Eli Saslow: HELEN FORD DRIVES to the house from memory, parks along the curb and idles in her car. This three-story duplex in Cambridge, Mass., had been her home for 40 years, but now she wonders whether she has the courage to enter. She turns on the radio and takes out a crossword puzzle. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do this,” she says.
It has been more than two years since she was last here — two years since her famous son betrayed her and the foreclosure specialists arrived with moving trucks. She fixates on the house during the long nights alone in her one-bedroom apartment, dreaming about all the good memories and waking every few hours because of the bad.
“I have to see it,” she says now. Helen turns off the radio and walks to the house. “The only way I’ll ever move on is by getting back in there.” A blue padlock is on the front door that she had once been too trusting to lock. A sign that reads “Danger: No Playing” is planted in the front yard, where she had hosted graduation parties for her children — four of her own, four adopted and at least 30 foster kids. Cigarette butts and half-empty beer cans litter the makeshift basketball court, where one of those children had turned into a star.
Helen’s lawyer, Dennis Benzan, stands on the front steps, waiting to greet her. The house belongs to the bank now, and Helen doesn’t have the authority to enter alone. Benzan punches numbers into the padlock, then turns toward his client.
“Technically, I should tell you that we are going to be trespassing,” he says. He asks Helen if she’d wear a mask to protect herself from dust and mold, but she waves him off.
“This is my house,” she says. “I can handle it.”
Leave a comment