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I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, sleepy-summered New Jersey town the Manhattan rich used to use as a refuge from various epidemics, in a house with odd-lot closets and secret stairs, and in the eighties, I spent a lot of non-homework time IN the odd-lot closets, reading stories in which secret stairs figured heavily – secrets of all sorts, really, fortunes and poltergeists and seven-year-olds who were really seventeen. I was a weird kid in a town with inattentive librarians, which you know already, but I mention it again to explain how we got here.
“Here” is the (somewhat incompatibly) grand house at one end of our street, the kind of house that had a name – and this one DID have a name: “Roanokes,” of all things. Not a bad name, on the one hand, given the name of the street (Rowan Road, awkwardly chopped into the side of a hill above Watchung Reservation) and the constellation of ancient, massive trees that shouldered all the houses along it. On the other hand…talk about leaning into neighborhood chatter.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself, though, because 40 years ago, on the one occasion on which I found myself IN Roanokes, I didn’t know it had a name. I knew its owners’ names – the Gordons – and that they didn’t come to the door when Girl Scouts or trick-or-treaters rang the bell; a polite, faintly accented manservant in a snug Izod, one of two of them, would be dispatched to dismiss us. I knew grown-ups used words about them that nobody had used in half a century (“tycoon,” chiefly, but a babysitter dropped a “nabob” on them once; also “manservant,” of course). I didn’t know anything else, and I certainly didn’t know why I “got to” come along with my father to invite them in person to the block party some keener on Oak Ridge Ave. had decided should occur. Possibly my facility with my grandmother’s friends was considered of value, although that derived primarily from watching the same ABC soap operas they did and despising the same characters thereon, and the Gordons didn’t seem like they owned a television, but in any event, Dad and I trooped dutifully over to the Gordons’ with event flyers in hand, expecting to hand one to a manservant and hear it hitting a mid-century waste-paper basket (…see what I mean with the heritage lingo?) before we’d gotten off the front steps.
The manservants (“menservant”?) must have had the day off, though, because Mrs. Gordon answered the door herself, and invited us in for a glass of iced tea. I don’t remember MUCH about our visit, except the truly delicious tea, and the frosted glasses it came in, and the little silver claws used to serve the sugar cubes. The house looked and smelled like a museum and was kept at rare-books temperature – for good reason, as the Times noted in 2011. Mrs. Gordon sat on the sofa with perfect posture; she was very kind. I THINK she explained that they couldn’t attend because Mr. Gordon was ill, but that could be a pattern-recognition thing – that that’s just what rich, mysterious ladies say in the early part of a fable, the part that maps onto a reality the reader has also experienced. Mr. Gordon may already have died by then. I don’t think she attended the block party. I don’t think I ever saw her again. I don’t think ANYONE in our neighborhood ever saw her again, only the manservants (“menservant”?) and their incongruous chest hair, bustling around near the Gordons’ garage, or smoking coatless by a side door – and I got the impression that nobody else in our neighborhood had ever seen Mrs. Gordon at all, much less a second time.
And this is how a comparatively unremarkable old lady becomes a myth. She is seen only once, and then the portal to her world closes, leaving her alone with her artifacts of a bygone age and her attendants from a faraway land, and leaving her neighbors – bored, ill-bred gossips waiting for the internet to be invented – to construct the Union County version of “A Rose For Emily” all around her.
Or Jane Eyre. Gatsby elements, sometimes. My own version, shared with Agent Weiss around the way, was that the manservants (“menservant”?) (…I’ll stop it with that now; I forget who started calling them “the Greeks,” but that is in fact what we called them back then) had decided to put the “kill” back in “Achilles” and murdered Mrs. Gordon. Or just…didn’t bother reporting her death of natural causes and stashed her remains under a roof eave, the better to continue enjoying the pool and grounds. But the striking part, to me, isn’t that we jackasses came up with a slanderously over-the-top explanation for a quotidian absence. It’s that most of the rest of the neighborhood ALSO did this, independently, and that the stories shared so many elements…not to mention a certain implausibility. Mummies forging checks. A tunnel under the swimming pool — which was tiled with gulden, by the way, like, what? Where did we get this shit? Why? Mrs. Gordon was probably in there painting her nails and watching One Life To Live just like my grandma’s friends and I were.
Maybe she knew, played the part. Maybe she snuck out of the house huddled in the backseat with one of the Greeks driving, shopped at an Acme two towns over, told a manservant to struggle outside with a suspicious-looking rolled-up rug once every 18 months to give the rest of Rowan a thrill. Or maybe she didn’t give a tinker’s damn about us plebes, which is also fine, but I think a lot at this time of year about the ways we organize the world for ourselves, so that we can understand it in a livable way. And I think a lot in the last few years especially about the stories each of us builds, separately and alone, that end up being the same ones. We tell tales to feel less confused and alone.
And sometimes it works.
Happy birthday, Don. Grab a frosted glass and have a swim.
Tags: September 11th
Thank You, Sars!! and Happy Birthday, Don!!
Happy birthday Don.
Sarah, I come here to read your 9/11 blog every year. I’m always hoping he somehow found you again.
Thank you.
Thank you for keeping this place of comfort. It’s so easy to feel alone in this world, and today, of all days, we need quiet community.
Take care, Sars and everyone.
Happy Birthday, Don.
Thank you, Sars, for providing this touchstone year after year. And happy birthday Don.
After all these years, we still haven’t found him. Maybe he really was a ghost.
Happy Birthday Don.
Happy birthday Don. Thanks Sarah, this year, and every year.
Thanks Sarah (well done as always) & Happy bday Don.
I spent the whole day at work writing September 10 on my documents, and I JUST realized it was actually the 11th. I immediately came here, and it warms my heart to see old friends.
Happy birthday, Don. I hope your friends are embracing you with warmth today too.
Sarah, you’re just such a beautiful writer. I am grateful I get to read what you write; thank you for sharing your stories.
thanks so much, friend!
Hi everyone! Thanks you, Sars! And happy birthday, Don!
My spouse and I were talking about the big historical moments in our lives, and I realized that #1. because I’m several years older, I’ve experienced/witnessed some that he hasn’t and #2. the ones we’ve both lived through, we have vastly different perspectives on — this day being one of them.
I was post-grad aged, working my first career job in PA and he would have been a college freshman in FL. I felt the emotional impact immediately; I also had friends directly affected. He is only just recently just starting to ‘get it’– and why I can’t talk about it with him. But you all do, and I’m so thankful than we can talk — or not talk — about it together, in our shared, yet diverse, narrative in this community.
I’m looking forward to sharing this tradition and also all of TN and my TN neighbors with my now 11-year-old kiddo, to show her what a healthy, supportive, online community really can look like.
Love you guys.
Fables and tales, histories and mysteries. So very human. So very divine.
Happy birthday, Don. Thank you for still being here, Sars.
Thanks, Sars. My daughter’s birthday is about a week before, and every year she gets older and then the anniversary tributes start, and every year I think how impossible it will forever be for me to describe the world before that day. Appreciate you being here.
Thank you, Sarah. Happy birthday, Don.
Happy birthday, Don, and thanks you, Sars, for getting us together here again. <3
Hi Everyone! Been trying to find a quiet moment all day to get back here today to read this years instalment and re-read, and I finally made it.
Sarah, thank you for continuing to keep this space for us to gather together and reflect on this day.
Happy Birthday, Don.
One of the days when I knew, as it happened, that this was a pivot point with a Before and an After. I don’t know how it’s 22 years already. Happy birthday Don, and hope you are with family and friends.
It’s strange to think of how much time has passed since that day. Thank you for keeping the tradition going. Happy birthday, Don.
Crying. The layers. Happy birthday Don.
Thanks for this, Sars – I loved it. I was going to comment yesterday, but I kept going down mental rabbit holes as I thought about the story and the day, how memory and legend are preserved, and how mass trauma echoes down the years.
…until I had to finally go watch a baseball game to yank myself out of the cycle (but given the way my team ended up last night, I probably should have stayed in the rabbit holes, sigh).
Hi everyone, nice to see all the familiar names! And happy birthday, Don.
Hi all—
Late to the reunion, as usual, but here…good to see everyone again. Wishing us all good luck and good health till next year, grateful as ever for Sarah’s ability to say it just right, and increasingly convinced that Don is as much guardian angel as human. Happy birthday, Don, wherever you are.
Just popping in to thank you for the “A Rose For Emily” mention because I immediately started thinking that was where the story was going when you mentioned Mrs. Gordon came to the door and said her husband was ill. Acme is also a blast from my youthful past (mom would’ve had a coronary if I’d ever pronounced it Ack-A-Me like the rest of the neighborhood).
One can’t help wondering if you are Don’s lady, seen only once, the portal to your world having closed, leaving you here with us, and your annual reminder that You Were There.
This is the first year I’ve been late to visit and I thought surely it would be the year there was nothing TO visit. I’m so glad I was wrong. Thank you, Sars, for still being here.
And happy belated birthday, Don. I still believe you’re out there and someday you’ll find this little corner of the world where these strangers hold you close to their hearts.