I’ve been teaching a later schedule for the past couple of years, getting into the office around noon and finishing my last class around 9:30, when it’s dark and the hallways are empty. Now I’m back to teaching at 8 a.m., meaning I get to the office by 6:30. The hallways are still empty and, except for the cleaning crew, I’m the only one around for about half an hour. It’s light when I get to work, but it won’t be by December, when the final classes meet and the year winds down.
The last semester I taught an 8 o’clock class was fall of 2001. That perfect autumn morning I remember teaching a class on Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, explaining some key points from Freud’s essay “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” and kidding about how little had changed over the last 89 years.
It wasn’t until 9:15, when I saw my husband waiting for me outside my classroom door, that I knew somehow the world had changed that morning.
I thought it had changed only for me. In an instant and practically without thought, I surmised, when I saw my husband’s face, that my elderly father had died. It was the only plausible explanation for his presence and his look. Although we teach in the same department, we rarely see each other. He never waits for me outside class; in ten years of married and professional life, I’d never seen him with such a desperate expression.
“What?” I asked.
“Somebody flew planes into the World Trade Center,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident. It’s an act of war. We have to go home.”
My father lived in the city. So did half the people in the world that we loved, including our youngest kid, my stepson who was working in midtown and living in Greenwich Village. My oldest stepson who lives in Denver was, in fact, the one who told my husband about the news, because he called to see if his brother was all right, thinking that we’d have heard. One of my best friends sister’s, a good pal in her own right, worked in the second tower and had already survived the first attack years earlier. My nephew had started three days earlier at La Guardia, the high school for performing arts, traveling in on his own from Brooklyn to Manhattan. My brother’s family had also just welcomed an exchange student from Germany—what could that poor girl’s mother be thinking? My three best girlfriends in the world lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island with their children, their families.
Michael and I sat in the living room with the television on, staring at it like it was an oracle, a god who would tell us our fate. When I tried to dial any New York exchange, all I got was an automated voice telling me there was an emergency—as I remember it, although my notes doesn’t show it—the recording said there was a “hurricane” in the area and my call could not go through. Finally, and bringing with them unspeakable relief, calls came to us: one by one, everybody checked in. “I’m here, I’m okay, I gotta go, love you.” The only remaining voice I hadn’t heard belonged to of my best friends from college, John Bussey, an editor at The Wall Street Journal, who had an office in the Dow Jones building.
But we heard Bussey’s voice as we flipped TV stations. He was reporting for CNBC, still in his building. He would write about it the next day and win a Pulitzer. He was one of the last ones out and he almost didn’t make it. He was doing his job and then the firefighters insisted on doing theirs and got him the hell out.
And out into hell. Because I guess that’s what it was there, then.
We sat in front of the television with our hands over our mouths—like the illustration for a child’s fable of “speak no evil”—not because we were silencing ourselves but because we were watching the impossible and dared not put our hands over our eyes.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be teaching Sons and Lovers to an 8 a.m. class again. I’ll be getting to school early, on what is meant to be a perfect fall morning, and I’ll probably mention Freud. But I won’t joke about the world not changing in 96 years. And even as the sun pours in the window, I’ll know that the dark can shroud it, without warning, and without regret.
