Cold today, and this an unfamiliar city. It’s been ten years since my feet touched ground in New York, and this is their first time flexing against Manhattan pavement.
This first night is a dark train ride through the unfamiliar Bronx and the marbled halls of Grand Central Station. Its high ceilings and rushing crowds a strange home to the sullen faces waiting two stories down at the platforms. Subway cars blurring their way down dimly lit tunnels, screeching warnings and a low rumble of flashlight intensity rushing up alongside the disinterested crowds, receipts and handbags blown back in the gusting exhalation. There’s too much history in these tunnels, too many passengers too late for work and too tired each morning, each evening. The afternoon wanderers aimless and hungry, the afternoon tourists confused but happier for it. In my head I pretend that this is my city, my boredom, my rush hour. I lean against the subway handrails purposefully. I force my eyes to scan the subway maps with the same rushed disdain they use to scan the advertisements and the newsstand-insulating tabloids. It’s good to be here, to join these crowds and feel at home in the current of lives and stone around me.
Stepping onto Wall Street brings the heavy smell of chocolate chip cookies. Sugar and vanilla and a warm, crisp burning in my nose and throat that brings memories of home and ovens despite a stiff wind and the low December mercury. There are two armed guards with riot gear standing in front of the Federal Reserve, and one last street vendor left standing after hours, stirring a cartful of honey-roasted nuts washed yellow by the soft glow of a warming lamp. This is not quite what I imagined. The Financial District has its scattered crowds of taxis and persons, but the air carries a hush that settles on the head with an unexpected sense of peace.
At the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, Trinity Church stands tucked between the high-rises. The stillness deepens as you cross the threshold; this is where I would spend my lunch breaks to just be, if there is such a thing in New York City[1]. The religion of cathedrals is not my own; their power lies in aesthetic beauty, grace and the awful presence of quiet. It’s been too long since I’ve kneeled to make confession, and if the day comes I want to feel it in my knees and shoulder blades. This is the Catholicism my parents rejected in the eighties, the same one my grandparents never really had, but wanted.
And the truth is that I don’t have any grandparents. The absolute truth is that there are two left, but the only lasting impact of either relationship is a likelihood of male pattern baldness, leukemia or heart disease. From my paternal grandfather I have only vague grade school recollections of a visit to his house in Niagara Falls, and a clear memory of awkward tension at my father’s second wedding. From my maternal grandmother, I have a hazy image of an elderly woman sitting in a stranger’s parlor.
I’m here to find a grandfather. Please forgive me for wanting the history of one already dead and gone; if only because for want of a grandparent I can know, I’m the type who’ll hold onto one he can imagine.
To this day, my maternal grandfather has been little more than a photograph from his obituary and the vague shape of a man my mother knew only until the age of four. The photo captures “Frankie Eagan” as a welterweight amateur boxer no older than I am now. At scattered points along the way between this memory of his glory days in the 1930s, and his death in 1978, this half-naked boxing champ would marry, serve in the U.S. Navy, father ten children, work in the railroads, and struggle constantly with tuberculosis and alcoholism. We’ll get to that.
Today I take the subway back to Grand Central and head to the New York Public Library. A few wrong turns take me in the out door, and at the wrong branch of the library system for good measure. Apparently, the gigantic stone edifice across the street is the central branch, not the nondescript hunk of brick around the corner. The lion statues and giant staircase may have been a good tip off. Tourists.
Inside, wide hallways match the grand exterior, and footsteps echo about as much as you would expect. The newspaper archives are my first hope of a connection, but nowhere near as helpful as the clerk manning the desk. He does his best to coax a response from a sluggish computer,[2] but a few minutes of hushed pleading and muttered cursing finally result in disappointment. Francis Eagan was born and raised in Niagara Falls, and to access that rustic gazette would require a trip to western New York, there are no microfilm obituaries for me here.
Luckily, I didn’t come here completely unprepared, and there just so happens to be a dusty room down the hall for genealogy research. Here the newspapers are more fruitful, along with the blessed U.S. Federal Census. The rumors are confirmed. Black and white spiraling newspaper montage. Cue cheesy news reel announcer.
Niagara Falls Gazette, November 23rd 1955: “Fifteen Years Ago Today, Nov. 23, 1940… Henry Butlers, William Collins, Francis Eagan and John Fitzgerald, all in the US Navy, come home on leave before being assigned to ships”.
No signs of his service record, but still some documented evidence that my grandfather served in the Navy. Of course, four years later (October, 1944) the Gazette would report that he had been fined $10 for “driving an automobile without… an operator’s license”. Apparently the police arrived on the scene not long after he crashed into a truck just down the block from his house. The plot thickens, since the car actually belonged to one Edward Richards, Jr. who appeared in court to explain “that he did not give Eagan permission to drive the car”. There’s a distinct possibility that Gramps was a bit of a schmuck.
And there’s no doubt that he fell on hard times, though there were several factors involved. I have not been fully honest with you. The first, the very first, article I laid eyes on was this:
From the Niagara Falls Gazette, Friday December 17th 1971: My grandfather, “55, no address, was sentenced to 10 days in Niagara County Jail on his guilty plea to public intoxication on Wednesday. [He] told [the] Judge [that] he didn’t remember anything about Wednesday’s court appearance”.[3]
So here is my grandfather, and yes it made me pause a moment to see this. The state of New York has taken his children away to foster care some four years prior. His wife is no longer his wife. His struggle with alcohol abuse seems to be in full swing. A man of fifty-five years with no address and no family. Still too drunk to remember what’s happening to him even at the time of his court appearance.
And this is something of a family tradition, this liquid despair and isolation. My uncles Pat and John, two brothers drinking accidentally at the bar and they stick to their cups, without a sign of recognition. The same Pat who volunteered to serve in Vietnam, still too full of anger to see my mother more than ten years after the family disintegrated. His future wife would come instead, to try and make an apology, to try and explain this to his youngest sister. And who am I to tell you this? This kid who spent two years skipping class religiously (I mean, irreverently). Who couldn’t keep his head up when he walked down Washington Ave., not knowing which professor he might have to acknowledge on the street. I can’t tell you for certain that we all have these moments, but I feel it. And I can vouch for what I know about my family.
It’s been over a month now since I wrote down his phone number, and I still haven’t called my uncle Jim. Jim who drank and thought and converted, early and hard, to a Christianity not like the Catholic identity he grew up with. Jim who did the work to know his father. Jim at the hospital, with the long conversations and the deathbed conversion. Jim who was unafraid of his past, who worked around his anger and reconnected with the wreckage of his father. Jim who I have never really known. Jim, who I admire, though I will not tell you about my father.
And you mustn’t misunderstand me. Frankie Eagan was no sad sack. Years before booze and tuberculosis and failed parenting, he really was the wiry boxing champ in that photograph. And I didn’t need some local rag to tell me it, either. They’ve got the New York Times here.
I don’t know who Frank Williams is. But I know that he’s from Massachusetts, and I know that he got the snot beaten out of him in front of 12,000 screaming onlookers. You can thank Frank. And you had better believe I’m proud of my old lady’s old man. He went all the way to the final round of the 1933 New York State amateur boxing championship, a quick, 135-pound Irish teenager fighting under the white hot lights of Madison Square Garden on a freezing day in January. He went down swinging, with a loss to that year’s state champion. But he came back again.
Three months later he would compete at the National A.A.U. championship boxing tournament in Boston, MA, finally working his way up to a victory in the final round over another young kid from Highland Park, Michigan. It’s totally legit.
You can look it up on Wikipedia.
[1] If there is such a thing as “New York City”. Italo Calvino tells us that cities are little more than spectral fragments of memory and desire, and I’m here for a taste of both.
[2] (Please ignore the ancient switchboard behind him; pay no attention to the familiar smell of mothballs and vintage 1970s mildew).
[3] This may not have been quite what Thoreau meant when he wrote that “men lead lives of quiet desperation”, but the mind wanders.
