Replacement Child (12 page)

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

12:00
PM

M
Y FATHER WAS
showing a Bulova watch to a man in a black overcoat, but he was thinking about the corned beef on rye that my mother had brought him that was waiting for him in the back room.

My mother was back on the bus with Linda, headed for home. It had been a full morning already, and she was looking forward to getting Linda down to take a nap. My grandmother would need her lunch, and then my mother could relax for a couple of hours.

Donna was having lunch in the school cafeteria at a crowded table of her friends. They were swapping apples for cookies, peanut butter sandwiches for tuna. Donna ate the cream cheese and jelly sandwich my mother had packed for her, and she bought a carton of milk.

Meanwhile, Flight 6780 was about to leave Buffalo airport. There were stops scheduled in Rochester and Syracuse before its return to Newark. Because the weather was uncertain, with a cold mist forming patches of fog along the way, the pilot would
have to use instruments in order to land safely. In case of a turn in the weather, or other problems he might encounter, there were alternate airports listed in Albany, New York, and Connecticut. The flight lifted off at 12:14
PM
and landed first in Rochester at 12:37
PM
. It took off again at 12:58
PM
.

2005

I
WANT TO TAKE
a full-fledged research trip to Elizabeth, and I present the proposition to David and Justin to come with me. David is amenable, as he usually is, and blocks out some time from his job. David has seen how I’ve been changed by the death of my parents, and he understands on a deep level my quest for answers through writing this story. I feel lucky to have such a partner, one who cares to listen and follows up his caring words with actions. We’ve talked a lot lately about my writing and the conflicts I’m having with telling the story. Like how I feel a responsibility to my parents to tell the story they would have wanted, to tell my own story as I lived it, and to uncover the truths that may have eluded me. It’s a high-wire act, and at times I am caught between their truth and my own. Do I tell about my parents’ relationship? How much do I tell about my sister Linda’s life without intruding on her privacy? And how about my past husbands? Should I change their names?

David is a wonderful sounding board and helps me think through many of my issues. From the start, he’s been my number one cheerleader.

When I mention spending a day or two in New Jersey to Justin, he shrugs and packs an extra book in case he gets bored.

The Elizabeth Public Library on Broad Street is a stately old building with thick stone walls and Romanesque columns guarding the entrance.

I walk slowly up the concave marble steps, where surely Donna had walked once or twice. I wander through the children’s section, wondering if she sat on these same wooden benches while my mother read to her. My phantom sister seems alive here in this place.

We are pointed to the research area of the library, up on the third floor. The librarian there takes a moment to register my request, looks over her black half-glasses, and points to the 1952 archives.

There are lots of records to go through, all on old-fashioned microfiche, for
The Elizabeth Star-Ledger, The Elizabeth Daily Journal,
and
The New York Times
for the weeks following January 22, 1952. Luckily, there are three microfiche machines we can use. We each station ourselves at one and start working the knobs slowly enough to scan the articles, maneuvering dials to zoom in on tiny type and murky photos, scrounging for quarters to print out pages. When any of us finds something related to the crash, we shout out to the others, “Wow,” “Look at this,” “I can’t believe this.” We are getting dirty looks from the librarian, who has her index finger positioned resolutely over her pursed lips.

Justin doesn’t know that much about the plane crash. I have probably sheltered him from it just the way my parents tried to shelter me. He knows his Aunt Linda is scarred, had operations
in the past and some recently as a result. But he knows nothing about the effect the accident had on my life. That may be one of the reasons I’m writing the story. To give my son more of a sense of who I am.

David and I have talked about how the accident may have shaped me. He knows everything about my first three marriages and why I believe they didn’t work, but we haven’t been able to draw a straight line from the crash to the issues I had with my previous husbands. It’s another reason I think he’s so supportive of me trying to write my way out of my confusion and put a name to my man troubles. Though I’ve done a lot of personal work to understand my relationships, we both feel that knowing more about this connection to my past will help protect us from whatever has reared up in my psyche before. In his heart I think David feels I just wasn’t with the right man before—and now I am.

In one newspaper story, I discover that it wasn’t a fireman, as my mother said, who had held her back from the burning building. It was a man named Henry Shubecz, who had been driving on South Street, crossing Williamson, when the plane crashed in front of him. He jumped from his car to my mother’s door, saw the intensity of the blaze, and held her back—saving her life. For a moment, I think about this stranger who intersected with our lives at a critical juncture. Who was he? What was he doing there? Where was he going? And did he ever know how his act had reverberated through the next generations of my family? That in saving Linda, he made the lives of her two daughters possible as well as her two grandsons? That in saving my mother, he saved me, too?

Articles in
The Star-Ledger
describe an uproar in the Elizabeth community—investigations of the crash, the airport, and the aircraft.

A photo shows the jury from the criminal investigation scrambling through the rubble on a field trip to see the crash site, kicking through the remnants of my family home. Did they come upon Donna’s doll? Linda’s Tinkertoys? Or kick aside scraps of treasured photos that my mother tried to replace for the next fifty years?

Newark Airport was closed on February 11, 1952, after protests from the community, but the U.S. Air Force reopened it for military use after six weeks, and for commercial flights shortly thereafter.

Each new detail allows me to share in the tragedy, but I am still left with the philosophic questions:

Why this plane?

Why this house?

Why this child?

My New Agey friends talk about learning something from each lifetime. Choosing your own circumstances for each successive life in order to learn what you need for your soul’s progress.

I like this idea, but I can never swallow that Donna chose to be killed by a plane dropping from the sky when she was seven. Or that Linda chose to be scarred and in pain much of her life. Or even that I chose my role.

No, I do not believe these to be part of any master plan. We are on our own. We make decisions that determine our survival each and every day. We are at the whim of every decision made
by every other human on the planet and at the mercy of the forces of nature, whirling through this life without so much as a twist tie holding us steady. The more I read of the accident, the more I am convinced: Anything can happen.

JANUARY 22, 1952
(DAY OF THE CRASH)

1:00
PM

D
ONNA WAS BACK
in her second-grade classroom after lunch period watching a film of President Truman signing the G.I. Bill of Rights for Korean War veterans. She was thinking of the brave soldiers and the pictures she’d seen of the injured.

My father was in the back room of the store at his old oak jewelers bench that was crammed with his accounting books, adding machine, and receipts. He had spread out the bag from his lunch over the top of the mess to protect the papers and opened up the butcher paper to retrieve his sandwich. He could keep an eye on the front of the store from this vantage and pop out to the counter if a customer walked in. Biting into the sandwich, he felt a surge of affection for his wife, who thought to bring him lunch.

My mother and Linda walked the two blocks from the bus stop to home. Linda was getting sleepy, and my mother let her walk the last distance to tire her out fully for her nap. They climbed the steep stairs to their second-floor apartment. My mother peeled off Linda’s coat and her own and hung them both in the hall closet.

Captain Reid was checking the weather at Syracuse airport. He may have been worried about the fog and cold rain, but by the time he landed in Syracuse at 1:34
PM
, visibility had improved, and he had no problem at all. In fact, the flight was routine to the point of boredom.

1963—1972

M
Y MOTHER HAD
not been out of bed all day. She was still in her flowered nightgown. The room was stuffy and close. She wasn’t reading a book, watching TV, or even sleeping. On better days, she would be waiting for me with a glass of milk and a snack of cookies or fruit. She’d be planning dinner or telling me to get in the car to come with her on some errand.

I first noticed it happening when I was around eight years old, and then at intervals that might be spaced out for months or sometimes years.

On one of my mother’s “bad” days, I would enter her room quietly, sit on the edge of her bed, and tighten my insides into a solid core. She would pat my hair and take my hand and stroke it. When I found her in bed, I knew I would need to be the one giving comfort.

“How was your day, honey?”

“Fine, Mom. Are you sick?”

She would sit up, pull me toward her, and hug me very hard. She’d whisper in my ear, “I love you so much, sweetheart.”

I would lean away. To distract her, I’d tell her how my friend Susie had to move to Kansas, and how we were all so sorry to see her go so far away. Did she think we should have a going-away party for her? Or I’d talk on and on about how much I wanted to learn to play “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on my guitar—anything to keep up the banter, to make her smile, to stay away from her pressing need for me.

I leaned away. I couldn’t hold her together myself.

I was grateful when my father finally came home. He would take in the scene and immediately change his end-of-a-long-day tired face to the one he used to cheer up my mother.