Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
something we recognize, something that allows us to go on with our lives without feeling
entirely inconsequential?
It seems to me that what terrorists stole from even the most fortunate of New Yorkers
on Tuesday may not have been our lives but fragments of them—whole unrecoverable
days, an unspecified number of them in which we simply believe we don't matter.
What can we do in the meantime to pretend otherwise? Frankly, writing this essay
was all I could think of.
September 11 was a Tuesday. On Thursday, September 13, my father signed the lease for
an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It occurred to me to bring this to the
attention of Mayor Giuliani—
Here's a citizen who believes in the future of our city!
—but I
didn't.
He returned to Atlanta for a couple of weeks—my dad, not the mayor. He sold his car,
giving up driving for good, thankfully, and packed up the house and Coco, the delicate,
feminine, dignified, ageless yellow cat I would later inherit and nickname Brooke Astor.
He and Coco were in their new digs by the middle of October.
Just about the first thing we did together was visit Ground Zero, where the cleanup
was, of course, still in progress, and the notices of missing people remained posted every-
where. We didn't say much as we walked around; it's remarkable the sobering effect of
rubble. Afterward I took him to the theater district in midtown for a comforting lunch,
and we had chicken soup and latkes in the coffee shop of the Edison Hotel. I guess I was
trying to show him that my New York could be his New York, too, that after his wife
had died and after the city had been assaulted, this was still a place for him. I don't deny
feeling guilty for my part in our estrangement.
At lunch he told me something I hadn't known about him, that he'd always felt in-
timidated in Manhattan, that as a child growing up in the Bronx he'd viewed Manhattan
as a place the Bronx and its inhabitants revolved around. The sense that he didn't be-
long here, that he wasn't important enough, never left him, he said. He had been thrilled
when I first moved to the Upper West Side; it was no small matter of pride, he said, that
his son had felt worthy where he had not.
When I protested that he'd worked in Manhattan for twenty-five years, he shrugged.
Every morning he walked from the bus terminal to his oice—irst in the old McGraw-
Hill Building near the Lincoln Tunnel and later the new one on Sixth Avenue—and
every evening walked back again. He knew a few restaurants in the neighborhood where
he'd gone for a business lunch occasionally—“There was a French place you took me to
once when I came to your office,” I said, nodding—but he didn't even know if they were
still there.
