Price - The Good Priests Son

9 . 11 . 2001

9 . 13 . 2001

T he whole three weeks in Italy had felt like the rescue Mabry hoped fornot a single moment of cloudy vision and almost none of the maddening jangle of threatened nerves in his hands and legs. Even the two quick days in France, despite the routine Parisian rudeness, had failed to crank his symptoms. So hed stuffed his ears with the airlines free plugs and sunk into a nap in what he suspected was half-foolish hope. Maybe my body isnt ruined after all. Maybe Rome has cured me. And the nap was so deep that the pilots first few news reports didnt reach him at all. What finally woke him was the huge plane itselfa steep tilt northward, a wide swing, then a mans calm voice as the wings leveled off.

It said Ladies and gentlemen, not the usual jaunty Folks . Then it took a long pause. The latest news is even more impressive. At the World Trade Center, the second tower has also collapsed. As many as six thousand people may be lost. The plane that crashed into the Pentagon has taken maybe three hundred lives, and a fourth plane has crashed in a Pennsylvania field with all hands aboard. All U.S. airports are now closed to traffic, and we have our orders to divert. Were headed for Halifax, Nova Scotia. No further plans are available at present. Ill keep you posted.

Mabry had removed his earplugs by then; but hed still never heard such silence in an airplane as what swept through in the wake of that voice. Before he could look aroundthe plane was half emptythe pilot said four more words that were worse than all the rest. I hope I can. When had any of them heard such desolation?

Behind, a single voice sobbed distinctly. It seemed to be a man.

But since no other passenger was near in the first-class seats, Mabry rang for help; and a rattled steward told him the little they knew. Both of the World Trade Towers had been hit by full-sized jets, and both had now fallen. The collisions had come just after work started. Some reports said a plane had struck the Pentagon; a fourth plane had crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Mabry sipped at the double gin the steward brought, unasked. Then he shut his eyes to think, if thinking was possible. He knew just enough American history to calculate that, if six thousand human beings were dead, then this was the most disastrous day since the bloodiest day of the Civil Warthe battle at Antietam when, almost surely, nearly four thousand died. And this day had barely started. Whoever had done this and what else was planned?

Yet when he opened his eyes again, he looked to the jittery steward alone in the all-gray galley and saw him as clear as a stark photographor grim as a Goya torture victim. Mabry gave him a brief consolatory wave, a windshield-wiper side-to-side gesture (he was in first class, courtesy of years of frequent-flier credits).

His wave brought the steward back; he leaned to Mabrys ear and whispered. My partner works fifty yards away, across the plaza. Hes an architect. Say a hard prayer for him. Me as wellhes all Ive got on the planet Earth.

Somehow Mabry felt he knew the truthful thing to say. Your friends OK. Im all but sure. When he looked, the stewards name tag said Larry Leakins ; so Mabry took the further risk of saying Hes truly safe, Larry. I live down there, just three blocks south.

For the moment at least, Larry seemed to believe him. He squeezed Mabrys shoulder and went back to work.

Then Mabry scratched his palms deeply to check for numbness. He was hurting himself; the feeling was normal. And his legs were still calm. So in his mind he stroked the curious peace he still felt, like a cooling wound in the pit of his heart. He was tired, God knew, but not drunk or drugged. All his life hed been a buoyant soul. Why on Earth now? From the time the Towers had first been bombed in 1993, hed known the Muslims would try againand likely succeed. Now he was right, way righter than he could ever have guessed. And aside from the blow his city and country had suffered todayand the future was botched for years to comehed surely taken hits of his own.

His loft was in actual sight of the Towers. It was bound to be damaged if not destroyed. How many friends were dead? Likely the client who sent him to Paris. His daughter lived and worked uptown but was she safe? Hed never surrendered to the cell-phone plague, and hed had no luck with airplane phones, so there was nothing he could do before landingif there was still land in Nova Scotia. He looked out and tried to imagine nothing but water water . It was easy enough to think that the heaving steel-blue plain stretching beneath them was all there was or ever would be, from here on at least. Well, hed shut his eyes and try for more sleep.

Sleep took him straight in, no nightmares or frights. And even as early darkness settled round him, hours later, in Halifaxand while he was waiting to learn where hed roost till U.S. airports opened againhe was still a calm man. By then hed guessed that the small painting hed brought from Paris, cushioned in socks and T-shirts in his suitcase, was the cause of his peace; but he couldnt know why. That understanding, and the help it would bring him, was weeks away.

With all the diverted flights, every hotel was filled before his plane touched the runway; so Mabry was seated in the living room of the Wilkins family, whod offered him a tidy room, before he learned from their television that no private citizens were being allowed anywhere near his part of lower Manhattan. And after a welcome Irish-stew dinner, with healthy lashings of good rye whiskey, his eerily quiet hosts left Mabry alone in the kitchen to try once more to reach his daughter. After six tries he managed to speak with her brusque roommate on the Upper West Side. Yes, Charlotte was safe but at her yoga class.