Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [36]
“There was some writing carved into Mary’s clothes,” I asked, innocently. “Do you know what it says?”
“It says MICHAEL. ANGELUS. BONAROTUS. FLORENTIN. FACIEBAT—‘Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence Created This.’ He carved it in there because when he attended the unveiling of the sculpture he heard people in the crowd give credit to another famous sculptor at the time, saying ‘so-and-so must have made this!’ It upset him, so that night he came into St. Peter’s and carved that inscription across Mary’s sash. But when he came back the next day, he saw what that looked like, and he was ashamed and upset that he had defaced his own artwork because of his pride and vanity. He vowed at that moment, as his penance, never to sign another sculpture of his again. And he never did.”
I paused to take that in, and it seemed like a good lesson to hear.
My other question was a simpler one. “What does Pietà mean?”
“It’s Italian,” the priest said.
“It means ‘pity.’”
“I want to see where the Towers stood,” she said, and she wouldn’t let me talk her out of it. I did not want to take my mother down to lower Manhattan. I did not want this to be her last possible memory of the city she loved, a place that was so much a part of her imagination and memories and a lifelong source of joy for her whenever she stepped onto this island. That magical place was now still smoldering, the fires underground still burning, some ten weeks after the attack. It still felt and smelled of death, and the progress of combing through the 220 stories of twisted steel and pulverized concrete in search of the departed was painstakingly slow.
“I want to see it.”
Days before, I went out to LaGuardia Airport in our Volkswagen Beetle to pick up my parents who had flown in to be with us for the Thanksgiving weekend. As I stood behind the newly tightened airport security zone I could see the two of them coming up the aisle of the Northwest Airlines terminal. My mother had not been well, and her health was deteriorating as each month went by. Yet there she was, walking three paces ahead of my dad as if she were twenty years younger, the kind of lilt in her step that only New York could give her. She also spotted me long before my dad did and started waving enthusiastically. I waved back.
Whatever “slowing down” she had done back at home was not evident once she was firmly planted in Manhattan. No longer forced to take the ferry and the bus to get into the city from her sister’s house on Staten Island, she was now “sitting pretty,” as my dad would say, in our West Side apartment. He would walk into my condo building and, without fail, remark that I was “sure livin’ high on the hog!” This was beyond anything he could have imagined on the factory floor of AC Spark Plug, and while he enjoyed the amenities and the view of the city, he remained appropriately skeptical for a man of his means.
The night before Thanksgiving, my wife and I took them over to West Eighty-First Street and along Central Park West so they could see the balloons being inflated for the Macy’s Parade the next day. It was cold and we bundled them as best we could, and for a short time they enjoyed being with thousands of New Yorkers marveling at the deflated Snoopy and slightly inflated Bart Simpson lying on the ground (though they had no idea who the latter was). It was a peek behind the curtain, one of many they had been given, due to my Life After Flint—a trip to the Cannes Film Festival with a walk up the stairs of the Palais, a seat at the Emmy Awards next to Sid Caesar the night we won, a chance to have people like Rob Reiner tell them that “your son’s film has the impact of an Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—that alone being worth the price of admission if you’re a parent, slightly embarrassing if you’re the son.
But now my mother wanted to see Ground Zero, the site of the recent massacre of 2,752 people. I acquiesced and, thinking that Thanksgiving Day would find it the least crowded there, I loaded them