A Husband Who Thought Only of a Reassuring Call

By Valerie Burgher | STAFF WRITER

September 17, 2001

The family resemblance between Deborah Opperman, her sister Andrea Buska and their mother Betty Jongbloed is not usually this pronounced.

But when they cry, each of the three women's noses turns red in exactly the same place, and the blood rushes to the same folded area under their six collective eyes. Each woman props her chin up on her fist with a folded left arm, so that the wedding band on her third finger offsets a patchy wet face.

Among them they have 157 years of life experience. But in that time, none of them remembers having seen or heard anything comparable to the week of Sept. 11.

Deborah's husband was Michael Opperman. He was working on the 102nd floor of Tower Two as a vice president for insurance company Aon Corp. when the first plane hit Tuesday morning.

Deborah was at World Gym in East Setauket, where she's a day-care worker. It was there she got a phone call Tuesday morning telling her to turn on the television.

Andrea's husband is Stephan Buska.

He works for the same company as Michael, and his office is on the 93rd floor of Tower Two. About 200 of his employees are still unaccounted for. On Tuesday morning Andrea convinced her husband to stay home from work to recover from recent oral surgery.

"We've been married for 19 years and he has never listened to me once," Andrea said. "For some reason, he - after 19 years - decided to listen to me and stayed home."

Betty's husband is Andrew Jongbloed.

He is 73 and saw combat in World WarII. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Andrew Jongbloed listened to the radio to keep up on developing events. This week he has spent every day on a couch in Deborah's living room, the TV tuned to WABC/7 or CNN. "My father's just obsessed with the whole situation," she said.

On Sept. 11, Michael Opperman left his home in Selden as usual at 3 a.m. to make his two-hour commute to Manhattan. He liked to get a jump on the day.

Opperman knew Deborah was at her day care job, so he pressed what he thought was the memory-dial number for the gym. He accidentally pressed the number for sister-in-law Andrea, who stayed on the line to ask if Michael was all right. He said he was and that he was leaving Tower Two, but first he had to call his wife, according to Andrea.

"I can't help but feel that if he hadn't called me and I'd kept him on, maybe he would have gotten her and got out of the building," Andrea said.

Deborah left Michael a message as she watched the first building collapse. "He called me back after 9," she said. All of a sudden, it was his building.

"At that moment he was shrieking in terror. That's why I'm pretty much sure that ..."

Deborah now accepts that Michael, "my Boy Scout," as she calls him, will not be coming home. She refers to him in the past tense.