Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  * * *

  During the campaign, Bob had ignored Snyder as she hammered away at his eighty-six years and “questionable health.” He had made public his doctors’ medical reports on the excellent state of his heart, lungs, liver, blood pressure. But after it was all over, a kind of survivor’s backlash set in. When you enjoy a victory over another, you are prone, at least subliminally, to magical thinking: in some unknown way, you will have to pay it back; the balance will have to be righted. One way to cause yourself misery is to fear for your life. A sudden pimple, a bruise, a cough, there is hardly a thing that doesn’t present itself as a portent.

  And then, one day, Bob’s worries were eclipsed by an obsession that ran much deeper. I assumed it was my fault. I assumed I had caused him to break the promise to himself that had helped make him the finest prosecutor in the nation. I caused him to look back, way back. And I was scared.

  27

  Sometime in 2006, the mountains of material on my father, the World War II spy, began spilling out of my small study. So I moved the research for my book into the dining room, where I banged the keys, sometimes exclaiming at the discovery of yet another harrowing undercover adventure of my phlegmatic father.

  Bob loved Dad, was fascinated by all his talents, and skillfully drew war stories out of him. But Bob would seldom reciprocate. Most veterans had never talked in depth about their roles in the war. Bob, for instance, was Byron White’s best friend at Yale Law School. “I talked to Byron White every day, but we never discussed the war,” he said. “After his death, I found out that his destroyer had been right near me in the Pacific.”

  I was approaching the end of my book, or so I thought, when I began getting calls from Dad’s war buddies. They had previously divulged very little to me, but now, suddenly, they wanted to talk, clearly needing to expunge all that they had kept secret these long years. They were joined by thousands of veterans in their late seventies and eighties who came out in television, print, and Internet interviews, ready to reveal the dramas of those most enthralling and terrible years of their lives.

  Then, one day, Bob decided he could truly risk reliving what happened more than sixty years before. Cautiously, he began to speak, not just to me, but also to old friends who told mesmerizing stories of being marine pilots or captains in famous battles.

  Meanwhile, Bob began to read monthly military magazines, and I noticed him occasionally leafing through my World War II histories and memoirs, which had articles about the sea battles in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. He soon became fascinated with anything about the war—army, marine, air force—for he had missed most of it; confined to his destroyers for long periods, he hadn’t watched newsreels or heard accounts, had never known what was happening elsewhere in Europe and the Pacific. He collected the works of World War II historians like Stephen Ambrose, created special exhibits on the war at the museum, and relished books about the Resistance and the Jewish underground. Soon he had almost as many volumes as I did. The bloodiest war in history had taken over our bedroom.

  He organized reunions of Lansdale survivors, engineered a museum exhibit detailing the thousands of Jews who, far from submitting to the Nazis, became fierce saboteurs.

  He had shared scraps of war memories with me before, but it was when he began to recount grisly stories of sea battles in detail, those that had weighed on his mind and kept him separated from others for so long, that I began to worry. For half a century, he had functioned by keeping these terrifying things that happened to him locked away; could he now, at his age, bear to bring out so many of these deeply suppressed memories?

  He was known for his unusually precise memory, never forgetting a date or a name or a place, remembering details and whole conversations better than those half his age. People were captivated by Bob’s stories, which ranged from tales of crazy ship captains to the seventeen kamikazes his ship shot down at Okinawa. I could listen to them over and over, for each time he told them, I knew him a little better.

  He would tell me—in little isolated flashes—the stories behind his stories: the promises he made to “the Almighty” when he spent hours in the freezing waters of the Mediterranean, giving his life belt to an injured sailor, not knowing whether he would live or die; what it felt like to see kamikaze planes coming at you, larger and larger, like meteors from the sky.

  One morning, when I was halfway out the door heading for the compost pile, he came down from our bedroom in Martha’s Vineyard. He looked like a homeless waif, one eye closed, hair sticking up, barely holding his ground on the red-painted floor. “Where’s my fuzzy bathrobe, the one like yours? Did you take it?” he rasped.

  I put down the garbage.

  “I had a bad dream,” he said. “The Lansdale was sinking again. The gunners, the mess attendants, sailors I hardly knew, were trying to grab hold of me, but they couldn’t, and one by one they were sucked down into the swells.”

  “Oh no.” I put my arms around him, felt the damp of his T-shirt come through my muslin beach dress. “How long have you been having these dreams?”

  “Off and on,” he said, sitting down on the round seat of an old chair at the kitchen table. “Shhh,” he whispered, as though addressing his nightmares. “Look out the window.” There was a ruby-throated hummingbird, revving its wings like a tiny plane, poking its long beak into our purple buddleia blooms and sucking out the nectar.

  “I really was badly shaken after the war,” he said. “Maybe you’re right; maybe it did change my personality as an adult.” He was meticulously peeling off strips of bacon and ever so slowly laying them side by side in the skillet. It was like watching a plant grow. Much more efficient just to dump them all together and occasionally toss them around.

  “After I came home from the Pacific, there were things I was afraid of, afraid to do.” He held up the spatula and scowled at me, as if I were to blame. “Working in Judge Patterson’s offices on the forty-second floor of One Wall Street was hell. If there was a high wind that came and rattled the windows, I’d have to go down to the lobby.”

  “It’s more of the PTSD, sweetie,” I said gently. “You’re letting the trauma out, letting it go, little by little, dream by dream. Every memory you talk about is a memory that loses its power.” Or at least I prayed that it would.

  “I guess, but when will it stop? I don’t think I ever told you, but after we sank, the captain committed himself to a mental hospital. The ship’s doctor went home and didn’t come out of his house again. We went to see him, but he wouldn’t answer the phone or the doorbell. He never married, had no friends, saw no one. He lived the rest of his life as a recluse as far as I know. There were a number of officers and sailors who refused to ever go to sea again, some whose lives were ruined. They called it battle fatigue in those days, and the VA paid no attention to the victims. As soon as you looked normal again, they sent you back to war.”

  I went over to the stove and rubbed his shoulders. “Now I know why you hate the Oak Bluffs fireworks,” I said gently. “You should have told me. It must sound like the world is exploding in gunfire.”

  The garbage was gathering flies, but I ignored them. Since I convinced him he had PTSD around my breast cancer, since we had reconciled, he would bring it up, but only rarely. Now he was in a confessional mood, and I knew he was never finished talking about a subject until he was finished. I forced myself not to speak. To interrupt him would be to lose something priceless.

  “I had had too many near misses. When I came home from Okinawa, the navigator on the USS Lawe asked me to help him and I refused. I thought my luck had run out.” He liked his milk heated. I dipped my finger into the little pan, warm enough, and I put it in his coffee. He took a large sip.

  “For fifty years, I couldn’t remember the name of that ship I came home on. Fifty years!

  “When they let me off in Seattle, I was in a daze. The ship put me off in Seattle, and nobody met me, no parades, no welcome wagon hostesses. No cabs. No hotels. I had to lug a s
ixty-pound canvas seabag, which contained all my worldly belongings, up a steep hill to find one. There was nobody at all to help me.

  “After the judge’s crash, I was even more afraid my days were numbered … I know how the veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan must feel,” he added, leaning next to the stove. “Nobody ever appreciated what we did.”

  “I do. I appreciate what you did,” I said, stroking his hair. I was also in awe that he had continued to remember and discharge these psychic injuries, that he was essentially giving himself PTSD therapy. Perhaps it hadn’t eased his mind, stopped his nighttime terrors, but we both agreed that it had freed up something inside him.

  Every time he talked about his war experiences, he changed a little; he was able to let go of the reins he had held so tight. After that morning, for the second time in the last several years of our marriage, he seemed to put away his stern persona and extract some of the high spirits from his youth.

  It was as though a phantom captain had finally said, “At ease.” Gone was the iron set of his face; instead, it became vulnerable, full of a range of emotions. He could look hurt or confused or moved or goofy; his famous scowl took on an aspect of thoughtfulness rather than displeasure, and displeasure was often expressed by sheer goofiness. If I was supremely crabby, I would be subjected to “There was a little girl, / Who had a little curl / Right in the middle of her forehead. / When she was good, / She was very, very good, / But when she was bad she was horrid.”

  He seldom laughed at my jokes—I was the only one in the family who thought them funny—but now I had his full attention, and he chuckled easily. If I snapped at him about the inexorable creep of his papers across every table in my beautiful orderly home, instead of pretending he hadn’t heard me, he declared I had hurt his feelings.

  I had always assumed that the fulcrum of Bob’s life was his work; I had both respected and resented this. I never imagined that one day he would tell me that really it had always been me. And when he would choose the office over me, he would surprise me by apologizing. One night, after he had missed a speech I had made, I came home late and flopped into bed, only to feel something crinkling under my head. On the back of an envelope he had written, “It was bad of me not to come. I am sorry. I love you. I get frantic when I think of all the work undone at the office.”

  Once, we were examining the Macouns in the orchards as it began to get dark. He was more at peace with his war memories now, but I still had visions of his enduring the icy Mediterranean suffered afterwards. “You didn’t do what so many trauma victims did,” I said. “You didn’t go berserk or become a hermit or get cynical like some of the others on the Lansdale. You went on to live a normal life and function brilliantly. I suppose it’s because of the work you do, how important it is.”

  He stared at me, and in the dimming light his eyes were like blue crystal.

  “My work, yes, but mostly it’s been you,” he ran his finger down my cheek. “When have I had time to get discouraged?”

  * * *

  Sartorially, Bob didn’t need me anymore; his clothes looked neat and trim. The only problem was that he liked gray. It was so woven into the fabric of his being that in his eyes this overcast hue seemed to masquerade as every other color except itself.

  “Be sure and get a lively shade,” I would say before he reluctantly went shopping. “A nice deep blue. Maybe with a tiny little stripe.”

  He would come home with a big smile and a suit the color of lead.

  “You’ve bought gray again!” I’d cry.

  “No, it’s not. Look at the little red threads,” he’d reply defensively.

  “Oh, baloney. You look beautiful in blue or tweed or even charcoal, and instead you want to look like the inside of a pencil!”

  “I wouldn’t talk,” he would say vaguely.

  That would stop me. For years, a line of buddies had tried to teach me how to dress, but I still didn’t get it. I’d put on a stylishly ragged sweater, whimsical earrings, and masses of bright beads and hop happily off to a fancy cocktail party. Perhaps that accounted for his conspicuously neutral attitude toward what I wore.

  Nevertheless, when we caught sight of ourselves in the mirror, we would still laugh: Mutt and Jeff, the Bohemian and the Old Bear. Physical opposites; moral comrades. With our radically different ages and styles, people still asked if I was his daughter, and each time it would startle us. We might as well have sprung from some dimension of No Time; we had no sense that we came from different generations. We were thoroughly compatible; we thought the same way. We both had either great sympathy with certain people or no sympathy at all; we liked and disliked similar types of movies, restaurants, parties—and these days even politics. Bob might dress like a banker, he might be conservative about the Middle East, but with his passionate stand against the death penalty, his promotion of women, his giving of himself to the underprivileged, his dozens of radical prosecutorial decisions, he was as soundly antiestablishment as I was. We represented the perfect meld.

  * * *

  As I was finishing up my book, Bob was trying to change a law he loathed—the state’s five-year statute of limitations on rape. “Murder, arson, kidnapping, and major drug dealing all have no statute of limitations,” he would say. “Rape is as serious as murder because the psychological damage is so severe; the woman can never lead a normal life.”

  Bob felt so strongly about this that he repeatedly warned me not to go into the park at night. “That’s when it happens,” he would say. “That’s when they’ll get you.”

  When he first came into office, one of the first people he saw was an articulate rape victim who said she had not only been forced to reveal the details of her past sex life but been pushed around and forced to relive the attack again and again; she had been questioned first by two sets of detectives and then by two ADAs. This was because the Indictment Bureau, which had its files in an old kitchen, had mislaid the first indictment, necessitating another ADA to go through the process all over again. This inspired Bob to make his first big change in the office: vertical prosecution. To an uproar of criticism, he abolished the Indictment Bureau and the Homicide Bureau. A crime, according to his new system, would be handled by one ADA from start to finish rather than passed from one bureau to another, each of which handled a separate phase of the prosecution.

  Thirty years later Bob began lobbying the legislature to remove the five-year statute by making it a class A felony, but the Defense Bar—its members often defended rapists—was a powerful lobby opposing it. The state senate and the governor had eventually been convinced of the need to change the rape law, but the one holdout was the influential Speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, a practicing lawyer himself.

  Bob asked for a meeting with Silver. He brought back that first rape victim, who had moved to California, to accompany him. The woman told the assembly Speaker the poignant story of her rape, and Bob, who had been backed by feminists and other DAs, argued that the new DNA “footprints” stored in computers could indisputably convict a rapist after the five years had run out. Silver was finally convinced.

  In May 2006, flanked by Bob, Silver announced a new law that would make rape a class A felony, wiping out the statute of limitations. Bob considered it one of the biggest victories of his career. But when he stood beside Silver, looking somber, I knew he was thinking about all the women who had suffered rape before and the ones who would be raped in the future. At least they would no longer be haunted by visions of their attackers running free, raping others.

  * * *

  Another crime that incensed Bob was elder abuse. He once got a call from Annette de la Renta, wife of the fashion designer, who emotionally recounted that Brooke Astor was being abused and tormented by her son, Tony Marshall.

  We had both met Mrs. Astor, the charming matriarch of high society and philanthropy, before she developed Alzheimer’s disease. When I was president of the first Writers Room, she made a generous donation, even though the organizat
ion was young and unproven.

  Annette, a striking and distinctly ethical woman who had become like a daughter to Mrs. Astor, told Bob that looking good, wearing the latest couture, was Brooke Astor’s passion. However, Tony falsely told her she couldn’t afford new clothes. “Meanwhile,” Bob said with disgust, “he apparently removed one of her favorite paintings, a valuable and historic Childe Hassam. Annette said that when she had last visited her, she was very unhappy. She was lying on the couch in a puddle of urine.”

  As bad as the abuse sounded, Bob had to weigh whether to investigate it. Prosecutors were generally reluctant to handle family disputes involving the treatment of the elderly. It was messy and hard to prove who was actually the one who committed a crime.

  “What would you do?” Bob asked me.

  “Go after him,” I replied strongly. It was particularly execrable to me when children turned on their parents. “If the accusations are proven,” I said, “it could set a standard and stop prosecutors from looking the other way when the old and helpless are being victimized.” He agreed.

  During the succeeding days, I talked a bit too much about the horrors of elder abuse: the sadism that went on in nursing homes, how we took the old out of their own homes and warehoused them with people who sometimes feel only contempt for them. I finally realized that my screeds weren’t designed to persuade my husband to take the case; he had already made up his mind. What I was trying to do was personal: to reassure him that this would never happen to him. I would always love him and be by his side, no matter his age or his condition.

  In 2009 Tony Marshall, eighty-five, and his lawyer, Francis X. Morrissey, were convicted of defrauding Mrs. Astor, then 104, of millions of dollars and valuable property, including paintings by Tiepolo and John Frederick Lewis. During the nineteen-month trial, the prosecution had thousands of exhibits and seventy-two witnesses, including the butler, the housekeeper, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and Barbara Walters, who testified about her mistreatment. Marshall and Morrissey were sentenced to state prison for one to three years. They appealed, but the conviction was affirmed by the appellate division of the supreme court.