Captain Fred ILL

Captain
Frederick Ill Jr.
Ladder 2

9-11-2001

Sunday Journal: A hurt that must be shared
By MARTY ROSEN

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This is New York and we are New Yorkers. We take civic pride in tuning out loud noise and minor dangers, like the crazy people who lurch toward us on subway platforms.

No more.

I ride 40 blocks to the Pierre Hotel, where hundreds of numb, tear-stained people wear tags with the names of the missing. My cab driver's name is Mohammed, with an equally Arabic-sounding surname, and for 20 blocks I am ashamed of myself as I fight the urge to leap out and walk as my mind conjures danger. This is someone's father, a working stiff from Queens.

But . . . what if fanatics used our taxi fleet as car bombs?

Unthinkable.

The A train slows in the dark tunnel, before the 59th Street stop, and the handful of us with a place to go exchange worried looks, breaching our own unwritten code against eye contact.

"I need to do something life-affirming," said a reporter friend, after her fourth day assigned to the morgue.

Another friend abandoned her job as a volunteer, first at a blood bank, then in Tribeca, where she shepherded the elderly to retrieve possessions from apartments in the war zone, through the acrid, thick yellow smoke and the stench of death.

We are exhausted.

The Friday after the attacks, proclaimed a Nation Day of Prayer, I walked with my boyfriend to Rodeph Shalom, an ornate old temple on 83rd Street. Small children handed us white candles as we entered the sanctuary, past a table stacked with boxes and tissues.

We prayed for strength, we prayed for healing. We prayed for the five families at the service whose sons, daughters, wives and husbands were lost beneath a 10-story stack of melted iron and shattered concrete.

From a row behind us, a man whispered to a friend: "My best friend's son-in-law is missing. He started to work at the World Trade Center a week ago on the 92nd floor. A week ago."

We filed onto 83rd Street at 7 p.m., our candles lighted as we sang America the Beautiful. Above us, silhouetted figures leaned from apartment windows holding votive candles. A young man tended a half-dozen candles melting on a stoop. Our voices rose: "Oh say can you see . . ."

We sang to the darkening sky, then slowly dispersed, walking toward the heart of the crowded Upper West Side, a strip of Broadway that had gone quiet and dark. Down the street, about 500 more people were gathered in front of Engine Co. 74. Firefighter Ruben Correa was among the missing. We stood in front of the empty bay, now more than 1,000 people holding candles and staring at the photo of the missing young firefighter. Several people had placed bouquets beneath the picture.

Five minutes passed, then 10. Pieces of anthems were picked up by the crowd, then softly faded to a restless silence broken only by a roar of an F-16 fighter jet. We saw the lights of the red engine first, red and yellow emergency lights cutting through the dark. The truck stopped, and the crowd parted, leaving room enough for the rig to slowly roll toward the station by candlelight.

A crescendo of applause greeted them.

"USA, USA," some of us chanted.

Now we drifted to Columbus Avenue, suddenly revived with open restaurants and throngs of New Yorkers, holding candles, wearing red, white and blue ribbons. We sat outdoors to have our dinner, serenaded by subdued laughter and honking horns.

We looked so normal.

But this morning, in the New York Times, there is a story about a fire captain I knew. Fred Ill Jr. was stationed at a midtown firehouse. Two years ago in an act of bravery that riveted the city, he pulled Edgar Rivera, a Bronx father of three, from beneath the No. 5 train after he was pushed off a crowded platform at rush hour. Rivera lost both his legs. Ill came to the Daily News newsroom to thank me for writing about him. He was thrilled to be recognized, even more excited that later he had been able to get Rivera's son into a private school. Ill was a dad, too, and he talked that day about his 10-year-old daughter, Jennifer.

Ill was one of more than 300 firefighters to die that Tuesday.

I rode past Engine Co. 74 afterwards, I can't say why. A child had hung a white ribbon around Correa's picture. "We miss you," it said. Dozens of white buckets outside the bay held thousands of flowers that spilled to the street, and the window ledge was ringed with flickering votive candles.

And wherever I looked, hardened tears of wax spattered the pavement.

- Former Times staff writer Marty Rosen lives in New York City.