New York - The Novel

good. He was choking and he couldn’t see. Finally, like everyone else, he retreated further up the street, and reaching a point where the air was somewhat clearer, he sat down on the sidewalk, and watched the gray-dusted figures as they passed, like Shades from Hades, in the forlorn hope that one of them, after all, might be his wife.
    And then, after ten minutes, she came toward him.
    “Hoped I might find you here,” she said.
    “I thought …”
    “I’d only just left the building when it started coming down. I guess it broke the cell connection. Then a whole bunch of us went into a café toget out of the dust. But I came up the street as soon as I could. You look awful.”
    “And you look wonderful.” He took her in his arms.
    “I’m a little dusty.”
    “You’re alive.”
    “I think we mostly got out. I’m not sure about the people higher up though, above the fire.”
    “Oh my God.”
    “What?”
    “Katie Keller. She told me she was going to a meeting somewhere in the Financial District this morning. Do you have her cell number?”
    “I think so.”
    “Let’s try to call.”
    But there was no answer when they did.

    As it moved to and fro that morning, still wrapped around the waist of Sarah Adler in the high room in the tower, the wampum belt had looked very well. Its little white and colored shells were as bright as on the day they were strung. To those who could read its message, woven with such love, it declared: “Father of Pale Feather.”
    And as the great burning rose, and the huge tower swayed, and then sank, so huge was the heat and so stupendous the pressure of that massive falling that, like everything around it, above and below, the wampum belt was atomized into a dust so fine it could scarcely be seen. For a short time it hovered around the base of the vanished tower. But then at last the wind, kinder than men, lifted it up in a cloud—high, high over the harbor waters, and the city, and the great river that led to the north.

Epilogue
Summer 2009
    T HEY SAT IN the café. It was a beautiful day. Gorham looked across at the Metropolitan Opera and smiled at his daughter. He could see that she was going to try something on him, but he waited for it to come.
    She looked serious.
    “Dad.”
    “Yes, my darling.”
    “I think I have ADD.”
    “Really? That’s nice.”
    “No, Dad. I mean it. I really can’t concentrate.”
    “Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear that. When did you discover this?”
    “This year, I guess.”
    “You don’t think it could have anything to do with all the parties you went to?”
    “Dad, be serious.”
    “I am being serious. Listen, Emma, I have to tell you something. You can’t have ADD.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Listen, when I brought you over here this morning and made you look at those two huge Chagalls by the entrance to the Met, did you have trouble doing that?”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t mean did you complain all the way across the park about havingto look at the damned opera house—by the way, it’s a very fine opera house and a damn sight better than the old one, but never mind that. I mean, were you able to stare at the Chagalls and take them in?”
    “I had great difficulty.”
    “No you didn’t. I watched you.”
    “That is so unfair. You’re worse than Mommy.”
    “Wow. Impressive insult.” He looked at her seriously. “Emma, you have to understand. Attention deficit disorder exists. A few people have it, and if they really do, it’s no joke. But nowadays, half the kids in your school say they have it. Why’s that?”
    “You get extra time in exams.”
    “Right. It’s a racket. The parents tell the doctors they think their kids have it, and the doctors go along with it, and soon everybody has it, so they can have extra time with their exams and improve their grades.”
    “Isn’t that a good reason to have it?”
    “No. And I also know the Ritalin racket.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Ritalin is the drug usually prescribed for ADD. Ritalin helps concentration. It also has the useful property of letting you stay awake and mentally alert through a day and a night. If you have to pull an all-nighter on a college essay, it’ll get you through. So the kids who claim to have ADD get prescribed the Ritalin, and then they sell it to the college kids. Do you think I don’t know that?”
    “So what’s your point?”
    “The fact that there’s a secondary market in something doesn’t make it right.”
    “Mommy