We ordered Caesar salads all around, and by some sort of silent consensus, possibly engineered by Paul, talked about everything but my awkward situation vis-à-vis the law.
By the time the waiter brought our apple pie, we’d come to an uneasy agreement over the 2004 elections and the war in Iraq (with a good deal of overlap between the two). Over coffee, we discussed the proper role of the U.N. in world politics, but hadn’t reached a conclusion by the time the waiter brought the check.
After the waiter bowed and left with his tip, Jack stood, laid down his napkin and said, “Before you go, there’s something else that I want to show you.”
Five minutes later the four of us were standing silently before a marble memorial on the first floor of E-ring: AMERICA’S HEROES: A GRATEFUL NATION REMEMBERS. On our right, the name of each civilian lost when a terrorist flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon had been incised in a marble slab, black and smooth as satin. On an identical slab to the left, the names of the military victims were carved. Stubby pencils and oblongs of tissue paper had been provided for friends and family to trace the names of their loved ones.
The Naval Academy, I remembered all too well, had lost eleven of its sons in the Pentagon attacks.
I ran my hand over the cool stone, feeling each letter beneath my fingertips. Chic Burlingame, captain of the ill-fated Boeing 757, had been a Navy Top Gun. He died one day shy of his fifty-second birthday. Gerald DeConto, class of 1979. We’d known him as “Fish.” Pat Dunn, class of ’85, whose wife Stephanie had been two month’s pregnant when the doomed airplane smashed into her husband’s office. At one time or another we’d known them all.
Behind us, yellow film covered the windows that faced Arlington Cemetery at the exact point where Flight 77 slammed into the building.
“I’ll leave you here,” Jack whispered after a while. “I’ve got another meeting. You know the way out?”
We nodded silently.
To my right a double door opened into a memorial chapel. Signaling to Paul and Murray my intention, I went in and sat down on one of the straight-backed chairs, upholstered in a mottled rose and blue. At the front of the chapel, just behind a small wooden altar, was a brilliant five-sided stained-glass window featuring the head of a bald eagle, the image of the Pentagon, a flowing U.S. flag, and the words UNITED IN MEMORY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. The window was fabricated, according to the brochure I’d picked up outside, from five hundred pieces of inch-thick, faceted glass called Dalle de Verre. One hundred eighty-four of them were crimson, arranged in a double ring.
I bowed my head, studying my shoes against the red carpet. Then I closed my eyes and prayed. I prayed for those gone too soon before their time-the victims, my mother, my friends Valerie and Gail-and I even prayed for the troubled soul of Jennifer Goodall.
And while I was at it, I said a little prayer for myself.
Then I stood up, squared my shoulders, and went out to face whatever fate might send my way.
CHAPTER 19
Late Saturday afternoon when Chris Donovan returned my call, I did what anybody with her fingerprints on file in JABS would do. I lied. Using my daughter’s name, I told Chris that I was a naval officer in imminent danger of being outed by my louse of an ex-husband, and she agreed to see me in Fairfax, Virginia, after church services the following day.
I briefly considered resurrecting my disguise, but even in this day and age, jogging attire-no matter how upscale-didn’t seem appropriate for Sunday-go-to-meeting, so I decided on a black and white herringbone pantsuit and a black V-neck sweater over a crisp, white, open-collared shirt.
There was a chance I’d be recognized. The Baltimore paper had unearthed a ghastly old photo from their archives and splashed it above the fold of Thursday’s Anne Arundel section, but the Washington papers had left me mercifully alone. I was betting that Chris didn’t read the Sun and decided to risk it.
Why anyone chooses to live in the northern Virginia suburbs, paying grossly inflated prices for the privilege, is completely beyond me. Even on weekends the highways are snarled with traffic any normal human being would count as rush hour, and I’ve never driven to Tysons Corner without getting hopelessly lost. To avoid all this, I take the Metro.
One hundred years ago, when the corner of Oakland and Ninth was probably just a cow pasture, someone-God bless ’em-had the good sense to build St. George’s Episcopal Church practically smack dab on the site of a future Orange Line Metro station. To get to the church where I’d meet Chris Donovan, I didn’t even need to switch trains. I’d timed my journey perfectly, too, emerging into the daylight at the Virginia Square/George Mason University stop at 10:15 A.M.
Aside from an apartment tower and a number of lofty office buildings, practically the first thing I saw was the church. The Episcopal Church of St. George and San José took up the entire block. On my right, a large brick sanctuary dominated the complex. Centered over a pair of tall wooden doors, a stained-glass window of Gothic style and proportions sparkled in the afternoon sun. A modern parish hall extended back to the left, and more modern still, two stakes had been pounded into the lawn and a banner stretched between them announcing St. George’s URL. As if acknowledging the parish’s Spanish heritage, an alternate entrance, much older, was constructed of stone. A single bell was suspended in an open, Spanish mission-style tower over its door.
Keeping one eye out for Chris Donovan-she told me she’d be wearing a pink suit-I stepped into the nave, smiled at one of the greeters, accepted a church bulletin, and sat down in a pew near the back of the sanctuary, trying as hard as I could to fade into the woodwork.
I studied the bulletin. The church’s official seal featured St. George jousting with a dragon, but his mount was a bicycle instead of a horse. I smiled, hoping that the service wouldn’t be as laid back as their logo.
I turned to the program for the morning service, and was disappointed to read that while the Holy Eucharist was taken from the Book of Common Prayer, that morning, at least, they were following the more modern Rite 2. I preferred Rite 1, the version that more or less maintained the majestic beauty of the language of King James. Back in 1979, when the BCP was revised, not even the Lord’s Prayer had escaped the commission’s tinkering, and “lead us not into temptation” became “save us from the time of trial.” I stared at the fur hat sitting lopsidedly on the head of the woman in the pew in front of me and thought: Time of trial. Thanks for reminding me, Lord.
As the pews around me began to fill, I gazed east toward the altar. A large red cross was mounted over a brass, open-worked altar screen behind which some sort of tapestry had been hung. On the wall above that, near the apex of the roof, a stained-glass window bloomed like a flower: a five-petaled flower. Five petals, like the Pentagon. I closed my eyes. Was the entire world becoming a place of symbols, each one serving to remind me of the late, unlamented Jennifer Goodall?
During the organ prelude (“Durch Adams Fall ist Ganz Verderbt,” by Johann Sebastian Bach) I listened quietly. The Bach was definitely a good sign that the service itself wouldn’t be too happy-clappy or the hymns so “relevant” that the ink was barely dry. As the organist wrapped up the prelude and made a clever little segue into the first hymn, I wondered idly what the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music would come up with in 2012, the next time the prayer and hymn books were due for revision. Back in 1979 nobody’d had laptops or forty gigabytes of anything, so it wouldn’t surprise me if future prayer books came in the form of customizable PowerPoint programs, designed to be projected on huge screens hanging over the altar.