The Tower

by Richard Martin Stern

  Patty sat quiet on a stool, watching, listening, smiling proudly.

  Giddings said, “Half the battle won. The other half—”

  “Agreed,” Nat said, his voice suddenly sharp, “but, goddammit, if we hadn’t won the first half, there wouldn’t even be a second half to try.” Then, into the phone, “Yes, Governor?”

  “Assuming it is going to work,” the governor was saying, “what all is involved? Happily, I have never had to ride in a breeches buoy, so I know nothing about it. There is wind, considerable wind. Can a woman alone ride safely?”

  “You stick your legs down through two holes,” Nat said. You’re inside a kind of sack. All anybody has to do is close his eyes and hang on.” He paused. His voice was solemn. “But you do have a couple of things to work out, Governor. Who goes in what order—”

  “Women first. We decided that earlier.”

  “Governor. The round trip, Trade Center roof to Tower Room and return, is going to take a little time. Say a minute. You have a hundred people up there, maybe half of them women. It’s going to take the better part of an hour just to get the women across, and another hour for the men. That’s a lot of waiting, and you’d better have the exact sequence—” He stopped at the sound of another voice in the office background.

  The governor said, “Good for you, Jake.” And then, to Nat, “Senator Peters has anticipated you. I was afraid he was cutting out paper dolls. He is preparing numbered lottery slips instead.”

  Nat nodded. He smiled. “Good.” He paused. “And somebody to enforce the sequence?” he said.

  “That too is in hand.” The governor’s voice paused. “Two hours? That is your estimate?”

  “Maybe less,” Nat said. “But slow and easy is the way, the only—”

  The walkie-talkie crackled. “Oliver to trailer,” it said. “We’ve bent on the heavy lines. We’ll pay them out as they haul in. Tell them to take it slow, easy. When all this heavy line is out, they’re going to have a lot of weight to haul. More, because of the windage.”

  “Will tell,” Nat said. “Hang on, Chief.”

  He spoke into the phone again. “All set, Governor. Tell your men to haul away, and be prepared for a load before they get the job done.” He paused. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you, young man.” The governor’s voice was tinged with anxiety. “You will continue to stand by the phone?”

  “Yes, sir. And the walkie-talkie.”

  “Bless you,” the governor said.

  Nat laid the telephone on the blotter and leaned back in the desk chair. He caught Patty’s eye. She smiled.

  Tim Brown said, “Will the structure stand? If it begins to collapse, we are going to have the damndest mess this city has ever seen.”

  “I think it will stand,” Nat said. “If the fire gets completely out of control—”

  “Man,” one of the battalion chiefs said, “it is completely out of control. All we’re doing is shoveling shit against the tide.” He paused. “And losing men doing it.”

  “Then more windows are going to go,” Nat said. “And that aluminum siding won’t stand up indefinitely. But the structure itself isn’t going to collapse.”

  “You’re sure?” Brown said.

  Nat shook his head. “My best guess,” he said. “I can’t do any better than that.” His mind went off on a new tack. “With a forest fire,” he said, “you pray for rain.”

  “Like they used to say in Boston,” Giddings said. “‘Spahn and Sain and two days of rain.’ How much good would it do here?” He spoke to the firemen.

  One of the battalion chiefs shrugged. “It would help. It would give them up there”—his raised head indicated the Tower Room—“a little more time, I’d think.” He paused. “But if they’re already getting smoke—” He paused again. “Two hours is a long time.”

  Time was the essence, Patty thought. Time was the dimension against which all else had to be measured; within its framework, length, breadth, depth, those who waited their turn in the Tower Room would live or die. While we stand by outside that framework unable to help, she thought, and was reminded again of the vigil outside the Coronary Care Unit in the hospital.

  She wondered how her mother was bearing up, and knew that at this moment Mary McGraw would be in church, on her knees, praying for the soul of Bert McGraw, and believing that her prayers would at least be heard even if not wholly granted. Faith has the power to move mountains? Maybe yes, maybe no. But certainly it did have the power to soothe and comfort.

  And faith I have not, Patty thought for perhaps the first time with real regret. We have turned our backs on the old ways, many of us, but what have we taken in their place?

  She was suddenly aware that Nat was watching her with concern, and she repeated the question aloud, wondering if he would understand.

  “I don’t think we’ve taken anything,” Nat said. “We’ve substituted what we considered knowledge for belief and found that we don’t yet know enough to make the substitution work. Maybe we never will.”

  His eyes searching her face asked a question, Patty thought, and she slid down from the stool to walk over and perch on the corner of the desk. “I’m all right,” she said. “Honest. Mother said she was going home to have a nice cup of hot tea and a good cry. Mine will come later too.”

  “Tea?” He was trying to keep it light.

  “I’m that old-fashioned,” Patty said.

  The telephone crackled. Nat picked it up. “Yes, Governor?”

  “We’ve had one heart attack,” the governor said. “It has set me thinking. I’m having a list prepared of names and addresses of all those up here. When it is ready, I’ll have it read to you for someone to set down.” He paused. “Just in case.”

  “Yes, sir.” Nat cupped a hand over the phone. “Get a stenographer to take down names,” he said to Brown.

  Patty stirred herself on the corner of the desk. “Let me.” Something, anything to do, she thought, anything that might in the slightest way help. Nat watched her; he was smiling approval. “I write legibly,” she said.

  Nat said into the phone, “We’re ready for your list whenever, Governor.” Again he leaned back in the desk chair, and smiled up at Patty.

  “You did it,” Patty said quietly. “You promised a new idea and you came up with it. I’m proud of you.”

  “It isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.”

  “I’m still proud of you. And however many people manage to get out will—”

  The walkie-talkie said, “Oliver to Trailer. They’ve got the line over there. I want to make damn sure somebody knows how to tie a decent knot; a bowline is what I’d like. If that end pulls loose while somebody is between the buildings—” He left the sentence unfinished.

  Nat said, “There are two firemen up there, and probably some ex-Boy Scouts as well—” He could not stifle entirely a triumphant sense of gaiety. “I’ll see to it, Chief. Hold on.”

  He picked up the phone and spoke to the governor, smiling a little at the thought of a man used to dealing with the problems of eighteen million people now bothering to make sure that somebody had tied a knot properly in a piece of line. He listened. “Thank you, Governor,” he said, and returned to the walkie-talkie. “Bowline it is,” he said. “Rest easy, Chief.”

  “Then,” the chief said, “tell them to haul away on the breeches buoy line. We’re ready at this end.” There was triumph in the chief’s voice too.

  In the building’s core, already converted to one great flue, temperatures were climbing to welding-torch levels. A continuous blast of fresh air was sucked in at the base, driven upward by its own almost explosive expansion and accelerating to near hurricane speed, acting, as the battalion chief had said, in the manner of a blast furnace.

  Structural steel began to glow. Lesser materials melted or vaporized. Where, as on floor after floor, random spacing, superheated air burst out of the core into open corridors and turned instantly to flames, the heavy tempered windows lasted only
moments before they shattered and threw out their shards to rain down on the plaza.

  Aluminum panels curled and melted, the skin of the structure peeling away to expose the sinews and the skeleton beneath.

  Like a gigantic animal in torment, the great building seemed to writhe and shudder, its agony plain.

  From the ground, to those whose eyesight could make it out, the line dangling between the two buildings looked impossibly fine, delicate as gossamer. And when the breeches buoy swung loaded for the first time from the Tower Room and began its catenary descent to the roof of the lower Trade Center roof, it seemed that the canvas bag and the woman it contained were hanging free, suspended by nothing more than faith, defying gravity in a miraculous attempt to escape the rising blast-furnace heat.

  Her name was Hilda Cook, and she was currently starring on Broadway in the new musical Jump for Joy!

  She was twenty-nine years old, dressed in shoes, mini-briefs, and a mid-thigh dress tucked up now above her waist. Her long shapely legs dangled crotch-deep through the breeches buoy holes. She clung to the edges of the canvas bag with the strength of hysteria.

  She had stared unbelieving at the number on the small square paper slip she had been handed from the empty punchbowl, and her first sound had been a squeal. Then, “It can’t be!” Her voice was shrill. “I’m number one!”

  The secretary general was conducting the drawing. “Someone,” he remarked, “had to be. My congratulations, young lady.”

  They had carried the heavy line on which the breeches buoy rode through the window and up to the ceiling where one of the firemen had broken through with his halligan tool to expose a steel beam around which they had bent the line.

  Ben Caldwell, directing the operation, had made the point: “Unless we go to the ceiling,” he said as if explaining a problem to a class of not very bright young architects, “the line will rest on the window sill and we will not be able to get the breeches buoy into the room. I, for one, would rather get into the bag inside than climb out the window to get to it.”

  Three men manned the lighter line attached to the breeches buoy itself, and Hilda Cook, swinging free within the room, said, “Easy, guys, for God’s sake! I’m already scared spitless!”

  As she rode through the window and away from the building’s protection, wind buffeted the bag, the heavy line began to swing, and the sensation of falling was inescapable.

  Hilda screamed and closed her eyes and screamed again. “And it was just about then, darlings,” as she told it later, “that I wet myself. I really did. I’m not a damn bit ashamed to say it.”

  The wind was cold on her legs and it blew through the pulleys above her head with a banshee wail.

  The rocking, swinging motions continued, the oscillations becoming wilder as she approached the center of the span.

  “I thought I was going to die, I really did. And then I was afraid I wasn’t! I screamed for the damned thing to stop! You know, Stop the world, I want to get off! But there was no way. No way! And when I was a girl, I didn’t even like rollercoasters!”

  She may have fainted; she was never sure.

  “The next thing I knew, I was in Heaven! I mean the swinging had stopped, and the howling of the wind, and the biggest, strongest man I ever saw, darlings, just plucked me out of that canvas sack like I was something coming out of a grocery bag. And he set me down on my feet and held me up or I would have gone flat on my face.” Pause. “Was I crying? Darlings, I was bawling like a baby, and laughing all at the same time!” Another pause. “And all the big man said was, ‘Okay, lady. It’s all over now.’ What he didn’t know is that I still dream about it and wake up trying to scream!”

  Nat watched from the trailer doorway until the breeches buoy had returned to the Tower Room and for the second time emerged loaded. “I make it just over a minute,” he said. “At that rate—” He shook his head in silence and walked back inside to pick up the walkie-talkie. “Trailer to Oliver,” he said.

  “Oliver here.”

  “Nice going, Chief.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” There was a pause. “But what?” the chief said. The big man is perceptive, tuned to nuances, Nat thought. “It’s going to take a long time to get them all,” he said. He paused. “How about a second line, two breeches buoys working at once?”

  The big man was also decisive. “No dice. At the angle we shoot from, we couldn’t get the lines far enough apart through those windows. Then in this wind they’d sure as hell foul each other, and we’d have nothing at all.” His voice was calm, but tinged with regret. “I thought of it. But it won’t work. We’ll have to do the best we can.”

  Nat nodded slowly. “I know you will. Thanks, Chief.” He put the walkie-talkie down.

  For every problem there is not necessarily a solution—true or false? Unfortunately entirely too goddam true. One hour and forty minutes, he thought, that’s all we need. All? Eternity.

  Patty was at the desk, pencil and pad at hand, the telephone held to her ear by one hunched shoulder. “A-b-e-l, Abel,” she read back into the phone. “Three twenty-seven North Fiesta Road, Beverly Hills. Next, Governor . . . ?”

  Nat listened to the names as Patty wrote them down and read them back:

  “Sir Oliver Brooke—with an e—Ninety-three E-a-t-o-n Square, London South West One.”

  That would be the British Ambassador, flown up only this morning from Washington.

  “Henry Timms—double m—Club Road, Riverside, Connecticut.”

  Head of one of the major networks?

  Howard Jones, US Steel . . . Manuel Lopez y Garcia, Ambassador from Mexico . . . Hubert van Donck, Shell Oil Company, Amsterdam . . . Walter Gordon, United States Secretary of Commerce . . . Leopold Knowski, Ambassador from the USSR . . .

  One name approximately every fifteen seconds. At that rate, it would take half an hour to list them all. Nat picked up the walkie-talkie. “Give us the names as you land them, Chief. We’ll want to know who—may get left.” He walked back to the doorway then and stood looking out at the plaza.

  Firemen, police, gaping crowds. The orderly tangle of hoses and the sounds of pumping engines at work. Occasionally the booming voice of a bullhorn. The entire plaza was wet now, a dirty artificial lake. The tormented building still stood, of course, but in a hundred places smoke oozed out to obscure the no longer shining aluminum siding.

  “Pretty, huh?” This was Giddings at Nat’s shoulder. His voice was low-pitched, angry. “Circus day. When I was a kid, Fourth of July was a big deal. Fireworks shooting out over the lake at night. People came for miles to watch.” He gestured at the crowds. “Like this.” He paused. “Maybe you can’t blame them, at that.”

  Nat turned to look at him.

  “They’ve never seen anything like it,” Giddings said. “Neither has anybody else.” He made a sudden angry hand gesture. “That goddamn Simmons.”

  “He isn’t the only one.”

  “Are you standing up for the son of a bitch?”

  “No,” Nat said, “for more reasons than you know. But,” he added, “neither am I letting the rest of us off the hook.”

  “We should have caught it, you mean?” Giddings nodded. “All right. We’ve agreed to that before. But which is worse, doing the dirty or failing to catch it? Answer me that.”

  It was a quibble, Nat thought, and found the question unworthy of answer. And yet he could understand Giddings’s need to ask it. A man had to salvage what he could of his self-respect, didn’t he? Didn’t everybody do it every day in many ways—the games people play?

  Inside the trailer Patty’s voice said, “Willard Jones, Peter Cooper Village.”

  Who was Willard Jones? Or did it matter who he was? It was a name that belonged to a person, now living, maybe soon to be dead. Did he, Nat, accept that now?

  Face it, friend, Nat told himself, you have known almost from the beginning how this was going to come out—and he thought of the nineteen bodies in that burned-over mountain clearing.
r />   But for them I had no responsibility.

  What difference? The question echoed in his mind.

  No one could have anticipated that all electrical power would go out; anybody in his right mind would have said that it was impossible. But so was the grid blackout impossible that had crippled the entire Northeast a few years back. So were the Titanic sinking and the Hindenburg disaster, the wave of assassinations beginning with President Kennedy’s, and the violence in cities only how many summers ago? Impossible, but they happened.

  Logic, he thought suddenly, had nothing to do with it. Logic was for law, for stately considerations of fact, unhurried judgments objectively taken. Logic was not for him.

  He, Nat Wilson, was what he felt, the subjective man, not the man with the computer mind. And what he felt was a sense of guilt that would not wash away—ever.

  That he had failed to find flaws in the building’s construction could be understood, explained, condoned, forgiven—but not by him. In the entire tangle of this day he was inextricably involved, woven right into the fabric of events even if with some of them he appeared to have no real connection.

  He had never laid eyes on the two firemen who had died screaming in the stairwell. Or the other two now in the Tower Room, probably no better off. But he had recommended that they be sent up the long stairs, and even though it had been within Brown’s authority to ignore the suggestion, for Nat a sense of responsibility remained.

  He had nothing to do with Bert McGraw’s death. True? False? Logic said one thing, sensibility the other. Because as Zib’s husband he had been insufficient, Zib and Paul had carried on their—thing. And somehow that had figured in McGraw’s heart attack, if Patty understood it at all.

  So where did all that leave him?

  I am glad you asked that question, sir.

  The hell I am.

  Am I a jinx?

  On the face of it, ridiculous. Involved, yes. Responsible, yes. Were not the two words, the two conditions intertwined? And if I am involved, responsible, then Ben Caldwell must also be drawn into the chain. And he is. He admitted as much in his office only this morning. Grover Frazee? Yes. Bert McGraw? Certainly. The list began to multiply with computer speed, its possibilities almost endless.