As President Obama began speaking at Ground Zero, Bechtoldt stopped at the marker for Gregg Reidy, folded her arms and cleared her throat in the quiet, suburban morning. “St. Mary’s church,” she said, explaining their connection. As millions watched the televised service in Lower Manhattan, Bechtoldt walked over to the marker of Patrick Hoey — “a great Irish guy” — whom she knew through local charity work. Around a curve, there was the smiling, sandblasted image of Louis Minervino, a frequent customer at her flower shop. She cried, kissed two fingers and pressed them to the stone.
“It’s just — ” she said, looking at the markers of friends and neighbors and familiar faces. “It’s still suffocating.”
To be in Middletown on Sunday was to be reminded that although Sept. 11 brought personal tragedy to families and defined an entire decade for the United States, it was also a day that left gaping holes in communities such as this one, where residents are bound by commuter trains and deli lines, and now, the shared experience of that bright September morning.
From the high-rise enclaves of Manhattan to suburban towns strung along the highways and parkways of Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey, people stopped to remember not only lost husbands and mothers but also the neighbor they waved at in the lobby, the soccer coach, the carpool buddy, or the familiar face from the long commute to Lower Manhattan. In Middletown, Mae Boguszewski remembered James Thomas Murphy.
“I just knew his face from the train station,” she said, explaining that she found out his name after he died, that he worked as a trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, as so many here did.
She walked through the Middletown WTC Memorial Gardens, a place built with guidance from a local committee and donations from companies such as Pantaleo Electric and Stavola Contracting and others that dot the strip malls along Kings Highway and Highway 35. Physically, the garden is in the southeastern area of Middletown, which doesn’t really have a middle and isn’t really a town as much as a collection of neighborhoods off shopping thoroughfares.
And yet this weekend, at least, people seemed drawn to the memorial garden, as if it had become their communal ground, a touchstone.
“We don’t really have a center,” Boguszewski said after her walk. “I mean, I can only think of the train station, and — this. I guess this is it.”
Ten years ago, many Middletown residents had gone to work in the morning and arrived home hours later covered in soot from the fallen towers or having lost shoes running from debris. In the weeks that followed, they counted the dead by how many cars were left in the commuter parking lot and which houses were still dark. When a neighbor saw Andrew Leong on the train without his wife, who always commuted with him, he asked Leong whether everything was okay. It was.
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