Firehouse (12 page)

If Mercado seemed edgy on the surface, always ready to zing someone else, he was also, the others thought, unusually sensitive. One of the things he loved about being a fireman, Jovi thought, was the respect that he and the other men got when they drove to and from a fire—the people in the streets waving and smiling at them, and even occasionally, cheering. The respect that went with the job, he told Jovi, was one of the things he liked best about what he did—people understood that what he did mattered. About six years earlier, on West Seventy-fourth Street, there had been a very tough fire, from which the men had pulled several people, including a young woman who seemed in very bad shape. Mercado had performed CPR on her, and she seemed to be improving. They took her to the hospital. The word was that she was going to recover. The next morning, after Mercado got up, he went directly to the hospital, only to discover that she had died during the night. He was, the other men realized when he got to work, utterly disconsolate.

Back in Islip, Long Island, Marion Otten finally heard from family members that her brother Michael had made it out safely. That meant her thoughts were now only about her husband, her Michael. She knew that it was her part of the bargain of being married to a fireman that she was not to worry about her husband. The job, her husband always insisted, was not that dangerous. When she would raise the question of danger, her Michael would talk about his own father, Richard Otten, who had been a fireman. “Look at him,” Michael Otten would say. “Thirty years on the job before he retired, and he got maybe a couple of bruises and bumps, but nothing ever happened—or nothing serious anyway.” So, nothing bad was going to happen to him. His and Marion's matter-of-fact conversations about his work had practically become ritualized: “How was work?” “Good.” “What kind of runs did you go on?” “The usual.” “What kind of usual?” “Gas leaks. A car fire. The usual stuff. Nothing very much.” Nothing very much, she thought, except sometimes she knew, nothing very much meant that he and the other men had risked their lives.

Some days when he would tell her that it had all been just the usual, his father would call, and Michael would talk with him about the jobs he had been on, fireman to fireman. She would listen in, feeling, as so many of the wives did at such moments, like something of an outsider as they talked shop. Michael would go into considerable detail—who had been good, and who had not been good. By overhearing those conversations, she realized that it was never routine. But she also knew that it was part of the code of the men that they did not want their wives to worry, so they deliberately edited the information they gave them. That created a special dilemma for the wives, she thought: They had to pretend that the constant possibility of danger did not exist, when in fact they all knew that it
did
. “The job,” she said, “is to learn how to live around it—you pretend that it's not really there, and that your lives are as normal as everyone else's.”

In October he would have marked sixteen years with the department, and they were happy years for them as a couple. The tragedy occurred, his family and friends thought, at the very best moment of his life; he had a wonderful family, he was immensely popular with the other men at his firehouse, and he loved his job. Her Michael was a marvelous, exuberant, playful husband, Marion Otten thought. She loved the contradictions in him, that this man who did dangerous things was always playing with his sons or cooking. In fact, he loved to cook. He also loved to shop for food—they would argue over whose turn it was both to cook and to shop. He spent more time watching the Food Network than most women she knew. One other thing that set him apart from almost everyone else, she recalled, was that he was always smiling; later, after it was all over and she had accepted the idea of his death, she looked through their family photo album. She was astonished to see that Michael was smiling in every single snapshot in the book.

He was a fireman's son and a fireman's grandson, and according to everyone's memories of him, he had loved to try on his father's uniform as a boy. Henry Otten, his grandfather, had been a fireman in Brooklyn and Queens, and Henry's son Richard had often hung out at the firehouse when he was a kid, and had sometimes even shown up at the fires the men were covering. In time, Richard Otten became a fireman, and he had enjoyed taking his son Michael, the second of his five children, to the firehouse—especially on Thursdays every other week, when they went in to pick up Richard's paycheck. Starting when Michael was about five years old, that had become a family ritual, and there would often be other kids there. The men always made a fuss over the kids and let them play on the rigs. When Michael was twelve, he began to hang out a bit more, at Ladder 24, near Madison Square Garden, and he would even sleep over once in a while, and slide down the pole with the men when there was an alarm. Sometimes he would put on some turnout gear—well, not exactly a complete set of turnout gear, and perhaps it was a little large for him—and he would even go off on some runs with the men. Richard Otten thought his son had never really considered anything else as a career.

Marion Otten agreed. It was, she thought, the only thing he had ever thought seriously of doing. When he got out of high school, he bounced around a bit, going from job to job, making just enough money to be able to have a good time. He briefly went to college, but it was obvious that his mind and heart were elsewhere, and there had been no great effort on the part of the college officials to dissuade him from leaving. Michael was still kicking around somewhat aimlessly when he met Marion Otten, who was no kin, and who was already quite serious about her purpose in life. She was the daughter of German immigrants who had come to the United States in the 1950s. Hardworking and pragmatic, they intended that their children would focus their energies in order to succeed in this new country—nothing would be wasted. When Marion met Michael, he was twenty-three and she was twenty, and she was studying to become an occupational therapist. She did not seem like a person who was going to spend much time with a man who wanted to coast through life.

At the time Michael was still hanging out, making just enough money to party, but, Marion suspected, he was already beginning to work out the puzzle of his life, and was aware that the time was drawing near when he had to make some hard choices. She had already completed two years toward her degree at Stony Brook, and was transferring to a Brooklyn medical school to finish. Michael was working for Northrop Grumman out on Long Island, but not taking the job very seriously. Eventually he was let go, which came as a genuine surprise to him. It was the one time she had seen him unhappy—it wasn't that he really liked the job, but he was still shocked at being fired.

He had taken the fire department test for the first time when he was eighteen and had not done well. Having been as casual about it as he was about the other things in his life, he had not prepared very seriously, but rather just showed up that day. That he had done so poorly, Marion thought, was something of a disappointment to his father. But now, having met Marion and beginning to take a hard look at his life and the options left to him, Michael Otten started getting more serious. Eventually he studied hard and took special classes to prepare for the firemen's exam, and he got himself in very good shape. He nailed it, getting a 100 on the written part, and a ninety-five on the physical.

It was the right life for him; as his friend Mike Kotula would say after his death, “Mikey, with that lovely smile, made it more fun for everyone. Everyone else wanted to smile as well.” At the house, he was known as the expert on classic comedies: He knew every line from
The Three Stooges;
he could do a very respectable Jackie Gleason on
The Honeymooners
, getting the lines out before Gleason spoke them; and he was, the others thought, just about up to speed memorizing
Seinfeld
routines.

Like his sitcoms, Otten took his ancestral pride very seriously. He was German in a predominantly Irish environment. Because of this ethnic tilt, he had to scramble for his turf, and when Pfeifer showed up for his first day, they bonded with each other practically from the moment they met. Otten came up to him and asked, “What's your last name?” “Pfeifer,” he answered. “That's a German name, right?” Otten asked. Pfeifer said it was. “Are there any other Germans here?” Pfeifer asked. “No, just the two of us,” Otten said. So Otten got Pfeifer a locker next to his own, and that area immediately became known as Kraut Korner, decorated with various German flags and decals. (When a phone call would come in for either of them, and Bruce Gary answered, he would yell out, “Will one of the two Nazis pick up the phone?”) Otten would refrain from marching in the St. Patrick's Day Parade, although many of the non-Irish firemen did so as a point of solidarity with their Irish colleagues. Otten marched in the German-American Steuben Parade instead. And each year for Oktoberfest he would host a party with beer and bratwurst at his house—the men called it the Ottenfest.

Otten and Pfeifer became even closer when Caryn Pfeifer, Ray's wife, was facing a serious kidney operation, for which her sister was going to be the kidney donor. The only area hospital where they could get two surgery rooms side-by-side was at Boston's Beth Israel, so Ray had to go up to Boston during that period, often sleeping in the car to save on hotel costs, until friends made a connection with a Boston firehouse, Ladder 4, where he could stay overnight. In those difficult months, it was Mikey Otten who helped him, who would drive to Boston with him, and who would stay on the phone for long hours with him, to reassure him that he wasn't alone, that it would all turn out okay. It was the kind of thing family did, thought Pfeifer, and in the firehouse, your friends became like an extension of your family.

Over the summer Otten had been studying hard for the lieutenant's exam. The first time he had taken it, he had not prepared sufficiently, much as with his first attempt to get into the department. “I got a seventy-one,” he told Pfeifer, and Pfeifer was pleased. That was pretty good for the first time on such a tough test, Pfeifer thought, and he praised Otten for doing so well. “Yeah,” said Otten, “seventy-one wrong.” But he planned to take it again in October, and this time Otten had worked hard to prepare and had told his father that he was very confident about passing.

Kevin Bracken tended to be more than a little overweight, and his nickname was Pugsley, after the character on
The Addams Family
—they even put it on the back of his softball uniform. That morning his wife, Jennifer Liang, was with a neighbor, and they had turned on the television set just as the second plane hit. Jennifer immediately called the firehouse and was told that the truck had just left. At first she, like many others, thought they had probably left too late for the worst of it.

In those early hours, she did not worry much about her husband. At one point she thought she saw Ladder 35 on television, but it was hard to know for sure. Eventually, as morning turned into afternoon, she began to call the firehouse hourly, but she still was not that worried. The absence of calls from Kevin was not unusual because he was in no way the kind of man who felt that he had to check in with his wife all the time. By mid-afternoon, though, she did begin to worry, and at around 4
P.M.
she went over to the firehouse and ended up staying there through the night and the following day.

Some of the other wives had come as well, and everyone there was trying to hold out hope for the men. But very early on, Jennifer had an eerie feeling that they were all gone. All of them. It was the absence of any news—not just from Kevin, but from all of them. All those talented, tough, resilient men, and not a single word from or about any of them. As it grew darker, she had a hard time watching the men from other shifts return from their search-and-rescue missions. Pain and exhaustion were all over their faces, and they could barely look at her and the other wives. She was scared for them, worried that they were going to push themselves too hard. If that happened, even more men were going to get killed, and they had lost enough men already, she thought. There was a brief flurry of hope sometime on Wednesday when the news circulated that Kevin Shea had been found and taken to a hospital. There was talk that this was just the beginning and that they were going to find others, but she had her doubts. Some of the officers were trying to rally everyone's spirits:
We're going to find them, we know they're out there. It's just a matter of time
. But Jennifer did not think time was an ally.

If there was any redeeming aspect about what had happened, she later decided, it was that she and Kevin had had no unresolved issues between them. They had loved each other completely from the start, and they had always understood how lucky they were. There was nothing she wished she had said to him before he died. In late August they had finished the last major stage of renovating their apartment, just five blocks from the firehouse—they had taken two small apartments and merged them into one by knocking down some walls. Kevin, aided by his father, Hugh, a retired army sergeant major, and some of the other men from the firehouse, had just put in an oak floor, and though there were still a good many smaller jobs to be done, the couple had been able to move their furniture back in. After a year in which the apartment seemed semi-habitable at best, Kevin had been able to spend a few days there, sitting on his own couch, watching his own television. During the renovation Hugh Bracken had come down from Cape Cod for a week each month to assist his son, and Jennifer had been moved by the sheer sweetness of father and son working together in such total harmony—both of them skilled carpenters, both of them enjoying not just their work, but working together. Hugh Bracken was particularly pleased that his son had become an even finer craftsman than he was.