by Tom Rinaldi
Then Jeff saw the second plane move across the screen and explode into the South Tower.
Almost too stunned to move, he rushed to the phone and dialed Welles’s number. Busy. He tried again and again, unable to get through. When the house phone rang, it was Alison. She was hysterical. He tried to calm her down, told her not to jump to conclusions. He asked if someone else in the office could drive her home.
The doorbell rang. It was Tom Wanamaker, a local police officer and cousin of Harry Wanamaker’s. Seeing him at the door, Jeff’s heart nearly stopped. Why was he here? What did he know?
Tom had come straight to the house after seeing the second plane hit, to ask if Jeff had heard anything, if he’d reached Welles. No, Jeff told him. The two hugged, the officer in tears, telling Jeff he would help in any way he could. After the short visit, Wanamaker left.
Jeff returned to the room off the kitchen, to the television, transfixed by what he saw. And then, just before ten A.M., he watched the upper floors of the South Tower tilt slightly and begin to drop. Impossibly, the building began driving downward, the floors failing, the steel buckling, the structure collapsing. Seconds later, it was gone. A memory of itself, printed in dust upon the air in mammoth clouds of gray.
He stared at the screen without comprehension. The voices on television gasped at the sight, trying to recover, to offer some explanation. Jeff was already past that. He fell to his knees in the room, and cried out into the emptiness of the house. He prayed, immediately and aloud, his voice broken.
“Dear God. Take me now. Leave him here. Please. Take me.”
The plea was swallowed by his weeping.
• • •
9:59 A.M. Fifty-six minutes after Flight 175 hit the South Tower.
Collapse.
The South Tower’s disintegration took ten seconds.
Is that the time it takes to read the last three lines, to clear a dish from the table, to enter a daydream at the traffic light? To pick something to wear today, to watch a tee shot land, to address an envelope? To order off the menu, to mix a drink, to beat an egg? To lace up a shoe, to back out of the driveway, to walk out of church?
It took ten seconds for the tower’s 750 million tons of heavy steel and concrete to drop, erased from the skyline, a sudden phantom. The energy released was an enormous bomb, creating dust storms and debris fields. Nearly all matter within and beneath the tower was crushed flat in those ten seconds, driven down fifty, sixty, seventy feet beneath the street. The collapse strained the bedrock below the building as it compressed cars and trucks and emergency vehicles, all absorbing the impossible weight and violence of the fall.
In the fifty-six minutes between the second plane’s strike and the building’s collapse, how many survived the initial moments in the impact zone and above? Who from the thirty-three highest floors escaped? Where were they now? Who was still alive?
• • •
After reaching his family as quickly as he could to let them know he was safe, Platz drifted through much of the rest of the day, unable to shake off the paralysis that so many felt, not only in the city but across the country and the world. For hours, his gaze shifted back and forth between the images playing on the television and the smoke from downtown drifting outside the bedroom windows. The calls he made went unanswered, the door to the apartment stayed shut.
As night fell, he left the apartment and went to the only place he could think of, guided as much by routine as by the hopeful message he’d left earlier in the morning.
He sat in the bar at Boxers for hours. Every time he heard the door open, he looked to see if it was Welles. Finally the owner, offering his apologies, said he needed to leave. It was time to close.
• • •
Night came. No word. Nothing.
Welles’s parents and sisters, aunts and uncles, college buddies and teammates, fellow firefighters and childhood friends, all the circles of his life, yearned to sustain hope, to find encouragement where they could.
Kevin Tiernan, a friend of Welles’s since childhood who the night before had been with him watching Monday Night Football, found the wait intolerable. He was one of the thousands who searched Manhattan’s hospitals one by one, making a desperate tour and finding the emergency rooms gravely still, awaiting the rush that never came.
Jeff and Alison could hardly remember all the visitors and prayers and plates of ziti. They answered as many calls as they could stand before letting others answer, accepting the hopes, passing each of them along. The same vigil, held to the glow of television sets and the hum of news accounts, was playing out in thousands of other houses as well.
They all waited, some steadfast and others stripped, holding back their grief.
• • •
The next day, Wednesday, Chuck Platz breathed deeply, paused, and walked into Welles’s bedroom for the first time.
Platz was twenty-three years old. The most significant loss he’d experienced in his life was the death of his grandfather when he was seven years old. No one else he’d known well had died.
He looked down at the threshold, the saddle of wood on the floor between the hallway and the room. He paused.
Outside, where streets had been blocked off and an emergency force mobilized, where a smoldering pile complicated by bodies rose 150 feet in the air, where the small city of the Twin Towers had populated the sky a day before, where families and friends were beginning to post signs of their missing loved ones on every flat surface they could find, where a city ever boastful of its imperviousness and its clout had been pierced and its psyche shaken, outside there were millions of souls all grappling, alone and together, with anger and pain, doubt and fear.
Inside apartment 19, there was stillness where yesterday there was luminous motion. The room was proof. Silent. Implacable.
The glass of water was still on the dresser.
The dry cleaning receipts for his suits were still pinned underneath a wooden loon, the one he used as a paperweight.
The dent from Welles’s head was still there in the pillow.
In the silence, Platz heard the first echoes of his friend’s life. Nothing definite had emerged as to his fate, no authority had decreed his end, no official had called or come by. But in his heart, Platz understood. He knew. He was not beyond denial, but he had occupied the same space and breathed the same air his friend did the day before. That held more than proximity. The space contained a truth.
He could hear Welles walking out the door, the sound forever tracked in his mind. The vacancy of Welles’s room would stay with him for years to come.
“Even today, I take a second to look around my room when I’m leaving for the day,” he said more than a decade later. “To maybe tidy up the bed or clean things up. Not that I’m thinking I’m not coming back, but it’s just this little reminder, in the back of my head, of what it was like to walk into his room, of what it looked like, just the way it was when he walked out the door that day.
“I find myself doing little things like closing the closet door, fixing up the bed, putting the remote on the back table. . . . I feel like I’m doing them because of the memory of walking into his room and seeing it like he just left it. He left as if he was coming back. . . . It was hard to see. So I think maybe in some ways, I try to make it look neat when I leave my place. For him.”
• • •
Jeff was the one who went to the city to search, to fill out the forms and answer the questions, to engage with the official machinery of loss. The morning after the attacks, he woke up early to make the ride in with his friend Tom Weekley. Jeff brought Welles’s New York State pistol permit with him, for the fingerprints it contained. He also went to the family dentist, without being asked, to collect his son’s dental records.
He joined a march of loved ones bearing the open wounds of their panic. Maybe it was natural that families of th
e missing turned here, to a place meant to symbolize security. They came to a fortress in the city.
The armory on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, on the East Side of Manhattan, was the headquarters of the New York National Guard First Battalion, Sixty-ninth Infantry Regiment. The families and friends of those who worked at the World Trade Center and had yet to return home came to the armory to file missing-persons reports. The hope was to match a name to a face of a very small number of the wounded being treated at city hospitals, those without any clear identification. The building was designated as a family assistance center, and it drew everyone still holding out hope.
The families arrived early. They refused to be mourners, not yet. In lines snaking around the entire block, they carried evidence of their love, and proofs of identity. There were pictures and letters, medical records and physical descriptions. Hundreds carried flyers advertising their missing, lives whittled down to the physical facts of being: name, age, height, weight, topped by a single picture. Nearly all the flyers ended with a list of phone numbers to call.
The notices were placed everywhere: on telephone poles and mailboxes, on streetlamps and tree trunks. They formed a pleading and dense collage on the walls of the armory itself.
Jeff came with proofs and markers of his son’s life, to join the somber line of those waiting to file reports and submit to police interviews. Years later, he’d recall nearby residents who came out of their apartment buildings with sandwiches and cookies to offer, a way to try to comfort those touched most by the assault on their city. The memory would bring tears to his eyes.
After speaking with two NYPD detectives and providing all the information he could, he left the armory. To the south, smoke from the pile stained the sky. In inaccessible pockets far below the ground, the fires would burn for months to come.
• • •
Thursday morning. Two days. Nearly fifty hours.
Each was a universe unto itself, vast and empty.
At 10:45 A.M., the doorbell rang. Jeff was in the city, covering the terrain as best he could there. Alison was home, exhausted with worry, when she heard it.
She walked to the door and saw Harry Wanamaker standing outside, covered in silt, ash soaked into the fiber of his gear and caked on his turnouts. Wanamaker stood with his helmet under his arm, his eyes straight upon her. He’d come directly from the scorched ground of the Trade Center complex, where he’d spent every moment not spent on Marine 1’s fireboats, throwing himself into the ruins of the pile. The only stop he made before coming to the house on Birchwood was at his own, to take off his boots and put on clean socks. He didn’t want to track dirt across her floor.
Less than three months before, on a June night, he’d stood on the deck of his fireboat surrounded by his friends from Empire Hook and Ladder. He had toured them around Lower Manhattan, and stood next to Welles, arm to arm, with the Twin Towers behind them, soaring and dark. He was relaxed, the collar of his blue shirt open, a smile creasing his face, Welles’s own grin wide beside him.
Now Harry stood outside the door looking at Welles’s mother, his face drawn and exhausted. Alison’s breath caught at the sight of him. She opened the door and ushered him in.
“Harry,” she said. “My God . . . what are you doing here?”
“I’ve just come back,” he said.
“Let me get you in here, and get you some food.”
He walked inside. “I just want to tell you . . . we’re doing everything we can.”
It wasn’t the prayer answered. It wasn’t her child delivered. But he wanted her to know he would make every effort, and everyone else would too. They would do everything they could do.
They sat and talked for an hour, Harry trying to eat the lunch she quickly made for him. There was everything to say, and nothing. He tried to explain the collapse of the buildings, the unthinkable scope of the ruins, the way the fireboat rushed to the scene upon receiving the first call. But over and over, Harry said the same words in a fragment or a sentence, a pledge and a wish. He gave them voice to make them real. He said it, so together they might believe it.
“We’re going to find him.”
• • •
Very early Friday morning, long before dawn, Alison was back at her task. The girls were sleeping, she hoped. Her job was to call the city’s hospitals and emergency rooms searching for someone not yet identified, to see if a voice might pick up the line, take the information, deliver the miracle. To hear a nurse or doctor rush back, out of breath and ecstatic, to exclaim, Yes, yes, he’s here. He fits that description. He answers to that name. He’s yours. He’s found.
Getting someone to answer was nearly impossible no matter how many times she dialed, to the point where her fingers grew numb. She knew she was one of thousands making these calls, from kitchens and living rooms, offices and dens, in desperation.
She began to call late, the hours on either side of midnight, and all through the dawn. She’d call from the room downstairs, so as not to disturb the girls and to let Jeff find any traces of sleep that he could. It was nearly three days since the attacks. She stood up from the desk to stretch and walk around the room a few paces, to get away from the mute hammer of the receiver and gather the energy for the next call.
That’s when she felt him. In the room.
“His presence,” she said. It was more than a vision. There was an energy there, a vital field reaching out to her. She wanted to turn around from the desk and look behind her, toward the dark right corner of the room, but she didn’t. To turn and look would be, in her mind, a lack of faith in him. The house was otherwise still and dim. She’d had visions before. This was different. It was not a clear sight, it was a connection, a communication.
“I just knew it was Welles,” she said. “I knew.”
She didn’t hesitate or startle. She spoke directly into the space before her.
“Welles,” she said his name. She waited, but not long. She wanted to acknowledge him. She said the first words inside her.
“Thank you.” She wanted him to know what this gave to her, what the moment contained. She had the phone message he’d left, she could hear the voice and perhaps already knew how she would play it, to hold the sound of him near. The feeling in the room now was different, a force more than a sound.
“If you can do that,” she said, referring to the energy and the field and the feeling, to the connection, “I know you’re okay. You’re not here anymore.”
It was around three A.M. She continued to look straight ahead, her back to the presence.
“I know you’re okay,” she said.
She stood for several long moments as the presence receded, leaving her alone in the silence of the house.
She made a decision, a silent step. Looking at the phone, she turned away. “That’s when I gave up looking,” she said. “Because I knew he was gone.”
• • •
The winds blew gently through the Hudson Valley, rippling the waters, stirring the trees. The final Saturday in September was cool, the promise of autumn deepening, as they gathered, carrying their emptiness inside.
Light poured through the stained-glass window, rounded and majestic, filling the sanctuary with soft beams from above the arched wooden doors.
Grace Episcopal Church in Nyack, a century and a half old, stood in its place on First Avenue, its massive stone façade stern and comforting. It was the Crowther family’s church even before moving to town, a place of worship and fellowship, of community and solidarity.
On this day, September 29, 2001, it was a place to say good-bye.
More than a thousand came, filling the sanctuary’s space, with more waiting outside in brilliant sunshine. The church drew them together as the central point in so many circles of Welles’s life. They arrived to pay tribute, and to mourn.
The Reverend Richard Gressle, the chu
rch’s rector, spoke in Scripture and used the words of Christ. He challenged those gathered to embrace their sorrow, but also to look beyond it, as an example and a standard by which to live.
“Welles, who befriended the world, has taken that step beyond,” he said. “It is our responsibility that we honor who he was by befriending one another and the world.”
For so many inside, especially those closest to the altar, sitting in the first few rows, the world felt different now, smaller, harder, reduced. Its horizon had collapsed; the views across the water were empty.
Welles’s sister Honor, two years younger, delivered the eulogy. She stood at the front of the church, looking out at her parents and sister, her aunts and uncles, and the rows of pews behind them, filled and silent, save for the sobbing and the echo of her own voice. The decision to have the memorial service was complicated, only arriving over time as the first few weeks passed and hope made its slow turn to grief. If it was surrender, no one would say. Acceptance was far off, in some unmarked distance.
She spoke with heart and humor, describing not a saint but a brother—in terms real and warm, the bond laid bare for all to hear and feel. On September 11, driving with her boyfriend, Rick, from their apartment in Mount Kisco to her parents’ house, she was filled with a terrible sense of certainty. She knew, even before reaching Nyack, that her brother was gone. She would fight to keep hope, but as they crossed the Hudson, she heard his voice come to her, Welles speaking to her, her feeling him. The message was clear. She should be the one to speak for him. Whenever the moment came, it should be her. And she made another decision on that drive. Still single, in her first year of law school at St. John’s, Honor knew that she would name her first child after her brother. As soon as she arrived home, she began composing lines in her mind, many she would say now. She felt the words came from them both, mingled. She was the Tonto to his Lone Ranger, the Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. She recalled the bright times and the sibling fights, the lacrosse practices and the training runs. They were part of daily life, and they would live on in memory.