Bitter Blood (25 page)

When Susie went home for Rob’s wedding in June of 1972, Delores was greatly on her mind.

“She’d be talking about her when it was not the time or place to talk about the woman,” Susie’s cousin Nancy recalled.

Rob’s wedding, like his sister’s, was at St. Paul’s Church, where his bride Alice, also was a member. The reception was held at Forsyth Country Club, where her parents belonged. The same fountain of champagne that had flowed for Susie’s wedding flowed for Rob’s. After the ceremony, Susie rode from the church to the country club with Nancy and her husband, Steve Dunn.

“All she talked about was what a witch Delores was, how awful she was,” Nancy said. “‘She’s mean and evil,’ she said. She just went on and on and on about how much she hated the woman.”

“I never had any hint that she hated her,” Tom said later. “I knew she didn’t want to be around my mother.”

Although Tom’s parents lived only eighty miles away, Susie refused to visit them. Only once, on Thanksgiving, at Tom’s insistence, did she go to the big house on Covered Bridge Road, and then she complained of a headache and stayed in bed. Delores made a tray and took it to her, but Susie didn’t touch the food.

“I slaved all day in the kitchen and set this wonderful table and wanted to make everything so special, and she went to her room and stayed the whole time and wouldn’t even eat,” Delores complained after the visit.

Tom tried to get Susie to visit on other occasions, but without success. “She made it clear that she wasn’t interested in doing that,” he recalled. “She put up such a fuss that she didn’t want to go that after a while you just don’t ask anymore. It didn’t bother me that much to not go home very often. I was never much of a homebody.”

“He’s married now. It’s his life. This is what he’s chosen,” Chuck kept reminding Delores, but it didn’t decrease her anger and pain.

“That girl’s got him wrapped around her little finger,” Delores said.

In his senior year, Tom decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the navy. By enlisting in the reserves, he could be commissioned an officer and would have to serve only two years active duty. It would give him time to decide what he wanted to do and allow him to save money to start a practice. It also would let the U.S. government pay for him and Susie to start a family. They had planned on children from the beginning, at least two, and now with Tom’s graduation looming, the time seemed right. Soon after the new year 1974 began, Susie happily called home with the news that she was pregnant.

Commissioned immediately after his graduation, Tom was assigned to the U.S. Marine Training Center at Parris Island. Susie, nearly seven months pregnant, was happy to leave Lexington and its close proximity to her detested mother-in-law. She and Tom settled into an apartment in historic Beaufort, only a few miles from the base, and while Tom went to work repairing the teeth of skinned-head recruits, she began seeing base doctors and making preparations for the arrival of her baby. The child, a boy, was born August 30 at the base hospital. He was named John Wesley for the middle names of his father and his grandfather Newsom.

Tom called his mother with the news, and she said that she and Janie would come to see the baby. They drove to Beaufort soon afterward and arrived while Tom was at work. Delores stopped and called the apartment to let Susie know they were in town. Delores never tired of retelling that conversation later.

“Can we bring something for dinner?” Delores asked.

“Tom’s not here,” Susie said. “We have plans tonight. You’ll have to come tomorrow.”

And she hung up.

Delores was furiously offended. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “Why should we subject ourselves to this treatment?”

But rather than risk hurting Tom, she and Janie checked into a motel, got up the next morning, picked up some doughnuts, and went to the apartment.

Susie was abrupt and said little. “It was very obvious that she didn’t want us there,” Delores said. “The tension was
so
thick.”

Delores and Janie stayed only a couple of hours, most of it outside with Tom and the baby, before leaving for home. Janie later said that her mother cried most of the way.

Susie was happy in Beaufort, where old hierarchies reigned and family names and traditions mattered. She loved its gray-bearded trees, its centuries-old houses and gracious, Old South atmosphere. She made friends with other officers’ wives and attended some social functions, but John, a fretful child, took most of her time.

On trips back to North Carolina, Susie discovered that things were not well at home. Both of her parents were under great stress. Sixteen months after he joined P. Lorillard in 1970, Bob Newsom was promoted to vice president of operations and put in charge of the company’s plants in Greensboro and Louisville. He also threw himself back into civic work, serving on the committee that planned the state’s bicentennial celebration, the North Carolina University Advisory Council, the board of visitors of Greensboro College, and the board of directors of United Day Care Services, and heading Greensboro’s United Way campaign. He was highly regarded by those who worked for him.

“He was a real, real nice person,” his secretary, Joyce Jarrett, recalled. “They just didn’t make them any finer than he was. He was just genuine, very genuine. He had a lot of compassion for people. He cared about the people he worked for, the people who worked for him. I used to always tell him he was too good for his own good.”

That, indeed, was the case. Bob was finding himself more and more often in conflict with his old friend from Reynolds, Curtis Judge, the Lorillard president. Judge thought Bob “sincere, honest, hardworking, intelligent, very capable, a good engineer,” but with a serious flaw.

“Bob was too nice a man to be able to handle the real dirty business of being a top executive,” he said more than a decade later. “He was almost congenitally unable to fire anybody. I’d call Bob and say, ‘Look, we brought in all of this new machinery. We’ve got to get rid of some of these people.’ It was just beyond him. I don’t believe Bob could ever have fired anybody. His days at Reynolds were glory days. It was growing like mad. He didn’t have to fire anybody. He was a good man. The only fault Bob had was that he was too good a man in terms of business. You know, in business you sometimes have to be a bastard, and he couldn’t do it.”

Early in 1975, Bob became embroiled in a dispute about union activities. He had a theory about unions. “He said that unions existed because of bad management attitudes,” his son recalled. “Anybody who didn’t want them didn’t have to have them. All they had to do was treat their employees like humans.” When he came out at the losing end of the dispute, Bob felt honor-bound to resign.

He was fifty-five, hurt and disappointed. He had a house, but his few modest investments were far from enough to provide an adequate income. He was uncertain what he would do. Florence was bitter and became deeply depressed. Worried about finances, she returned to teaching at a business school in Greensboro. Bob went into partnership with a friend in a metal-plating business, but it proved profitable enough only for one, and he sold out to his friend and became a private consultant. For two years in the early seventies he had been president of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers, a group with more than 20,000 members. He also belonged to several other professional societies, which he had served in various capacities. Using contacts he had made in those groups, he began landing jobs as a consultant, often with the federal government.

By the spring of 1976, things were looking brighter, and a new grandchild had arrived.

Susie gave birth to her second child, another boy, on March 26, 1976. He was named James Thomas for his great-grandfather Sharp and his father. Florence drove to Beaufort to see the baby, but Delores did not. Jim would be more than two years old before she ever saw him.

Tom was soon to be discharged from the navy and he was making plans. He was thinking of moving out west to start his practice. Susie confided to family members that it was because he wanted to get as far away as he could from his mother—“that old witch.” Tom said he thought it would help his sinus problems. But more than anything, the idea of the West always had appealed to him. He liked the outdoors and open spaces. In dental school he had friends from New Mexico who extolled their home state. He thought he might like to live there. One of his friends gave him the names of two dentists in Albuquerque who could help if he decided to go there.

Tom flew to Albuquerque to check it out soon after Jim’s birth. Albuquerque is in the center of New Mexico, on the Rio Grande River, at the base of the bare and imposing Sandia Mountains, a city surrounded by desert. Founded by Spaniards in 1706, it is one of the nation’s oldest inland communities, a mile-high city of cool, crisp nights and warm, sunny days. Ernie Pyle, who traveled the country writing columns before he became the nation’s most famous war correspondent, picked Albuquerque as the most desirable place to live in America and bought a small white house there before going off to chronicle World War II. When Tom came to look it over, Albuquerque was a burgeoning blend of old and new, a city on the make, with a rising crime rate, growing opportunities, and a metropolitan-area population nearing half a million. It was home of the University of New Mexico and Kirtland Air Force Base, and buried under nearby mountains was a large part of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Albuquerque seemed to have everything that Tom wanted, including quick access to rugged territory for hunting, fishing, skiing, and other outdoor activities. He loved it immediately.

He also liked the dentists he had come to meet, Armand and Robert Giannini, brothers. They invited him to join them as a partner. He returned to Beaufort excited about the possibilities and later took Susie to see Albuquerque. She wasn’t enthusiastic about the place, but Tom thought that would change once she had been there a while.

After his discharge in June, Tom took Susie and the boys to Greensboro to stay with her parents while he flew to New Mexico to get established. He got a bank loan, bought equipment, set up his office, and found an apartment in the Heights, the Sandia foothills that look down on the city. He returned to Greensboro, loaded up his family and possessions, and drove to their new home.

Susie disliked Albuquerque from the beginning. It was too rawboned for her tastes, too informal. There were too many rough-looking people, she complained, too many Mexicans and Indians. She tried to help Tom get his new practice going, but the babies took most of her time.

Soon after Tom and Susie settled in Albuquerque, Jerry and Joy Montgomery came to visit. Susie was happy to see familiar faces. Jerry had been Tom’s best friend in college, the star guard that Tom had longed to be on the basketball team, the best man at Tom and Susie’s wedding. He was John’s godfather. Joy had visited with Tom and Susie while she was attending the University of Kentucky and dating Jerry. They once had gone camping together in West Virginia, Jerry and Joy’s home state. Jerry had gone to Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest, had just finished his residency, and was looking for a place to settle. Tom talked him into trying Albuquerque, and Jerry soon found a job at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Six months after arriving in Albuquerque, Tom and Susie bought a new house in Thomas Village at 3121 La Mancha Drive in the valley, only a few hundred yards from the Rio Grande and not far from Old Town, the city’s historic district. It was a pueblo house, a style popular in the city, fake adobe, stucco over frame, with three bedrooms, a fireplace in the den, and tall cotton-wood trees in the backyard. They paid $5,000 down and took out a mortgage for $47,000.

Henry and Irene Eichel, who lived next door, came calling the day after Tom and Susie moved in. Henry was a retired air force colonel, an engineer, then working as an executive at TRW Inc. Irene was from a prominent family in Texas. Susie took an immediate liking to them. “We had entertained senators and company presidents,” Irene said. “That made an impression on Susie.” Soon Susie was visiting every day. Irene began thinking of her almost as a daughter. She loved John and Jimbo, as the baby was called, and frequently tended to them while Susie ran errands. John started calling her Granny Goose. He called Hank Opa. Jim would, too, when he was old enough to talk.

Within six months after moving into her new house, a year after her arrival in Albuquerque, Susie began confiding her unhappiness to Irene. She wanted Tom to go back to North Carolina to practice. Albuquerque had no culture, she said. The museums were pathetic. The university was second-rate. Where was the chamber music? She had to go all the way to Santa Fe, sixty-two miles, to see an opera.

Irene suspected that Susie really was unhappy because she had no social identity in Albuquerque. Her family name didn’t count. Susie talked frequently about her family back in North Carolina, about her uncle, Fred Klenner, who was, she said, a world-famous doctor, but mostly about her aunt, Susie, the chief justice. She regularly dropped into conversation that
Time
magazine had named her aunt one of the twelve most important women in America. Irene got the idea that Susie Sharp must run North Carolina.

Tom was keenly aware that Susie didn’t like Albuquerque. “She wasn’t happy here from day one,” he said years later. “She didn’t have anybody out here who was impressed with her name. Out here, people rely on themselves rather than their family. People tried to like her at first, but after a while they quit trying. It didn’t matter to them if she was a Sharp or anything else.