When Where Who, nonfiction by Frank Corley

When Where Who

Frank Corley

The first time I ever went to New York City I was forty-three years old. Maybe that doesn’t seem that late in life to you, but when I was in college a lot of people were from the east coast, and my closest friends were from New Jersey, so I felt like everyone had been to New York but me. It was a Sunday afternoon; we drove in through the Lincoln Tunnel because the Holland Tunnel was closed. There were six of us in the car, college friends. Most of us had not seen each other for about twenty years. One of my friends had chartered a jet that flew four of us out from the Midwest.

I can still remember the drive into the tunnel. The highway slows to a crawl through the little town of Weehawken, NJ. Just before the toll booths at the entrance to the tunnel under the Hudson River is a great 360° arc, dropping down and around. Tucked inside that cloverleaf was a small baseball field, apparently the home field of the Weehawken High School Indians. On the right field wall was painted an American flag, which of course on that day held special meaning. It looked like a set from the music video for “Glory Days” off Born in the USA. The field actually sat directly above the toll booths as the road slipped under the river. I had never seen anything like it, and I stared out the window at this scene from another culture. We entered the tunnel and crept into New York City. I did not know what to expect from this huge, strange place, so often the victor, but now a victim.

It was late September, 2001, and we were coming to New York for the funeral of a college friend who’d been killed in the World Trade Center collapse after the attacks a few weeks before. Joe McDonald was the older brother of my best friend Paul. Joe was a senior when we were sophomores in college, and he was the oldest member of a family which that year actually had someone in every class of the small college we attended. Joe was a senior; his cousin Bob—the guy who chartered the jet—a junior; Paul, my best friend, a sophomore, and his younger sister Nancy was in her first year. We were all good friends, ran in the same social circles. Paul and Nan were close enough to my wife and me that they were both in our wedding. Joe was very much the older brother to all of us: he treated us respectfully, like peers, but also taught us the ways of the world. He recruited Paul and me and several others to play on the rugby team. He had a great smile, an easy laugh that covered what a thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent man he was. Joe had been a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, a brokerage firm which occupied many floors of the World Trade Center and which lost many, many people on September 11th. Joe worked there with another cousin, Jimmy, who had actually invited Joe to go golfing that morning. Joe had declined.

I say we were there for Joe’s funeral, but it was really only a memorial service. There were no remains recovered yet, so there wouldn’t be a funeral for another five years. Joe was the oldest of seven children, a good Irish Catholic family: his father was a cardiologist, all the kids went to excellent colleges and are now very successful. Joe was a wonderful husband, the father of two girls who were just little kids at that time. We drove into the city the day after the memorial service, to see the city, have lunch, and get as close to Ground Zero as we could. It was a damp, misty day, and the smell and feel

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of concrete dust was still in the air all over lower Manhattan from the buildings having fallen. If you’ve ever laid concrete, you know the sandy, caustic sensation in your nostrils and the back of your throat which stuck with us throughout our time there.

On this day, after a weekend charged with emotion and love and brotherhood, what I remember most is this: the walls of buildings, the fences along the streets of the city, posts and poles, everything was covered with missing persons signs. When the buildings had collapsed, only about an hour or so after they’d been hit, no one really knew who had lived and who had died, who had escaped or what had happened to them. So they made these posters, the kind you see tacked on telephone poles when someone in your neighborhood loses a puppy or a cat. There were thousands of them, all over the place, everywhere. And of all those missing persons, almost none of them were ever heard from again. Virtually everyone who’d been in either tower when they fell, and most of the adjacent buildings, had been killed and their bodies lost.

My friends and I were looking at them, surrounded by candles and crosses, like those memorials on the side of the highway where a fatal crash has occurred. We were walking around lower Manhattan, silent, stunned. We would read the signs, light candles that had gone out, just shaking our heads in amazement. I don’t really know where we went. It was all unfamiliar territory to me. It started raining, and every little corner store put out a bucket of umbrellas for sale. People would buy one for a few bucks then cast it aside when it stopped raining, as if the umbrellas were disposable. I remember wondering that people must walk around pulling them out of trash cans, to resell the next time it rained, sort of like the luggage carts at the airport. I tell you this to say that the afternoon was a foreign, off-balance, almost surreal experience for me.

Wandering lower Manhattan, I found myself standing in Union Square, a park a couple of miles from the World Trade Center. A statue stands in the center of the park, and a lot of the posters were taped to the pedestal and on the stone structures around it. And then we saw one which blew me away. It said: “If you are wondering where your loved ones are, where all the people you’re looking for are, they are everywhere, surrounding you. They were incinerated, and crushed, and they were scattered all over the city. They are in the very air you breathe, and that makes every space in this entire city sacred. You should act accordingly.”

An anonymous poster had created a powerful moment which I have never forgotten. In the midst of the destruction, someone had called us all to see the holy. The whole day, all weekend, I had felt God’s presence. But at that moment I heard the message of that sign. I felt the sanctity of the city of New York. It was not just a big, cold, mean concrete city. It was a cathedral, as sacred at that moment as any place I have ever been. I stood there, stunned into thought. I think of talking to my friend Paul the day it happened, then to his secretary when she told me he’d gone home for the day, and knowing that Paul was at that point working through an awareness of what must have happened. I thought, as so many of us still do every year on that date, of where we were, the people we were with and how we worked through the comprehension of those events. I think of Paul and of his father, strong and eloquent from the podium the morning of Joe’s memorial service. I think of the crazy way that Joe’s death became an opportunity to reconnect with dear friends I had not seen in decades.

I believe that, for many of us in the midwest, September 11, 2001, was like a newsreel or a television show or a disaster movie. Two giant concrete skyscrapers crumbling to