One Family's Agonizing Wait At the McAleese home in Baldwin, hope is alive - but slowly fading to resignation September 27, 2001 JOHN AND KEVIN McALEESE meet most mornings at their mother's house on Tennyson Avenue in Baldwin. They gather there before going into Manhattan to search for their little brother, Brian. John, a city firefighter, and Kevin, a city police officer, sip coffee brewed by their little sister, Maureen, who is now 30 years old. It's bad coffee. They tease Maureen about it, and she tells them they should be grateful she got up and made it. They nibble on bagels in their mother's kitchen. Ann Marie McAleese and her late husband, Jack, also a city firefighter, had brought up five children here, in the house on Tennyson Avenue. Eventually the brothers push away from the kitchen table and match up their big boots and collect their gear, John's radio slung bandolier-style, and they head off to look for their brother in the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers. To the women in the family, the boys always look like soldiers going to war. But John, 38, pauses at the doorway flanked by potted chrysanthemums left by well-wishers. He keeps telling his sister Pat Nitti, 40, over and over again that he loves her. He stands there. It's a stall, really. The men have heard that it is possible that some bodies might be freed from the rubble this day. "I don't want to go today," he says. Neighbors have tied yellow ribbons around the oak and elm trees whose upper branches meet like clasped hands over the pavement outside, and the ribbons flutter. "I don't want to go today," he says. "I don't want to identify my brother. Of course, he left, but he did not find Brian that day, the eighth since the buildings had fallen. Or the day after. Or the day after. Or any day since. Some in the family dreamed of Brian showing up at the front door, a wry smile spreading across his face, but then, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said it would take a miracle to find survivors. Resignation had finally ground down hope. All the McAleeses of Baldwin have been left with is a hard wait. Like thousands of other families whose people are "unaccounted for" at the disaster downtown, the McAleeses have been unable to participate in the comforting rituals of loss. They are all stuck. "We still haven't heard anything, and there are people who are having memorial services every day," Pat says. "That's hard." Brian, 36, who loved to play the welcoming host at all the McAleese family events, ringing a glass with a fork and issuing the official welcome, deserves a real Irish wake. It would be so sad and also so funny, and all the stories would be told, like when he would give his little sister Maureen rides on his motorcycle instead of going to Mass. Brian deserved that. But where was he? They started the search for Brian not long after the two passenger jets rammed into the Trade Center towers. At his firehouse in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where he worked at Engine Co. 226, Brian had been working overtime that day to pay for the christening of his 4-month-old son, Aidan. John was home, but sped into the city when the fire department issued a "total recall" of all hands. Kevin, 41, was across the East River, at his office in Brooklyn. The police in Kevin's unit rushed down to the river, commandeered ferry boats, and helped get people out of Manhattan. At some point that day, both McAleese brothers began to pick their way across the mountain of wreckage at the same time, from different directions. A choking mist of pulverized concrete obscured their vision. They asked everyone they met, "Where are the guys from Engine Company 226?" Both sensed that Brian would have entered the building, but neither could imagine how anyone inside the towers could have survived their collapse. Fires flared orange in the blizzard of dust and ash. The heat seeped through the soles of their boots. Kevin watched as a police van wobbled down the street, its tires shredded, its windows blown out, the shell-shocked men inside coated with the white rain of swirling debris. It was Kevin who first found Brian's truck. The windstorm triggered by the collapse of the towers had dusted it white and ripped away its hoses and equipment. The front end was smashed. He called Pat, who remained at their mother's. It was the house on the corner of Tennyson and Harte avenues, where Ann Marie and Jack McAleese had presided over a high-spirited Irish Catholic family, where three generations of wedding photographs hang framed on the walls, and a stained-glass shamrock sparkles in the sunlight above the kitchen sink. "I'm standing here," Kevin told Pat. "I've seen Brian's truck. And, it's not good." John eventually found Brian's truck, too, but only after the hulk had been towed to a side street. As a firefighter, he knew to look inside for the "ride sheet." There was Brian's name on the list of those who made the last run. The next day, the McAleeses' search continued, with Maureen's coffee in Ann Marie's kitchen. Kevin and John were joined by Kevin's partner on the police force and a childhood friend of Brian's. John dreads it every day. He can't quite grasp the enormity of what has happened, and how it is going to change his family forever. The towers had fallen. People talked about voids at the attack site, the open places under the rubble where rescuers hoped to find trapped people. What about the void in the McAleese family? The delicate architecture of the relationships, an arrangement that had proved strong for so many years, has been undermined. Of course, he and Kevin and Pat and Maureen had lost a brother, and Ann Marie a son, but he also thought of Brian's four little children and his wife of seven years, Dawn. She had called Brian's firehouse moments after seeing the attacks unfold on television. But someone there told Dawn her husband had just left for the scene. She has remained the most hopeful of all the people close to Brian. No one could blame her for that. At the site downtown, Kevin and John often work side by side. They use shovels to remove compressed concrete dust and debris from around girders that can be cut with torches or lifted away with heavy equipment. Sometimes they get split up. They both laugh about the day that a call went up for buckets, and Kevin and several other men heaved them up to one section of the pile, and out of the dozens of rescuers there, Kevin's smacked John in the head. Kevin wears a cell phone, and the family calls him down there. One day the phone rang, and it was Kevin's 8- year-old daughter, Catherine. "Daddy, I think Uncle Brian is alive. He's in a hole, and he's dirty. He's drinking water from a puddle." "You think so, Catherine?" "I really think so, Daddy." "We're hoping to find him, honey. We're hoping to find him." Even two weeks after the disaster, the house on Tennyson Avenue fills with people at night. That is when Kevin and John return from digging at the site. Their clothes are spotted white with dust. John, the firefighter, talks the most. Kevin, the cop, is quieter. They are tired, but they tell stories about what they've seen. They walk around the dining room table and fill plates from the food there, including food dropped off by the NYPD and the roast beef left by a neighbor. Family friends Bill and Mary Lou Diechler always seem to be in the kitchen, cleaning up. She clears the table. He washes the dishes. They were always there to help Ann Marie, because Jack had been slowed for 20 years by multiple sclerosis, and they are there again. "It's been like one big wake," says Maureen one late night last week, when the family gathered after a prayer service for unaccounted-for rescuers at nearby St. Christopher's Roman Catholic Church in Baldwin. "This family has changed forever," John says. "This has kicked our family straight in the face. But we're just one family in 5,000." The talk at night on Tennyson Avenue inevitably comes around to Brian, and the last time everyone spoke to him and what he means to the family. Brian and Dawn had taken the kids to the beach on the Sunday before the attack. Robert Moses, Field 5 - where the family met almost any summertime Sunday, and anyone who wanted to meet them there was welcome. Ann Marie calls her youngest son a "doing father." She remembers him that Sunday. He had scooped out a big, protective hole near the water for Liam, 2. He had made sand castles with Jack, 4. Then, he had splashed into the surf with the eldest, Brianne, 5 1/2. "That's how I see him - running down the beach and diving into the water," Ann Marie says. "He was such a good daddy." Brian lived life brightly. He served lobster tails at his kids' birthday parties, where he would spend way, way too much time making sure the balloon bouquets had an equal number of balloons. Counter to departmental regulations, he wore a green beret when he marched in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Manhattan. He would snatch his mother's good crystal for a picnic at the beach. He loved to engineer surprises. Once, he heard his mother and sister were dining at a favorite restaurant, and he secretly called and put the bill on his credit card. Brian's enthusiasm for life stood out even in the McAleese house, where the siblings hire Irish singers for all-night house parties and where, in one rowdy teenage brawl, one brother tried to punch another through a window pane. Jack McAleese didn't like the earring Brian wore home one day, so Brian kept it in his pocket until he got outside. His parents ordered him to sell his motorcycle, but he hid it at a friend's and gave Maureen rides down to Jones Beach when they were supposed to be at Saturday evening Mass. Yet, there also was a softness with Brian. Once a friend of the McAleese family died, a former firefighter in his 80s. He wanted to be buried in a uniform of the fire department but no one had one. Brian had a brand new one - the navy-blue uniform known in the fire department as a "Class A." He went to the funeral home and presented it to the undertaker, who told him the man already was dressed in a suit. "He's dead," Brian said, "so let's undress him." "I don't know if I can do that." "Let's do it together." So they did, and the old man wore a Class A in his casket. The McAleeses love to tell that story, but they're starting to get talked out. The hours that have passed since Sept. 11 have dissolved into one long day. The family tries to break up the draining routine with days at a friend's beach cabana at Point Lookout. That's where they went Sunday. They had the radio on, and Pat heard a line from a new song by U2. You've got stuck in a moment And you can't get out if it. "That's us," she thought. "That's our family." Without a formal declaration from authorities that no one else has survived the attack, the McAleeses are left only with a sense of determination to find something that might comfort someone, even if it's someone from some other family. When a rescue worker unearthed a firefighter's helmet at the site one day last week, a huge cheer rose from the men there. All for a helmet. "The bond down there between people is that everyone knows someone who's in there," Kevin says. John McAleese estimates he knew 40 people lost. He goes to funerals almost every day. The firefighters' bond starts when many are rookies, when they enter burning buildings for the first time. Like boys grasping their father's hands in a crowd, they hold onto their lieutenants' coats and walk closely behind. Eventually, they let go and walk with more confidence into the flames. "Guys from my house," John says of his firehouse, "are all looking for guys from my house, but they're also looking for my brother." But some days Ann Marie wants the boys home, at the house on Tennyson Avenue with the girls and Dawn and the grandchildren. Her family is her strength. The more she has around, the stronger she feels. Even the babies. "Kevin, please don't go in there anymore," Ann Marie says to her eldest son on one of those days. "Look, Mom," says Kevin, "if we can find anything, for anyone, we need to go." Ann Marie and the daughters speak with hope about Brian's fire department ring, given to him when his father, Jack McAleese, died in January. They wonder if the ring could be found. The ring is gold and has a red Maltese cross with Jack McAleese's unit number: 10685. The Maltese cross has been the trademark of firefighters for generations. It has its origin in the 11th century, when a similar badge graced the armor of the Knights of St. John, who guarded Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. The Arabs of that era used crude bombs containing flammable oils, and the knights distinguished themselves by fighting the fires to save their comrades in arms. Over time, the Maltese cross became the symbol of firefighters everywhere, including men such as Jack McAleese, who served for 25 years with the city fire department, as well as his sons John and Brian. The inside of Brian's ring is engraved with the name of his father: John J. McAleese. Of course, the McAleese brothers would love to find that ring. Brian has always said he wanted to pass on the ring to his own son Jack. Finding the ring wouldn't be at all like finding Brian, of course. It would not be like that. But, it would be something. -- Joe Haberstroh (Newsday)

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