had this Houdini-like knack of plucking the main point out of a complicated argument and expressing it with astonishing and sometimes exasperating simplicity. Often, this skill would pop up in his private life. Since Josh’s graduation from Yale in 2006, Bob, who had been teaching his son about farming since he was a toddler, began to teach him how to run the operation. Josh, an artist, planted hundreds of new trees and organic vegetables and acquired laying chickens that wandered free around the trees; the rolling fields and fruit trees unfolded like a stunning Grandma Moses painting. Bob soon made Josh manager of the sizable Fishkill Farms Store, where we sold our produce. Bob had given Josh a lot of power and responsibility in a short time, but Bob also made the big decisions when he wanted to, often, as was his wont, without telling anyone he had made them.

  As Independence Day approached, Bob and I decided to move the party, which had grown quite big, from our home up to the store, whose patio overlooked the farm that Josh had re-created. Bob, however, forgot to tell Josh this, and when Josh found out the week before, he was understandably put out.

  “How could you guys do this without asking me?” he said. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms folded. Bob was leaning against the fridge, and I was sitting a little ways away at the table.

  Bob graciously took the fall for both of us. “I decided we should have it up at the store. I wanted everyone to be able to look down and see the terrific job you’ve done.”

  “But, Dad, you didn’t even consider my side of things. All the things I’ll have to do—close the store for the party, get our staff to clean up afterward…”

  “Well, I thought people should see what you’ve done, the new plantings, the chickens…”

  “You know, the staff work long hours, and the store is the store, not a party hall.”

  “I wanted people to be impressed by how you’ve changed the farm.”

  “Aren’t you listening to me? You should have consulted me!”

  “I did it for you. I wanted people to see all that you’ve accomplished here.”

  At first, hearing Bob repeat the same answer over and over, I became alarmed. Could he not hear Josh? Was he losing it?

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you; I did it for you,” he said again, and suddenly I burst out laughing. And then Josh started to laugh too. I knew what Bob was trying to do. Letting Josh shine in front of a hundred people was the only important part of this. The rest was dross.

  And the following week people crowded onto the patio to peer out over the orchards and couldn’t stop marveling at Josh’s handiwork.

  26

  We were heading home from the farm, zooming down the parkway with hardly a car in our way, when we ran into them all at once entering the Bronx. It was the kind of traffic jam that made us want to just abandon the car and walk the remaining fifteen miles to the city.

  We were sorely tempted. Our ten-year-old Volvo, heavily dented due to my issue with parallel parking, wasn’t particularly comfortable, and Josh and Amy were hot, cranky, and nauseous in the cramped backseats. “Let’s play Who Am I?” I suggested.

  “Okay,” Josh said. “I’m it. Start guessing. Amy, you go first.”

  “Are you a famous politician?” she asked coolly, as though reading Josh’s mind. Yes, he was. A woman? I asked. Yes. “Are you a female dogcatcher?” Bob ventured, eliciting a family groan and a polite request from Amy to stop being silly.

  “I was perfectly serious,” he said, adding, “Is it Ruth Messinger?”

  “Daddy, you’re cheating. You only get one question at a time.”

  “Bob, Messinger is yesterday’s news. Josh’s is a current politician,” I said. “Oh, pee-yew, who did that?” I opened the windows as Josh and Amy quickly blamed the dog, a placid white fluff ball whom Bob had christened Ivan the Terrible. I was physically and psychologically allergic to dogs, but Amy, who worked as subtly and effectively as her father, had finally managed to talk me into getting a hypoallergenic bichon frise. Everyone but me constantly fed him scraps, after which he would sit on Bob’s lap and fart away for ninety minutes from the farm to the city.

  The game moved on until it was established that Josh was a female politician who had run against a prominent man for a prominent Manhattan office.

  It was Bob’s turn. He thought and he thought: “I don’t know. I give up. I can’t think of anybody like that.”

  Josh began chuckling. “He won’t say her name! Right, Dad? You know the answer, but you’ve blocked her out. It’s Leslie Crocker Snyder!”

  Bob looked straight ahead, unsmiling.

  * * *

  During the 2005 campaign for DA, Bob had had his first serious opponent since the Mason challenge twenty years before. She had a following among right-wingers and extreme feminists, who had visions of Manhattan’s first woman DA. Like now, he seldom referred to Snyder in anything but the third-person pronoun. At the beginning of the race, I chided him as harboring a tinge of sexism.

  “I’m not against women, just this woman,” he replied acidly.

  Snyder was a judge handling criminal cases and a death penalty advocate so tough she once told a defendant that she would personally give him the lethal injection if she could.

  “She’s been a correspondent for NBC News; she wrote an autobiography while she was a judge inappropriately titled 25 to Life. She’s even done cameo appearances on Law & Order.”

  “Well, that’s interesting, since the show was modeled on your office and the DA character, Adam Schiff, on you. How many times did Sam Waterston pick your brains about playing the chief DA?”

  “She thinks of herself as a star.”

  “Sounds to me like she’s a star fucker.”

  “She’d go after the high-publicity cases and ignore the rest of the city’s crime,” Bob said, slapping down his newspaper. He mentioned that the next day he was going to start visiting the district Democratic clubs, whose support was vital. “Would you like to go with me?”

  “Oh, gosh, that’s the night of my writers’ group at Hilma’s. Michael Cunningham and I are supposed to be reading from our novels in progress.”

  “Don’t bother, then, it’s not that important.”

  But it was. Since the Mason campaign, when I had, at first, failed him, Bob, just by being Bob, had given me a bigger conscience, robbed me of some of my selfishness. I could no longer conveniently ignore what I well knew: that often Bob says not what he wants but what he thinks you want him to say. By the end of the day, I had canceled on Hilma.

  The next night, we were getting dressed, and I had helped Bob find his toothbrush and the missing money clip given to him by his father, and now I was rubbing a spot of dinner off his lapel. “Stand still,” I said, and then I took a deep breath. “I think it’s important I come tonight.”

  “No, I told you it was fine if…”

  “You want me to come. Say it.”

  “I want you to come.”

  “So do I. You need me to watch your back. From now on, ‘whither thou goest, I will go.’”

  I kept my vow; I was with him all the way through the campaign. I hurt when I saw that he hurt; when he was scared, so was I; his little triumphs became mine. What was important to me was more than just winning the election; it was that his dignity and self-respect were preserved, that he did not go down in humiliation.

  Snyder was using the media to push him to the brink. Journalists want their stories to be read, to be praised, to be so much better than their competitors’ that they themselves will be written about. And Snyder’s constant colorful slurs made good copy.

  Like Mason twenty years before, she
went after Bob’s age like a coiled cobra. “He’s too old, stale, decrepit,” she chanted. To my frustration, she managed to revive my old fear that Bob would die on me; I was afraid that he would be as affected as I was by these intimations of his mortality, so I’d slip the newspapers into odd places. Of course, he always found them.

  When you judge someone not by who he is, his character and achievements, but by what he is—short, black, young, old—it’s some kind of global ism we haven’t yet got a word for. While many columnists refuted Leslie’s claims that Bob was over the hill, others took her at her word, failing to examine what he had done in the last decade. Ironically, at eighty-five, Bob was at a peak of his career and frequently dubbed the leading prosecutor in the country: Who else had changed the paradigms for convictions? There was Schiele, Kimes, the DNA rapist, and the continuing ripple effects from his prosecution and closing down of BCCI (which was known in London as “the Bank of Crooks and Criminals”), a favorite bank of terrorists.

  Snyder criticized him for spending too many resources pursuing useless white-collar crime like the recent Tyco scandal, where the CEO, Dennis Kozlowski—with the six-thousand-dollar shower curtain and parties in Sardinia—looted the company of millions. The conviction was an early message, a warning: the greed of financial high rollers would all too soon cause the collapse of the economy.

  “She’s blowing these accusations through her nose, isn’t she?” I asked Bob one night when we were proofing some campaign literature. “She knows that banks launder money for drug dealers, which ends up as cocaine or heroin in the backpacks of our kids.”

  When Bob spoke, I always sat in the front row, smiling and nodding. During a particularly grueling debate, Leslie snarled that he had brought no innovations, no energy, to the office. Bob ticked off the thirty-four new units and bureaus he had established and the dramatic drop in Manhattan’s crime rate to 10 percent of what it was when he took office in 1975. The citywide police department had its new programs, like putting more cops on the street, but of the city’s five boroughs only Manhattan enjoyed the drastic drop in murder and violent crime. The reason? The office’s prompt and tough prosecution of small-time offenders, like turnstile jumpers, who had traditionally been let off. The office correctly deduced that they were usually the very ones committing the murders and rapes. Having destroyed Snyder’s claims, he gave me a triumphant wink, which made the pages of The New York Times. Thank God I was there. Who else would he have been able to wink at?

  Snyder kept criticizing him for being out of touch, for abdicating responsibility to the top ADAs who established little fiefdoms. This accusation had a modicum of validity. Bob had his hand in the most significant cases, but with thousands of prosecutions a year he had to rely on assistants whom he had extensively tested, who had won his trust. His hands-off philosophy had garnered him gratitude and loyalty; it had helped him build what was considered the most talented law enforcement team in the city. But it occasionally left him with a legal mess.

  Perhaps his biggest vulnerability was the Central Park jogger case.

  Back in 1989, Manhattan was saturated in crime; there was a murder every four hours and the sound of gunfire was common. Then, on April 19, 1989, a white woman taking a night run in Central Park was raped and almost fatally beaten. The city was outraged; the police quickly got confessions from five black teenagers who were said to have been on a “wilding spree” that night; the DA’s Office, led by Linda Fairstein, the prominent head of the Sex Crimes Unit, obtained a jury conviction on assault charges, and they were sent to prison. Later, the defendants claimed to have been coerced by overzealous police interrogators. The convictions unleashed protests and cries of racism from the black community.

  More than a decade later, and after the young men had served their sentences, one Matias Reyes, doing life for serial murder and rape, came forth and confessed that he had been the one who raped the Central Park jogger. He first wrote and then talked on the phone to the Innocence Project, which ended up taking no action. He then told prison officials, who contacted Morgenthau, who did take action. Bob got samples of both Reyes’s DNA and the DNA found on the victim: they were a perfect match. Morgenthau then led a months-long reexamination of the evidence in the Central Park Five case and, against the vehement protests of Fairstein and the NYPD, decided the verdict should be set aside.

  As for Reyes, because he was already serving a life sentence, he was not tried for his rape of the Central Park jogger.

  The police and prosecutors had grossly bungled the Central Park Five case.

  The debacle unfolded this way.

  Two days before the jogger rape, Reyes had committed a rape in the same area of Central Park. Passersby had interrupted it and Reyes had gotten away. The female detective who was looking into the earlier rape and the male detective handling the jogger case were sitting right next to each other but never exchanged information or apparently even noticed what the other was doing.

  Then there was the Manhattan chief of detectives. He took home the forensic pictures of the Central Park jogger crime scene and kept them. Maybe he figured he would write a book about the case, complete with the exclusive photos.

  Faced with investigating a case with this key evidence missing, Bob raised hell, called the citywide chief of detectives, and demanded them back. The photographs were returned, and the offending Manhattan chief of detectives was taken off the case. This led to even more damage to the people’s case since there was then no supervision or even coordination of it.

  In the earlier Reyes rape, the rape kit gathered after the assault ultimately disappeared. So even though detectives had obtained the name of her attacker—Reyes liked to chat up his victims before he pounced—the case was closed by the police after six weeks.

  “This was unprecedented,” Bob said. “To just prematurely throw the case into a cold file in spite of having so much proof against a perpetrator!”

  “You have to bring this out,” I urged Bob. “If the Reyes case had remained open, someone, someone like you, would have linked it with the jogger rape.”

  But he refused, saying that this was not the way he did things.

  The NYPD and Linda Fairstein reacted furiously to Morgenthau’s decision to consent to vacate the convictions. Eager to save their reputations, reluctant to admit they had committed egregious errors, they demanded a public hearing.

  But Morgenthau wouldn’t budge from his decision to permit setting aside the convictions from the young men’s records. No more investigation, no more hearings, no more stalling. The victim, the defendants, and their families had suffered for too long.

  Bob figured that the NYPD wanted a hearing to plant doubt about Reyes’s story by implying he had lied. “They hoped they could show he had wanted to make a deal for leniency,” Bob told me, “or even that he could have been an accomplice of the Central Park Five.”

  When Linda Fairstein left the office to write mystery novels, which were based on her cases in the Sex Crimes Unit, she thanked Bob profusely in her books. But her attitude changed. Suddenly Bob fell from grace. To this day, she shuns her beloved “Boss.” In fact, upon the death of her husband, the lawyer Justin Feldman, she failed to invite Bob to the memorial service. Bob was visibly hurt: “Justin was one of my closest friends.”

  * * *

  During the election fight with Snyder, Bob kept from the press a number of unsavory facts about his opponent. Her reputation as a criminal court judge, he told me, was less than sterling: she arrived at the bench at a late 10:00 a.m., took long lunches, and favored certain lawyers.

  While Bob kept refusing to do negative campaigning, Leslie kept slinging the mud. When she told the press that Bob “had to be trotted out and propped up for news conferences,” I wanted to break her neck. I wanted to cut off all her dumb blond hair and grind her preppy suits into the muck and pull out her sixty-two-year-old pink teenybop fingernails. Bob, to my amazement, just smiled. “That’s politics,” he said. Nothing, ho
wever, prepared either of us for the blow that was to come.

  You think life is proceeding sensibly and relatively sanely, that up is up and down is down, and then, in an instant, you find yourself inside a Dalí landscape where the clocks are dripping and ants are crawling over everything. This is what happened to me the morning I opened The New York Times, my home away from home, the abiding supporter of my husband, the liberal publication that abhorred the death penalty and long prison sentences; when I saw that this revered publication had endorsed Leslie Crocker Snyder, I thought someone had played a malicious joke, substituted the real Times for one of those fakes manufactured in Times Square.

  Within days, however, while I remained hurt and angry at the paper, Bob found a way to explain the editorial and put it away. “You can’t predict the Times,” he told people. “After all, in 1940, the most crucial presidential election of the twentieth century, with Hitler having overrun Europe, the paper opposed the reelection of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The publisher liked Wendell Willkie, a lawyer who had no government experience.”

  The night of the election, Bob and I, our family, and our closest supporters crowded into a mustard-yellow hotel room. His principal assistants, Dan Castleman and Jim Kindler, planted themselves behind computers, calling out the numbers as the voting results of each election district came in. Trying to be useful, I stood and redundantly shouted out the numbers after they did.

  Finally, Dan stood up and with a giddy grin hollered, “It’s Morgenthau, three to one!” Campaign workers began clapping, jumping, whooping, slapping each other on the back. Their pleasure transcended the vicarious. Each one owned the victory; each wondered whether it was his efforts that tipped the scales.

  Everything after that was a blur. I remember the state senator Eric Schneiderman, our steadfast supporter, ushering us into some room with a microphone to stand before the press. We were dazed. “Make a victory sign!” Schneiderman whispered several times until finally he raised both our arms for us. The picture was on the front page of all the New York newspapers.