At the same time, Linda was at Patterson State College majoring in speech pathology. She drove a white Dodge Dart convertible with red racing stripes along the sides. She had a small, tight-knit group of girlfriends who were always going somewhere—the beach, a concert, a dance. She seemed to find her niche at school, and I didn’t need to worry about her.
She met Phil at a college dance. They had danced together all night, and he called her the next day, not knowing her name, but having gotten her number.
“You had the red dress on last night, right?” he confirmed when he reached her at her dorm. That was all he said he remembered.
An engineering student at a nearby school, Phil was a handsome boy with a kind smile and gentle eyes. He was very quiet, and somewhat shy, but he folded himself into our family quickly and completely. What I most liked about Phil was that he seemed to be able to do what we all did in the family—see through Linda’s scars. Just as we did, he didn’t treat her any differently than anyone else. And Linda seemed to be herself around him.
They married after they both graduated from college. Linda wanted to work with children, when speech therapy is most needed, but she was turned down for job after job because people thought she would frighten the kids. I always thought they overlooked how accepting children can be when they have an explanation. Mostly, they just want to know what happened. In any case, no school or hospital would give her a chance at the profession she had studied.
For a while, Linda had a fairy-tale life as far as I knew. Phil landed a good job and they bought a house in the suburbs in New Jersey. They had two beautiful daughters, Cheryl and Debbie. The babies were another miracle—the doctors had said she could never conceive because of her extensive radiation exposure from X-rays over the years.
I was surprised when the marriage ended. All I know is that they tried marriage counseling, which didn’t work. Linda moved back home for a little while after that, then to an apartment near my parents. She worked at a hospital in medical records for several years before she married again. Meanwhile, my parents sold their house and moved to Florida to retire. Linda’s second marriage only lasted a few years as well, and toward the end of it, she moved with her girls to Florida not far from my parents.
chapter forty-five
2006
IT’S MY FIRST trip to Florida to see my sister since our parents died. Linda had a hard time finding a place to live after her recent breakup with a boyfriend, and I want to see where she landed. We talked on the phone during her search for a place she could afford, and I tried to help from a distance as much as I could. But ultimately, all I could do was help her meet the first two months’ rent deposit. Any money from the settlement with the airline has long since been depleted, and she relies on disability assistance because of her injuries. Her back and leg pain require constant pain medication. She walks with the help of a cane and uses a scooter for shopping and longer outings.
Coming from the West Palm Beach airport, I try to follow her directions, but I can’t seem to find the street she told me she lives on. I call her on my cell, and she talks me through the turns until I see a small street between streets that looks like an alleyway. It’s lined with small houses that look more like shacks to me. My heart sinks a little when I see her little red car parked in front of one of them. The one-story boxlike building has yellow peeling paint and a flat, unevenly shingled roof. It doesn’t look big enough to have more than one room inside. One reason she chose the place was because it is on one level, and she can manage getting in and out with groceries and laundry.
Linda is at her door when I pull up. She looks small to me, slightly hunched over and leaning heavily on her cane. Her hair is short and reddish blonde and has thinned quite a bit. I can tell she’s taken extra care with her makeup for me today, and she’s dressed in a colorful purple-and-white print top with black slacks. I notice she’s wearing the silver earrings and necklace I gave her for her last birthday. She’s glad to see me, and we hug at the entranceway to her place. She looks well, if a little tired around her eyes. I watch her watch my face drop as I come inside and I try to hide my shock.
Linda has managed to make the place homey. The tiny kitchen only has space for a very small table with two chairs. Linda proudly shows me how she has painted a kitchen set she found discarded in a Dumpster. There is a living room of sorts, where I spot many familiar things from her old place as well as some things from my parents’ home: an antique cigarette holder; the Royal Doulton pitcher I brought back to her from England; a white ceramic vase my mother made. The couch is another pick-up that someone discarded, with a blanket thrown over it to dress it up. She has hung pictures on the wall and gotten some lamps to counteract the darkness of the place. The one window in the room is boarded up.
She’s made a pot of coffee and bought a cake to celebrate my arrival, and we sit at her kitchen table for a while and talk. This place is not permanent, she tells me. Just until she can find a better one. We talk about how to find one, and I offer some ideas about newspaper listings and using the web. I ask her if she wants to go out and look at some places while I’m here. She can see I am anxious to get her out of this place. All I can think of is how upset my parents would be to see her here.
We get around to talking about my writing, and I tell her what I’ve been doing, how I’ve been collecting articles, going through our parents’ letters and hers to me. I take out a folder I brought with me, and we uncover some of the details together. In various news articles, we find that the plane hit 306 and 310 Williamson nearly simultaneously. Number 306 exploded and collapsed, the sides of the house falling outward, the people inside buried.
As the flames roared through my parents building, they also spread through the duplex frame house next door and the concrete house behind them. A car exploded inside a garage.
Rosa Caruso was the lone survivor of 306—pulled out of her flaming kitchen by patrolmen John Mannion and John Long. Her husband was still inside.
The third floor of my parent’s building was completely destroyed. Neither Michael nor Christina Pagoulatos got out. Their boarder, Karl Reuling Jr., missed the crash by those ten minutes he kept his class after school.
All the children got out of the candy store, on the ground floor of my parents’ building, unharmed. The owners of the store, Alfred and Margaret Collins, had a near-tragic confusion. Margaret was behind the soda fountain and thought Alfred was in the back. Their niece, who was waitressing, dragged Margaret out as she screamed, “He’s in there! Alfred is in there!” But he wasn’t. He was standing outside the building waiting for her.
LINDA AND I ruminate about the what-ifs.
“If that day hadn’t been foggy and rainy, Donna wouldn’t have been home. She would have stayed at school to do her project,” Linda says.
“Well, there may never have been the crash in the first place then,” I add.
“You know, Dad always thought it would have come out different if he had been home when it happened,” she says.
“I can’t see how.”
I leave Linda’s house and get back into my rental car and head for my hotel. I’m feeling so close to the accident, looking at it with Linda and still seeing the ramifications of the crash in her life. Thinking about the place she lives in now, I have to pull my car over to just let the tears have their way. Still, I have trouble accepting the unfairness and the contrast in our lives. As I think about how grateful I am to be going home tomorrow to my raised ranch, my husband, and my son, I’m hit with a familiar wave of guilt.
chapter forty-six
JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)
3:40 PM
CAPTAIN REID’S PLANE was cleared to 2,500 feet, then 1,500 feet. He was told to start his approach and was cleared for landing at 3:45 PM on Newark Runway 6.
MY MOTHER CHECKED the kitchen clock to time her baking, watched the second hand bounce and tick the minutes away. Her bright yellow curtains let in as much light as the gray day
offered. The black-and-white tiled floor caught a glint by her feet. Her shoes clicked on the tile as she moved from sink to stove to refrigerator.
Donna and Sheila had spread poster boards for their science project on jet propulsion on the floor and were outlining letters in marker. They were quietly engrossed in their work, their markers squeaking across the shiny surface.
Linda was supposed to be napping on the couch, but instead was playing with measuring cups in the living room, contentedly fitting them together and taking them apart to hear the clang of metal on metal.
“What smells so good, Mrs. M?” Sheila asked.
“Come on girls, come sit and have some chocolate-chip cookies. They’re still warm. Tell me how your day was.”
Donna and Sheila took seats at the kitchen table. My mother poured two glasses of milk.
chapter forty-seven
“THAT FINGER WON’T be worth a damn. It won’t ever bend. And it may cause infection. She would do just fine without it. It will just be a pest for her,” the doctor said.
Amputation was his recommendation for three-year-old Linda’s left index finger. The joint of the finger was fused, contracted by a patchwork of thick, discolored scar tissue. A stick of a finger with a tiny rock of nail tipping the edge.
“With everything she is going through, I don’t want to take anything more away from her,” was my mother’s reasoning when she told the doctor no.
And so “Pesty” was named and adopted as a favored digit. A pet that was babied and cared for. The small nail chip polished in bright red with each manicure. Pesty was a symbol of defiance and gut decisions that my mother believed were often necessary.
“Sometimes, we just know best,” my mother would say.
chapter forty-eight
2006
I’M AT LINDA’S new apartment in Florida, a vast improvement over the last one. This one is small but cozy, in a two-family house with a small yard for her little toy poodle to run outside. It’s clean, and everything in it works. It has a real roof and real windows that let light inside, though I worry about the ventilation and how much Linda smokes. She is limping badly now. Although she tries to hide it, I see her wince when she stands from her chair.
It’s no mystery now that her knee replacement a few years ago was too big for her leg. By the time it was discovered to be the problem, no surgeon wanted to do the re-replacement because of complications with her scar tissue. I don’t want her to give up on finding a solution to her pain, and I have urged her to see another doctor. I asked my doctor in Connecticut to recommend a surgeon down here, and she has just seen him. This new doctor has told Linda that he will do it, but that there is a 50 percent chance he will have to amputate her leg if he encounters problems with the surgery. And he anticipates problems.
We’re sitting on her couch talking it over, her dog running between us for attention. I am a poor substitute for my mother. She would have known the right thing to say, how to advise her. I flounder with the words.
“They’re doing wonderful things with prostheses these days,” I tell her. The words escape before I catch their meaning. They fall with a thud between us.
“Let’s do some online research,” I offer. “See what some of the support groups say.” About amputees, I don’t say.
The knee doesn’t bend anymore. A stick of a leg. A painful pest of a leg. But she decides it’s better to have it than to risk losing it.
I look down and see that the nails on the foot of the offending leg are painted with bright-red polish.
chapter forty-nine
JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)
3:41 PM
FLIGHT 6780 WAS over Linden, below 1,500 feet, and was again advised to listen to Newark Radar. Captain Reid seemed to be drifting on and off his flight plan course.
This was the recorded interchange at 3:41 PM:
“American 6780, this is Newark Radar. How do you hear? Over.”
“Roger, Radar, I’ve been listening to you monitor 6720, and I hear you loud and clear.” Flight 6720 was another American Airlines Convair immediately ahead of 6780. It landed safely on Runway 6 at Newark at 3:39 PM.
“6780, this is Newark Radar, I have you five and a half miles out, coming up on the glide path, and you’re nine hundred feet to the left of course.”
“American 6780, five miles out, on the glide path, still nine hundred feet to the left of course.”
“Coming back to course now, you’re now four hundred feet left, glide path is good, four and a half miles out.”
At four miles out, Radar Control sent this message: “Three hundred feet to the left and coming back to course.”
Then, “Right on course, and one hundred feet high on the glide path with the courthouse one mile ahead.”
The Elizabeth courthouse was three quarters of a mile from my parents’ home on Williamson Street.
Then, from Radar Control:
“You’re drifting to the right, you’re nine hundred feet to the right of course and one half mile from the courthouse.”
Four or five seconds later, the aircraft vanished from radar screens.
Several requests were sent to Flight 6780 for its position. None were answered.
chapter fifty
1954
LINDA STARTED KINDERGARTEN at the same school that Donna had attended, Woodrow Wilson School 19. My mother walked her there, along the same streets, but from a different direction now. I was just four months old.
On the way to her class, Linda passed this memorial plaque on the wall near the principal’s office:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR FRIEND AND CLASSMATE
DONNA JO MANDEL
JULY 25, 1945–JANUARY 22, 1952
At first, she felt like a sort of star at school. Everyone knew her, and of the accident and her sister—now famous in her death. She didn’t have the chance not to tell anyone. She wore the evidence every day.
Photos of Linda at that age showed a spunky kid with a ready smile and a determined look in her eye. My parents had put everything into building her confidence, showing her all the things she could accomplish just by trying hard. Already, she had learned to walk twice, once at a year old, and again at three after the accident. In a few years, she would have to do it again after another surgery.
My mother started working with the PTA the year before Linda started school, while she was pregnant with me, arranging seminars and workshops with parents and teachers about what today would be called “diversity.” She kept encouraging class discussions about accepting people that were different in some way. She used the PTA as a tool to make Linda’s life easier.
Her early school years were good ones. In first grade, Linda even got her first real valentine. But, later, kids were not as accepting and were sometimes cruel. When teenagers started having parties where the boys and girls would pair off, Linda told me, she was left alone. She would go to the bathroom a lot, or help in the kitchen to get out of the situation and then go home to cry herself to sleep. Finally, she wouldn’t go to those parties at all, making up some excuse to my parents—that her friends wouldn’t be there, or that she had something else to do.
I must have realized some of this happened while it occurred, but Linda made light of it so that it was easy to ignore. She was always fine, she said, whenever I asked.
chapter fifty-one
2006
WITH JUSTIN AWAY at college, this is the first time David and I have lived alone together in our six years of marriage. Although I miss my son in an almost physical way, this part of the empty-nest equation is a nice one. David and I can be just a couple, which we have never really had a chance to be. We can just be us. It’s the kind of calm, happy relationship I had always hoped to find.
I’m thinking of how my parents survived what they did. I decide to do some research into grief and, specifically, the death of a child. Online I find a plethora of books to order that promise some answers on the subject along with some online support groups.
I wish these had been around for my parents, my mother especially, to help them through.
While I’m reading about how parents try to recover from losing a child, I find that many decide to have another child, and then I see a term I had never seen: "replacement child." Though the words are used to describe an antidote for the parents, the children themselves seem to be at some risk in their role as healers. They even have a psychiatric condition named for them: replacement child syndrome.
chapter fifty-two
JANUARY 22, 1952 (DAY OF THE CRASH)
3:43 PM
AFEW BLOCKS AWAY from my parents’ house, Vincent J. O’Connell was standing in his yard at 325 Fay Avenue. He heard the aircraft approach from the southeast. Several seconds later, he heard a loud blast, and then another after a few more seconds.
By that time, the aircraft was close to where he stood and had veered sharply to the right. It was over his head when there was a third blast. He saw a yellowish glare for a moment through the fog.
“One motor stopped. The other increased in intensity and whined,” he told reporters. It seemed “as if a tremendous amount of power was being applied.” A few seconds later there was “a terrific explosion in the distance.”
The plane careened just over the rooftop of Battin High and landed across the street. Cafeteria workers were sure the blast was an atomic bomb. The three hundred students inside escaped the crash by fifty yards.
In the tiny concrete house behind my parents’ house, Mrs. Fetske heard a roar, and then one wall of the building fell away. She grabbed her baby, Albert, and escaped.
At 314 Williamson Street, Mrs. William Schwartz raced with the baby she was watching and her own two children across the street to the high school.
Replacement Child Page 13