Intellectually, I know that Marcia and Bill Scanlon have not always resided on Cedar Street in Wakefield, Massachusetts. I know that Aunt Marcia, my father’s older sister, grew up in the same home on Richardson that my father did, but I’ve seen no evidence of this. For the entirety of my lifetime, every visit to my aunt and uncle has involved a single home.
It’s this home’s driveway that I pull the rental car into, driving to the back and then, breaking from tradition, circling around to the front door to knock. Marcia opens the door, greeting me with her thick Boston accent and a hug. Inside, the house smells of chocolate chip cookies, which slightly perplexes me—I can’t remember Marcia ever having made cookies before, but she informs me they’re for an upcoming visit to one of the couple’s three daughters. By the end of the night, I will eat my share.
We sit down at the kitchen table, and Marcia tells me the story I want to hear, right from the very beginning: Saul Mark Rosen, the early years.
“He was born the day before Thanksgiving. So the next day, for Thanksgiving, we had to go to my grandmother’s house, because my mother was in the hospital. He must have come home on a Sunday night, because he cried through a TV show. After that, he was okay. He got better.”
For my father’s early years, his mother, my grandmother Ethel, stayed at home, but once he started school, she returned to work as an eye and ear tester. Despite my grandmother’s stay-at-home status, Steve and Marcia, who were respectively 12 and 10 years older than my dad, inherited a lot of responsibility.
“We would babysit at night if she had meetings, or Saturdays, we’d have to take him to the park. By the time he was born, Steve and I had to share the responsibility of doing dishes: one would wash, one would dry. One would dust, one would vacuum. We had all these responsibilities, and we used to say that little Saul didn’t have to do anything.”
Marcia remembers that two of her friends had younger brothers the same age as my father, so they all hung out together.
“We took them everywhere, we did everything with the boys, because there were three boys. I taught him how to read. He was young. He must have been like four years old. So, he knew how to read. He knew his numbers. I think he was advanced for his age.”
By the time Marcia finished high school, Steve had already flunked out of college. As such, Marcia attended Boston State College, a commuter school.
“Steve dropped out of college, therefore I’m being punished for Steve. Poor little Saul is sitting there saying, ‘I’d better be really good, because otherwise God knows what’ll happen to me.’ He was prissy to that point, but he was a good kid, and he did what he was told to do.”
Marcia’s big rebellion arrived a few years later, when she married her now-husband of 42 years, Bill Scanlon. She had gone to school with Bill’s brother, but the two of them first met when she worked at the Wakefield Theatre in 1964.
“My mother didn’t let us date, because he was Catholic. So we never dated, but we got married in 1967.”
Ethel took the idea of Marcia converting to Catholicism and marrying a gentile poorly.
“She didn’t go to the wedding. Steve and Nancy came. Saul did not come. He was like 14 at the time. So that weekend in particular, Mom, Dad, and Saul must have gone up to Portland, Maine to visit Aunt Edie. That’s where they had to go instead of coming to the wedding.”
At the time, Marcia taught at the same middle school that my father attended. Marcia never had him in any of her classes, but says he used to say hi in the hallway. Ethel worked in the schools at the time, too, which meant information traveled through the grapevine.
“I was not spoken to until we told them I was pregnant, and she said that was nice. She knew, because I was teaching, so she would know through the school system. The day that Carolyn was born, that afternoon, they came into the hospital room and said, ‘We have our first grandchild!’ They came in with a car seat. During that interim, between the wedding and Carolyn, there was no contact. And Saul had no contact. He couldn’t.”
“After my mother had passed away, my father said his hands were tied. So, you know where the fault laid. Someday, when you get married, you will understand that.”
Marcia finds the whole situation especially ridiculous in light of her parents’ marriage.
“My mother would have told you that when she married my father, they eloped. Supposedly, they eloped because her parents did not approve of him, because he was only a window-washer. Going through that, I would think there would be more compassion, but she stood her ground and said no.”
In 2004, Marcia and Bill’s middle daughter, Christine, married a Persian man who had immigrated from Iran as a child. World peace may be difficult, but my family has overcome cultural differences with ease.
“I feel you don’t look at a person for their race or their religion, I would look at the way they live their life, and their morals more than anything. Why would I marry a Jewish person just because he was Jewish?”
Ethel passed away in 1980, shortly before my parents met. The next year, when my father married a nice Jewish girl1, my grandfather Simon suffered from eye problems, heart problems and type II diabetes, but wouldn’t dream of missing the wedding in Memphis. With two children in braces, Marcia couldn’t afford to attend it, and feared Simon would drive down alone. She tells me she talked him out of it by suggesting he would have to drive his sister, Helen, down as well. He flew instead.
Simon died nine months later.2
“Now, if you want to play numbers, he died on June 21st of 1982, so six years and six months later, Saul died. Isn’t that ironic?”
Marcia tells me about the day her little brother died.
“I worked down the corner there at a little bank. The bank closed at 4:00. I came home. The girls were home from college, in ’88. I walked in the door, and Bill said, ‘There’s been a terrible accident. Pan Am 103 crashed.'”
“And I said, ‘Really? That’s horrific.’ We were watching that, and your mother called and said she had just come in from shopping. Did she? She must have told you that. And you guys had turned on to watch Sesame Street or some wonderful program at the age of five and said she heard about it.”
I tell her the story as I was told, that my mother turned on the TV while doing chores around the house, and first heard the news while my sister and I were elsewhere. Even so, I have no idea which of us, if either, remembers correctly.
My mom told Marcia that she thought my dad was on that plane, but couldn’t get any information from Pan Am. Marcia called a friend who worked for Delta, hoping they might be able to help, but to no avail. Later, she tried Pan Am, who told her they had no record of a Saul Rosen, but they had one for Paul Rosen3.
“By the time we went to bed that night, we were 90% sure it was Saul, but we weren’t sure until your mother called the next morning and said that was it. At which point, we said we would be right down. But she said she didn’t know whether she’d get any remains or not at that point. So she said, ‘I want him buried—or something—in Wakefield.'”
Marcia agreed to arrange for whatever remained of my father to be laid to rest beside his parents, then drove down to help my mom.
“We ended up going to New Jersey, just Bill and I. We left the three girls here. We had a memorial service for him on Christmas Day4, and then we left there, came home.
“So then, New Year’s Day, we were going to celebrate our Christmas finally, because we hadn’t had Christmas, and that morning, your mother called and said that they had called and identified or found remains of your father, and that she wanted to plan the service up here.”
As Marcia remembers it, my mom’s parents and all of her siblings came to Wakefield for the funeral. Unlike Steve, she also remembers that my sister and I stayed in New Jersey.
“So they came over here, and we went to the cemetery. We’ve talked about that. It was the coldest, windiest day you could ever imagine. It’s right on the lake, and the wind was just phenomenal. I remember, prior to that, I got a call from the funeral director. They sent all remains in a pine box, which they had built over there. He said, ‘Do we want to change it to a regular casket?’ and we said no.”
“That was my decision. I never said that to your mother. I just said, ‘Whatever he comes in,’ because we have no idea, to this moment, what they found.”
Soon after the news about my father broke, the local newspaper, the Wakefield Daily Item, called Marcia to ask where people should send flowers or donations. Since he had attended Wakefield’s public schools, Marcia decided to set up a scholarship fund in his memory to benefit local students.
“We could have set it up to be specific for engineering or whatever, but we just said no, as long as they’re a Wakefield High School graduate. They give scholarships each year in his memory, and we usually get a letter from each person that gets a scholarship.”
This year, the scholarship awarded funds to three students, who will be attending Merrimack College, the University of Rhode Island, and Notre Dame in the Fall.
“We set that up, and it started with a minimal amount of money. It has grown. They have a fundraiser every spring, and people do donate. We donate every year, your mom donates every year, and Nancy and Steve donate on a regular basis. It’s a good program. Maybe the scholarships don’t pay for much, but maybe some books or whatever. It does help.”
Marcia grappled with her little brother’s death for years afterward. For a while, Marica refused to fly anywhere, but eventually, she didn’t have a choice.
“When did I start flying again? I can’t think where we were going. It was like we had no choice but to fly there, and I can’t think what it was. I’ve been to Switzerland. We did get over there a few years ago. And San Francisco. Maybe that was probably why, because the kids were out in San Francisco, so there was no way else to get there. Carolyn had moved out there in, I would say by ’92, ’93 maybe. There was no other way to get there, so we did that. I’m not happy, but I do it.”
Beyond her fear of flying, Marcia questions the justness of a world in which someone like my father can be cut down in his prime. Her youngest daughter is almost as old as my father was, and Marcia thinks she still has her whole life ahead of her.
“I’m looking at, for instance, Janet, who is going to be 34 this year. Why would I even think that she would leave this Earth at 35? Why did your mother, who had married your father, after, what, seven years of marriage, lose him? You don’t get married for a seven year span of time. I’m sure when they got married that they figured for a lifetime, but a lifetime was not seven years in their estimation. And yes, he did plan, and he did protect his family. Under the circumstances, yes, you did come out okay as far as economically. Mentally, it must have done a job on you.
“But, to go back to God, I believe there’s a supreme something out there that controls part of all that. I believe there’s a reason for everything, but you won’t always know the reason. The reason for my parents dying was so that they wouldn’t see Saul die. That’s my reason for that.”
Marcia never got particularly involved in the victims’ group, but she did follow along with the criminal trial through the Syracuse website, and feels strongly about security.
“If they had started security after 103, 9/11 wouldn’t have ever occurred, and that’s my bone of contention.”
When my family agreed to the settlement with Libya, Marcia asked my mother for a portion of it. My mother called me to discuss the topic, and I pointed out that if the money was meant to compensate us for our pain and suffering, we should respect what she’d gone through as well. Ultimately, we gave both Marcia and Steve portions of that first payment, but while we heard about the things that Steve and Nancy had done with their share, we never learned what Marcia and Bill did with theirs.
Apparently, there’s a reason for that.
“I put it aside. Just as easy as that. I put it aside. We did give a portion of it to each of the three kids.”
When that first payment came through in late 2003, all three of Marcia’s children were going through life-altering changes. Carolyn had recently given birth to her first child, while Christine and Janet were due to get married the following summer.
One night, Marcia’s daughters and their significant others were going out for dinner together instead of buying each other Christmas presents. Marcia and Bill agreed to babysit Carolyn’s son, and asked for all of the girls to swing by Carolyn’s house after dinner. When the girls returned, Marcia explained about the settlement, and gave each of their daughters a check. Stunned, the girls asked if Marcia and Bill could afford to give that much away.
“We didn’t tell them what you had given us, because it’s nobody’s business.”
The girls suggested that Marcia and Bill do something with their share of the money, and Marcia insisted that they already had. I’m surprised by this—after more than five years, this is the first reference I’ve heard to Marcia and Bill doing anything for themselves with the money.
“I can even show you what we bought. You don’t even have to move,” she tells me as she reaches into one of the cabinets behind me in her kitchen for the big reveal. “We bought a matching set of travel mugs. They said, ‘That’s what you bought? You should do something more.’
“We didn’t really need anything. We had people leave us money at different points in our life. When my parents were both gone, we got some money from that, and we put it away for the kids’ education, because at that point, we had to worry about education.”
Now, though, Marcia has little to worry about. Her children are grown, and she’s a grandmother three times over. She retired four years ago, but still works part-time in the same bank she worked all those years. And, every spring, she revisits a little ritual she maintained for nearly 30 years: Planting flowers at the graves of her family, on the shores of Lake Quannapowitt.
“Every May, once we can start planting, I do begonias for Saul and my parents. Begonias grow great there.”
By the time we’ve finished speaking, evening has set in, and Marcia and Bill offer to take me to dinner. As we eat, I fill them in on my life in Seattle and assure them that I’m doing great out there. Marcia, at one point, comments on how scruffy I’ve let myself get—I’ve got a week or two of scruff growing, which is actually my usual state, but I normally make a point of shaving before I see her. Bill remains reticent as ever, speaking up only when we discuss the theatrical nature of modern airport security.
After dinner, along the way back to their home, we drive past Lake Quannapowitt, Wakefield’s most defining characteristic to a visitor such as myself. My father’s grave lies elsewhere on the shore, but we drive past a portion that serves as a park. On the softball field, a team goes through warm-up exercises as we pass, and I’m hit by a sudden, crippling desire to be home. I’ve already confirmed my roster spot on my softball team—I paid before I left home—but practices should be starting soon, and I want nothing more than to climb a fence onto the field where we practice and play catch or field grounders with my friends.
Moments after passing the field, we arrive at Marcia and Bill’s house. After a little more conversation and a lot more cookies than I should have eaten, I bid Marcia and Bill adieu and head back to my hotel. Two days from now, I will return to their town, but I have no idea when I’ll see them next.
- Despite Maurice’s insistence that they don’t exist.
- As Steve detailed in Chapter Nine.
- My dad’s name was often misspelled as Sol or Paul or the like, and my mom, Meryl, frequently got Sheryl or Merly. They named me Scott and my sister Elizabeth because a) they wanted to name us after Simon and Ethel, and b) they wanted to give us more common names than theirs.
- I had no idea it was Christmas Day. I mentioned my lone memory from it in Chapter Twenty-Seven.