SATURDAY, JULY 24, 1999

    The day of the Massacre dawned bright and hot.
    It was a Saturday in late July. Hendon Chait woke up alone. Xenia and friends had left the day before on a bargain jaunt to London and Paris. Given the tumultuous turn Hendon’s life took the following day—and the ten days that followed—it was sheer luck she had decided to take off.
Actually, it wasn’t altogether luck. Xenia had a grueling job as a highly paid vice president of a brokerage house in New York where she ran the entire back office operation—telephones, computers, Internet. She and Hendon would stumble out of bed at 5:15 every weekday morning and scramble to get to the Society Hill Towers garage by six so that Hendon could drive her to the 30th Street Station to catch the 6:30 Clocker to New York. Hendon then went on to his job in Paoli, getting to the office at seven and working till six in the evening when he would drive into the city to pick up Xenia. Usually they were too tired to cook and went out for an early dinner, after which they would fall into bed by nine. For weeks, Xenia had talked of doing a “girls” outing with her commuter friends and was reminded that everybody with any sense got out of town during the Greek Picnic where 200,000 black concelebrants descended on Center City and Philadelphia went nuts.
    Hendon made a pot of coffee and drifted over to the windows of his twelfth-floor corner condo in the north building of Society Hill Towers. More like glass walls than windows, they afforded a panoramic view up and down the Delaware River with the Ben Franklin suspension bridge to the left nearby and the Walt Whitman bridge in the far distance at right with the ribbon of I-95 paralleling the river. Splayed out before him were the Penn’s Landing wharves where the last of the Great White Fleet was docked, Admiral Dewey’s massive turn-of-the-century cruiser, Olympia, its hull very white, its superstructure and vertical smokestacks painted tan, its turrets and mighty guns silent for nearly a century. Beside it, sleek, black and sinister, while at the same time reminiscent of a child’s bathtub toy, was the World War II submarine, Becuna. Across the river was the quintessential slum city of Camden, New Jersey, desperately trying to make a comeback with its new waterfront development that included the domed New Jersey State Aquarium and a Sony concert arena complex. On the other side of the Ben Franklin Bridge was a New Jersey correctional facility, its razor wire glittering in the morning sunlight. A jolly blue passenger ferry plied the river back and forth between Penn’s Landing and several stops on the Camden waterfront. To Xenia and Hendon, the river traffic—cargo ships, occasional giant cruise ships, sailboats, pleasure craft and jet skis—was endlessly fascinating. On Independence Day and New Year’s Eve and several other nights of the year when Philadelphia put on mesmerizing fireworks displays, their vantage point was the very best in the city.
    He went to the front door and opened it; at his feet were The Observer and The New York Times, both fat with the Sunday feature sections and inserts that are delivered on Saturday, thus staving off hernias for the paper delivery people. The front page of The Observer was filled with stories of the upcoming Greek Picnic in Fairmount Park. He scanned the stories and then turned to the celebrity gossip column. The Greek Picnic was a horror show, but it did not affect him; Society Hill Towers was his fortress.
    Turning to the sports pages, he devoured the big story of the day—the likelihood that Lance Armstrong, who had miraculously won his bout with testicular and brain cancer, was about to win the Tour de France.
    Hendon drifted into the den and turned on the big Sony set. For the second straight Saturday, all the networks were engaged in a full court press to mop the floor with the plane crash of John F. Kennedy, Jr. and his wife who had been buried at sea on Thursday. Chait remembered coming into this room the preceding Saturday morning at about this same time to see how Tiger Woods was faring in the British Open. Instead of the narrow fairways, waist-high rough of windswept Royal Carnoustie, the picture that came up was of a flat misty expanse of ocean. At the bottom of the screen, these words:
    John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane missing and feared
    down in the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard.
    It had taken him a few minutes to digest what was happening. He had had no idea John-John was a private pilot, let alone the owner of a sophisticated Piper Saratoga. Throughout the day Hendon kept expecting to see the British Open, but the only story of the day was live coverage from Hyannisport or Dr. Bob Arnot in the studio explaining for the umpteenth time the intricacies of flying in haze. Hendon and Donn had talked by phone that day, and Donn pointed out that this tragedy was just the latest installment in the new breed of 24-hour talkathons with their parade of experts, interviews, replays, and endlessly tedious speculations. The live soap opera began with the Gulf War. Episodes that followed included the O.J. Simpson trial, the crash of TWA Flight 800, Princess Diana’s death, the U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the Columbine High massacre. The grandest chapter of all was, of course, the Monica Lewinsky scandal with its players from central casting—the sleazy Lucienne Goldberg and Linda Tripp, the aggrieved Michael Isikoff of Newsweek whose story was scooped by that insouciant rascal, Matt Drudge, and, of course, the sanctimonious Republican legislators whom porn-master Larry Flynt exposed as being just as abusive to women as the president—Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, Bob Livingston and Newt Gingrich.
    Hendon once remembered a dinner party riff by Donn where he imagined World War II being fought in the era of 24-hour talk television. Tune in for the results of the latest CNN-Wall Street Journal Poll! Were Kimmel and Short really responsible for America being asleep at Pearl Harbor? Was a crippled Roosevelt fit to lead the country? Should Bomber Harris be fired for the Ploesti debacle? Were we losing too many men on Guadalcanal? Should Patton have been drummed out of the Army over the slapping incident?
    Now, one week later, the Kennedy story was still all over the news. Particularly appalling had been the continuing commentary of ex-Boston Globe writer Mike Barnicle. For more than a week, Barnicle was photographed, in beach chair in front of the Kennedy compound, bemoaning the family’s loss of privacy while the camera zoomed in over his shoulder for close-ups of grieving relatives. It was columnist Jimmy Breslin who said “media is the plural of mediocre,” and here they were at their most transparently dishonest.
    Hendon flicked off the set and called Donn Kilgore to see if he wanted to have lunch. The answer was yes and they agreed to meet at quarter of one at Bridget Foy’s on Head House Square.
    Little did Hendon imagine that the Kennedy tragedy would be replaced in the cable talkathon by the Mowbray Street Massacre, and that he and Donn would be locked together in an obscene Chang-Eng union that would catapult both of them into leading players in what Donn dubbed the Great Media Circle Jerk.