He ran.
When he’d gone three or four hundred yards north up Church Street, he paused to consider the situation. It seemed to him there could be only one explanation: it was a terrorist attack. What else could it be? After all, back in 1993, terrorists had planted a truck bomb in the World Trade Center garage which had done huge damage, injured more than a thousand people, and might have brought the Twin Towers down. This looked like a similar attempt. And if so, what else was to come?
A stream of people were coming up the street. It seemed as if everyone was deciding to leave the area.
His cellphone rang.
“Mr. Master?” It was Maggie’s assistant again. “Where are you?”
“Down near the World Trade Center. But I’m fine, I’m not in the building.”
“We just saw what happened on the television. We just saw the second plane.”
“I saw it too. Did you speak with my wife?”
“That’s why I’m calling. I wondered if you did.”
“No. She probably turned her cell off during her meeting.”
“Only …” Maggie’s secretary seemed to hesitate a moment. “Mr. Master, that’s where she went.”
“What do you mean? The meeting got moved to the World Trade Center?”
“That’s what she told her paralegal just before she left. Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Master, I’m just so worried.”
“Which tower?”
“We don’t know.”
“What’s the name of the firm?”
“We’re trying to check.”
“For God’s sake, you must know who she’s meeting.”
“We’re checking that out right now. One of the other partners knows, but he’s in a meeting.”
“Well, interrupt the meeting. Right away. And call me back please.” It was an order.
“Yes, Mr. Master.”
“Call me back.” Goddammit. His pulse was suddenly racing. If necessary, he would climb up the fireman’s ladder or scale the sides of the building, but he was going to get Maggie out of there. No question. Only he had to know which building.
He tried Maggie’s cell. Nothing. He started to walk back toward the World Trade Center. Minutes passed. More and more people were coming up the street. He’d give Maggie’s office a couple more minutes, no more.
His cell went again.
“Daddy?” It was Emma.
“Hi, honey.” He tried to sound unconcerned. “Aren’t you in class?”
“I’m just going back in. Daddy, is everything all right? Are you anywhere near downtown? What’s happening down there?”
“I’m out in the street, sweetie. There’s some kind of fire in the World Trade Center. But I’m quite all right.”
“Is it, like, bombs or something?”
“Could be.”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“In a meeting.”
“She’s not down there, is she?”
He hesitated, but only for a second. “Why ever would you think that?”
“I don’t know. I called her cell and she didn’t answer.”
“You know she always turns her cell off when she’s in big meetings.”
“I know. I just …”
“She’s in Midtown somewhere, honey. Everybody’s fine, go back to class.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
She hung up. He redialed Maggie’s office immediately.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Master, we’re still trying to get that information.”
“Now I want you to listen very carefully,” Gorham said. “If any of the children call, nobody is to tell them that their mother is at the World Trade Center. This is really important. You have to tell them she’s somewhere in Midtown. I can’t have the kids going crazy at school, when there’s probably no need. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mr. Master. I get it,” she said.
“Call me back with the information about where she is,” he told her. “I need to know.” Then he hung up.
But ten minutes passed, and still she didn’t call.
Dr. Caruso was glad to be out of Doug’s office. He’d changed his mind just a couple of minutes after he’d got back there. Not that he was worried about his safety, but it occurred to him that there must be a lot of people injured in the North Tower. No doubt the emergency services would cope efficiently, but he was still a doctor. All right, an obstetrician, but a doctor nonetheless. He’d decided to go down to see if there was anything he could do to help.
It hadn’t taken him long to find a fire chief.
“Thank you, doctor. Would you stick around?”
“Sure.” They were in the lower lobby.
“I’ll get back to you.”
The second plane had hit a moment later.
He’d been waiting quite a while now. Firemen came and went. They were brave fellows, but it looked as if this situation was presenting them with some huge problems. So far, he hadn’t seen that fire chief again.
It was 9:25 when his cellphone rang again. It was a number he didn’t know. He took the call impatiently, wanting to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
“Honey? Can you hear me?”
“Maggie! Where are you?”
“I’m at the World Trade Center.”
“I know. Which tower?”
“South. I’d have called you before but my damn cell cut out, and this nice guy let me use his. Where are you?”
“On Church Street, at Chambers. Maggie, I’m not going to Boston, okay? I was crazy. I love you.”
“Oh thank God, Gorham. I love you too. I’m coming down the stairs, but it’s kinda slow. Some of the building’s got twisted around a little.”
“I’m coming in to get you.”
“Don’t do that, honey. Please. I don’t even know where I am. You’ll never find me, and then we’ll miss, and then I won’t be able to find you. Just wait right there. I’m on my way. It’s not like the building’s going to fall down or anything.”
“Just keep talking to me then.”
“Honey, the guy needs his phone back. I’ll call. Just wait there and give me a big hug when I get out.”
“Okay. But Maggie—” The call had ended. “I love you,” he said to the cellphone.
By 9:40, Dr. Caruso reckoned that if he was going to be of any use to anybody, he’d better look around and make his own assessment. He was in the upper lobby when he heard the first thud. At first he didn’t realize what it was. A few moments later, there came two more.
Bodies. They were coming from the North Tower. He understood what that meant. People must be trapped up there in heat which was becoming unbearable. So you had the choice: burn alive or jump. He’d read accounts of people jumping from buildings, but this was different—these bodies were falling a thousand feet. The math wasn’t difficult. Accelerating at thirty-two feet per second, after falling a thousand feet, a body hits a hard surface very hard indeed. He wasn’t sure if you’d be conscious just before impact, but death would be completely instantaneous. If these were his only options, he reckoned, he’d choose to jump. But the sound it made … He tried not to hear the sound it made.
“There’s my doctor. You thought I’d forgotten you.” The Irish face of the fire chief, looking a little red from exertion. “Like to do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Well then, doc, what I’d like you to do is go over to Trinity Church. There may be some folks over there that need attention, and I believe some of my boys are there too. Would you do that?”
“I’m on my way.”
He went outside onto Liberty and started south down Broadway, glad to have something to do. He’d better call his wife to let her know he was safe. She could call the office. And while she was at it, he suddenly thought, why not call the realtor and tell her they’d changed their minds about that damn Park Avenue building. He didn’t want to live there any more.
It was nearing ten o’clock. What could be taking her so long? Gorham stared at the tower.
While the flames were still burning brightly up in the North Tower, the South Tower seemed to have settled into a smokier, more sullen mood. Several times he’d heard explosions from lower down in the towers. Stores of gas or electrical equipment? Or perhaps, he guessed, fuel from the planes might have run down the inside of the buildings, collected again, and suddenly exploded. Who knew? But whatever the causes of these other sounds, it was smoke rather than flame that was to be seen issuing from the South Tower now.
Almost ten o’clock. Surely she must appear any second now.
His cellphone rang.
“Hi, honey, it’s me.”
“Thank God.”
“That was a bit of a journey down.”
“Maggie …”
“What’s up?”
His eyes were fixed on the upper part of the South Tower. Something was happening. The top seemed to be leaning, twisting.
“Maggie, where are you?”
Now the tower seemed to be righting itself, but only because further down, something had snapped or shifted. For suddenly the roof of the great tower was beginning to sink.
“It’s okay, Gorham. I’m down, and—”
“Maggie—”
Nothing. Deadness. The top of the huge tower had started to travel downward. He had never seen anything like it, except in movies, or old newsreels. The controlled demolition of high-rise buildings. It was amazing how they could just sink, like a collapsing concertina. And that was what was happening now. The South Tower was falling in on itself.
But so slowly. He could not believe how slowly. Second by second, as if in slow motion, the tower was traveling down. One second, two seconds, three seconds, four … With majestic, deliberate, measured speed, the top was sinking while, at the bottom, with a slow roar, like a groaning waterfall, a huge, grayish cloud of dust was belching out.
“Maggie.” No voice.
The ground was trembling now. He could feel the tremor underfoot. The billowing tidal wave of dust was rolling up the street toward him like a volcano’s pyroclastic flow. He must back away and flee. He had no choice. He couldn’t stand his ground. He backed into Chambers Street, hoping the dust wave would not sweep down over the rooftops and smother him. But the rumbling continued, for nine interminable seconds, as the tower fell, and the cloud of dust, as if it had acquired a life of its own, grew and roiled on itself, and grew again until, in all the streets around, you could not see the light at all.
He could hear people running northward, half choking, many of them. After a while, he unbuttoned the top of his shirt, pulled it up to use as a mask, and tried to make his way south into the dust storm. But it was no good. He was choking and he couldn’t see. Finally, like everyone else, he retreated further up the street, and reaching a point where the air was somewhat clearer, he sat down on the sidewalk, and watched the gray-dusted figures as they passed, like Shades from Hades, in the forlorn hope that one of them, after all, might be his wife.
And then, after ten minutes, she came toward him.
“Hoped I might find you here,” she said.
“I thought …”
“I’d only just left the building when it started coming down. I guess it broke the cell connection. Then a whole bunch of us went into a café to get out of the dust. But I came up the street as soon as I could. You look awful.”
“And you look wonderful.” He took her in his arms.
“I’m a little dusty.”
“You’re alive.”
“I think we mostly got out. I’m not sure about the people higher up though, above the fire.”
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Katie Keller. She told me she was going to a meeting somewhere in the Financial District this morning. Do you have her cell number?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s try to call.”
But there was no answer when they did.
As it moved to and fro that morning, still wrapped around the waist of Sarah Adler in the high room in the tower, the wampum belt had looked very well. Its little white and colored shells were as bright as on the day they were strung. To those who could read its message, woven with such love, it declared: “Father of Pale Feather.”
And as the great burning rose, and the huge tower swayed, and then sank, so huge was the heat and so stupendous the pressure of that massive falling that, like everything around it, above and below, the wampum belt was atomized into a dust so fine it could scarcely be seen. For a short time it hovered around the base of the vanished tower. But then at last the wind, kinder than men, lifted it up in a cloud—high, high over the harbor waters, and the city, and the great river that led to the north.
Epilogue
Summer 2009
THEY SAT IN the café. It was a beautiful day. Gorham looked across at the Metropolitan Opera and smiled at his daughter. He could see that she was going to try something on him, but he waited for it to come.
She looked serious.
“Dad.”
“Yes, my darling.”
“I think I have ADD.”
“Really? That’s nice.”
“No, Dad. I mean it. I really can’t concentrate.”
“Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear that. When did you discover this?”
“This year, I guess.”
“You don’t think it could have anything to do with all the parties you went to?”
“Dad, be serious.”
“I am being serious. Listen, Emma, I have to tell you something. You can’t have ADD.”
“How do you know?”
“Listen, when I brought you over here this morning and made you look at those two huge Chagalls by the entrance to the Met, did you have trouble doing that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mean did you complain all the way across the park about having to look at the damned opera house—by the way, it’s a very fine opera house and a damn sight better than the old one, but never mind that. I mean, were you able to stare at the Chagalls and take them in?”
“I had great difficulty.”
“No you didn’t. I watched you.”
“That is so unfair. You’re worse than Mommy.”
“Wow. Impressive insult.” He looked at her seriously. “Emma, you have to understand. Attention deficit disorder exists. A few people have it, and if they really do, it’s no joke. But nowadays, half the kids in your school say they have it. Why’s that?”
“You get extra time in exams.”
“Right. It’s a racket. The parents tell the doctors they think their kids have it, and the doctors go along with it, and soon everybody has it, so they can have extra time with their exams and improve their grades.”
“Isn’t that a good reason to have it?”
“No. And I also know the Ritalin racket.”
“Meaning?”
“Ritalin is the drug usually prescribed for ADD. Ritalin helps concentration. It also has the useful property of letting you stay awake and mentally alert through a day and a night. If you have to pull an all-nighter on a college essay, it’ll get you through. So the kids who claim to have ADD get prescribed the Ritalin, and then they sell it to the college kids. Do you think I don’t know that?”
“So what’s your point?”
“The fact that there’s a secondary market in something doesn’t make it right.”
“Mommy doesn’t say I haven’t got ADD.”
“What does she say?”
“She says she doesn’t know.”
“Your mother’s a lawyer.”
“You think you’re so clever.”
“I pay for your school fees. And I pay for your tutors. Last year you had a tutor for math, and another for science, and another to prepare you for your SATs. Shortly you will have a tutor to help you prepare for your college applications. Your mother will insist on that. You have so many damn tutors that I don’t know why I pay for you to go to school. But I am not paying for ADD. That is final. And let me
tell you something else. There are kids all over America who don’t have all these fancy tutors, and who just sit down to do their SATs and applications, without any help at all.”
“But they don’t get into the best schools.”
“Actually, you’re wrong. I’m very glad that some of them do.”
Gorham shook his head. You could say, of course, that he’d brought this upon himself. He’d raised the kids in pampered privilege precisely because he wanted the best for them, and now he’d got what he paid for. But it went beyond his kids, who were a little spoiled, but fundamentally sound. New York, it seemed to him, was just the pinnacle of a more general problem.
Look at what happened if one of the kids got sick. Antibiotics, right away. It wasn’t just New York, or even America. He had friends in Europe who told him that the socialized doctors there did exactly the same thing. Give the child antibiotics and stay out of trouble. The only trouble was, did any of these children build up natural resistances? The new bugs that resisted antibiotics were going to come and get them one day.
There was never a downside. Nothing must be allowed to go wrong. You could find the tough old American spirit on the sports field. But was that enough?
“I can’t believe you won’t let me have ADD,” Emma said.
Yet maybe deep down, he thought, she was pleased. Kids like it if you say no. He remembered his son once, when he was a little guy, saying something about another boy: “His parents don’t care about him at all, Dad. They let him do anything he likes.” There was wisdom in that.
“Let’s walk back across the park,” he suggested.
“Walk? Okay.”
But a tiny detour first, he thought. Just up to Seventy-second Street. It was a grand street to walk across. As they came to Central Park West, he paused and pointed at the Dakota.
“You know who lived there.”
“Tell me.”
“John Lennon. The Beatles.”
“Right. I knew that. He got shot there. And his wife Yoko Ono made a beautiful garden in the park opposite.”
“Did you ever go in there?”
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