Bitter Blood (5 page)

Her mother told her not to worry. Just move in with her, rest, recover her health, then decide. That was the course Janie chose, the course of delayed decision, a non-decision that would be the most decisive of her life. Delores couldn’t have been happier about it. Her friends knew that she had Janie exactly where she wanted her.

Delores had flabbergasted Janie’s fellow students at dental school with her hovering presence in her daughter’s life. Janie lived at home when she began classes, but when she moved into the university’s apartment building for dental and medical students, it was Delores who came with her maid to clean and paint, fix and decorate. And when Janie moved from the second floor to a larger apartment on the seventh floor, Delores repeated the performance. Delores had a key to the apartment and came almost daily to clean and straighten and bring food. She cooked all of Janie’s meals at home and brought them to her in heat-and-eat containers. She left fresh milk in Janie’s refrigerator and took home for herself the still unspoiled milk she’d left earlier. Janie was expected to call her mother every night at 11, and if she was late by a few minutes, the phone rang and Delores wanted to know what was wrong. If Janie was to be out late, she had to call her mother before leaving and again upon returning, no matter the hour.

Janie seemed unbothered by such smothering and laughed it off, telling friends, “She’s just a Jewish mother who isn’t Jewish.”

Her mother, friends figured, was the reason Janie never married. They thought that Delores’s constant harping against her husband had helped sour Janie on the idea of marriage. But more important, they believed that Janie simply was afraid that she never could find anybody who would please her mother. Four times, Janie seriously contemplated marriage, three times to lawyers (her mother not only boasted that Janie dated lawyers but she also kept in touch with two of her daughter’s old boyfriends after the relationships ended in case she needed their services), but as the moment of commitment neared, Janie inevitably stepped back.

“Every time somebody asks me to marry him, I go get another degree,” she laughingly told Denise Payne, a friend from the dental school who was about to marry.

That wasn’t exactly true. Janie’s first serious romance was over by the time she got her degree in education at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, in 1966. Encouraged by her mother, she followed her parents to Kentucky to begin teaching and got an elementary school job in Cobb County, some eighty miles from Louisville. After two years, she enrolled at the University of Kentucky in Lexington to get her master’s degree in special education.

Janie shared her mother’s paranoia about crime, and to protect herself, she began taking karate lessons, a skill in which she eventually won a brown belt. She attempted to teach karate to her mother in weekend classes in her parents’ front yard at Hunting Creek, much to the amusement of neighbors, who speculated about which of them Delores was planning to use it on. Janie’s instructor was a lean, muscular young man, a native of Lexington enrolled at a prestigious out-of-state college. John Trent was nineteen, Janie twenty-five. Their relationship would last five years, during three of which John was away at school. In the beginning, their romance was one of holiday visits, summer vacations, letters, and long-distance calls, but it grew deeper when John returned to Lexington to attend law school.

Once, when it seemed that marriage might be in the offing, John was visiting at the big house on Covered Bridge Road into which Janie’s parents had moved, and Janie’s father pulled him aside and said, “You know, Janie is a lot like her mother.”

John took it as a warning, and later Chuck made it clear that that was how he had intended it. “You might want to read this,” he said, offering John a gift of a book,
The Manipulated Man
by Esther Vilar.

After getting her master’s degree in 1970, Janie became a speech pathologist in the Fayette County schools, then went to work at the Clinic for Communicative Disorders at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. By 1975 she was restless and unhappy, troubled at work by an older man whose sexual advances she’d refused, uncertain about her feelings for John, a vegetarian she described as being “into weeds and seeds.”

After a trip to Los Angeles to visit a sorority sister from Bradley, she became enthralled with the idea of California. Suddenly, she seemed to know exactly what she wanted—and it lay beside the Pacific. She sent out applications and was accepted as a speech pathologist in the Santa Monica schools.

She needed time to think, she told John, and although he never understood exactly what she needed to think about, he drove her to California to allow her the opportunity.

Friends thought that in moving to California and fleeing commitment with John, Janie might be fleeing her mother as well. Delores was upset about the move. Her son was in South Carolina, her daughter in California, and she was left in a big house in Kentucky with only her dogs and a husband she detested.

Janie settled into an apartment only a few blocks from the beach in Santa Monica and wrote to friends that her life was more free and open than it ever had been—and she was loving every minute of it.

Romance blossomed anew for Janie in California, again with a lawyer, but that relationship, like the others before it, would pass without commitment.

By 1977 she was again enrolled in school, this time in Santa Monica College, taking courses that would allow her to enter dental school. In her work as a speech pathologist, she had encountered a doctor who corrected speech problems with dental changes, and he had inspired her to seek her own degree in dentistry. Delores was quick to seize on her daughter’s new ambition. She checked out the University of Louisville’s School of Dentistry and began pitching it to Janie. She could live at home, Delores pointed out, and her father would foot the bills.

So it was that four years after she left for California, fleeing commitment, Janie returned to Kentucky, fleeing not only another romantic involvement but her one fling at freedom from her mother.

In the fall of 1980, Janie was back in school in a class that was only one-fourth female and far younger than she. If her age concerned her, she never showed it. Anyway, she looked so much younger than her years—by at least a decade—that few of her classmates ever realized she was their oldest member.

By her second year, Janie’s grades were at the top of the class, and, as usual, she was finding no shortage of attentive males. Her beauty was intact: her slim, shapely figure; her long, auburn curls; her dark, expressive eyes; and her quick, engaging smile still had their effect. She restricted her dating to classmates, and although she dated many and forged strong friendships with several others, she didn’t dabble with serious romance again until her final year at school.

Her father’s death in November 1983 was the catalyst for that. Janie was in her apartment when her mother called to tell her about it. She went looking for Ron King, her closest friend at the school, but he wasn’t in his room. Her search took her to Phil Pandolfi’s dorm room.

Phil was surprised to see her. He was a first-year student, and he had met Janie on his first day at school. He had been seeking advice from Ron King when Janie came in and gave him a big smile. “Who’s this, Ron?” she’d asked. “He’s kinda cute.”

Phil paid little attention to her remark, but later he realized that Janie was always flashing smiles at him, that she made a point to say hello, to stop him to chat about classes and how he was doing. He knew flirting when he saw it, but because she was a final-year student, he had been reluctant to respond.

On the night she came to his room, he invited her in and offered something to drink before he realized she was upset and hadn’t come to visit.

“Have you seen Ron?” she asked.

“No, is something wrong?”

“My father died,” she said, and broke into tears.

“I’m sorry,” Phil said, moving to comfort her.

“He was an alcoholic,” she whispered as he put an arm around her and let her cry on his chest.

“If you need somebody to talk to, I’m here,” he told her. “I just want you to know that.”

After that night, Janie and Phil were together often. Because of her fear of crime, Janie never walked anywhere on campus without an escort, and Phil took on the job full-time. He walked her to class every morning and back to her apartment in the evening. They had lunch together and chatted in lab. He started taking her out for pizza on Friday nights and dropping by her apartment on weeknights to watch TV. After Christmas, Janie took him home to meet her mother, and on Valentine’s Day she sent him a big card with two funny frogs on it with hearts bubbling over their heads.

“You probably think you’re getting this valentine because you’re special…” it said.

“You’re right,” was inside.

It was signed, “Love, Janie. P.S. Hope you did well on your exam! I’m sure you did!”

In March, Phil told her that he’d fallen in love. She cried and said she felt the same way. Shortly afterward, she took him to spend a weekend at the big house on Covered Bridge Road. He cooked a spaghetti dinner for Janie and her mother. Pooky barked at him, but Delores made much ado over him.

An unusual thing happened that weekend. Phil was sleeping downstairs—in the room where Janie’s father had slept—when he was awakened by a strange feeling that left him bathed in sweat and gripped by fear. It was as if he had found himself in the very presence of evil, had been enveloped by it, as if the house itself was evil.

At first he tried to rationalize it away. He had been a tough, street-smart kid in the Palisades of New Jersey, an athlete, a bodybuilder, an army officer in an airborne rapid deployment force. He’d faced all kinds of danger and never been afraid of anything. He couldn’t be scared of a house. Impossible.

But he had to admit that he was.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” an inner voice kept telling him. “Get out of here and take Janie with you.”

In the dark, he fumbled for his rosary, and by clinging to it and praying he made it through the night.

He was embarrassed to mention this to Janie, and even tried to deny to himself the feelings that had overcome him that night, but when he returned to the house a couple of weeks later, he experienced the same presence.

“I didn’t want to be near that house,” he recalled later. “It scared hell out of me.”

Yet he kept the fears to himself, unwilling to mention them to Janie out of concern that she might think him crazy. He would come to torture himself over that decision.

The approach of graduation was a busy time for Janie. She studied long hours for her state board tests and had little time for other activities. But she and Phil did go to see her mother play the part of Daphine Drimmond in “There Goes the Bride” at the Little Colonel Theater, and Phil took Janie to the graduation dance, he in a three-piece corduroy suit, she in a dress of pink chiffon with a lace bodice to which Phil pinned the pink carnation corsage he bought her.

On graduation day, May 13, Delores came with cheese and wine for Janie’s friends; on the next day, Phil left for New Jersey and a job teaching high school biology in summer school.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” he assured Janie, then made her promise that when her work at school was finished she would come to New York to visit. He wanted her to meet his family. He would get tickets to see the Mets play the Cubs, her favorite team. They would take in all the sights and eat fantastic pizzas and have a wonderful time.

Phil was thoroughly in love, but one thing bothered him about the relationship: the age difference.

“No way!” he said, when Janie told him soon after they began getting close that she was thirty-nine, fourteen years older than he. He couldn’t believe it. There seemed no gap at all. He told her that age was unimportant, but he knew that in one big respect it did matter. He was Italian. He wanted a big, raucous family. Lots of kids. Her childbearing years were limited.

As soon as he got home, Phil sat down to talk about this with his mother. Her acceptance was important.

“If you feel that way about this girl,” she told him, “don’t let her go.”

That decided it.

Janie, too, was thinking about their relationship. “But, Jesus, he’s so
young,”
she told a friend. He was also passionate and exciting, and she loved his dark good looks, was flattered by his attentions.

Delores had taken note. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told her friend Joyce Rose one day that spring. “Janie has dragged home a New York street Italian.” She mentioned him to Susan Reid as well. She didn’t like him. He was clearly rabble—a Kennedy lover. Besides, he’d made a terrible mess of her kitchen cooking spaghetti that wasn’t very good.

From the day he left, Janie wrote to Phil every few days. She had remained at school, completing her lab work, and her letters were chatty, filled with news of classmates and school and everyday affairs, never romantic or gushy—that wasn’t Janie. But she signed them with love and an occasional “I miss you.”

On the first of June, Jackie and Mario Timpone, old friends from Chicago and the parents of one of Janie’s early loves, came to visit Delores and Janie, bringing eight quarts of home-cooked spaghetti sauce and a boxful of pastries from Naples Bakery in Chicago. Janie took a day off from school to be with them. In mid-June, Janie and her mother went to a picnic with the Little Colonel Players. By the end of the month, Janie was making final adjustments on her patients’ teeth at the school clinic and the university was pressuring her to leave her apartment. She tried for an extension through July but won a reprieve only until the eighteenth.