Blane Jane’s daughter Jandy married Tom Barrington in 1978. It is through this marriage that I (Mick Jane,
Jandy’s brother, Blane’s oldest son) become part of the Dentdale Diaries.
The Jane house was located within blocks of Jake and Carol Barrington’s
home in Dentdale, but our house called Denton Heights its home. The interstate (I-295) created an unnatural
divide between the two towns and none of us had ever met or heard of the
Barringtons until Jandy started seeing Tom.
Jandy has four brothers in this family and seven half-brothers and
sisters through Blane’s first marriage.
The Second Family is what we were called by The First Family. Blane liked to think of us (the second
family) as The Jane Gang. This was a
not-so-subtle way of hiding an embarrassment by putting in plain sight for all
to view. His embarrassment was that he
was a sixty year old man with a family of five children (plus wife) to house,
feed, a cloth. Actually, having a young
wife and five children was a source of pride: that he no longer earned enough
money to support his ‘trophies’ was his embarrassment. Recognizing that the best way to earn money
was through sweat equity, and also recognizing that his aging body would no
longer produce the testosterone to produce the needed sweat, Blane reviewed his
remaining assets, and quickly put them to work. We (Mick, Stan, Jandy, Heff, and Scotch
Jane) were the most visible (and audible) of Blane’s remaining assets and so,
like it or not, we became independent contractors in Blane’s diverse business
empire. Whether it was cutting lawns,
shoveling snow, house painting, or any other ‘handy-man’ chores that could earn
a buck – Blane had a worker who was immediately available: one of us!
He disavowed his previous employment as a privileged executive (or
maybe they ‘disavowed’ him when he knocked up his secretary). He liked the idea of steady
income, and of steady work. He just
wasn’t really fond of doing the work that provided the steady income – after
all, in his previous career he had been ‘management’- not labor.
The seasonal businesses that diversified the ever-expanding portfolio
affectionately referred to as Blane Inc. LLC would always be regarded as money
that could not be depended upon. A
drought would mean that lawns weren’t mowed so frequently, a blizzard would
mean that the gas bill could be paid within 30 days of its presentation. Years that presented rain and no snow meant
the gas bill wasn’t paid until lawn cutting began in the spring. Equipment failures meant an unexpected
expenditure. Births represented another
set of hands that could one day offset the expense of the equipment costs. Birthday parties were written off as a
business expense because the cake and ice cream were an entertainment expense
for the independent contractors. Birthdays also meant that we were one year
older, and that meant we could work harder, longer, faster, and that no
increase in salaries would be necessary.
When we were very young, Blane would use day laborers for his
businesses. Given that I had so many
half-brothers and sisters, I assumed that Jesus, Juan, and Carmen were my blood
relatives. They were there at every
birthday party, that every child in The Second Family had, so it was kind of
reasonable to assume that there was another ‘Mommy’ out there producing these
brown eyed kin. Later on, Priscilla
explained that they weren’t actual relatives.
She explained that she treated them as family because they were such
nice, caring people. In fact, they were
very nice people, who we saw on at least a weekly if not daily basis. Blane invited them to our celebrations
because he honored their work, and was empathetic to their obvious limited
social mobility. But, as with most
things in business: business is business, and with every slice of cake that
Jesus, Juan, and Carmen enjoyed, Blane saw a tax deduction for ‘business
entertainment’.
The foundation of Blane Inc. LLC was related to his career in the
printing industry – well, kind of. One
of the customers for the printing business was a local newspaper. Their delivery service was somewhat
slipshod, and they no longer wanted the responsibility of delivering the product
that they printed. Thinking that
newspaper delivery was a temporary fix for a short term cash flow shortage,
Blane agreed to deliver the newspapers.
Some people don’t need a straight eight hours of sleep every
night. Blane was one of those people
who could be happy with short naps, and four or five hours of sleep at
night. When the kids started arriving,
he found it difficult to find the quiet time to get his well-earned and
much-needed rest. The paper route
required waking at 3 a.m. to pick-up, rubber-band, or encase in plastic wrap
the newspapers. This would take two or
three hours, and then the next two hours was spent delivering the papers. By the time he returned home, the older
children were off to school, and the younger children were there to be
enjoyed. By noon the younger children
and Blane would nap. Late afternoon would see the return of the older children
from their classes and we would be marched out the door to earn some money in
the other business opportunities that Blane would stumble onto.
Blane had more quiet time than of any of us in that house. ‘Alone’ was just not something that one
could be with five children, two parents, and a mother-in-law living in one
house. His odd hours meant that he could
sleep when most of us weren’t there. Or,
he could be out of the house, when we were there. Either way, it was a win/win situation for
him.
Blane enjoyed the solitude of the paper route. He liked the physicality of the work. Yes, the customer complaints were a daily
source of annoyance, but the complaints were generally resolved by quickly
replacing the soggy, thrown-in-a-bush-and-can’t-find-it copy of the complainant’s
newspaper. There were chronic
complainers, but Blane recognized that their complaints were most likely the
only human interactions that these sad and forgotten people would have during
their long lonely day. So, the
chronic complainers were thwarted in their whining, by nearly daily ‘wellness
checks’ that Priscilla would execute by phone.
The Jane Gang’s reputation was burnished to a high gloss by Priscilla’s
actions to thwart complaints with kindness!
We (meaning Priscilla) took special care with folks who
were suffering from loneliness, illness, or any other ‘ness’ that could be cured
with a smile, and the episodic gift of home baked cookies. Little could be done about an errantly
thrown newspaper, or plastic wrapped newspaper whose plastic disintegrated in
the acid rains from Dentdale’s industrial facilities. It was Priscilla who recognized that a ‘big
deal’ could be turned into an ‘oh well’ by simply being friendly. It is easier to complain to a stranger, than
it is to complain to a friend so Priscilla made all of her customers, her
friend.
He walked out on his family of seven (plus his wife) to begin life anew
with my mother Priscilla. He was in his
fifties, and clearly having a mid-life crisis.
Priscilla was an only child with a great sense of humor, and her
personality boasted a pragmatic way of seeing things. She was pretty-of-face, and had a bubbly
personality, but she was a large girl who had pretty much resigned herself to
remaining single.
Blane had risen through the ranks to become an executive in the company
that he worked at. Priscilla landed a
secretarial position in the company, and then she landed Blane. The ‘doing’ was not Priscilla’s work. It was Blane whose wandering eye wandered
her way. The heart wants what the heart
wants, and as he approached his fiftieth birthday his heart wanted to start
over – to do it all again. The thing he
most wanted to ‘do’ was Priscilla. His
doings were done without regard to the consequences. However, he did not shy away from the
responsibilities that resulted from his behavior. “You breed
‘em, you feed ‘em!” was
his motto, and he stayed true to his word.
We never lacked for food, or fun.
What more can one ask for in a childhood? The only thing we wanted was the thing we
would never get (of course):
to be able to stay in a warm comfortable bed on a cold rainy day; and
not have to wake up every, single, day of my life at 3 a.m.!
Tom Barrington’s dad (Jake) required Tom and Frisky to unload and load
Jake’s station wagon with whatever product he was peddling at the time. Jake had been a milkman, but when grocery
stores and ‘The Wawa’ started selling milk, the milkman disappeared from the
American scene. Jake liked physical
labor, but was much more sociable than Blane.
Jake was a much younger man than Blane.
His work had far fewer customer complaints, so he didn’t need the
isolation that Blane preferred. When
the milk business shut down Jake and his other milkmen buddies (mostly) went into
the food brokerage business. They
already knew the routes, the highways and byways, of southern New Jersey and
eastern Pennsylvania, so instead of milk; they peddled Chun King, Aqua Net
hairspray, Lysol, Thousand Island salad dressing, or any other non-perishable
product whose manufacturer wanted premium shelf space in the supermarkets.
The Barrington’s basement served as a warehouse, and it was here that
Jake had what he thought were ‘bonding’ moments with Tom & Frisky. Frisky liked organizing the warehouse, and
the organizational skills that he learned served him well in his later
careers. Tom was less enchanted with
the duties required of him to help Jake keep his job, and provide income to the
family. Tom grew to resent Jake’s bi-monthly
loading and unloading of the station wagon.
The unloading occurred on Friday night, or Saturday morning, and the
reloading would happen on Sunday evening.
Total time to unload and reload the car was less than an hour (half hour
unloading, a half hour loading). So, it wasn’t a daily occurrence consuming
twenty percent of Tom’s waking moments.
Tom’s resentment of Jake for this and other perceived failures in Jake’s
personality were unshakable. This is
kind of funny because Tom greatly admired Blane for making us work every day of
the week delivering papers in the moon’s waning light. His resentment of Jake’s chores is
laughable, because the grass was most certainly not greener in the not-so-verdant
garden of the Jane household.
Tom’s love affair with Blane was evident to everyone in the Jane
household. Tom expressed in word and
action his desire to disassociate from the Barringtons (Jake
specifically, Carol later on, and Frisky – always). Tom and Jandy had many things in common, and
it wasn’t thought of as a bad match.
But, Blane had already experienced three other daughter’s marriages, his
sister’s marriages, and his own two marriages. Blane’s experience in marriage was extensive
and his opinion of Jandy’s marriage to Tom was not quite ready to be verbalized
or discussed. His surprising departure
from this mortal coil left the question about his opinion on the pending
engagement ceremony unanswered.
Blane had the rather dubious distinction of having a wife, a sister,
and a daughter who were all the same age!
Take a moment to figure out how that works out……… we’ll wait! While he was considered a man’s man, he
clearly had a way with the ladies. He
was a very smart man, whose libidinous instincts would prove to be his
legacy. His success with the ladies was
not due to his good looks (he was good
looking though – as we all are in the Jane family); it came from an intuition about
feminine attitudes and behaviors.
As Jandy progressed through her teenage years, Blane supervised and
hoarded her virtue. This was a mostly
successful campaign, and Blane relinquished his management of Jandy’s chastity
shortly after she met Tom.
Blane saw Tom as a nice ‘starter-kit’.
In today’s terms, Tom would have been seen as a nice first husband. Blane would not have minded if Jandy and Tom
shacked up (after all it was the ‘70’s and
living together was becoming a common modality).
Did Blane transition from this life to avoid refusing Tom’s request for
Jandy’s hand? Did Blane relinquish his
control knowing that all-would-be-well?
As Freud said: “sometimes
a cigar is just a cigar.”
Blane was old. He didn’t go to
the doctor, and really who knows what really ailed him in the final months of
his life. He had fallen a few months
before his demise, and it is most likely that some thrombosis, inner bleeding,
or issue related to the fall hastened his ending.
The romanticized version that Tom and Jandy cling to, is just that: a
romanticized version of the truth. In
the movie “Something’s Gotta Give” Jack Nicholson’s character tells
Diane Keaton’s character that he’s always told her “some
version of the truth”. It
is said that history is written by those who survive the longest. Tom and Jandy’s version of the truth makes
for a nice story, and it will be the version of the truth that will become (if
it hasn’t already become) an unimpeachable chapter in the official
family history.
Blane saw through Tom’s pretensions.
Blane disliked Tom’s disavowing and discrediting of the Barrington
family. Blane could not understand how
Jake became the cause of all that was evil in Tom’s world – Jake was
well-liked, he never divorced Carol, or ran away from home and he kept a steady
income from a job that he despised so that Carol, Tom and Frisky would have a
solid foundation from which they could build their fortunes.
Blane also knew that if a man would turn on his own flesh and blood, he
would turn pretty much turn on everyone that he would encounter. As time has gone on, it has been proven that
Blane was correct in this observation.
Tom’s treatment of Jake, Frisky and then Carol was stunningly
inappropriate. How Carol got onto the
bad side of Tom we’ll never know – but there she was. Fortunately, Carol was blinded by her
grandmotherly duties and Tom could have lit a bag of dog poop on her doorstep
and she would not have minded – just as long as the grandchildren continued to
visit.
Tom swore that his kids would be shown the door on their eighteenth
birthday. The fact that he did not
leave Jake’s house until he was twenty three was just another inconvenient
truth. Did he make good on his
promise? Yup, the kids had eighteen
years to get their act together on Tom’s ticket and then it was “Bye-bye,
don’t let the door hit you in the ass…..”.
When Jandy got sick, Tom’s true colors began to show. Frisky had revealed that he was being
treated for HIV many years before Jandy’s illness. Frisky’s clock was clearly ticking, but Tom
showed no empathy or sympathy for Frisky’s plight. Tom truly believed that Frisky was just
being a hypochondriac and that Frisky’s hospitalizations were just a ploy for attention. This explains why Tom was rarely ever
informed about Frisky’s hospitalizations, and why Jandy fearfully told him that
she too was ill.
Of course, Jandy didn’t have HIV.
It was cancer that was found, fought, and defeated. Cancer didn’t fit into Tom’s neat and tidy
life. There were too many ups and
downs, and Tom found himself encumbered with Jandy’s prescriptions, doctor
visits, and hospitalizations. Jandy had
always been so self-sufficient, and independent. Tom trusted that Jandy would never set
emotional ‘traps’ or employ cloying techniques to manipulate or control his love
for her. However, he did suspect that
Jandy’s illness was some kind of Trojan horse that she sent his way filled with
emotions, sentiments, and needs that Tom was completely incapable of
processing.
Tom could share his emotions (in
a somewhat niggardly fashion). He
could give (reluctantly), but he could never
receive. In some way, he perceived
every act of kindness as a Trojan horse.
Possibly he misunderstood Carol’s declaration that: “a buck is
your best friend”. He would never ask for, or accept help from
anyone. He felt that assistance was
really just a covert methodology being employed to shackle his free spirit, and
independence. He felt that if one did
not pay in cash, one would pay in some other way. The cash he didn’t mind paying (if
it wasn’t a lot of cash) – it was the paying of his imagined
emotional debts through acts of kindness that he could not find himself capable
of.
Jandy’s recovery was a slow process.
The countertops filled with prescriptions reminded Tom of Jake’s
medicine cabinet. He hated Jake for his
illnesses. While it was true, that Jake
was a bit of a hypochondriac, it was more truthful to state that Jake’s
insurance plan caste him as bait in a sea filled with money-hungry physicians
whose prescriptions and quack treatments would ultimately be the end of Jake.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder had really not gained a foothold when
Jandy became ill, and Tom’s retroactive use of this excuse for his poor
behavior during her illness fell on deaf ears.
Just like Jake’s plea that he really was sick, no one believed Tom.
Tom didn’t have PTSD, he had selfishness. Was he afraid: he was afraid for himself, not for Jandy, not
for Frisky, not for Jake, not for Carol, not for……! Well, you can fill in the blanks. The list of people that Tom could not find
compassion for is a long one. Really,
it’s quite a shame, because Tom is essentially a very nice guy. All of the Barrington’s are and were nice
people. Tom just could not unlock that
last door that would open his heart to a land of emotional fulfillment.
Tom wanted to be a part of The Walking Id, The Jane Gang. But he was not willing to pay the price of
admission to our low-bar-entry-level club.
Part of being one-of-us meant that you would be responsible for a
unilateral sharing, caring, giving and receiving – and poor Tom just would have
none of that!
When the angels handed out self-protection, Tom took the entire
shelf-load for himself. When Frisky
Barrington went to get his ration of self-worth, self-esteem, and
self-protection he discovered that the angel’s pantry boasted only empty
shelves – Tom had taken it all, and hoarded it as if it were gold. To him (Tom) it was gold. No, it was better than gold, because it could
be stored in the safest place of all – in his cold and miserable heart!
Was Tom’s coldness nature or nurture?
In his case it was a bit of both.
Grandma Mary’s coldness ran in his blood, but Mary came from a different
time and place, and her survival depended upon her ability to continue on,
through the most stressful of circumstances.
One does not bury three children without an incredible resilience that
sometimes manifests itself as coldness.
Mary’s attitude was in his nature, but she did not nurture Tom’s
coldness.
There were several incidents in Tom’s youth where he was held
accountable for actions of a rather dubious nature. Truthfully, he was lured into some of these
situations by older people in positions of authority, and should have been
shown more sympathy than discipline. But
not all of his transgressions were executed in ignorance. His fertile mind learned quickly the way to
entrap people into activities that he desired without leaving so much as a
fingerprint to imply his involvement.
He never did anything that was much more than an average boy’s
maturation process, but there were a few things involving Frisky that Tom
should have, and did, know better than to involve his younger brother.
Was Tom abused? We’ll never know, he’ll never tell. Certainly
to no great extent was he abused, but it is common knowledge that his proximity
to those who may have acted inappropriately creates a cloud of suspicion. In
retrospect Tom’s ability to protect himself from abusive relationships resulted
in a hyper-sensitivity and distrust of all relationships.
Carol and Jake had no particular opinion about Jandy, and no particular
objection to Tom marrying straight out of college. That Tom had not experienced much of the
world, or experienced the personal growth that comes from failed, youthful
relationships was seen as a safe and logical choice. Safe and logical choices were important to
the Barringtons. If it seemed safe and
logical then it could not be found to be wrong. They later applied this template to Frisky’s
childhood – ‘it was a safe
and logical choice to dress Frisky as Jackie Kennedy…..’!
One can well imagine Mary Dolan Barrington’s raised eyebrow when she
learned of that safe and logical decision.
Tom believed himself to be Carol’s favorite son, and felt some sympathy
for Frisky in this regard. Frisky
thought himself to be Carol’s favorite son, and felt sympathy for Tom in that
regard.
Carol had enough common sense to keep her opinion about her sons and
their choices to herself and really had no favorite of the two.
Tom was her ‘rock’ and Frisky was her ‘hard place’. She was never torn between the two, because
they were so diametrically opposite.
What she found amusing was the fact that the distance between them could
never erase their closeness: they really were peas-in-a-pod. They walked alike, they talked alike, they
thought alike – they just refused to admit how much alike they really were. They were Barringtons, Shreves, Dolans,
Smiths and the hodge-podge of genetic material that may or may not have
descended from French royalty. It was
their Irish Alzheimer’s that allowed their good memories of their youth to fade
while keeping the resentments and slights of those same precious years alive
and well.
Tom never really did make it into The Jane Gang. We were too old to continue our
fraternity. Also, four of us moved out
of the house shortly after Blane’s passing.
Stan has stayed in that house to this day. He still wears his high school bomber
jacket, and his high school ring. He
loves his Corvettes, The Brass Rail, and pizza. He vacations in Sea Isle, and has never
travelled further than Virginia. It was
a happy day for him when he kicked Priscilla over to the Denton Towers for
Senior Living. Frankly, even Priscilla
jumped for joy when she learned that she was to be emancipated from that eighty
year old house whose floors never ceased to be creaking. Finally, Priscilla could sit in her living
room, and be deafened by the sounds of silence.
Heff and Scotch both married relatively early in life. Stan and I (Mick Jane) waited until our
thirties before marrying. Of the five
of us, you would think there would be at least twenty children. But no, only seven kids were produced out of
five marriages. The Jane Gang is still
close, but our lives weren’t particularly eventful or challenging so there were
very few incidents where we needed to pull the gang together to defeat or
overcome any obstacles that presented themselves.
The last time I saw Tom was at the funeral. He stood in the back of the funeral home,
and then in the back of the church.
When the casket passed by him he acted as if it was Pandora’s Box. Those of us who knew Tom, knew that he feared
the casket would open, and out would leap his pre-deceased ancestors who would
want to hug him, kiss him, and tell them how much he was loved. For Tom, that would be a fate worse than
death….
………..
