Idyll Banter (2003)

by Chris Bohjalian

  The memory stuck for our little girl, and Tuesday was a long day for her--though I wasn't there to hold her because I had been at the airport in Denver that morning.

  I learned of the disaster when I called my wife to wish her good morning from the gate. It was about 7:15 A.M. my time, and 9:15 in the east.

  "It's not a good morning," she said, and her voice had a quiver to it I wasn't sure I had ever heard there before. I immediately feared that something had happened at our daughter's school or to one of our parents. And then she told me what she had heard on the radio.

  She explained that two planes had crashed into the towers, and at least one was a commercial jet. This was no Cessna accidentally dinging the paint on the side.

  A plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center monoliths has always been one of her fears, something she sees in her mind's eye often when we fly near Manhattan and the skyline seems so close it's as if we're at eye level with the rooftops. We're not, of course, even when the plane is well into its final descent, and she had always presumed this fear was completely unfounded. No longer.

  As soon as she had finished describing to me what she had heard on the radio and then seen on the television, the cell phones around me started to ring. The gate was crowded, and we all had our phones, and there was someone somewhere for virtually every one of us who wanted us to know what had happened because they loved us and were scared. They needed to hear our voices and know where we were.

  Still, the magnitude of the attack wasn't yet clear, and the airline had us board the jet for our planned flight to San Francisco a little past 7:30. I was sitting one empty seat away from a passenger whose brother-in-law worked in the World Trade Center, and he called on his phone everyone he could think of who might know the fate of the complex of buildings tantalizingly close to the Statue of Liberty.

  All this week I have wondered why the Statue of Liberty wasn't, apparently, on the list of targets. After all, we had been shown that Washington, D.C., was not invincible, and the symbol of our financial and corporate wealth was devastatingly vulnerable. Why not add to that litany the majestic icon of our freedom? Surely by mid-morning there are plenty of people on that small island, a good many of whom are likely to be children.

  I will never know whether the brother-in-law of the gentleman I met on the airplane is alive. After waiting about forty-five minutes in the plane on the ground, the pilot informed us that no more flights would be leaving until at the very least the end of the day, and in a voice that was even and calm he told us why. He told us that the number of planes that had crashed now totaled three, and that a fourth one seemed to be missing. We were to disembark.

  I exited the plane and sat stunned in the very seat at the gate where my wife had informed me that the world had been forever transformed. I called her again, and the one piece of good news she had was that a friend of ours who we presumed had been at the World Trade Center that morning had been fired at the end of last month. My wife had tracked her down at her home while I'd been on the edge of the tarmac.

  Even this kernel of relief dried up quickly, however, when I saw the man from the plane whose brother-in-law had been at work at the tip of the island. He passed by me, squeezing his cell phone against his ear, and his skin was paler than it had seemed when we had spoken together on the inside of the plane. I told myself it was just the lighting in the terminal versus the lighting in the cabin, but I didn't really believe this was the case.

  I wasn't sure what I should do. I was at the very beginning of a lengthy book tour, and I was supposed to be heading west, but I no longer had any desire to talk about my novel. Likewise, I couldn't believe there was a soul on the planet who would have any interest, either.

  I wanted only to go home, but even that was impossible. An airport representative informed us that the airport was going to close. We were to take the underground trains from our concourse back to the main terminal, and from there we were to vacate the airport. It wasn't going to reopen for at least twenty-four hours.

  I was lucky: The hotel where I had been staying hadn't even changed the sheets on the bed on which I'd slept, and my publisher was able to get me the very same room. Other travelers weren't so fortunate.

  Still, that afternoon when I took a long walk I felt farther from home than I ever had in my life, and the sky above--though the fathomless blue that I crave in the fall--made me lonely. I knew, by then, that there wasn't a commercial jet in the sky. They'd all landed as quickly as they could.

  Imagine, I thought. Other than those F-16s on patrol, a sky without planes.

  For all of us there are moments that represent horrific turning points in our lives and images that we will never be able to forget: the paisley-shaped plumes of smoke that trailed the space shuttle Challenger through the atmosphere after it exploded; the rubble that surrounded the skeletal remains of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; and, of course, the footage we revisited the past few days of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John Kennedy.

  I doubt any of those images, however, will scar the soul of a nation as deeply as what we all watched on television or in person this week: a plane slicing into one of the World Trade Center towers, its twin beside it already ablaze; two 110-story buildings collapsing in upon themselves in mere seconds in storms of smoke and soot and debris. A rolling wave of ash that tumbled like lava down the streets of the financial district.

  My sense is that this nation will recover. We will not be bullied, and we will not be frightened; we will give meaning to the lives of the people who died by going on--by refusing to see our way of life annihilated.

  But we will all know where we were when the comfort and security we take for granted was destroyed as surely as the skyline of lower Manhattan. And that moment, for me, will be a gate at an airport far from home.

  Chapter 8.

  TALKING THEN, TALKING NOW

  IN THE DAYS immediately after terrorists transformed four commercial passenger jets into guided missiles last year and forever altered our world, people talked. We talked of our immediate past and where we had been September 11.

  Two weeks later I agreed to stumble through the vestiges of a largely canceled book tour in Boston, and I must have had fifteen conversations about the attacks that late September day with people I was meeting for the first time. Everyone needed to share where they were, what they had experienced, and their personal interpretation of how things had changed.

  All the conversations that day seemed to share one thing: the desire to portray oneself as having a connection, however tenuous or vague, to the victims of the attack. One woman told me that she had gone that weekend to a memorial service for a friend of a friend. Another person said that she'd flown twice on the same Boston-based flight that would auger into the World Trade Center's north tower. A man shared with me his fears for his nephew who was living in Brooklyn Heights and who was at the moment enduring the fumes from the fires in lower Manhattan.

  There were more, and I certainly wasn't shy with my own anecdotes: the fact that I had been at Denver International Airport when the attacks occurred and was stranded in Denver for a week, or the footnote that my wife once worked on the 104th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers.

  Throughout the day in Boston I was with a woman who was conspicuously quiet: my media escort, the individual my publisher had retained to take me to the area bookstores and radio stations.

  Around lunchtime I wondered why she was so silent when people shared their tales of 9/11. My sense was that suddenly we were a nation of talkers--except for this woman. And so I asked her where she had been on the morning of 9/11.

  She rolled her eyes and told me--not a trace of self-pity in her voice--that she had begun the day watching as her brother perished because he worked on an upper floor of one of the towers, and then she helped novelist Jane Hamilton find a way back to her home in the Midwest.

  After a moment she added: "If I entered the conversations you've been ha
ving today, I would have stopped them dead in their tracks. There's a lot of one-upmanship going on right now, and I just don't feel like playing."

  Ever since then, I've been leery of talking about where I was on 9/11, or what I was experiencing. It's not that I no longer believe it's healthy or helpful to reflect on my specific place in the cosmos on 9/11. But my grief is different from that experienced by the families of the nearly three thousand people who died, the people who still live in lower Manhattan, or the people who rose to the daunting task of cleaning up the mess: carting away a literal mountain of rubble, trying to identify the tens of thousands of body parts, or even replacing the windows that were shattered at the nearby apartment buildings.

  My grief--the grief of most Americans--is for the loss of that feeling of invulnerability we've savored since the Cold War ended. In that regard it's very real. Likewise, our sorrow for what the victims endured before they died and for their families who are left mourning is with us every single day.

  Nevertheless, when we talk this week of the anniversary, let us not simply recall where we were a year ago. Let us not merely sit before the mind-numbing parade of images--the towers, the Pentagon, the living, the dead, the missing who will never be found--that are monopolizing our TV screens and being used to sell a small library of new books.

  Let us honor the victims instead by discussing as well energy policies that do not demand foreign oil, and behavior that is less dependent upon fossil fuel. Let us talk of peace in the Middle East. Let us celebrate our incomprehensible bounties while imagining how we can share that largesse with the rest of the world. And, yes, let us envision ways to spread democracy--ways that do not involve the carnage that comes with all war.

  In short, let us talk this week not only of where we were, but also of where we can be.

  Chapter 9.

  CANDY HEARTS WOULD HAVE BEWILDERED ARMENIAN GRANDPARENTS

  MY ARMENIAN GRANDPARENTS did not invest much energy in Valentine's Day. They took it about as seriously as they took Arbor Day.

  Nevertheless, I view their marriage as one of the great love stories to which I am attached by blood. I know it wasn't perfect: Leo and Higoohi Bohjalian had a relationship as complex as any, and their happiness together was leavened by their share of disappointment, discontent, and deeply personal dissatisfactions. But it was also a liaison that traveled successfully from Istanbul to Paris to a suburb of New York City, and a marriage that lasted half a century.

  Moreover, it was a marriage that succeeded despite the fact it had been arranged by their families before they met, a relationship brokered by a seemingly endless array of aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, while my grandfather was living in the United States and my grandmother was living in Turkey.

  My grandfather had immigrated to America at the beginning of the twentieth century, after spending his adolescence as--consider this an exercise in creative resume writing--an "importer-exporter": He was a hashish courier between Egypt and Europe. In Manhattan he went from washing windows to repairing watches for an upscale Wall Street firm that specialized in clock restoration. No one in my family is quite sure how this career change was managed.

  He was either very good with those watches or he'd saved a lot of money from his days as a courier, because he built a three-story brick house twenty minutes from Manhattan that I know from old photographs was every bit as large in reality as it is in memory.

  And then he needed a wife, which was where my grandmother came in. My grandmother's father had been killed in the murky, violent miasma that swallowed a million Armenians in 1915, but she and her mother were spared. And her mother--my great-grandmother--was willing to broker her lovely daughter to Leo since this successful man planned to bring her to that fantasyland of freedom and opportunity and (more important) safety.

  Everyone convened in Paris in 1927 for a summit, and the deal was sealed--and, soon after that, consummated. It was touch and go whether my married grandparents would get my grandmother through Ellis Island in early 1928 in time for my father to be born on American soil.

  When I was a child, I occasionally stayed with my grandparents when my parents were away, and so I glimpsed how the two of them lived.

  The day would begin with my grandmother preparing for my grandfather his usual breakfast: a fried lamb chop and American cereal. My grandfather loved American cereal, and he used to mix Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes in a dish the size of a punch bowl. Then he went to his office in Manhattan, and I would explore the house in which my father was raised. Occasionally, my grandmother would try (and fail) to interest me in dense books of Armenian hieroglyphics.

  In the evening when my grandfather returned, he would play the oud--a sort of Middle Eastern lute--and then my grandparents would talk . . . forever. Sometimes they spoke English, but often it was Turkish or Armenian. They would talk for what seemed an eternity before dinner, they would talk during dinner, and they would still be talking when I went to bed. Sometimes they would adjourn to the basement where my grandparents had an ornate pool table, and there my grandmother would quickly dispatch my grandfather. Though she never learned to drive, she could have made a very good living hustling pool.

  When my grandfather wasn't at work, my grandparents were inseparable, their own small world of two. They needed no one, and my sense is they thought the notion of a day to celebrate romance with chocolate candy and paper hearts was somewhere between harebrained and inane.

  Even so, their marriage ended only when my grandfather, then a very old man, passed away one night in his sleep, after a day spent playing his beloved oud for his beloved wife.

  Chapter 10.

  ON MOTHER'S DAY, GRANDMOTHER BRIEFLY RETURNED

  THE WORDS--two syllables, really--should have been spoken by a toddler: "Who dat?"

  My grandmother was just shy of eighty at the time, and as she asked her husband, my grandfather, this question, she was pointing at me with a hand so gnarled by arthritis that she was actually aiming her knuckles at me, rather than the tip of her finger.

  "That's Christopher," my grandfather said.

  "Not Warren?" she asked, turning away from me for the first time since my mother and I had arrived in their front hall in Florida.

  "No," he answered calmly, "it's not Warren."

  Warren was her son--my uncle. I was twenty-two then, and so my Uncle Warren had to have been in his mid-fifties. He was tall and blond and had jumped from an airplane into France as a member of the 101st Airborne in the Second World War. He had a movie star's chiseled jaw. A person would have had to work hard to confuse us.

  "Who's Christopher?" she continued, and my grandfather patiently explained to her that she had a daughter named Annalee and I was one of Annalee's boys. Annalee, at that moment, was surveying the kitchen, discovering that my grandfather had installed child-guard locks on the cabinets because he was fearful that his wife would confuse Drano with Cool Whip or Windex with tea.

  This was the last time I would see my grandmother, a Mother's Day weekend visit my own mother and I made together to Florida not quite two decades ago.

  My grandmother's descent into Alzheimer's had not been as swift as we had feared, but it had been steady. It had taken close to five years for a suddenly cantankerous obsession with temperature (always it was either too hot or too cold) and a benign forgetfulness to evolve into full-blown dementia. Still, my grandfather was determined to keep her at home, a testimony both to the impressive depths of his love for her and his faith that he could provide her better care than a stranger. One of my mother's reasons for our visit was to convince my grandfather that in fact he could not: My grandmother needed the ministrations of a nursing home.

  Nevertheless, my mother was also hopeful that her own mother would be sufficiently lucid for one last Mother's Day brunch at a restaurant on the ocean, or to enjoy one last walk along the beaches of Longboat Key in search of shells. These were pretty unrealistic desires. My grandmother was no longer even tying her own s
hoes or cutting her own meat. Consequently, I was expecting a fairly somber long weekend. And, in truth, most of those three days were either poignant reminders of my grandparents' love--such as when my grandfather gently would wash my grandmother's hair in the sink because she could no longer do it herself--or unpleasantly grim indications of their situation. Twice that weekend I was awakened by my grandmother shouting that there was a burglar in their house (me), while during the day she continued to presume I was Warren.

  Still, my grandmother had one last surprise.

  She was an organist, and for years had played show tunes and Christmas carols at the Macy's department store in White Plains, New York. Between her arthritis and her Alzheimer's, however, she rarely touched her own organ at that point in her life. On Mother's Day morning, the day my mother and I were going to return to New York, she surprised us both by playing--badly, but recognizably--the wondrously saccharine, mawkishly sentimental ballad "Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms."

  It was among my mother's favorite songs, even butchered as it was by my grandmother. She told her mother how much she loved it.

  "I remember," my grandmother said, and then she sighed.

  She would die soon after that. I am not sure she ever had the slightest idea who I was that weekend. But for one moment on Mother's Day, she recognized her own daughter, and even on their final day together she remembered what made that woman, once a girl, smile.