Guy had been a friend of Susie and Tom in college and became close with Susie’s family. After Susie’s marriage, he maintained his friendship with Bob and Florence, Nanna and Paw-Paw, frequently stopping by to say hello. The previous Christmas, he had dropped in to wish the Newsoms happy holidays and been surprised to find Susie there, separated from Tom. They renewed acquaintance, and while Susie was in Taiwan, they corresponded. When Paw-Paw died that spring, Guy spent a lot of time with the family, running errands, doing whatever he could. To the family, it was almost as if
he
were filling in for Susie in her absence. As soon as Susie returned, Guy came calling, and they had been seeing each other since.
By that fall, Susie was aglow with romance. She gushed about Guy in letters to friends in Taiwan and Washington. Annette thought this was all sort of soon for Susie, especially when she began talking about marriage after a few months. What about her career? What about China? Could she be happy in the small country town where Guy was safely ensconced in business?
Apparently so, for Susie forged ahead. Her parents had his parents to dinner. Susie began talking about a garden wedding, perhaps at Nanna’s. She sought Annette’s advice on what to wear.
“All of a sudden,” Annette recalled later, “bam! It was off.”
Susie wrote to friends that the romance had fizzled, but she didn’t offer reasons. Neither did she tell Annette why.
Later, Guy was reluctant to talk about it as well, saying only that Susie had become more and more absorbed in graduate school and her growing difficulties with Tom.
“She was pretty fiercely determined not to let Tom have time with those kids,” he recalled. “And she had this almost unconscionable hatred for her mother-in-law. She just hated her and would express it frequently. She seemed to be getting wound tighter and tighter and tighter.”
Susie sought relief for her tension at the Psychological Services Center at Wake Forest, where she began seeing Dr. Ron Davis, a tall, bearded, soft-spoken, contemplative staff counselor, a former Baptist minister, four years older than she.
“She was very alive, very energetic, bubbling over,” Davis recalled. “Appeared to be very happy. Everybody in the office looked forward to Susie coming in because she was just a ray of sunshine when she came through the door. She could make a stone talk to her.”
After a few sessions, Davis realized that Susie was “a little too light, a little too cheerful, a little too talkative, a little too animated,” that it all was a cover for a great deal of distress and anxiety.
At first, Susie talked about the problems of being a single parent, going to school, and dealing with her children. She worried about how the boys were adjusting without a father. She was concerned that John was hitting kids at school.
Dr. Davis got her to bring the boys in and found them to be “very normal, delightful, bright, well-adjusted, just charming boys.”
“They were different,” he recalled later. “John was very aggressive. He was very articulate, bright. Jim was a lover. He was a people person, soft and warm and gentle. Climb up in your lap, liked to be held. John preferred distance from people.”
Susie was overly invested in the boys, too protective of them, Davis thought, and he tried to get her to loosen her hold a little.
As their talks continued, he realized that Susie held a lot of bitterness for her estranged husband and mother-in-law. Tom, she told him, was a neglectful father who didn’t want to see his children, but his manipulative mother was pressing him to get visitation rights. She didn’t want the boys spending time with their father, not in New Mexico anyway, where, she said, “the environment” wasn’t good for them.
“She certainly wanted to limit the amount of time he saw the boys,” Davis recalled. “She wanted to place restrictions on his seeing the boys. She wasn’t willing to bend. Well, she just wasn’t tolerant of Tom’s rights.”
Later, Davis would be drawn into Tom and Susie’s court fight over visitation, but in the beginning he was worried about Susie’s condition.
“Susie was under a lot of stress. My concern was trying to get control of that so that it didn’t spill over in ways that were damaging to her. She just wouldn’t deal with it. She just refused to acknowledge the level of stress at which she operated. My concern was that she would just collapse with that stress level.”
He wasn’t the only one worried about Susie. Her cousin Nancy and Nancy’s husband, Steve, came to visit in the spring of 1981 and noticed how distraught she appeared to be. They thought she needed a break and suggested that she come to Raleigh and do the town with them. Bob and Florence thought that a good idea and agreed to keep the kids. Susie went one weekend soon afterward.
Nancy and Steve took Susie to three different nightspots. At the first two, Susie ordered a glass of white wine but finished neither. At the third, she passed when drinks were ordered, and it was so evident to Nancy and Steve that she was having a miserable time that they suggested going home. On the way, Susie threw up on the backseat of Nancy’s new station wagon. The rest of the night she lay on the bathroom floor, hugging the commode, refusing all offers of help.
Dead drunk on less than two glasses of white wine? Nancy and Steve found that dubious.
Susie spent the next day on the sofa in a snuggle sack, drinking hot tea, nibbling toast, and popping pills. From her pocketbook she fetched a freezer bag bulging with pills and capsules of many hues and sizes, a wad as big as a baseball. Vitamins, she said. She took them by the handful.
“I’m talking hourly, she’d pop those things,” said Nancy, who was flabbergasted by it.
Nancy knew that Florence believed in Dr. Klenner’s theories about vitamins as preventive medicine, that she always kept big jars of vitamins on the dining room table so family members could take them freely, but had had no idea that Susie was taking vitamins in such quantities. Considering Susie’s condition, Nancy wondered if she might have something other than vitamins in the bag.
“She was an absolute wreck,” Nancy said. “I can hardly describe her.”
That Sunday, Susie talked for hours about two subjects: her parents, and Tom and his mother.
She hated living with her parents, she said, but she had no choice.
“She said her mother and daddy were crazy and they were warping her children’s minds,” Nancy recalled. “I kept trying to get her to tell me what they were doing. She said it was psychological the way they were doing it. She didn’t like what Bob and Florence were teaching her children, but she’d never be specific. She said the boys were scared of Florence.”
She also went on about how Tom had no interest in his children but was being pushed to see them by his mother, “the witch.”
“All weekend she talked about what an SOB Tom was,” Nancy said, “how he wouldn’t settle up and give her the money he owed her.”
Nancy was glad to see her cousin leave that weekend, but she felt sorry for Bob and Florence, whom she knew to have big hearts and gentle souls. Later, when the situation between Susie and her mother grew worse, Nancy sent Florence a bouquet in sympathy for what she was going through.
Despite what Susie said, Tom was indeed ready to settle up, but the lines of communication between him and Susie had grown brittle, their conversations, when they had them, were terse, tense, and crackling with hostility. Tom had asked Susie to let the boys come and see him at Christmas, and she again refused.
“I thought I had been cooperative monetarily as well as every other way, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t see these kids,” he said. “It didn’t seem to matter whether I was nice or not. She didn’t want me to see the kids or have anything to do with them.”
He turned the negotiations over to Rueckhaus. Tom’s desires were simple: he wanted to be able to see his sons, and he wanted out of his marriage.
By the end of April, Rueckhaus thought that he had worked out an agreement with Sands. His understanding was that Susie would accept $15,500 in total settlement, with the support payments to continue as earlier agreed. The sum would include $14,000 for Susie’s equity in the house, and $1,500 for the furniture she left behind. Tom said he would borrow the money from his mother. The money came in May, and Tom drew a cashier’s check and gave it to Rueckhaus. He was confident that his troubles soon would be behind him, and he was looking forward to spending time with John and Jim that summer.
On June 1, four days after he got the check, Rueckhaus told Sands that he was ready to send Susie’s money, and he requested that Sands confirm in writing that this would be full settlement. When he received no confirmation after three weeks, Rueckhaus called Sands again. Sands brought up a $2,400 student loan Susie had got, and said Tom was supposed to pay for it. Rueckhaus said that was not part of the agreement, and he brought up the question of visitation. Sands said he would talk with Susie and call back shortly.
Three days later, on June 26, Rueckhaus returned the check to Tom with a note telling him of developments and advising him to put the money into an interest-bearing account. A copy of the note also went to Sands.
“I made a deal with Sands, and he just denied it and reneged,” Rueckhaus said. “I got really pissed off. The way I play the game, if you cut a deal, you cut a deal. You take notes and you try to make sure you understand what it is.”
It began to become clear to Tom that his chances of seeing the boys that summer were growing slim.
“She had the kids basically as ransom,” he said. “That was always the deal.”
Rueckhaus agreed. “They were just intractable,” he said of Susie and Sands. “You settle the financial stuff, then we will start talking about the kids. That was their position. They were using the kids as a wedge.”
On July 8, Susie wrote to Sands: “Feel free to play hardball wherever you think it appropriate.”
Two days later, Sands responded to Rueckhaus by letter, including a copy of the separation agreement, pointing out that it required Tom to pay Susie’s expenses for graduate school. Clearly, Tom was obligated to repay the student loan, he wrote, as well as unpaid medical and dental bills for the children.
As for visitation, Sands went on, Susie would accept whatever Tom could work out with Dr. Davis at Wake Forest. She would not let the children travel alone. She would be willing to fly with them for a visit in Kentucky or New Mexico if all expenses were paid. Of course, Tom always could visit them in North Carolina with proper notice.
“I am concerned that the children are not seeing enough of their father,” Sands wrote, “and I hope that this problem can be worked out.”
Tom didn’t want to pay to fly Susie to Kentucky or New Mexico or anywhere else. He simply couldn’t afford it, he said. Neither could he afford to take off time from work and pay motel and food bills to visit at length with the boys in North Carolina. He wanted them to visit in a family setting at home.
“Just at the point where I’d think we’d worked out an agreement, there was always some little thing thrown in, some roadblock that would cost another thousand dollars that I couldn’t afford,” he said.
One such roadblock, Tom felt, was Susie’s insistence that the boys were too young to fly alone. In this stand she had found an ally in Dr. Davis. Davis thought one parent should put the boys on the plane, another be waiting for them at their destination. If the boys had to change planes—and there were no direct flights from Greensboro to Albuquerque—that meant either that Susie accompany them to Atlanta, where she could put them on a direct flight to Albuquerque, or that she put them on a flight to Dallas and Tom fly there to meet them and take them on to Albuquerque. Either case required considerable extra expense.
As Tom began to realize that another summer was likely to pass without seeing his sons, his determination not to give in to Susie’s demands hardened.
The continuing conflict was showing on Susie, too, that summer. At one point, she took the boys to Raleigh to a family outing at the home of her cousin David Miller. John and Jim were playing kickball with the other children, and John, who didn’t like to lose, began scrapping with his playmates. Other family members thought the children were just being kids, that John had committed no great offense, that the spat would pass quickly without adult interference. But Susie screamed at John and chased him around, hitting him in the head.
Her cousins were shocked. They had noticed that Susie treated John differently, and they thought it was because Jim was sweet and looked like Susie, while John was aggressive and looked like Tom. But they hadn’t realized that the difference in treatment extended to abuse.
“He’s just got to learn,” Susie kept saying after the incident.
David was so upset that he told other family members he was going to call Tom.
“You can’t just go call the ex-husband,” his sister Nancy told him.
“Somebody’s got to do something,” he replied.
They came to regret not doing anything. “At that time,” Nancy later explained, “we’re thinking Tom’s an SOB. But we realize there’s two sides to every story and we’re asking ourselves, ‘Could you live with Susie?’”
Living with Susie was not easy in September, when she finally was served notice of Tom’s petition for divorce. Tom had instructed his lawyer to take whatever action was necessary for him to see his sons. Susie was livid that the action had been filed nearly a year earlier and that she hadn’t been told about it. She was frightened of the consequences that the petition might hold.