We were speeding south on the New Jersey Turnpike, and it was a sunny day in early June 2004. McAdams, then the director of the New York Audubon Society, had invited my companion, Alexis Rockman, and me to join him, and an ornithologist, Paul Kurlinger, on a survey of black crown night herons at an 80-acre refuge known as Prall’s Island.  

One of three islands wedged into the slender estuary known as Arthur Kill, which winds between western New Jersey and the eastern shore of Staten Island, Prall’s Island had once been a thriving bird sanctuary, boasting healthy populations of nesting egrets and herons. But then a spill in 1990 leaked 567,000 gallons of heating oil into the estuary. With their food supply contaminated, an estimated 700 wading birds had died. Since then, according to McAdams, nesting activity along Arthur Kill had been, at best, erratic.

McAdams gave his name at the security booth of a Conoco Philips-Bayway refinery in Linden, before introducing us to a heavyset communications coordinator, who ushered us down to a dock crowded with towering oil storage tanks.

It struck me as odd that we were embarking on a birding expedition from the headquarters of an oil refinery, especially since the refinery’s previous owner, Exxon, had been responsible for the calamitous 1990 spill. But when I asked McAdams about this, he brushed me off. Of the Conoco folks, he said, “They may be the bad guys, but they’ve been very nice to us. And they always let us use their boat.”

The ride across the Kill usually took ten minutes, but when Conoco’s captain suggested a tour of Prall’s periphery, we were happy to oblige. The Kill was calm, albeit filthy. While McAdams and Kurlinger discussed their plans for counting nests, Alexis, a painter, enthused about our first-hand encounter with what he called “toxic real estate.” Spotting a motorboat with a NYC Department of Parks and Recreation logo, McAdams explained that Prall’s belonged to the parks department, but a 30-year lease gave the Audubon limited access in the name of science and education.

Prall’s Island was originally called Dongan’s Island, after a New York Governor Thomas Dongan, who took office in 1688. Toward the mid-1700’s the island, a former center for cultivating feed for livestock, was renamed Prall’s, in reference either to its former Dutch-born owner, or a prominent Staten Island farmer, according to the Parks’ website. When business in New York harbor boomed more than a century later, Arthur Kills became an industrial hub with more shipping traffic than the Panama Canal. Prall’s Island, by contrast, slipped into neglect.

“What was amazing about Prall’s Island was that so many birds found shelter in the middle of these very, very active waterways,” said McAdams. “But everyone was so busy working that no one paid much attention.”

Proposed for a waste processing plant in 1916, Prall’s briefly assumed center stage in a political battle between the plant’s developer and Staten Island’s residents, according to an excellent book, “The Other Islands of New York City,” by Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller. Eventually a waste processing plant was proposed elsewhere, and apart from the two World Wars, when Prall’s provided anchor for occasional military ships, it saw little human activity.

In its relative obscurity it become a haven for wading birds until the 1960’s, when the waters of the surrounding Kill became so polluted that, according to Seitz and Miller, the fish and marine life providing the waders’ nourishment could no longer survive.

The birds proved resilient. Shortly after the passing of the Clean Air act in 1972, said McAdams, wildlife conservationists once again began to see birds building nests there. In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrating birds were using Prall’s and its neighboring islands as a seasonal sanctuary. Among the many birds that once called Prall’s island home are the glossy ibis, the snowy egret, the cattle egret, the great egret, the little blue heron, and the black-crowned night heron. Although none of these birds are endangered, this rookery in New York Harbor is considered the most important in the state, according to Seitz and Miller,

As our boat nudged into soggy marshland surrounding this former idyll, Alexis and I jumped off, and immediately sank into shin-deep mud. From the bow of our boat, the captain called, “You guys all set?”

McAdams arranged a time for our pick up. Then the motorboat pulled away, leaving us in its mucky wake.

Taking the lead in our march toward solid ground, Alexis exclaimed, “I love the contradiction of a bird sanctuary in a toxic waste dump,” his gleeful disgust in direct proportion to the distance his feet sank in the dark brown ooze.

“It’s the dirtiest part of New York,” agreed McAdams, gamely, “but that’s kind of a good thing, because there’re no people.”

Due to limited access on Prall’s Island, no trails had ever been cleared there. Alexis climbed up the riverbank into a thicket. Then he reached for my hand. That was when I noticed, to my terrified astonishment, that the thicket was completely overrun with poison ivy.

“I think I mentioned, they have a little poison ivy problem,” said McAdams.

Indeed, earlier that morning we had dressed, according to McAdams’ instructions, in long pants, long sleeved windbreakers, and hiking boots. But somehow in my excitement over what had sounded like an exotic excursion in the out-of-doors, I had ignored the possible degree of the infestation. Poison ivy snaked through every plant in sight, it’s shiny red leaves dangling from every raspberry bush, bramble, tree, and nettle. In order to count nests, McAdams, Kurlinger, Alexis and I would each have to find our own path through the dense underbrush.

The others didn't appear particularly worried, but glancing up and down the shoreline, I felt suddenly lightheaded, all of the alarm bells in my body signaling danger. A horror movie starring poison ivy, as a human predator would probably look like this, I thought. I considered my choices. Waiting offshore in the mud, and having McAdams send the boat around to fetch me when the time came, sounded pathetic and boring. Also, in the company of such enthusiastic naturalists—all men—I was pretty loath to play the role of helpless damsel. So I followed Alexis inland, my body physically catapulting forward, as my mind drifted up to the treetops. From up there, at least, I was relieved to note, the poison ivy looked much smaller.

Prall’s Island is so narrow that, depending on the density of the trees and underbrush, you can sometimes see across to both coasts from the center. Kurlinger suggested that we divide into two groups, the better to maximize our total nest sightings. Sending McAdams and Alexis in one direction, he suggested that I follow him. When Alexis and McAdams disappeared into the underbrush, my heart fluttered erratically. In the canopy of leaves above, birds fluttered and squawked. Kurlinger rattled off their names—woodcocks, egrets, starlings. Whenever he spotted a heron nest I scribbled a notch in my notebook, in the hope of distracting myself. We had counted our 11th nest when it occurred to me that my pen was probably contaminated, and my notebook. The underbrush thickened. “They should make trails,” muttered Kurlinger, yanking apart the young shoots of a gray birch tree, and shimmying in between. Several steps ahead, he called out “PI at eye level.”

PI? I’d never heard it called that, but immediately I saw it, snaking like a cobra from above. With less than a foot of space to edge through sideways, I wondered, did the PI touch my hair? The underbrush was thick with nettles, and thorny vines that kept scratching my legs through my pants. If any of these branches had brushed against poison ivy, I realized, the nasty oils were probably now inside my clothes.

“How allergic are you to this stuff?” Kurlinger asked, as if my terror was finally dawning on him.

“Very.”

“Ever had any shots?”

I nodded. One winter, I told him, long before leaves were even visible, I was walking in the woods, fully dressed in a turtleneck, long pants, winter coat and boots. I caught the worst case of the poison ivy of my life. Having somehow penetrated my layers of winter gear, the nasty little plant had managed to cover my face, neck, chest, and back with a nasty rash of bumps and pustules. The rash spread under my arms, behind my knees, even into my belly button. After a month of itchy hell, it began spreading into my eyes, my mouth, and down my throat. Finally, a doctor agreed to give me a shot of some steroid considered too unhealthy for routine use.

Kurlinger had been listening intently, and for a while all I heard was the snapping of branches and the dull thud of our boots in the leaf litter.

“I see,” he said, finally. “Well. Huh.” Then he told me about someone descended from the original owners—the Dongans—whom he’d invited to Prall’s a week before. Apparently this guy Dongan hadn’t even known how to ID poison ivy. “I guess he’s okay, since he hasn’t called,” mused Kurlinger. “Then again, he doesn’t have my number.”

On several occasions we could hear Alexis and McAdams thrashing toward us. Each time, Kurlinger would instruct them to keep their distance. His motive for dividing us up, he said, had been somewhat selfish. He was hoping they would flush all of the birds in our direction. “You’re a quiet walker,” he told me.

On the forest floor, Kurlinger spotted remnants of a heron’s egg, which he said could have fallen from a nest after hatching. “Of course, it also could have been eaten by a raccoon,” he added. Further along, another shattered eggshell looked even more promising. I imagined a heron chick learning to fly. Kurlinger turned the shell over in his fingers. He believed the chick had hatched, he said. But fledglings also presented easy targets for predators.

There were fewer nesting trees than there had been, he observed, but there were also more nests than he’d seen nearly a decade. Many of the nests were old, but several were also newer, suggesting that our black crown night herons were, at least, attempting a comeback.

At a small clearing, I noticed off to our left, that the sun was much brighter. “Is the coastline through there?” I asked.

It was.

Was there poison ivy along the coastline? I wanted to know.

“Not so much,” he said. “You may have to cross a barrier of the stuff to get there. But on the other side you should be okay.”

I left Kurlinger to his nest counting and made my way toward the light.

“I’ll call out to you if I find any nests,” said Kurlinger.

Of the countless times I’d come into contact with poison ivy, I’d often managed to prevent an outbreak, by washing my hands with soap and warm water. On Prall’s Island, unfortunately, I had no soap, and the fetid water didn’t exactly encourage hand washing. A scallop-edged yellow foam ran along the length of the shoreline. Clusters of small the rocks were covered with black slime. I saw Kurlinger through the trees, more or less alongside of me.

“You think it’s alright to wash your hands in this?”

“If I were you I would. Just don’t lick your fingers after.”

I bent down and dipped my hands in the toxic filth. The only other exposed part of my body--my face--I didn’t dare let near the water.

Kurlinger disappeared toward the island’s interior, and I picked my way quietly past the garbage that littered the shoreline--empty beer cans and plastic bags. Someone called to me from the underbrush—a man, Mike who had been dropped with several others at the far end of the island. My crew had been looking for him. He asked if I wanted to join them. I said thank you, but no.

Eventually Kurlinger called to me. “Just keep heading north,” he said. I didn’t have a compass. I continued in the same direction. The boat with the Parks Department logo droned past at a distance. Not far from the tip of the island, a long wooden beam had washed up along the shore. I decided to take a break and sit down. An old apothecary bottle laid half buried in slime. I fished it out with a stick.

Eventually I heard the sound of a motor. Moments later, our boat captain waved. Alexis, McAdams, and Kurlinger were all clad in bright orange life jackets. All told, they’d counted a minimum of fifteen and a maximum of thirty nests.

Back at the oil refinery, we sat parked in a steamy van, while a Conoco official went to make a phone call. The first sign of sweat activated what I immediately recognized as my body’s response to poison ivy. My skin began to tingle. The tingling began to itch.

I needed to scrub my entire body with warm soapy water as soon as possible. But we weren’t authorized to leave until all of our permits and papers were approved and signed off on. Kurlinger said he needed to go talk to someone. My heart raced. To kill time while we waited, our driver told us a story.

In December 1989, he said, months after the disastrous spill in Valdez, Alaska, Exxon wanted to assess what the response would be if there were a spill along Arthur Kill. “All of us contractors--we had the same response,” said the driver, who declined to give his name on account of his current employment with Conoco. “We said we’d come in with one boat, maybe two, and a couple of men.”

After deeming these responses insufficient, he said, Exxon acknowledged that they were not adequately prepared for a disaster in Arthur Kill. They planned to train eight people a week for a period of about two years, he said. By the end of the first week, he admitted, “I’d learned a few things.” But then, two weeks later, on January 2nd, a spill was reported. So soon after New Years, he said, it was difficult to find contractors willing to work, making response even slower than it would have been otherwise. “I was one of the people who showed up,” he said.

The air was cooler than the water, he said, so there was fog everywhere, making visibility extremely low. When he finally saw the water, he said, he was shocked to discover that it was completely green. He described blindly motoring through the water, trying to locate the source of the leak. Then he spotted a geyser, rising like a fountain about three feet above the water. He said he and his men began skimming. “We skimmed and skimmed for days,” he said, in accordance with Exxon’s recent—but limited--training. “Turns out, oil has a pretty thin surface,” he said. “We skimmed about 6 inches deep,” then the water looked clear.

When Kurlinger returned, the driver escorted us to our car. I ran into a bathroom reserved for truckers, and scoured my face and hands with warm water and apricot scrub. The following day, after repeated showers and scrubbing, a dermatologist administered a steroid shot in my arm, in addition to prescribing a topical foam and a pill, a powerful antihistamine the better to stave off a reaction.

Now six years later, it occurs to me that my skin fared much better than the nesting herons on Prall’s island. In the spring of 2007, an infestation of Asian longhorn beetles forced Parks to reduce nesting trees on the island to their stem, according to a 2009 Audubon survey. McAdams is now an associate director of philanthropy at the New York Conservancy, because, as he said recently, “I learned at the Audubon that money was a big limiting factor. According to Susan Elbin, an ornithologist, and currently the NYC Audubon’s director of conservation, some 30,000 gray birch trees were chopped down. “Then they chipped them. Then they burned the chips,” she said.

As if this were not trouble enough, the island has since become rife with nest predators such as red-tailed hawks and raccoons she said. Although the future still holds promise for herons seeking to raise their young on Prall’s Island, their projected presence depends on several key factors, according to Ms. Elbin. “One big question mark is what will happen when the Fresh Kills Park gets up and running,” she said, referring to the 2,200 urban park scheduled to open in the next year down the channel from Arthur Kill. Predators present a second problem. “But even if you get them off,” she said, “there’s still oil embedded in the sediment, which needs to get covered over.”

Yet Susan remains optimistic. “At one time the islands in Arthur Kill were among the most productive in the whole harbor heron system,” she said. “We have great hopes of attracting birds back. We want Prall’s Island once again to be a thriving colony.”

Her words reminded me of a particular moment in my 2004 visit that I will always cherish. I had just rinsed the mud from the apothecary bottle I’d found in the Kills, when I accidentally touched my pants. Certain the fabric was contaminated with poison ivy, I waded in a little deeper into the mud to rinse my hands.

That was when I saw the birds—hundreds of them—egrets, ibises, and herons. McAdams, Alexis and Kurlinger—or maybe Mike’s group—had flushed them out. Gazing up at the sky, I watched the birds cross paths with airplanes taking off from Newark Airport. I’d gotten lost. I didn’t care. For that moment, at least, all the risks I’d taken were worth it.

Dorothy Spears is a New York-based writer and arts journalist. Her anthology, Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying, was published last year by Open City Books.

Even after we all were married, with children of our own, my siblings and I would celebrate Mother’s Day in Greenwich. If the weather was good, we ate sandwiches with our mother and father on the porch, watching our children run together, and split apart, calling, screeching, and laughing as we once had, all around the big yard. If it was rainy the adults ate inside, where the many bay windows framed one child slipping in mud, others scrambling up the front rocks, and still others sitting in contemplative circles by the old stone well. Sometimes, watching, I would rush out to join my sons Alex and Ferran under my favorite tree, a huge copper beech, whose trunk looked like the leg of a giant elephant.

Then, within the space of a few years, my mother died, my husband and I separated, my father remarried, and he and his new wife sold the house where my siblings and I–and all of our children—had celebrated Mother’s Day for most of our lives.

Without a place for all of us to descend, my siblings and I drifted apart. Mother’s Day became a source of solitary worry more than group celebration. For several years I tried to remind myself that now I was a free woman. I could re-invent Mother’s Day according to my own desires and wishes. This proved extremely difficult. Then more recently, any freedom I may eventually have relished stood at odds with the entertainment suggestions (faced a cultural showdown with) of my 14-year old son, Alex, whose idea of a fun Mother’s Day activity was to go see the movie “300.”

If it’s sunny, I told Alex, I want to go to the Brooklyn Botanic gardens. If it rains, I said, I might agree to a movie—but not “300”.

“How about ‘The Invisible?’” was Alex’s come back. He was sitting at his desk, Googling shantytowns in Sao Paolo.

“Yeah, ‘The Invisible!’” said Ferran, 11, who was feeding his bearded dragons their daily portion of live crickets.

My boyfriend, Alexis, slid his forefinger repeatedly across his neck, his eyes wide, as if to say,

“Trust me.” “It’s supposed to be sunny,” he said.

On Mother’s Day morning, my sons gave me presents from our neighborhood independent bookstore. I appreciated their altruism. Whenever I suggested going there, they moaned and forced a follow-up purchase of the latest “Worst Case Scenario” at a nearby chain bookstore.

“You guys are so thoughtful,” I said, laughing, turning over a book that had reminded Ferran of the book I was reading–about child soldiers in Africa—and a recently re-issued book about England during World War II, a pet subject of Alex’s.

“Did you get Mom a present?” Ferran pointedly asked my boyfriend.

“I’m about to,” said Alexis, who returned, ten minutes, later with the fixings for huevos rancheros and a bouquet of pink lilies.

Since the weather was sunny and warm, we decided to eat in our garden. Ferran was connecting his iPod to speakers, when I walked up the steps. “Bang bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer came down on her head,” sang the Beatles. “Papa used to sing this to Mimi,” I told Ferran. Papa and Mimi were what the boys’ called my parents. “Mimi’s name was Joan,” I said, “like the girl in that song.”

“Did Papa hit Mimi with a hammer?” Ferran asked.

“He pretended to,” I chuckled, explaining how we used to spend Saturday nights dancing to the Beatles in the living room. During ‘Octopus’ Garden,’ I told him, my brothers and I would compete for a twirl from one of my mother’s wriggling octopus tentacles.

“I’ll dance with you.” Ferran looked expectant.

“When I finish my eggs,” I said, suddenly alarmed by the prospect of wriggling my pretend tentacles in broad daylight, in front of all our neighbors.

Ferran and I danced. But when the benign gurglings of an octopus had gone the way of the monotonous and more urgent, “I want you,” we both felt self-conscious. So we dispersed inside to find Alex at his desk, Googling skyscrapers in Buenos Aires.

Half an hour later, on a Number 2 train bound for Brooklyn, I began to feel a flicker of easy well-being that had so eluded me on recent Mother’s Days. The train was passing its first Brooklyn exit: Clark Street, when it occurred to me: I had lived in Brooklyn Heights until I was five. Then, seeking a bigger yard for us to play in, and free schools, my parents had moved my brothers and me to Greenwich (my sister was not yet born).

“Maybe after the Botanical Gardens,” I suggested, “we could wander around Brooklyn Heights.”

There were assorted nods and shrugs. The train was approaching Borough Hall, which was right near Livingston Street. “We could visit the house, where we my brothers and I lived when my parents were first married,” I suggested. Again Alexis and the boys nodded. But this time, within seconds, the four of us had jumped the train and were headed out to Court Street.

My former brick home on Livingston Street was now painted yellow, with cheerful flowerboxes out front. Frail sticks of wood supported the rippled glass windowpanes. “I bet they’re the same windows I used to look out of,” I said. “They look old, don’t they?”

“They look old all right,” said Alex.

A half-flight below us, what used to be a shiny red door was now an even shinier black.

Alex was skeptical that a stranger would let us in, but I felt pretty confident. We descended the steps and rang the bottom buzzer. There was no answer. We rang again.

“You mean to tell me,” said Alex, “that if someone came to our house, and said they used to live there, you’d let them in?”

“I absolutely would”, I said.

Alex cocked his head, as if deciding which issue of “Worst Case Scenario” would most likely address this.

We tried the second buzzer, and the third.

My pink rubber ball was stolen, I told the boys, one time when I’d left it out on the sidewalk during dinner.

“Someone stole your ball?” said Alex, indignantly.

“Well, if she left it on the street,” said Ferran.

This was in the mid-to-late 1960’s, I explained, when the neighborhood surrounding Livingston Street was gentrifying.

“Then the day before we moved, we bought a station wagon, and parked it on the street. The next morning, when Papa went to load it, someone had spray painted it white.

Nobody was home at 44, but through the basement window next door, a woman frowned. I didn’t ask her to help us.

We were approaching the corner of Livingston and Henry, when an old man rushed passed us carrying a bouquet of purple lilacs. Something about the flowers in his arms, and the determined tilt of his body, suggested he was nearing home. He descended steps to the house next door to my old house. His key was turning in the door, when I rushed up to him and said, “Excuse me.” I breathlessly explained who we were and asked if we could look out back at our old garden.

The old man hesitated. “My wife is in a wheelchair,” he said. He would need to ask her permission. Watching him slowly disappear inside, I felt almost certain he’d never return. I was contemplating a reprieve to the less fraught botanical gardens, when he old man re-emerged, waving us in.

His wife was the woman we’d seen frowning. She nodded perfunctorily, when the old man introduced us. A TV hung above the window. She was watching the news.

We followed the old man through his small kitchen, where the purple lilacs still laid bundled on the counter. Out in the garden, a black wrought-iron fence divided his property from what had once been mine. I used to squeeze through the fence to visit a neighbor my age. Now, the fence had a gate.

“You can go on in,” said the old man, who looked rather jaunty, in his beret. “The owner’s my friend. She won’t mind.”

The yard was much smaller than I remembered. A tall tree to the side, looked like the one we’d draped with a tire swing. A carefully tended English garden had replaced our modest rectangle of lawn.

When I told the man this, he removed his beret, and began scratching his balding head. “I used to have grass, too,” he said. “We all did. But it was such a pain to keep up.”

“The flowers are beautiful.”

“She works very hard at it.”

The steps that led down to a back patio were paved with bluestone.

“I ate yodels on those steps,” I told the boys. “I wore a nurse’s costume on my birthday. There are pictures at home. I’ll show them to you.”

“I’d like to see you in a nurse’s costume,” murmured Alexis.

I told them about the crabapple tree where dressed as pirates, my brothers and I had dug as far as we could, in hope of finding gold or China.

Alex raised his eyebrows. “That’s interesting, Mom,” he said, in a deadpan voice.

Ferran nodded, stroking an imaginary goatee. “Yeah, uh, Mom, that’s truly fascinating.”

Alexis clapped his hand to his mouth and pointed to Ferran laughing. Then Ferran started play punching him. They both laughed and pointed at each other.

The old man smiled at Alexis, a grown man, goofing around with an eleven year old.

“Teenagers,” I said.

After wishing his wife a Happy Mother’s Day, we headed over toward the Promenade, where mothers and daughters everywhere appeared laughing and talking. Eventually we found a bench in the sun looking out over the East River. A barge moored below boasted a big outdoor swimming pool. Alex suggested we walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Neither Alex nor Ferran had ever crossed the bridge on foot. Alexis, who grew up in Manhattan, had never crossed it in this direction. My father had worked on Wall Street, so I had crossed it as a very young child, with my parents. But now I was with my new family. It seemed an important moment in history.

“Come on, Mom,” urged Alex. “It’ll be an adventure.” Directing us inland, since “bridges often start pretty far inland,” Alex led us to a footpath, and, eventually, among the low-rise buildings, we found a ramp leading to the bridge’s pedestrian walkway.

Walking against the Brooklyn-bound foot traffic, we kept dodging the rush of oncoming pedestrians. Their exodus from Manhattan reminded me of the day JFK was shot. I was still a baby, but my father, who then worked on Wall Street, once told me how, after the news came across the ticker tape, and the stock market closed early, he and his colleagues had remained at work, trying to fathom the effect of the President’s assassination on their stocks. For a while they all felt paralyzed. Then, all at once, with their shirts unbuttoned, their ties yanked loose, he and countless others had trekked across the Brooklyn Bridge, returning home to safety.

More recently, of course, on 9-11, the bridge witnessed a similar historic exodus.

Cars rushed past on both sides of us. “Look down,” Alex cried. Through the gaps in the wooden slats we saw the steely East River rushing below us. “What if one of the strips of wood broke?” he said. Then, laughing, he and Ferran dramatized this worst-case scenario, wobbling and shrieking, with flailing arms, as they pretended to fall to their deaths.

We never made it to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, but later, in a taxi, I spotted a man rushing down the street with flowers. “Mother’s Day is like Valentine’s,” I laughed. “You always see all of these men racing frantically, with flowers.”

I would always miss the yard in Greenwich, and, of course, my mother. But it was reassuring to know that, in their absence, I could enjoy a Mother’s Day, which, perhaps for the first time in my life, had begun, and ended, with me.

Dorothy Spears is a New York-based writer and arts journalist. Her anthology, Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying, will be published this June by Open City Books.

At the corner of Hudson and West 11th Street, Alex’s leg froze in mid–air. “This is exactly where my foot was,” he said, “when we heard the plane. I was stepping down, like this.”

He was referring to the first plane of last Tuesday’s attacks. I had not been with them, but the sitter, Dona, had told me afterward, how the plane had flown very low over their heads. A few seconds later, they heard the crash and saw the smoke. “I’m never going to fly again,” Alex announced. Dona and I had both shared a moment of appreciation of Alex’s typical sensitivity. At the time, they–we all–had assumed the crash was just an isolated event, an accident.

I had repeated this anecdote, along with Alex’s alarmed pronouncement umpteen times. But repeating, it turned out, was just a way to keep the horror from sinking in to a place where I really felt it.

On the other side of West 11th Street, Alex said, “This is where we heard the crash.”

Outside the Bleecker Street Park, where they play in nice weather, they’d seen the first signs of smoke. “Where?” I said, squinting backward, trying to locate the exact view.

“We can’t show you,” said Ferran, impatiently. “The World Trade Center isn’t there. The plane touched a cloud. Then it turned into smoke.”

“There are more American flags than before,” Alex observed. He glanced up at me, taking my hand. I leaned over and squeezed him.

On 8th Avenue the spire of the Empire State Building began poking out, buoyant as always.

Ferran said, “Is the Empire State Building the new tallest building?”

Children are always reminding us of how little we know. Was the Empire State Building third, after the two towers? I was slow to answer. “It may be the tallest building in Manhattan,” I said. “But there are other taller buildings in the world.”

“Mommy,” said Alex. “Who is our enemy?”

“It’s hard to say, exactly. I guess the terrorists.”

“If I killed Bin Laden,” said Ferran. “Would I be a hero?”

“I think you’d go to jail,” said Alex.

Last Wednesday, the day after the attacks, the wind shifted. The air around our house and in the Bleecker Street park looked hazy and yellow and tasted of a frightening mix of soap and metal. I called my husband Vance at his office.

“My tongue is tingling,” I said. “The fumes are coming through the air conditioner. People outside are wearing masks.”

Vance got out the car and we headed to my parents’ house in Greenwich, Connecticut. When I told my parents we were coming to stay with them, they sounded surprised. “Oh, okay,” my father said, guardedly. “I think we have enough steak.” He may have been surprised we were all coming together, since Vance and I had separated–amicably–just a few days before.

Driving North on the West Side Highway, we felt like royalty in a police state. National guards stood along the side of the road, waving us on. There were almost no cars. In the on-coming lane, for as far as we could see, was a line of dump trucks and bulldozers.

Greenwich still felt the way all of America had until a few days ago: an island unto itself. Waspy-looking ladies with meticulous hairdos still vied for parking spaces at the local supermarket. The sky was still blue, the lawns undisturbed.

Sipping one of his favorite bottles of wine by the pool that evening, my father, became concerned about his next day’s business lunch. “What if the military ships prevent fishing boats from entering New York Harbor?” he said. “The fish at the Four Seasons might not be fresh.”

“That’s true, Billy,” said my mother. “Well, we better find out. We have a reservation there next Monday.”

My father rolled his eyes. “Mom’s trying to get out of it,” he said to me. “She thinks the city’s dangerous.”

That night after dinner the phone rang. Vance’s mother had died of cancer. She’d been ill for a long time. It wasn’t a surprise. Still, it was another loss. The following morning Vance drove upstate to New Britain to help his family with funeral arrangements, while the boys and I stayed on with my parents.

My father, an investment advisor, commuted to work as usual. That evening on the porch amid chattering cicadas, my father described his lunch. “I asked about the fish,” he said. “And Julian–the maitre d’–assured me, ‘Mr. Spears,’ he said, ‘the fish at the Four Seasons is always fresh.’” My father and his client ordered the dover sole. Then Julian came back, “Mr. Spears, the dover sole is fresh, but there is a slight problem. A bomb’s been reported in the building. We’re going to have to ask you to evacuate.’

“Twenty years ago,” my father continued, “everyone would have stayed and eaten their fish. I would have stayed and eaten my fish, today, if the waiters hadn’t all vanished. And of course the cooks. Actually, it worked out well,” he added. “My dentist had an opening an hour earlier.”

What my father didn’t tell me then was that most of his trading was done through firms in the Twin Towers. That, oblivious to the destruction, he had assumed the traders–if they were alive–could still be reached at their desks. That he had actually asked his secretary to call the traders up at their old numbers. “In many ways,” he said, during a reflective moment, “It’s astonishing the number of survivors.”

My mother’s perspective on the attacks was even more detached, albeit for good reason. Now in the advanced stages of ovarian cancer, she’s taking a drug that’s only been tested on 40 humans. On Friday, only two days after Vance’s mother died of the same kind of cancer, a nurse phoned to tell my mother that, for the second time this month, her cancer cell count had doubled, leading us all to believe that the new drug wasn’t working.

“This must be hard for you,” I said to her.

“What?” she said. “Oh, oh, yes, that. Well, yes, it is. But I feel fine. I mean, really. I feel great.”

Greenwich was Greenwich. Meanwhile I couldn’t sleep. . The thunderstorm that night I mistook for Armageddon. I called Vance. We talked for an hour, maybe longer. Alex came stomping into my room. “Do you realize what time it is? he demanded. “It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. What are you doing?”

I felt like a chastened teenager. “Talking to Daddy.”

“Well could you make it sound a little softer? You’re keeping me awake.”

In the morning we laughed about it. I said, “You sounded like a little old man. You sounded like my father.”

Eating pancakes later, I told my father.

“Is that what you think?” he said. “That I’m a little old man?”

I was taking a shower, when Ferran suddenly screamed. I rushed out to find his hand stuck in the fold-out couch. I had a moment of single mother panic. Then I remembered: The last third of the couch had been up, now it was down. When I started to push it up, Ferran screamed even harder. I thought I was cutting off his fingers. I jammed my own fingers in as hard as I could, to absorb the pressure or make room for his smaller ones, or, at the very least, to see which way opened and which way closed. Luckily I was right. A surgeon friend told me later that the three surgeries he’d done on children’s hands had all been re-attaching fingers lost in fold-out couches.

Even in all its toxicity, I longed to be home in Manhattan. But this wasn’t an option–I had a funeral to go to. So I consoled myself with CNN.

“What are you doing?” my mother called down the stairs to me.

“Watching the news.”

“Oh, really?” she said, cheerfully. “What’s on?”

A teenager from Stuyvesant Highschool was being interviewed on Channel 4 News. “I thought, I’m going to die today,” said the teenager, referring to last Tuesday.

I had thought that, too.

The temperature had dropped considerably. I went to the Gap to buy the boys jackets. They wanted camouflage fleeces, but I said no.

“If you don’t buy me the army sweater,” said Ferran. “I’m going to join the army when I’m bigger.”

“By the time you’re bigger,” I answered, gamely, “you’ll probably change your mind.”

“If you don’t buy me the army sweater,” he persisted, “I’m going to go into the World Trade Center.”

I was in the front seat of the car. He and Alex were strapped in back. “Are you trying to torture me?” I said. Ferran grinned sadistically.

“Why won’t you buy them?” asked Alex.

“Because,” I said. “I don’t like thinking about little boys in the army.”

“Daddy might buy them for us,” said Ferran.

“He might.”

During lunch, my father played Simon and Garfunkel. “Music helps,” he said, quietly. I wondered at his change in tone. He said he’d also been playing Mozart’s Requiem. It was the first time he’d admitted anything was out of the ordinary. Later that afternoon, the boys rode a skateboard down the hill over rocks, catching air, while my father and I sat by the pool in strained silence.

My father got up to go work out. Then he came back. He pulled his chair very close to me. “How does Mom look to you?” he asked.

I said, “She looks okay. “Why?”

He said, “Well, her stomach’s distended.” He was shaking his head. “You know, Dorothy?” he continued, “For the first time in my life, I feel really overwhelmed. I’m worried about Mom. I have business concerns. This attack, it feels like an attack on my profession. It’s just too much.”

My father was always so strong. His vulnerability, while welcome, scared me.

“I know the feeling,” I said.

“I know you do.” He patted my hand.

I thought Vance’s and my separation probably had something to do with my father’s business concerns. He and Vance were business partners. They had just moved to a huge new office space, sunk millions of dollars into renovations, when we decided to separate. The decision was mutual. That didn’t make it easy. We’d been together twenty years. Maybe our lives, I mused, narcissistically, are a metaphor for history.

The boys were giggling in the grass, playing with little wooden gliders.

“What are you doing?” I asked, hoping for a little diversion.

“We’re playing World Trade Center,” said Ferran

“What do you mean? What’s that?”

“We throw airplanes at each other. And when they hit us we fall down.”

Vance wanted me to read at his mother’s funeral. It felt awkward to me, but I obliged him. I was raised Catholic, but I’m no longer religious.

Vance’s mother had been the long time editor and publisher of New Britain’s local newspaper. At the funeral on Monday I read to a packed church of fellow mourners. From the Book of Revelations, I read “…he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more.” (At this I started crying.) “Mourning and crying and pain” (I could no longer see the words) will be no more.” It seemed to be all about the second coming. Death and crying and mourning were no more, because we were no more. In any case, I didn’t–I couldn’t make myself–believe it.

The cemetery was on a fragrant hillside that had been lopped off on one side to make room for a six-lane highway. The burial was like something out of a Victorian-period horror movie.

Velvet-covered chairs stood in prim rows by the grave. Against a backdrop of perfect blue sky, a minister read from the Bible. I kept seeing everything from below: the blowing robes of the minister, people tossing flowers and dirt on top of me.

“I hope I don’t get put in the ground like that when I die,” said Ferran, as he clambered back into the hearse.

Alex agreed. “I think I’d rather burn in the World Trade Center.”

Finally, after the reception, we went home. Vance returned to his apartment.

Yesterday, school was closed for Rosh Hashanah. Today, as my sons and I climbed the school steps, I was struck by the change since the last time I’d been there. It was a week ago Monday, the first day of school. Everyone had been exchanging hugs, greetings, bits of news about their summers. Today no one looked sad. Parents and teachers were just passing through the doors, nodding and rushing as usual.

In the school lobby there was a miniature model of a city, our city. On one end stood a cluster of foil-covered blocks, among them two that rose taller than all the rest. “Look Mom,” said Ferran. “The World Trade Center is still here.”

Ferran marched straight into his classroom, through a group of chatting parents. One of them touched my shoulder and said, “Dorothy, where have you been?”

“We’ve had a death in the family—-”

“–Oh, I’m so sorry–”

“It was nothing–related,” I said, clumsily. “Their grandmother. She had cancer.”

Ferran was talking animatedly to his teacher. “We saw fifty soldiers,” he was saying.

“I know,” said the teacher, widening her eyes at me, as if for guidance. “The city has changed hasn’t it?”

I started to tell the teacher how yesterday Ferran and Alex had stood by the West Side Highway waving American flags and thank you signs and shaking the hands of firemen. One child had asked about a certain fireman, and when his mother said, “God took him to Heaven,” the child’s brother sighed, “God must be an octopus.”

I left Ferran at the play-dough table and went upstairs to drop off Alex.

On the way up to Alex’s class, we ran into Alex’s best friend’s mother. “I’m so sorry,” she said to me. “I heard.” Then she glanced toward Alex. “I’m so sorry about your grandma.”

“Thank you,” answered Alex, graciously.

Alex’s chair was on his desk. “Well, finally,” said his classmate, Xavier. “Where were you?”

“Connecticut.” Two days ago Alex had wanted to take a picture of his grandmother’s coffin to show his classmates. Now he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Bye, Mom,” he said.

“Bye, darling,” I kissed him. I took two steps away. Then I stopped.

“Bye, Mom,” he repeated, without looking at me.

“Bye.” I was standing near the door.

“Bye, Mom,” he said.

“Bye,” I said. “I love you.”

On the way downstairs I was all-out crying. “Hi,” I said to one mother whose kids were friends with my kids. When I passed another mother, a lingerie designer who I hardly knew, I couldn’t think what to say, so I turned my face to the wall, and kept walking.

Ferran was still at the play-dough table when I returned. “Here’s a piece of pizza,” he said, handing me something worm-like. Then he looked up at me, suspicious. “Why’s your face red?” I tried to smile. “Why does your face always look like that?” He sounded fed up. Another mother glanced over, then averted her eyes. “Are you sad?” asked Ferran, a little more kindly. “Because of the World Trade Center?” I can’t remember what I said to him. I ran to the bathroom.

Of all the hours of TV I’d watched over the last week, the thing that upset me up most–that still upsets me–was the thought of children in school first receiving news of the attacks. Children with parents who worked in the World Trade Center herded to guidance offices or in other ways singled out. Children evacuated from the schools further downtown, finding their way through smoke and rubble. How I wished when I saw the first tower dissolve into ash that my own children were beside me. How much safer I felt when I heard Vance’s key turning in the door, the boys’ familiar footfall signaling that we were finally together again, in our home.

Part of me thinks kids are much better at handling trauma than grown-ups. They just accept whatever this world–whatever we as adults–give them.

In any case, my crying among the kindergarteners, wasn’t doing anyone any good. I had to get out of the classroom. Abandoning my temporary hideout, I pulled up a chair next to Ferran’s. He was still making pizza. “Bye, sweetie,” I said. “I love you. I’ll see you later.”

I roughed up his hair. It was matted.

“Will you pick us up sometime?”

I said yes, but not today, I had work.

“Okay.” he said, agreeably. “Maybe someday. Like when the babysitter is sick.” There was a pause. “Daddy picks us up sometimes.”

My stomach tightened. He was talking about last Tuesday.

“The only time Daddy picked us up,” he continued, “was when the World Trade Center fell down. Will he pick us up again when the Empire State building falls down?”

“Something bad doesn’t have to happen,” I said, “for Daddy to come pick you up. It could be something good, too.”

“Oh,” said Ferran, “Like when Daddy comes back to live with us?”

Out on the street, I saw the lingerie designer at a distance pulling a tissue from her pocket. Maybe she had a cold. I don’t think so. Around the corner another mother from the school was crying. When she saw me, she did a double-take. It was as if, like me, she was relieved to find another mother’s face as red her own.

My ten-year-old son, Ferran, has suffered a different sort of basketball setback. Playing this past winter in a West Village league run by the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, Ferran was assigned to a team named Faicco after its sponsor, a local pork store. But Faicco’s coach, Nick, disappeared after the first game only to resurface a few weeks later in a black and white referee’s uniform. “He’d rather be a ref than our coach,” complained Ferran, who took it personally.

Faicco’s team had a lot of good players, including a boy named Adrien who scored a 3-pointer at the buzzer during the season’s final game. But with the coaches rotating each week based on whomever was around on Faicco’s game day—and Nick, the ref, snickering behind the backs of Faicco players—Faicco’s had a losing season. To make matters worse, during the one game Faicco won, Ferran forgot that after half-time, the teams switched baskets. When one of his teammates passed him the ball, Ferran scored a terrific jumpshot—for Faicco’s opponents.

Still suffering from basketball-induced disheartenment, Alexis dropped in on the cage at West 4th Street a couple of weeks ago, to glance wistfully at a game he would probably not be able to play again until August. He had come from the art gallery in Chelsea where he had a show—Alexis is an artist—and was headed for the grocery store, where he and I had scheduled a 4 o’clock shop. He was running a little late, though, so he called me from his cell phone.

When I picked up, he’d just spotted Nate Robinson playing on one of the teams. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “if I watch for five minutes.”

Mind? No sooner had I hung up the phone, than I issued a rally-cry to the kitchen: “Nate Robinson’s playing at West 4th Street!”

“Great,” said my older son Alex, who was 13, and busy drawing.

“Nate?” said Ferran, with just the kind of excitement you’d expect from a kid who loved watching Knicks games—win or lose—on TV with his mother’s boyfriend.

*

In our household, Nate Robinson, the Knicks rookie, was the silver lining on an otherwise dismal Knicks season. At a height that vacillated only between 5’4” and 5’9” depending on who you asked, he represented all that was possible if you worked hard enough and believed wholeheartedly in your dreams.

While all the sportscasters were in agreement that Nate should quit attempting to sink his crazy dunk, I, for one, was howling—at the TV, naturally—for him to continue. During the NBA All-Star Weekend Slam Dunk Contest it took him 14 tries, but Nate finally did it, and the dunk—a spectacular pass to himself thrown off the backboard—lived up to all of its ambitious promise.

Unfortunately, because it had taken him so many tries to get it right, the crowd was not as impressed as we were at our house, and erupted into hisses and boos. And less than a week later, he was indefinitely benched. This only cemented our conviction: Nate was an underdog’s hero.

Ferran shared my enthusiasm not only for Nate, but for the Knicks in general. After all, it was on his birthday, January 27th , that the Knicks scored one of their few victories of the 2005-06 season. Our odd little family—Alex and Ferran, their father, his girlfriend, Alexis, and me—all celebrated together. After dinner at Keen’s Chop House, and after Ferran opened gifts, we cheered from the floor of Madison Square Garden as the monitor read “Happy Birthday, Ferran!”

Sadly, Nate sat out most of the game. But Jamal Crawford played well. When the Knicks followed up that victory with a losing streak, and Alexis was reduced to pounding his fist on the TV-room floor muttering angry epithets, Ferran would remind him that the last time they won was on his birthday.

“They won for me,” he’d say. He really believed it.

*

“Let’s try to catch Nate,” I said to Ferran that afternoon. “Let’s go to West 4th Street.”

Ferran was on it so fast, he more or less catapulted—with his shoes and socks miraculously on!—to the front door. Together we plunged down Bedford Street, calling Alexis frantically on his cell to tell him we were coming, as if he possessed the power, somehow, to keep Nate from leaving.

Nate’s team had won the first game by the time we arrived. The second game had just begun. Alexis picked up his gym bag, evidence of his determination to stay in shape during his recovery, and nudged us toward a good viewing spot just outside the cage.

The atmosphere was more hushed than usual, more like a tennis match than a basketball game. Nate wore a black sleeve on his arm, suggesting that the visit wasn’t merely impromptu, and that he’d come prepared to play. He had taken off his shirt and his upper torso was a marvel of human anatomy, but apart from that, he more or less fit in with the other players. He fed them the ball instead of hogging it, and then, after the appropriate amount of solid team play, he’d suddenly soar above the rim for an offensive rebound or a tip-in, and everyone would be reminded—a star was in their midst.

Someone called a foul at one point, and the game devolved into the usual token bickering, but other than that everyone appeared to be on their best behavior. If Nate ever wanted to take an outside shot or try to dominate the ball, he didn’t show it, and his reluctance to flaunt his talents seemed to rub off on his teammates and opponents; everyone was playing in a dignified manner.

When an opening appeared inside the cage, Alexis quietly ushered us through it. There we stood next to a pair of French tourists, one of whom was using his digital camera to shoot live footage of the game.

Alexis nodded toward a slight-looking young black man in street clothes standing under the basket. “Jamal Crawford,” he whispered.

Crawford was poking the keys of his cell phone, as if text-messaging someone. He put the cell phone in his pocket, turned to one of his friends.

“Why don’t you ask Jamal for his autograph,” I whispered to Ferran. “Now is probably a good time, while Nate is playing.”

Ferran stared at me, unmoving. Eventually, he slid the nub of a pencil and a crumpled ATM receipt from his pocket.

“You can’t use those,” said Alexis, referring to Ferran’s dubious materials. “Here.” He pulled a sketchbook from his gym bag.

When Alexis handed Ferran the sketchbook, Ferran opened it to tear a page out. “We’ll cut the page out later,” Alexis said impatiently, as if it were he, and not Ferran, who was going to ask for the autograph. Then, seeing Ferran’s expression, he softened and carefully ripped out a page—something he never did—as neatly as he could manage, given the quality cardstock. He handed Ferran one of his favorite pens.

“Maybe mention that you saw him play on January 27th,” I whispered. “That was such a great game for him.”

Ferran proceeded tentatively along the baseline, joining Crawford and his friend under the basket. His back was toward us, but he must have popped his question, because Crawford smiled down at him accepted the pen and paper.

“He was nice,” said Ferran, returning, his eyes blinking as if from exposure to a bright light. He held the signature up to show us. “When I asked for his autograph, he said, ‘Oh sure. How you doing?’ Then a guy on the court said, ‘Hey, you want my autograph, too?”

Hearing Ferran’s story, the French tourist focused his camera on Crawford. There were dozens of spectators, guys hoping to play inside the cage. There was the shuffle and stamp of feet as they descended onto our corner. Then the players receded back again, like the tide.

Then suddenly, Nate vaulted like a gymnast over the defense. His body flew straight toward the basket as he held the ball in the air with both hands. When his head appeared over the rim he seemed to float in the air much longer than a mere mortal could. Then he slammed the ball down, swinging from the net for a second before jumping to the ground.

The game came to a halt. Nate was beaming. Players shook their heads in awe. There was an air of celebration as the teammates and opponents alike high-fived Nate and hugged him.

“Now’s your chance,” I told Ferran.

Ferran stumbled backward a few steps. Nate was like the eye of a tornado, Ferran had to voluntarily enter.

“Go on,” I urged him.

“Ferran, go!” said Alexis.

God forbid either of us went with him.

Finally, Ferran ambled into the fray, his expression dazed, as if he were walking underneath everyone.

Nate’s shirt was still off, his skin covered with a sheen of perspiration. Ferran tapped him on his arm. Even at 5’9”, Nate towered a foot above him. Nate looked over, but he seemed to be looking for someone his own height or taller, not down, and he didn’t see Ferran. Several very big players stood around, laughing and making comments. Ferran tapped again from the other side. Again, Nate didn’t seem to notice. It almost looked as if Nate was trying to ignore Ferran. I began to wonder if the tap of eager children was something to which professional players became immune.

Finally, Ferran got it. The signature was a small scribble. It was impossible to make out letters, or even tell which way was up. When we got home, he propped the sketchbook page against a ceramic bird on the mantle.

The following day, when Ferran returned from school, he couldn’t find the coveted autographs. I called the housekeeper’s cell phone, suspecting she might have mistaken Nate’s and Crawford’s autographs for, well, nothing, but the line went straight to voicemail. The trash was already curbside, awaiting pickup the following morning. Ferran brought it in. Alex, a self-proclaimed germophobe, kept his distance. A putrid smell rose up as I untied the bag.

“I think I’ll get some gloves,” said Ferran.

About half-way into the bag, a corner of what looked like sketchbook paper appeared from a tangle of wet garbage. I reached in and pulled. From the wetness emerged the autographs. Crawford’s signature was a little smudged, but the paper itself was salvageable. Alex and I sighed heavily. Ferran didn’t like the smudge, but I just told him what I’ve finally learned tell myself in such situations: It’s just part of the story.

*

Three years later, their smudged signatures would be lost without much promise of every being found. Jamal would leave Nate—and the Knicks–for the Golden State Warriors. Nate would have just won another Slam Dunk Contest with a gleeful vault over seven foot Dwight Howard that looked a lot like the vault we saw that day on West Fourth Street. His former coach Larry Brown, who had once dismissed his zeal for dunking as a circus act, would consider Nate a solid team player, and even praise his ability off-the bench, and suggest naming him sixth man of the year.

Ferran would be playing for the Hoyas, another league team at the Tony D’Apolito Recreation Center. And he’d have two coaches who appreciate him: Salvatore Vitiello, who had played off the bench in Georgetown, before hanging up his jersey permanently on account of a rare heart condition; and Alexis, who, having fractured his foot during a drive to the basket would face yet another basketball-related surgery.

Ferran’s new league team would include 14-year-olds, many of whom were already shaving. His growing strength and determination would have stirred in him a certain swaggering confidence his limitless potential. But Ferran’s countless hours of shooting and dribbling drills would be offset by a condition known as Osgood Schlatter’s syndrome, a temporary but intense knee pain, triggered by his rapid growth (the bones are growing faster than the muscles, and the knee is not comfortably situated on the bone.) In spite of rigorous physical therapy, and shooting drills that didn’t require him to run, he’d have to watch his team hurtle toward the playoffs, from the bench.

Was this just a taste of further heartbreak to come? Undoubtedly. But such are the heartbreaks incited by the sheer love of a sport.

Seeing Nate and Jamal on that beautiful spring day in the city, made me obscurely happy that the playoffs had started without them. For an afternoon, or a small portion of it, we all shared the same turf–professionals, athletes, spectators, tourists and 10-year-old boys with stars in their eyes who can watch one of the league’s littlest players leap-frog over the competition, and still have ample imagination to see themselves up there alongside him, floating above the rim.

A 1950’s Sunset Appetizer Book inspired the retro nibbles, including deviled eggs arranged on Tupperware’s Eggs-ceptional Server Set which, incidentally, fits into the Round Cake Taker, for easier transport, and also inverts to make a cake stand. There were classic pigs in a blanket, as well as ham and cream cheese cubes, chosen for Sunset’s pithy description: “These delectable appetizers have gay colors and the stripes of a peppermint stick.” Chicken salad, among other time-tested goodies, was served on white bread rounds cut from an old-fashioned biscuit cutter and placed on Tupperware’s spring colored containers, based on a 1950’s photo of an appetizer spread.

Gone was the angst of Tupperware parties past, the pressure I remember my own mother feeling, the result, most likely, of the conventional Greenwich housewife protocol that if you attended a Tupperware party, you were expected to return the favor and host one. (You can now buy Tupperware online and in malls).

With a nod to this kind of obsessive 1950’s entertaining, an oversized movie screen bore the silent projection of Rock Hudson and Doris Day’s Pillow Talk. That and the musical compilation, Martini Madness, provided the final touches of archness that kept the party attendees from taking the proceedings—or themselves—too seriously. The point of this Tupperware party was simple fun: see friends, eat, drink, maybe go home with a container or two. “Everyone’s thinking about the war,” said Young, appropriately clad in a red wool dress straight out of I Love Lucy (though she prefers to think of it as her Roman Holiday dress, a la Audrey Hepburn). “With all our friends attending peace marches, it seemed important to bring everyone together. To have a break,” she said. “The thought of doing a European-inspired dinner,” she added (the parties in her book all took place in Europe), “seemed completely ridiculous. Tupperware sort of follows my book into America after the war.”

Indeed Tupperware’s connection to World War II extends beyond mere timing. Earl Tupper, a freelance inventor, worked for Dupont in the1940’s, using polyetheline plastic to make gas masks and windshields for B52 bombers. In 1947, looking for domestic uses for this plastic, Tupper designed a line of high-end dinner plates, hoping they would find their way into the dining rooms of 5th Avenue.

When this venture lagged, Tupper turned his attentions further inward, that is, toward refrigerators and cupboards. Sales were modest until Tupper’s discovery of Brownie Wise, a divorcée from Detroit, who was, apparently, buying Tupperware by the hamperful. According to Young, “Tupper called Wise up. He was like, ‘Wow, how are you selling so much?’ only to realize Brownie was inviting women over to her house and giving them demonstrations, the better to sell his products. Door to door sales had been a big source of employment since the Depression,” Young continued. “This type of sale—probably why your mom felt so much pressure—was more community-based, involving people you would normally interact with socially.” In 1956, because of their balance of Bauhaus ideals of form and function on a Post-war industrial scale, Tupperware was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection, thanks to design curator Arthur Drexler.

No Tupperware party would be complete without a demonstration, of course, so as the cocktail banter began to dwindle, our evening’s representative, Nellie O’Brien, formerly a TV anchor for local stations in New York and Connecticut, took her place at the head of the Tupperware display. Wearing what looked like a white lab coat, the perky blonde confessed with a sigh, “I was organizationally challenged.” Now a self-proclaimed “organizational expert,” O’Brien’s tone was part ironic, part Born-Again preacher. “Let’s face it,” she continued, “bugs love the glue that holds bags and boxes together.” Against a chorus of groans, O’Brien recounted her personal discovery of Tupperware’s moisture-free containers, Modular Mates, one fateful night at a friend’s party. After Tupperizing her cupboards, she moved on to a more formidable concern: her refrigerator. “My freezer used to be a frozen tundra,” she admitted, wide-eyed. “It was full of UFO’s—unidentified frozen objects. There were chicken breasts frozen to the walls.” Her refrigerator was no better. “My broccoli,” she said, disgustedly. “Ugh! What nobody knows, what I didn’t know, is that food breathes at different rates.” Pausing a moment, for the weight of this to sink in, she held up a FridgeSmart container and added: “Now my broccoli stays fresh and green and crisp for five weeks.”

After a series of hoots and applause, and the demonstration of an ice cube melting with great speed in a Tupperware Ice Cream Scoop, the rapt audience reverted to Jello shots. O’Brien graciously took her cue. “If you have any further questions,” she shouted over the mounting din, “feel free to ask me. But not until I’ve had my vodka and tonic.”

Someone turned up the music. People rushed to the demonstration area for order forms and catalogues. A tall, handsome man clutching a Tupperware spatula, let out a groan. “Everyone must hold a spatula before they go,” he insisted. Across the room, a goateed man in black leather spoke excitedly into his cell phone. “Honey, have you ever heard of Tupperware?”

“There’s one!” Alex, then eight, would cry, elated, from the backseat of the car. “Oh, there’s another one.”

“Look over there—there’s two more!” five-year-old Ferran would trill.

Anyone unfamiliar with the Hamptons might have assumed we were on a safari, mistaking my sons’ enthusiasm for a love of wild cats. But they were merely responding to the seasonal influx of fancy imports. And judging from a random sampling along the Montauk Highway, this particular breed of Jaguar was under no threat of extinction.

“I count five! I count six—I mean seven!”

“That’s not a Jaguar, silly. That’s a Mercedes.”

We had just moved into our beautiful summer rental in the Springs. But my husband and I were considering separating. And our mothers were both terminally ill with the same kind of cancer. And my sons’ jaguar counting, not to mention the $130.00 parking ticket greeting us after the briefest imaginable trip to the beach, and the snaking lines of cell-phone toting businessmen at the farmer’s market, and the ponderous foresight required to buy a movie ticket at the local theater before they’d all sold out, and even the making of a simple left-hand turn off of Route 27, everything seemed to be conspiring to make me crazy.

“Craz-i-er,” corrected my friend Bob Braine, an artist.

In search of a more down-to-earth get-away, I had called Braine and asked him to take me kayaking on Manhattan’s East River.

“You must have some secret destinations you like to go to,” I said. “Undiscovered spots along the river.”

“I could take you to my favorite swimming hole,” he suggested.

I imagined—rather unrealistically—a deserted beach near Manhattan, and asked if I should bring my bathing suit. But the place Braine had in mind was a toxic waste dump. “You swim in there,” he chuckled, “it’ll burn the bikini right off you. Not to mention your skin.”

So much for escapes.

“Maybe we should bring a harpoon,” he added, thoughtfully. “Try to harpoon something.”

“What, like dead bodies?”

A Williamsburg-based artist, Braine has a knack for discovering wildlife—and beauty—in the marginal pockets of New York City. For a recent work on view at the Gorney, Bravin, Lee Gallery, the artist kayaked out to Hoffman Island, with a 90-pound tank of helium. There, using a remotely triggered camera suspended under helium-filled balloons, he documented, in infrared film, a nest of bird’s eggs. A current project for the Art in the Arch program at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn features aerial infrared photographs of contiguous segments of Bushwick Inlet, resembling topographical maps. In still another installation, for the windows of the restaurant La Luncheonette in Chelsea, infrared photographs show wildlife consuming the abandoned raised railroad trestle, known as The Highliner, along the West Side Highway.

A combination of influences—from Richard Long and Robert Smithson to Outsider Art—Braine ’s work reveals his deep physical connection to his own habitat or environment. Still, qualifications aside, I was going for the company. Braine is one of those people who manufacture their own fun. He builds kayaks; he loves to fish. Listening to him talk is like listening to ghost stories on camping trips. No matter how scared you may feel, you know that somehow everything will turn out all right.

On the train back to the city, I envisioned our little adventure as a kind of post-Industrial nature treasure hunt.

Our meeting was set for 8:30am. When I arrived at Braine’s apartment ten minutes early, his kitchen was chaos: frying pans, blenders, scattered fruit peels. I watched suspiciously as he gulped a banana milkshake and inhaled an egg and cheese sandwich.

Did I mention that I was functioning on five hours of sleep, and a piece of buttered toast? Braine didn’t see that as a problem. What about the pulled muscle in my neck, the fact that I’d taken a Motrin?

“Oh,” said Braine, good-naturedly, pouring milk on a heaping bowl of granola. “Did I tell you to do that? That’s why I’m eating this big breakfast. I always take an Advil before I go out on the kayak. Don’t want to get seasick.” He asked how my muscles were doing.

“My biceps?” I asked, alarmed.

“Well, actually,” he said, “it’s more the abs. But, don’t worry. Something tells me you’ll do fine.”

I began to see our outing as a test of my manhood.

Braine downed a tall glass of orange juice and glanced at the clock. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “At 9:10am, the current changes direction at our launch point. We’ll have to sprint the first half hour to get out in front of it. Otherwise we’ll be paddling pretty much in place.”

I should say right now that I’m not a camper. I had kayaked once the summer before along the mirror-flat inlet of our rental house in Shelter Island. But my penchant for suffering in the out-of-doors had come to a decisive halt—thanks to my fanatical, camping-obsessed father—when I was ten, in the Adirondacks, during a two-week canoe trip in a hurricane.

Any hope that I was now putting my life in more sympathetic hands was dashed when I took a look at Braines’ 1982 Toyota. The mechanics on the doors were all exposed, and the vinyl seats had long since been replaced with slipcovers aged to a dull grayish sheen, full of holes and dangling threads. Amidst miscellaneous paint cans, and tools—including, of course, jumper cables—Braine loaded a duffle bag, a backpack, and two sets of paddles. On the drive around the block—after expressing pleasure that the car had started—Braine described how, recently, he’d almost abandoned his car in the tow yard on account of unpaid tickets.

By the time Braine parked—without explanation—at a building on South 2nd Street spray-painted with spiders, the purpose of our trip was all but lost to me. Braine proceeded to unlock a trap door, turn on a flashlight, and disappear into a cellar. Eventually a wooden triangular-shaped point emerged from the cellar door. Then, as if on cue, an employee from a refrigerator repair shop across the street came over to help. I got out of the car just as the two men were hoisting the kayak onto the roof of Braine’s car, a roof bearing the telltale pocks and dents of a history of—shall we say?—use.

Behind an abandoned warehouse at North 7th Street and the East River, Braine opened a zip lock bag, and, following his lead, I dropped in my cell phone, a rite that reminded me of pre-adolescent boys rubbing their spit together. There had been some mention of a picnic, sandwiches. Instead, Braine produced—with admitted finesse—two liter-bottles of Poland Springs. “This one’s for you,” he said, generously, passing me one of the waters.

Braine carried one end of the kayak while I carried the other, backwards, a couple of hundred yards down a stony path to the waterfront, a no-man’s land of sharp gray rocks, dirt, and scattered garbage. There he launched the boat, with me in it, and passed me a paddle. Our cargo consisted of a couple of spray skirts stuffed into the cavity at the kayak’s center, with a fishing rod sticking out. Bungee-type cords ran like veins along the top of the kayak. For his own protection Braine had stuck a dust mask under one of them. “When you’re pulling the rear,” he remarked, rather jovially. “You tend to swallow quite a bit of water.”

The day couldn’t have been more beautiful. The air was clear, the view of the Empire State Building looked all the more miraculous from the low, childlike angle of the water. As we paddled against the current, Braine explained how the Hudson River is an estatuary and, therefore, naturally calm. The East River, on the other hand, was a tidal gut, and could be treacherous. On one end, you have the Long Island Sound emptying through a narrow gullet called Hell’s Gate. On the other, you have the Atlantic Ocean.

The current was against us. It was hard work. I tried to use my feet against the footholds for leverage, and to move as one solid unit and use my abs, as Braine instructed. But my shoulders and elbows were torquing and, within a half-hour, I was sore. The following day loomed large, the image of my two young sons frolicking with my husband on boogie boards at the beach, while I was in traction.

We were furiously paddling, crossing the river. Water kept splashing onto my lips, and I kept wiping it on my shirt collar. “Don’t worry too much about that,” called Braine from behind me. “A little spray here and there won’t kill you.” I looked to see if he was wearing his dust mask. (He wasn’t.)

By staying close to shore, we discovered we could use the drag off the land to avoid the pull of the current. Paddling was still difficult, but we made progress. We passed Uthant Island, a small dot of land with something that looked like scaffolding over a monument of some sort. When we passed the mouth of New Town Creek, Braine said, “There’s your swimming hole. The most toxic part of the whole river.”

At Roosevelt Island, where chairs were set up for the Fourth of July fireworks, a flock of cormorants circled over the vine-covered remains of a small pox sanatorium. Within a few feet of the shoreline were a series of warning signs. In front of one that read: Warning: Underwater Power Cables: Do not Dock or Anchor, Braine got out his fishing rod.

I was on Braine’s turf; I decided to trust him.

I paddled; he set the line. A few minutes later he pulled in an undersized striped bass. We watched it flop around, then he respectfully threw back. It was the first time Braine had ever caught a fish on the East River.

“You’re the one who should be fishing,” he said, passing me the rod.

The break was welcome.

Braine instructed me to let out the line, then to hold it over the side, parallel to the water. As we moved along, trolling, he explained how salt water was heavier than fresh water, and that the Hudson River had both. The lower level fish were adapted for salt water. Freshwater fish skimmed the surface. The East River, on the other hand, was all salt. We paddled to a spot where cormorants were diving for the smaller fish that the bigger stripers preyed on.

The only time I’d ever fished, with my husband, I’d caught a baby fish, but then I hadn’t known what to do with it, how to get it off the hook. “It looked so sad,” I said, “With its little eyes staring up at me. I felt awful.”

Suddenly I felt a tug. “You’ve got one,” cried Braine. He started shouting instructions at me, none of which I recall, so caught up was I in the process of reeling the fish in. This one, it turned out, was a keeper. We began daydreaming about lunch, discussing various side-dish options.

“I’ve got a six-pack of beer waiting in the fridge,” he said, as if it was all staged, which of course it wasn’t.

After we crossed under the 59th Street Bridge, Braine pointed out the two red buildings that were the sculptor Mark Di Suvero’s studio. We were headed toward the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where Braine’s work was then exhibited. He didn’t know if we could make it—the current was holding us off—but at that point I was too sore—and too happy—even to care. I began to tell Braine about my experience camping in the hurricane, my father’s refusal to call for help. I mentioned my father’s use of a term “bush,” as in the lack of necessary courage or zeal to push through the rough spots. I wondered if Braine had ever heard it. He hadn’t. “Calling for help was ‘bush,’” I said. I told him how that time in the hurricane was as cold as I’d ever been. How by the time my father finally agreed to call for help, my teeth had been chattering so long that the rest of my body was beginning to spasm. How afterward, sitting inside by a fire, wrapped in a wool blanket, I watched the clock, wondering how many hours it would take before my body stopped shaking and I started to feel warm.

“Sounds like you’re lucky you didn’t get hypothermia,” observed Braine. He said camping shouldn’t be like that. That sometimes you needed help, that was part of it.

Eventually we pulled up on a tiny curve of dark sand known as Rat Beach. Braine said he’d watch the boat, and pointed me in the direction of Socrates Sculpture Park. On the billboard at the park’s entrance stood one of Braine’s photos, a farm-raised striped bass whose stripes, because of some genetic mix-up, didn’t line up, but were jagged. The bass was laid on a piece of black velvet on grass. The distorted ruler alongside it referred to the myth of the big fish. Further inside the park was Braine’s installation, an improvised—but fully functioning—campsite, complete with a workbench and—naturally—a kayak. It was composed from detritus recovered around the city—a cast-off restaurant awning, an orange pollution boom—and ailanthus and maple saplings cut from North Brother Island. Above the camp, a blue plastic sheet blown in from an industrial waste site was strung up as a tarp.

Sixteen years ago, when I got married, and my husband and I first moved to New York, it used to upset me that I couldn’t go outside without spending money. For the first couple of months I sat in our apartment amid boxes packed with wedding china and crystal, in a kind of passive protest. Since then, I’d adapted, joining the ranks of city-dwellers, obsessed with work, family, and the accumulation of things. What happens to these things during the course of a marriage? Are the plates and goblets destined to crack and shatter, or at the very least gather dust in an obscure closet? Is it our best-case fate that the management our lives—the organization of our time here—at some point takes the place of actually living?

It’s been a year since Braine took me kayaking on the East River. Last September, two days before the Twin Towers were obliterated, my husband moved into his own apartment. On September 12th, his mother died. My mother died a few weeks ago. There’s no escaping these losses. Still, I find myself drawn to that day and the solace of an afternoon that preceded so much sadness. I remember the excitement of disappearing from my life, if only for a few hours, and then afterward, how I couldn’t wait to get back to the Springs, to tell my sons I’d caught a striped bass while kayaking on the East River. If I really concentrate, I can still see Braine bending over to snap a couple of shots of an over-turned grocery cart on Rat Beach, before climbing back into the boat. I remember how he suddenly became reflective. “You should give camping another try,” he said. “I think you’d like it.” He stowed his camera, then added, “Could you give me a push? Actually, you may not be able to.”

It’s probably the residue of my father: I respond to a challenge.

I gave Braine a push that sent the kayak out twenty feet. “Hey,” he called to me, laughing, delighted. “Aren’t you coming?”

November 29, 1998
Carol Suskind, Principal
Fielding Elementary Day School
Lower Manhattan

Dear Carol,

As you are probably aware, my son, Luke is a student at Fielding, in Debra’s 4/5’s class. Last week, I found Luke huddled in a corner outside his bedroom, crying. When I asked what was wrong, he said, “I was so homesick today. I was so homesick.” It is unlike Luke to cry like that all alone. He looked very scared. After a bit of prodding he told me that two boys in his class, Billy and Jim, had threatened to give him a good pounding that afternoon in yard. I said him that if anything like that ever happened again, he should tell his teacher, Debra, and left it at that.

Then, yesterday Luke mentioned that Billy’s parents had given Billy a Swiss Army knife. Billy told Luke he was going to bring the knife to school. Luke said Billy was sitting next to him at lunch, when Billy said, “Raise your hand if you hate who you’re sitting next to.” Billy held up a metal fork. Want to fight, Luke?” he said. “I bet my fork can go through you.” Luke said to me, “I was so frightened. I really freaked.” When I asked if he told Debra, he shook his head, “She was on her lunch break.”

Luke was concerned that Billy might bring the new knife to school and cut him. I assured Luke that Billy wouldn’t bring the knife to school, there was no way his parents would let him. I suppose this was naïve. Today Billy brought in the knife. Luke said that when Debra saw the knife, she told Billy to put it in his cubby. This struck me as odd. The common sense response—or so it seems to me—would have been to take the knife away.

I understand that it’s somewhat ridiculous to be worrying about knives in kindergarten. And Fielding Elementary seems the last place on earth where any real violence would occur. On the other hand, five-year-olds are only just learning to take responsibility for their actions, to understand that their actions have a real effect. I don’t want anybody—particularly my own son—getting hurt.

Best regards,

April 27, 1999
Notes for meeting with Carol Suskind, principal,
Fielding Elementary Day School
cc: Carol Suskind

Last week Luke’s teacher, Debra, called to schedule a meeting with herself, me, and Fielding’s behavioral specialist, Nadine. Debra’s tone was casual. She said Luke had made some drawings she thought we should take a look at.

I was a bit anxious going into the meeting—I had no idea what to expect—but since I am always on the lookout for tips on parenting, I tried to view the whole thing as an opportunity. After dropping Luke off as usual, Debra led me down to Nadine’s office. The office was in the school’s basement, and was the size of a closet, with no windows. Debra introduced me to Nadine, who immediately asked, “Are you claustrophobic?” It seemed strange for an opening line. I felt as if she were judging me in some way, as if this were a test. “No,” I answered, slowly. She said, “Okay, so we can close the door.”

Nadine pulled out a folder, arranging 5 drawings side-by-side on her desk. The drawings, she said, were Luke’s. They showed two figures lying on their backs, with stakes in their heads. In place of eyes, there were little x’s, as if to imply that they were dead. Next to the figures were the names Billy and Jim.

The drawings didn’t look like anything Luke had ever done and my stomach twisted at the sight of them. There was a side of Luke, I realized, that I didn’t know, or that I’d refused to see. I was overcome with shame and horror.

Nadine said that, although Luke was extremely bright, his behavior was not up to the first grade (which he’s supposed to attend this fall). “His murderous, annihilating drawings,” she said, “are not appropriate in this school.” Luke would not be welcome back this fall unless I agreed to take him for a psychological evaluation, the most extensive possible, which would run upwards of $2000, and which would include a neurological exam.

My heart was racing and I began to blubber like an idiot. I reminded Debra of our fall parent-teacher conference when she said Luke was having a fantastic year. Debra shook her head. “There were problems then, too.”

I asked Debra if she thought that the drawings might have something to do with the situation with Billy and Jim in the classroom, then cited specific examples of Billy and Jim hitting Luke and calling him names. “Well that’s funny,” said Debra, dismissively, “because Luke doesn’t even spend that much time with Billy and Jim.” I repeated what Luke keeps telling me, that these things tend to happen when Debra isn’t around. Nadine, the expert, interpreted this as further evidence of Luke’s deeply afflicted imagination. “Luke has a problem with boundaries,” she said. She was of the mind that he was letting himself get hurt or else imagining things. “We need to help Luke feel safe at school,” said Nadine, condescendingly.

I reminded Debra of the hundreds of drawings of smiling creatures and airplanes that Luke has made throughout the school year, of Luke’s four-year old classmate, Brian, whose mother keeps telling me, Brian wants to draw like Luke. I told Nadine about Luke’s composure this past weekend at the first chess tournament of his life, when he won a trophy and walked up on stage in front of 300 kids to accept it. Debra merely shrugged. “That’s true,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like Luke.”

That I had always liked Debra only intensified the burn of her betrayal. I could accept that Luke had made these drawings, but she had to accept that there was another Luke, who was mild-mannered and sweet. “I suppose it doesn’t help,” I said indignantly, “that the Columbine killings happened three days ago, and that the profile on the murderers bears a vague resemblance to my son, in that the murderers were highly intelligent, liked games, and shied away from conflict.” Nadine and Debra exchanged glances. Then Nadine gave her final assessment, “These drawings are the cause of great alarm.”

I asked how I should tell Luke to defend himself against Billy and Jim in particular and bullies in general. At least drawings aren’t violent, I argued. “Or are they?” Nadine stood up. The consultant would help me with all that, she said, adding that she happens to offer the type of exam she’s suggesting on the side. “We’ve done everything we can,” she said, washing her hands of me.

I had an important interview/luncheon uptown and it was all I could do to put my napkin in my lap and speak coherently. After the interview, I headed straight for the park where our babysitter usually brings Luke and my younger son, Sam, on the way home from school.

Luke was sitting with the sitter on a bench; I rushed up to hug him. Then Luke said, “Mommy, a terrible thing happened to me today in yard. Billy and Jim pushed me on a bike until it crashed. Jim pushed me off the bike onto the dirt. He tipped the bike over. Billy was there, too. They threw a tire at me. Then they threw the bike at me. They trapped me with the bike. Then Billy went and got a broom that had mud on it and started hitting me with the broom.”

As with the previous incidents reported by Luke, Debra was not present when this happened and it occurs to me now that this is a pattern. The incidents probably have been occurring precisely because Debra’s not there and the class is under-supervised. Luckily, this time, an assistant saw the whole thing, and, when Debra returned, the assistant’s account matched Luke’s. Luke appeared reassured by Debra’s handling of the situation. On the way home from the park, he said, “Debra’s going to make a report.” Then he squeezed my hand, and smiled. “I’m so happy,” he said. “I love my pants. I love myself. And I love my life.”

I have spoken with Keith, my husband. We both feel that we have been treated unfairly, and that Nadine’s use of the words “murderous and annihilating” to describe Luke’s drawings shows a lack of perspective. We suspect her (over)reaction has more to do with Columbine and violence in American schools generally, than it does with Luke and us. We agree that Luke’s drawings express his increasing helplessness and rage. And we want to help him. But since the trouble is taking place in the classroom, we believe it should be addressed in the classroom.

We are entrusting you with our child. And we are, frankly, appalled by the suggestion that Luke’s getting hurt in school is somehow his fault, that he’s brought it upon himself.

We look forward to meeting with you and discussing this further.

April 27th, 1999

Our meeting with Carol is set for the day after tomorrow.

April 28th, 1999
(Diary entry)

This afternoon, when I picked Luke up at school, Wendy gave me a meaningful look and her eyes immediately welled, “Luke had a great day,” she said. Luke had finished his handwriting book and she sent it home with him, like an apology.

April 29th, 1999

Carol is a moron. But she said she’d look into the situation and get back to us.

May 6th, 1999

In school today, Jim told Luke to say “shit, ” then Jim told the teacher. When Luke was discussing it with me later, he asked me please to tell him all the bad words, so he won’t say another one by mistake.

I cannot know what Luke is doing when he’s not with me. I keep hoping he’s okay.

May 24th, 1999

At today’s follow-up meeting today with Carol and Debra, Nadine was not present, at Keith’s and my request. “I know you have asked that Nadine not be present,” said Carol, stating the obvious, as usual, “but let me begin by saying that Nadine is a highly qualified professional.” Carol went on to list Nadine’s credentials, none of which dazzled either Keith or me.

During the three weeks since our last meeting, Carol said, the school has had Billy and Jim “shadowed,” meaning that an adult has observed Billy’s and Jim’s activities more or less constantly during the day. Since there was no evidence of any trouble, they have deemed that the situation between Luke and Billy and Jim “not a problem.”

As for Luke’s neuro-psychological exam, Nadine who “is very qualified” still felt strongly that we should pursue it. “Luke seems to have a problem with boundaries,” reiterated Carol.

Keith was irate. He said, “What if we refuse?”

Carol looked at him and chuckled smugly, as if Keith’s anger shed further light on Luke. “You mean,” she answered, “will we let Luke come back this fall? Well, I guess I’ll have to think about it. I hope it doesn’t come to that.” Then she looked at me. “I don’t think it will.”

I mentioned that I’d been asking Luke about the situation with Billy and Jim, as well. That Luke, too, had been saying things were better. Luke had also said that Billy had been away in Germany for ten days. I asked about Nadine’s lack of professionalism in her judgement of Luke’s drawings as “murderous” and “annihilating.”

“Let me say once again,” droned Carol, “that Nadine is very quailified. In the 15 years she has been with Fielding, nothing like this has ever occurred. Nadine was extremely effected by the incident at Columbine. If Nadine were at this meeting,” said Carol, “she would be apologizing to you in person.” Carol asked that Keith and me “find it in hearts” to forgive Nadine.

She was treating us like children. “Forgiveness is one thing,” I said. “But you’re asking us to trust Nadine’s judgement. Talk about lack of boundaries.”

Carol smiled. “I know how difficult this is,” she said. “I have a son, too. But please remember: we only want what’s best for Luke.”

May 25th 1999

Today Luke came home from school and asked me what “duh” meant.

May 28th 1999

Luke’s drawing of a magnolia branch is in the school’s year-end art fair. Everyone keeps coming up to tell me how much they love it.

June 3rd, 1999

At the class picnic, Billy was fighting with another boy who was bigger than him. The boy punched Billy and, instead of hitting the boy back, Billy turned to Luke, who was sitting on the ground nearby. I was sitting on a park bench with the other mothers. Luke noticed me and started to come over. Billy grabbed both of Luke’s cheeks and stuck his thumbs in Luke’s eyes, throwing his head back. As Luke’s head returned upright, Billy punched him between the eyes.

I rushed over to Luke and together he and I went after Billy, who ran straight to the teacher, Debra. I let Debra handle Billy, while I comforted Luke.

Eventually Debra and Billy came over. Debra said to Billy, “Tell Luke what you just told me.” Billy mumbled something. Debra said, “Billy wants to tell you it was an accident. He didn’t mean to hit you. He meant to hit the other boy instead.”

The other mothers offered sympathy and stories of similar run-ins with Billy. One had checked out ten books on bullies from the public library. She suggested starting a support group. I prefer to crawl under a rock. I didn’t know when I became a parent that I would have to relive all the horrors of growing up. It occurs to me that I am no better at handling this now than I was at ten.

June 4th, 1999

I have taken to walking around with a sheet of paper and a pen. I can’t sleep. I can’t move Luke to a new school, either. This is Manhattan. I have made a slew of phone calls. If you don’t apply in kindergarten, there are no new spots until middle school, unless someone leaves. Would Luke be better off in public school with a high student-teacher ratio and less supervision? I know these are the lessons of life, I just don’t know why he has to start learning them this early.

June 5th, 1999

Among the smiling creatures and airplanes in the year-end stack of Luke’s drawings, I see something strange: scribbly figures with frowning faces. The drawings look frighteningly like the ones that started all this trouble. I am scared. They are so different from Luke’s other drawings, it occurs to me that my son might be schizophrenic.

In the park, I stuff the drawings back into Luke’s backpack, so no one will see them. Later, surreptitiously, I take another look. I can’t decide whether to throw them out or to keep them as documents of this phase in Luke’s life.

“What’s this?” I ask Luke finally, when I am studying one of them, yet again. “Oh, says Luke. “That’s Brian’s drawing. The ones with the spikes, the kind of scribbly ones, those are all Brian’s. Because he’s only 4 and he can’t draw so well.”

I separate all the scribbly drawings from the stack. Luke confirms that they are all Brian’s. He says Brian gives him lots of drawings because Brian loves him so much. I call Brian’s home. “I have a whole bunch of Brian’s drawings,” I say. “I guess he gave them to Luke.” Brian’s father is delighted. “Brian thinks the world of Luke,” he says. “He really looks up to him.”

I am beyond vindication. I’ve started seeing a shrink.

October 1999

The psychologist who evaluated Luke said the lack of structure at Fielding was making Luke anxious. She suggested a school with more “limits” and intellectual focus.

February 2001

Luke is still at Fielding. So far, we have been unable to move him. People are having their second children, and, instead of moving to the suburbs, they are buying bigger apartments. There are still openings, however, in kindergarten.

This year’s perennial interview question: Would you consider sending Sam [Luke’s younger brother] to our kindergarten, even if we have no place for Luke?

I can’t help but feel that on some level I have failed Luke. That I keep failing him.

“Unearthing Gotham” examines New York archaeological history in all five boroughs, but most of Wall’s actual fieldwork has taken place in this part of Lower Manhattan, where for years she worked as a contract archaeologist and as curator of archaeology at the South Street Seaport Museum. Her most memorable find is 7 feet of road upon road upon road under what is now 85 Broad Street, the headquarters of Goldman Sachs. The lowest layer of road dates back to 1650. Her face lights up at the memory of it.

I point out a building at 75 Murray Street, which I know to have been designed by the founder of cast-iron architecture, James Bogardus. I wrote a piece on him once, featuring this building, and I am relieved to see the building still standing; I’ve been worried about it. The building looks beautiful–it’s completely unscathed–and it’s creamy color reveals not the slightest bit of fire damage. We pause, in shared awe of it. Then Wall, perhaps in fear that I’ll go off on a tangent, steers me back to our subject. “I don’t care about so much about buildings as I do what’s under the ground.”

She proceeds to tell me that, stored in the second basement under 6 World Trade Center, where the Customs House used to be, are two collections of city artifacts. One collection came from Five Points Site. “Five Points,” she explains, “was the most notorious slum of the nineteenth century. It was located east of Center Street. It was the area Dickens was dying to see when he came to New York in 1842. That whole collection is gone, except for a few artifacts that happened to be on loan to exhibits.”

“What was in the collection?”

“You know,” she answers, “what archaeologists love: garbage. Potshards, pieces of broken dishes, chamber pots. And this was really touching: a New World monkey, the kind that organ grinders used.” Part of another collection was also lost, she tells me. Artifacts from an excavation of an African burial ground located between what are now Duane and Reade Streets, just East of Broadway. “The human remains and the grave goods—what people were buried with—are intact,” she says. “What was destroyed was the garbage of people living on the same property in the early 19th century.” It all depended on what part of the basement the artifacts were stored in We have just hit Chambers and Greenwich and the milling crowds and the smoke distract us and our discussion of the past gives way to the more pressing present.

We are smelling what my son, Alex, has referred to, having so quickly adapted—as children do—as “the smell of home,” a mixture of burning plastic, computers, carpeting, human remains, what have you. We are treating our present day experience as if it’s already history, and there is an odd tension because of it. Maybe this is our own form of archaeology: accepting pamphlets. We are eying the hawkers of hats, gloves, tee shirts, all imprinted with American flag logos. We discuss our disapproval of the unwritten rule of our culture to capitalize on the moment. At the same time, we understand, for this is a moment we will all remember, and will tell our grandchildren about, as we clutch this American flag pin, or that red, white, and blue ribbon.

I have walked down here once, along the West Side highway, and I’ve taken the subway around it, and seen it from the Staten Island Ferry, but I have never taken a picture. I get out my camera.

People around us are speaking in myriad foreign languages.

“Tourists,” Wall comments wryly, “Not all of whom come from out of town.”

I tell her how, on my first trip down, when I thought of tourists coming to see this, it occurred to me, This is our urban Old Faithful.

“That’s a good comparison,” Wall says, as I snap my first souvenir picture. It’s hard to believe that the wreckage is still burning. Wall says she feels the need to come down here once a week.

“New York is my city, I grew up here. This is like part of my body. I have to make myself aware that it’s really real,” she adds “It happened with the Gulf War, and now it’s happening again, with the bombing in Afghanistan. It’s like video game wars. You see a lot of this on TV, but it becomes very remote, like a movie.” We keep bumping against barricades. Policemen; chain-link fences covered with green woven plastic, so you can’t see.

Someone hands me a flyer that says, “What’s Next? What can we do?” then answers its own question:

“One good deed”

Another flyer says, “Prayer is the best weapon of protection.”

A young woman passes out red, white, and blue elastic bands that say, “United we stand,” and “God Bless America.” I take three, one for me, one for each of my sons.

“Could I have two for my daughters?” asks the woman behind me.

“Another pair for my sister?” says another woman. It’s as if we’re latter day peasants begging for alms. We see a man dragging his small son by the hand,

“Would you bring your kids here?”

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

It’s comes at us from all angles. A sign in the window of the New York Sports Club reads, “It will also strengthen your spirit.”

We pass Saint Paul’s church, flanked by a Latin-American-style shrine, framed by a policeman and a national guard.

The buildings west of the former World Trade Centers are exposed, their glass windows warped, as if from heat. We stare at the windows, wondering if it’s an optical illusion, then realizing: there are missing windows covered with plywood. The windows are not just warped, but in some instances, gaping star-shaped holes. It looks at once innocuous—a standard modernist cityscape—and eerie, a witness of latter-day optimism and commerce.

There is the glass canopy of the Winter Garden, its burned-out backside. There is blue sky through the glass of buildings that have spent most of their time on earth in shadow.

Another building with arches looks like ancient ruins. Yet another looks burnt black, or charcoal-colored. There’s something kinetic about it, a sense of fractured movement, like in a futurist painting. It looks as if it’s in the process of falling.

There is dust on all the facades nearby, infinite shades of gray. “Do you think the facades were always this dirty?”

She doesn’t know.

We are standing to the side of Saint Peter’s Church, “the oldest Catholic church in New York,” according to Wall.

Something’s going on on the other side of the chain-link and green plastic. A mass is being projected over loudspeakers. There is music. A beautiful voice floats through the air, singing “Amazing Grace.” The sun is blinding. We cannot see. “It confirms our guilt,” I laugh.

“We’re blinded by looking,” she answers gamely, smiling.

A priest is praising Guiliani’s leadership, the bravery of firemen. The mention of heroes is followed by the mention of grief. There are crowds of onlookers shading their eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s going on beyond the barricade.

I am suddenly snap-happy. “It’s beautiful,” I say, “in a strange way: the cranes, the flags, the music. She nods, pointing to a hose spraying onto the smoke, the arc of water in the sun. We have moved from the historical to the purely visual moment. It is beautiful. It is also awful.

At the corner of Maiden Lane and Broadway she points out the ultimate shot. There’s a man behind me urging me forward, like a coach, “you got it you got it, as long as you don’t let any heads block your view, get as close as you can, get up to the front. He gives me my shot than snaps his own. The people looking on behind me on the sidewalk are crying.

“That’s your picture, ” I tell her.

“Now we can go home and see it all on the news,” she joked. For the news—especially lately—has come to seem more real than actually being there, telling us what we just did, handing us history—or is it experience—in some identifiable package.

We later hear that the mass was for families of World Trade Center victims; that over 9,000 people had gathered to hear Bishop Egan saying mass; that Hilary Clinton and Mayor Guiliani and Governor Pataki were all behind the chain-link fence. That that beautiful voice belonged to Kathleen Battle.

But right now, we are caught up in aesthetics, composition. Trying to shoot above the heads of onlookers, pushing toward the front of crowds for an unobstructed view. For we are here now, and this is what it looks like. And I want to see it, to feel it, and, finally, to hold it in my hands.

Bogardus was a watch-maker and inventor who was awarded thirteen US patents and one British patent, for clocks, spinning machinery, grinding mills, gas meters, and devices for pressing glass cuttings, working with rubbers and making postage stamps. He built the first cast-iron fa?ade in history in 1848 at 183 Broadway (it has since been destroyed). In 1850, he patented his method for cast-iron construction.

As James Sanders, co-writer of the New York documentary series recently put it, "Cast Iron architecture is one of New YorkÕs greatest architectural achievements and James Bogardus was the premiere architect of cast-iron architecture." Made from separate cast parts that could be ordered from catalogues and then bolted together on site, cast-iron construction marked the birth of pre-fab architecture.

75 Murray Street

Until 1862, when his health began to fail him, Bogardus championed the use of cast-iron in developing industrial cities. His commissions extended from Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, San Francisco, to places as far-flung as Santa Domingo and Havana. The sturdiness of metal offered ample support for the soaring windows often associated with cast-iron construction. Since there was no electricity at the time and since, according to Sanders, gaslight only supplied 1/10 the strength of natural light, the light brought in by these large window openings proved especially useful for industrial purposes. (Natural light played an equally important role when these warehouses were converted to artist’s lofts and galleries in the 1960′s and 1970′s). Finally, Bogardus’ work in metal pre-figured the use of steel in the building of skyscrapers, and, by extension, what we have come to know as the Manhattan skyline.

In recent years, Manhattan’s architects and developers, and the population at large, have demonstrated an increasing respect for the integrity of what is now commonly thought of as New York architecture. The Landmarks Commission has become a force, with more and more buildings protected under its stringent auspices (some 25,000 buildings are now registered landmarks). Along with all of this, the life and work of James Bogardus has again come into the public eye. According to Margot Gayle, the pre-eminent scholar of cast-iron architecture, and author of the book, "Cast-iron Architecture in America: The Significance of James Bogardus," Bogardus was "quite well-known during his life." And yet, by the time Gayle began researching her book, which was published in 1998, she admits, "he was forgotten." Part of this is due to the simple fact that there are very few examples of his work still standing. Of his 23 commissioned buildings in Manhattan alone only three remain (a fourth at 63 Nassau Street has yet to be officially attributed to him).

I began my pilgrimage that day with visits to Bogardus’ three remaining buildings at 254 Canal Street, 85 Leonard Street, and 75 Murray Street, with a final stop at the James Bogardus triangle, as a kind of homage to the master.

George Bruce, an inventor and printer commissioned 254 Canal Street. Completed in 1856, the building is elegantly designed in the palazzo style, with fluted columns, as well as the details in Bogardus’ signature Medusa heads. The building offers a wonderful example of the soaring window spaces associated with most cast iron architecture. One major disappointment at 254 Canal was that the first story of the building has been, curiously, paneled in wood. Located in the heart of China Town, the building is now the home of HSCB and Fleet Bank and myriad lawyers, doctors and brokers. A tattered banner announcing RFR Textiles blows a little dejectedly outside 85 Leonard Street, a sad reminder that industry in this country has become more or less obsolete. One of the early supporters of cast-iron architecture, the textile industry embraced BogardusÕ own dream of inventing a building that was completely fireproof. This turned out not to be the case, for under extreme temperatures it becomes brittle. While 85 Leonard Street is badly in need of restoration, it is a beautiful example of the decorative possibilities presented by working in cast-iron. Leafy vines and bunches of grapes appear between the arched windows below the roof. The two sets of columns, rising up two stories, are designed in what is known as the sperm-candle style, because of the columns’ resemblance to the tall delicate candles made with the oily wax from sperm whales. A Tiffany plaque by the loading dock reads: "James Bogardus, originator and patentee of iron buildings, Pat; May 7 1850."

Of all of the remaining Bogardus buildings in Manhattan 75 Murray Street is by far the best restored. This is largely due to the diligence of the current owners, George and Christiane Aprile. Since buying the building in 1991, George Aprile has become something of a James Bogardus aficionado. Built in 1857 for merchants of fine table china and paint, 75 Murray Street resembles a late-fifteenth century Venetian palace. The building is three bays wide and sits on a 25-foot lot. Corinthian columns frame the windows and Medusa heads decorate the keystones on the third and fourth floors

85 Leonard Street

As I was photographing the building from across the street the elevator opened at street level. When I crossed the street to peak inside, I noticed two articles on James Bogardus hanging on the elevator’s walls (one from the New York Times by Christopher Gray, from August 20, 1995, the other by Oliver E. Allen, from the May 1995 issue of the Tribeca Tribune). The Tribune article suggested that the current owners actually lived in the building, and I asked the elevator operator if there was any way I could get in touch with them. He said that in fact Mr. Aprile was upstairs. He went to ask if I could see him. Mr. Aprile very generously invited me into his home, where he keeps a veritable treasure trove of James Bogardus literature and memorabilia. Aprile confessed that when bought 75 Murray Street in 1992, heÕd never heard of James Bogardus. "No one had," he said. He credited Margot Gayle for rescuing Bogardus from obscurity.

Our animated conversation about Bogardus and cast-iron architecture in general lead to a top to bottom tour of 75 Murray Street. According to Mr. Aprile, the building had no windows water or electricity when he bought it, but it was convenient to his child’s school and the price per square foot, was reasonable, at least by Manhattan standards. What he didnÕt know when he bought it was that one of the drawbacks of owning what some might call a monument is the cost of restoration. On one floor, a fallen piece of wall on the inside revealed the bolts that affixed the cast iron to the front of the building. It was like seeing a skeleton. It occurred to me that I was as close as I would probably ever get to the ghost of my late ancestor. A trip to the cellar revealed the vault area under the sidewalk, and assorted fieldstones from the original foundation, which had most likely been collected from nearby building sites. Before I left, Mr. Aprile informed me that Margot Gayle lived in New York. He mentioned that she was in her eighties and encouraged me to call her.

It was several days before I spoke to Margot Gayle. A founding member of the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture, Gayle used to host walking tours "to get people acquainted with iron clad architecture." The tours, she said, would meet on a concrete area, which was actually a traffic island. There were a couple of trees, not big, and concrete benches. According to Gayle, "The City paid very little attention to it." The Friends tours had four volunteer guidesÑmostly architects. When the tours dispersed, it was Gayle’s habit to sit down and catch her breath. "Maybe "I’d have a coke," she said. "Then one day it dawned on me that the traffic island didn’t have a name and it would be appropriate to name it after James Bogardus." After a series of city council and committee meetings a bill was introduced. Gayle testified that it would be a fine thing to memorialized this famous figure. Mayor Koch signed the bill into existence. Gayle still has a picture of the group of them, standing around Koch as he signed the bill.

My grandfather, John Bogardus had recently died. Various letters and papers detailing our relationship to the Bogardus clan were passed into my mother’s hands. She has, in turn, passed them on to me. I have yet to make any sense of them. What has struck me, however, over the course of my research, is that my grandfather’s deeply practical nature, his almost defiant lack of pretension, traits described over and over again in the eulogy, are traits the late James seems to have shared as well. (A picture in Margot Gayle’s book also reveals a certain likeness to my mother around the eyes.)

"It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it," O. henry said of New York. At some time or other everyone looks for the story of their own past in the city, and every now and then I walk down to the James Bogardus Triangle and savor this small intersection of the public and the personal. Never mind the red bank awnings, this building at Lafayette and Canal Street is a Cast Iron Classic.

Photographs by Dorothy Spears

Fanny came twice a week and my mother’s outings were specifically timed for these visits. There was only one acceptable answer to “See you later, Alligator.” If I said it, my mother would smile appreciatively. If I didn’t, she would go anyway.

My mother’s spare time was occupied in a way befitting an upper-middle class housewife of her generation. She would go shopping at Saks, and Bonwitt Teller. She would meet her friends for lunch or coffee. She would go to the beauty parlor to have her hair streaked. Or she would volunteer. She was a member of the Junior League and a docent at the Brooklyn Museum in the Department of Egyptology. I have always been curious why she chose Egyptology. She’s never been to Egypt, or revealed any particular interest in ancient cultures, or kilims. When I’ve asked, her answers are, as they often are when she talks about herself, frustratingly vague. Maybe one of her friends mentioned something about it and it sounded interesting. Maybe they were looking for volunteers. More than anything, I think, it was something to do, an excuse to leave the house.

My father worked on Wall Street, a fifteen-minute walk from where we lived, across the Brooklyn Bridge. Sometimes he would come home for lunch, but usually he was too busy. It made my mother sad to spend so much time alone with us, but my father was the youngest partner in his firm. To prove himself, he had to work hard, long hours. His parents supported my parents early on in their marriage, when Wally was born, and my father was still in business school. They loaned my parents money for the down payment on our house. My grandparents were wealthy. Still, after this considerable head start, that was it. They never gave my parents any more money. My father said they believed people needed to take care of themselves. But sometimes my mother would whisper about how they thought she came from the other side of the tracks, that she was a gold-digger, and that she’d trapped my father into marrying before he finished graduate school.

Before my mother went out, she would give Fanny the stamps from the grocer, which my mother kept in a pile on the kitchen counter. Fanny would smile and thank her. “You have a good time, now,” she’d say, in her sweet, sadistic voice. “We’ll be alright, won’t we?”

I was so focused on my mother, on bracing for the inevitable, that I would barely hear her.

“See you later, Alligator,” my mother would say to me cheerfully, buttoning her coat. The silky assurance of her voice, the smell of her perfume, the way she tugged at the cuffs of her leather gloves as she gave last-minute instructions to Fanny—all of these things only increased my panic.

At the top of the front door there was a pane of etched glass. My mother would stand on the other side of it. Tapping her gloved finger on the glass, she’d mouth the words. “See you later, Alligator.” Her nose would crinkle up, the way it did when she was excited. And I would realize with dismay that this process of leaving was easier than anything else I’d seen her do. That in fact, she was quite good at it.

I was only two or three at the time, but I knew a few things, and this was one of them: If she left without my saying goodbye, I was the one who would suffer. Tears got you nowhere with her. Wally’s stoic bravery was what she admired. If I wasn’t cheerful enough, she would only leave faster—she resented feeling guilty. With this in mind, I’d force the words up through my throat: “After awhile, Crocodile.” With her nose still crinkled, her lips bright and glamorous, she’d blow me a kiss.

Things would calm down a little once she was gone. Fanny and I would go to the kitchen where I would play with our cat, Underdog, while Fanny did her stamps. There were these cards Fanny had, and she would line them up on the kitchen table. She’d take a sponge from the sink and lay it on a saucer. Then, counting the stamps on the card, she’d add this number to the number of new stamps my mother had just given her. One-by-one she’d peel off the new stamps and wet the back of them, and stick them on the cards. She was very methodical. She said the stamps on the cards were worth money. Some stamps were worth a penny. Other stamps were worth five cents. Sometimes Fanny would let me stick stamps on her card. But they had to be straight and in the right order. When Fanny finished her stamps, she’d get out the vacuum. Then Underdog would run upstairs and I’d miss Wally.

I’d follow Fanny around while she cleaned. “Where’d Mom go?” I’d ask. “When will she be back?”

“Errands,” Fanny would say, casually. I could tell my questions irritated her. It was all right to talk while she did her stamps. She was taking her time then. But when she was cleaning she didn’t like it, because she wanted to go fast.

Once I offended her in some way. “That’s it,” she snapped, “I’m going to wash your mouth out.” It all happened very fast. She got a bottle of Joy from the kitchen and stuck it under her arm. With her free arm, she dragged me into the bathroom.

“No,” I said. “Please. I want Mommy.” I covered my mouth with my hands.

She pried my mouth open, and held my head over the sink. Then suddenly she let go, as if I wasn’t worthy of all her efforts, she let go. “Here,” she said, tossing the Joy at me. “You go ahead and clean your own dirty mouth.”

Fanny’s back was turned. She was walking away. I thought she was going to tell my mother, but she didn’t. I didn’t tell my mother, either. I knew she’d only get mad at me. And if she got mad at me, she’d tell my father. And I’d get spanked. Anyway, it wouldn’t have made a difference. My mother treasured her time away. And Fanny was convenient.

“You need to get out. You need to do something for yourself.” Those were the words of the day among young housewives. Just as they were my mother’s words to me, when the time came. As if the simple act of going outside were enough to quell the rage and humiliation one sometimes felt at finding oneself stuck at home with young children. As if one’s lack of personal purpose could—and should—be assuaged by a trip to the beauty parlor or to Saks. As if one were a freak—or worse—ungrateful, if one happened to crave more. I don’t harbor any grudges toward my mother. To me it shows how little she asked for. How little she expected from her own life.

I still wonder at her choice of Egyptology. I have asked her, several times. Her answers are always frustratingly vague. Maybe someday she’ll tell me.

After her outings, my mother would look almost suspiciously radiant. Her heels would click glamorously on the marble tiles as she peeled off her leather gloves, hung her coat in the closet. And for a brief moment, with the outdoor air still clinging to her, I would glimpse the person she was without me; the person perhaps she wished she could have been; her other self, which, for some reason, she can’t, or doesn’t know how to share with me.