Firehouse (16 page)

The news of finding Gary's body profoundly affected the other men at the firehouse. Gary's friends believe he had been giving emergency first aid, even as the building was about to topple. But that would be Bruce Gary, doing the right thing up to the very last second of his life. A number of the men realized then that they had, in their own way, loved Gary, even though, on occasion, loving Bruce Gary was not unlike loving a human cactus.

Of the memorial services, one of the most moving was the joint November 5 service at St. Patrick's Cathedral for Mike Boyle and David Arce, the Engine 33 firefighters who had recently rotated through 40/35. (Arce was known to most of the attendees simply as Buddha, so much so that when his brother Peter eulogized David, he said to the firemen, “That's Buddha to you.”) The turnout for the service was enormous, in no small part because Mike's father, Jimmy Boyle, was a warm, extroverted, immensely popular man who, as the leader of the firefighters' union, had frequently battled with Mayor David Dinkins over proposed cuts for the department. St. Patrick's was filled that day—a standing-room-only crowd. It seemed as if the entire world of New York City firefighters had come together as one immense family.

More than most men, Jimmy Boyle understood the hardship and risk inherent in this job and the pain that parents who bury their sons experience. That pain really came home to him a few weeks after his own son's memorial service, when at another ceremony he looked around and saw six senior firemen, all of them old friends of his, and all of whom had lost sons on September 11. Boyle possessed an uncannily nuanced sense of how to make other people feel comfortable in a time of grief. He always seemed to be able to get outside of his own wounds and to understand the pain of others. It did not necessarily lessen his own grief, but he knew how to hold it in in order to ease the suffering of others and to somehow take strength from the care he was bestowing. Still, for a proud and successful fireman such as Jimmy Boyle, losing a son who had followed him into the department, and who might one day have followed him as president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, was painful beyond all imagining.

What was additionally difficult was the fact that they had found neither Mike's nor Buddha's bodies. But three months later, in early February, the workers doing the excavation at Ground Zero came upon eleven bodies of men from the Great Jones firehouse, including those, it was believed, of Boyle and Buddha, which were found within a few feet of each other. They were together at the end, as they had been for most of their lives. Four men from that house had managed to escape—the entire company had been trying to get out of the north tower just as the collapse came.

Jimmy Boyle had talked to a few of the survivors, and he discovered that his son, Arce, and the nine others had been about thirty seconds from making it out when they were buried. The sheer force of the implosion drove them five stories under. Even if they had made it out of the tower, there was no guarantee they would have lived, Jimmy Boyle discovered. Those who came out and turned north lived; those who turned either south or west died.

Mike Boyle and David Arce were to be buried next to each other in the Holy Rood Cemetery in their hometown of Westbury, Long Island—buried as if they were brothers, which was only appropriate. Jimmy Boyle took some comfort in the fact that he was certain they had finally found his son's body, and from the fact that being a firefighter had been Michael's choice and that his son had died doing exactly what he most believed in.

Marion Otten slowly began to deal with the reality of not just losing her husband but of losing so many of their friends as well. Everywhere there were reminders: the bathroom that Bruce Gary had worked on, the wallpaper that Jimmy Giberson had put up. Marion recalled a day a few years earlier when she and Michael were renovating their house because they needed more room for their three sons, Christopher, Jonathan, and Jason. They had to extend the roof to cover a new addition, and some fifteen men from the firehouse had shown up to help do it. There had not been much in the way of a formal plan for this—but somehow all of the men had arranged their shifts so they could be there. They were like some kind of Amish barn-raising crew, organizing themselves brilliantly as if they did roof extensions every day for a living. The skilled men took the specialized tasks and the others served as support troops. By noon the old roof was off, and by late afternoon a new plywood roof was on. About ten of them had shown up again when it came time to put up the Sheetrock on the new addition, Marion remembered.

Marion had always understood that the firemen were family, and whoever needed help always got help. In addition to the new roof, Michael had been planning to turn the basement into a den, and in early December, her middle son, Jonathan, had casually said something about it to Matt Malecki, one of Michael's close friends at the firehouse. Matt in turn asked Marion about the plan, and she knew immediately that these extraordinary men would one day come out in full force, transforming the basement into a handsome new den.

One of the things Marion had wrestled with in the weeks after her husband's death was what to do about a memorial service—a dilemma faced by many of the other widows as well. It was hard for her to go ahead without a body, but in the middle of October the children were still talking about the possibility of their father being alive. “How long can Daddy live?” one of them asked. “How much food and water do you need?” There had to be some kind of closure, Marion decided. She thought the service should take place before the holidays. Her old friend Reverend Scholz, the Lutheran minister who as a young pastor on Long Island had officiated at Marion and Michael's wedding, realized what a terrible dilemma it was for all of these families and how important it was for the ritual of a funeral to have the body of the deceased. But in the end, Marion held the service in mid-November, as much for her children as for anyone else.

At six and a half, Skylar Mercado, who his father had hoped would grow up to be an Olympic stickball player, was at the age when little boys are most intoxicated by firehouses, and he was a special favorite of the men at 40/35. Steve Mercado had worked on the engine, but before he died, some of the truckees had been trying to recruit Skylar for the truck, though as Jimmy O'Donnell said, it was hard, because Steve had propagandized for the engine so intensely for so long. O'Donnell, a veteran truckee, had insisted to Skylar that all ladder men were great lovers, and he had even spelled it out: the
L
in lovers is for ladder, the
O
for overhaul (that is, the opening of the walls and ceiling to make sure the fire didn't spread), the
V
for vent (as in outside vent man, a truck position), the
E
for (forcible) entry, the
R
for rescue, and the
S
for search. But Skylar had seemed unmoved, and probably, O'Donnell thought, the boy had already decided long ago to be an engine man. Perhaps, O'Donnell said, they might do better one day with his younger brother, Austin.

When it first became clear to Joviana Mercado that her husband was lost, she had held back in telling Skylar the truth. But she figured that he probably already understood more than he let on, and he had probably picked up either from other kids or from the men at the firehouse that his father was dead. By the Friday after the tragedy, she felt it was time to tell Skylar the truth. When she did, he immediately wanted to know who else was missing because he had so many friends at the firehouse. She told him the names, and he knew almost all of them, save for one or two of the newest men. When she had finished, he had asked to go to the firehouse right away. He was quite nervous about it, she thought—he wondered, was it still going to be a home for him, and was he still going to be welcome there?

It had been very emotional for Skylar when he arrived at the firehouse. There were so many old friends trying to reach out to him. As he watched the men return to the house from the search parties, dirty and exhausted, he kept saying, “Where's my dad? You've got to go back and look for my dad!” With emptiness and dejection plain on their faces, the men explained that they were only taking a break, that they would go back, and that there were other search teams out there right at that moment looking for Steve.

When Joviana decided to have a service, on November 10, the men made a miniature fireman's dress uniform for Skylar, and pinned on it all his father's medals and emblems. At each memorial service the grieving families gave out small laminated cards with the deceased's name and a few details about his life, and often a prayer as well. Skylar made up his own collection of the cards for his room, and he liked to line them up and study them, as a way of remembering each man he had known.

Joviana had thought that of her two children, it would be Skylar, with greater comprehension of what had happened, who would undergo the harder time. But to her surprise it was Austin, only two and a half, who had the more difficult adjustment. Often Austin would wake up in the middle of the night and cry out for his father.

With April Ginley, grief and anger were mixed in equal parts, her friends and family thought; moreover, she wore her anger openly. Because John had been a lieutenant, and because the officers were somewhat apart from the men, she did not feel as close to the life of the firehouse as some of the other wives did. Her life had been the one she and John had shared in Warwick, and she thought of him more as a father and a husband than as a fireman.

Shortly after the attack, April toured Ground Zero, but it gave her no comfort. Some of the other widows, she knew, thought of it as sacred ground, but the tour had only served to make her angrier—not at any one person, but more at the Fates, which had robbed her of her husband overnight and had so completely changed her life. She understood that her anger seemed to make her a little different from some of the other wives, but it was the way she felt, and she could not change it; if anything, some of the therapists who were dealing with the families of the firemen believed, her anger was a more natural reaction than the stoicism exhibited by many of the other wives and families.

On the way back to the firehouse from Ground Zero, there had been an attempt to make small talk with Bob Hickey, the fireman who had accompanied her, when April, in her own words, lost it. John, she said, had not prepared her for this, and he never thought it would happen—he never thought he was going to die on the job. Hickey had tried to comfort her, but she remained inconsolable, well outside his reach. She felt that little could have been done for most of the people in the Twin Towers that day, whereas John Ginley had been on Sixty-sixth Street along with the other men, and they could have lived. Hickey tried once more to console her, telling her that no fireman ever thinks he's going to die. “John didn't prepare you for it because none of us thinks that something like this is going to happen. None of us thinks that we're going to die,” he said.

At Michael Lynch's service, April told one of his sisters, Kathleen Lynch, that she was sorry her husband had taken Michael into the building. Kathleen told her she must not think that way and recalled how many wonderful things she had heard about both John and April. But dealing with her grief remained exceptionally difficult. At Frank Callahan's memorial service, April stood in front of two older firemen and one of them had been talking about his heart attack and his bypass operation. April was irritated that the man was talking about something so
frivolous
when they were there to say good-bye to a man like Frank. She looked around and saw several older firemen with gray hair, and she thought to herself,
John will
never
have gray hair
.

She could not bear the talk about John being a hero or about how the tragedy had brought all of New York and even all of America together. Everyone kept saying how many lives had been saved because of firemen, but it brought April no comfort. Perhaps in a few months, she thought, she might see things differently. But at this point, when she put her two children to bed every night, John was not there. Throughout the fall, John's brother Bob Ginley came by often to play football with seven-year-old Connor, and she was pleased that Bob had done it, but she kept thinking that it was supposed to be John. In a year, she said, Connor was going to make his First Communion, and his father was not going to be there to see it; and someday his daughter, Taylor, was going to be married and her father was not going to be there to walk her down the aisle.

April thought her whole life was different now, different from the moment she got up in the morning to the moment she went to bed at night. She herself was a different person, she thought. All her thoughts were different. All her friends were married. She was not. April Ginley was now a single parent with two young children. She liked the old April a good deal more than the new one. That April had always known where she stood and what she wanted and needed and where her husband was. The old April was compassionate and concerned about others. The new April was much more self-absorbed and self-centered. This was not a person she liked being. She wanted her old life back. Most of all, she wanted her husband back.

Angie Callahan thought the tragedy of September 11 was much harder on a young wife such as April Ginley than it was on her. After all, she had had twenty-seven years with her man. Her and Frank's had been a strong marriage, and she had no regrets about her life, nor, she believed, would Frank have had any. She had been married to a good man, and he had done what he wanted professionally. It was a valuable life for a man: Where else, she noted, can you be brave in a time of peace, and where else can you do things that few other men do, deeds that save lives?