The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  “He helped me understand our bumps and bruises were badges of courage,” she said, looking out at the assembly in its black and muted dress.

  “His ability to laugh led him to see the best in any situation. . . . He could brighten a room from the house next door.” It was courageous and honest and real. It didn’t set her brother upon a pedestal, but cast him as a boy, and then a man, who stood beside her as they each grew every day until he was gone.

  After she finished, others followed. Friends of Welles’s laughed and wept, their numbness thawing if only for an hour or two, opening themselves to receive his absence now as something final.

  Near the end of the memorial service, Jeff watched as Bill Cassidy, Empire Hook and Ladder’s company chaplain and for the entire Nyack Fire Department as well, walked to the front of the church. Jeff had been the company chaplain once too, and had stood where Cassidy was now. He had delivered the words he was now about to hear, in tribute to other fallen firefighters. All those services had been for men much older. None had been for his son.

  Cassidy recited an order of the service Jeff had shared many times before.

  The last alarm has sounded for our brother.

  To Welles has come that last call.

  It is the call from which there is no turning away,

  The imperative and final order,

  Of the great chief and captain of us all . . .

  The words rang through the church.

  Jeff’s brother Bosley gave the final reading, straining with emotion, delivering lines from Tennyson’s elegy “Crossing the Bar.”

  The remarks done, the echoes quieted, mourners stood and turned to leave. Alison walked from the pew and saw the doors open, flooding the entire space with a dazzling light. The world beyond the church’s threshold was difficult to glimpse, its reality blank and flat. But as she got closer to the exit, she began to discern figures standing along the sidewalk, lining the entire frontage of the church lot. There was a color guard and an honor guard, and there were firefighters as far as she could see, standing in uniform dress. They stood still and solemn, flanking the ladder truck from Empire Hook and Ladder No. 1.

  The sight overwhelmed her and her body buckled before Jeff caught her. She beheld the large American flag flying from the truck, rolling with the breezes off the river. It was placed prominently, proudly.

  There was no casket over which to drape it.

  III

  AS A CREEPING DARKNESS IT MOVES, SET OUT FROM its launch unseen, at a time unknown. And then it’s in you, with each dawn, a shadow in every light.

  Its force is inevitable and, somehow, still surprising. We know we will feel it, as surely as we know our names and hold our loved ones and count our days. We know we will bear its weight. But before it arrives, we know it only as abstraction, a dim light in the fog across the river, an echo of the train’s roar. Only when it lands and we feel the awful mass of vacancy do we understand how unready we are.

  As a plague, a hollowing out, it insinuates itself—a suffering that can never be approximated, no matter how many others we see enduring it.

  That’s its onslaught, more complete and consuming than we might ever expect, swallowing us—not from top down, but from last breath to next. The death of a child before the parents, the fracturing of life’s cycle, the interruption of generations. A permanent emptiness.

  It is more profound than terror. Terror fades.

  Grief lasts.

  • • •

  For many weeks, she couldn’t look at his picture.

  She couldn’t bear the sight of his face. While others carried pictures of their lost, in large frames or folded flyers or in their wallets or purses, always at the ready, she avoided the image of her son.

  “I couldn’t look him in the eye,” Alison said. “I couldn’t face him.”

  The intensity of her love and the promise of his life were unbearable to contemplate. The picture represented not just a moment in time, but time stopped. There would be no more frames to add.

  He was twenty-four. Those were hours in a day, not years in a life. Not a quarter century reached, not a woman courted and married, no children expected and born, no family of his own to love and raise. He would never have them. The deepest, richest parts of his life, the challenges accepted and rewards gained, the sunsets over the river and the trips back home, the gifts opened and the failures absorbed, all of it interrupted, stopped.

  She had pictures. She wouldn’t look at them. Not yet.

  For the first few months, nearly every time she stepped outside the front door, she was unable to return without friends and neighbors offering an embrace or a gesture of comfort. All of it was well meaning, but also exhausting and emptying. There was nowhere in town to go without all who saw her knowing whom she had lost, and how she’d lost him. Alison would end up comforting others who were trying to help her.

  As the holidays approached, she felt herself needing to escape, and she took a job for a couple of months in retail, working at the upscale department store Neiman Marcus across the river in White Plains. She went to work, finding a context where strangers sought nothing from her beyond a transaction. She wanted to be seen but not watched, to be heard but not known.

  The holidays were excruciating. Paige and Honor gave her a pair of earrings, telling her they were from Welles, the gesture accompanied by kindness and torment, the pain incessant. “I cried,” Alison said. “Hard. Every day, at some point of the day, I just cried.”

  The sorrow was damaging, wearing her away.

  At some point, her friend and neighbor Fran Sennas, Stacey Sennas McGowan’s mother, visited the house. As a managing director at Sandler, Stacey helped Welles, a fellow Nyack High School and Boston College alum. She opened the door for his first summer internship, and, ultimately, to land the job with the firm. Without her help, he might never have worked at the Trade Center. Thirty-eight years old, married with two young daughters, four and five years old, she also died in the attacks.

  Fran brought over a bottle of holy water a friend had given her, drawn from the sacred spring in Lourdes, France, where pilgrims had traveled for centuries with the faith that the water might cure all afflictions. Alison accepted the gift from Fran, each woman walking her own path through the emptiness and anguish. She looked at the bottle, then drew it to her lips and took a small sip.

  “After that,” Alison said, “I stopped crying.”

  The pain didn’t stop. The door didn’t swing open. The phone didn’t ring. But something entered her. “It just brought me a peace,” she said.

  It didn’t bring answers as to where he lay, or what he’d done before the tower fell, but day and night in the pit of ground zero, in the twisted ruins, hundreds were working, clearing, digging. They were getting closer to the bottom.

  • • •

  They needed Welles to be found, and returned. They understood that this was a search that could end only in ritual, but the ritual mattered.

  As devastating as the loss was, there was a deeper cry in its ache. He was not only gone. He was lost. There was a difference. While his absence was a fact in every instant of the day, the longing to bring him back home was a separate anguish—a feeling that he’d been abandoned, by his family and the world, left in a place somehow colder than death.

  Port Authority Police Lieutenant John Ryan was among those who came to work day after day, month after month, in the hollow of that place. From the day he arrived at the World Trade Center on September 11, he would be a part of the tireless militia of recovery, the group of people who devoted themselves to sifting through the pile, and to retrieving the bodies and remains buried within it.

  As commander of the Port Authority Police Department’s rescue and recovery operation at ground zero, Ryan understood the feelings of the families. They were close to his own. While there was much attention on
the loss of 343 members of the FDNY, the PAPD had suffered as well, losing 37 officers in the attacks. Ryan felt deeply connected to, and responsible for, all of them. To work in the pile forced a choice—a hardening and closing off of one’s heart, or a daily and ferocious fight to keep it open, against the horrors of the task. Ryan fought each day with every recovery.

  “We would place the remains in a body bag,” he said. “We would drape it with an American flag. We would perform an honor guard and carry the remains to a temporary morgue site.”

  Initially, the custom was reserved for members of the departments only, those recovered with clear identifications, either their police shields or the markings of the FDNY’s gear. But in time, Ryan instituted a change. He wasn’t sure exactly when, but he was present when a set of remains was found, the body in an FDNY T-shirt. The understanding on the pile was to let each department retrieve its own. When Ryan reached out to a counterpart with the fire department, he was told that anyone could buy a T-shirt, that there needed to be more proof for the honor guard and flag to be used. Ryan disagreed. He came to the belief that all who perished on the site, in uniform or not, serving a designated department or working as a civilian, shared the same hallowed ground and should be united in their most basic designation. The distinctions, to him, were wrong.

  “Every set of remains,” he said, “would be wrapped in an American flag, and with the honor guard. I didn’t need to know who the person was that we were recovering. . . . At that point I changed it.” Every recovery was treated with the same due ceremony.

  • • •

  Alison picked up the violin, surprised by its strangeness in her hands, its foreign weight and feel. For the first time in nearly twenty years, she played again. In a different life, almost all of it in the open country before children, she played every day. Alison had been a concert-level violinist, a passion that ran deep inside her. It was never the only pursuit in her life, but there was something in its discipline and purity that spoke to her, its demands and rewards an inarguable equation. Then came marriage, and then came Welles and the girls. The violin came out of her hands to be put in its case. Welles remembered her playing in a concert.

  It was a Tuesday, March 19, 2002. Half a year had passed. Two days before, at the start of the week, Alison had been watching the news at home, her hunger for information never sated. By this time, much of the compacted debris of the pile at ground zero had been cleared. A last major area remained, near an access road built within the acreage of the gaping hole. For those who worked at the pile, and for the victims’ families especially, it was an anxious time, a fear deepening that they would never receive their loved ones’ remains. Much of the pile was gone.

  The news report stated that excavation would begin in the area underneath the central ramp leading down into the pit. Without knowing the exact geography, Alison was still struck by the report. She sensed that maybe this was the place where Welles would be. She’d learned not to hold back from such feelings. To keep them inside would be to collapse from their weight. Whatever she felt, she acknowledged and accepted. She gave the feelings voice, most often to the person closest, to Jeff.

  She looked at him after hearing the report and without hesitation made a declaration she’d never made before.

  “Jeff,” she said. “They’re going to find Welles. This week. They’re going to find him.”

  He looked at her, hearing her certainty, even if he didn’t share the same expectation. Of course he wanted his son back, in the most desperate way. But he didn’t make these declarations the way Alison did.

  “Well, okay,” he said, accepting her belief.

  It wasn’t the only feeling she’d had in the week. In truth, she’d picked up the violin spurred by something more than restlessness. That Tuesday, Alison took a lesson with her friend Ed Simons, the music director and conductor of the Rockland County Symphony Orchestra. She could read music as well as ever, but the translation by her hands was lacking. Her fingers were still unused to the bending and positioning. Simons, who’d conducted her for years, was patient and encouraging. But it was the memory of Welles’s encouragement that brought her to try again.

  Last summer, without any cue that she could recall, he had told her as much.

  “Mom, you should start playing again,” he said. “Just start.” This was the week when she did.

  The lesson with Simons was in Pomona, near the house where they lived when Welles was born, before the family moved to Upper Nyack. Afterward, she drove past the old house and parked, spending time looking out and looking back.

  “I just had this wonderful warmth,” Alison said. “Welles was really with me, really close.”

  • • •

  Three days later, the Friday of that same week, March 22, Alison was with her youngest daughter, Paige, accompanying her on a visit to the State University of New York in nearby Purchase. SUNY Purchase was a magnet for aspiring artists, with one of the strongest performing arts programs in the country. Paige, an elite dancer considering a life in professional ballet, was auditioning for the university’s dance conservatory.

  Alison was reading, waiting, when Paige joined her during a break. A few minutes later, her cell phone rang. It was a housekeeper calling.

  “There’s a policeman here, at the door,” she said.

  Alison wondered if one of the family’s dogs had gotten loose and was marauding through the neighborhood.

  The policeman came on the line. “Mrs. Crowther,” he said. In the tone of those two words, she knew it was something else entirely. She stepped away from Paige, the phone to her ear.

  “Mrs. Crowther,” the voice said, “your son’s body has been recovered at ground zero.”

  She fought desperately not to cry. Trying to collect herself, she thought of Paige and her audition, not wanting to cast any shade over her daughter, who’d suffered in her own way through these long months. She didn’t want to take an ounce of light from her daughter’s day, but how not to? She brought herself back to the phone in her hand, and found courage enough to ask the question. “How did they identify him?”

  “By his fingerprints.”

  “His fingerprints? Oh my God . . .”

  It was certain. It was her son.

  The call ended. She stood there, overwhelmed, but determined to be present for Paige. To support her daughter in her moment as best she could. Her mind had to slow. There would be procedures to follow and forms to sign and documents to examine.

  Later in the day, Paige sensed that something had happened, and she asked her mother what was wrong. Alison could hold it no longer. She looked at her daughter.

  “They found Welles,” she said.

  • • •

  The remains were found three days before the family was notified, the time necessary for the body to be transported from ground zero, taken for examination, and ultimately identified.

  The date of Welles’s recovery, Tuesday, March 19, brought an odd measure of comfort. Their first child was born on a Tuesday. He died on a Tuesday. On a Tuesday, he was found. And, of course, on the nineteenth, his number in all things since his boyhood, chosen for nearly every jersey he wore, even down to the apartment number he shared with Chuck Platz in the city.

  Alison and Jeff still had a hard trip to the city’s chief medical examiner’s office on East Twenty-sixth Street. It was the place where death was made official, and where its cause, manner, and mechanism were determined for the entire jurisdiction of New York City. The loss of life at the World Trade Center was the most profound challenge the office had ever faced, both in scale and in level of scrutiny. The examiners were called to the site to begin the process of identification almost immediately. As the months passed, the natural process of decay affected even those relatively few bodies that had somehow remained largely whole through the devastation. Most, of course, were in pieces.

&nbs
p; In the first ten months after the attacks, the office identified more than twelve hundred victims at ground zero. A much smaller number, fewer than three hundred, were discovered intact, or nearly so.

  Jeff and Alison came to the Manhattan office to find out as much as they could about their son’s end, or at least as much as they could bear. How many details could they endure, how many facts could they accept, beyond the final one?

  Together, they passed into the offices, with its motto written on the lobby wall: “Science Serving Justice.”

  They met with a medical examiner and asked their first question: What condition was he in when recovered?

  Part of his lower right jaw was missing. As was his right hand. Beyond that, the rest of the body was largely intact.

  Where was he found?

  The body was recovered in the debris of what had been the lobby of the South Tower.

  For Jeff and Alison, this answer was a revelation.

  The lobby. Could that really be? From 104 floors above, when the second plane struck, all the way down to the ground?

  Somehow, some way, he had made it down.

  How? How close was he to getting out? To surviving? Could he have made it? Why didn’t he? What stopped him? What was he doing? Who was he with?

  Jeff felt the answer immediately, even as so many other questions flooded through his mind: He was helping.

  They learned more. Welles’s body was found that March in an area of the pit where firefighters’ remains were recovered. Most specifically, he lay close to FDNY assistant chief Donald Burns. Burns, sixty-one, one of the most respected members of the entire department, had been a responding commander during the 1993 attack at the World Trade Center in the North Tower, decorated many times over in his thirty-nine years serving. As a citywide commander, he covered all major incidents and emergencies across the five boroughs. As the chief in charge of the South Tower on September 11, he had set up a command post in the tower lobby, helping to lead the evacuation effort for thousands who survived, as well as to guide the department’s responding personnel through the challenge of fighting a raging fire nearly a quarter mile up in the sky. Burns’s body was discovered in an area of rubble beside the remains of ten other firefighters. And those of Welles Crowther.