Dispatch from Suburbia: The Longest Night

When I was a boy, my family lived in a middle-class suburban neighborhood just west of Syracuse, N.Y., in a town of 25,000 souls called Camillus.

The Blaneys lived next door. Their tri-level house was charcoal-colored, and somehow made a bolder architectural statement than our drab light-gray colonial. 

Tony Jr. was a few years older than me, a kid whose body had the inelegant roundness of a young John Madden. He and his sister, Kathy, who was younger than I was, both wore glasses, which gave them an academic air.

I have often thought back, across so many miles and years, to compare the Blaney home with its two children to our insane asylum, which housed seven kids (six after my eldest sister, Suzanne, left for college) and two over-burdened parents.

Compared to our shouting, screaming, bickering, tears and slamming doors, their house seemed like a law library, quiet and dignified in a way ours could never be.

It wasn’t perfect, mind you.

We had a mutt, a female named Sam, who was just a normal dog, holding her own against the other mutts on our block. As Sam got older, loyal Sam, she began to carry herself in a crooked way, so that her ass didn’t quite line up with her head, so you never quite knew in which direction she was heading.

But there were so many dogs! When my father was much older, I would sit with him at the kitchen table and quiz his longterm memory, asking the name of the dog owned by each surrounding family.

He never could get them all, but I could; how could I forget?

The Bradleys had a pooch named Penny; the Englebachs had Freckles; the Privons had Tuffy; the Bradys had Rusty; and the Piedmonts had Snoopy, an annoying little brown Pomeranian who never stopped barking and would run along the fence, yapping, as I mowed our backyard lawn.

The Blaneys owned the strangest dog of all. Prince was a midsized Collie who to me just seemed neurotic, long before I even knew what mental illness was. 

The family never let Prince off the chain, like the rest of the neighborhood did, save the Bradys and Rusty, and the collie would be there on the family’s small backyard porch, running in circles, chasing its tail. The slightest sound set him off.

Looking back, maybe things weren’t so library-peaceful in the Blaneys house after all.

In fact, one night, I know for a fact that it wasn’t.

But I would only learn this decades later, when my father thought to tell me. By then, we’d long before moved away from Central New York. And the Blaneys — mother, father and two children, were all deceased.

It was no dark secret; my Dad had just never thought to tell the story. 

But it has nonetheless stayed with me, for years.

Tony Blaney Sr. was a gentle man who, as neighborhood gossip went, had once tried out as a pitcher in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization.

In my 12-year-old mind, I could never quite match up this middle-aged man with the image of a young minor-league flamethrower. 

To me, he was just old, an adult with a reddened face and low, soothing voice. In the evening, Tony talked for the longest time with my father, who worked at Bell Telephone, starting as a lineman after the war and slowly moving to a white-collar job.

I never knew what Tony did for a living, but I do remember that his wife, Jan, or Janet, was a schoolteacher who probably taught in a nearby district, because I’d never seen her in my scholastic travels.

What I’m about to describe to you took place after Tony Jr. and Kathy had moved out of the house. They may have lived in or around Syracuse, but not at home, with their parents quietly inhabiting their empty nest. 

By then, Prince was long dead and both Tony Sr. and Janet had retired. Their tri-level was an affair popular in the 1960s: A room and bathroom on the first floor, kitchen and living room on the second, and two bedrooms upstairs on the top level.

I think I’d only seen the inside once, as I wasn’t exactly close with either Blaney child. Maybe I’d peered inside when I went collecting on my afternoon paper route.

By then — I was probably in high school at the time — Janet was bedridden with diabetes and too weak to move. If she did so, it was with a cane and she rarely, if ever, walked down the stairs to the home’s kitchen level.

Tony, by then, was frail and walked with a cane as well — a far cry from that young hurler on the mound in a Pittsburgh organization uniform.

This was probably before Meals on Wheels, so Tony would cook a simple dinner and then bring the food upstairs on a tray so the couple could eat together.

One evening, he was probably hurrying and somehow took a fall. Janet must have heard the noise from upstairs and called out. 

I can still hear her now.

“Tony? Is everything alright?”

But everything was not alright. 

While Tony wasn’t seriously hurt, he could not get up. He couldn’t reach his cane and could not prop himself up to use the telephone to call for help.

“I’m OK,” I can hear him call to his wife.

But there they were, my elderly neighbors, in quite a fix, while right next door, we all went about our business, fighting over the last Popsicle in the freezer and over who was using whose hair dryer.

Tony and Janet lay probably 10 yards apart, on two different floors, but they could hear one another, console one another, encouraging one another to wait until help arrived.

Who knows what they talked about, as the hours passed? 

Did they relive their childhoods, relating stories they’d never before told? Did Tony try to calm his wife, or she him, as the afternoon turned dark and night descended?

Or did they both lay in silence, comforted by the fact that the other was near?

I cannot tell you how many times I have revisited this scene in my head, two people who have shared a life for decades, confronting an unknown neither can control, right there in their own house, the place that had always provided them protection from danger, where they had lived peaceful, familiar lives.

To me, the episode is the stuff of a play, or short story. I’ve even written dialogue, made things up whole cloth, about Tony, or even Janet, fearing they would never be found in time, making a final confession of a dark untold past.

But, of course, I’ll never know. How could I?

I was probably listening to eight-tracks up in my bedroom — Neil Young and Black Sabbath — on the far side of my house from the Blaneys, oblivious to their plight.

In the end, I think it was my father who found them, both alive, grateful to their rescuer

As I recall, he was leaving for work, noticed that he hadn’t seen Tony about and knocked on the door.

Or it could have been their daughter or son.

But I like to think of it being my Dad, that gentle soul and good neighbor, coming to the rescue, finally putting an end to a frightful suburban drama to which me and my entire neighborhood— and the world, for that matter — was blind.