was a teacher who specialized in working with troubled adolescents for a decade, he’d also owned a bar. Helen taught reading to kids who needed extra help with it, mainly in a trailer in the parking lot of a Catholic high school. They struck me as maybe the nicest people on the planet. He and my brother were still roommates, but this time in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, trying to navigate young adulthood.īack when Bobby was still alive, I would occasionally see the McIlvaines. But thanks to a happy accident of timing, my brother got to spend his nights chattering away with this singular kid, an old soul with a snappity-popping mind.Įight years later, almost to the day, a different accident of timing would take Bobby’s life. My brother often thinks about what a small miracle that was: If he’d arrived just 30 minutes earlier, the suite would have been an isomer of itself, with the kids all shuffled in an entirely different configuration. ![]() On my brother’s first day of college, he was assigned to a seven-person suite, and because he arrived last, Bobby became his roommate. Here I should note that I know and love the McIlvaine family. (Danna Singer original photo courtesy of the McIlvaine family) Bobby’s body was found in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. Today, she can’t so much as recall Jen’s last name.īobby McIlvaine, with his parents, Helen and Bob Sr., at his Princeton graduation in 1997. “She became a nonperson to me,” Helen told me. Helen and her husband never saw Jen again. If Helen wanted to discuss this matter any further, she’d have to do so in the presence of Jen’s therapist. Shortly after, she wrote Helen a letter with her final answer: No, just no. When she finally left the McIlvaines’ house for good, Jen slammed the door behind her, got into her car, and burst into tears. Helen, Jen pointed out, already had Bobby’s other belongings, other diaries, the legal pads. The requests escalated, as did the rebuffs. If Bobby’s describing a tree, just give me the description of the tree. All she asked was that Jen selectively photocopy it. Helen was careful to explain that she didn’t need the object itself. Helen had plenty of chances to bring it up, because Jen lived with the McIlvaines for a time after September 11, unable to tolerate the emptiness of her own apartment. Over and over, she asked Jen to see that final diary. “One missing piece,” she told me recently, “was like not having an arm.” How, Helen fumed, could her husband not want to know Bobby’s final thoughts-ones he may have scribbled as recently as the evening of September 10? And how could he not share her impulse to take every last molecule of what was Bobby’s and reconstruct him? It raised the prospect, however brief, of literary resurrection. In that sense, the diary wasn’t like a recovered photograph. Here was an opportunity to savor Bobby’s company one last time, to hear his voice, likely saying something new. “This was a decision we were supposed to make together,” his wife, Helen, told him. It was a reflex that he almost instantly came to regret. Could she keep it?īobby’s father didn’t think. Jen took one look and quickly realized that her name was all over it. One object in that pile glowed with more meaning than all the others: Bobby’s very last diary. Maybe, he told them, there was material in there that they could use in their eulogies. And so he began distributing the yellow legal pads, the perfect-bound diaries: to Bobby’s friends to Bobby’s girlfriend, Jen, to whom he was about to propose. Less than a week after his death, Bobby’s father had to contend with that pitiless still life of a desk. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap-philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends. ![]() To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But the diaries told a different kind of story. The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. He’d kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things-longings, observations, frustrations-while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction. W hen Bobby McIlvaine died on September 11, 2001, his desk at home was a study in plate tectonics, coated in shifting piles of leather-bound diaries and yellow legal pads. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. This article was published online on August 9, 2021.
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