Gossip

  It was a beautiful day, I don’t know if you remember. Nicky said it was surreal, to walk up Lexington not knowing if his father was alive or dead and find all the shops open, the restaurants full, people going about their business. Dinah, for once in her life, didn’t offer anyone food and didn’t eat herself. She just stared at the television, where WTC Seven was burning. During station breaks we obsessively told one another exactly what time it was when normality ended for each of us. Who called. What was said. Where we were. WTC Seven burned all day, because it held the mayor’s emergency center, complete with a fuel dump for running generators. Rudy Giuliani strode around. We were learning a whole new vocabulary. Jihad. Osama bin Laden. Was it that day that we started watching the film clip of the man we know now as Mohammed Atta clearing security in the Portland airport that morning? Or was that later?

  I know the Portland airport. I’ve been through that security check. If you had a computer with you, you had to boot it up to prove it was a computer, not a bomb. Such innocent times.

  Charlotte called sometime in the afternoon; Dinah had the phone before the first ring was finished.

  “He’s alive,” Charlotte said.

  Dinah’s eyes cut to Nicky as she slumped against the kitchen counter. Nicky instantly understood. I didn’t.

  “Where is he?” I heard Dinah say, and I was still thinking hospital . . . morgue . . . until Dinah said in surprise, “New Jersey?”

  Nicky called Charlotte right back, but she didn’t know any more than that Richard had called and said he’d explain when he saw her. She was weeping. Nicky told her he’d call back later, and he did, three or four times, as we waited. In between, RJ called. He said he was coming to New York.

  “How?” said Nicky.

  All flights were grounded. Of course we knew by then about the crashes in Washington and Pennsylvania. I think trains were stopped as well. I guess there was still driving that day, and now I no longer remember, day by day, how long it was before any of that got normal again, and my diary doesn’t say. Meanwhile, where was Richard?

  At about four, the doorman called to say Mr. Wainwright was on his way up. We weren’t surprised, but only because we’d lost the power to be surprised. We all stood looking at the door. Richard walked in, wearing a suit in a condition I couldn’t interpret. He looked as if he’d been through a washer that stopped before the spin cycle.

  Nicky walked to his father and wrapped his arms around him. Richard returned the embrace and began to weep. Dinah and I were both in tears as well. When Nicky let Richard go, Dinah went into his arms, and they held each other as they had not done since the terrible Christmas after Richard left the marriage.

  Then it was my turn. I, who had never held Richard like that, clung to him and cried for all those souls who were somewhere now, but where? For the horror of the day, for our fear for him and so many others, for the knowledge of the terrible, terrible news that was coming, of who was lost and for the pain and terror in which they died. And Richard wept because he wasn’t one of them and there was no reason on earth he shouldn’t have been.

  When we finally let him go, but still stood close around him, Dinah touched his suit and said, “This smells like wet dog.”

  “I know,” said Richard.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Could I have a drink?”

  We all agreed that a drink was a good idea. Richard went into Dinah’s bedroom to call Charlotte again. When he came back, Dinah had put a towel on the best chair for him to sit on, and handed him a scotch and a Tupperware box of cold curried lamb and a fork. Richard said he had eaten a hot dog on the street somewhere on his way and wasn’t hungry, then ate the whole thing without even seeming to know he was doing it.

  The scotch steadied us all, although none of us was far from tears for the next few hours as he talked.

  He’d gotten to the city late because he’d stopped in Ardsley to vote. He’d come out of the subway and had just bought a coffee from a cart on Fulton Street when he became aware that a plane over the Hudson was flying much too low, the noise much too loud. Then he saw it, so he knew from the start it was no Cessna. People on the street were paralyzed, watching. At that point, after the initial shock, his instinct was to try to get closer. To see if he could help. Or just to see. They could hear the roar of the fire above them, and soon, the people trapped above the crash line hanging out the windows, looking up, looking down. On the street chaos and ash and debris rained everywhere, but at that point, he said, there was still a sense that this couldn’t really be happening, or that soon someone would stop it, put the fire out, ’copter in and rescue the people at the top of the building. Sirens screamed everywhere around them, and fire trucks raced toward the site from every direction. Richard said he was still thinking about the work he had to do that day, planning, the way you do, about where he would do it, since he clearly wouldn’t be getting into his office. He tried calling Charlotte at home in Westchester to tell her what had happened, but he couldn’t get a signal.

  Then the second plane hit, and the horror moved inside him to a different level, although he admitted that, as a spectacle, it was so overwhelming that you couldn’t react with more than astonishment. You stared. Wanted to move but couldn’t look away. Couldn’t process emotions, so they went somewhere, and the eyes and that powerful motor, curiosity, ruled. What would happen next? When the top of the South Tower with all its human cargo fell off the building toward the east where they were standing, they started to run, some of them screaming, and when they looked back, the whole tower was gone. He said that later he realized he had felt the earthquake shock of the planes hitting, heard the vast inhuman roar of the building as it died, but at the time he only knew running, in a herd, through stinging stinking smothering pink-gray dust. When the cloud thinned enough for sunlight to penetrate, they were blocks below where they had been, moving toward Battery Park. They stopped to look back, their eyes and noses full of ash and grit, which wiping made worse. Policemen herded them southward. You could tell who had been closest by the thickness of the dust coating them. Many, who kept looking back like Lot’s wife and shaking or crying, had come from the North Tower itself, which was then still standing. “I was on the sixteenth floor.”

  “I was on the twenty-ninth.”

  “At first they said not to leave.”

  “ . . . we went down the southwest fire stairs . . .”

  “ . . . so she tried to go back up, I don’t know . . .”

  They ended up in the park at the tip of the island with no place to go but the water. They went to the harbor’s edge and stood like puzzled horses. Police boats arrived, Harbor Police or something, little motorboats with swollen rubber bumpers along the gunwales, which was lucky because there was no place to land. No pier or dock or place to tie up. They just nosed the boats up beside the seawall and held them there with the engines running, amazing seamanship really, while dazed hysterical people climbed or dropped or fell over the seawall into the boat. It was hard on the women in their business suits. (Pencil skirts, I thought, you’d have to just pull them up to your hips, and no one wears slips anymore.) One woman took off her heels and threw them into the boat before her, but one went into the water. She must have had to walk the whole way home in her stocking feet. When a boat was full it took off across the river mouth to New Jersey. The refugees climbed out, and the boat zipped back to the New York side for more people.

  Richard found himself on a pier at the edge of a New Jersey park he’d never heard of, on a sparkling September morning, looking back across the river at a tower of black smoke, and flames and a hole in the sky where the buildings had been. He understood what he was looking at much less than we did, because he hadn’t heard the radio or seen a television. Rumors spread among the refugees: there were other planes, the White House had been hit. The word terrorists, terrorists buzzed through the group but was not well understood. Their mental processing units were pretty much shattered. After a while two men
in hazmat suits approached Richard and asked him what the stuff was all over his face and hair and clothes. He told them, and they turned a fire hose on him.

  I’ve forgotten now exactly how they got back across the river. A cadre of them who had been together from the park onward chose without discussion to stay together. Those who had cell phones lent them, and sometimes they worked. One young man had a Walkman with a radio in it; he was in charge of reporting what the news was saying. A half dozen of the women who had escaped the North Tower had no money, keys, or ID, having left their handbags at their desks. The others bought them bagels or water or whatever they came across as they walked. By the time they reached the Upper East Side, Richard was walking with just one young lawyer named Thomas who should have been in the North Tower on the hundredth floor, but a fight with his girlfriend had delayed his leaving for work. Thomas didn’t know where he would spend the night, and Richard said his ex-wife would find room for him, but Thomas said he thought he’d go find his alcohol support group and headed for a bar on Third Avenue.

  Richard’s company reopened quickly in rented offices in Jersey City. Richard tried to go back to work, but the subway terrified him. He wasn’t sleeping and was afraid of everything. Sirens, smoke, even dogs. He tried driving to work, but crossing the bridge was worse than the tunnels, and he developed a panicky fear that the trucks on the highway on the Jersey side were going to topple sideways onto him and crush him. He was so tense and erratic that Nicky told me he thought his father’s marriage was in trouble.

  Dinah invited Richard to her apartment for lunch. They sat at the dining room table all afternoon, with Dinah’s tax records for years back, her statements from Social Security and her retirement account, crunching numbers and projecting income, if she continued to work at her current rate for such and so many years. They agreed that she could afford to reduce his payment to her by two-thirds; in return he would oversee her investments, renegotiate fees with her broker, make sure her insurance and will were in order. All the things he used to do for his private clients he would now do for Dinah, for free, for life. He resigned from his job, went back to Westchester, and reopened his family office. Within five months, he had his old clients back, and at least one new one: me. To have him take over the job of fighting with the monsters who provide, or rather do everything they can to avoid providing, my health insurance was worth the fee by itself. Dinah claimed it was the best deal she ever made, but then, she’s like that.

  Chapter 11

  Nicky started law school that January. He was twenty-six. He took student loans to cover tuition and went on living at home to save room and board money. It must have been that winter, too, that Dinah called me about our high school reunion. Hoping for big reunion gifts, the school started promoting a year in advance.

  “Are you even thinking of going?” she demanded. It was to be our fortieth, if you can believe it. Well, why shouldn’t you believe it? But we found it hard. Inside I felt as young as I ever had, and it was hard to reconcile my inner reality with the face that now looked out at me from my mirror topped with increasingly improbable auburn hair.

  “Why?” I asked. “Are you not thinking of it?” As I had had no Bright College Years, Miss Pratt’s had remained important to me, if only for the lifelong friends I’d made there.

  “The only people from our class I really want to see are you and Nanny Townsend and Leonora, and I can see you all here, and the food will be better.” She invited us to dinner (we brought the wine) and she was right. After that we met every six weeks or so to catch up with one another.

  The four of us were finishing dinner one October night at Dinah’s when a key turned in the front door lock, and Nicky appeared, wearing a broad-shouldered suit from the 1940s and a becoming fedora. Behind him was a slight and arty blond boy, now sporting round tortoiseshell glasses, whom I dimly remembered from Nicky’s high school crowd.

  “Good evening, ladies,” Nick said. “I am Clark Kent.”

  “Well, of course you are,” said Dinah. “We’ve all suspected that.”

  “You look very dashing, Nicky,” said Leonora.

  “Thank you. I’ve got a lot invested in this suit. Mom, you remember Toby?”

  “Of course, darling, how are you.” She kissed them both. “Where did you get it?”

  “Opera Guild Thrift Shop. I had to have the pants taken in about a foot. We’re having our class reunion at Paula Donnelley’s, but Toby didn’t know it was a costume party. Can he go as you?” he asked Dinah.

  “He doesn’t have to wear my underwear, does he?”

  Nicky took that as a yes. They started toward her bedroom.

  The interruption had had the happy effect of shortening Nanny’s detailed explanation of how well she had been feeling on hormone replacement therapy and how sorry she was to have to give it up, because now she wasn’t sleeping and sometimes had to get up and change her drenched pajamas in the middle of the night. Not that we didn’t care; we did. In fact I had a breathlessly interesting contribution to make to the topic regarding evening primrose oil. Still, having a boister of youthful high spirits sweep through the room was a welcome treat. We could hear the boys laughing in Dinah’s bedroom.

  The young returned, and we gasped. Toby was uncanny as the Full Dinah. He was wearing a long dark skirt and Dinah’s wide black wool jacket with the huge bone buttons, perhaps the most characteristic item from her winter uniform, and her long cherry-colored scarf double-looped around his neck in the way my age group does when we haven’t had any work done on our many-pleated necks. His eyes were dramatized with a graphite shadow and lines of kohl at the lashes, and he wore a bright slash of familiar crimson lipstick and one of Dinah’s berets.

  “Oh. My. God,” said Leonora.

  “If you’ve wrecked my favorite lipstick I’m going to kill you, you know that,” said Dinah.

  “Toby, you look divine. Who did your makeup?” I asked.

  “Nicky,” said Toby, appearing pleased.

  “My goodness, you do pay attention,” I said to my godson.

  Leonora said, “I would know you were Dinah Wainwright anywhere, Toby. It’s quite frightening.”

  “The shoes aren’t perfect,” said Dinah. Toby was still wearing his own high-top sneakers. “I kind of like the look, though.”

  “Thanks, Ma,” said Nicky.

  “Good-bye, louts. Have fun,” said Dinah.

  As they went out the door I saw Nanny and Leonora exchange a look.

  Dinah called the next morning to say that Toby had been a succès fou. Cries of “Oh my god, it’s Nick’s mother!” had been heard all over the party. Nicky didn’t get nearly as much attention as Toby did until midnight, when he’d shed his suit and revealed his Superman costume.

  There was no question that Nicky was doing well and having fun, but I think you can imagine his mother’s pleasure when he asked if he could come for dinner and bring a girl.

  As I heard the story, they met when Nicholas stopped in a bookstore in Carnegie Hill one evening to browse the art books and schmooze with the owner. He noticed a fine-boned blonde standing on the mahogany library stairs shelving oversize stock, and couldn’t help but notice her delicate ankles and quiet but very good clothes.

  “Who is that?” he asked.

  “She’s called Grace Metcalf,” said Clifford. “We’re trying each other out.”

  Grace was just back from three years in France to which she’d fled after her father died. She accepted Nicky’s invitation to walk in the park after the shop closed, and they were still together six hours later, leaning their glossy heads together over guttering candles in a trattoria on Third Avenue as the last waiter piled chairs on the tabletops and leaned sarcastically against the cash register, feigning sleep.

  It had been a wind-haunted autumn night in the city, chilly but not yet bitter, with wood smoke in the air and yellow leaves still clinging here and there among bare branches, turning over in the wind, or giving up at last and falling t
o where they crunched underfoot. Grace remembered Nicky from their teenage years; although they had gone to different schools they had moved in the same circles, but Nick belonged to a glamorous older crowd and hadn’t notice her at the Hols and Cols and Mets and Gets where she and her not yet sleek or stylish friends had sat in clumps at dances. They walked to her old school, then to his, telling each other stories of what had happened on this block, in that shop, in the apartment right up there on the eighth floor where someone had had an amazing party one Thanksgiving. They described the Halloween costumes they’d worn as children, the buildings where they been allowed to trick-or-treat. Grace confessed that her friend had had a crush on Nicky and dragged everyone to see him in Most Happy Fella. Everything amazed them, everything made them laugh. The streets were luminous, enchanted places where each of them had walked alone, becoming themselves, until it was time to discover each other.

  They talked about the songs they had loved, what they’d danced to, books they’d read for English class. All their memories were happy, all their luck seemed to have been good. He said he didn’t want to call her Grace; it didn’t suit her, he declared. By the time I was invited into the romance, a month or two later, they were calling each other “pup.”

  Dinah was the first to learn they were an item, but I believe I was the second. Nicky telephoned. “Lovie, may I take you to lunch? There’s someone I want you to meet.” We agreed on Sette Mezzo on Lex in the seventies. I arrived first and was at my usual table in the back when Nicky walked in with his “someone.” My Grace. It was an ugly winter day, with a sky like wet concrete, and a bitter wind, but as they shook off their heavy coats and followed the maître d’ toward me, they both seemed to shine with happiness. People turned to look at them as they passed.