They told Frank that his wife and daughter’s seats were in the tail section. When the plane broke up, the roof peeled away. At the same time the tail flipped upside down, crushing the fin, nothing to brace the inverted fuselage, and the passengers, unbuckled, fell. Here comes the plane, scraping the passengers along the road and into first one house and then out the back yard and across the next back yard into another house. These bits and pieces of people, squeezed into nothing by the weight of the plane, masticated by metal bed-frames and stucco walls, and nails, and chimneys, and the jumble of stuff that a second before had been a car filled with children and groceries, now packed tall metal drums lined with plastic. There were probably things other than ruined human body parts in the drums. Anything fleshy had been collected for examination, classification, and that would include what was left of dogs and cats, the meat from freezers, and pieces of the dinners from the airline’s kitchen, choices of fish, chicken, beef or cheese, now fused by the heat with the skin of burn-ravaged flight attendants. Let the coroner’s sophisticated laboratories divide the blended proteins from each other and say with great assurance that this was passenger and this was enchilada.
Frank heard a worker joke with another worker as he pushed one of those barrels in front of him. ‘Come on, honey, let’s eat out tonight, I’m tired of leftovers.’
Frank went back to the hotel. He knew he was in that state of grief that was denial. Knowing this, could he still deny?
7
Public Relations
Frank watched himself become famous on the news that night, the story was the same on every channel: man misses plane, evades police barriers at crash site, is arrested for looting on Cohassett Street. As he listened to them talking about this man who had been arrested, as he felt the thrill of fame, a disturbing high-pitched tone vibrated through their reports, linking the basic elements of the story, implying a relationship, an intention, some subtle marriage between the crashed plane and his walk through the ravaged houses, his arrest. He wanted to know what they really meant by the implicit connections – ‘PLANE CRASHES’; ‘MAN WHO MISSED PLANE SEARCHES THROUGH RUBBLE’; ‘ARRESTED’ – and why they were frightening him. He wanted to call up the radio and television stations, and the newspapers that would print the story in the morning, but he couldn’t think of anything to say that would help his cause. Don’t they care how it makes me feel? What do they mean when they say I was searching through the rubble? Searching? As though I had a goal.
He wanted to tell the reporters covering the story that in his distress he had visited Cohassett Street to see for himself where the plane had crashed, and that of course he had not been looting. He could tell them what he told the police, that he had found his wife’s suitcase. He hoped that anyone hearing about this would put themselves in his place. He hoped they would understand that there was nothing to loot. But who would believe that? Too many people crowding the police barricades that night wanted grim souvenirs. But who would blame me for wanting something that might have been touched by my daughter? What if I said I was looking through the awful zone hoping to find her favourite doll? Yes, if it comes to trial, he thought, and my lawyer sees the jury running against me, he will claim that my search through the wreckage could hardly be called looting, since by definition looting is theft, and by definition I was looking for what I had lost. And I found it.
No jury will go against me, he thought. But there won’t be a jury. And how important is my story in the larger story? I will be lost in all the other news. There were so many pieces of the event now. The flight attendant whose dogs were waiting for her. The pilot who was going to retire in six months. The three couples killed on their honeymoons. The destroyed families. The reports of eye-witnesses.
In the Flight 221 Crisis Center at the Marriott, Frank waited with the families of the dead, while Lowell was at the airport, meeting their parents. The airline was flying them down, for free.
Minutes would pass while he watched Bettina Welch on the phones, or Ed Dockery talking to the press who tried to get through the cordon into the room with all of the families, and Frank would have no thoughts. He was aware of nothing, really. Occasionally some consciousness would surface, like a fish stirring itself to a bit of food, alert only to the moment of hunger and the moment of placation, and then he would settle down at the bottom of this ocean of no feeling, and he would stare into nowhere, thinking nothing. Something within him, or something that he was within, marked the remote distance of his large emotions, saw them, absorbed them, and forgot them. Whether everyone in the room felt this way, or only those called survivors, or just Frank, well, who could say? Not Frank. This was not a feeling of peace, because there was still the electricity of grief, of regret, of mistake. No, he rode on the inevitability of the crash’s effect on the rest of his life. As soon as he said to himself, ‘Everything will be different’, something like darkness came up around him, and he had only to give himself a push into this, and he would collapse. Frank saw his fate and was stunned by it.
After however long he sat there – three hours like this? – he found himself standing, but he didn’t know why, or for how long he had been up from his chair. In his daze he had been blind, without knowing it, but now he could see again. Something had impelled him to stand, but the reason behind the move was gone. A few people watched him. Are they watching me because I have been standing here for twenty minutes, asleep, or because I am the man who missed the plane, or because I am just one more place in the room, not even a person any more, and as good as anything else for them to look at? Look at a curtain, look at Bettina Welch, look at me. When he sat down again, he tried to find the sensation that would bring him again to the pleasant isolation of the last three hours. But then he heard his brother’s voice, and knew that Lowell must have called his name a second before, and that out of habit, because he always wanted to stand when Lowell found him at his desk, in the office, thinking about what he would rather be doing, he had jumped at the familiar, truly familiar, sound. Even when Lowell called on the phone, Frank would put his feet on the floor, if they had been on the desk. And yet sometimes he saw Lowell behind his own desk, with his feet up, while he argued with the presidents of record companies, trying to get them to see things his way, trying to wrestle a little more money from them without making them an enemy. Often he even won those battles. To win, and stay friends! And still with your feet up! To be casual about the battles! And when Frank, in a negotiation, never as important as his brother’s since Frank had no authority to feud over something that the stores could not do without, tried to relax like Lowell, and put his feet on the desk, he lost the line of his thoughts, and panicked, thinking that he would soon lose the deal. So when he kept his feet on the floor, he felt safer but, too aware of his safety, congratulated himself for learning to concentrate. How to measure successful concentration except by waking up to a mountain of unconsciously completed brilliant work, and time passed? To fly through the business day, making money the way a bird finds columns of warm air rising. But some birds must be better at flight than others? In all their Darwinage. This one flies higher. Stupid songs about soaring hearts. Some soar higher. Another kind of flying. And what goes up must come down. Like a plane.
Here came his family. Each of them took one of his hands, and his father gathered him into a hug with them. They had never done this before, the four of them, close like this. Lowell with his hand on Frank’s shoulder, something shy in the touch, afraid to admit he needed to join in. Ethel, crying, and Leon asking Frank, not in words, but with the pressure of a hand, to help her, to give something to her and promising him, again not in words, that helping her would be good for him, would take him out of himself, that anyone could see that Frank was too inside himself, that he would ruin himself by staying so close to his grief. So many hugs in the last two days, and bodies, and hair, and skin, Leon’s smooth wrists, and his mother’s perfume. Even today, she put it on. It was a heavy perfume, something he had once give
n Anna, who refused to wear it because she said it made her smell like Ethel. The comfort of the closet in his mother’s bedroom. In the mansion. What adheres to clothes over time. The memory of a social life.
But I should love them now, he thought. I should finally forgive them. I should see their humanity now. I should see that they love me with all the complicated feelings that I love – loved – my own child. They may have hurt me at times, yes, yes, but I was no better with my own. Or I thought I was better, but what challenges had I faced with her? So my parents shamed me when I was young, or even later, just by being themselves, but what have I done to bring honour to them?
Or is this crap, these feelings, should I not see that the events of the week, events that, in the future, I will see with dispassion, have clouded my resolve, and that the dangerous, heroic gesture now is not to let go of what I think about them? Just because they need me now, or think they need me, does that create a special indebtedness? I will not cave in, thought Frank. Not collapse like the ceiling of a plane when the walls are crushed, and hundreds die screaming.
‘How were you treated by the police?’ Leon asked. ‘If they hurt you ...’ If they hurt me, what? Frank wanted to say. What are you going to do? Shoot a cop?
‘We’ve got a lawyer now,’ said Lowell. ‘Aaron Waramus, he’s very good.’
‘Is he the best?’ asked Ethel. Frank hated this in his mother, because he hated it in himself, always to think about the best, not to buy unless he could afford the best, or to know what the best was, and then, when buying something that was not the best, thinking of it only as a temporary substitution until he had the money to buy the best. And did he really need the best lawyer for this case? Wasn’t the case so obvious?
‘As good as they come,’ said his father.
‘But the arrest, is he a criminal lawyer? I thought he was for the lawsuit.’ So there had been discussions between Lowell and Leon from which Ethel had been left out. She was used to playing catch-up with their conversations.
‘They’ll let me off,’ said Frank. ‘I wasn’t looting. There was nothing to loot.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Leon. ‘There’s a lot of money at stake here.’
‘What difference does that make?’ asked Frank. He didn’t understand what his father was saying. That because the airline might have to pay out millions of dollars, or an insurance company would have to, therefore the police, in collusion with the forces of authority and capital, would put Frank on trial, and that this trial, successfully pursued, would somehow diminish the obligations of the immense financial combines that own airplanes and insurance companies?
‘We’ll probably need a psychiatrist’s report to clear you,’ said Leon. ‘I don’t see how we can get around that.’
‘But what did I do?’ asked Frank.
‘You were caught where you shouldn’t have been. I don’t blame you, Frank, don’t get me wrong.’ Everything sounded stupid now, everything his father said. ‘But these things get tried out of court, in the press. And the press needs to think of you as crazed with despair.’
‘As though I’m not.’
‘You have certain tendencies,’ said Leon.
‘What tendencies?’ asked Frank.
‘This isn’t the time,’ said Ethel.
‘Great,’ said Frank, ‘so you’ll provoke me the way you usually do. You start to say something to me about how you really see me, and then just as I want to know what you’re thinking, you pull back, so I don’t get to hear what you had to say, and I have to make it up myself, something that’s usually worse than what you were about to tell me.’
‘You know what I mean,’ said his father, ‘and it isn’t a terrible thing about you, but you do wander a little. You have a tendency,’ and he underlined the word, ‘to kind of go off by yourself, and you did it yesterday when you took the train here.’
This was Leon’s attempt to prove that the family still had a commander. Since he had no direction over his sons’ business, and little over his own, he had nothing left to play with but their emotions. Lowell was immune to him, even liked him, but Frank hated Leon in these moments.
‘I don’t want to go to a psychiatrist,’ said Frank.
‘You don’t have to,’ said Lowell, trying to finish this.
‘I’m not crazy,’ said Frank, and tears came to his eyes, and he felt pathetic. ‘Everyone is dead.’
Ethel hugged him, rocked him. She loves me, he thought, she knows who I am, and she still loves me. She loves me because I gave them their only grandchild. And now that grandchild is dead. And she doesn’t really know who I am. She doesn’t know about Mary Sifka. So he broke the hug, he broke another hug.
Ed Dockery walked towards them, and it made Frank happy to see him. What he hated in the man two days before, his class ring, his shuffle, now seemed to Frank emblems of a deep sincerity, an empathy, even a real compassion so rare that no one he had met since shaking hands with Ed had made any similar claim on Frank’s respect. Behind Ed was another man. Ed shook Frank’s hand, and then introduced him to Piet Bernays. Frank then introduced them both to his parents. Ed regarded Lowell with a bit of suspicion.
‘Are you with the airline?’ asked Lowell.
Bernays said that he was not from the airline, that he was with a public-relations firm hired by the airline. Frank thought that he might be homosexual. A Republican homosexual. Why? He was fastidious beyond the culture of this airline. He liked his clothes too much, he liked his hair. He was trim. He had a thin gold watch on a lizard band, with the watch on the wrong side of his wrist. He was beautiful, in a way. Was this what Lowell felt with men, to see their beauty and not run from it? But I hate this man, thought Frank.
Bernays explained that the airline was aware of pending lawsuits and wanted to do nothing to stand in anyone’s way of them. That there was a procedure for the lawyers to follow, and that everyone knew the protocols. Rather, he said, it was his job to make the survivors available to the press. He wanted Frank to speak to them.
‘No,’ said Lowell. ‘And I want you to get out of here, now. Just get the fuck away from us.’
Ed Dockery shook his head, and in his look to Piet Bernays Frank saw the confirmation of an earlier warning. Bernays tried to say something to Lowell, but Lowell would have none of it.
‘You’re trying to take control of the propaganda here,’ said Lowell, ‘that’s what’s going on.’
Bernays said that he only wanted to help Frank.
‘How does Frank’s going to the press help him, if you do the handling?’ asked Lowell.
‘That’s a good question,’ said their father. Ethel put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and the four Gales stood in a line, this bulwark.
Bernays said that he had hoped only to stop the kind of mad speculations that drive the press into frenzies and make everyone’s lives difficult. Better, he said, for everyone to be as direct as possible than to hide something.
‘But we have nothing to hide,’ said Frank.
‘That’s right,’ said Leon. ‘Nothing to hide.’
Bernays said that he knew of the arrest, and that the press knew of it too.
‘Maybe we should get our own press agent,’ said Lowell. This seemed to Frank to be a good idea, and immediately he saw the advantages to this, how their press agent would speak for him, and arrange interviews, if everyone agreed that they were useful, with only those reporters who would be sympathetic to Frank, and would not press him to talk more about his trespass on Cohassett.
Piet Bernays said that hiring their own press person was a good idea, and that he could find one in San Diego if they wanted. This man will run the airline some day, thought Frank, and if not this airline, then another one. I am looking at a man who is brilliant at what he does. Any other functionary, even while encouraging the Gales to hire a press agent, would have conveyed some tremors from the corporation’s anxiety. When Bettina Welch and Ed Dockery stood for the airline, one could still see pieces of their flesh be
hind the masks. Bernays, practised in the art of transparency, wasted no time putting on a cover.
‘Look,’ said Lowell, ‘I’m a businessman in San Diego. I deal with the public all the time. Don’t you think I have my own resources here? Don’t you think I’m capable of finding my own press agent if I want one? Are you suggesting that I don’t even have my own publicist already?’
Bernays apologized if anything he said had implied that he did not respect Lowell’s place in the community. He even smiled as he admitted that he often bought records in Lowell’s store.
Bernays gave Lowell a boyish, shy smile, and Lowell patted him on the back.
‘What a fucker,’ said Lowell, with respect, with envy. ‘You’ve really done your homework, haven’t you?’
Bernays said that the airline was just doing what it had to do, and as a businessman, Lowell would appreciate that they should be expected to do no less. Frank saw that with this Bernays had brilliantly and deftly raised Lowell’s business to the stature of any important business, to a level equal to the airline.
And their father relaxed his posture, and even their mother, she relaxed, and sat on the back of a chair. When she did this, Bernays pulled a chair from a table and sat down. He was so finely tuned, and he used himself brilliantly, his breeding; quietly appealing to Frank’s mother and father that they compare their sons to him, with his posture, how wonderfully relaxed he was with himself, so unlike at least one of their sons. And then they all sat down.
It was maddening to Frank! They liked him, this dry Republican homosexual, this catamite to industrialists, this pet of bisexual investment bankers. He could imagine Bernays dressed in nothing but suspenders clipped to a jock strap, with his fucking hornrimmed glasses on, pouring gin martinis for a senator whose campaign he had just successfully managed, in some CIA condominium in Santa Barbara. And the senator, in a pink alpaca sweater, smoking menthols and nattering on about how we did it, we did it, I’m a senator! I’m in the club! I made it, we made it, you helped me make it! And then what would they do?
Among the Dead Page 17
