“Well, not too good,” Susie said.
She and the boys flew home the next day.
Soon after her return, Tom and Susie were called in for consultation by the doctors who had treated Jim. They said they believed Jim’s injury was more than an accident.
“I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it,” Tom said. “I told them, ‘I don’t think what you guys are thinking is right.’”
Tom and Susie heard no more about the matter, and not until much later did Tom learn that they had been reported to authorities as suspected child abusers, although he was never aware of an investigation.
Matters did not improve between Tom and Susie, and that summer, when Paw-Paw suffered a series of small strokes and was hospitalized in Winston-Salem, Susie decided to take the boys home to see him. She told Irene and Joy that they would be gone a couple of weeks. Joy volunteered to drive them to the airport, and on the morning of July 16, when she came to pick them up, she realized that something was wrong.
“It was tense,” she recalled later. “Susie was sort of strung out. She was really nervous. She didn’t talk much. I felt bad for the boys. John was worried. He kept asking, ‘Mommy, are we coming back?’”
Joy suspected that Susie might be planning to not return, and she was right. It had not been spoken between Tom and Susie, but they both understood that she probably was leaving for good, and before he left for work that morning, Tom took snapshots of the boys.
A week after she got back to North Carolina, Susie called to confirm what Tom already knew. She and the boys would not be coming back.
21
Word spread quickly through the Sharp and Newsom families that Susie had returned to stay, her marriage at an end. As Susie told it, Tom asked her to leave and take the children. He simply didn’t want to be married anymore, she said.
Tom had undergone a personality change, Susie told her friend Annette Hunt. She thought it might be related to medicine he had been taking. He’d been diagnosed as having high blood pressure soon after their move to Albuquerque and had been taking pills for it since. The medicine wasn’t supposed to be taken over a long period, Susie said, and she wondered if it could be responsible for the changes she perceived in Tom.
“He just wasn’t the same person I married,” Susie said.
“She blamed everything on that,” said Annette, who thought Susie was seizing it as an excuse.
Susie’s aunt Su-Su, who, due to mandatory age restrictions, stepped down as chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court only two weeks after Susie returned home, suggested that she hire an attorney. She recommended a young lawyer in Reidsville, Alexander P. Sands III, called Sandy. Sands was a Sharp family friend. He’d grown up in Reidsville, where his father operated tobacco warehouses. After his graduation from Duke University, he went to law school at the University of North Carolina and worked a year for a corporate firm in Winston-Salem before returning home to join a group of Reidsville lawyers. One member of that group was Norwood Robinson, who as a young lawyer had practiced with Susie’s grandfather, Jim Sharp. Sands was Susie’s age, and he and his wife, Ginny, had two children, a son, Andy, who was three, and a daughter, Anna, just a year old.
Sands drew up a separation agreement that gave full custody of the children to Susie, with Tom to pay $200 a month for support of each. Tom also was to pay Susie $100 a month in permanent alimony, plus full expenses to attend graduate school for four years. Additionally, he was to pay her for half the equity in their house, plus $1,500 for home furnishings Susie had left behind and half of their accumulated interest in forty acres of desert land Tom had bought, sight unseen, for $5,000 at $49 down and $49 a month. She would relinquish any claim to his dental practice.
Susie didn’t send the separation agreement to Tom immediately. Her friend Annette Hunt was convinced that she secretly hoped for reconciliation. Some family members, too, thought that Susie still loved Tom and that leaving him was just a dramatic gesture to get his attention. Her real dream, they thought, was to work things out and reunite her family, perhaps even to convince Tom to move back to North Carolina, where she could be happier. But her mother had no illusions about that possibility. She thought that Susie was too bitter toward Tom, that she wouldn’t accept any of the blame for the failure of the marriage, and that reconciliation was impossible as long as Susie maintained that attitude. She had argued with Susie about it.
Susie planned a trip back to Albuquerque early in September, ostensibly to retrieve her car and other possessions, but Annette thought that she clearly was excited about seeing Tom again.
“It was like the night before the prom,” Annette recalled. “She’d have gone right back out there with him if he’d just asked.”
But Tom had no intention of asking, and he made that clear with a cold reception upon Susie’s arrival. Scorned, hurt, and angry, Susie spent the night next door with her former neighbors, Hank and Irene.
Next morning, Tom told Susie to take what she wanted from the house but he expected her to be gone before he returned from work. Irene said later that she couldn’t remember seeing Susie so furious as she was when she went through the house piling up stuff to take with her. She cursed Tom and threw things at the walls. But before Tom got home, she had struck out for North Carolina in her blue 1974 Audi Fox, the car jammed with clothing, toys, household items, and personal treasures.
Tom followed the next day in his four-wheel-drive vehicle, pulling a U-Haul trailer loaded with furniture Susie’s family had given them, much of it made by Paw-Paw. He received a cordial welcome from Bob and Florence and spent two nights at their house visiting with his sons while Susie stayed away, avoiding further confrontation.
Soon after Tom returned to Albuquerque, Susie signed the separation agreement and forwarded it to him. He suggested a few minor changes and signed a final draft a few weeks later without consulting a lawyer.
Delores was pleased about these developments, and that fall, unannounced, she set out driving cross-country with Helen Stewart to visit her son. Few things suited her on the trip, and she complained most of the way. She talked a lot about Susie, about what a cold and cruel person she was and how lucky Tom was to finally be rid of her. From a motel in Oklahoma, after complaining to the manager that her room was not clean, she called Tom to tell him that she and Helen were on the way.
“We’ll be there tomorrow,” she said happily.
Helen was listening, and she realized that Tom must have asked where they were planning to stay, because Delores looked startled and said, “Why we’re staying with you!”
When they arrived for Delores to spend her first night ever under her son’s roof, Helen saw the reason for Tom’s question. Delores was startled to find another person at the house—Tom’s tall, long-haired, attractive, young dental assistant, Kathy Anderson, who’d come to Albuquerque from Nebraska and had gone to work for him in the spring of 1978. Tom and Kathy had become close friends as Tom talked about his problems at home. After Susie left, they began dating, and Kathy soon was spending a lot of time at Tom’s house.
Delores didn’t like that. She had thought that she was regaining her son, not simply losing him to another woman. She didn’t like the state of his house or his life-style, and after making her feelings known, she set about trying to straighten out his life while Helen cleaned house. On leaving, she hugged Kathy and told Tom she thought Kathy was good for him. But that was not what Helen heard on the way back.
Susie, too, had heard that her husband’s leggy dental assistant was spending a lot of time with him at what was still her house. She learned about it in a call to Irene, and she was outraged. She bitterly profaned Tom’s name to relatives and claimed he’d been fooling around all along. She vowed that she never would allow her children to go back and witness such shameful behavior.
After Susie accepted that her separation was permanent, she began trying to decide what to do with her life. “I was faced with a decision most women in my situa
tion must be faced with: how to provide for my family,” she later wrote. “For me the answer would have to be either graduate school or another job in advertising or television production.”
She chose graduate school, but it would come later. First, she wanted to expand her knowledge of Chinese. If she knew Chinese culture and could speak the language, she figured that she could parlay a graduate degree in business or political science into a career in diplomatic service or with one of the corporations trying to cash in on the big new market in China. At Guilford College, not far from her parents’ house, she found a young student from Taiwan, Bie Ju, who agreed to tutor her in Mandarin. Susie soon became convinced that if she went to Taiwan to study she could learn the language much faster because she would be forced to use it regularly. Bie suggested the Mandarin Training Center of Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, where non-Chinese study the language as well as Chinese history and culture. Susie applied in the fall of 1979, was quickly accepted, and began making plans to spend a year in Taiwan.
“I realized that I had chosen a very competitive field and that I was going to be playing ‘catch up’ for the next four years, or more,” she later wrote. “I had a limited budget and no time to waste. I knew that I could also do primary research while I was in Taiwan that would be the kind of firsthand information other graduate students would not have. This was no time to do things the tried and true way. It was a one-shot chance to have a better future for the three of us, and I was obsessed with taking it.”
She dreaded telling her parents. John and Jimbo had settled happily with them, and Bob and Florence were enjoying their company. Her parents didn’t like the idea of her going to live in a strange country with two small children. They tried to talk her into leaving the children with them. Tom was upset, too. She had mentioned to him in September that she was thinking of going to Taiwan, but he never dreamed that she would go through with it. When he called Susie to see about having the boys visit for Christmas, Susie told him that they couldn’t because she and the boys were leaving for Taiwan. He tried to talk her into leaving the boys with her parents or dropping them off in New Mexico with him. This was a Third World country, he reminded her; she’d never been out of the Carolinas or New Mexico; she had no idea what it could be like. But Susie was determined that she was going and taking the boys. When Delores found out, she was flabbergasted. Why on earth would Susie want to do such a thing? And why would Tom allow it? It was the craziest thing she’d ever heard, she told friends. But Susie’s parents and Tom realized that Susie had made up her mind and that no amount of reasoned argument would change it. Stopping her would be all but impossible.
“I was firmly advised that I could not do it (not true),” Susie later wrote, “that I did not have enough money (almost true), and that if I were more experienced I would know better than to try (true).”
Susie wrote to another friend from Taiwan, Gwen Kao, whom she had met in Albuquerque, to tell of her plans. Gwen was visiting her family in Taipei and wrote to say that she would still be there when Susie arrived. She also mentioned that her sister-in-law owned an apartment that Susie could rent for eighty dollars a month. Susie called Gwen in Taiwan and accepted. Things were falling into place perfectly, she thought. She even had received a favorable response from one of several institutions in Taipei she had written to in hopes of finding a part-time job teaching English during her stay. And Bie had called her brother, Henry, and asked him to meet Susie at the airport on her arrival.
Susie was more excited and ebullient that Christmas than her family could remember seeing her in a long time, and three days later, she said happy good-byes and departed with six suitcases, $1,800, and a bagful of Star Wars toys.
“It was to be for all of us the journey of a lifetime,” she later wrote.
Her plane was late leaving Los Angeles, and twenty-six hours later, after several stops, it landed in Taipei at 2 A.M. Susie and the boys were exhausted, and Susie was nervously uncertain about what lay ahead. She was irritated to learn that her luggage had been left in Los Angeles. She had only two carry-on bags, one containing a single change of clothes for the boys, the other filled with toys. She was buoyed, however, when she walked into the reception area and saw a big banner, held aloft by Bie’s smiling brother and his wife Marie, saying WELCOME SUSIE LYNCH.
The Jus took Susie and the boys to their apartment and put them to bed. Susie remained with them three days while she got established in Taipei and waited for her lost luggage. Gwen came and helped her enroll at the Mandarin Center and find a childcare center for John and Jim where the director spoke a little English and the fee for both was only eighty-five dollars a month. Then she took Susie to see the apartment she had rented. It was new, just six months old, but small and cheaply constructed, a fourth-floor walk-up on a narrow alley in Yuan Ho City (city of eternal harmony, Susie later translated in a letter home), a working-class area, a sharp contrast to the luxury Susie had known all of her life.
Susie would have to share the apartment with her landlady, who did not live there but retained the largest bedroom and came three or four nights weekly to cook for and entertain friends, occasionally sleeping over. Susie and the boys had two small bedrooms. They shared the bath, kitchen (two gas burners, a tiny refrigerator, and a sink), and living area, which included a TV, with their landlady. Susie decided to sleep in the same room the boys slept in and turn one of her rooms into a study. Not until she moved in did she realize that she had no closets and much of her precious room would be consumed by stand-up dress racks that she had to buy.
Originally, Susie had planned to spend the first month getting to know the city, but her classes were to begin only five days after her arrival, long before she had learned streets, bus schedules, shopping techniques, and other things she needed to know to attend to their daily needs. By her second week, she knew that she was in trouble.
“I had come to realize how out of control the situation was,” she wrote. “I found myself being too demanding of myself and of John and Jim. I was expecting all of us to be ‘super heroes’ and developed a ‘Lone Ranger Complex.’ I felt (guilty?) I was being especially unfair to John and Jim since this trip was for my career and to their advantage in that respect but it was not something to which they felt a real commitment. I knew only too well that this trip had been my decision and mine alone. I felt total responsibility for success or failure for the first time, and it was frightening.”
She systematically began to organize her life, studying maps, exploring, learning bus routes and shops, making lists of contacts she might need, finding a church to attend, and within two weeks, although her performance in class suffered, she felt that she was beginning to get control. With the strain, as well as the novelty and excitement, of being in a new place beginning to dissipate, she also began discovering many things she did not like.
The pollution that constantly clouded the city annoyed her, as did the constant noise and crowds. The buses were so packed that she felt like a sardine riding them, she wrote. And everywhere she seemed to encounter filth. She was wary of eating in restaurants because of the poor hygienic practices she observed, and the only public rest rooms she would use were at the Hilton Hotel. All others she found abominable. She carried packets of sanitized towelettes wherever she went.
In her apartment, she discovered hordes of roaches and set about killing them with noxious sprays. She blamed the roaches on her landlady’s poor housekeeping, which she resented. “I found many frustrations and aggravations from sharing a bathroom and kitchen with Chinese,” she wrote. “My standards were simply not theirs. I ended up doing a ridiculous amount of cleaning just to stay even. For example: the refrigerator was never cleaned by anyone else; in six months the floor was mopped twice. In the bathroom the standard method of cleaning was to rinse everything with water—no soap or disinfectant. However, the most difficult thing for me to handle was the occasional guest of my landlady who deposited his or her toilet paper in the trash can
instead of the toilet. I was totally shocked the first time it happened and had to instantly create a new rule that the children were not to ever use that trash can.
“This place is wonderful for germs and not so wonderful for people,” she wrote Aunt Su-Su.
Few foreigners ever had lived in the area of her apartment, and she and the boys attracted attention every time they went anywhere. Some people reached out to touch the pale, fair-haired boys, frightening them and causing Susie to become resentful. After a few weeks, though, they became less an oddity, and life settled into routine.
In February, Jim began to be troubled with bronchitis. Susie took him to a neighborhood doctor, who suggested that the problem lay in allowing Jim cold drinks with his meals. Susie dismissed this as absurd. The antibiotics that the doctor gave him didn’t help, and Jim’s condition was worsened, Susie felt, by her landlady, who believed that “fresh” air was necessary to good health and left doors and windows open even on the coldest days.
By the end of February, Jim had pneumonia. And Susie and John were sick as well. She took Jim to Taiwan Adventist Hospital—the best in Taipei, she’d been told—where the doctor insisted that he be admitted. She and John stayed with him, sleeping in the same bed. By the next day, disenchantment had set in.
“The toilet overflowed and I received a lecture, in Chinese, on why it was my fault,” Susie later wrote. “Since I did not understand much of what was said, a nurse who knew a bit more English than the others came in to explain. It seemed that I had committed the unpardonable sin: putting toilet paper in the toilet. Where, I asked, was one to put it? ‘In the trash can, of course, where everyone else puts it.’ Their disgust at my ignorance was obvious and no one bothered to hide their feelings. That night the last straw arrived in the form of tribes of roaches which came out of the dresser drawers to feed off the sticky floors. I could not take any more and left the next morning.”
Bitter Blood Page 21