manhasset, 9/11
manhasset is about thirty-five minutes from penn station on the port washington line, and in 2001 it put its men on the same trains to the same four blocks of lower manhattan every morning, which the los angeles times later called a pinstriped platoon. eighteen thousand three hundred seventy-six people lived in the town. it lost nearly fifty of them before ten o'clock.
st. mary's buried about forty of its own, and its priests call that day our good friday. the memorial day paper printed the names, and there were more of them than the town had given to the civil war, the first world war, korea and vietnam together. at shelter rock elementary, four boys in the fourth grade had lost their fathers, and the school cancelled the self-esteem lessons. i was two grades behind them.
roko camaj. twenty-five years on the glass.they were not all bankers. roko camaj had washed the windows of the towers for twenty-five years and went up that morning the way he went up every morning. a town of eighteen thousand does not lose people as a list, either. the line the paper got at louie's counter was that you don't know everybody, but you know everybody's face.
i was seven and late for school, which in the second grade is a serious matter, and the radio in the car was already talking about it when i opened the door. an hour later the car came back for me. nobody explained. for the rest of that day the house was people in front of a television, trying to get my father on the phone. he was the chief information officer of general motors' asset management business, which meant nothing to me and a great deal to a building full of people whose systems had to work on a morning the systems had other concerns. he called that night to say he was fine and would be staying in the city some days, on account of the business having to continue.
the lot at the train station stayed full, which was the part nobody in town could walk past, because a commuter lot empties every evening and on the night of the eleventh this one still held seventy-three cars. it emptied slowly over the next few days, as men came home on whatever they could find. then it stopped emptying. one car sat where it was for a month. the man's wife could get as far as the driver's seat and no farther, so the town covered the car in flags and notes and left it where it was. nobody organized that. it is the thing i would most want a stranger to understand about the place.
then came the flags, a full year of them, on every porch on plandome road. i have not seen the country like that before or since, and i was seven and had nothing to compare it to, so i took it for the normal state of things and have been disappointed ever since. the men who went in kept going in. some of them are still paying for it: at the town's memorial this morning, three port washington firemen who died of illnesses they got at the site were read out alongside the men who died on the day.
a town that loses fifty commuters in one morning raises a certain kind of child, and it does not have to say so out loud. nobody sat any of us down about it. you knew which kids at school had lost a father the way you knew who was left-handed. a boy of seven decides nothing. but he files things without knowing he is filing them, and ten years later i walked into the manhasset-lakeville fire department, signed up, and stayed five years. the badge is in a drawer in brooklyn now. whether the smoke is why is not a question i can answer honestly, and i have stopped pretending the line is straight.
this morning the town read the names out at the memorial in manhasset valley park, the way it does every september. it takes a while. that is the entire point of doing it out loud.