Bitter Blood (22 page)

After her graduation, Florence took a job teaching typing and business English at Kings Mountain, forty miles west of Charlotte, but she didn’t like it because it was so far from home. She had no car and took the bus home on weekends. After a year, she moved to Walkertown, near Winston-Salem, where she taught for two years before moving on to Hanes High School, where she became a friend of Flavella Stockton.

Bob was immediately taken with Florence. He invited her out, and they had such a good time that he asked her out again. On the second date he proposed marriage and she accepted. Family and friends were stunned. Some blamed the war. Bob’s family thought he was reacting on the rebound from his failed engagement. Surely, the marriage wouldn’t come about.

Bob’s leave ended all too soon, and he returned to sea filled with romance. Some months later, when his ship docked in New York, Florence took the train to visit him. They planned their wedding for his next leave.

It took place on August 25, 1945, at First Methodist Church in Reidsville. Florence wore a dress made by her mother. Bob was resplendent in dress uniform. After the ceremony, they settled briefly in Gray Court Apartments on Fifth Street in Winston-Salem. When Bob returned to sea for the final nine months of his enlistment, Florence’s younger brother, Kits, then a student at Bowman Gray School of Medicine, moved in to await Bob’s return.

Bob was released from his tour in May of 1946 and applied for work at R. J. Reynolds, where his father had begun his career. The company was wary. Robert Newsom, Sr., had been a successful warehouseman, widely known in the tobacco business. Reynolds officials were sure that Bob soon would leave them to join his father. Bob argued that he had no interest in the warehouse business. His field was industrial engineering. The company countered that it had no industrial engineering department. “Let me prove you need one,” Bob said.

He was hired as a machinist in the engineering department and later worked in personnel. Within four years, Reynolds decided that it did indeed need an industrial engineering department, and Bob, at age thirty, was named chief industrial engineer of what was then the world’s largest tobacco company and was fast becoming one of the world’s largest multicompany corporations, a job he would hold for many satisfying years before giving it up in disappointment.

19

Despite the suddenness of their marriage, Bob Newsom and Florence Sharp proved a proper match. Each found quick acceptance with the other’s family.

Bob was just the sort of man the Sharps hoped their daughters would marry: solid, dependable, intelligent, a man of great promise. Best of all, he was from good stock, a true gentleman, kind, generous, thoughtful, attentive, wryly humorous.

The Newsoms took immediately to Florence and she to them. They thought her the perfect wife for their quiet son, one who would bring out his best qualities. Florence quickly became a devoted and loving daughter-in-law. Robert Newsom particularly liked his new daughter-in-law’s sense of humor and the feistiness with which she spoke her mind. He thought the Sharp family a bit aristocratic—“highfalutin,” he called it—but he saw no pretentiousness in Florence. Still, he enjoyed teasing her about her family.

“Those Sharps keep their pedigrees on the wall, don’t they?” he’d say.

Florence laughed off his good-natured jibes.

Both families were pleased when, soon after Bob returned from the Merchant Marines, Florence announced that she was expecting a baby, a first grandchild for the Newsoms.

The baby came as a Christmas gift, born on Christmas Eve 1946, at Annie Penn Memorial Hospital in Reidsville, a lively girl with her father’s bright brown eyes, delivered by her uncle, Dr. Fred Klenner. She was named Susie Sharp, for Florence’s beloved eldest sister, by then a popular lawyer working with their father in Reidsville.

The happiness of their daughter’s birth soon turned to fear for Florence and Bob. A mentally unstable young woman, A.W.O.L. from the Women’s Army Corps, was being held at the hospital awaiting military authorities. She wandered from her room and made her way to the nursery, where she stood admiring the babies. When a nurse left the babies momentarily unsupervised, the young woman darted in, picked up Susie, and fled. She was stopped before she got out of the hospital, the baby returned unharmed, but when a nurse told Florence about the incident, Florence became distraught. For the remainder of his family’s stay at the hospital, Bob sat outside the nursery, keeping a close watch on his newly born daughter.

As if that weren’t enough, a new worry soon arose. After examining Susie before her departure from the hospital, Dr. Klenner announced that the baby had a heart murmur. He advised that Susie not be allowed to cry, lest it trigger an irregular heartbeat, perhaps a stoppage. For the first year of their daughter’s life, her parents’ efforts to keep her quiet were often frantic, sometimes heroic.

Soon after settling in their Winston-Salem apartment, Bob and Florence had gone searching for a church. Bob had grown up attending Lee Memorial Presbyterian Church with his father; Florence had gone to Reidsville’s First Methodist with her mother. But denomination didn’t decide their choice. Music still drove Bob. He wanted to find the best choir in Winston-Salem and join it. He picked the choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, an imposing granite structure near downtown. There he soon became a soloist and popular choir member. There, too, Susie was christened. Her Aunt Susie, for whom she was named, commemorated the occasion by presenting her with a small cross on a silver chain that had been given to her by her own mother’s sister, Susie Blackwell, for whom she was named, a tangible symbol of the binds of family over generations. Susie later lost the cross, but nobody saw that as portent of the terrible break she eventually would make from family.

Susie’s arrival brought the need for more living space, and Bob rented a small house on Jarvis Street. Five days before Susie was to celebrate her third birthday, a baby brother arrived. He was named Robert W. Newsom III, to be called Robby by the family, later Rob.

Susie had been smothered with affection, particularly from her father, and she resented the baby, pouting when he received attention.

Within months of his son’s birth, Bob had a second reason for joy. He was given a big raise and promoted to chief industrial engineer at R. J. Reynolds. New status and a new child sent him looking for a new place to live. He bought ten wooded acres atop a steep hill between the old Moravian settlements of Bethabara and Bethania, just a few miles from his parents’ big house, and there he built a small, neat, three-bedroom, brick-and-frame house. But before his family could move, fear struck again.

Bob’s sister, Frances, had given birth to her first child, a daughter, Nancy, in Raleigh in June of 1948. Soon after Nancy’s second birthday, she fell ill with polio. Her left arm, legs, and body trunk were paralyzed, and she languished with high fever. Robert Newsom, then called Paw-Paw by his two granddaughters, rushed home from South Carolina, where he had been auctioning tobacco. “Find the best place in the United States and let’s take her there,” he said, but the doctors said there was little anybody could do.

Florence called Frances to tell her differently. “Fred Klenner has done a lot of work with polio patients,” she said. “I’d like him to see Nancy.”

The work Dr. Klenner had done was experimental. He believed that massive doses of vitamin C, administered intravenously, could stop polio. Frances talked it over with her pediatrician. He didn’t believe the treatment would help, but he wouldn’t stand in her way if she wanted to try it. Frances and her husband, Bing, desperate, agreed to the treatment.

Dr. Klenner arrived in Raleigh, driven there by his sister-in-law Susie, who a year earlier had been appointed North Carolina’s first female superior court judge. He gave Nancy vitamin C equivalent to what he said would be found in five gallons of orange juice. He returned several more times to give her injections. Her temperature dropped and the paralysis began to recede. Later, Frances put Nancy through intensive physical rehabilitation, which left her with only the barest signs that she had suffered polio.

Bob and Florence were frantic with worry because Susie had played with Nancy at Nancy’s second birthday party. When Susie became listless soon after Nancy’s condition improved, her parents rushed her to Dr. Klenner in Reidsville. He confirmed their fears. She did indeed have polio, he said, but he thought they had caught it soon enough. He began the vitamin treatment, and Susie soon regained her liveliness. Although Florence blamed a painful chronic lump that later formed at the base of Susie’s spine on the disease, she credited her brother-in-law with saving her daughter’s life and preventing her from being crippled.

Susie had developed into an active and precocious child. She was called Susie Q to distinguish her from her aunt. Susie Q couldn’t understand how two Susies could be in one family, so she called her aunt Su-Su, a nickname the entire family picked up and one that would cling to the distinguished jurist for the rest of her life. Susie was especially fond of Su-Su and anticipated with great excitement the times when her aunt would stop by while going and coming from court assignments around the state, because Su-Su always brought presents. Susie also looked forward to the regular family gatherings in the big Sharp house in Reidsville, when Su-Su would take her to the depot to see the trains, one of her favorite activities.

Susie came to one family gathering clinging to a small doll. When her uncle Tommy, visiting from the North, asked if he could take her picture, she refused. No amount of cajoling could get her to agree.

“How about if I take a picture of your doll, then?” her uncle asked.

“Okay,” she said, and posed holding the doll while her uncle snapped her picture, creating a story that would be laughed about and retold in the family every time the picture was shown.

Susie was not often so easily fooled, however. When she was four, her mother came home from her job at Old Town School to find her housekeeper, Neely Davis, so upset about Susie’s misbehavior that she was ready to quit. “That child is just too much to handle,” Neely said.

Florence took Susie aside for a talk.

“I’m trying to be so bad that she’ll quit and you’ll stay home with me,” Susie said.

“I can’t do that,” her mother explained. “I’ve signed a contract. I can’t quit.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you’d signed a contract,” Susie said, as if that changed everything.

The problems Susie caused Neely subsided somewhat the following year, when Susie entered Meadowbrook Kindergarten, where she was chosen Queen of the May and posed regally in a long gown on her high-backed throne, attended by her court while a professional photographer took her picture.

Her proud father worshiped her, and she in turn was a daddy’s girl. Early on she had learned to charm him to get what she wanted, but when charm failed she resorted to other tactics. Her relationship with her mother, who was not so easily manipulated, was often tense. If her mother told her no, or her will was otherwise thwarted, Susie often threw tantrums. At first, her mother dealt with them by closing her in her room. But they grew so intense and violent that she later tried quelling them with cold showers.

“Susie held that against Florence all of her life,” her aunt Su-Su said later.

Florence’s attempts to alter Susie’s behavior created a simmering rift between mother and daughter. Florence was so concerned about it that she took a course in child psychology, hoping to learn to deal better with Susie’s problems. When Susie started biting other children, Florence decided that the time had come to take her daughter for counseling.

“On the whole, Susie was a sweet child,” her aunt Louise recalled, “but she had a mean streak. She used to torment her brother.”

“Rob was a gentle little boy who didn’t throw tantrums,” his aunt Frances remembered. “Susie was overbearing to him. Bossy. He didn’t fight back a whole lot.”

At five, Robby was diagnosed as having an ulcer.

High-strung
was a phrase that popped quickly to mind when relatives attempted to describe Susie’s nature. “Not your placid, happy-go-lucky person,” said Frances. “Nobody else uses this word, but I always had a feeling of her being brittle. She could not allow anybody else’s will to overwhelm hers.”

“She was an adorable little girl,” her adoring aunt Su-Su recalled, “but she was rather willful. She wanted her way.”

When Susie got her way, everything was fine, and at times life was almost idyllic on the Newsoms’ beautiful hilltop, with its commanding view through the trees. Florence loved the place. Rob-Su Acres, she called it; “living on the hill.” A creek ran at the base of the hill behind the house, and Paw-Paw had a pond built on it for the family’s Christmas one year. Bob got a small rowboat for the pond, and the children used it to play pirates. He later built a baseball diamond for Rob and bought a big mare pony that Susie named Flicka and over whom she alone could exercise her will, for Flicka would allow no one else to ride her.

Susie and Rob were close with their cousins Nancy and David. They regularly visited back and forth, spent time together each summer at the beach and at Nanna and Paw-Paw’s. Nancy was tomboyish and loved playing outside with the boys. Susie took part, but usually on the fringe of activities. She was more prim and preferred dressing in lacy things and playing inside to getting rowdy and dirty in blue jeans. She had much of her mother’s fastidiousness.