Mary’s, where roughly 40 members are gone, Father Peter Dugandzic says flatly: “We will measure our lives from that point,” meaning Sept. “I thought I’d seen it all,” he says-then closes his eyes and slowly shakes his head.Īt St. flags, a New York Police Department officer talks about the staggering number of hours he’s logged at the World Trade Center site and the things he’s seen. At Leo’s, where the bartenders honor the missing regulars by wearing neckties adorned with U.S. Especially now, with the stores empty, the bars and churches packed. You can always read the mood of the town on Plandome Road, residents say. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, the road runs down a gentle hill, past the bars where the men hang out, past the hair salons where the women hang out, past the soda fountains where the teens hang out, all the way to the yacht clubs, where the rich float out on Long Island Sound. Like a cardboard set for a play about small-town America, Plandome Road is the backdrop and foreground of life in Manhasset.īeginning at St. In those warm days of late September, there was a sickening false spring in Manhasset as the town bloomed overnight with condolence bouquets.Īlong with every other business in town, the Orofinos’ flower shop sits on Plandome Road, the only commercial strip. Now, the Orofinos were making floral arrangements for their funerals. They may have come to the Orofinos to buy orchids for their mothers, corsages for their prom dates, roses for their wives. Their big round faces were as welcome in the shop as new daisies. People who hadn’t yet stepped safely off one of the trains pulling into Manhasset’s station like troop trains limping back from battle.Īmong the dead were men the Orofinos knew as boys and watched grow. They began to hear names, an endless roll call of names. Later, after their relief wore off, dread set in. They locked up their shop and dashed to his house. When the Orofinos first heard that the World Trade Center was in flames, they didn’t know their son was safe, sleeping late. 10, he gave everyone-himself included-the next morning off. But after keeping his staff of 28 computer technicians working late into the night Sept. He should have been at his desk the morning of the attacks. The Orofinos’ son worked in the World Trade Center. He stops and wipes his eyes with a rough, stained hand. “People who were born here,” says her husband, Ray, “who grew up here. “People are just going through the motions.” “There’s a pall over Manhasset,” says Lillian Orofino, owner of Olive Duntley Florist. Scott Fitzgerald romanticized Manhasset and used it as the setting for much of “The Great Gatsby,” the town had a reputation as one of those lovely places where the American dream rings true, and often comes true. Simple country village, enclave of vast wealth.
His son boarded the 5:43 a.m., or the 6:34 or one of the other 42 Long Island Railroad trains that run into Manhattan each day, and he never came back.įor generations, this small town 17 miles east of Manhattan has straddled two identities. The whole town knows the man’s son died in the World Trade Center, along with nearly 50 other people who hailed from here. Seven hours later, the man’s friends are gone, but the man is still standing in the same spot at the bar, drinking, talking. He looks like every other man in the place, but he’s different, and everyone knows it. The man walks into the bar, shakes hands with his friends, orders a beer.
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