Bitter Blood (40 page)

December 18: Speaking of Fritz, still no word. Either he’s lost in the jungles of S.E. Asia looking for POWs, or he’s in a loony bin. I really can’t decide what’s up. The strange thing is not feeling at liberty to call his dad.

December 20: I called Fritz’s mom today. I broke all the barriers. What the hell. Is he alive, dead or in a loony bin? The former or the latter I guess. I still can’t be sure. She said they saw him last Sunday, that he is working hard but ok. Did he owe me any money?

January 1, 1984: I didn’t mention that Fritz called. Sometime maybe Christmas Eve, or the Monday after. Wished us all a merry Christmas and said he’d see us in the first of the year. I was not overly friendly and tried to express some of my indignation. Oh well. I have that relationship still on Freez-dry. We’ll see what comes.

Amanda never heard from Fritz again. Not until more than a year and a half later would she discover that all the time she had spent longing and waiting for Fritz, while she thought him off surreptitiously fighting for his country in North Africa and Southeast Asia he was right in North Carolina, much of the time in Durham, plodding through mundane dental lab classes while living a fantasy life that was growing ever richer and more adventurous. Nor would she know until then that all that time she had been but one of several women in Fritz’s crowded life, and that by the time she last heard from him, he had focused his attentions on only one, his cousin Susie—the cousin he had planned to include in his little survival brood with her and his sister and their children.

28

January of 1983 brought the long-brewing final confrontation between Susie and her mother. It came after a neighbor told Florence that Fritz had been spending weekend nights at the Newsom house while Bob and Florence were in Winston-Salem at Nanna’s. Florence could not tolerate that. No matter what was happening in the house when she and Bob were not there, the appearance was scandalous and it had to cease.

“Propriety was so important to them,” Bob’s sister Frances later explained. “How one appears to other people is as important as what one really does.”

For several months, the spats between Susie and Florence had been growing in frequency and intensity. Florence confided to her sister Louise that she feared Susie was becoming mentally ill. It worried her that Susie was so consumed by her bitterness toward Tom and her protectiveness of her children, that she was becoming so dependent on Fritz and wouldn’t talk about her problems.

“Susie Q didn’t confide in Florence,” Louise said. “She was very difficult and she got more difficult as time went on. Florence was so good to Susie. She never deserved the treatment she got from her.”

The family whispered that Susie had undergone a personality change and that its roots lay in Albuquerque.

“Nobody knows what went on in Albuquerque,” Florence said.

Annette Hunt, whose corner house on Fairgreen Drive was separated from the Newsom house by an intersecting street, Redwine Drive, saw the confrontation building and tried to keep clear of it. She was Susie’s best friend but she also loved Bob and Florence and didn’t want to take sides. Other neighbors found themselves in the same situation. The Newsoms were gracious hosts, and their big house was a neighborhood gathering spot. In warm weather, neighbors gravitated to their spacious back porch to chat, sip cool drinks, and admire the roses Bob tended so lovingly. All of them were aware of the tension between Susie and her mother, and none wanted to get involved.

Annette had watched the relationship build between Susie and Fritz. At first, it seemed centered on Susie’s boys. Annette felt sorry for John and Jim. She knew that they needed male attention, John particularly. Fritz doted on the boys, played with them, took them places, did things a father would do, and Susie was plainly grateful.

Susie told Annette that Fritz longed to have sons of his own but couldn’t. He’d had leukemia while she and Tom were living in Kentucky, she said, and although his father cured him the treatments left him sterile. “I guess that’s why I care so much for John and Jim,” she said Fritz told her.

Annette knew the power Fritz held over children, because he had become close to her own sons, talking to them about camping, hunting, guns, and the arts of the Ninja, the secret hooded assassins of ancient Japan. She knew how much John and Jim looked forward to his visits.

“They adored Fritz,” she said. “The children really looked up to him.”

Although Susie didn’t talk much about Fritz, as time passed Annette realized that not only had Susie, too, come to have deep feelings for him, she seemed dependent on him.

“He wanted her to need him,” Annette said. “He wanted her to feel dependent on him.”

He wanted her to believe his fantasies, too, Annette later was certain, and he went to extraordinary measures to convince her they were true. Once, Susie had become excited when Fritz invited her to attend a medical school dinner at Duke, at which, he told her, he was to be honored for his scholarship and research. She bought a new dress, and for weeks she talked to Annette about the upcoming event. Famous doctors were to attend, and Susie, who always had been impressed by doctors, was to sit beside a noted medical school professor. She even read about him so she could converse knowledgeably. On the day of the dinner, she left her sons with her parents and drove off to meet Fritz at his apartment in Durham.

“Well, how did it go?” Annette asked when she saw Susie the next day.

“We didn’t get to go,” Susie said, crestfallen. “I got down there and Fritz was sick and throwing up. All I did was sit and hold his head while he threw up all night.”

Although Annette could see Fritz’s Blazer across the street when Bob and Florence went out of town, she didn’t want to believe that Susie was having a physical relationship with her cousin. But she realized that Florence, who long had thought the growing closeness between Fritz and Susie improper, might now be facing that possibility and that she could not abide it.

Florence had even expressed concern about the relationship to her sister Annie Hill, Fritz’s mother. But Annie Hill saw no harm in it. Fritz and Susie were just close friends, she said. Fritz was good with the boys, and Susie just felt better when he was around. They were comfort to one another in their troubles.

Florence was certain that the relationship was not so innocent. She suspected that Susie and Fritz were sleeping together and adding insult to injury by doing it in her house and she knew she would have to confront Susie about it. She knew, too, that nobody said no to Susie without paying a price, and she was proceeding cautiously in bringing up the matter. But before she could do it, a minor incident provoked a blowup.

Florence fixed elaborate breakfasts on Saturday mornings. One Saturday at the end of January, Fritz showed up at breakfast and was invited to eat. During the meal, Susie mentioned that her cousin in Washington, Jim Taylor, had bought a chow.

“I think somebody would have to be stupid to get a chow,” Bob observed.

It was an offhand remark, but it threw Susie into a rage.

“I don’t have to take this kind of shit!” she said, slamming down her fork.

Susie stormed from the table and left the house, taking Fritz and the boys with her. She didn’t return until Sunday night, when Florence confronted her, not only about her behavior but also about Fritz. A loud and bitter argument developed, and rumors later circulated through the family that Susie struck her mother, claiming that Florence’s body language had been threatening. The conflict ended with Susie gathering up her children and her belongings and leaving her parents’ home permanently.

The boys later mentioned little to their father about what happened that night, John saying only that they’d had to leave “because GG swore at Uncle Fritz.”

Florence confided the events of that night to only one person, her sister Susie, who, at Florence’s request, kept them secret even from other family members. “It was so terrible, and Florence was so humiliated and embarrassed by it, that she didn’t want anybody ever to know,” Judge Sharp explained.

After Susie left that night, Florence, distraught, called her son Rob and his wife, Alice, who were living in Illinois. Susie had gone, she said, but she didn’t say why. She was worried that Susie didn’t have enough money to take care of herself and the boys. If Susie called, Florence wanted to know about it.

Susie did call Rob and Alice a few days later. She said she’d moved out but wouldn’t say where she was living. She left a phone number where she could be reached, however.

“She just said she had this big fight and she would never tell anybody what had been said, never,” Alice recalled. “She said that her mother was just shrieking. I said, ‘That doesn’t sound like your mother.’”

Weeks passed before Bob and Florence even learned Susie’s whereabouts. Florence was especially worried about the boys, whom she and Bob loved dearly. She told her sister Louise that John cried at leaving and she had taken him into the bathroom to console him.

“You know Grandpop and I don’t want you to go,” she told him. “This is your mother’s idea.”

A few weeks after the confrontation, Florence spotted the boys outside an ice-cream parlor in Friendly Shopping Center and hurried to chat with them. Susie emerged from the store to snatch up the boys, screaming at her mother to keep away. Publicly humiliated, Florence fled home in tears.

Susie had long wanted to be out of her parents’ house and on her own but simply couldn’t afford it. Now she could. At least for a while. Shortly before Christmas, her divorce had become final.

In the settlement, Susie received $23,500—$14,000 for her equity in the house, $1,500 for the furniture she left behind, $5,300 for her share of Tom’s dental practice, $2,000 in attorney fees, $500 for medical bills, and $200 for unpaid alimony. The $100 monthly alimony was dropped in the settlement, but the $400 support that Tom was paying for the boys was raised by $100 each month. Susie was to receive $8,000 in cash, which was provided by Tom’s father, who would be dead in less than a year. Tom was to pay the remaining $15,500 at $200 a month, with 10 percent interest annually. He left in a bank account the $15,500 his mother had sent earlier and used the interest to help pay the additional $200 he sent Susie each month.

With the $8,000 as a cushion for survival, and $700 in monthly income, Susie rented for $475 a month, utilities included, a two-bedroom upstairs apartment at 28-L Hunt Club Road in Friendly Hills Apartments, a huge complex on Greensboro’s western edge near Guilford College, less than two miles from her parents’ house. Without telling family members about it, she had put a deposit on the apartment four days before the confrontation with her mother.

The family knew that a blowup had occurred and Susie had moved out, but they didn’t know why.

“Bob and Florence just didn’t talk about it,” said Susie’s cousin Nancy Dunn.

“They didn’t tell us a whole lot about the trouble that was brewing,” said Nancy’s mother, Frances Miller, Bob’s sister. “It was something they could not share. They did not discuss it with us. They were very moral and circumspect people. It was hurtful to them for people to know those things. Over and over I would be surprised at things I learned. All I knew, I got from Mother.”

Bob and Florence even kept the details of the incident from Rob. “They were very mum about it,” he said. “All I know is it must’ve been pretty bad, but they never discussed it with us.”

At that time, Rob was creating his own worries for his parents. On the day after Florence called to tell Rob and Alice that Susie had left, Rob was fired from his oil company job.

Bookish, brilliant, and devout as a young man, Rob had won a William Neal Reynolds scholarship to Duke University, but he declined it to accept a National Merit Scholarship at the University of the South, an Episcopal college in the green hills of southeastern Tennessee near a small town called Sewanee. Sedate and proper, the University of the South was where aristocratic southerners sent their sons and daughters to ensure that their Republican and Episcopalian foundations remained firm. Professors wore academic gowns to class, and male students were expected to wear coats and ties and be gentlemen at all times.

“I was sort of impressed with its claim of being the Oxford of America,” Rob said later in explaining why he chose Sewanee, as the university usually is called. “I was an arrogant little jerk at the time. I liked that elitist nonsense that went with it.”

Rob went to Sewanee with the idea of becoming an Episcopal priest, but later decided against the ministry and turned his studies to philosophy. After his graduation, he enrolled in law school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He was the only member of his class to be sworn to the bar before the North Carolina Supreme Court, a privilege arranged by his aunt Su-Su. It was a proud family moment, the tradition of law passing to a third generation of the Sharp family.

Rob became an assistant state attorney general in 1977, and two years later, he accepted a job with an oil company, Conoco, in Houston and moved to Texas with his young family, which by then included three children. By 1981 Rob had realized something that his parents didn’t want to accept: he was an alcoholic. He had started drinking to win acceptance of his peers when he was fourteen—his “redneck training program,” he called it. He picked up the pace when he got to Sewanee and entered the “southern gentleman training program.” The combined programs had simply produced at age thirty-two a southern drunk who was having more and more difficulty dealing with life. He gave up alcohol and took a new job with Marathon Oil Company in Robinson, Illinois. But the after-effects of his drinking caused him to become, in his own description, “a basket case.” The result was his dismissal. His parents encouraged him to come home, and only three weeks after Susie and her boys moved out of Bob and Florence’s big house, Rob and his family arrived, soon to move in.