David parked near the unassuming stone and wood buildings. Jack toddled down the gravel path ahead toward the chapel. I heard music, the strumming of a guitar. I had mastered a few of the monks’ songs on my own guitar in high school.
I didn’t recognize the song the monks were playing as we approached the post-and-beam chapel beside a small stand of white birch trees. They were seated in a semicircle, dressed in simple tunics and slacks. I stood in the sunshine, among the pots of mums and bundles of hay decorating the entrance. I closed my eyes. I tried to pray. “Dear God,” I began, wiping away the sudden tears. “Please . . .”
I stopped. “Please” what? What is the point of a God who couldn’t, or worse, wouldn’t, stop 9/11?
The monks continued to sing.
I turned away.
Tough Questions About Massport
What, exactly, is a hack? Does Virginia Buckingham, the executive director of the Massachusetts Port Authority, qualify as one? The answer is relevant but not conclusive to the debate that is raging in Massachusetts in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 hijackings out of Logan Airport. In its most simplistic form, the controversy is framed like this: Do hacks run the Massachusetts Port Authority? Are they somehow responsible for the terrible events that began at Logan and ended in those deadly explosions in New York City? Would their firing produce a better, safer airport?
—Boston Globe, October 18, 2001
October 19, 2001, 6:00 p.m.—Logan Office Center
Dems Rip Gov on Massport Patronage, Logan Woes
—Boston Herald, October 19, 2001
I sat at my desk going through phone messages I hadn’t had a chance to return. The TV was turned on. I could hear the anchor of the local evening news but I wasn’t watching it.
“Massport Director Virginia Buckingham”—the mention of my name caused me to look up—“is three months pregnant.”
The “news” that I was pregnant—barely five weeks along when the planes struck the towers—broke in the Herald that morning. The reporter had called Jose the night before and asked for confirmation. I hadn’t told anyone about the baby except family and close friends, but as I reached the end of the first trimester, I thought it was appropriate to let the governor and her staff know through a third party. The Herald story cited an unnamed State House source.
Gov: Pregnancy Won’t Affect Buckingham Decision
—Boston Herald, October 20, 2001
Since the hijackings, I’d tried not to think about the baby during the day. But late at night, before I went to sleep, I’d read through the pregnancy handbook I kept by the side of my bed. The pages on miscarriages were dog-eared. I didn’t know if stress could cause the baby harm. “Headache. Numbness. Baby movement.” I jotted notes of symptoms to tell my doctor. I didn’t remember from my pregnancy with Jack what was normal.
A week or so earlier, I’d lain on the examining table as my doctor inserted the long needle required for the amniocentesis test. I’d had one with Jack also. That first time, I was consumed with anxiety over the possibility of miscarrying him, a risk of the procedure. This time, as the long needle was withdrawn, I could see the same worry in David’s eyes. I knew I could never admit to him the thought I tried to push from my mind: If I lose the baby, maybe I deserve to.
Pregnancy Is No Excuse for Ginny’s Fiascos
—Boston Herald, October 21, 2001
October 23, 2001—State House, Boston, Joint Committee on Transportation hearing
I’d been called before a legislative committee to testify about Logan security. The small hearing room was packed. Legislators were arrayed behind a horseshoe-shaped wooden table. Newspaper photographers sat in front of me on the floor, aiming their cameras at my face. TV crews lined the side of the hearing room. Still more reporters piled tape recorders on the table.
“Those were our planes up there, and our people,” I began, reading my prepared statement before taking questions. I was wearing on my lapel the American flag ribbon given to me by a Massport firefighter despite the fact that I had been ridiculed in a recent newspaper column for wearing it “like a shield.”
The Democratic Senate chairman of the committee, Robert Havern, was the second questioner. I didn’t know him personally, only in the context of his legislative role. “When was the last time you spoke to the governor?” he asked.
I tried to be vague. “I haven’t spoken to her at length for a while,” I answered.
“The marks on your back and on Joe Lawless’s back are clothespin marks, because you’ve been hung out to dry,” Havern said in disgust.
As the intense questioning continued from the rest of the panel, I unconsciously slipped one hand onto the side of my stomach. It was rare to feel a baby’s movement so early. But the flutter, the twitch in my left side, was unmistakable.
The baby is moving! Oh my God, she’s okay. I didn’t know for sure that I was carrying a girl but I thought so. I hoped so. For the first time in many weeks, I no longer felt alone.
After the hearing ended, the media crowded around me in the hallway. Videographers jostled with one another to get the best angle. “Is it true the governor hasn’t spoken to you in weeks?”
“Do you agree with the chairman’s comment that she is hanging you out to dry?”
I was asked the same questions over and over again. I tried not to answer directly. I also didn’t say what I was really thinking: the senator’s comments had provided me an opening to resign before I was fired. I walked away from the gathered press feeling relief at the return of a small sense of control, like a car finally reaching dry pavement after trying to gain traction on a patch of black ice.
Month Long Silence Echoes Between Gov, Buckingham
—Boston Herald, October 24, 2001
October 25, 2001, 4:00 p.m.—Logan Office Center
The large meeting room on the first floor was packed with reporters and Massport colleagues. I walked straight into the crowd of news photographers and TV videographers who parted as I moved into the room toward the podium. No one teaches you, I thought, randomly, that a crowd of photographers will move aside if you walk straight toward them, despite all instincts to stop and wait for a path to clear.
Do not cry, Ginny, do not cry, I admonished myself silently.
I looked straight ahead into the bank of TV cameras and read from my prepared statement.
“Six weeks ago, nineteen hijackers changed our lives forever,” I began.
“The fact that our airport was used in an unimaginable plot that killed thousands of innocent people is something I will carry in my mind and heart forever.”
Head of Agency That Runs Logan Airport Resigns
—CNN, October 27, 2001
Buckingham Resigns at Massport
Boston Globe, October 26, 2001
Swift under pressure as scapegoat resigns
—Boston Herald, October 26, 2001
November 7, 2001—Logan Office Center
I put the Herald down on my desk. “Jane Knew” was the blaring headline splashed across the front page, over Jane’s picture. I had negotiated a severance package with the Massport board after asking an intermediary to get Jane’s signoff on the general financial scope. When the deal became public, igniting another media controversy, Jane denied she knew about it in advance. She called on the Massport board to rescind part of it.
“Doesn’t Ginny care about her reputation?” my intermediary was asked by one of Jane’s aides, as the media controversy got hotter.
“Her reputation?” the intermediary asked, amazed at the question. “She’s basically been called a murderer in the media for the last six weeks.”
I winced when he repeated the story to me.
Murderer?
Is that how I will be thought of? Is that what I am?
I agreed to reduce the amount of the severance.
Murderer?
November 8, 2001—Logan Office Center
As I packed up the rest of my boxes, my assistant Julie told me Jim Coull, a longtime Massport board member, was on the phone.
“Why aren’t you staying until the fifteenth,” he asked, “as you’d planned?”
I held the phone loosely against my ear and considered my answer to why I was leaving a week earlier than I’d announced. I could still see the huge green dry dock out my window. Despite our efforts to relocate it, it sat there, immovable.
Some obstacles were simply too big to overcome.
“I just want to go home,” I finally answered.
As I pulled out of the parking garage a lone TV camera and reporter were waiting for me. David Muir, who later would serve as ABC’s national news anchor, called out to me. I backed the car up and rolled down the window. I answered his first question as Jose and I had planned. I was leaving to give Jane the flexibility she needed. “What’s next for you?” Muir asked. The question surprised me. I didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know. I’m sure good things.”
As I drove out of Logan I turned into the tunnel toward the city instead of my usual route north. Jack and David were waiting at his parents’ apartment, where we planned to stay for a couple of days. Even though the State Police had assigned an unmarked cruiser to sit in front of my house, we felt it was safer for us, especially Jack, not to be at home given the continuing intense media coverage. I clutched the steering wheel with both hands to keep the car under control as I wept so hard my whole body shook.
The ball of fire.
The black smoke.
Bodies falling.
“What’s next for you?”
Chapter Seven
Haunted
January 2002—Watertown, Connecticut
I could hear Jack’s even breathing as he napped in the crib nearby. The sky-blue walls in my childhood room were pocked with tiny holes, remnants of the posters I’d tacked up as a teenager.
There was one still hanging on the wall near the window. It was the poem “Desiderata.” I didn’t remember where I’d gotten it or why it hadn’t been discarded or packed away with all my other things. “Go placidly amid the noise and haste. And remember what peace there may be in silence,” I read.
“Peace.” I’d brought Jack here to my parents’ house for a few days with the hope of finding peace, making peace with what had happened.
Besides the one poster, there was little else still left in the room I had last lived in more than twenty years earlier. I wonder what happened to all my collections? I thought to myself. The Madame Alexander dolls and favorite books must be packed away in one of these closets.
I’d looked for them before, without success, when I’d come home on other visits. My mother insisted I took them with me after college. I insisted they were here somewhere. “What about the shells, Mom? Have you seen those anywhere?”
I’d kept my modest shell collection in four glass bottles partially filled with sand, topped with cork stoppers. I’d gathered the shells and sand each summer at the beach in Rhode Island. In the winter, I used to lie on this same bed, turning the bottles this way and that to see what shells would emerge from the sand.
Jack cried out a little in his sleep, and I could see his hand was stuck between the pad that was tied around the edge of the crib and the mattress. I gently moved it and re-covered him with a blanket as I picked up Special Doggie off the floor where it had fallen. “Sorry, doggie,” I said softly as I kissed the top of the furry stuffed animal’s head and placed it next to Jack.
I shook my head and smiled a little as I lay back down. I may have lost the belief but not the childhood habit of worrying stuffed animals and other inanimate objects had feelings and could be hurt.
That’s the thing about the shells I collected, I now remembered. They weren’t all especially beautiful. As I walked along the shore, eyes downcast, I’d see one and reach for it. From a distance, it looked unique—an unusual shape or patch of color. Yet, when I stood back up and took a closer look at the treasure in my hand, I’d discover it was broken or just not particularly pretty or different. But when I moved to toss it back down onto the sand, most of the time I found I couldn’t. It was silly, I knew even then, but I didn’t want to hurt the shell.
Jack was stirring. I knew he’d be a little frightened when he woke up since he was in a strange room. I stood by the crib so he saw me when he opened his eyes.
“Two planes are off the radar.”
I used to fear I’d hurt a stuffed animal or a seashell. How could I possibly bear the idea that I’d hurt . . . thousands of people?
***
Later that morning, I made Jack a snack and took out a bag of wooden blocks to help him build a tower. My father watched from his recliner, laughing each time Jack knocked down the blocks and immediately demanded, “Again!”
“Do you mind if I take a walk, Dad? Can you watch him?”
“Sure,” he answered. “Be careful. Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, thanks,” I answered. Careful of what? I wondered.
My father had come up to stay with us a few weeks before I resigned. My dad’s Yankee reserve made him better suited to extending kind gestures like coming up to help with Jack—or offering to go with me on a walk—than knowing the right thing to say.
“They rough on you today?” he asked one night when I got home late, referring to the media.
“Not too bad,” I answered. I turned away so he couldn’t read my expression. I, too, had inherited my family’s habit of not expressing what I felt.
Now the snow was coming down gently, little wisps blowing across the driveway.
I reached the bottom and paused. The neighborhood of small Cape Cod–style and colonial houses built in an old apple orchard looked the same, I thought, looking around. Maybe a tree or two was missing. The rest, in my parents’ yard at least, were still standing, bare except for the coating of snow clinging to gnarled branches.
My brothers’ basketball hoop was gone, but there, in the neighbor’s front yard, was the rock—was it always that small?—that had been our pirate ship one day, a deserted island the next.
I kept one gloved hand on my now-protruding belly and decided to follow the route I had taken with my best girlfriend, Kathleen, every afternoon to walk her dog.
The green wooden bus shed was gone. The woods behind it had been developed into a new neighborhood of houses. I smiled as I remembered the Saturday morning when Kathleen and I had taken buckets of water and washed the shed’s walls. An elderly neighbor stopped her car and rolled down the window. “What nice girls you are!” she exclaimed. Kathleen and I looked at each other guiltily and glanced over at the bags full of chalk that we’d brought.
“Thanks,” we answered.
When the sun dried the back panels of the shed, we covered every inch with every swear word we knew. One, in particular, took up a good bit of space. I have no idea where we, two parochial-school girls, had learned it: cocksuckerfuckermothertwoballedbitch.
One long word. We even said it with a singsong giggle as we wrote it across the shed’s back wall.
As I walked by the site of the shed, I knew I was still too embarrassed to tell anyone, even David, that it was this childhood memory that popped into my head as I walked into the packed resignation press conference. Cocksuckerfuckermothertwoballedbitch. I repeated it to myself a few times before speaking. It’s what stopped me from crying in front of the cameras. Why did it come to mind then? I didn’t know. Maybe it reminded me that at one point in my life saying that word and writing it on the shed was the worst thing I had ever done.
I turned up East Street, the steep hill that connected my street, Beach Avenue, to Longview. At the top, I stopped for a few seconds to catch my breath. From there, I could see vast stretches of my hometown arraye
d in the distance like a painting. The white steeple of the Congregational church, the sports fields of Taft School, the wooded hills beyond. It, too, looked the same as it always had.
It was me who had changed.
Susan Brophy, a childhood friend, used to live around the corner. Her parents still did. As I approached, I saw the same big monogrammed B adorning their property that had always been there.
“Susan Brophy’s husband was killed in the towers.”
I suddenly remembered my mother calling and telling me about Susan’s terrible loss while I still worked at Logan. They’d been married just a year. They lived in Manhattan. “So sad,” my mother had said.
The second plane, the explosion.
Which tower? I can’t stop the question from coming into my mind now. Which floor?
The ball of fire.
Stop.
Before I got to her driveway, I panicked. I can’t walk by here! What if they recognize me? What if Susan is staying with her parents? What would I say? What would she say to me?
I took quick, shallow breaths.
I could hear Susan’s voice in my head. Why? Why did you let it happen?
And, then, strangely, it felt as if the soul of her husband was on the street with me. A shadowy, pained presence. Why did you let me die?
Shivering, I tightened my coat around me and pulled my hat low. I turned and walked hurriedly back the way I’d come. Despite my unsure footing on the slippery pavement, I looked back and then began to run.
I didn’t stop until I was at the foot of my parents’ yard. Panting with exertion, I looked up toward their backyard. I saw the old apple tree where I’d sit for hours, a shy, excessively serious girl, and write poems in my journal. Just beyond it was the spot where my mother would pose us for pictures when the trees were in bloom. I had just looked at one the day before in an old album I’d found in my room. I was wearing my white Communion dress and veil. My palms were pressed together, fingers straight. I had practiced for hours to do it just as the nuns had taught me. Perfectly.
On My Watch Page 10