“And Katie misses you! We’re temporarily living with John and Peter, but I’ll call you every day and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
It became quickly clear that it was going to be impossible to return home anytime soon. There was no electricity, gas, water, or telephone service. Moreover, Battery Park City was now an armed camp, surrounded by the National Guard, the FBI, FEMA’s (Federal Emergency Management Agency) Urban Search and Rescue, and the New York City Police Department—the entire neighborhood declared a crime scene.
And just across the street from our complex, the smoldering ruins of the Trade Center site were guarded by the military and overrun by rescue workers who had the grim task of sifting through the debris, removing victims’ remains.
In conversations with Pearl over the next day or so, she sounded weak. She said she was fighting a stomach bug, so she insisted that we wait to visit her until she’d had a chance to recuperate.
“Do you have everything you need, Oldest?” I asked her.
“Everything but Katie. Give her a kiss.”
Over the next week, as we watched the round-the-clock TV coverage of 9/11, Katie and I settled in with John, Ryan, Peter, and their two dogs—Virgil and Chance.
Middle-aged Virgil was the grouchy alpha dog of the house, snarly and prone to biting anyone in his territory. He instantly disliked Katie (and the feeling was mutual), so Katie was kept gated in the bathroom for her own protection. She moped there on the cold tile floor, barely eating her food, only content when I took her out for walks or when she slept with me at night in the apartment’s small office.
John’s other dog, Chance, the papillon, was a yappy white ball of fur who irritated Katie, so she simply ignored him, or slapped him away with her paw.
Aside from the stress of having too many dogs in one apartment, I was very grateful for the hospitality that John and Peter offered Katie and me. In the dismal aftermath of 9/11, it was so comforting being together again.
We ate bagels and cereal in the morning as I talked to Ryan about his schoolwork. I strategized with John about my work and about functioning without my computer. And through it all, I gained enormous strength in their companionship, recapturing the closeness we’d always shared.
This was definitely not a time to be alone—and Granny was anything but happy marooned in New Jersey. She wasn’t very close to her niece and nephew, Edith and Leonard, and felt somewhat uneasy in their home, as she later told me. But even if she had been comfortable, having been uprooted from her own apartment and traumatized by the physical rigors of 9/11, she was understandably depressed and anxious to be around her regular group.
“I miss the little child!” she told me yet again on the phone. “How’s she doing?”
“Misbehaving, as usual,” I laughed. “She’s not very popular here with John’s dogs—they hate her—and she’s risking her life to steal their food.”
“That’s my girl!” laughed Pearl, who also missed her new friend, Lee, who had provided such kind and attentive care.
“Lee saved my life,” Pearl told me gratefully, anxious to see her again.
Lee and I called Pearl every day, and, at first, she seemed okay. But she really wasn’t. She seemed to resent the good intentions of her niece, mostly because she didn’t want her independence taken away. So even though her niece got Pearl’s hair and nails done, and bought her new clothes, which was certainly a kind thing to do, Pearl wanted none of it.
Pearl was becoming somewhat irrational and paranoid in her suburban surroundings. One day she called up telling me that she was locked up in the house, a “hostage,” and couldn’t get out, which was not the case. All this, I believed, was a function of being in shock—disoriented, crushingly lonely, and worried.
The solution was obvious: bring Pearl back to Manhattan, and fast. So John rented a car and, with Katie and Ryan in tow, off we went to Montclair to rescue her.
When we pulled into the driveway, Pearl rushed into our arms and gave us all a big hug, elated to be leaving for Manhattan. She looked good in a new shorter, curled hairdo and had obviously gotten excellent care. Katie was beside herself with excitement. She licked Granny’s face and sat on her lap the entire way back into the city, a quick twelve-mile ride. She soon fell sound asleep in Pearl’s arms, her paws hanging possessively over her wrists.
John and Peter didn’t have room to host all of us, and I couldn’t impose on them any longer than the two weeks I’d already stayed. Also, since Katie was so dissatisfied with being penned up all the time in the bathroom, it was definitely time for us to move out on our own.
Since FEMA was offering free hotel stays for all those displaced by 9/11, we searched for one that would take both people and dogs. The only dog-friendly hotel I could find was the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West, right across from Central Park.
Unfortunately, they only had one room left, as the hotel was filled with many other displaced residents of Battery Park City. As much as I didn’t want to be separated from Granny, I got her into the nearby Helmsley Hotel, around the corner from Carnegie Hall, just a few blocks from me and close to John and Ryan.
True, she was all alone in her room, but much happier.
“I’m free!” laughed Pearl, delighted to be back in walkable Manhattan, close to Katie and the gang. Most days, I picked her up for lunch and for dinner and we enjoyed long strolls in Central Park. Katie chased birds and squirrels as always and asserted herself, lunging at little dogs that irritated her.
Indoors, Katie reveled in her freedom and quickly made friends with the hotel maids. She followed them around, just as she had Ramon, hoping they might drop something to eat, which they never did. She marched through the lobby of the hotel and stopped to flirt with all the bellmen and anyone else willing to pet her. And even though she sometimes bumped into walls due to her cataracts, she was in good spirits, stimulated by the change of scenery while anchored to her “pack” of regulars—me, Pearl, John, and Ryan.
On October 7, we celebrated Pearl’s eighty-ninth birthday at an Italian restaurant a few blocks from John’s apartment. Rose was there along with Lee and other friends from Battery Park City, none of whom could yet return to our neighborhood, which remained off-limits and uninhabitable. Through the evening, Ryan snuggled close to Oldest, his head often touching hers as they posed happily for photos. Pearl looked radiant that night, smartly dressed in a black suit, a leopard-patterned blouse, and pearls. Ryan was so grown-up in a button-down blue dress shirt and khakis, his long bangs falling into his face.
We sang happy birthday off-key and had a chocolate fudge cake from the Cupcake Café, decorated with a wild garden of blue, red, and yellow sugar flowers. Granny took charge of cutting the slices, thinner than any of us would have liked. At the table, Ryan shoveled in cake as he showed Pearl his new Nintendo gadget.
As a birthday present, he gave Pearl a small plant for her hotel room. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said, holding it as if it were made out of pure gold. “I love it.”
That night as we headed back to our hotels, I realized something that I would never have fully understood had we not been displaced from our neighborhood: Home is not a place; it’s the people placed in your heart.
So that night, even though Granny and I were still exiled from our homes, we were alive, and together again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ghost Town
In late October, having been uprooted and living in hotels since the terrorist attacks, Katie, Granny, and I finally returned home, though our world, as we had known it, was inexorably changed.
Although I, along with many other Battery Park City residents, had been briefly allowed into our building in late September to collect essentials (under National Guard escort), that whirlwind visit had been a total blur.
We had been allotted exactly fifteen minutes to get in and get out. “This is a crime scene,” we were told, “and if you take any photos, you’ll be arrested.”
I just rushed
into my apartment and grabbed some clothes, my checkbook, and files I needed for magazine stories, then locked the door and got out, relieved to return to the hotel.
But before I left the neighborhood, I noticed two unmarked, refrigerated trailers parked near our building. When I asked one of the guardsmen about them, he told me that they held human remains recovered at the disaster site.
And now, weeks later, on this crisp fall day, the trucks were still on site, morbid reminders that the cleanup was far from finished.
This was the day I actually saw the neighborhood again—and a sad sight it was.
It was hard to believe that just seven weeks earlier, the 110-story Twin Towers had been gleaming in the morning sunshine—hubs of commerce that dominated the landscape.
The skies were now vacant. What remained was a barren, flattened field filled with tons of twisted metal, powdery dust, armies of round-the-clock cleanup crews and, hidden from the eye, body parts still beneath the earth.
As we pulled up to our complex, Katie poked her nose out of the taxi window, curiously sniffing in the strange new smells. The streets were eerily empty. There was still a pungent smell of burning ash.
And as later reports revealed, even on the day of our arrival back home, the air was still toxic, polluted with asbestos and cement dust. By the furious swatting of her tail, however, Katie definitely knew she was home, though nothing was the same.
An aura of continuing shock and fear was palpable. Barricades blocked all nonessential traffic; trunks of cars were searched for bombs, while German shepherds sniffed every parcel and backpack. The community I’d known was like a war zone, and its residents, like war refugees, looked shell-shocked, with blank or dazed expressions, not a smile in sight.
As I looked beyond our circular driveway, mounted police navigated their horses around piles of debris, keeping a watchful eye on the temporary phone and electrical cables that were exposed aboveground. Portable toilets and hastily erected emergency telephone booths littered the once-manicured park adjacent to the Hudson River.
Most foreboding, police boats armed with machine guns patrolled the water, while Air Force helicopters hovered in the skies. Hearing the ominous sound of those helicopter blades, I wondered if we were returning home too soon—or if we should have returned at all.
On the way into our building, I stopped at our local drugstore to get a few supplies. Katie, as always, swiped a candy bar from the lower counter, which I plucked from her mouth, giving her my standard “no!” stare. Dejected, she slyly turned her head away from me, but stood ready, as always, to make another try.
As I walked back home on the near-empty streets, with no dogs or traffic, and almost nobody to keep us company, it struck me that our once-vibrant neighborhood—bustling with legions of babies, teenagers, young professionals, and seniors—was now a virtual ghost town.
Of the over 1,700 apartments in our complex, a whopping 70 percent of them were vacant. Many residents who had temporarily moved in with friends or family, or into hotels, were so shaken that they were never coming back. Some believed their children weren’t safe, that with Wall Street so nearby, another attack was inevitable. Others suffered from posttraumatic stress and disappeared without even returning for their furniture.
But for Granny and me, Battery Park City was home, the place where our hearts would always be. And we would not be driven from it.
We had spent such happy days here together, outside in the park, walking with Katie along the water—surveying the sailboats, the marina, and sweeping views of the Hudson—eating ice cream on summer nights, enjoying outdoor concerts, and savoring the magnificent sight of the Statue of Liberty.
And inside our homes, we had baked cakes and cookies together—eggs and sugar flying from one apartment to another. We had feasted on Granny’s plum tarts and paprika chicken and breaded zucchini. We had shared holidays and Katie’s annual birthday parties with her favorite carrot cake.
Through the rituals of celebration, we had established a true family unit that extended beyond just us to a wide network of our neighborhood friends—all of which made it impossible to even consider breaking it apart.
A friend living in another city asked why it had taken us so many weeks to get home. I explained that when one of the doomed planes flew into the Trade Center, one section of its wing had broken apart and been hurled, like a meteor, across the street, cutting a deep hole into the side of our thirty-five-story apartment tower, and shattering all the windows.
And so, on our first day back, as residents trickled back into the neighborhood, our homecoming was anything but happy. Yes, our homes were habitable, but everything was changed—and much was lost.
Tears flowed for all of us returning home that day, feeling, as we did, the ghostly presence of those now tragically gone.
As Katie and I entered the lobby of our building, I looked through the glass wall facing what had been a verdant backyard garden. It was now ripped up and brown. Seven weeks earlier, the grass had been covered with a blanket of singed papers hurled into midair during the implosion of the South Tower. The documents had been carried across the street from the burning towers, landing in our backyard. Also on the ground had been one stray shoe that had been blown from the foot of some poor soul. I had bent down to touch that shoe and had also found, nearby in the grass, a tube of lipstick and a banker’s business card.
Although things had been cleaned up a little on that October day, our home, as we had known it, was definitely not the same. Our formerly pristine lobby, with its floor-to-ceiling mirrors, potted palms, polished steel columns, and Oriental carpets, was now dusty and disheveled, a shadow of its former self.
The sitting area was filled with the piles of luggage of returning residents. There were notices tacked to the walls about emergency services and apartment cleaning. Card tables set up in the area leading to the elevators were manned by FEMA workers and insurance representatives, who answered questions about resettlement efforts in Battery Park City.
Katie trotted over to one of the tables, spotted an open bag of Fritos lying under it, and efficiently swiped it, running to the elevator in an attempt to escape detection. She failed, as I grabbed it away and returned it.
A moment later, as Katie and I came off the elevator, she bounded happily down our long hallway, overjoyed to finally be back home in her territory.
“There’s my girl!” Granny smiled with pleasure, as Katie ran into her arms, covering her face with kisses. “How’s my little baby?!” she asked over and over again. Katie’s tail told it all—just fine, happy to be reunited with Pearl.
My feelings were somewhat ambivalent. Most of the apartments on our floor were deserted. The hallway was empty and dark, with only the dim emergency lights turned on.
Two weeks earlier, after the National Guard had loosened up its rules and allowed longer home visits, I had been able to return to my apartment to survey the damage. I was accompanied by my Travelers home insurance rep—a wonderfully warm woman named Jean Harper. An avid dog lover, Jean was seduced by Katie and was especially efficient in processing my claim.
“Wow, this really is depressing,” I had told Jean as we surveyed the mess inside. There had been considerable water and dust damage: The marble kitchen counter was cracked in two, the oak cabinets were warped, the light-beige marble floors had turned brown, the wallpaper was discolored, and the living room carpets permanently stained. Everything was soaked in an inch of yellowish water.
I was relieved to know that all of it would be repaired or replaced, though some things could never be. For example, my computer was a dusty wreck, destroyed by the refuse that had billowed inside on 9/11, blanketing everything with heavy black soot. Although I had backed up some of my files, much of what I had stored was permanently lost.
After that discouraging visit with Jean, I’d been consumed with having everything dried out and cleaned up before our arrival home. So a decontamination crew in spaceship-like uniforms had been
brought in to scour every surface from floor to ceiling, removing the asbestos dust.
“This place really is a ghost town,” whispered Pearl, startled by the shadowy hallway and the absence of her women friends, who were still scattered with friends and family.
As she was unpacking her things, she surveyed the thick dust covering every surface in her apartment, sad that most of her beloved plants were dead, except for one—the rhododendron given to her by Ryan.
She seemed overwhelmed by the cleanup task at hand, and I arranged for a cleaning company to decontaminate her apartment as well.
“I guess I’ll go shopping for some food,” she murmured that first day, setting off for the grocery store, walking down the stairs.
“Why don’t you wait a minute—and I’ll go down with you,” I told her.
But independent as always, Pearl shook her head no, and walked right past me.
“I’m fine, don’t worry.”
But I was worried.
Oldest was definitely shaky (and who at her age wouldn’t be?), off in her mood and energy, definitely not strong enough to resume her life as she had known it. But I gave her a lot of credit for trying.
Beyond the physical, I could see that the readjustment period was going to be difficult because she had recently grown reaccustomed to seeing Ryan and John nearly every day. But here she was downtown again, more alone than she wanted to be.
Meanwhile, Katie was oblivious to it all and trotted into my bedroom to find her favorite toy, the pink rubber mouse that squeaked when you squeezed it. She began shaking her head back and forth, tearing that thing apart with gusto. And then, as she always did, she picked up a sock and we played tug-of-war. Katie snarled enthusiastically as she attempted to rip it away from me.
Finally, she opened her mouth, her pink tongue hanging out, and gave me her version of a doggie smile, content, at last, to be home. I popped in a dog biscuit and she curled up on the couch and took a nap.
Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family Page 17
