Down Around Midnight (17 page)

A word about compensation. Americans will more readily volunteer their medical history than talk to you about their money. I don't know what kind of settlements my fellow survivors reached with the airline. I didn't bother to ask. I wasn't interested in the numbers, and I knew everything I needed to know about the experience. Theirs would have been no different from mine in any way that was instructive. The claim to which I was a party, thanks to the caliber of the advocates on both sides, was handled in as dignified and professional a manner as such endeavors ever enjoy. And still, there was nothing enriching about it. There are few things that come with greater spiritual cost than involving yourself in a lawsuit. No matter how successful you emerge, the trade-off is never worth it. All they give you is money. And in liability cases, to make serious money—if that's what you're after—what you really want to do is die. Mine was a case where proving liability was unnecessary. I was well represented, in the end I was treated fairly, and it was three years of my life you can have. Damages are compensatory, an indemnity, not a reward. You keep the cash. I'll take the no-plane-crash option.

T
he NTSB, in its findings, reported that when the plane hit the woods, “Two passengers were not wearing their lapbelts.” Neither passenger was identified by name. One, of course, was Jonathan Ealy, who had been thrown through the cockpit on impact. I'd known that within a couple of days of the crash, advised of it by the federal investigators who visited me in the hospital. The other was Brian McCann, the passenger lying in the aisle beneath the seat to which I was strapped when the plane came to rest. I wouldn't know that until almost thirty years later.

Tracking down my fellow survivors, I took advantage of contemporary information technology. One might say that the task would have been nearly impossible before development of the Internet search engine, but to believe that is to believe in fairies.

My first job, right out of college, was as a reporter for a now defunct Scripps-Howard newspaper, the
Washington Daily News,
an afternoon tabloid that competed for circulation with two broadsheets in the nation's capital, the
Washington Post,
which is still in business, and the
Evening Star,
which is not. The
News
will forever be famous for having been home to the legendary Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent who lost his life on Okinawa. When I went to work at the
News,
almost a quarter of a century after he died, Pyle's desk was still in the newsroom and little had changed since he'd last used it.

Stories at the
News
were generated in a city room that even then was a primitive artifact of American industry. Lifted intact and hauled away, it could have been placed on exhibit in a wing of the Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian. Copy, composed on manual typewriters, was edited with pencil, paste pot, and scissors. Rolled and stuffed into cylinders, it was delivered by pneumatic tube from the city desk to keyboard operators downstairs, whose clattering typesetting machines spit out lines of justified type in the form of hot slugs of cast lead.

It was a place where a young reporter could follow a story's physical transformation as it went from the pages of his notebook to the pages of a newspaper leaving the building in the back of a truck. The story, within a couple of hours of the time it was written, would appear under his byline alongside a cup of coffee on Capitol Hill, or a beer and a shot across the street. Deadline for the city edition was seven A.M. The paper, rumbling off the web-fed presses, hit the street at nine. It was a time when, unless you arrived in handcuffs, you needed a necktie to get into court. Some of the old-timers still owned fedoras, and even the female reporters wore trench coats. A cigarette habit, though not required, was a pretty big part of the deal.

All a reporter needed in the way of a search engine back then was a phone, a cross-directory, and a morgue. After that it was just a combination of shoe leather and no shame. A newspaper morgue is an archive of stories clipped from previous editions of the paper. The morgue at the
News
was a small room behind the city desk choked with file cabinets containing ages worth of yellowing newsprint and original black-and-white glossies. A cross-directory is a listing, arranged alphanumerically by street, showing the name and phone number of the current resident at any given address. (And the names and numbers of that resident's neighbors.) A telephone . . . Well, the newer telephones at the
News
were the rotary-dial phones that weren't black. With these tools, a standard phone book, and the right number at the Department of Motor Vehicles, a reporter at any newspaper, like all the private eyes in pulp fiction, could find any person he wanted to talk to. Today the same reporter would type the name of that person and click “Search.”

In finding people who were present that night in 1979, I started with a morgue that was no more sophisticated than the one I'd used at the
News.
It consisted of the stories I'd clipped from the newspaper while I was confined to the hospital in the days after the crash. The clips, yellow with age and few in number, contained the names of numerous people I would eventually talk to, but they were of no practical value to me in tracking down the survivors themselves. The names of the survivors, where they were from, their ages, their occupations, the schools that some were attending, the simple biographical bullet points by which they were identified in the newspaper—over the years I had forgotten none of it. I could repeat the information in my sleep. Sometimes I did.

Brian McCann was eighteen years old, a student at Boston College. He was from New Rochelle, New York. He broke his collarbone in the crash. That's what the newspaper had said, and all of it had remained with me. I knew more about him than that. I knew what his nightmares were like. I remembered things he would never forget. But to find him I had only what I knew from the newspaper, and it was all I needed to know.

To say that McCann is a common name—and granted, I grew up in Boston—is to my mind akin to suggesting that Marie Antoinette liked to shop. It's certainly more common than my name. And few are the McCanns, I would submit, who have not at one time or another considered the name Brian for that bundle of joy on the way. The Catholicism of the Irish, I think, tends to hasten the inevitable. With six or seven trips to the maternity ward . . . Sean, Michael, Patrick . . . sooner or later, it's going to be Brian.

(As I would discover, the Brian McCann I was looking for was one of eleven children in his family, ten of whom were boys, an accomplishment that even my parents, who ushered five children of their own into the insatiate bosom of the Catholic Church, might have perceived as showing off.)

In trying to find the Brian McCann who that night had mistaken his broken collarbone for a dislocated shoulder, I launched a preliminary electronic search, prepared for battle in a war of attrition with all the Brian McCanns of the world. I never anticipated being overwhelmed by just one of their legion's number: Atlanta Braves catcher Brian Michael McCann, a 2006 National League all-star , who in 242 at bats that year went .333, with 34 doubles, 24 homers, and 93 runs batted in. There was no escaping the guy. Or his stats. In the time that it would have taken me to extract from the search enough data to narrow its parameters, in the time required to circumnavigate that single entry, only to reach the virtual armada of Brian McCanns certain to lie beyond, I could have driven to New Rochelle.

By coupling today's technology with the old-fashioned skills I had picked up as a reporter, I saved myself the drive. The alumni associations of most universities, Boston College being one of them, are accessible on the World Wide Web. But in almost every case they are accessible exclusively to the alumni themselves. An investigator, any police detective will tell you, is only as good as his informants, and over the years, I have managed to cultivate some excellent confidential sources. It's not how I usually think of my dental hygienist, Sue, but her son, as luck would have it, attended Boston College. Within twenty-four hours, I had the addresses of more than one Jesuit-educated Brian McCann, and among them was a student who had graduated three years after the crash. He lived in Connecticut.

He recognized my name, with no reference to the crash, when I introduced myself over the phone. Sparing me the burden of an awkward preamble, for which I was grateful, he made a joke about airplanes. He agreed to meet me to discuss what he called “a life-changing event,” but rather than open up time in his schedule in Connecticut or in Manhattan, where he worked as a currency trader, he preferred to meet on the Cape.

That he still remained somehow attached to the Cape came as no surprise. Cape Cod is not really a moveable feast. It does not stay with you that way. It is not like Paris so much as like Lourdes. Being there is the important thing. It is more like a reliable dope connection: People keep coming back. Guessing that Brian's family, like Suzanne's, had probably had a summer place on the Cape at the time, I asked where he had been going when the plane crashed.

“I was going to see my sister,” he said, explaining that she still had a home in Brewster, that he continued to visit her there, and that he was planning to do so soon, at which point he and I could meet. He asked if I knew Brewster. I told him I did.

He said, “You know the general store?”

It was where everyone met.

“I know it well,” I said.

 

 

The Brewster Store, built as a church in 1852 by members of the Universalist Society, was converted to a general store in 1866, and through a succession of five owners, it has been operated as such in the mid-Cape town for which it is named for almost a century and a half. General stores are a common feature of Cape Cod, which remains, in its own way, rural, but few match the store in Brewster for atmosphere and charm, and none succeeds so well in preserving a feeling of never having changed. The sense of continuity is reflected in the assortment of merchandise available and in numerous antique appointments, many of which are in everyday function, including a peanut roaster, a turn-of-the-century nickelodeon, and an old coal stove in the middle of the store around which patrons sit and warm themselves in winter. The wide steps of the front porch, which are perfect for loitering, and the painted benches outside, which were installed by the current owners to extend the capacity for same, give the two-story, wood-frame structure on Main Street a center-of-town flavor in a town that has no discernable center.

Owners George and Missy Boyd bought the store in 1986—they have owned another Brewster business longer—and it was just a few years before they bought it that they and I became acquainted. We met in New York through mutual friends, Robert Billingsley and his wife, Janice. Bob Billingsley and I will have known each other for half a century soon, and our friendship, which runs deep, is of a rare and special character, one of “the kinds of friendships,” says Hillary Clinton, who is married to another of my college classmates, “that have to be rooted in the common experiences of one's youth.” I've known Janice almost as long.

The Boyds and the Billingsleys, whose daughters attended the same school in Manhattan, are more than friends, they are the kinds of friends who spend family holidays together. My acquaintance with the Boyds, springing as it does from my long friendship with Bob and Janice, is such that when I see them, it usually happens in New York rather than on the Cape, where I now spend most of my time. A typical example of our getting together was a small birthday party the Billingsleys hosted in their Upper West Side apartment to which the three of us were invited.

Ghosts, once laid to rest, will remain there undisturbed, effectively forgotten, neglecting to reveal themselves even over the extended course of the most intimate friendships. I had known the Boyds casually for some twenty-five years, had seen and talked to them on almost as many occasions, and had talked to the Billingsleys over that time almost as often as I'd talked to the members of my family, before I learned that Missy Boyd's maiden name was McCann and that the young man I'd helped to his feet that night as I rose to my own in the wreckage of the aircraft was her brother.

 

 

“Your sister owns the Brewster Store?”

“She didn't own it then.”

“Missy Boyd is your sister?”

And that is just one of the synapses across which the signal had never been transmitted.

The eleven McCann children had grown up in New Rochelle within a block of another, equally energetic family of Irish Catholics, one of whose twelve children, Brian informed me, lived in Wellfleet and owned a business there. Brian asked if I knew him. “Pretty well, in fact,” I said. Older than Brian, younger than I, he was someone I had met and become friendly with two years after the crash. I had known him for twenty-five years, Brian had known him since childhood, and never in all that time, on either side of the mutual acquaintance, did the connection the two of us shared reveal itself.

Again, it's as if these were not the kinds of things one talked about in polite company.

“It's a small world,” observes comedian Steven Wright, “but I wouldn't want to paint it.”

Well, he needn't bother. The phenomenon that sociologists and mathematicians refer to as the small-world problem has driven enough academic dissertations to wallpaper it. A hypothesis of social networks that has been around for almost a century, small-world conjecture puts forward the idea that any two randomly selected people will exhibit a connection to each other through a chain of associations that includes six other people, on average. The idea took hold in popular culture under the label “six degrees of separation,” after the 1990 play of that name by John Guare.