It Ain't Over (19 page)

The woman (think Meryl Streep in
The Devil Wears Prada
) studied every page carefully, brusquely holding up her hand to silence Layla every time she tried to provide a painting’s backstory. When the consultant closed the book, she leveled her verdict:

“It’s good—
and we don’t care
.”

Then she offered the advice that would change Layla’s life: “What does a Layla Fanucci painting look like?” Layla tried to formulate an answer, but the consultant barreled on: “In order to market your work, you have to paint a style nobody else paints”—she got an inch from Layla’s face and finished in staccato—“In. The. World.”

The art consultant sent Layla home to produce 17 more paintings over the next six months. It was a daunting assignment, but one she welcomed. “I instinctively felt that the process was going to take me where I needed to go.”

Over the next two years, they “did a dance,” with the consultant critiquing each new batch of work and Layla going back into her studio to experiment some more.

Through the process, she developed a one-of-a-kind Layla Fanucci style of cityscapes: She paints layer upon layer of color on linen canvas to communicate the mood of a city—New York, Paris, Venice, Rome. When the paint dries, she takes a brush in black oil and adds architectural details like buildings, bridges, and streets, then gives the painting life with people, motion, and energy before covering it with more color. She may paint three cities on top of the first one, creating depth and texture, so anyone who looks closely can see the other cities and architectural details bleeding through.

“For the first time, I began to recognize the influence of my dad, an architect who died in 1996. I remember from my childhood watching him at work and at home, drafting houses, churches, and buildings,” she says. “Emotionally, my art was a tie to my family and my past.”

Layla had proven herself as an original to the art consultant, who now introduced her to a prominent gallery in New York City, which offered her a solo show of 16 of her paintings. If they didn’t sell, the consultant warned, Layla’s big-time art career was done. Nine sold in one month.

Since then, she’s had shows in San Francisco and Morocco and has sold her work to collectors all over the world.

Critics also praised her work—and one in particular caught Layla’s connection to music, saying, “She captures the rhythm of the great metropolis, the lyrical splendor of its skies and the cacophony of its streets. Looking at these scenes, one understands why people return time after time to these places, like musical phrases we never tire of hearing, always finding something new in them.”

In 2006, Layla and Robert merged their boutique winery, Charter Oak, with her art business. She recently sold her largest painting to date, a nine-by-fourteen-foot work called
City of the World Opus II
, for $100,000 when a tourist walked into her on-site gallery and fell in love with it. “In a year, I sold
32 paintings and made as much money as I would have if I had taught for 33 years.

“We all have hidden talents,” she continues. “If we find them, we need to work on them every day and let them flourish. I often think of what I would have missed if I had not given up a steady, reliable salary and followed my passion.”

“People often ask, ‘How do you work with your sister?’ Truth is, I couldn’t do this with anyone but her.”

Jane Alderman Zeitz, 40

Scarsdale, New York

Liz and Steve Alderman,

Pound Ridge, New York

L
ate in the summer of 2001, Peter Alderman, age 25, was vacationing with his family. For almost a year, he’d been working at Bloomberg LP, and recently the company had called him to New York. Casually he mentioned that he would soon have his first real assignment in the city, representing the company at a conference in downtown Manhattan the following week.

Ten days after that discussion, Jane Alderman, Peter’s sister, was sitting at her desk in the Washington headquarters of Viacom when a colleague ran into her office. “Turn on the TV,” she hollered. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

At that moment, the television news organizations still knew very little,
not even what kind of plane was involved; like many people, Jane thought a private plane had somehow gone terribly off course. But she remembered that Peter had said that he was going downtown. She thought maybe she could give him a heads-up, warn him that traffic was likely to be chaotic and he should plan accordingly.

Hey, are you there?
she wrote in an email message.

Jane and Peter had always been close. Elated by the birth of a baby brother, Jane had always lavished attention on Peter, and the bond proved enduring. Both Jane and Peter had trundle beds in their bedrooms growing up, and even into their teenage years, they traded off spending the night in each other’s bedrooms.

Yes. 106th floor. There’s a lot of smoke. I’m scared.

“I couldn’t process the message,” she recalls. “It never occurred to me that he would actually be in the World Trade Center. I thought he’d be in the neighborhood, have to take a detour.”

What building?
she typed.

Windows on the World, World Trade,
he typed back.

“I freaked out,” recalls Jane. “I yelled for my boss. I called my friends. By this time, the second plane had struck.”

Can you get out?
she typed.

No, we are stuck.

Keep emailing me to let me know that you are OK.

Jane’s friends tried to reassure her. “He’ll be all right,” they said. “He survived the hit. They’ll get him out.” Then came the shocking report that a third plane had struck the Pentagon. With that, Jane and her colleagues were ordered to immediately evacuate their offices in the Watergate complex. Jane and a group of friends walked to a colleague’s apartment in Georgetown, passing army tanks that had taken positions in the street.

“We just waited together,” she says. “We didn’t turn on the television or anything. I just sat there, waiting for Peter to call and let me know that he had gotten out.” Not until later, when Jane and her friends went to a restaurant and saw that the towers had collapsed, did she realize that Peter did not get out. Peter was gone. “I kept checking my phones, but I knew.”

Jane and Peter’s parents, Liz and Steve, were in France, on “the trip of a lifetime.” Peter’s boss, Michael Bloomberg, not yet New York’s mayor, flew them home on a private plane. The shock was overwhelming, says Liz. “I always felt that if a child of mine was killed, I would never be able to stop screaming. But you can’t keep screaming. I realized you only have two choices: You either crawl into bed and never get out, or you put one foot in front of the other.”

Though still in the throes of grief, the Aldermans accepted the reality of Peter’s death and soon focused on ways to honor his memory. “My dad talked about endowing a chair; my mom talked about setting up a playground,” Jane recalls. “But nothing seemed quite right.”

Then one night in June 2002, Liz was watching the ABC News program
Nightline.
The show was called “Invisible Wounds,” and it focused on Harvard psychologist Richard Mollica’s work dealing with traumatized populations. As the program reported, one billion people across the globe—a sixth of the human race—have directly experienced torture, terrorism, and mass violence; at least half and perhaps as much as 70 percent of this group are left suffering such traumatic depression that they can no longer lead functional lives. The vast majority of these people live in places like Cambodia, where psychiatric help is practically nonexistent.

As Liz watched the show, a thought took hold in her imagination. “There wasn’t anything we could do to bring Peter back to life,” she says, “but if we could help bring these people back to life in Peter’s name, what better memorial to him than that?”

Ten days later, Steve and Liz Alderman were in Richard Mollica’s office at Harvard. It took almost no time for them to recognize that this was a cause the family wanted to embrace.

“Dr. Mollica talked about a study done in a refugee camp,” says Jane. “It showed that there were three things that fought depression among trauma victims. They were work, altruism, and spirituality. Our family recognized that in the midst of our own grief, we were seeking, each in our own way, work, altruism, and spirituality. What we wanted to do for other people, in reality, when we started, was what we were doing for ourselves.”

The Aldermans began small, underwriting a master class taught by Dr. Mollica. Approximately thirty doctors from Cambodia, Uganda, and eight other countries came together and were trained in how to treat victims of trauma and terrorism. The Aldermans, too, attended. Once they met the professionals who were confronting these horrors, once they heard their stories, they grasped that what they were doing did not go far enough.

Using money they’d received from the Victims Compensation Fund, they formed the Peter C. Alderman Foundation (PCAF) to help people who have survived terrorism, torture, or mass violence but whose trauma has left them emotionally and mentally fragile, if not broken. Since its inception ten years ago, more than 100,000 victims have been treated by the trained personnel at the foundation and at Peter C. Alderman Mental Health Clinics. Operating on an annual budget of less than one million dollars of donated funds, PCAF has funded eight trauma clinics and sponsored master classes, as well as studies to identify effective therapies.

“Our family suffered one trauma when Peter was killed,” says Jane. “Most of the patients we see in our clinics have suffered an average of seven.” Among those patients was Esther, a mother in northern Uganda. The Lord’s Resistance Army came into her village and murdered her husband with a
machete; grabbed her five-year-old son by the ankles and banged him against a tree until he was dead; and trampled to death her two-year-old son. Then they marched her out of the village, raped her for several days, and left her there.

Esther was eventually reunited with her two daughters, who were away at the time of the attack. She showed up at the PCAF’s clinic, suicidal. The clinic provided treatment, found a place for Esther to live, and connected her with a church that hosted meetings of women who had similar experiences.

“No one is going to make people like Esther whole,” says Jane. “But we have helped her to begin reconnecting to her family and community, and this will help her return to a functional life.”

The commitment dramatically changed the lives of Steve, Liz, and Jane. Steve, now 72, closed his oncology practice to work on the PCAF’s programming issues. Jane reached the practical conclusion that the PCAF required committed, trained leadership, and she accepted that responsibility. She left her job, enrolled in business school, and earned her MBA. Now 40, she runs the PCAF, managing it in a cost-effective, sustainable way. “My parents were wary,” Jane says. “They didn’t want me to devote my life to my fallen brother. But I told them no, that I believe in this work.”

Liz has focused on communications and marketing. “You never get over the loss of a child,” she says. “My grief has not abated one iota. But the foundation has been an effective antidote. It gives me a reason to get out of bed every day; it helps people; and it is a perfect way to memorialize my son, who never had a chance to leave his own mark.”

In 2011, President Obama presented the PCAF with the Presidential Citizens Medal at a ceremony at the White House.

“It’s almost impossible to admit that anything good came out of Peter’s death,” says Liz. “But through the foundation we’ve done some good. I’ve learned that I’m a lot tougher than I thought I was, that I’m smarter than I
thought I was, and that I can talk to anybody—I went up and introduced myself to Kofi Annan! And as a result, I’ve become the face of the PCAF, because I can speak comfortably, knowledgeably, and emotionally.”

When the PCAF holds its annual conferences, hundreds of mental health practitioners from around the world come together to learn better ways to relieve suffering. At the foundation’s third conference, a Somali imam opened the plenary session.