Day of Terror Brings a Love Renewed

The Griffiths met at the World Trade Center 22 years ago. That’s where they worked, where they kissed for the first time and where they fell in love. It’s also where they almost died, each sure the other was lost forever.

Arturo Griffith was in a Trade Center freight elevator when New York came under attack. His elevator plummeted 10 stories before the brakes caught and the doors imploded, shattering his left leg. As he was pulled to safety, he took a peek back at the north tower and saw the gash the plane had left.

“My wife,” he said. “She’s dead.”

Carmen was near the 78th floor, where she reported to work each day in a burgundy maintenance crew uniform, ferrying the suits to the top floors, mustering a cheery “good morning” for each of them. Trapped in an elevator, she clawed her way out, but not before burning jet fuel attacked her face, her hands, her legs. Her eyes were swollen shut, her earrings welded to her neck. After co-workers helped her to the ground floor, a paramedic eased her onto a stretcher.

“Don’t look up!” he shouted. “Don’t look at it!”

She did, of course.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I know my husband is gone.”

Five months later, reunited and recuperating, they are out of a job and have little means to support themselves beyond charity. Haunted by the memories of that morning, Carmen has trouble spending time alone, even doing simple chores like walking to the Laundromat. Arturo can barely leave the house because of his bum leg. Both face additional surgeries.

But inside the walls of the Griffiths’ cramped Bronx apartment, amid the uncertainty and the pain, they have rediscovered a pure, visceral affection for each other. It is a love they say is difficult to put into words.

“We’ve always been close. Now, we’re so close that it’s like she’s the nail on my finger,” Arturo, 55, said. “Now we know that if we didn’t both live, neither of us could have lived. When I found out she was alive, it was a joy I can’t describe. It was like falling in love all over again.”

They met on the job in 1980. Both were working for the World Trade Center maintenance company. He was drawn to her spunk and her fire. She was put off by his notorious string of girlfriends.

“I’ve never kissed a Puerto Rican before,” Arturo, a native of Panama, told her one day when the two of them were alone in an elevator.

“You aren’t going to kiss this Puerto Rican either,” she replied.

He got the hint. They became good friends, but still flirted.

“He used to say my Spanish wasn’t perfect,” she said.

“It still isn’t,” he said. “But it’s better than Jennifer Lopez. Rosie Perez, too.”

In 1994, he couldn’t hold off any longer, and reminded her that they had never gotten around to kissing.

“Well,” she said, as they were alone again in an elevator, “go ahead.”

“And that was it,” Arturo said. “Love made in heaven.”

They were married a year later by a justice of the peace at New York City Hall. It was his fourth marriage and her second.

They moved to a Bronx apartment so close to Yankee Stadium that Arturo would watch the games on TV, and through the window hear the crowd roar for a home run.

There was a constant merry-go-round of visitors--the Griffiths, who call each other “Ma” and “Pa,” have 12 mostly grown children between them. On many weekends they rented a cabin in rural Pennsylvania and hosted feasts for dozens of relatives.

On workdays, they rode the No. 4 train to the southern tip of Manhattan, Carmen sipping tea, Arturo enjoying a decaf coffee.

It was their usual routine on Sept. 11. When they arrived at the World Trade Center, Arturo was told to cover a shift for a co-worker, working a freight elevator in the north tower. Carmen worked elevators on the upper floors, mostly running Cantor Fitzgerald bond traders from the 78th floor lobby to their offices 25 stories above.

Flames in the Elevator

When the first plane hit, Carmen, 48, was trapped in an elevator. She pried the doors open about 18 inches, allowing five other people to crawl out between her legs. When she turned her head, she saw the wall of the elevator split apart. The flames burst inside.

“I am not going to die like this!” she shouted.

She dived into the lobby. Less than 15 stories above, a jet had exploded, and it would soon take the building down. Already the marble walls around her were cracking. Her face felt like it was on fire. Friends and co-workers guided her down to safety; her eyes were swollen so tight her tears could not escape.

She was taken by ambulance to Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn.

Arturo, meantime, was in the freight elevator.

On coffee breaks, he and co-workers who operated the World Trade Center’s spider web of freight elevators often had mused about what they would do if one fell. There were different theories. Some said they would lie on the floor so they wouldn’t break their legs. Others said they would jump up at the last second to counter the impact.

“When it actually drops, though, you don’t think of any of that,” Arturo said. “You just think: This is it. I’m going to die in here.”

The real-life sensation was terrifying--the elevator was falling and for a several seconds it was unclear whether it would stop before hitting the ground. Near the bottom floor, however, the brakes caught and the car skidded to a halt. Then the doors caved in with a powerful force, burying Arturo in rubble.

A rescue worker quickly pulled him to safety.

“I asked him how my leg looked,” Arturo said. “I didn’t want to look at it. He said it was OK. But I knew from his expression that it wasn’t too good.”

Arturo was taken to St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital.

For two days, Carmen and Arturo each thought the other was dead. Finally, a nurse delivered the news to Carmen: “We found your husband.” They were reunited several days later at the Brooklyn hospital.

She was worried that her burns, which had melted her stockings, severely injured her hand and covered much of her face, would make her unattractive. It turned out he didn’t care about that. He was only worried about hurting her if he squeezed her too tight.

“Nothing hurts,” she told him when, with crutches under his arms, he walked into her hospital room. “Nothing else matters now.”

They stayed together in that hospital room for a month, surrounded by 27 deflating balloons, a slew of U.S. flags and 85 get-well-soon cards.

They were celebrities, in a strange way. When they ambled off to physical therapy, strangers reached out and touched them, laid their hands on their shoulders, told them they had been chosen by God to survive.

But recovery was hardly glamorous. Doctors removed a 5-inch-wide graft from Carmen’s leg and used the skin to repair her hand. For weeks, the hand bled every time they changed her dressing, and large pieces of skin peeled away each day.

“It looks rotten,” Carmen said in late September. “And it stinks. It smells like I’m dead.”

Arturo had to have a large metal rod installed in his lower leg to repair the shattered bones. There were dilemmas he’d never considered: He had no way to pull his underwear over his cast until hospital workers brought him a hooked device that came to be known as the “underwear stick.”

“They think of everything,” Arturo said with a laugh.

The couple received many visitors during the day, but nights were often difficult.

“Sometimes I will lie here and I’ll just cry,” Arturo said in early October. “Tears just stream down my face and they don’t stop. I’ll look over and she’s sleeping. I’m just glad she’s sleeping.”

But she wasn’t, not soundly, anyway. Her bed was directly under an air-conditioning duct, and every time it turned on she would wake up with a jolt, reliving the attacks again.

A Sunny Day in the Fall

They were released from the hospital on a sunny morning in late October. A driver strapped Arturo’s wheelchair to the floor at the back of the ambulance. Carmen sat in the front seat. As they rounded the southwest tip of Brooklyn, she looked west and saw the Lower Manhattan skyline, seeing it for the first time without the twin towers.

“They’re gone,” Carmen said. “Just gone.”

The ambulance rumbled over the Triborough Bridge into the Bronx. Their entire apartment complex, all 150 people it seemed, waited to welcome them. Carmen ran into the open arms of her neighbors. Arturo was wheeled out of the back of the ambulance like a returning war hero, his underwear stick in his lap.

Several friends and neighbors had taped welcoming greetings to the wall of the apartment building. “Dear Carmen,” one of them read, “I know how you get when you are mad. I knew you wouldn’t let no bomb keep you down.” It was signed Big John.

Carmen tried to tell the crowd in the lobby about their ordeal. “You don’t know how hard it was,” she said. “I didn’t know where he was. I kept saying ‘He’s dead, he’s dead.’ But then they brought him to me.”

Soon she broke down in tears, and she and Arturo went upstairs to their apartment.

These days, they rarely leave the house for anything other than doctor appointments. A psychologist comes by on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they go to physical therapy together on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Both probably will require more surgery. She needs work done on the webbing between her fingers. He needs liquid and scar tissue removed from his knee.

But along the way, they say they have rediscovered an uncommon love.

They finish each other’s sentences and are sure they finish each other’s thoughts.

Both have nightmares. She hears the screams of those who didn’t make it out. He wakes up wondering if things would have turned out differently if he had made a different decision--if he had gotten in the freight elevator just a few minutes earlier and taken it to the upper floors of the tower, where he surely would have perished.

Arturo and Carmen aren’t planning anything special for Valentine’s Day. They can’t really leave the house, lest Arturo’s leg swell up again. She can’t easily cook because of her hand. Money is tight--several charities, including the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, are paying their bills.

But it will be another day together, Carmen said Monday night, another day of survival.

“We know it’s not going to ease up, not any time soon,” she said. “It’s going to be like this for a long time. But we’ll come out of it. With time, we’ll get over this. We believe that. We have to.”