A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  “Mom,” I say, “the Irish are really going to get up in the world this time.”

  She gives me a welt on the rear end as I head out the door, and says, “Good luck to you now, Dennis.”

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Four years later I am twenty-five years old, and it is 1966. The war in Vietnam is beginning to boil over, there is something called Black Power that is taking over the civil rights movement, Muhammad Ali is beating everyone, and Bobby Hull has scored fifty-four goals for the Rangers.

  My mother’s good-luck wish seems to have worked, because I got the fire department job.

  This is the job that has saved my life.

  I could go on from here and make a million dollars, but that wouldn’t be such a great leap. It wouldn’t mean half as much as having gotten through all the trouble of my young years on the East Side of New York, and still being able to take the oath of office for the New York City Fire Department.

  I am now crossing the wide, dirt-strewn, cobblestoned surface of Intervale Avenue. I look up at the front entrance of Engine Company 82, at the high, red-painted doors. The red is so vibrant it makes me think that a flashbulb has gone off.

  I look around the area.

  The corner of Intervale Avenue and 169th Street is filled with action. There is loud Latin music blowing out of a loudspeaker in front of a bodega across the street from the firehouse. In the distance I can hear a couple of bongo drums coming from another block. There is such a different culture in this neighborhood from the one on East 56th Street. There is garbage at the curbs, and the buildings are stained with roughly painted initials and symbols of one kind or another. The street itself is cobblestoned, like from a bygone era. It is everything you expect to find in a neighborhood the newspapers refer to as a ghetto.

  This is my first day here, and I am scheduled to work the night tour, from six in the evening to nine in the morning, fifteen hours straight. I am not a “johnny” firefighter anymore, but neither am I a seasoned vet. I’ve only been in a few fires these last three years, but up here in the South Bronx it’s a different fire-fighting story, and miles from the quiet firehouse in Queens where I have been working the last few years.

  Here the firehouse is like an island surrounded by a sea of fire. Engine Company 82 responds to forty alarms a day, and there is nothing like this alarm rate anywhere else on the face of the earth.

  I am feeling good, real good, because this is my firehouse now. I had gotten my feet wet in fire fighting out in Queens, but it just wasn’t active enough there for me.

  Engine Company 82 is on the top of the list of the busiest fire companies in New York, and I asked a friend of mine who is driving a deputy mayor to put the fix in for me to get me transferred here. He is also the manager of the department bagpipe band, and since I started to play the bagpipes I have been introduced to people like him who are “heavy” in the politics of the department.

  So here I am, just assigned to the busiest engine company in the city, in the world, and I have no idea of what to expect. I was only told that if there is anything easy in this company, it has been hidden away for years.

  I remember the day I became a firefighter as clearly as any president remembers the day he was elected. It was a day of pride and exuberance. I passed a firehouse on the way to the subway that day, the one on 51st Street, ecstatic that I would soon be a part of the whining sirens and clanging bells. I felt both reverence and the excitement of a new beginning when I was finally presented the three-inch silver Maltese cross, which is the firefighter’s badge.

  My wife, Pat, was there, and my mother, too, one prouder than the other that I had made it through the mental and the physical tests and the character investigation.

  That badge to me was the shield of the diligent, for I was now in a job that was a fulfillment of a goal, a job that I loved in the same way patriots love America. There is so much good about it, particularly the way it makes me feel good about myself.

  Maybe that comes with putting yourself on the line for other people.

  This job will not make any of us rich, but I can’t help thinking, after three years of fire fighting, a fabulous wife, two kids, four years of college, and a healthy mother, it would be hard to be much richer than this.

  Still, I am working to lay up the stores of tomorrow.

  I have become what all in my neighborhood respect—a cop or a fireman.

  If I could go off to war, or perform surgical miracles, or nurse the dying, or give out soup on the Bowery, or teach in a paint-worn classroom in the South Bronx, I would have a job that would let me look in the mirror and say that the people need me. I think that’s true for a fireman, too.

  Not that I expect people to think of me in this way, or that anyone will be better off because of me. No. I just know that because of the nature of my work, I am needed, for fire is a thing that doesn’t happen just to the other guy.

  And when the alarm gets pulled, I’ll do my best.

  Fire fighting is a good job. I mean good, like in regular-paycheck, pay-the-rent-every-month, twenty-year-pension good.

  I know I didn’t have much success as a kid in school, and I didn’t make such a good job of it in the air force, either.

  But I was given another second chance, and a great chance it was.

  It got me into college. It got me married to a wonderful woman. It got me appointed to the fire department. And it got me here to the front doors of the busiest fire company in the world, just where I want to be.

  And the funny thing is, I don’t know where that another second chance came from if it didn’t come from God.

  I had applied for the police officer job and the fireman job, and passed both tests. The police department called me, and I was being investigated, but I knew that I wanted to wait for the fire department.

  I heard that the cop’s job is harder to take day-to-day. People are not always supportive of cops. Except in those situations when you are being murdered or mugged, people don’t like to think about cops, especially if you are double-parked, spitting, littering, loitering, making a U-turn, or fighting with the landlord or the bookie. The last person in the world you want is a cop, and when a cop shows up, you are never happy to see him.

  Not the firefighter, though.

  I remember that firefighter who came when I was sleeping on the fire escape so many years ago.

  He was there when Mr. Sorenson needed him, because they carried Mr. Sorenson out and he just spent a day or two in the hospital after being knocked cold by the smoke. The firefighters seem to come when you need them. Even in the middle of some great tragedy, where you think no one can help you, the firefighter is going to do something that helps.

  I guess I’ve always wanted to be like that fireman that night on the fire escape. “Hey, kid,” he said, “how about that DiMaggio?” I will never forget what a great way that is to keep a youngster from being frightened.

  There is no doubt that I got off to a few good starts with some disappointing finishes. I am not sure what interfered with a steady upward progress for me, and I don’t think I will spend much time thinking about it.

  All of us carry around some psychological baggage—if only my mother had done this, or if Father O’Rourke had done that, or if only people did not exploit or abuse children, or if only my father hadn’t gotten sick, or if my mother had remarried.

  None of it matters now.

  What matters is that I am a part of the New York Fire Department, and the rest is all behind me.

  I think being a fireman made all the difference to Pat, too. No smart girl would marry someone without a future, without the ability to provide. And now I am becoming a man with definable abilities.

  My famous abilities. All my life people have been telling me that I have to recognize my abilities, and now I’m beginning to waltz in the cloak of those abilities.

  I met Pat the year before I went on the fire department. Walsh and Scarry and I were in East Durham, a resort village ups
tate they call the Irish Alps, not far from places like Grossinger’s, which they call the Jewish Alps. It was a wild, youthful weekend.

  Pat was with friends, and we danced a hundred dances in some Irish ginmill a hundred miles away from the city, and had the best time. She knows all the Irish dances, and we did the Stack of Barley and the Siege of Ennis, and then we did the New York Savoy, and since I didn’t know anyone with a car, we walked what seemed a hundred miles under the moonlight to where she was staying.

  We dated steadily after that, the first truly steady girlfriend I ever had, and it went straight down the road called serious. So serious that we just had our second son, Dennis, who will probably wrestle his brother Brendan for a good seat at the table for the next decade.

  My wife is from Queens, the daughter of a roofer like my grandfather, but her family is from county Kilkenny and mine from county Cork. Meeting Pat was also part of the good luck my mother wished me, like a good-luck prediction of a seventh son of a seventh son.

  Maybe someday God will bless Pat and me with a girl to sweeten the pot. I’ve always wanted a Deirdre, or maybe an Aislinn, to join our Brendan and Dennis. But, if we have another boy, we’ll call him Sean and maybe Sean will be the first up in the morning, and the best dressed in the family.

  We are building our future together, and little by little we are doing more than getting by. We even bought a new car, a Volkswagen Bug, and we go to a play off-Broadway once in a while. I have the good city job, and I have the twenty-year pension that goes with it.

  “If they knew about the twenty-year pension,” I can remember my Uncle Buddy saying, “they’d be swimming like dolphins across the Atlantic, leaping and dancing with the joy.” He wasn’t talking about whatever relatives we had still working the land in Cork and Monaghan, but the whole of the Irish publicht from Dublin to Galway, people who we remembered as those we left behind.

  When I was growing up, we always thought of the Irish we knew in Ireland as the poor relations. I never realized the history then, that they were just newly relieved of the suffering handicap of British government.

  There were no “good jobs” in Ireland then, and not many now, either. If there are good jobs, we do not know anyone who has one. I never heard of a civil servant in Ireland, and while I’m sure there are some, they are not anyone we know. The good jobs are here in America.

  I think of people in Ireland as heroic legions, battering rams who are there in our name denting the doors of British history. Maybe someday, like my father and all four of my grandparents, they might leave their homes and come to America to escape the English and to secure a bountiful future.

  My four grandparents came from different parts of Ireland to the borough of Brooklyn, America’s city of churches, land of Pee Wee Reese and one end of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  They worked at laboring jobs and raised their families. There may not have been fistfuls of dollars, but there were pocketfuls of morality tales, and they all had to do with hard work and clean shirts and being on time.

  My Grandfather Smith traveled, with his five children, including my father and my Uncle Tommy, whose plaque is in the back of the church, from county Monaghan, Ireland, where he owned a pub, to Glasgow in Scotland, where he owned another pub, to Detroit, Michigan, where he had hoped to work for Henry Ford, and, finally, to Brooklyn, to work in the shipyards. He did all this, like most immigrants of the time, to search out a better future for his wife, who was Ellen Cosgrove, and his children.

  My mother’s father, John Hogan, worked on the fishing boats out of Kinsale Harbour, county Cork. None of us knows how he came here. He just somehow walked out of the shadows of Ireland, without a history, a story, or an explanation, and ended up in Brooklyn, where one day he met my grandmother, Elizabeth Harrigan, who was born in county Clare.

  “He was a solid man,” my mother says, “and he always had a job—until he fell off the roof anyways.”

  None of my grandparents were ever on the inside of anything out of the ordinary, but they had families they loved, and they provided for them, probably better than they would have in the old sod.

  And so, what does it matter if my grandparents were on the outside looking in on establishment America? They probably didn’t think about it or know that once the Irish got inside of anything, politics, business, education, or sports, they always found a way to get to the top.

  That kind of observation would not have helped my grandparents, or my mother or father, either. They were too busy getting by.

  It doesn’t matter what the top is, it could be anywhere you want it to be.

  I know about the “No Irish Need Apply” signs that were in New York and Boston, and I hope my own children remember this, too. But we must also remember that America is such a different country now. We even have a civil rights law to protect against prejudice.

  I don’t feel put upon in any way for being of Irish parentage. Prejudice is something I worry about in our country, which still has plenty of inequities, but not for the Irish. I have always felt that I could do anything anyone else could do, could climb to any top that I wanted to climb to. I think it is good to think this. People are not like paintings where you can say that a Leonardo da Vinci is worth more than, say, a Modigliani, or like cars, where a Rolls-Royce might be better made than a Caddy. This is America after all. A car is just a car, unless you worry too much about it. And every person has a shot at going wherever they want to go.

  Look at my brother Billy.

  Billy’s become a schoolteacher in Harlem, 127th Street and Lenox Avenue. He’s read more books than anyone I know, and hasn’t disappointed anyone in meeting the potential of his intellect. Things could’ve been a lot easier for him, but he’s not the complaining type. He didn’t go to Exeter, and he didn’t go to Oberlin, and he never had a year in college when he didn’t work two jobs. But if you asked him, he’d tell you that he got a good deal, and the deal paid off.

  I can hardly ask a question about literature, philosophy, history, art, or music that he doesn’t know the answer. And he cares about everything. He leaves the humanitarian talk to the civic theorists and do-gooders, and commits himself to the education of Negro children.

  Billy was offered an assignment in a softer school out in Queens, or in midtown Manhattan, but he wanted to go where he would be challenged by the toughest kids in New York.

  And who knows how many da Vincis or Thurgood Marshalls may evolve out of his classroom?

  Sometimes I think about the impoverished childhood so many of us lived on East 56th Street. If Billy and I grew up poor, so did my mother and her brother and sisters. But that shouldn’t make any difference in a person’s life, good or bad, positive or negative. It didn’t in ours. Billy and I never missed a meal, and we sang songs around a keg of beer on Sundays. It was never a life of hardship for us. We may have been on the welfare rolls, but we always saw and understood how much better it is for people when they are working.

  Working, as my mother tried to teach us, is the key to tomorrow and the definition of life.

  Such is the nostalgia of the tribe—my tribe, anyway.

  My earliest memory is of my mother taking in a big pile of shirts from a neighbor down the hall on 56th Street.

  “Work,” she said, plopping the shirts into the kitchen bathtub, “is the thing that supports the neck.”

  It was a long time before I knew what she was talking about, and it might be her greatest lesson. Whether it is ironing shirts or being a firefighter, twenty-year pension or not, caring about your work is the thing that supports the neck in keeping the head high.

  If there is anyone to thank for getting me through to where I am, it is my mother. She is having a tough time with the stairs now, and I know that she will have to move from the tenement on 54th Street pretty soon, by the time she retires from the telephone company, anyway.

  I try to see her once a week. She comes to our house mostly, to see the kids, to baby-sit while Pat and I go out to a movie.<
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  I wish she would stop smoking. If she stopped smoking, she could do another few years of climbing the stairs. But she has been combing her hair one way for most of her life, and I know that she would not take the advice she once gave me to use a brush.

  “I’m going to have to put a carton of Old Golds in your coffin the day they bury you, Mom,” I said to her recently, when we were sitting across from each other, having a cup of coffee.

  “Don’t forget the matches,” she returned quickly, with a wink of her eye.

  I like being with my mother. She has humor. She might have some prejudices and periods of short temper also, but they are a consequence of a longtime loneliness, I think, and a small price to pay for giving up any chance of a normal social life to care for her two sons.

  I believe she has earned the right to tons of happiness, but it doesn’t look like much will come her way. I suppose she is like a million other women who were left alone with a few kids by a husband who became absent for whatever reason. They are like the fifth estate in America, and what they do is every bit as consequential for America’s future as anything that gets written in a newspaper or done in Congress, a church, or a synagogue.

  I am sure it is not easy to be alone now, but my mother does it with her chin held high, anyway. She works six days a week at the telephone company. She comes home after work, makes a small dinner, gets into bed, reads the Daily News, and sips a small glass of port. She does this every night without fail.

  It may not be much of a life, but it’s a respectable one, I think. I make sure I call her every day, to let her know that she is being thought of, to thank her in my own way.