The Tower

by Richard Martin Stern

  The analogy between the World Tower and the Titanic was strained. Only the fact of inevitable disaster linked the two, because the one setting for tragedy was strangeness and the other was everyday familiarity.

  The Titanic was a ship crossing the ocean in a day when crossing an ocean was not at all the usual thing to do. Within that strange setting unknown dangers lurked; their existence could be accepted as real.

  But this was a building, a known world, with differences only of degree, not of kind. You enter buildings and ride elevators every day—and nothing happens. This time something had happened, but it was beyond total belief that it could be as serious as some tried to make it out. The fact of the breeches buoy had allayed many fears.

  Oh, there was still some singing, and some praying, and a few people drinking or dancing while they waited their turns at deliverance. But there is singing, drinking, and dancing every day, and praying every Sunday with no immediate crises in sight.

  What was left of Grover Frazee was already forgotten beneath the white tablecloth. Paul Norris was merely a hearsay death. Singed eyebrows on the two firemen were scant proof that actual disaster was at hand.

  There was the breeches buoy, and one by one women rode it across the gap between the buildings to safety. Still. . .

  The fact of the matter was that of all the people in the Tower Room, only a handful understood and accepted not only that catastrophe was in the making, but that it was inevitable.

  Ben Caldwell understood and accepted. He needed no complicated calculations to convince himself; simple arithmetic sufficed:

  One hundred and three persons had drawn numbers.

  The round trips of the breeches buoy averaged very close to one minute.

  One hour and forty-three minutes, then, would be necessary to evacuate the Tower Room.

  With heat in the building’s core already sufficient to distort steel elevator rails, would the Tower Room remain a sanctuary for one hour and forty-three minutes?

  No.

  So be it.

  With far less technical knowledge the governor nevertheless understood and accepted the situation. “The need is for haste,” he said to Beth, “but we can’t hurry.” He was remembering Nat Wilson’s cautionary words.

  It was becoming hotter in the office. The governor thought of Fireman Howard’s analogy of the nest in the treetop: sooner or later the fire would reach it, and that would be the end of the nestlings. We are nestlings, he thought, as unable as they to fly. The temptation was strong to hammer his fist on the desk in sheer frustration. He stifled it.

  Mayor Ramsay appeared in the doorway. “Paula has gone,” he said. “I watched her land safely—if that’s the word.” She had turned to wave. He paused, remembering. “Thank God for that.”

  “Good for her,” the governor said. “And I’m happy for you, Bob.”

  Beth was smiling. “I’m glad,” she said.

  The governor said, “What is your lottery number, Bob?”

  “Eighty-three.” The mayor’s voice was expressionless.

  The governor smiled. “I’m eighty-seven.”

  “It isn’t fair!” Beth said suddenly. “There are people out in that room who aren’t worth any part of you! Of either of you! And what is Senator Peters’s number? I’ll bet it’s high too!”

  “Easy,” the governor said. “Easy.” He stood up, took off his jacket and loosened his tie. He sat down again and began to roll up his sleeves. He smiled at Beth. “It’s probably cooler out in the big room,” he said, “but for now, at least, I prefer it here.” He paused. “Unless you disagree?”

  Beth hesitated and then shook her head slowly. Her lower lip was tucked between her teeth. When she released it, tooth marks showed. “I’m sorry, Bent.”

  “They’re behaving very well so far, Bent,” Bob Ramsay said. “I’ve been watching Cary Wycoff, and for the moment, at least, he is—defused. And I don’t think anybody else is in his class as a rabble-rouser.”

  The last-moment rush to the lifeboats, the governor thought, or the inevitable jamming of the exits when flames appeared. He had never seen either, but he well understood that in sudden panic terrible things could happen. He said slowly, thoughtfully, “But it might be just as well, don’t you think, to have barricades set up?” He gestured with his hands at right angles. “Some of those heavy tables set in place surrounding the loading area with room for only one person at a time to come through?”

  The mayor’s immediate smile was faint, bitter. He nodded. “And the opening guarded against gate-crashers.” He nodded again. “I’ll see to it.”

  “Maybe,” the governor said, “we’re seeing shadows.” He paused. “But I’m afraid I don’t think so.” He leaned back in his chair and waited until the mayor was gone. Then, to Beth, “How do you walk the tightrope between cynicism and reality?” He shook his head.

  “Is there going to be trouble, Bent?”

  “We’ll try to anticipate it.”

  “How?”

  “Like this.” The governor picked up the phone and spoke into it. Nat’s voice answered instantly. “Everything,” the governor said, “is going beautifully, young man. You and the Coast Guard have my thanks.”

  Beth smiled. It was lordly of him to make it his thanks; and yet it was also fitting, because from the beginning of the problems, it was one man, Bent Armitage, who had automatically taken charge and spoken for all. And so the imperiousness lacked arrogance and was thereby acceptable. More than acceptable. Beth’s smile turned fond and gentle.

  “Everything is orderly now,” the governor was saying, “but when the pressure starts to build, and people begin to understand that maybe there isn’t going to be time for everybody—” He left the sentence hanging, implications plain.

  “Yes, sir,” Nat’s voice said. “I’ve been thinking about that too.”

  “Good man.” The governor waited.

  Nat said slowly, “We have the leverage, or the chief on the roof has, and maybe he’ll do what I say.”

  The governor was nodding. “Which is?”

  “We can issue an ultimatum,” Nat said. “At the first sign of trouble we can put it that unless the process stays orderly, as you’ve planned it, we’ll shut the entire operation down, because slow and easy, one person at a time, is the only way it can work. It may look simple, but it’s touchy, and one mistake can spoil it for everybody.”

  The governor was nodding again. “And can you make the ultimatum stick?”

  “If we have to,” Nat said, “we will.”

  For the third time the governor nodded. “You may have to,” he said. And then, “For the moment, that’s all.” He paused. “Bless you for standing by.” He leaned back in his chair again and closed his eyes.

  “Bent,” Beth said. She hesitated. “Oh, Bent, why does it have to be like this?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Beth said, “and I know it, but I can’t help asking the big question: Why me? Why any of us individually, but most particularly why me? What have I done to be here, to meet you and then have it—like this?”

  The governor was smiling faintly. “I’ve asked the same question many times. He paused. “And, you know, I’ve never yet found the answer?”

  The senator walked in. “I’ve just come to make a report, Bent. Bob is having tables moved into place around the buoy-loading area. Your idea, no doubt. And all is more or less quiet.” He smiled. “So far.” The smile spread. “Bob said you asked his lottery number.” He took his time. “Well, I’ll watch you both go. Mine is one hundred and one.”

  Beth closed her eyes.

  “I’ve also been thinking,” the senator said, “and lo and behold, a limerick came to mind fullblown:

  “A nun from Biloxi, Miss.,

  Was seduced from her faith by a kiss.

  She found that the cloister

  Was not quite her oyster,

  And now she’s called Madam, not Sis.”

  “
I leave you with that thought.” He was gone.

  Beth was shaking her head, even smiling. “It isn’t real,” she said. “He isn’t real. People don’t behave that way at a—time like this. They don’t.”

  “I don’t think you have any idea how you’ll behave,” the governor said, “until you’re there.” He spread his hands. “And then it’s too late to change.”

  Cary Wycoff had a glass of plain soda in hand. He sipped it slowly while he watched the heavy tables being maneuvered into position around the area where the breeches buoy came in through the window.

  It was perfectly obvious what the purpose of the tables was. It was simply more of the same: entrenched privilege throwing up barricades to keep out the barbarians. Himself. And he resented it with fierceness and, at the moment, impotence, which made it even worse.

  The lottery slip in his pocket was number sixty-five, which meant that fifteen males would go before him to safety. Bent Armitage, Bob Ramsay, and Jake Peters, he was willing to bet, would be among them. Oh, they would not be the first three; they were too canny for that. But they would have seen to it that they were close enough to the beginning of the line to be safe without being obvious in the bargain.

  Cary resented the women’s going first too. He had fought as hard as the next man, harder, for women’s rights, but he did not really believe in them. Women were created weaker, usually less intelligent, altogether less useful members of the community except for the one function which they never let you forget they, and they alone, could carry out. And in Cary’s view there were too many births anyway.

  From a purely objective viewpoint, he, Cary Wycoff, was a far more valuable member of society than any of the women who had gathered in the Tower Room. He should, therefore, have preceded all of them across the chasm to the Trade Center roof and safety.

  But to have gone first, even if he had been allowed, would have been to demean himself in the eyes of the stupid world, which thought with its stomach; more especially in the eyes of the stupid electorate, who kept sending him back to a very pleasant life in Washington. So there it was. Let the women go.

  But the men, that was something different, and he was not going to stand idly by and watch fifteen—fifteen!—others go ahead of himself.

  Bent Armitage and Jake Peters, those two in particular, had always treated him at less than his real worth; there was no denying that. Cary had another sip of soda while he thought about it. Then, “I’ll show you bastards,” he said softly. “You can’t get away with it this time.”

  Nat put down the phone after his conversation with the governor. He was conscious that Patty watched him, frowning. “You heard what I said?” he asked.

  Patty nodded. She kept her voice expressionless. “Would you do it? Stop the whole—operation just as a threat?”

  “I don’t believe in threats.”

  “I don’t—understand.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me.” There was that bulldog quality again; total refusal to sidestep unpleasantness.

  Nat said merely, “We’ll see what the chief says.” He picked up the walkie-talkie. “Trailer to Trade Center roof.”

  “Roof here.” The chief’s voice. “The naked chick’s name is Barber, Josephine Barber. And after her came Mrs. Robert Ramsay.”

  Nat watched Patty pick up her pencil and start searching the list. “Got it,” he said. And then, “How’s it going, Chief?”

  “Slow. Steady. What we could expect. Twenty-two across in”—he paused—“twenty-three minutes flat. Best we could hope for.” Was there faint belligerence underlying the words?

  “Better than I was afraid of,” Nat said. He paused again. “I doubt if it will happen before you have the women across. I hope it won’t. But when the pressure really begins—”

  “Trouble you mean?” Pause. “Important people, aren’t they?” The chief’s voice was unexcited.

  “That,” Nat said, “doesn’t mean that some of them won’t—panic.”

  Patty had found the two names and crossed them off. She sat now, pencil still in her small hand, watching Nat and listening.

  “Yeah,” the chief said, unexcited still. “Stripes on a man’s sleeve don’t necessarily mean too much.” He paused. “You’re getting at what?”

  Nat told him what he had said to the governor. There was silence.

  Then, “The way I see it,” the chief said slowly, still unexcited, merely stating facts, “when you’ve got a command situation, men obey or they mutiny. If it’s mutiny, you stop it right at the beginning or it gets out of hand. First sign of trouble, you let me know and we hold the breeches buoy right here until they line up again and stay in line. That way we may not get them all out, but we’ll get some. Let them fall to squabbling and there won’t be a manjack get out of there alive.”

  Nat nodded. “Long speech, Chief.”

  “Yeah. I don’t ordinarily use that many words.”

  “But I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  “We’ll get along,” the chief said. “You just pass me the word if there’s trouble.”

  Nat laid the walkie-talkie down on the desk. He said nothing.

  “So you two are in agreement,” Patty said. She paused. “You knew you would be, didn’t you?”

  “Simmer down,” Nat said. He could even smile and mean it. “What do you think Bert would have said?”

  Patty opened her mouth and then closed it again in silence. Slowly she nodded. “Probably the same.” Capitulation. “But I don’t have to like it.” Defiance flaring again.

  “No,” Nat said, “you don’t.” He pushed away from the desk and walked once more to the doorway to look out over the plaza.

  It was a dismal, depressing scene. Thunderheads to the west had obscured the sun; the light in the plaza was smoky gray, the air soot-filled, acrid.

  Firemen swarmed in the plaza—like scurrying ants in slow motion, Nat thought—and the perimeter of the area was an almost solid mass of fire equipment parked check-by-jowl, engines and pumps throbbing.

  The entire plaza floor was a lake now. Cascades of water poured back out of the building, down the concourse steps—like spawning ladders for salmon.

  A fireman lurched from the concourse, stumbled down the steps, and fell face down, his arms and legs moving weakly.

  Two ambulance attendants rushed up with a stretcher, loaded him on, and bore him off.

  Nat’s eyes followed the stretcher to a nearby ambulance where three other firemen were standing, sucking oxygen from rubber masks.

  Police manned the barricades. Nat could make out Barnes, the black cop, and, yes, there was his partner, the big Irishman, white bandage plain on his cheek.

  Behind the barricades the crowds were orderly and strangely quiet, as if at last the enormity of the tragedy had reached them. In the crowd an arm was raised, pointing upward. Other arms followed. Without turning to look, Nat guessed that the breeches buoy was making yet another trip, one more person swinging to safety.

  He felt no sense of triumph. That was long gone. Instead he blamed himself that this was all that they could do and it was not enough. What was it he had told Patty about the thinking in certain parts of the Middle East? That man was supposed to try for perfection, but he wasn’t ever supposed to reach it? But that didn’t make the fact of even partial failure any the more palatable.

  He was not a religious man, but sometimes there were events—those nineteen bodies curled like snails in the smoking burned-over mountain clearing came to mind—that seemed to demonstrate a flaw, point a direction, and by the depth of their tragedy simply force a man to reexamine many tenets and thoughts he had long taken for granted. Too long.

  If one result of all of these reexaminations was constant, even inevitable, it was determination that could be expressed in two words: never again.

  Never again a Titanic blundering in the ice lanes.

  Never again a Hindenburg filled with explosive hydrogen gas.

&n
bsp; Never again if good men could prevent it a Hamburg firestorm, a Nagasaki, a Hiroshima.

  Never again a fire like this in a building this size—

  Correction: Never again a building this size. Didn’t that make more sense?

  Bigness for bigness’ sake was never a solution. Remember that.

  “I will,” Nat said silently. “By God, I will!”

  He heard a telephone ring in the trailer, and he waited for it to be answered. Patty’s voice said, “Yes. He’s here.” And then, expressionless, “Nat.”

  She was holding the instrument out to him. “Zib,” she said, and that was all.

  Zib had left the magazine at the usual time, taxied home, and hurried into a scented bath. Luxuriating in the suds, feeling the tensions flow away, she told herself that everything was going to be all right. After that talk with Cathy she felt like a different person, able to see herself more clearly, and wasn’t that the name of the game—know thyself?

  And she had turned her back on Paul Simmons, hadn’t she? Nat must have seen that from her telephone call telling him that Paul was not coming down to the building. It was a sharp cutting of the last ties, wasn’t it? The symbolism was inescapable. And at heart Nat was a lamb. He hadn’t really meant those harsh things he had said to her. He couldn’t have. Nobody could. Not to her.

  She sank deep in the tub, closed her eyes, and stroked one smooth sudsy shoulder and arm with her hand. What was that commercial on TV? “If he doesn’t feel the difference, he has no feeling.” That applied to all of her, didn’t it?

  Of course Nat would be tired when he got home. But not too tired. She had always had the power to arouse him. That was one thing the Women’s Lib fanatics tended to forget, possibly because some of them, but not all, were rather unattractive pieces of sexual merchandise, and any subtle advances they might make would tend to be—what were that judge’s marvelous words when he passed Ulysses as salable?—“emetic rather than aphrodisiac.”

  Zib’s own qualifications in that direction were impeccable—as she well knew. And, given that head start, in the constant underlying sexual struggle between herself and a man, any man, there simply was no contest.