One Family Lost, One in Mourning
And as I tremble I look once again
to my ocean
And I know in my heart
that across that ocean on another shore
You are thinking of me too.
--Excerpt of an untitled poem by Candace Silverman, written for a college class last fall.
****
On three different occasions over the last few days, Richard Bergman mistook strangers and thought for an instant that he saw Etta Silverman and her younger daughter, Jamie. Each time that wave of relief was eviscerated by reality: The entire Silverman family--Etta, Jamie, husband Eugene and older daughter Candace--was gone with the 226 others on TWA Flight 800.
Only one entire family, the Silvermans of Bel-Air, was lost on Flight 800. They left behind another family, the Bergmans of Brentwood, who will never feel complete again.
For more than a decade, the two families’ lives and households inextricably wove together, a rich tapestry of daily life chores and vacations. They consulted on every significant decision from career moves to decorating their homes. They purchased a condo in Palm Springs together. They had food fights and fierce water battles with hoses.
Etta Silverman and Barbara Bergman saw each other every day and usually spoke several times a day by phone. They ran errands, perused clothing racks, went to the grocery store together. If one woman was cooking and realized she lacked a key ingredient, the other fetched it from the market.
When 13-year-old Lauren Bergman needed help learning the prayers that she will recite this Saturday during her bat mitzvah, Candace Silverman, 22, and Jamie Silverman, 15, each tutored her, promising rewards of shopping trips.
When Steven Bergman was too young to drive and his mother couldn’t take him to the golf course, he called Etta. Unbeknownst to their children, Etta and Barbara would chat about how one day they hoped Steven and Jamie would marry.
Today, with the Silvermans’ relatives in the East, the Bergmans are executing the Silvermans’ will. They are planning funeral services, waiting for the last Silverman body--Eugene’s--to be found in the waters near East Moriches, N.Y. Then the awful news will truly sink in.
“Our family wasn’t the four of us,” says Steven Bergman, 16, blinking back tears. “It was the eight of us. We’ve lost our family.”
Half of my world is embracing your memory
Half of my world is grieving your loss
Halfway across the world I look at what’s before me
And I wonder if your world now houses the half that was mine
--From Candace’s poem
****
Three years ago, Steven had his bar mitzvah in Israel. As the time approached for his sister Lauren to have her bat mitzvah, she, too, wanted to go to Israel, where some of her relatives live. Lauren chose the spot: the rooftop garden of Hebrew Union College, overlooking Jerusalem.
Three Silvermans had attended Steven’s bar mitzvah. (Candace was busy with college.) They would, of course, go to Lauren’s. Before meeting the Bergmans in Israel, Gene and Etta decided they’d take their two daughters on a 10-day vacation to Italy.
This would be a special trip. Candace had just finished USC with a double major in English and psychology. A gifted writer, she’d talked about interviewing for public relations jobs in San Francisco--a venture both Etta and Gene weren’t crazy about because they wanted their eldest closer to home.
Candace told a close friend that she didn’t want to go on the family trip. This was no surprise. Candace didn’t like to travel, though she had spent one summer taking classes in Oxford, England. She’d make plans for trips, even purchase plane tickets, and then cancel a couple of days before.
But Gene and Etta wouldn’t take “no.” With Candace poised to launch a career, they figured this could be the last family vacation.
Gene Silverman, 54, a tax attorney and partner with DeCastro, West & Chodorow, ever busy on the phone with clients and friends, stunned friends by telling them he wouldn’t be in touch with the office for the entire three weeks.
After touring Rome, Florence, and Venice (using the same guides whom Richard and Barbara employed the year before), the Silvermans would meet the Bergmans in Jerusalem.
The night before the Silvermans’ flight, they dined with the Bergmans at the Beverly Hills restaurant La Scala. Conversation ricocheted across the table. Lauren Bergman had just returned from camp and was upset because she broke the Italian blue enamel charm that Etta Silverman had given her. Etta promised to get six more on this trip--one to wear, five as backups.
Jamie was sad because two school friends had been killed in a car accident earlier that week and she would miss the funeral. Candace, her red-brown hair cut just above her shoulders, her crystal blue eyes sparkling, joined the adults discussing the sights the Silvermans would see in Italy. Barbara offered to help Etta pack, an offer that was declined. At the end of the evening, as valets ran to get their cars, the families kissed, hugged, and told one another, “I love you.”
Gene promised, “Next week in Jerusalem.” Richard and Barbara went home feeling buoyant.
The next day, Etta called Barbara three times from Los Angeles International Airport before her flight took off, just to chit-chat: Could Barbara purchase and bring the sweater that they’d seen shopping? Etta had forgotten to pack the sugar substitute, Equal. Try raiding the airport coffee stands, Barbara advised.
In her last call, Etta Silverman sounded annoyed. The leg of their flight from New York to Rome had been canceled. The family could now take a different flight to Italy, sitting separately, or fly to Paris sitting together in first class and taking a connecting flight to Rome.
They chose to fly together. They would be in Paris just long enough for Etta to dash into the duty-free shop and buy Barbara one of the small, delicate Limoges boxes that both women collected.
Etta had just finished a trip. In April, she’d flown to Maryland, where one of her five brothers lived, picked up her 82-year-old father, and driven him to California. Dad did not fly. Now, days before her planned European vacation, she’d driven Dad back to his home in Oklahoma.
This was Etta’s way. It reminded Barbara of the evening that cemented their friendship 14 years ago, shortly after the two husbands had met professionally.
The Bergmans had moved into a new house, three blocks from the Silvermans. That night, the Silverman family showed up at their door. Knowing that the Bergmans wouldn’t have unpacked, the Silvermans brought their own fine china, silverware, a bottle of champagne and a hamper filled with a home-cooked dinner.
“For whatever the reason, the chemistry was there,” recalled Richard Bergman, 42, an investment manager. “My closest friend in the world was Gene. My wife’s closest friend was Etta. My son’s closest friend was Jamie.”
It became a special bond of friends who knew they would grow old together.
The 12-year age difference between the men didn’t matter. They counted on one another for serious advice and hearty laughs. Each played practical jokes on the other. One night, Gene called the Bergmans, impersonating a Westec security officer. There had been trouble with their alarm system, he told them, disguising his voice.
For the next 45 minutes, Gene had the Bergmans scrambling all over their home, opening doors, shutting windows until the real security police showed up. By then, Gene was howling with laughter on the phone.
The payback came another time. At dinner in a restaurant, Richard turned to the waiter, waved him over to Gene, whose hair was prematurely gray, and asked: “Please give my father the check.”
Etta was just as likely to jump into the fray. During one vacation to Las Brisas resort in Acapulco, Barbara used her beginner’s Spanish to order appetizers to the two couples’ private pool. Waiter after waiter appeared, laden with trays. Barbara suddenly realized she’d inadvertently ordered food for 40, not four.
When the last waiter disappeared, Etta picked up a guacamole platter. With a gleam in her eye, she expertly tossed it at Richard’s face. Bull’s-eye. The food began to fly.
‘Oh my God’
On July 17, just as the Bergman family sat down for a dinner of pineapple chicken and soybeans, Richard’s mother called. Had he heard about the TWA plane crash? Don’t worry, she told him, it’s not the Silvermans’ plane to Rome. This was a flight to Paris.
“Oh my God,” Richard said. “I have to get off the phone.”
He ran and turned on the television. Then he started dialing TWA. Were the Silvermans on Flight 800?? Or had they changed their plans again, maybe taken a flight to Milan? Hoping to expedite his request for information, he told the airlines he was Etta’s brother. After several agonizing hours, Richard learned the Silvermans were not aboard the Milan flight. Panic set in. He called Etta’s and Gene’s brothers, but the relatives were already alert to the possibility.
He called every friend of the Silvermans he could think of. Perhaps, Jamie or Candace had called someone and told them the one crucial piece of information Etta had not relayed to Barbara: the number of the flight the family was taking out of New York. But no one knew.
At 2:15 a.m., Etta’s brother called Richard. The airlines believed the Silvermans were on Flight 800. Richard’s son Steven began screaming and pounding the floor of his parents’ bedroom.
Richard dialed and redialed the Silvermans’ hotel in Rome. Had the Silvermans checked in yet? No. In Richard’s final call, the hotel concierge wondered: If the family was on the flight that crashed, could he release their rooms?
No, Richard thundered. “You are not releasing their rooms!”
Six hours later, the news was confirmed: the Silvermans had boarded TWA Flight 800.
Over the next few days, Richard Bergman, aware that the bodies would have to be identified, gained a new grim intimacy with his friends.
For days after the crash, as the five phone lines in his house rang endlessly, he quizzed the limo driver to find out what clothes the family had worn to the airport. He talked with the family’s doctor and dentist. He learned Gene had one mole removed four centimeters above his left eye and another from his left ear--minor surgeries that would leave telltale scars. Jamie had a bunion on her left foot and a wart on her right index finger.
Frantically busy, Richard still could not escape the sorrow welling up inside him. “I’d never felt this uncontrollable wave of emotion,” he said.
Through it all, he kept asking himself: What would Gene do here? How would Gene handle this?
Until the bodies were found, Richard nurtured his own hope. Perhaps, by some miracle, they had escaped death. Perhaps they were sitting in a life raft at sea.
On Sunday, July 21, four days after the downing of Flight 800, 1,500 mourners gathered at Stephen S. Wise Temple, the Bergmans’ and Silvermans’ synagogue, to remember the Silvermans.
Two hours after the service, TWA representatives told the family that they believed they had found the bodies of Etta and Candace. It squashed what little hope Richard had harbored. Four days later, TWA found a body it believed to be Jamie’s. Now only Gene remains undiscovered.
“It just goes on and on,” Richard said wearily. “If they were located and given a proper burial, maybe you could move on.”
After consulting a rabbi, the family decided to proceed with Lauren’s bat mitzvah. There will be no flying to Israel. Instead, they will host a small ceremony here.
“We’re empty, lost, and heartbroken,” said Barbara.
Richard came downstairs one recent night, thinking he left a light on. There sat his son Steven, quietly gazing at the numerous photographs of the Silverman family atop the mantle in the oak-paneled living room. He and Steven talked, trying to make sense of the overwhelming tragedy.
“I’m still waiting for them to walk in the door and say, ‘Hi, guys, we’re home,’ ” Steven said later. “I miss Jamie so much I can’t think about her not being there and that a picture will be the only time I see her.”
These days, Steven can’t help but muse about Jamie, the friend with Natalie Wood-like good looks and who was as close as a sister. He remembered how she could always finagle a ride from him and how 400 days before she was due to get her driver’s license, she’d begun a countdown. She’d even figured out what kind of car she wanted (a two-door turquoise Ford Explorer).
“People say it gets easier over time,” said Steven. “But it hasn’t gotten easier.”
Unanswerable questions gnaw at the Bergmans as they think about the last few seconds of their friends’ lives: Was each daughter sitting with a parent? Fragments of news torture them. Barbara heard a report that one rescuer was taken aback by the beauty of a dead woman in her 20s. Candace, she thought. It had to be.
I look out over a clear blue ocean
and think to myself
that somehow, somewhere you are out there
looking back at me
A thought crosses my mind
Is it possible that this water that touches my toes
once caressed your lips, the way I once did
And that maybe you are holding me close to you
Holding your heart in an effort to relinquish the pain
now that I’m gone?
--From Candace’s poem
* ANTI-TERROR UNITY: World powers agree to anti-terrorism principles. A4
