Forgotten City in a Triangle of Tragedy

The president has asked the country to move on, and many parts of the country seem ready to comply.

Not this region, not yet.

Something has happened to Boston, the third city in this country’s triangle of tragedy. New York and the Washington area took the hits when terrorists struck more than a month ago, leading to U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan.

But Boston was the launch pad.

Two planes that struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 originated here at Logan International Airport. They carried mostly New Englanders and were flown by pilots from this region. The towers they hit were filled with people who had close ties to Boston’s busy financial industry. And even the day’s third target had links to the city. Boston, a rich intellectual center, exports wonks who work at the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington.

The proximity feels raw and undeniable. So does a gnawing sense of guilt. For many, the ache of culpability fast translates to anger aimed at public officials who let Logan Airport become an easy entry point for terrorists.

“In effect,” said writer and theologian James Carroll, “Boston was turned into a weapon against New York. It’s not rationally connected in a causal way. But I feel a sense of outrage toward our political establishment that I haven’t felt in a long time.”

Bruce Gellerman, a radio show host here, said, “It resonates. It resonates. There is a sense of shared responsibility here. We in Boston are profoundly wounded. This has gone through us, not just to the bone, but it is part and parcel of who we are and who we will be.”

Around the city, outsized emotions surface quickly--as if people here were desperate to release their feelings. Few conversations of more than three minutes bypass the subject of Sept. 11. In Boston, it is all about degrees of separation: Where were you? How often do you fly those planes? How many friends or family members did you lose?

“I’ve been trying not to be the one who brings ‘it’ up,” said the Rev. Debbie Little, an Episcopal priest. “But I am finding that ‘it’ always gets brought up.”

Little was at Trinity Church in New York, three buildings away from the World Trade Center, when the airplanes struck. She heard the first crash, saw the second--and ran for her life. She shudders now because Boston’s own skyline is beautifully dominated by a version of the twin towers: the Prudential Center and the glass column called the John Hancock Building. Echoing the view of many in this city, Little said she is haunted.

“Every time I look at the Hancock, I see an airplane flying into it,” she said.

Linda Tischler, an editor at the business magazine Fast Company, said upscale lunches ostensibly devoted to food and wine focus instead on the links to New York and the Washington area--and, most of all, to Sept. 11.

“In Boston, we take the air shuttle to New York like it’s a bus,” Tischler said. The plane flies over the tip of Manhattan, directly above the site where the World Trade Center stood. The route of the two Los Angeles-bound planes was also familiar to Boston business travelers, Tischler said.

“All of us have those boarding passes tucked in our books as bookmarks. I fly that American flight all the time,” she said. “Those were our people on board. Those stories are our stories.”

The connections are close and personal, said Ira Jackson, director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In a single week, Jackson said he attended five memorial services for friends who died on the two airplanes.

At one service, the victim’s daughter gave the eulogy, then hopped on a train to New York. There, Jackson said, she delivered the eulogy for her best friend--”her best friend having been killed at the World Trade Center when her father’s Flight 11 hit it.”

Presiding at a memorial for a victim of Flight 11, Rabbi Harold Kushner said the crowd took him by surprise.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people turned out,” Kushner said. “It went beyond anything I had seen. I think people were grieving not so much for Robin Kaplan as for what happened. I think that is why you saw such an exaggerated turnout.”

But Boston also is known for its restraint, its Yankee reserve. Grieving excessively when there is no dust to sweep up, no broken buildings to reconstruct, seems somehow out of place. The city defers to the grief of New York and the Washington area--all the while feeling inextricable sadness of its own.

“I think one feels that so many other people have suffered in a more obvious, life-changing way that to be burdened, or to be encumbered by fear, anxiety, a sense of uneasiness--one almost feels indulgent, as though you don’t have the right,” said Sandy Goroff, a publishing consultant. “I think, in a way, that makes the emotional discomfort stronger.”

One month after the attacks, Goroff fled to visit relatives in Florida, explaining, “I didn’t feel emotionally safe in Boston.”

Novelist Anne Bernays concurred, saying, “We are the part of the triangle that got left out. But you know all the while that it’s there, that there’s a very close connection.”

The city’s disquiet may trace to a broad feeling of direct responsibility, said psychotherapist Rosamund Zander.

“When something happens like this, of course our minds go through, what went wrong, what did we do wrong?” said Zander, who studies the dynamics of forgiveness.

“‘Why did they choose us?’ becomes a personal thing. Suddenly, we’re the first cause in a sequence. Naturally, we in Boston become marked people.”

Oddly, said Zander, there is a positive side to this process: “People are thinking very deeply, broadening the scope. I think we feel that we are participants in the experience, that we are active participants.”

The stewpot of strong feelings has produced a strange mix of results.

Cab drivers with Middle Eastern surnames are newly suspect: accused by association of having taken advantage of Boston’s openness to immigrants.

Yet the dreaded Yankees, the team that routinely destroys Boston’s beloved Red Sox, benefited from a wave of sympathy toward New York.

As the local team finished yet another washed-out baseball season, some fans at Fenway Park started in with derogatory chants about the Yankees. But in a scene seldom seen or heard here before, they were drowned out rapidly by Red Sox fans booming “We love New York.”

“Totally extreme,” said Boston University professor Robert Pinsky, one of this country’s former poet laureates. “New York has become popular here.”