Through the Children's Gate (20 page)

We had two parties for the two children; one on September
io
, for Luke, and one on September
n
, for Olivia. The one on the tenth was better. Luke has now read Harry Potter, so we had a Harry Potter party. We had been planning for it all summer.

“Are there any wizards in
Harry Potter?”
Martha, a
Potter
non-reader, asked innocently. Luke and I paused in wonder and then broke up in cruel guffaws. “Are there wizards in
Harry Potter!”
we said.

It had been a wonderful summer, the best. There were fireflies in the air and black seals in the ocean water. The fireflies had been out in force near the park all summer long. If you took a walk up Fifth Avenue alongside the park, they were everywhere: floating in and out of the twilight along the cobbled sidewalk near the park, resting invisibly among the twigs in the gutters, hovering around the doormen at epaulet level. They were out elsewhere, too, of course: Everywhere in
and around Central Park was dense with them. But there was something piquant about their presence on Fifth. They were the only creatures living there who have not had to seek approval first. They were this year's Razor scooter, the thing that every child wants. Luke set off for Fifth Avenue in the Nineties one night, jar in hand—actually, it was a plastic receptacle that had held take-out chicken vindaloo the night before—and stalked his prey. (It was not very good sport, since fireflies are almost ridiculously easy to catch: You can pluck them out of the air gently with your hand and hold them there.) The summer's fireflies glowed green, and only when they wanted to. The green was a strange X-Men kind of green, the color of the aureole that comicbook artists used to draw to suggest mutancy, radioactivity—the chartreuse glow that engulfed Bruce Banner as he became the Incredible Hulk. The folk explanation for the abundance of fireflies was that they were here because the mosquitoes were not. Last summer's West Nile spraying, the legend goes, had eliminated the bloodsuckers and left a niche for the fireflies. Last summer's bug was the whine in the ear of an imperial city, reminding us how vulnerable we are. This summer's was a consolation, and all the things we would still like to be: sexy yet reticent, and bringing its own gilding to a drier season.

A
nd then, on our two weeks by the sea, there were seals—real honest-to-goodness big black harbor seals that would come within ten or fifteen feet of the shore. They would just sit there and watch you, mustachioed and skeptical, looking like the uncles in turn-of-the-last-century photographs. You almost expected them to be wearing bathing costumes, like in a Chaplin film: striped suits with long pant legs and bare arms.

We took pictures of our family and our friends all summer, and planned the Harry Potter party. I would play—I was drafted into playing—Dumbledore, the head of Hogwarts, and I'd do a little magic show. I have my doubts about Dumbledore. Although he is relentlessly good and wise, he seems strangely lax in his administration. He allows the Slytherin house nearly free reign in Evil; tolerates the malicious Professor Snape; and generally intervenes only at the
very last possible second when Harry is facing a hippogriff or a basilisk or the all-evil Voldemort. I am instinctively a religious conservative: I want God, Dumbledore, just to take care of it, to intervene before the evil takes place. But he can't, or won't.

The party was fine. The kids played pin the snitch on the Quidditch broom, and pass the broomstick, and lots of other games, and there was a green Ridgeback dragon piñata. I failed rather grandly as Dumbledore, doing magic, sweating through the artificial robe and unbelievably scratchy white beard. The kids all knew how the tricks were done and let me know it—not aggressively, but sore with boredom. Sorry, Luke's Dad, I've seen that one. I felt a little exasperated with New York children, their knowingness and their knowing too much too soon—their lacking, at times, the sensitivity that goes with being a little fearful of the world, that look you see in French kids’ eyes that reflects their knowledge that the world is a difficult and demanding place.

We went to bed thinking,
God, this two-birthday business is a marathon.

O
livia slept through the whole thing, taking her morning nap. We stumbled out onto the street with half a crazy thought of laying in provisions. I ran into David Del Guiso, a friend in wordless shock who happened to be carrying a big brown paper package, which I knew was the framed version of a French etching of a white woman stretched out on a blanket in the forest of Fontainebleu, her back turned. I had bought it for Martha one Christmas. He had framed it for us, and now he handed it to me, and, perplexed and cheerless and robotic, we hung it up. It looked wonderful; she looked wonderful. Then I walked downtown. The pile of presents stood on the table. Later, we got back the summer snapshots and found that there was something wrong with the camera; all of them, all, had a black band cutting the picture in three, two thirds cheer and then a marked black stripe cutting off the image of good times. Everyone forgot about the fireflies.

* * *

E
arly Thursday morning, a friend brought me into the Emergency Operations Center, which had been set up on Fifty-fourth Street, right by the river. The intended command center had been, with an irony that was almost unbearable, in 7 World Trade Center and had been destroyed. People who had seen it before said that it was very fine, with light-up maps and signals that told you the condition of every traffic light in the five boroughs. The city people had been given two days to create a new center from scratch.

They have been mapping every day, the mapmaker tells me, flying over the site, taking pictures, and then translating them into schematics. “It's a very dynamic site,” he says drily. It is hard to give a sense of how virtuous they seem. These are the city men who live in a world where it is always 1961. Every morning they send out an aerial camera to see exactly how the destruction lies and what lies beneath. They treat it as a challenge in mapping. Only they know the precise, impossibly intricate pattern of cables and pipes and sewers and tunnels and lines. They don't stop; they don't grieve or mourn or melodramatize. They just work.

These, of course, are the bureaucrats, the deadwood employees of a socialized state for whom everyone had contempt, and who were being made obsolete, we were told, obsolete by the forces of the New Economy. Now, as that world cowers, or at least is paralyzed, it is the City Men, of all improbable people, who come to the rescue. The infrastructure of New York has turned out to be solid and resourceful, which one would have guessed if one had spent time with the map-makers in the first place. The firemen first, and then the policemen—but it was the mapmakers and the engineers and all of the anonymous bureaucrats in loosened ties and white shirts and gray flannels, the women in suits, who held us together and stitched up the wounds when everything was coming apart. Alan says to me, “I never want to meet another guy who talks about deadwood in the bloated city bureaucracy,” as he looks out over the vast, hastily assembled, room full of energy. The public had come to the rescue of the private and, to its credit, did not jeer at the private's incapacities or impotence or weakness, as the private had so often done to the public.

Later that day, I bump into F.A., the Arabist, and we have a talk about What Is to Be Done. I ask him if there is anything we can do about madmen who worship psychopathic gods. And he says something obvious but interesting: that there's nothing to be done about the core, the real nuts, but they exist, as human beings must, within concentric circles of culture: an immediate circle of murder-minded sympathizers and financiers; a circle just outside that of sympathizers who would not do such things themselves but will not stop them from happening; a circle beyond that of people who choose not to know what is being done but sympathize with the radical purpose; a circle beyond that one of the fearful and even sentimentally sympathetic—on and on, each circle of culture outside the actual nucleus of evil a little larger and a little less regular in its orbit than the one before, and therefore able to be dried up, reduced, set loose. Attack and persuade the outer circles of culture to abandon the inner circles, and eventually, the core will be all alone, isolated and futile.

It occurred to me, going home—taxicab responses, the New York version of the
esprit d'escalier
—that the city men, the firemen and policemen and city workers, live in concentric circles of culture, too. The simple, unimaginable bravery—going up the stairs toward the fire while everyone else was going down, away—was possible only because of the other firemen, who could not be let down, and then the brothers and fathers and sisters who shared their job and expected them to do this and would have been let down if they hadn't, and then the still wider circle of New York working-class culture, with its odd combination of skepticism and solidarity, on and on, circles saying, in this case,
Yeah, we do this.
It was a moment of self-definition: a true hero doesn't
want
to be one, he just is one. Their culture turned out to be far stronger than anyone would have known or guessed.

A
ll the little rituals of New York are enacted more mindfully now: from the breakfast special in a coffee shop to pizza on Saturday night to the way people never know how to pay when they get on a bus to the way they pull out tables in their living rooms to dine. I've always
liked Howells's comparison of New York and Venice but thought it a sport, a conceit. Now it seems suddenly real: It's amazing, this city as dense as that city is wet, and you can imagine it engulfed by water.

We try to control the uncontrollable through small acts of organization and domestic continuity. We have dinner every Saturday night with friends, the M's, as reliably as any family might have had dinner in Winesburg, Ohio, a standing date for a covered-dish supper. All across the city one hears about such retreats, though one also hears, enviously, that among the preparental group, it takes the form of passionate, unimpeded coupling, “terror sex,” sex made more exciting by fear. The child-laden instead have terror dining. Perhaps there is a lucky couple somewhere having both, terror sex with terror dining afterward; we make do, as our class cohort always has, with food alone.

But what do you tell the children, what do you do with the children, what do you do
for
them? Do you level with them, protect them, or engage them? Our dear Deb K. decided to act. She took Luke's friend Jacob to Pakistan to deliver in person the money that their class had collected on behalf of Afghan refugee children. Admirable courage and proper aplomb. But we refused to send Luke along—Martha won't let him cross the street alone, much less send him halfway around the world on a mission of emergency relief. And there are parents who want …
nothing,
no news, no fright, only insulation and postponement. There was a prayer meeting, though not called so, in the church around the corner, where the firemen paraded down to a standing ovation from the children and the parents. The firemen looked embarrassed, but the children seemed glad to have someone to applaud.

In the end, the children figure it out for themselves. They find their own models and formulate their own hypotheses, theories of the immediate world that might explain the larger and perplexing one outside. They are mindful but not careworn. After the towers fell, for instance, Luke became absorbed in playing chess, and then he became a Yankees fan, and I watched him use both these things, in different ways, to steady himself, to seek and grope and understand, and even to steady us.

How much he grasped, how much he knew, I couldn't be sure. Did he play chess in “reaction”? I don't know. He is a seven-year-old boy
in a school where chess has a large, perhaps overlarge, place; but I do know that he was frightened, a little, and was glad to have a game, to have anything, that he could control. We had, in the end, tried, as every parent did, to soft-pedal the disaster without sweet-talking it; to let him know what had happened without letting him see too clearly the unthinkable abyss of malice and nihilistic hatred that could produce it; to let him know that something terrible had happened in the city without making him think that something terrifying had permanently entered his world. We tried to conceal from him our fears, so different from our anxieties, which, like any child, he has long ago learned to notice and discount. (Children don't mind if their parents are worried; they expect it—parents are there to worry. But they notice at once if their parents are afraid, for that is what parents are never to be.)

Luke looks soberly at us, as all children do now, in part for reassurance: “Like, if there's a war, they have no chance, right? Our army is much bigger than their army?” “Well, they don't really have an army,” the father begins, before recalling that what is wanted here is reassurance, not a page on asymmetrical warfare from Foreign Affairs. Dr. Spock, not Tom Friedman.

So: “Whatever happens, it will all happen far away from here.” “How do you know?” “Well, because we're going over there to try and get the bad guys.” “Why are we going over there?” “Because that's where they bad guys are.” “Well, didn't the bad guys come here?” Well, they did. But the father says only, “We're going to go over there and stop them from being dangerous.” “You mean they'll have the war
there?”
“Yeah. I mean, obviously.” “Oh,” he says, greatly relieved, “I thought it was, like, they would
choose
where to have the war.”

And I realize that he knows both far more than I imagine and far less than I realize. He thinks it is a tournament, like a baseball play-off, home and home series. (And, terrifying fact, this may not be so far from the terrible truth; it
is
home and away games.) As he presses the questions, harder and harder, the father is left, finally, with the one-size-fits-all parental explanation: “Don't worry. I know I'm right about this. You just have to trust me.”