Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Several days after 9/11, Jack sat weeping42 on his back porch, where the previous Sunday he and Alayne had shared wine, cheese, gratitude, and a kiss. Alayne, her colleague Ed Emery, and the technology consultants they tried to evacuate were among eighty-seven Fiduciary Trust Company employees and ten contractors who died. Alayne’s boss told Jack that she saved forty people by ordering an immediate exit.

  As Jack cried, wondering how he’d raise their two sons alone, his pastor called: “You need to come to the church, to see something.” There, Jack found hundreds of chrysanthemums lining the sidewalk, a tribute from the children Alayne taught at Sunday school and the families she’d touched. Jack took it as a message.

  “I had to recover for those boys, and I did,” Jack said. “I didn’t want to let her down. I wanted to make sure I would do everything to raise our kids and make sure their lives went on as well as I could, because I know that is what she would want me to do. I didn’t want to fall down and become this sad, miserable nothing.”

  Their son Alex earned a master’s degree at Rutgers, where his parents had met, and became a math teacher. Their son Rob went to New York University, where Alayne had earned her MBA, and became an app developer for Major League Baseball. They remained close to Alayne’s parents. Jack remarried and became a stepfather to two children.

  Jack credited his recovery to keeping Alayne’s memory alive. The effort began in earnest several months after 9/11, with a call from a real estate agent. Unaware of Alayne’s death, the agent said the beach house the couple liked during their bike survey of Barnegat Light had come onto the market. “I couldn’t possibly do this now,” Jack said. But later he called back. This was what Alayne had wanted. Jack bought the property and built a house he knew she would have liked.

  “It’s a way of keeping something special between us,” Jack said. “And then handing it down to our children and, hopefully, our grandchildren.”

  When FDNY paramedic Carlos Lillo didn’t call or come home, his wife, Cecilia, hoped that he was in a hospital. When she learned that he’d died in the line of duty, Cecilia was overcome with grief. She suffered not only from his loss, but also from fear that Carlos had died trying to find her inside the North Tower.

  Cecilia gained a measure of relief three days after 9/11, when Carlos’s friend and fellow paramedic Edith Torres43 rushed to her house with a copy of a special edition of Newsweek44 magazine. A photo splashed across two pages showed Carlos tending to a bloody woman in a red dress, an image that confirmed for Cecilia that he’d kept his promise.

  It’s not entirely clear how Carlos died, but based on reports from colleagues, Cecilia believed that he answered a call to the South Tower lobby for a firefighter with chest pains minutes before the collapse. His partial remains were identified in March 2002, and Cecilia held what she called the “first funeral” that September, to coincide with their second wedding anniversary. The serial discovery of more partial remains, spread over more than a decade, led to more funerals and memorials, including an elaborate shrine to Carlos’s memory in their Long Island home. Cecilia grieved, too, for friends, among them the two women with whom she evacuated: Nancy Perez and Arlene Babakitis.

  Cecilia canceled her appointment with the fertility specialist. She never had children. She struggled with her unusual, unwanted circumstances as both a 9/11 survivor and the grieving widow of an emergency responder. Yet in a way, that unique status meant that her life and Carlos’s death would forever be intertwined.

  “My husband was my hero,” she’d say. “He will always be my hero. All I learned from him gave me the courage to go on.”

  Bit by bit, Cecilia rebuilt her life. She left her job with the Port Authority and doted on her nieces and nephews. She kept a special eye on her sister’s daughter Casandra, with whom Carlos played on the last day of his life. In time, Cecilia began a relationship with a man who understood that Carlos remains her true love. When she dies, Cecilia wants a container holding her ashes to be placed inside her wedding gown, then sealed inside a double vault in a mausoleum where some of Carlos’s ashes already rest inside his dress uniform.

  Carlos’s death was honored in numerous tributes, but one carried special meaning for Cecilia. A few months before 9/11, on one of their daily commutes, they noticed an industrial property across from an elementary school in Astoria, Queens. The trash-strewn lot saddened Carlos, who told Cecilia he thought it would make a fine place for a father to toss a ball or enjoy a milkshake with his child. The City of New York acquired the property in 2007. Today it is an oasis of green space and flowering trees, a haven for city parents and children, named Carlos R. Lillo Park.

  Ron Clifford was shattered by the confirmation that his sister, Ruth Clifford McCourt, and his niece, Juliana, were aboard United Airlines Flight 175. His brothers in Ireland had called earlier in the day, to check on him. Now he called them back. “We’re in trouble,” Ron said. “It’s the end of the world.”

  Ron told himself that Ruth must have been a beacon of calm at the very end. He thought she must have comforted Juliana, holding her close as their plane veered wildly then dipped low over Manhattan, perhaps whispering an Irish lullaby in her ear. A thought both harrowing and strangely comforting entered Ron’s mind. At the instant of Ruth and Juliana’s murders, when Flight 175 pierced the South Tower, he’d been nearby. He’d felt the shock wave in every cell of his body.

  At home with his family on the night of his daughter’s eleventh birthday and the deaths of his sister and niece, Ron could still feel the vibrations of impact, bottomless bass chords resonating in the hollow of his chest. As long as he lived, Ron would remember what he was doing at the moment everything changed. He was kneeling on the floor of the Marriott lobby, tending to Jennieann Maffeo, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  Ron never rescheduled the September 11 meeting he’d considered crucial a day earlier. He learned that the man he was supposed to meet had fled the Marriott after the first explosion. Ron decided that he didn’t want to work with someone who might have brushed past without stopping when he and Jennieann huddled on the lobby floor. Ron built a new business that worked out better than he ever imagined.

  In the days after 9/11, Ron learned that a young man named Bryan Craig Bennett,45 a salesman for a division of the investment banking firm Cantor Fitzgerald, had died on the 104th or 105th floor of the North Tower. Bryan grew up in Ron’s New Jersey house; Bryan’s mother had sold it to Ron and Brigid a year earlier. Adding to the litany of loss, Jennieann Maffeo was right about the colleague she’d stood beside at the shuttle stop. Wai-ching Chung was dead. So was his niece, Maurita Tam, an executive assistant on the 99th floor of the South Tower, whom Wai-ching had amused as a child with floating tissue tricks.

  The funeral of Ruth and Juliana drew more than twelve hundred people and received media coverage around the world. Ron organized a celebration of their lives at the Connecticut home of Ruth and her husband, David, complete with an Irish bagpiper. Later, Ruth’s wedding ring turned up, undamaged, as workers sifted through the Trade Center wreckage. Its South Sea pearls and diamonds still glistened.

  Meanwhile, family and friends sat vigil by Jennieann Maffeo’s bedside. She survived the night, then another, and another. The hospital allowed only two visitors in her room at a time, so Jennieann’s supporters often filled the waiting area. The two-to-a-room rule didn’t apply to Jennieann’s mother, Frances, who wouldn’t leave anyway.

  Andrea Maffeo kept Ron updated about Jennieann’s condition, and a few days after the attacks he came to visit. With Ruth and Juliana gone, Ron desperately wanted Jennieann to live, for something positive to emerge from his suffering.

  Jennieann’s father took Ron’s face in both hands and started to cry. “Thank you for giving me my daughter back,” Sam Maffeo said. Ron sobbed, too.

  Ron moved to the head of Jennieann’s bed and whispered: “Please get better.” Ron left his yellow silk tie on her pillow.

  Weeks went by and Jennieann se
emed to defy doctors’ dire predictions. She remained in a coma and still hadn’t spoken, but she improved enough to be moved to a recovery room. Finally, though, after forty-one days, after more surgeries than Andrea could count, after her percentage of burned skin area was corrected to more than 90, Jennieann’s kidneys failed. She died October 23, 2001.

  Ron heard the news on the radio after dropping his brothers at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, after they had come from Ireland to see the pit that had been dubbed Ground Zero. Ron pulled his car over and wept.

  On the same day Jennieann died, the coroner’s office called Ron. A DNA match had identified some of Ruth’s remains. Ron brought the ashes to Cork, to bury them alongside his and Ruth’s grandparents, their brother who died young, and their father, Valentine. A couple of years later, around Christmas, the coroner called again to say that some of Juliana’s remains had been identified. Ron returned to Ireland to place them with the remains of her mother.

  Ruth and Juliana became symbols of 9/11 in Ireland, and reporters regularly asked Ron to talk about them. On one visit to Ireland with Brigid and their daughter Monica, Ron was cornered by an official at a sports club.

  “I know you,” she said. “You’re the man that was on the television. You’re the man whose sister and niece died in 9/11, and they’re buried out in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery.”

  “Yeah,” Ron said. “That’s me.”

  “Listen to this, now,” the woman said. “I drive by there with me mother every week, and we say a Hail Mary to them. As long as me and me mother are alive in Cork, your sister and niece will never be lonely.”

  Kindness from strangers helped, but for a long time Ron had awful dreams, often featuring Jennieann, but sometimes with Ruth, in which he felt trapped somewhere, trying to escape. Awake, he suffered post-traumatic stress. He’d stand in the shower, scraping and scrubbing his feet raw. Ron’s compulsion stemmed from a mental link he’d made between his experiences and the Holocaust movie Schindler’s List. In a wrenching scene, Otto Schindler steps into a street as the ashes of murdered Jews float down around him. Ron suspected that outside the Marriott, he’d trampled on the ashes of the dead.

  Therapy eased his mind, as did sailing in the Long Island Sound, and the love of Brigid and Monica.

  For years Ron ached for Ruth’s husband, his brother-in-law, David McCourt. Searchers at Ground Zero found Ruth’s battered Hermès wallet, complete with the papal coin from her and David’s Vatican wedding. David put the coin on a chain and wore it over his heart. David remarried a decade after 9/11 but died of cancer in 2013.

  Allan Hackel paid tribute to his late wife with the Paige Farley-Hackel Memorial Playground in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. As he approached ninety, Allan still cried for the love of his life.

  Brigid and Monica accompanied Ron when he testified at the Moussaoui trial. Andrea Maffeo testified immediately after Ron. Nearly two decades after 9/11, Andrea still cherished the yellow tie Ron left on Jennieann’s pillow, a silken bond between them and their lost sisters.

  Now and then, Ron pulled out an email that Ruth sent him three months before she died, addressed to “Dearest, Dearest Ron.” She wrote: “Congratulations on life. You’re doing a great job. It’s time to sit back, take a breath, and let the energy flow.” It was signed, “Love you always, Ruthie.”

  As Ron moved ahead with his life, he came to believe that he’d initially misunderstood what happened to him on 9/11. He’d been hailed as a hero, but Ron realized that if not for Jennieann, he might have run through the North Tower lobby and out onto the plaza where fiery wreckage, building debris, and people rained down.

  “Do I believe there’s a hereafter? There’s something. You can’t prove it for some reason, but there’s something else at work here. The meeting was changed to that place, I happened to be there at the right time, and that got me out of there and got me home to my daughter’s eleventh birthday. Jennieann Maffeo was put there for me.”

  Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 soon realized that if they hadn’t encountered Josephine Harris inside Stairwell B, they might have been among the dead.

  If they had stuck to their original double-step evacuation pace, they might have caught up to Chief Richard Prunty in the lobby where he died. If they’d rushed faster, they might have been just outside the North Tower, where the collapse crushed Chief of Department Peter Ganci Jr., First Deputy Commissioner William Feehan, and numerous others. Or, if they’d hung back like some other firefighters, if Jay hadn’t ordered an immediate retreat when the South Tower fell, Ladder 6 might have been higher inside the tower, with no time to rescue themselves or Josephine.

  Jay would spend long nights picturing the faces of lost friends and replaying a conversation he had on 9/11 with a fellow captain near the pile of rubble. “Congratulations!” Captain Jim Riches told Jay that day. “I heard all your radio transmissions. That’s the most dramatic thing I’ve ever heard in my career. By the way, did you see Engine 4?” Jim Riches was looking for his eldest son, Firefighter Jimmy Riches. Jay hadn’t seen him.

  Those thoughts would come later. First, on the afternoon of 9/11, Jay had to get home. The North Tower collapse had destroyed Ladder 6’s truck, leaving only his tired legs to carry him. Jay straightened his helmet, gripped his pry bar, and walked north through streets filled with the silt of pulverized buildings, empty of cars and people.

  As he entered Chinatown, Jay strode down the center of Canal Street, on any other day a pedestrian death wish. He felt like the cartoon character Pigpen, filth clinging to his skin, trailing a cloud of dust. Jay sensed eyes upon him, so he turned around to see about twenty Chinese men following him at a respectful distance.

  One fell in step alongside Jay. “You okay?” the man asked.

  “Yeah,” Jay said, “I’m okay as long as I keep going. If I stop, I’m not going to want to start again.”

  “Where you going?”

  “The firehouse on Canal and Allen.”

  “Okay,” the man said, “we’ll make sure you get there.”

  With the Chinese men as a solemn honor guard, Jay walked the rest of the way to the Ladder 6 firehouse. There he called his weeping wife, Judy, and told her how much he loved her and their children.

  The escort from the Chinese men was among thousands of tributes, official and unofficial, to the heroism of New York firefighters, Port Authority and New York City police officers, and other emergency responders. In the weeks and months that followed, amid funerals and tears, the accolades built into a national outpouring of gratitude.

  Among the dead were 343 FDNY firefighters and paramedics. The loss dwarfed the FDNY’s previous worst day,46 in 1966, when a fire in a Manhattan brownstone killed twelve firefighters. Those lost on 9/11 included more than a dozen of the friends and colleagues Jay encountered that day in person or on the radio: Chief Richard Prunty; captains Paddy Brown, Billy Burke, and Terry Hatton, who died without knowing that his wife was pregnant; lieutenants Pete Freund, Dennis Mojica, and Mike Warchola; and firefighters Faustino Apostol, Andy Fredericks, Scott Kopytko, Kenneth Marino, Gerry Nevins, Doug Oelschlager, and Dave Weiss.

  Lieutenant William “Billy” McGinn, who worked under Jay years earlier in Ladder 11, and who immediately warned that “it could be a terrorist attack,” was also among the dead. Chief Joseph Pfeifer’s brother, Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer, died in the collapse of the North Tower. The FDNY’s annual fitness award was renamed for Battalion Chief Orio Palmer, whom Jay saw in the North Tower lobby before Orio led the charge up the South Tower.

  Also killed was Firefighter James Riches, whom searchers found in what had been the North Tower lobby. “Big Jimmy” Riches and his three younger sons carried the flag-draped remains of “Little Jimmy”47 from Ground Zero. Later, all three surviving Riches brothers joined the FDNY, like their father and brother before them.

  The death toll included thirty-seven Port Authority Police officers, among them Superintendent Ferdina
nd “Fred” Morrone, whom Cecilia Lillo passed in the stairwell; twenty-three members of the New York Police Department; eight medics from private ambulance companies; and one member of the New York Fire Patrol. Plus, one bomb-sniffing Labrador retriever, Dave Lim’s partner, Sirius.

  Amid the grief, word spread about what became known as the Miracle of Stairwell B. Producers for NBC reconnected the men of Ladder 6 with Josephine Harris on the show Dateline. With the camera rolling, they credited her with their survival and she lavished them with praise. “They are [the most] strong, brave, caring, kind people48 I have ever met,” Josephine said. “When I was scared, they held my hand. They took off their jackets and gave them to me when I was cold. They told me not to be afraid, they would get me out. And they did. They are magnificent.”

  Josephine was made an honorary member of Ladder 6, and they bestowed upon her a title even higher than Chief. Her jacket read guardian angel.

  Their mutual affection continued in the years that followed. Sal D’Agostino invited Josephine to his wedding. Jay and the rest included her in media interviews, September 11 memorial events, and parades. At one of them, she waved like royalty from a convertible while they walked alongside, her uniformed footmen.

  The bond remained strong despite moves to new firehouses, promotions, and retirements that sent the men of Ladder 6 in different directions. Yet even as she reveled in their connection, Josephine remained intensely private, never letting them know about her financial hardships and significant health issues. Jay expected Josephine to join them during events and media appearances marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, but in January 2011 she suffered an apparent heart attack in her Brooklyn apartment.

  Josephine Harris was pronounced dead at age sixty-nine. Her funeral mass was conducted by Cardinal Edward Egan, archbishop emeritus of New York, with luminaries including former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was laid to rest inside a blue steel coffin, its silken interior embroidered with an image of a firefighter walking hand in hand with an angel. Jay and the men of Ladder 6 carried Josephine one last time, as pallbearers.