TWENTY-TWO
Aftermath
The funeral for Kazushige Ito, a thirty-five-year-old planning specialist at Fuji Bank, took place in that famously afflicted city, Hiroshima, Japan, on March 9, 2002, six months after Ito died in the south tower of the World Trade Center. Ito’s father, Tsugio Ito, spoke at the ceremony, and there must have been an added measure of sadness for him, if it is possible for anything to add to the sadness of attending the funeral of a son without a body to put to rest. In the usual Buddhist ceremony of Japan, relatives meet in the crematorium and they use chopsticks to pick the cremated bones out of the ash and pass them from person to person. But this was the second time in Tsugio Ito’s life when a funeral was held without the body being placed on an altar so that the sutras can be intoned by the priest, and without incense being sprinkled on the smoldering remains. The older Ito’s older brother, the uncle that Kazushige never met, died many years ago at another ground zero. He was vaporized when the atomic bomb was dropped there on August 6, 1945. In both cases the grief of the Ito family was intensified by the deaths of young men in events so cataclysmic they left behind no trace of the deceased.
“What happened in Hiroshima and in the terrorism [in New York] is the same because there are many people who can’t recover one tooth or one nail,” Ito told a Japanese reporter.1
Kazushige Ito was a music lover who used to go to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York twenty times in a season. He was also a marathoner who finished the New York City event in four hours eighteen minutes in 2000 and was jogging every day in Central Park to get ready for the Philadelphia Marathon, which he planned to run in November. His goal was to break the four-hour mark, and his wife, Yuko, said she believed he would have done it. He would have turned thirty-six the day after the Philadelphia Marathon, if he had lived. If he had lived, he would probably have settled permanently in New York, a city both he and Yuko loved.
But he didn’t live. He was probably one of those killed when flight 175 plowed into the south tower at 9:02 on September 11, since Fuji Bank was one of the unfortunate companies whose offices were at the immediate point of impact. Maybe Kazushige Ito was one of those who heeded the public address announcements ordering people not to evacuate the south tower after the north tower was hit and that is why he was sitting at his desk when Marwan al-Shehhi slammed the hijacked Boeing 767 into his office on the 81st floor, killing sixty-two Fuji Bank employees altogether. Stanley Praimnath, who walked out of the south tower with Brian Clark, did survive the crash on the 81st floor. He also worked at Fuji Bank, and he may have been the only person who was on the 81st floor who survived.
In any case, Kazushige Ito is dead, though his body was never recovered. His remains are still there at Ground Zero in New York in what became a common mass grave. His father visited the site in October, and he remembers feeling for the members of the rescue and cleanup crews who, he felt, were freezing in the late autumn weather. He remembers also going to the bathroom to weep privately over his loss. Eventually he gave up on finding Kazushige’s body, saying that everybody was doing the best they could. And in March, finally, a funeral service was held at which Ito addressed the spirit of his son directly:
“Please look after us from heaven,” he said. “And don’t worry. I’m thinking about making a new start today.”
* * *
It is worth remembering one of the videotapes of Osama bin Laden in which he expressed his considered opinion about the United States getting what it deserved on September 11. “Here is America struck by Almighty God in one of its vital organs so that its greatest buildings are destroyed,” he said. “America has been filled with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God.… God has used a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme place in heaven, for He is the only one capable and entitled to do so.”
One wonders what bin Laden would say to Pauline del Carmen Cardona, four months pregnant, who was literally in her doctor’s office having a sonogram when her husband, Jose, a clerk at Carr Futures, was killed in the south tower of the World Trade Center. The couple had tried three times to have a baby and had had three failed pregancies before this one that seemed likely to succeed.
“I feel him kicking and I feel happy and then I feel sad,” Mrs. Cardona, who is thirty-three years old, said. “When I feel too sad, I pray to God, ‘Make me strong like a rock so my baby is not affected.’ But sometimes I can’t help it. I cry a lot in the shower, while the water is running.”
Nobody knows exactly how many wives were pregnant when their husbands were killed on September 11, but the number is high. At the bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, at least fifty pregnant women lost their husbands. The median age of the men killed in the attacks was thirty-five to thirty-nine, the main child-producing years, and many of their wives were pregnant.
Sonia Morron, forty-one, was three months pregnant when her husband, Jorge, a security guard, was killed. She said afterward that the baby inside of her was the only bright spot in her life and she was more than ever anxious to have it. But after September 11, she had panic attacks and nightmares that left her trembling and drenched in sweat.
“I would tell my baby, ‘Daddy is not with us but you are. Don’t go, you’re the best thing I have.’”
On October 4, Mrs. Morron had a miscarriage.
“It felt like another tower fell on me,” she said. She held a joint memorial service for her husband and the baby and she visits both of them at their tomb. “In that little piece of human being is my husband,” she said.
Soon after September 11, a Twin Towers Orphan Fund was created to help children who lost a parent. As of April 2002, 746 such children were registered with the new charity, 446 of whom were ten years old or less. There were no reports of any children losing both of their parents, but there were forty to fifty who lived in single-parent households and have now been left with no parent at all.
* * *
Most of the dead were never found and never will be, which is one of the matters that makes the redevelopment of the Trade Center site in lower Manhattan so delicate a matter. It is hallowed ground and it is a commercial site. And, as always in matters of disaster, September 11 was followed by a debate about practical matters, legal disputes between the leaseholder and the consortium that insured the towers—for $3.5 billion or $7 billion, depending on whether the attack is considered a single event or two separate events. There were arguments about an appropriate memorial to the dead; there were demonstrations by firefighters who scuffled with police after Mayor Guiliani, one of the heroes of the day, decided in late October that the search for remains would have to end and the cleanup begin. An enormous outpouring of generosity followed the disaster, with donations pouring by the millions into the coffers of charities and relief organizations, but even that brought its dark side as quarrels erupted over when the money would be distributed, and how much. And then, of course, in the days right after the tragedy, the United States went on a war footing with President Bush warning the governments that had harbored terrorists, most notably the Taliban government of Afghanistan, that they would be treated as terrorists themselves.
* * *
In New York the mourning went on, and so did the many private struggles of the bereaved to come to accept the bitter fact, as Tsugio Ito was forced to do, that their missing loved ones were not going to turn up alive. By the first week of October, only 321 remains had been identified of the thousands who were missing. Mayor Giuliani himself went to the city morgue to identify the remains of Terence S. Hatton, a fire captain who was married to a longtime mayoral aide. A team of people, police officers, Fire Department battalion chiefs, clergymen, and others, were enlisted to go to the homes of the identified victims to give the news that a body had been found directly and in person. Members of some three thousand families gave DNA samples, toothbrushes, razors, even lip balm used by victims, and saliva swabs from the victim’s relatives, to help in the work of identification, with DNA collection kits sent away to places like Germany and Guatemala where some of the bereaved families lived. And whenever a match was made—sometimes from nothing more than a fragment of bone found in the debris—there would be that visit to a family informing them that something had been found proving their loved one’s decease, and at least the suspense and anguish of waiting would be over.
Inevitably this process entailed some heartbreaking bureaucratic formalities. Families were required to fill out forms in which they specified what they wanted to do if additional tissue samples of a loved one were found. There were two choices: they could be notified or they could have the sample disposed of by the authorities. Exactly how the disposal of what the printed form did not call body parts was to be done was not specified.
“When you get that knock on the door, it’s the big one,” said Michael Meehan, a New York City detective whose brother, Damian Meehan, a trader at Carr Futures, was among those whose bodies were identified in the wreckage.
After six months, a set of grisly statistics were announced in the cool language of bureaucracy. To that date, 18,937 body parts and 287 whole bodies had been found in the rubble, and 972 identifications had been made—which meant that there was no trace yet of 1,852 victims. Only two of the sixty-five people (not including the hijackers) aboard flight 175 were identified, which is no doubt an index of the incinerating heat that accompanied their deaths. By contrast, 182 of the firemen, who wore protective gear, have been identified, out of the total of 343 dead. But almost all of the remains were burned or mangled beyond recognition. The identities of only ten victims were confirmed by visual identification alone. All the rest were done through dental records, fingerprints, and, above all, by DNA testing.
Families faced heartbreaking choices that sometimes even the most well-designed bureaucratic procedures could only make worse. Do you bury a part of a body and hold a funeral, or do you wait in the hopes that more of the body will be found? What if you have a funeral without a body and then the medical examiner calls to tell you months later that a body was found? Do you have another funeral, or just a burial or a cremation? If only part of a body is found, do you bury it in a full-sized coffin or in some smaller container? And, if you have buried what was initially found of a body and more is found later, do you disinter the original remains and rebury them with the newly found parts? And if your loved one is found mangled almost beyond recognition, or if you are only burying parts of a body, do you view the remains? Painful as it sounds, many counselors recommended that the remains be viewed on the grounds that it might help in accepting the tragedy that had occurred, in providing what is commonly called closure.
Beata Boyarski, twenty-five, whose thirty-four-year-old brother Gennady Boyarski’s body was found in the rubble, called the medical examiner in an effort to be sure that the body had not been misidentified. In her grief she entertained the suspicion that the city might just be trying to get rid of bodies without worrying excessively about who they belonged to.
“Tell me like it is,” she said to the medical examiner, whom she managed to get on the phone. The body was horribly mangled, the medical examiner told her, and only about three-quarters of it had been found, along with a wedding ring and a wallet. The identification was made from a driver’s license and the cause of death was given as “blunt impact,” which provided Ms. Boyarski with no information about how Gennady, who left behind a wife and a seven-year-old son, had died and where exactly and at what time. When Ms. Boyarski said that the family wanted DNA testing done just to be sure of the identification, she was told that that might take several months, so she went ahead with a burial, only to be told when it was already too late that the DNA testing could be done right away after all. If further remains were found, she said, “We would, I guess, bring him back up and include it.”
The family of Shimmy Biegeleisen, who failed to leave his 97th floor office in the south tower before flight 175 crashed into it, found themselves in the immediate aftermath of September 11 dealing with the complex laws governing the situation wherein a husband and father has died but there is no body. In the Jewish way of mourning, there can be no funeral without the body, and, in many situations, the family cannot properly even observe the standard weeklong mourning ritual, known as sitting shiva, when they sit on low benches and friends and family come to visit. The situation is particularly agonizing for the wife of a dead husband, because she is deemed to be an agunah, a woman who is still bound to a husband, even though the husband is absent. The laws stem from olden days when a man might disappear on a trip to some faraway place and there was no way of knowing what happened to him. There are women in agunah who have spent the rest of their lives waiting in the hope that he would return.
“To Miriam it was very hard,” Regina Biegeleisen, Shimmy’s mother, said. “To have to wait.”
Fortunately, though, several of the people who spoke to Shimmy when he was in the tower, and who heard his cry of “Oh God” in the last seconds of his life, testified before a rabbinical tribune, and the rabbis declared that there was no possibility that Biegeleisen was alive. Miriam and her five children were able to sit shiva, and to complete the process between the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many people came, including, one day, an entire busload of colleagues from Fiduciary Trust.
“By declaring it finished at that point, we were able to have an uninterrupted week,” Mrs. Biegeleisen said. “It was something that was important to his children, to me, and to his family.”
Right after that Shimmy’s parents gave DNA samples, and the family waited, hoping that Shimmy’s body would be recovered, since only then could a funeral and burial take place. In October, two thousand mourners heard several rabbis and friends of the Biegeleisens eulogize Shimmy at a memorial service held in the auditorium of the school his daughters attended. And then, the family waited over the months—October and November, December and January and February and March, without getting the news they were hoping for.
“One of the men he was in the office with was found at the beginning of October,” Miriam Biegeleisen said, “so I kept saying, ‘Why was he found and why not my husband?’ It didn’t make any sense to me. So at that point, I called up the medical examiner’s office, and somebody suggested I bring two of my children, so we would have a backup with the DNA.”
Miriam went with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Adeena, and Morde-chai, nineteen, her oldest son, to give additional samples, and she remembers thanking God that the children didn’t inquire too closely about the refrigerator trucks parked outside and what was inside them.
Then in April, on the second day of Passover, two policemen arrived to say that Shimmy’s body had been found. The funeral was held in Borough Park and Shimmy Biegeleisen was laid to rest at the Beit Dovid, the House of David, Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, where his grandfather and his great-grandfather are buried. Because it was in the month of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, when no lengthy funeral orations are supposed to be given, only a few words were spoken by the head of the Belzer community in Borough Park. Then Mordechai said the words of the psalm that Shimmy had recited over the phone in the last minutes of his life. It is the psalm that is recited in the synagogue service when the Torah is replaced in the Ark of the Covenant, and Mordechai felt it was appropriate. His father was, he felt, going back where he came from. It is the Twenty-fourth Psalm of David, and it ends:
Who is the King of glory?
The Lord of hosts,
He is the King of glory.
* * *
Susan Rescorla watched on television as the second tower crumbled into dust and she ran out of her house and into the street, and there she saw one of her neighbors, a woman whose husband was at a meeting on the 100th floor, do the same thing. It seems to have been a terror reflex, the impulse to get away from the television screen with its images of horror.
“From that moment on, for the whole day, and for the next week, we held vigil,” she said later. Despite her hopes, Rick didn’t come home that night, and he didn’t call, and she was, of course, fearful that the worst had happened, even as she wanted to cling to some hope that it hadn’t. “We did everything to find him,” she said of herself and her two daughters. “Unfortunately, because of the chaotic situation there was a lot of misinformation. Hospitals were saying that people were on a list when they weren’t. We got one report that somebody had seen him, but it must have been somebody who saw him inside the building. For one second we thought maybe he had gotten out, but he hadn’t. We hoped that maybe he was walking around someplace in a daze, and then, at the end of a week, we understood there was no hope.”
A month after September 11, the annual meeting of the Ia Drang veterans took place, with General Moore, about to be played by the actor Mel Gibson in the movie version of We Were Soldiers Once, in attendance. The whole group watched Robert Edwards’s eight-minute documentary film, in which Rescorla predicted that terrorism rather than conventional war would be the next major national security threat facing the country. Joe Galloway, coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once, was there.
“You were looking at your friend who is now gone, and listening to him talking about everything that has happened to him, predicting what was going to happen to the U.S. before it happened,” Galloway said. “The whole time we were watching the video, it was so emotional, so shocking. In a way it was a way of saying good-bye to him.”
* * *
When it became clear that Yeneneh Betru, a standby passenger on flight 77, had indeed gotten on the largely empty flight, his sister, Ruth, couldn’t get over her brother’s bad luck. “It was as if he won the lottery for his own death,” she said later, recalling the grief of Yeneneh’s mother at the loss of her oldest born.
“I knew my parents, who were then in Ethiopia, would worry when they heard the news about the plane hijackings,” Yeneneh’s brother Aron said. At first, he said, he spoke to them on the phone and tried to reassure them that everything was all right, but they insisted on getting the full story, on checking every one of their four children, all of them in America.
“At that time I got the confirmation that Yeneneh was on the same plane,” Aron said. “And I was crying in my car.… My mom went down the list inquiring about her children beginning with me. I told her that we were all OK,” Aron said, recalling his desperate effort to postpone the moment when he would have to tell the truth, as if by not saying it, he could prevent it from being true. “When she got to the last name, I just couldn’t say anything. And at that point, she started screaming on the phone. And that is how she knew her first child was dead.”
Yeneneh’s mother has had an especially hard time over the loss of her oldest son, and in the living room of the family home in Los Angeles, where once there were graduation photos of all four children, each of them wearing cap and gown, now there were eight photos of Yeneneh, put up after his death. In Ethiopia, more than a thousand people came to his funeral, held in Addis Ababa on November 12, including the country’s high priest, who performed the last rights. In December, the Addis Tribune, an English-language paper, ran a full-page feature on Yeneneh and on the dialysis project that had taken much of his time for three years.
Now the family, led by Aron, has arranged with a Swedish medical technology company, Gambro, to donate four new dialysis machines in return for a contract by which the new Ethiopian center will purchase its supplies from that company. Funds are being raised for a new water filtration system, required for the new machines. The World Foundation for Renal Care has agreed to train the nurses in dialysis. Yeneneh had planned to name the new center after his grandmother, but now it will be called the Dr. Yeneneh Betru Hemodialysis Unit, and that seems entirely appropriate given that Yeneneh, through the center, will be saving lives even after his own was lost.
* * *
The ceremonies for John Ogonowski showed how many lives he had touched. The Department of Agriculture international farming assistance program under which he had helped Cambodian immigrant farmers was renamed the John Ogonowski Farmer-to-Farmer program in special legislation signed by President Bush. About twenty-five hundred people came to the memorial mass for “John Deere Johnny” at the St. Francis Church in Dracut that looked over farm fields there. There were four hundred uniformed airline workers, many of whom never knew about his other lives, as a New England farmer and an environmentalist and a man who donated some of his own land so new arrivals to the United States could get started in agriculture. Some people, like John Panarelli, another airline pilot, drove from as far away as Georgia. Massachusetts senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry and Congressman Marty Meehan were there too, along with a dozen of his middle daughter Caroline’s school soccer team, and about thirty members of the Cambodian community of Lowell, Massachusetts, including some of those who had farmed vegetables on Ogonowski’s land.
“Imagine that,” his brother Jim said in his eulogy, “John helping victims of another terror.”
“It doesn’t get easier,” Theresa Ogonowski, John’s bereaved mother, said during the memorial service. “I just saw John tonight on TV and felt like he is coming home, but I know he is not. This will never have an end.”2
Peggy Ogonowski meanwhile has been saving the hundreds, the thousands, of letters and gifts that have arrived in the mail at White Gate Farm—American flags, quilts, a stained-glasss panel depicting a bald eagle, an alabaster eagle statue with wings arched in a swoop and talons extended, and numerous medals, cards, plaques, and letters. American Airlines, which published a color pamphlet honoring all of the crew of flight 11, gave her and her three daughters a model of a 767 jet mounted on slender pedestals that each has put in her room.
But as Peggy has gratefully accepted the gifts, which have accumulated on end tables, in frames on walls, in baskets and on the tops of dresser drawers, she has been asking herself how she wants to live the rest of her life.
“I don’t want it to be a museum,” she said of the house that John built on the farm where they lived.
But she plans to stay, city girl that she is. She held the wooden urn of World Trade Center ashes that was given to her by the City of New York, and she allowed that, again while grateful for the gesture, it doesn’t mean a lot to her, but the house does.
“I realize that I’m not the first woman who has lost a husband,” she said. As the spring of 2002 brought warmer weather, she has thought about putting a larger window into her bedroom to improve the view of the roadless eastern tract of her property. She wants to spend more time reading in the Adirondack chairs on the lawn. On the west side of the house, it was time to take down the storm-window paneling and to put up the screens on the three-season porch, which is shaded from the summer sun by apple trees. She thinks it’s time to have somebody tighten up the panels of the slate roof.
“Life is still good, even though we’ve lost him,” she said. “We don’t have to leave this house and we don’t have any plans to.”
* * *
On April 19, 2002, the FBI allowed the relatives of people killed on flight 93 into a large conference room in Princeton, New Jersey, so they could hear the plane’s cockpit voice recorder. For months the federal government had denied the families’ requests to do that, on the grounds that, first, the tape was confused and jumbled and didn’t hold any answers to the plane’s crash in Pennsylvania, and, second, that the tape would be used in evidence in the upcoming trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, and was therefore protected by judicial secrecy. But the families persisted, and they were invited to hear the tape, though they first had to sign a waiver promising not to sue the government in any matter connected to it. About a hundred people, according to one estimate, sat in the conference room. They listened to the tape on headsets installed at each seat, and they watched a written transcript on a large screen in front of them.
The family members’ comments on the tape confirmed earlier press reports about them. Shouts of “Get them, get them” could be heard, and so could somebody saying in Arabic, “They’re trying to get in.” An unidentified woman could be heard saying, “Oh God, Oh God.” But the basic questions—Did the passengers actually get into the cockpit? Did the struggle with the hijackers cause the plane to crash, or did the hijackers crash, or blow up, the plane intentionally?—were not resolved. And there were no answers about what role any given person played.
“I didn’t hear anything that indicated what my son had done,” Jerry Guadagno, the father of Richard Guadagno, said later. “There was really nothing there. I guess the big question mark still remains, and it always will.”
Lyz Glick went to the tape playing also, and she is convinced that it does prove the success of the passengers in breaking into the cabin. What else would all that shouting and commotion mean?, she wonders.
“But when it came to the last two minutes, which is just the sound of the wind in the cockpit, I stopped listening,” she said. “I started shaking. I’m glad I listened to it, but I knew how much I could listen.”
At least, she feels, she knows what happened to Jeremy, and she was connected to him in his final minutes, and she knows that, in its way, that was a rare privilege among the survivors of the victims of September 11.
“In a way it does make things a little easier,” she said. “So many people don’t know what happened, but I do know. I had the phone calls. I heard the black box.”
* * *
During those same weeks, after the tragedy and after she too had given up hope that her husband might still be alive, Migdalia Ramos, left now to care by herself for her two children, asked herself over and over a single terrible question: her husband, Harry Ramos, had died, she believed, because he refused to abandon a man he didn’t know and whom he had just met in a stairway of the north tower. Why, Mrs. Ramos wanted to know, did Harry put this stranger ahead of herself and their two girls?
He didn’t, of course, not really, and Mrs. Ramos understood that he didn’t one day at the end of September when she went with a group of relatives and in-laws and their children to empty an apartment where her recently deceased mother had lived. The apartment was on the 7th floor, and while the Ramos group was carting out boxes and furniture, a fire alarm sounded and Migdalia saw smoke billowing out of a hallway. First she ran down the stairs and then, when she found out that the fire department had not yet arrived, she thought of her mother’s elderly, nearly blind neighbor, and she realized that she was still upstairs and couldn’t get out by herself.
Migdalia ran upstairs and found the fire in the kitchen of an apartment upstairs where a woman her mother’s age was struggling to breathe through a scarf over her nose and mouth. Migdalia put out the fire, which she found in a toaster oven. Afterward, she remembered that when she was running up the stairs, she actually said to herself: “Harry, what am I doing?”
“The feelings I was having, it crossed my mind that he had had those same feelings,” she said later. “The fear. The anxiety. The heart palpitating. The adrenaline rushing.”
Mrs. Ramos’s sister-in-law suggested that maybe Harry himself was trying to tell her why he had stayed behind to help the stranger named Victor.
“I did the same thing Harry did,” Migdalia said later. “It took me to how he would be feeling. I realized that Harry did what he did because that was Harry’s nature.”
A while before that, Migdalia had gotten a call late one night from Rebecca Wald. Mrs. Wald said that she had read about Harry Ramos and she was sure that the man he had tried to help in the north tower was her husband, Victor Wald. Rebecca told Migdalia that she had two little girls; the Ramoses had two little boys. One of the Wald girls was named Alex and so was one of the Ramoses’ sons. The two women then met at a gathering of May Davis employees, hosted by the company’s cofounder, Owen May, at his home in New Jersey, and over the weeks they stayed in touch.
In the meantime, Harry was honored for his selflessness and courage. A scholarship in California, a golf tournament in Puerto Rico, and a bowling league in Newark were all named for him, and the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New Jersey was dedicated to his memory. While all that was happening, Rebecca Wald called to say that her husband’s body had been found. She would have a burial and a funeral, which she did. Victor’s remains were interred on November 23 on what would have been his fiftieth birthday.
For a while Migdalia Ramos hoped that, since Harry and Victor must have died side by side, the discovery of one meant that the discovery of the other would come as well.
“It would be closure to a certain extent,” she said. “When I go to my mother’s grave site, I pray for her, and I can talk to her. I can’t do that for Harry.”
Migdalia has not had an easy time of it. Henry Ramos, her brother-in-law, went to see her every day for a couple of hours to help her through. She wasn’t forgotten. She was invited to run a leg of the Olympic torch procession during the winter, and she did, holding it aloft from Queens to Manhattan. And while she now knows what went on in Harry’s mind, she still wonders about his decision to help Victor, which cost him his life. She’s thought about the moment on September 11, at 8:49, when Harry called her. He told her that something awful had happened but not to panic, he had to go. Barely awake, sleep-deprived from infant care and from the weeks when she had had to care for her mother, Migdalia was so groggy that she didn’t answer. She does remember that just before he hung up, she could hear him shouting and other people screaming in the background. She never talked to him again, and that phone conversation has been one of those events that come in life that you wish you could somehow pull back and do over. What, she has wondered, if she had screamed at Harry to get out of the building as fast as he could?
Would it have made a difference? Probably not, because Harry didn’t know that the tower was in danger of collapsing, and, anyway, he was constitutionally unable to turn away from a person in distress right there in front of him. And Victor was calling for his help.
As of April 2002, eight months after September 11, Harry’s body had not been found.
* * *
Meanwhile, Rebecca Wald was considering her husband Victor’s fascination with mystical interpretations of things in Judaism. She’s remembered a vision she had a few weeks before September 11. One night, she awoke to find something hovering in the air above her, a man, part flesh, part skeleton, with a cloak the color of the gold beads on the Mikasa pear in her coffee table centerpiece. She knew it meant something and she now believes that it was a premonition of Victor’s death.
Victor died on the 36th floor of the south tower, and the number 36, in the kabbalistic numerology known as the gematriya, is the equivalent of a double “chai,” the Hebrew word for life, and it also corresponds to the number of the passage in Exodus when Moses said good-bye to the children of Israel, who were going to the Promised Land while he stayed behind. She wonders if, in his way, Victor didn’t plan this kind of death, with its Mosaic correspondences, knowing that it would be a way of being erased, honorably, from the world.
* * *
Like many people, Brian Clark went to a lot of funerals after September 11. He went to the funeral of Bobbie Coll, whom he last saw walking up the stairs, the wrong direction, helping the heavy woman who had told them they couldn’t go down. He went to the funeral of Jose Marreno, the man who he saw on the 68th floor and who walked back upstairs to help a colleague. In the week right after the disaster, he spent a lot of time answering the phone calls of people who were still hoping that their missing relatives might yet be alive. They asked him if he had seen them, and if he had spoken to them, and whether he thought they might have made it out safely.
“I couldn’t help them, but I would tell them that they had to remain hopeful,” he said. “I didn’t want to dash their hopes but you had to be realistic as well.”
Very few, if any, people whose relatives were missing in the hours after the attack turned up alive in hospitals later. After a week or so, like Susan Rescorla, most relatives realized that there was no hope.
Clark himself got a new job at Euro Brokers. He became president of the Euro Brokers Relief Fund, Inc., whose purpose is to raise money to help the families of the sixty-one Euro Brokers employees who died. About eight months after September 11, he had raised about $3 million. More than $1 million came in from a Charity Day that the company announced, a day on which 100 percent of the revenues—revenues, not profits—went into the fund, a total of about $1.2 million. Other money came from donations, including donations from both Euro Brokers customers and competitors.
“It’s sort of an endless process,” Clark said. “There are children who will have needs going into the future, medical insurance needs, education needs, whatever they are.”
While friends and relatives of the victims mourned and faced the future, the cleanup at Ground Zero continued, and the authorities set up a viewing stand on the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway where people could go to look at the scene. You had to get a ticket at the South Street Seaport and you walked up a ramp—the ancient, sycamore-shaded graveyard of St. Paul’s Church was on the right—to the platform itself, where you had the right to a half hour on the stand itself before a man in a blue jacket with the inscription “NYPD Community Affairs” politely urged you to leave.
By April, the mountain of debris had essentially disappeared, carted away truckload by truckload and sifted for human remains. Standing on the viewing stand, which looked east to west, you could see the foundations of the towers, surrounded on one side by the largely unscathed World Financial Center buildings across West Street, and several other skyscrapers still draped in netting. It no longer looked like a disaster site; it looked like a construction site, with all those rows of sheds you see in such places on the street level alongside an immense excavated rectangle.
Near the entrance ramp, visitors by the thousands had left small mementos—fire department hats from across the country, T-shirts, banners, pictures of victims, prayers scrawled on squares of cloth or on the plywood sheets that served as partitions for the viewing stand. Most of all, people just wrote their names, tens of thousands of them, and the places they had come from, or they left a little message: “Arkansas prays for you,” or “The Smiths are so soorry,” with sorry spelled incorrectly, or “God Bless All of You,” or “Aspire and Persevere.” There were some obscenities as well, directed mostly at Osama bin Laden. There was what looked a bit like corporate sponsorship: “Southwest Airlines Loves NYC.”
On the exit ramp was a large plaque, hung on a plywood partition, with the names of many of the victims, those who had died on flights 11 and 175 and those who had died in the north and south towers inscribed alphabetically. The framed plaque was festooned with flags, with roses, rosary beads, and pictures of victims. Nearby was a poster saying, “Imagine—a Department of Peace.” The spire of St. John’s Church, converted into a hospitality room reserved for rescue workers, soared above. On the plaque, which ran for perhaps thirty feet, was an inscription, the final sentence of the letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote to Mrs. Bixby of Massachusetts who lost her five sons, all she had, on the battlefields of the Civil War. Lincoln’s letter was written for a very different circumstance, and yet, in its lean elegance, it seemed entirely suitable to soothe the afflicted spirits of those whose loved ones were taken from them on September 11:
“I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only with the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”