A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  I went to a school called Ateneo, probably the most prestigious in Manila, which was something like going to Harvard. But after my first year of college I came to the States to continue school at Berkeley, right at the time of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. Being a student from a foreign country, I stayed out of it, as I didn’t know what was going on, and I really was not interested. I took a degree in business and have a master’s degree in finance.

  It was a difficult time. I had never been alone and was used to having a crowd around me, with me as the leader, and here I was in a foreign country, where I really just stayed on the sidelines. From a very early age I had leadership qualities, and in any undertaking I was the one who was doing the talking, the planning. At Berkeley I definitely knew that I was not in my environment, and that I had a lot to learn. As a foreigner with English as a second language, I was behind the eight ball. But I knew where I stood and I accepted that.

  I had come to the States planning to go back home to either help my dad or actually work with him in his business. Part of my education, though, was also having to go to work, for I did not want to add to the cost my dad had in putting four other children through school. This was also a little bit of a learning process for me, because in my younger days I never worked, except to do schoolwork. I had two jobs that became fairly important to my life. One was as a waiter on weekends at the golf and country club. The second was at Berkeley after I posted a notice on a bulletin board [saying] that I was looking for a job. One day I got a call from a placement officer offering work cleaning the school, which was very much against my ego—a person of my background cleaning school floors? Those two jobs broke me down, taking all the time and pride from me. Actually, I got used to them, got to like them, and told myself, Okay, I’m going to be the best waiter and best cleaner around. But it was an awakening, being brought down to earth like that.

  When I got a job with Merrill Lynch, the stock brokerage house, I started at the very, very bottom. I was two years away from graduating college, and they had an opening for a board marker. During those days, when they had those ticker-tape things, we used a board to mark down when they [the stocks] changed prices, and that was my job. At the time, I was going to school at night, taking fifteen credits and working five hours a day. But again, I was probably the best board marker that office ever had. Very shortly after I graduated I was fortunate to be hired there full time. I started to work in San Francisco and moved there. And Merrill Lynch was really the starting point in my life—a real job, with an office. I learned how to mingle with people. I could now think about goals. I was allowed to do eighteen months of training. So I learned a lot.

  I started really liking the environment and what I was doing in the United States. It was far different from where I had come from, but it made me want to develop the ability to make money, to buy things with my own money, and not have to depend on anybody. That felt good. I was always eager to work. Anything that had to be done, I volunteered for. I had bosses who recognized my wanting to do things and to further my ability. Eventually that paid off, because when they needed to appoint a supervisor, I was recommended. That was the opening that I had been looking for. I then eventually became the lead assistant operations manager. My operations manager was one of the brightest people I knew, and I always picked his brain. We were close enough to have gone to basketball games, but there was always that line that I never crossed: He was my boss. But I knew that someday I wanted his job or one like it.

  Eventually I was transferred to New York and enrolled in what they called operations management school, which prepared me to be an operations manager somewhere in the Merrill Lynch system. I completed that and I was assigned to Newport Beach, California, where I did well. I did not have authority over the brokers, but I made sure they were compliant with everything that they needed to be compliant with.

  On June 30, 1970, just before that assignment, when I was still in New York training, I met Marie Labeglia. Marie was from Queens and had been accepted into a program for high school graduates with Merrill Lynch. I was in my office one day and saw four girls go by. I asked who they were, and one of the guys said, Oh, those are the new June grads. Merrill Lynch’s June Grads Program had been established to hire new graduates at the firm. The guy who spoke looked at one of them and said, “She looks like a cutiepie doll.”

  But I said, “I like the scrawny one.” Marie was eighteen, I was twenty-four, and I fell in love with her the first moment I saw her—a scrawny little thing, plain, just my type of girl.

  Marie later went on to Queens College and graduated as one of the outstanding students in the United States, summa cum laude. She was also a Phi Beta Kappa, and I still wear her Phi Beta Kappa key, which I had made into a necklace. She was a superintelligent person, and you could talk to her in many subject areas. Very modest and from a very modest family. Her father was a train inspector in New York, her mother, a dressmaker. She and her brothers lived a very simple life.

  I didn’t start a relationship with Marie at Merrill Lynch because I was one of the managers and that was naturally taboo. But one day she came to me and said, “Can I talk to you?” She felt badly, because she had applied for the job to keep a friend of hers company, but she was accepted and her friend was not. She had thought, what the heck, I’ll try it for the summer, but when the summer was over she wanted to go back to school, and she did not know how to tell her managers. She asked me, “What should I do? Should I go back to school?”

  I said, “Yes, that’s a no-brainer; you go back to school.” I told her I would take care of the problem, because she felt like she had misrepresented herself, and I told her not to worry about it. I would let them know.

  So we kind of started having a friendship then—hello, that kind of thing—but still nothing serious. The last day of her job I asked her out to dinner; it was no longer a conflict of interest. We went out to dinner in Chinatown. I did not know what to expect at that time, but after that we had our first phone call, and then it was a series of phone calls, one hour each time, two hours, every single day. I don’t know what we discussed, but it was just very pleasant to talk to her, and I would save time for her. One thing she made clear to me: We are just friends. She knew that I wanted more, but she made it very clear that that was all it was going to be. Once in a while I would ask her out, and every six weeks we’d go out for lunch or dinner. But every time I came too close, she would remind me, “We are just friends.” The conversations every day continued, and I looked forward to them, to the point that I had become satisfied to just be friends with her. That’s what I told myself. And that went on for a year. I was not content, but there was nothing I could do.

  Marie lived with her parents in Richmond Hill. They were Italian Catholic, went to church every Sunday, a very close family, and she kept me from them for a long, long time—over a year. She did not want to introduce me, and though I didn’t ask why, I kind of knew, as did she, that they would object to my being brown skinned and foreign.

  Maybe a year later, another girl and I started dating, but my conversations with Marie every day continued. I told this girl about Marie—I’m that kind of a guy—to the point where it began bothering her. So she asked me to break it off with Marie. I went to Marie, who said, “I like you a lot, but really, nothing is going to happen with us.”

  So I said, “Well, if that’s the case then I have to break off with you.” So I did, and began concentrating on Doreen, the young woman I was dating.

  About a week later Marie called up and said, “I don’t know what I’m feeling; I really don’t know what this is. The only thing I know is that I feel for you more than just a friend.” And I thought, Oh, my God, now what do I do?

  But it was not a difficult decision to make after that. The opportunity was there, and shortly afterward I broke off with Doreen and started my relationship with Marie. This relationship lasted probably close to a year, and it was happy—dating and all that, and clean, as
she wouldn’t let me go past second base. But then I was assigned to California, and was basically told to go or I’d be out of a job. So I went, and did a good job there, and Marie and I continued our telephone conversations, two hours a day. We also had over two thousand pieces of correspondence during the one year that I was there. A card, a letter; sometimes I’d be writing three times a day, she’d write me three times a day. And this was [during] her going through her college, getting her Phi Beta Kappa and everything. So all of my time was going to letters, and all of my money was going to long-distance calls.

  Then I started missing her a lot and went to my boss and said, I think I’ve done a good job. He agreed, and then told me that San Diego was opening up. The San Diego office was everybody’s dream, and I thought, Oh, my God, it looks like I’m being offered San Diego, but I had to ask him to please send me home. They recognized that I had accomplished quite a bit, so I got my wish and was sent back to New York, where I became assistant manager for the biggest office in the system, at 165 Broadway.

  When I came back to New York, Marie and I got engaged, and in November 1974 we were married. Though I now had a very big job, I was not satisfied with it, and after a while they told me that it was time for me to be reassigned to my own office and they set me up in Chicago. It was the first time in her life that Marie had ever been separated by real distance from her family, and it was a difficult adjustment for her. I watched her crying for a year. She wouldn’t say anything to me, but she was very unhappy and ended up getting a menial job at a grocery store. She couldn’t get a better position because she hadn’t had any experience yet. I was afraid if I was brought back to New York, they would switch me again to another office, so I took a job and said [to her], This will be my last move, and then they are never going to move me again. So in 1977 we came back to New York, and I went into sales—basically starting a career all over again.

  Marie, at the time, began working for William Rogers, who was the secretary of state, but one day applied at a bond house on Wall Street, FB Cooper. Marie was very bright, always smiling, and had the best personality, so she was a very easy hire, and because she was intelligent, did her job very well. But FB Cooper had to close for lack of cash, so they recommended her to Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, an investment banking firm. She was fortunate enough to be hired there as an administrative assistant, making a very nice salary, and from there just moved up the ladder, time after time after time, until eventually she was the highest-ranking female in the company: senior vice president.

  Marie was everybody’s friend, was always being kind to people. When I attended Christmas parties or gatherings with her, they would make sure we were at the best table—that’s how popular she was. She was very downto-earth, very honest. In all the years I knew Marie I never heard her say anything negative about anybody. If she felt that way she just would keep it to herself.

  During those years the standard executive salary was about a hundred thousand dollars. She eventually passed me. She was the senior vice president at Keefe, and I was an options specialist at Merrill Lynch, a certified options principal. I was a broker and not one of those hotshot traders, as I was not looking for drama or glory or anything like that. I just did my job and brought home not as much money as I could. Almost always the Merrill Lynch bosses would tell me that I could double what I was making, but that was not an incentive for me. Marie and I were living a very comfortable life; not having any children, our lives revolved around each other. We had no debt, we had no finances to worry about. We did everything in cash. We put things on credit cards, but when the bills came we paid them. The one thing we allowed ourselves to do was go on vacation, and we went to Hawaii every year. What she loved most was to read books, and would bring a dozen books to Hawaii, finishing them all. Aside from Hawaii, we had our weekends to do whatever we wanted, and we would go shopping in Philadelphia or to the Amish country.

  We also went to the Philippines to visit my family, who, while caring for us, planned our entire visit, what we were going to do, at what time, and all of that. Marie was so dear she never said anything: It was my family, and it was fine with her. And her heart was so big. The first time we got to Manila I was in shock, because I had been gone so long. It had been poor when I left, but driving in from the airport, I was struck by the poverty, the needy children. When we had to drive through the really desperate areas, I remember looking at her and seeing her cringe. She would cry, and I would just hold her hand, as I was moved, and tell her, “You know, this is not the country I left.”

  Marie and I would jog in the morning, because we were both fit. We were staying close to Antipolo and every day we would go to the cathedral and shrine of the Virgin of Antipolo to say a prayer or go to Mass. One day we were approached by a little girl, four years old, who was selling lottery tickets, saying, Please buy, buy, buy. Neither one of us had money, and it broke Marie’s heart. We went home and had breakfast and she came to me and said, “Would you go to the bank with me?” She took out five hundred pesos and had them changed to one-peso coins. I didn’t ask her why, but the next morning, when we went jogging, she had the five hundred coins. She began looking for the little girl, who soon came, and then another little girl came, and then the mother. Joe, Joe, Joe—they called Marie, and anybody who was white, Joe. We sat there on a wall for about a half hour, everybody touching her hair, because she was a blonde, and she did not stop until all five hundred were gone. I remember her saying at the time, “Someday, I don’t know when or how, but I’m going to come back and I’m going to help these kids.” That created such an impact on me, and later on in life it came back to me.

  I was the biggest person in her life, and she was the biggest person in my life. We tried to outdo each other with surprises when it came to birthdays. Once I took her on an ecological tour, a three-hour trip on a boat. She was so, so pleased. She thought we were then going home, but no, I had a formal dinner all set up at the same place. When my birthday came I would open at least ten presents from her. Christmas, the same way. She just loved loving me, and vice versa. It grew like that for twenty-seven years. People might often claim, “I love you more today than yesterday, / but not as much as tomorrow,” but I could honestly say that I loved Marie every single day more than I loved her the day before. I made her know that every single night and every single morning. I would tell her how much I loved her. I would tell here two and three times a day. We would call each other; I was never too busy for her. She was never too busy for me. We went to work together to different jobs, and we went home together on the Long Island Rail Road.

  Keefe, Bruyette was originally at 165 Broadway, but eventually it moved to the World Trade Center, occupying the eighty-eighth and eighty-ninth floors. Marie was on the eighty-ninth floor of the South Tower.

  The week before 9/11 was significant only in the sense that, because of our wanting to be together and in order to lengthen our weekends, I drove Marie to work on Monday morning, instead of her taking the train alone. At the time, I was working in our Melville office and sometimes I would work at home. In the city on Mondays, we would sit down for about five or ten minutes and have our cups of coffee by the World Trade Center. That gave us more time together after the weekend. And it never failed, never ever failed, that when I got home I would have an e-mail saying, Thank you so much for driving me. She appreciated every single thing that I did for her and she made sure that I knew that. She would leave me notes sometimes where I would see them, when she was already gone. Have a nice day, or thank you for this, or thank you for that. She was such a darling.

  The next day, on September 11, I drove her to the station, like I always did. It was just before 6:00 A.M. We said, Good-bye, see you later. How could I know that that was the last time I would see her?

  I was working at home that day, and I was working out in the basement when she called and said, “Don’t worry, I’m okay.” I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Do you have the TV on?” I said I w
as watching a movie, and she told me to turn on CNN. I saw the huge hole burning and said, “It looks like a plane went through your building. What’s going on?” She said they didn’t know—they had heard a very, very large noise, and papers were going in all directions, and that they had no television signal and so had no idea what had happened. She told me they were okay, just wanting me to feel at ease, so I told her I’d talk to her later. After a while she called me again and said that they had started going down but were told to go back, because the building was secure. The fire marshals in the building made that announcement on the PA system: “Your building is secure.” But some of them did not go back. The eighty-eighth floor went down, and some on the eighty-ninth actually left but then returned. I told her, “Your building just got hit,” not knowing what else to say. She said, “I got to go, I got to go.” “Call me back,” I said. And she said, “It’s getting very hot up here. The fire marshals are moving us out. I’ll talk to you as soon as I can.”

  We talked one last time. They had gone to the top floor; it was locked. They had to come back down, she said. They went to the stairway, as there were no working elevators. It was pitch-black, no lights. At one point while we were talking she said, “This might be my last call to you.” And she said, “Rudy, pray, okay? Pray.” And she said, “Good-bye.” I said, “Okay. When you get to a phone, give me a call.”

  It never dawned on me that she might die. Just as it never dawned on me that this could happen in the United States. She’ll get down, I kept thinking. It never dawned on me that the building could fall. If the building didn’t go down, maybe eventually . . . But I just saw the building go down....

  Marie was afraid of only one thing: She feared death. I don’t know why. And as I was watching that thing fall I could feel the building blocks hitting her body and feel what she was going through. I felt the fear of being afraid to die. There was nothing I could do.