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with what sounded like a tractor engine under the hood. He also had farm-buying clothes, not quite overalls and a straw hat but almost. He also had a farm-buying lingo. One of his many connections would tell him that some farmer was getting old and didn’t have any farming children, or that some kids who lived in Portsmouth had inherited the family farm, and he would get on the proper costume and go talk to whoever was in a state of landowning flux. Often enough he would come back home with an oral agreement to buy, and then I would follow up on the deal with the paperwork. By the late seventies, Gordon had quite a few farms, amounting to several hundred acres in all, some of them contiguous, some of them close to town, some of them way out in the middle of nowhere. Those were the farms where he kept his cattle. One piece of property, some 120 acres, was a development about ten miles from West Portsmouth that Gordon had been building on at least since I got into his business. It was called Glamorgan Close. My father thought this name was ridiculous; the acreage was open, almost flat at the front, rolling more steeply toward the back. My father never tired of pointing out that, on the one hand, a close was a stabling area, and, on the other hand, there was nothing “close” about Glamorgan Close and nothing Glamorgany, either, since there wasn’t a Scot anywhere in the vicinity.
    Glamorgan Close had had several phases. Phase One, near the highway to Portsmouth, had inexpensive three-bedroom houses with small front yards, large backyards, and three styles, the Maryland, the Virginia, and the South Carolina, which had a larger front porch, labeled in the brochure as “the veranda.” These houses, which were on straight streets (Kinloch Avenue, Glengarry Avenue, Kirkpatrick Avenue), were a quarter mile from the elementary school Gordon had talked the county into and a mile from the Kroger’s shopping center. Phase One was a big success. Behind Phase One was Phase Two: Stuart Way, Robertson Way, and Ivanhoe Way. Phase Two featured three-bedroom houses also, but with two and a half baths and a bonus room. Phase Two styles, the Sonoma, the Mendocino, and the Santa Rosa, had somewhat larger rooms than the Phase One styles, lots of wood and beams, decks off the back, and a little bit of a view. The ideal couple who moved with their first two toddlers into the Virginia would find themselves, ten years later, entertaining junior high schoolers in the bonus room of the Sonoma, the deck of which could easily support a hot tub. If the couple did extremely well and maintained the integrity of their assets by not divorcing, Gordon was ready for them with Phase Three, the Greenwich, the Hastings, and the Ardsley: four bedrooms, four baths, master suites with sitting rooms, screened-in verandas, center-island kitchens, and mother-in-law apartments. These properties (Blacklock Circle, Praed Circle, Tartan Circle) were larger and had better views than those in the other two phases and, in fact, looked down on the other two, but at this point the ideal couple was expected to finance the down payment of their eldest child and his or her spouse in one of the Phase One houses, which now had mature landscaping and the individuality born of age and idiosyncratic property ownership.
    This was Gordon’s vision of life, even if he didn’t say so—you made your way and populated your vicinity with your offspring, who then dropped the grandchildren off at your house whenever they felt like it. Phase Three was essentially complete now, some twenty years after groundbreaking for Phase One. There was still some land, though not much, and Gordon was going to start Phase Four when he could get around to it. Glamorgan Close was not Gordon’s only development, but it was the one that had established him in the Portsmouth area. Selling houses in Glamorgan Close was as simple as putting a notice in the paper that one was available. They were reasonably