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.
At a time when they should have been thinking of retiring and enjoying life in peace, Bob and Florence had only turmoil and tribulation. Those close to them knew that they were grieved and hurt, but they chose not to talk about it and tried not to show it. Although he was drinking more, Bob was more successful at keeping his disappointment hidden than was Florence. Family members worried that she might have a nervous breakdown. Her lifelong sense of humor departed. She grew depressed, lost weight. Her hair seemed to turn white overnight. She looked strained.
“She was brokenhearted, just completely brokenhearted,” said a close friend.
“She felt defeated,” said her sister Louise. “She felt like she was a failure as a parent.”
In an attempt to escape her problems, Florence threw herself into work, taking on extra duties at the business college where she taught.
“She wrapped herself up in the job,” said her sister-in-law Frances. “She stayed busy. She was a good teacher and she didn’t do a sloppy job of it.”
Nanna did not have to be told when somebody in her family was suffering. She knew it instinctively, and she reached out to comfort. She reached out to Bob and Florence, and, when she learned Susie’s whereabouts, she reached out to her, too. Susie didn’t want her comfort. When Nanna called and asked to come and see her, Susie made excuses. Nanna was deeply hurt.
Susie not only turned her back on her parents, she spurned her entire family except for the Klenners, whom she visited often. Defying family, she turned to Annie Hill, the only Sharp who had defied family. On one of Susie’s trips to Reidsville to see the Klenners, Louise invited her to bring the boys to the big Sharp house for lunch. She wanted to try to get to the base of Susie’s split with her family in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation.
“I tried to find out why,” she said. “I couldn’t get any satisfactory answers.”
After he moved in with his parents, Rob went several times to call on his sister, occasionally taking his children to play with her boys, and although she was cordial, she made it clear that she didn’t want to talk about Fritz or her parents and had no intention of making amends. After several months, Rob quit going to the apartment. Soon after moving there, as if in deliberate defiance of her parents, Susie bought a black chow puppy that she named Shiao Shiong, Chinese for “little bear.” The boys called him Chowy. The dog grew huge and ferocious, and Rob didn’t like being around him. “Chows give me the willies,” he said.
Friends, too, felt Susie’s withdrawal. Annette went to her apartment several times to visit. “I felt like she was ill at ease with my being there,” she said later. “I think she didn’t want me to realize how much she was seeing Fritz.”
Susie even shut out her namesake, Su-Su, the aunt she loved and admired above all others, the one about whom she so frequently had boasted. Susie Sharp used the occasion of John’s ninth birthday at the end of August to reestablish contact.
“I wondered what I’d done to be excommunicated,” she said when she called her niece.
“I just thought you’d never want to see me again,” Susie responded.
Su-Su invited her to come to Raleigh and bring the boys for a birthday celebration. She took them to a department store restaurant for cake and ice cream, then to Pullen Park for the afternoon.
“I couldn’t get Susie to talk about anything I wanted to talk about,” she later recalled. “If anybody mentioned Fritz to her, she just immediately bristled and shut up.”
What Susie wanted to talk about was Tom, how awful he was and how he was involved with the Mafia. The judge thought that her niece was sorely in need of help, but she didn’t push her for fear of breaking the new contact. Still, at departure, she could not resist a stern admonition.
“Susie,” she said, giving her a hard look that many a defendant had known to fear, “make peace with your mother.”
“A lot of things will have to change before that happens,” Susie said.
29
Spring of 1983 found Delores Lynch still stewing about the decision in Tom’s hearing the summer before, and a few days before John and Jim were to fly to Albuquerque for their first spring visit, she called Tom’s lawyer in Reidsville, Bill Horsley, to vent her unhappiness.
She was particularly upset about Tom’s having to pay to fly Susie to Atlanta with the boys so that they wouldn’t have to change planes alone.
“This is costing fifteen hundred dollars,” she complained, “five hundred of which is to fly her back and forth from Greensboro to Atlanta to meet their plane twice. Now, she has a perfectly good broomstick she could use, as you and I well know.
“Really, Bill, there’s something wrong with that girl. She’s a strident, loud, abusive female. I don’t know how Tom did it for ten years. I just really don’t. My first remark was, ‘Well,
I’m surprised it lasted this long.’
“I don’t think she gives a damn for those kids. All she wants to do is break Tom.
“It’s harassment. It’s a flagrant violation of our decency, and I think we’re a lot better people than those funny people down there. I’ll send you a picture of our house. We have a fourteen-and-a-half-room house with four bedrooms on four acres and it’s a showplace. But they treat us like we’re from the wrong side of the tracks.
“That judge didn’t give visitation rights. He sentenced those children. They love Tom. They want to be with him. But they aren’t allowed to mention his name.
“That’s why she won’t let me talk to them on the phone. I never mentioned his name but this one time when little Jimbo got on the phone.
“He said, ‘My school’s going along just fine and I don’t want to talk about my daddy.’ I said, ‘Well, honey, what’s the matter? Didn’t you have a good time in Albuquerque?’ ‘Well, yeah.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you want to talk about your daddy?’ Well, there was a set speech. Now what kind of a mother sets her children up with set speeches like this? He was five years old then.
“Tom wouldn’t even call her up because she’d scream at him. I said, ‘Why don’t you call her up and reason with her, honey, there’s no sense to all of this.’ This was before. He said ‘Mom, you can’t talk to anybody who gets hysterical and screams.’
“I wake up at night and I think, My God, what has happened to my nice son? He never knew people like this existed. Neither did I.
“So, I don’t know, Bill, I’m just real unhappy for Tom. You might tell Sands Tom is a gentleman, as you can tell, but I’m no lady. I’m a she wolf and I’ll defend my cub if I have to.”
Horsley listened with great patience, as he always did. Delores called him far more frequently about the case than Tom did, and she continued to seethe about the injustice she thought had been inflicted upon her son—especially the financial injustice. She railed against the judge and complained that the entire North Carolina judicial system was “under the thumb of that old bat,” the former chief justice, Susie’s aunt. Nothing Horsley said could dissuade or appease her. His feeling was that while Tom hadn’t been particularly happy with the judge’s order, he had accepted it and wanted to get on with his life with as little contact with Susie as possible. But Delores, he thought, would not be happy until she had pushed Tom to try to change the situation and confront Susie once again.
Delores’s friends knew that she was nearly obsessed with Tom’s problems with Susie. “Delores lived and breathed that thing with Tom,” Susan Reid said. But her friends also knew that wasn’t the only reason for her growing unhappiness that spring. She seemed equally upset about Tom’s pending marriage to his former dental assistant, Kathy Anderson, who had been living with him for more than three years.
She’d done everything she could to stop it, she told Susan Reid and Joyce Rose. She couldn’t understand why Tom wouldn’t listen. After all, hadn’t she been right about Susie? Wouldn’t he have saved himself a lot of pain and trouble if he’d listened to her then?
“She said this girl’s family was far below her son,” Joyce later recalled.
“Delores was a woman, it didn’t make any difference who it was, they weren’t good enough,” said Susan.
Kathy never knew that Delores had such feelings about her. She had a genuine fondness for Delores and made every effort to show it. She thought that Delores felt the same way about her.
Despite her misgivings, Delores went to Albuquerque for the wedding, taking Janie and leaving behind her hospitalized husband. The wedding took place June 11 in the chapel at the University of New Mexico with nearly two hundred family and friends present. Kathy’s family stayed at Tom’s house, and Delores got a room at the Sheraton. With the boys soon to arrive for their first full summer visit and both of their families visiting, Tom and Kathy decided against a honeymoon. But before Delores left, they promised to come to Kentucky later in the summer and bring the boys.
Less than three weeks after the wedding, John and Jim arrived in Albuquerque. They looked sickly, and Tom was not only distressed with their appearance, he was disgusted with their plaque-encrusted teeth. The boys came with a load of vitamins and medicines. The huge doses of vitamins sometimes made them nauseated, but they insisted they had to take them or their mother would be angry. Tom threw away most of the pills and assured them that their mother would never know.
The boys were reticent at first, seemingly fearful of saying the wrong things. John sometimes elbowed Jim when he began to say something, and Jim would check himself. When Tom went to work leaving the boys alone with Kathy, they said disturbing things about their father and grandparents.
“Daddy was a jerk. Daddy was dumb. Daddy was stupid. Stupid and dumb. Stupid and dumb. Delores and Janie and Chuck were mean. They were stupid and dumb. GG and Granddaddy were mean to us. They kicked us out of the house. Daddy used to be mean to us.”
“I’d say, ‘Where did you get that idea?’” Kathy recalled. “Everything was ‘Mother said.’”
Tom tried to spend as much time as possible with the boys. He took them to Wagon Mound, New Mexico, to a ranch owned by friends who also had a young son. The boys rode horses, jumped on a trampoline, and searched a canyon cliff for arrowheads. At night they had cook-outs and sat around the fire with the ranch hands telling ghost stories. One night during the story telling, a cowboy galloped in on his horse and jumped the campfire, a cape flying from his neck, his six-shooters belching smoke.
Back in Albuquerque, Tom and Kathy took the boys on the world’s longest tram ride up Sandia Mountain, 10,600 feet high. They went with them on the Wild Water Slide and took them to Uncle Cliff’s Amusement Park, where Jim stepped into the cage to face a baseball-pitching machine and knocked the first pitch out of the park, creating a memory his father would always carry.
“He’s going to be the next Joe DiMaggio,” Tom predicted.
Jim was not nearly so athletic as John, who clearly was his father’s son. Not only did John look like Tom, he was a natural athlete. He loved sports. He could do anything with a ball and was the fastest kid in his class. But he never got to play sports, except during school recess, he told his father, because his mother wouldn’t allow it. She rarely let him and Jim play outside, he said, and discouraged them from making friends.
John, sensitive and highly competitive, was obviously frustrated and on edge much of the time. Tom also knew that he craved affection. John’s second-grade teacher, Shirley Thorne, had written to tell him that John was the only student who gave her a big hug on leaving each day.
Both John and Jim were bright and studious. Tom knew that they did well in school because of his correspondence with their teachers.
Jim was much different from his brother. Tom could see that he had the soul of a poet, an artist, a philosopher. Jim saw images in the clouds and pointed them out. He had the heart of a peacemaker, and was always trying to quell the acrimony between his parents. Less aggressive than John, he rarely stood up for himself, and seemed more fearful.
Jim was a ladies’ man, too, his father could tell, a charmer. Girls gravitated to him. He quickly made friends with several in the neighborhood.
Jim’s first-grade teacher, Julia Cooper, had written to Tom that Jim was the “most caring child” she’d ever taught. “No one could help but love Jim,” she said.
Near the end of the summer visit, Tom borrowed a motor home from his neighbors, Hank and Irene, and drove to Kentucky with Kathy and the boys. Delores had complained because she never got to see the boys and couldn’t even talk to them by telephone anymore. She sometimes made fudge and cookies and mailed them to her grandsons, but the boys told Tom that their mother threw the packages out because the food in them might be poisoned. That infuriated Delores.
The boys seemed to enjoy their visit with their grandparents. They played with Delores’s dogs, banged on her piano, got running starts and slid in their
socks on her highly polished floors. Delores piled into the motor home with them to see Mammoth Cave and to visit a friend of hers who raised miniature donkeys. She rented a room at the Melrose Inn, only a few miles from her house, so the boys would have a swimming pool to play in, and she splashed in the water with them.
To Tom and Kathy, Delores seemed to have a good time and enjoyed the boys immensely, but after they were gone, Delores told her friends that she was relieved. She complained that the boys messed up her house. She called them “brats.”
“She wasn’t a typical grandmother,” said Joyce Rose. “She was anxious to see the boys, but she was anxious to see them leave, too.”
That summer, John and Jim began to tell their daddy about “Uncle Fritz.” They had mentioned Fritz a few times on earlier visits, but Tom hadn’t paid much attention. He knew that Fritz was Susie’s cousin, but he’d seen him only a couple of times. He’d noticed Fritz at the custody hearing the summer before. That had struck him as odd, but other things were on his mind and he didn’t think about it.
Now the boys told him that Uncle Fritz sometimes stayed with them, that he took them camping and to gun shows. They seemed to like him.
Tom couldn’t understand why Susie would be spending so much time with her cousin. She’d never been close to him before, had hardly ever mentioned him. Indeed, Tom had the impression she’d thought her cousin peculiar, as he did. “A nerd for life” was how he’d always pictured Fritz.
“I thought he was a little strange, but I thought he was basically harmless,” Tom said.
He had troubles enough with Susie, though, without questioning why she was spending time with her peculiar cousin.
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