Bitter Blood (24 page)

His athletic abilities were not what attracted Susie Newsom. She was drawn by his wholesome good looks and medical ambitions. She always had been impressed by doctors, and some of her friends predicted she would marry one. She and Tom began seeing each other frequently on campus. She was always vivacious and happy to see him. She had a car, too, and offered rides to him and his friends. Soon they were attending campus events together.

Susie was two years older than Tom, from a prominent family, one of the most beautiful women on campus, and he was flattered by her attentions. He was teased by his fellow players when Susie was featured in a photo page of fraternity sweethearts in a campus publication, posing by a fountain in a striped minidress, looking demurely over her shoulder from beneath her long bangs.

By her senior year, Susie and Tom were dating regularly, and she wore his fraternity pin. Her friends were seeing little of her anymore. Linda Crutchfield, Susie’s best friend in high school, was a day student at Wake Forest, but she was attending her dying mother, was engaged and soon to be married, and had little time for Susie. She had met Tom and wasn’t impressed. She knew that Susie never had been attracted to jocks and wondered at his appeal to her. She knew, too, that Susie had dated little and never had a serious love affair, and that worried her.

“In this area she was inexperienced,” Linda said years later, “so she had no basis for comparison.”

Susie’s family had similar concerns. They didn’t quite know what to make of this quiet young man who was two years their daughter’s junior. He appeared to be a nice, stable boy, but his drive and ambition seemed no match for Susie’s, and his disposition seemed just the opposite of her effervescent, sometimes almost frantic boisterousness.

“He’s a lot like Gary Cooper,” Paw-Paw observed after Susie brought Tom to meet him and Nanna. “Don’t have much to say, does he?”

The family hoped the relationship a passing fancy, but Susie clearly was in love, and nobody was willing to caution her about it.

Chris Severn became one of Susie’s closest friends that year. She roomed next door in Bostwick Hall and they attended the same church, St. Paul’s. Chris, whom Susie nicknamed Christabel, couldn’t understand Susie’s attraction to Tom.

“Tom just was not a real dynamo,” Chris said. “I never thought Tom amounted to much.”

She knew that Susie didn’t like any of the fraternity brothers who were Tom’s friends and that she loathed Bob Brenner, his close friend, who was on the football team.

“She had her heart, mind, and soul set on marrying Tom,” Chris said. “I never thought that was a match made in heaven. I don’t think anybody ever tried to convince her otherwise.”

In the spring of 1968, only a few weeks after a curfew had been clamped on Winston-Salem, the city’s streets patrolled by National Guard troops because of rioting in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Susie received her degree in history. Shortly thereafter, on June 4, she wrote to her aunt Susie Sharp to thank her for a cash graduation gift.

Dear Su-Su,

This afternoon while I was lying in the sun, I thought over the exciting things I remembered in the last 19 or so years. My conclusion was quickly drawn: the sole unifying factor was you. My first walking doll, my turquoise bracelet, my first pair of pierced earrings, which are still my best, and all the countless little things (trips to the train station and getting to go to a grown-up restaurant on my birthday) which made my childhood exciting. And now you have given that special graduation present—special because without it, I could never have bought the pearl necklace I’ve wanted for so long. But more especially I want to thank you for being a constant guiding force, for being someone I could always trust and depend on, for being that one person whom I knew no matter what happened I could always turn to. I am and will always be proud to be your niece and namesake.

Love, Susie

Big changes lay in store for Susie’s family that summer. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company had been growing rapidly, diversifying, buying up other companies, particularly food companies. New management had begun shifting executives, lest they become stale and complacent in their positions. Bob Newsom, who’d been the company’s chief industrial engineer for eighteen years, was targeted for a move. He was asked to become chief industrial engineer for R. J. Reynolds Foods in New York.

Bob was not particularly pleased at the prospect. He liked the tobacco business and didn’t want to leave it. Neither did he want to leave Winston-Salem, where he and Florence were deeply rooted. They loved St. Paul’s Church, where Bob not only was bass soloist in the choir but a member of the vestry. They loved Forsyth Country Club, where they had many friends and belonged to bridge groups. They loved the madrigal group they had formed that met regularly at their house. Both had involved themselves deeply in community activities that they didn’t want to abandon. Bob had been chairman of a committee studying what needed to be done to improve Winston-Salem’s schools. He worked with the Boy Scouts, served on the board of the North Carolina School of the Arts, headed the city’s Goodwill Rehabilitation program, and was three times elected president of the Singers’ Guild, the choral arm of the Winston-Salem Symphony. He worked for the local Republican Party. Florence, who had given up teaching before Rob entered junior high, was a member of the Library Commission, active in Scouting and PTA. She served on several committees at church and delivered hot meals every day to sick and elderly people in the poor, black areas of East Winston where many volunteers feared to venture. Neither relished the idea of leaving their families. Bob’s parents were getting on in years and Florence’s mother, now living back at the big Sharp house in Reidsville with Louise, who had retired from the navy to look after her, was in poor health.

Bob’s loyalty to the company was strong, however, and he reluctantly accepted the new assignment. That summer, he sold the house at Green Meadows and he and Florence settled, far from children, family, and friends, into a big house in Silver Mine, Connecticut, where they began to try to adapt to a new life-style, with Bob joining the daily hordes of executives commuting to the city by train.

Susie stayed behind to enter graduate school at Wake Forest that fall, living at first with Nanna and Paw-Paw, later moving into an apartment of her own. In an era of war protests, flower children, easy sex, and drugs, Wake Forest, with its conservative Southern Baptist traditions, was an island of middle-American values and stability. Susie scorned hippies, war protesters, and civil rights activists, strongly supported the war in Vietnam (she later said she didn’t know why Nixon didn’t just end the war by dropping “the bomb” on Hanoi), and she was comfortable in the sedate, conservative atmosphere at Wake. Her main reason for remaining there, however, was Tom.

That year, their relationship became so close that he took her home to meet his parents. Delores and Chuck Lynch had moved to Louisville a year after Tom started at Wake Forest, and Delores had grown progressively unhappier. The weekend visit did not go well. Later, some who knew the strong wills of both women suspected that each recognized herself in the other. Susie, the daughter of privilege and “good family,” and Delores, the hardscrabble child of the Depression, disliked each other instantly, instinctively.

“My mother was a little sensitive about her origins,” Tom said later. “She would get upset if she thought somebody was looking down at her. She always thought that people should earn what they got, that that was much more noble than being born to it. She never felt family name means anything. It’s what you make on your own that counts.”

Tom was unaware of any conflict between his mother and Susie that weekend, but on the flight home, when he asked Susie what she thought of his mother and she was noncommittal, he realized that no bonds of affection had formed.

Soon after the visit, Susie told family members that Delores was overbearing and domineering. Delores told her friend Marjorie Chinnock that Susie was snooty and pretentious.

Susie had no intentions of letting her feelings about Delores interfere in her relationship with Tom. By then she had made clear to her family that she and Tom would marry, and after a year of graduate school, she got a job as a research assistant at R. J. Reynolds and settled in to wait for Tom to finish his final year of college.

In 1969, Tom gave Susie a diamond engagement ring he had ordered from a catalog, and the wedding date was set to follow his graduation in June of 1970.

Delores was distressed. Susie had resisted all of her efforts to get close to her, she told her friend Marjorie.

“I just have a gut feeling about that girl,” Delores said. “I’ve talked to Tom until I’m blue in the face, and he won’t listen.”

As Delores went on and on about Susie and Tom, one message emerged to Marjorie: as far as Delores was concerned, no woman would ever be good enough for Tom.

Delores had, indeed, made her feelings known to Tom. “She kept asking me if I really wanted to do this,” he recalled. “I knew she didn’t think it was a good idea. I thought at the time it was just a matter of, you know, mothers don’t want their sons to go off with somebody else. And maybe I was too young or something. She thought people shouldn’t get married until they were older.”

Susie wanted a big wedding, and that spring she was giddy with plans for it. She was overjoyed that her mother was back to help her with it.

Bob had been very unhappy with his work in New York. From the beginning, his relationship with the chief operating officer of Reynolds Foods was not a good one. He felt thwarted at every turn and undermined by company headquarters in Winston-Salem. He longed for the old days in the tobacco business. Florence didn’t like his having to travel so much, leaving her alone. Although they liked their house in Connecticut and had made friends, they still were homesick for North Carolina, their families, and old friends.

One day, Bob came home from work and announced, “I have had it.”

“I thought he meant me,” Florence later laughingly told a friend.

Bob went to see his friend Curtis Judge, who had been a vice president at R. J. Reynolds. Judge had just moved to New York as president of P. Lorillard Tobacco Company and was looking for new executives. He hired Bob to be director of material and engineering services, assigned to Lorillard’s big plant in Greensboro, North Carolina. Both Bob and Florence were overjoyed to be returning home. They bought a new two-story house with a big screened back porch on Fairgreen Drive in Hamilton Forest, an expensive subdivision just beginning to develop in northwest Greensboro, and moved in shortly before their daughter’s marriage.

Susie’s wedding was set for June 6, 1970, at St. Paul’s Church, the reception at Forsyth Country Club. Tom’s sister, Janie, was to be a bridesmaid, Susie’s brother, Rob, then a philosophy student at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, an usher.

Tom’s parents and sister arrived in Winston-Salem, checked into a motel room arranged by Florence, and a minor uproar soon ensued. Delores thought Susie’s family was not paying proper attention to the Lynches. Florence told friends that Delores expected more of her than she could deliver. Susie was furious at Delores, claiming Delores embarrassed her by drinking too much at the rehearsal dinner.

The wedding was formal. The men wore morning clothes, the women lime-green chiffon dresses. Shortly before the ceremony, Susie found fault with Janie’s dress. It was wrinkled.

“We don’t have time to get it pressed now,” Delores said.

“Well, she just won’t be in the wedding then,” Susie said sharply, before others stepped in to soothe matters.

The wedding proceeded under great tension. Right to the end, Delores hoped Tom might not go through with it.

“She was saying things like, ‘It’s still not too late to change your mind,’” Tom recalled later. “She was sort of joking but she was semiserious. If I’d said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, let’s go,’ she’d have gone.”

Despite their earlier flare-up, after the reception, Susie tossed her bouquet to Janie.

There was no time for a honeymoon. Tom had given up on becoming a physician and chosen dental school instead. His father was paying his way, and his mother had urged him to study in Kentucky, where he was entitled to lower resident tuition rates. He had been accepted at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and Delores had found and furnished an apartment for him and Susie at Creekside Apartments, where Janie lived, only a few miles from the campus. Tom also had taken a summer job with the Kentucky Department of Health and had to leave soon after the wedding to begin work. He went ahead without Susie, who packed up the wedding gifts and followed a week later. Susie soon found a job at Spindletop Research Company near the campus.

Tom started classes that fall. With his parents paying his school expenses, he and Susie were able to live modestly well on her salary. They saw little of each other, however. Tom was in school all day and studied into the night. In his few free hours, he ran and played intramural basketball and tag football. Susie enjoyed her work, liked Lexington well enough, and was happy with Tom, but she missed home and made trips back to North Carolina whenever she could.

What she didn’t like were Delores’s calls and drop-in visits. Delores rarely stayed long when she stopped by while also visiting Janie. She told friends that Susie never made her feel welcome and not once offered to cook her a meal. Susie saw the visits and regular calls as interference in her and Tom’s lives.