Firehouse (7 page)

About an hour and a half north of the city, in upstate New York, Lieutenant John Ginley's wife, April Casey Ginley, was readjusting to the fall routine on the morning of the eleventh. It meant her kids were going back to school and that she would resume her job working for a Japanese cosmetics company. The summer had been an idyllic time for the family, she thought, and it had marked a very good period in her marriage; everyone seemed to be at the same place at the same time. So she was not quite ready for the kids to go back to school, and for the increased pressures of the fall. During the summer they had traveled to Phoenix for a family wedding and afterward had camped near the Grand Canyon for a week; then later in the summer they had gone to Martha's Vineyard and had camped there for about ten days. Although April was not particularly fond of camping, and the weather had not been especially good, they had had a wonderful time. There was no television set, and so everyone had participated in family discussions at night.

John Ginley was in the midst of a twenty-four-hour shift when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. He phoned April to tell her to turn on the television set. The engine had not yet been called, he said. She was already watching TV when the second plane hit, and, seeing the sheer magnitude of the explosion, she knew it was serious. She took some solace in the fact that John was probably still at the firehouse, way up on Sixty-sixth Street. There were a million firehouses between Sixty-sixth Street and the World Trade Center, she thought, and even if the men from Engine 40 made a run down to the site, it would take time because Manhattan's streets tended to be clogged with traffic during the day. If John and his men got there, she reassured herself, he would probably be out on the street, doing some form of EMS, rather than in the towers.

John Ginley's next call was to his brother Bob, who was also a fireman, at Engine 307 in Queens. Four days earlier, on September 7, Bob's son Ryan John Ginley had been born. Ryan was a third son, as Lieutenant John Ginley was a third son, and so this child was his namesake. Before driving to work on Monday, John had stopped by the hospital to see the baby and to visit with Bob's wife, Sue, and they had all noticed that John and Ryan John had the same unusual lines running through their palms. At the firehouse, as the first reports of the attack began to come in, and the tragedy was unfolding on television, John Ginley reached his brother, who was at home in Warwick. “Have you seen the television news?” he asked. Bob turned the set on. He thought John's voice sounded unusually somber, far tighter than usual, very concerned, but somehow determined not to show any unwanted emotion. The only other time Bob had heard it like this was back on Father's Day, earlier in the year, when there had been the explosion at the hardware store in Astoria, Queens, and three firemen had died. John Ginley had called then because he was worried at the time that Bob may have been working that fire.

Now that same tight, controlled tone was in John's voice. “Are you going?” Bob asked his brother. “Not yet,” John answered.

Soon after, Bob Ginley left for the hospital to see his wife and new son. Later, when he checked back at John's firehouse, he was told they had left at 9:24. He did the numbers in his head and decided that, with the time it took to go down the normally crowded West Side Highway, and with the south tower collapsing at 9:59 and the north at 10:28, his brother had probably missed the worst of it. As the day wore on and they heard nothing from John, he thought that his brother was simply too busy to call, and he told April not to worry, that her husband was simply overwhelmed by work. But by 5:00, Bob became seriously concerned; it was just too long a time for someone as careful as John not to check in. He kept calling the 40/35 firehouse, and finally he learned that the fireman he had spoken to earlier had gotten it wrong, that the engine had not left the house at 9:24, but instead at 9:08, just five minutes after the second crash. The moment he heard the corrected time, Bob Ginley felt a chill run through him.

Joseph Ginley had never pushed his sons to be firemen, but he had loved his job, and he had always put it out there as a possibility for them; he told them that it was a good life, you lived with other men in genuine camaraderie, and you ended up, almost without realizing it, having the rarest kind of friendships, ones with men who were willing to die for one another. That kind of loyalty was special on this earth. Most important, there was a sense of doing something of value, something that mattered in your community. All in all, Joseph said, it was a very good life, a valuable life, and his sons had witnessed that for themselves, growing up in his home. His boys, Joseph said later, grew up in firehouses, and their childhood photo albums were filled with snap-shots of them playing with the men there. The firemen seemed like additional uncles to them.

When Bob and John were still in high school, they talked about becoming firemen, and when Bob was eighteen and a half and John was seventeen and a half, they took the department exam. Their father had suggested that they take the test, because you never knew what you might want to do. Boys of eighteen were not really ready to make final career choices, the father knew, but it would be four years before they gave the test again; by then his sons might want to be firemen, so why not get in line earlier rather than later. They both were working at night as hotel security guards in Manhattan, and they were both already in very good shape—John was a high school quarter-miler who held some local records—but they got in even better shape by running the hotel stairs. They both did well: Bob scored a ninety-eight on the written test and a 100 on the physical; John a ninety-nine on the written, and a ninety-five on the physical. Some 30,000 applicants had taken the test that year, and when the list was posted, Bob was the 426th highest scorer and John, who was a year younger, was around 1,400th on a list of approximately 6,000, of whom about 5,000 eventually became firemen. John went off to college, but nothing that school offered interfered with the strong pull of a career in the fire department.

Reverend Delendick and Joseph Ginley had met at the Anchor Club, a charitable organization of Catholic firemen that was formed in the 1920s to combat prejudices against Irish Catholics in the fire department. Delendick was the chaplain of the group and Ginley was then the president, and in time Delendick officiated at the marriages of four of the Ginley boys and at the christenings of ten Ginley grandchildren. Delendick believed that religion was an integral part of the Ginley home, and that it was directly connected to the boys' desire to become firefighters. The values in the family stressed service and obligation to others; there was a desire to be part of something larger. “In a family like the Ginleys,” the reverend said, “becoming a fireman is like living out your vocation—instead of becoming a priest, you become a fireman.” As another priest said at one of the memorial services, the fire department can teach you how to put out fires, but they can't teach you the values that are really necessary for the job—the compassion and generosity of spirit, and the willingness to risk your life for others. That has to come from the home and from the religion.

Later, when everyone spoke of John Ginley and the others as heroes making heroes' decisions, April Ginley was not entirely comfortable with the description. What she had always liked about her husband was his modesty and how quiet he was—he was, she believed, the antithesis of a man who thought he was a hero. There was nothing showy about him, no macho swagger, certainly not at home, and not, she was sure, at the firehouse. She did not think of him as a hero or even for that matter as a fireman; to her, he was a father and husband. What had struck her most was how unusual John was for a man of his background. Old-fashioned and a traditionalist, he was in no way controlling in his relationship with her, as she believed many other traditionalist men tended to be; those men always wanted to make all the decisions for the family because their fathers had made all the decisions for their families. But John had always consulted with her and taken into account what she had felt on any issue that mattered to them as a couple and to their family.

April Casey (who was half Irish and half Italian; her parents, in the more rigidly enforced ethnicity of their day, had been forced to elope) and John Ginley first went out when she was twenty-seven and he was twenty-four. She had been drawn to him because unlike some of the other men she was meeting, he was so quiet and modest, and yet he was still confident and self-assured. She met him with his brother Bob and their friend Steve Milana on Memorial Day weekend in 1988. They passed the day on Steve's boat, and she spent much of the time talking to John. It had turned out to be an unusually pleasant time because he was such a good listener. He had not tried to impress her with his various exploits, but rather he seemed interested in everything about her. She was the one who did the majority of the talking, which was a little surprising because most of the men she knew liked to impress women, and the way they tried to do that was by talking about themselves.

He ended up asking her for her phone number, which she gave him, and which she had already given to his more extroverted friend Steve. She was, she later admitted, slightly shocked at herself for giving out her number to two men in one day. She and John started dating soon thereafter, and when Steve had said something to John about calling her, asking whether John would mind, John had said yes, as a matter of fact, he
would
mind. April had recently broken off an engagement with another young man, and she was still somewhat bruised from that experience. She kept reminding herself,
I don't want to fall in love, I don't want to fall in love
. But then, after about six months of seeing John, she turned to him one night and said she needed to know where this was going and how serious he was. “Are you asking me to marry you?” he said. He went shopping for a ring, and proposed on Memorial Day, a year after they had met. In 1990, they married.

April remembered the one time John had changed greatly in behavior. It happened around the time of the birth of their first child, Taylor. She had not known what was wrong, and whether or not the drastic change in him was job-related, but there was no doubt something had profoundly changed him. He seemed distant, cold, unable to talk to her, pulled into himself. For the first time, she thought, her marriage might be in trouble; that, perhaps, John was seeing someone else, although somehow that seemed unlikely. Still, a loving man who had always been there for her and open to her was suddenly unreachable.

Slowly the story came out from him. He had been on a fire in the Bronx up around the Grand Concourse and 190th Street, and the Engine had gotten to the fire a little slower than it should have, John believed. He was assigned to the back of an apartment house, and arrived just as a young woman of perhaps eighteen or twenty had panicked and jumped from an upper floor. What made it so painful was that her situation had not been that perilous; she had had more than enough time, if she had held steady. But she was young and scared, and she had not realized there was time to spare, and he had gotten there too late to talk her through it, but just in time to witness her final, desperate decision to jump. If only she hadn't panicked, he kept telling April, if she hadn't panicked, and if only we had gotten there one minute earlier. Just one minute! He could not stop thinking about it, could not get rid of the image of her jumping. April had never seen him so cut off from his normal, optimistic demeanor. Finally, covertly, she called his brother Bob, hoping that he might have been through a similar experience. She asked him to get John to talk about what had happened. Sure enough, Bob Ginley had been on a fire in which he had had to carry out the burned body of a child, a child they had just missed saving. He reminded his brother that sometimes in this job you did not always get there quite in time. Gradually John Ginley became himself again.

His father, Joseph, had always been aware of the dangers of being a fireman. He had been to the funerals of many firemen killed in the line of duty, and he had taken his boys to a few of them. He had told them of the dangers and that when you chose firefighting as a profession, you had to accept the possibility of losing your life. He himself had almost done so on two occasions—once when he had stayed a bit too long at a fire and had been burned, and another, some twenty-five years ago, when there was a fire in a men's store, and they had been hit with a terrible backdraft. On the latter fire, the lieutenant in charge had had a sixth sense about what was happening and had gotten his men out seconds before the building collapsed. Such incidents were an integral part of being a fireman, Joe Ginley knew. You always understood that there was a very high price that might have to be paid.

On September 11, Joseph and Betty Ginley were halfway across the world, on what had been planned as a long vacation in Asia. They were preparing to depart Seoul for Beijing the next morning, when Joe turned on the television set in their hotel room and saw footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers. At first he thought he was watching a movie, but then he realized he was watching a real-life tragedy that had been unfolding for some time. One of the CNN anchormen mentioned that it was believed that more than 300 New York City firemen had been lost in the tragedy, and Joseph suddenly felt a terrible fear growing inside him. Eventually he managed to get through to his family back in New York, and he learned that no one had heard from John in many hours. Joseph Ginley knew a great deal about fires and collapses, and he understood right away that unless survivors had been found immediately at that terrible scene, there was very little hope. He was sure then that his son was dead.