“Go home tonight and write God a letter,” she urged. “Just see what might come of it.”
Our friends’ son Jordan took his place next to the rabbi as the Torah was placed in front of him.
On the ride home from the appointment with Andrea, I thought about her suggestion. There was a chill in the damp air. A light rain had begun falling. I realized I was shaking, not with cold but with anger. The feeling made me uneasy. Who was I to be angry at God?
David squeezed my hand and said he was getting up to help his father, Marvin, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, join the rabbi and do an honorary prayer, called an aliyah. I nodded, still lost in thought.
Where was God on 9/11? I asked myself, maneuvering through the traffic as I neared home. Did He just stand by and watch as the hijackers boarded the planes?
It started to rain harder. I turned the windshield wipers to the next setting. My fury seemed to rise in concert with their increased tempo. Did He choose to do nothing while the pilots’ throats were slashed? While people jumped from the towers rather than burn to death?
With a bitter shake of my head, I knew exactly what I would write in my letter. Four words. My response to the falsehood, “turn to me and be saved.” My answer to the lies, “be not afraid” and that He’d carry me “on eagle’s wings.”
No. He. Will. Not. I wanted to scream it out loud.
“Dear God,” I would write. “Fuck You.”
***
David sat back down next to me and drew my attention back to the front of the temple. “Jordan looks great,” he whispered as our friends’ son began to read his Torah portion from the—altar?—I knew that wasn’t right but I didn’t know what to call it.
When Jordan finished, the rabbi stepped down from the bimah—that’s what David said the raised platform was called, in a whispered answer to my question—and began telling the congregation the story of God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. “Abraham challenged God,” he said. “He urged God to stop.” The rabbi moved toward the group of Jordan’s Hebrew-school classmates. “What do you think Abraham is doing?”
A student ventured an answer. Then the rabbi provided his:
“Perhaps,” he said, “Abraham was trying to teach God. Perhaps, we not only learn from God but also God learns from us.”
The rabbi suggested, “God is evolving. Abraham is trying to teach God that if He is looking for perfection, for justice, he will never find it in flawed human beings. He will never find it on earth.”
I looked up at the pitched roof above me, the wooden crossbeams providing an illusion of support, and then glanced at the stained glass window behind the bimah, so reminiscent of a church. David could sense my disquiet, and he leaned over. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I might be,” I answered and finished the thought silently. I might be if this turns out to be true: on 9/11, maybe God cried, too.
Chapter Nineteen
A Warning
March 2004—Singer Island, Florida
The sun and the sand wrapped themselves around us. Carrying pails and shovels, chairs and blankets, juice boxes and snacks down to the beach each day was a gift, a needed respite.
It was far too windy for an umbrella. I securely tied a sun hat underneath Maddy’s chin and settled Jack’s baseball cap more tightly on his head. We sat as close to the water’s edge as the tide allowed. David got to work helping them dig a big hole to fill with buckets of water.
There was a yellow flag flying at the public beach a little to the right. I tried to remember what each color meant from a sign I’d seen that morning posted by the Juno Beach Park fishing pier. Purple for marine life in the water. Red for no swimming. Yellow for? Caution. “That’s what the yellow flag means,” I told David. This beach was prone to riptides and each time Jack or Maddy moved to the water’s edge to fill their buckets, David followed them. He wouldn’t let them venture beyond their ankles in the roiling surf.
I was struck by David’s seriousness as he stood guard over them. Jack built walls of sand and Maddy promptly smacked them down with her shovel. I noticed David’s hands loose by his sides, his knees bent. He was at the ready should a wave sweep up and threaten them. Caution, the yellow flag meant. We had been warned.
***
I liked vacationing with my parents, except for the TV. It was on constantly. If my mother wasn’t insisting on watching “Wheel,” as she called the game show Wheel of Fortune, then it was Jeopardy with Alex Trebek. Occasionally, I’d try to join her, yelling out the answers, doing best in categories having to do with current events or literature, almost always forgetting to phrase my answer in the form of a question. Most evenings, though, David and I sat on the balcony with the sliding glass door closed after putting the kids to bed, trying to block out the noise and read our books.
Once the game shows were over, it was Dad’s turn and he immediately switched the channel to Fox and The O’Reilly Factor. The host’s voice carried through the glass door.
Giving up any hope for peace and quiet, I went inside to sit with my father. I immediately regretted it. The show was about 9/11 and the presidential campaign. No matter where I was, there is no escape, I thought, with a flash of anger, which quickly dissipated into disquiet as the show continued. Someone was saying that US Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, must have known weapons were able to get through the checkpoints at Logan because an undercover Fox News investigation before the hijackings had spotlighted it.
That’s ridiculous, I thought angrily, standing to leave the room.
“Did you know?”
I thought I must have misheard the question.
“What?” I asked, turning back to my father from the threshold of the bedroom.
“Did you know?” he asked again. His voice wasn’t accusatory, just curious. But it stung me like an arrow dipped in poison. I didn’t bother rushing to my own defense. I didn’t bother explaining that the checkpoints were not even under Massport’s control, that under federal law, they were the responsibility of the FAA and the airlines. That the small knives brought on board weren’t even necessarily illegal.
“Yes,” I simply said, “everyone knew.”
But no one knew what counted. That a man in a cave thousands of miles away would send nineteen hijackers to America not just to sneak knives aboard but to use the planes themselves as weapons. There was no yellow warning flag for that.
***
We were scheduled to fly home the next day. The airport was just twenty minutes away. On the short ride there, the Florida sun, which the day before had warmed and soothed me, seemed too bright. It exposed the ugly concrete highway and blight of strip malls, one after the other. I felt exposed, too, the doubts I had sought to quiet about 9/11 back in force, fertilized by my father’s question.
We had to return the rented minivan. “It will be easier to pull up to the curb and check all our bags,” David suggested, before returning the rental car.
“Okay,” I agreed. David dragged the bags one at a time to the skycap, while I waited behind the wheel in the car with Jack and Maddy. Then we switched, so I could check us in. I showed the skycap my license and he carefully examined it, questioning why my name was listed as “Buckingham-Lowy” but my airplane ticket only said Lowy. Then he asked whether all the bags were mine.
“No, one is my husband’s,” I answered.
“Well, then, I need to see his identification, too.” I explained that David was in the car with the kids and couldn’t leave them alone to bring over his license.
“Where?” he asked.
“Right over there.” I pointed out the car and was surprised when the skycap stepped out from behind his desk and walked over to the driver’s-side window.
“May I see your ID, sir?” he asked.
“Thank you,” I said, touching his arm. “Thank you for being
so careful.”
“Yes ma’am,” was all he said, smiling. He was doing his job. He had been warned.
***
Flying down to Florida, I had barely noticed being in the terminal, having been consumed with keeping track of the kids, balancing my purse and carry-on luggage on the back of Maddy’s stroller, making sure Jack went to the bathroom one last time, checking that I had drinks and snacks for them on the plane.
But now my emotions careened between rage and despair. Will I ever be free of these questions?
Why didn’t I do something? If my own father could wonder, how can I expect others not to?
The crowd of travelers swelled and receded around me. I felt trapped in one of those funhouses at a traveling carnival. Everywhere I looked there was a mirror image of me that was grossly distorted.
As we got close to our gate, I finally noticed the TVs suspended from the ceiling. They were tuned to CNN and the 9/11 Commission hearings. David saw that I was openly crying and took the handles of the carriage. “I’ll wait here, honey,” he said. In the ladies’ room, I saw that my eyes were red and swollen, and a lady standing at the next sink offered me some Visine drops. I shook my head no and mumbled that I had contacts in, but I was calmed by her kindness.
When I emerged, David said, “They called our flight.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “We’ll catch up.” I handed him two boarding passes. Jack pulled on David’s arm.
“C’mon, Daddy. C’mon, let’s go.”
I was several people behind them on the jet bridge and had to stop near the aircraft door to fold up Maddy’s stroller. There was a bit of a backup of people entering the plane, and I shifted Maddy on my hip, wondering what the problem was.
As I got closer, I saw David standing by the cockpit. I was momentarily confused. What was he doing? “Oh my God,” I whispered, as I followed David’s gaze, my eyes filling with tears again. After 9/11, security protocol had virtually ended the once-common practice of showing children the controls in the cockpit, yet there Jack was, wearing the captain’s hat of the Delta pilot, staring in awe as the captain pointed to the dials and numbers.
“You should take a picture,” a nearby flight attendant said to me. “This doesn’t happen much anymore.”
As I fastened the children’s seat belts and listened to the flight attendant’s instructions about securing their oxygen masks in case of emergency, I asked another passing attendant if she’d get me the pilot’s name. “Captain Eddie Briggs,” the attendant wrote on a scrap of paper that I tucked in my purse. I leaned my head back against the back of the seat. Captain Briggs knew how vulnerable he was every day, and surely his life had changed irrevocably, too, the day thirty-six of his aviation colleagues were murdered. Yet he chose to do what he’d always done. He chose joy in the simple act of exposing a child to aviation’s wonders.
A choice.
That’s what I was making every time I let people’s questions drive me to despair. I was choosing to accept a paradigm that fit neatly into the evening news, a cable TV talk show, and our political culture. Someone had to be held responsible for 9/11. Someone had to have missed something, an expired visa, flight school irregularity, a gathering in a foreign land, a weakness in security checkpoints. We couldn’t simply be vulnerable. Life this fragile. Terrorists that evil. It had to be someone’s fault. But why? Andrea once pointed out that human beings are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. “We are mortal, and we are conscious of it,” she said. Did blaming me allow people to feel safer? Did they sleep better at night with the belief that if one person was responsible and that if that one mistake could be remedied nothing like this could happen again?
As we pushed back from the gate and began taxiing to the runway, my view out the window widened.
Like Captain Briggs, I could choose differently. I reached for Jack’s hand and wrapped my arm around Maddy.
The engines roared to life and we gathered speed, lifting off the ground, headed home.
Chapter Twenty
“Apologize”
March 24, 2004—Washington, DC
Former Clinton/Bush Administration chief counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission and expressed his regret: “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”
Spring 2004—Boston Herald
Back from vacation, a few mornings after Clarke’s apology, my day started out like any other. I read the papers. Checked the wire. Jotted down potential topics for the day’s editorials. I took a sip of coffee and grimaced. It was cold. I started to get up to walk down the hall to the publisher’s office suite to grab a refill. The phone rang.
“Hello,” I said.
The man on the line claimed to be from Lynn, a city northeast of Boston. “Is this Virginia?” he asked.
“Yes, can I help you?” I answered, already impatient, wanting to get on with the morning, wanting another cup of coffee.
“Did you get my letter?” he asked. “It had a lot of vulgarity in it. Sorry about that.”
“If it had vulgar language in it, I would have thrown it away,” I responded curtly, moving to hang up the phone. It wasn’t unusual for me or my editor, the two female names on the paper’s masthead, to receive letters, some crude, some even from state or county prisoners.
“So, when are you going to apologize for 9/11?” I put the receiver fully back on my ear.
“What?”
“When are you going to apologize so this city can move on?”
Silence.
He didn’t say anything else. He was waiting for an answer.
I couldn’t speak.
I could hear him breathing.
I tried. “I . . .”
I stopped.
He said nothing. Waiting.
I tried again. “I don’t . . .” My voice cracked. “I have . . .” I breathed in. “Nothing . . .” Breathe, Ginny. “To . . . apologize . . . for.” I was barely speaking above a whisper.
Still silence.
Except for his breathing.
I hurriedly hung up the phone.
That man never called back, but at least once a week, there was a voice mail message waiting for me when I got into the office. I knew who the message was from even before I dialed the code to retrieve it. “Virginia,” it typically began, “this is Anne from South Boston.” That was how she identified herself. Simply by her first name and the Boston neighborhood she lived in. She always called after she’d read the morning paper, but never when I had already arrived at work. Not once had she agreed with the editorial opinion of the paper, but it seemed my occasional bylined columns particularly goaded her. “I don’t understand how you could have written what you did,” she’d say, a pleasant Irish lilt belying the coming ugly turn she always took in the message. “But then again, I don’t know how you live with yourself, given what you’ve done.”
Sometimes, I’d have a nightmare that took place, not in the sky, but under the water. I’d be underneath the surface. It was dark at first, then lighter, the sun penetrating the water as I swam closer. Drawing me toward it. Just as I was about to break through and fill my lungs with a deep breath of air, I was pushed back under.
“Apologize,” he demanded. “I don’t know how you can live with yourself,” she said.
I was pushed back under.
***
Over the next several weeks, the 9/11 Commission hearings received around-the-clock media coverage. During this time, Shelly asked me to watch President George W. Bush’s live press conference in case he made news we should editorialize about for the next day. I knew he would be asked about the Commission’s progress. I sat alone in the conference room, waiting for the inevitable.
Reporter: “Mr. President, to move to the 9/11 commission, you yourself have acknowledged that
Osama bin Laden was not a central focus of the administration in the months before September 11th. ‘I was not on point,’ you told the journalist Bob Woodward. ‘I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.’ Two and a half years later, do you feel any sense of personal responsibility for September 11th?”
I couldn’t believe he was being asked that. The three TVs lined up on the dusty metal stands in front of me all had the same shot, the camera tight on the president’s face. His expression betrayed no hint the question surprised or bothered him. Back when he and Governor Weld served together, sometimes they would join late-night poker games in the hotel where national governors’ conferences were held. Maybe this was his so-called poker face. Or maybe, unlike me, he harbored no doubts. “Apologize.” I could still hear the breathing on the phone line. My hand tightened on the pen as I waited for the president’s answer.
“Let me put that quote to Woodward in context, because he had asked me if I was—something about killing bin Laden. That’s what the question was. And I said, you know, compared to how I felt at the time, after the attack, I didn’t have that—and I also went on to say, my blood wasn’t boiling, I think is what the quote said. I didn’t see—I mean, I didn’t have that great sense of outrage that I felt on September the 11th. I was—on that day, I was angry and sad. Angry that al-Qaeda—I thought at the time al-Qaeda, found out shortly thereafter it was al-Qaeda—had unleashed this attack. Sad for those who lost their life. Your question, do I feel—yes?”
The reporter repeated, “Personal responsibility for September 11th?”
“I feel incredibly grieved when I meet with family members, and I do quite frequently. I grieve for, you know, the incredible loss of life that they feel, the emptiness they feel. There are some things I wish we’d have done, when I look back. I mean, hindsight’s easy. It’s easy for a president to stand up and say, now that I know what happened, it would have been nice if there were certain things in place.”
On My Watch Page 17