Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “I don’t think he deliberately misdiagnosed,” said one such patient, who held no bitterness about the fear Dr. Klenner’s diagnosis had stirred in him or the unnecessary treatments he had undergone. “He just believed so much that this worked that he wanted it to happen. I’m very aware his ego was part of it. He wanted to be Louis Pasteur or something.”

  By the summer of 1980, when Dr. Klenner diagnosed his niece, Susie Newsom Lynch, as having multiple sclerosis, he no longer was a healthy man himself. The sixty-five vitamin tablets that he took every day—and had been taking for thirty-five years to stave off ill health—had not kept his blood pressure from rising or his heart from betraying him. A pacemaker stimulated his heart to action, and no longer could he climb the steep, creaking steps to his office without stopping to catch his breath. But he still did it every day at seventy-three, a tall, shambling, stoop-shouldered man with solid white hair and a kindly face. And his waiting room remained filled with desperate and devoted patients seeking the hope that only he could give.

  23

  Soon after Susie’s return from Taiwan, she began making weekly trips to Dr. Klenner’s clinic in Reidsville. For an hour she lay on an ancient treatment table while massive doses of B complex vitamins dripped into her veins, her uncle’s surefire cure for the multiple sclerosis he had diagnosed.

  First came nicotinic acid, B3, which dilated her blood vessels and caused her to flush crimson. This, her uncle explained, would allow her body to absorb more B1 thiamin, which followed. Not only would the B1 rebuild her diseased nerves, he said, it also would provide her with a natural source of energy.

  Energy was one thing for which Susie had little need that summer of 1980. To family and friends she seemed almost frenetic, her usual hyperactivity running at more than full speed. She was worried about building a future for herself and her boys, and she set about laying the foundation for it. She enrolled once again in graduate school at Wake Forest University, this time to study anthropology, a subject in which she and her brother had shared an avid interest since childhood. Despite her bad experience in Taiwan, she still had not given up the dream of somehow working in China, perhaps as a liaison for some big corporation, maybe even for the State Department. She had become interested in customs and protocol, and she was convinced that anthropology would lead her where she wanted to go. Her mother thought that frivolous. She should study something more practical, Florence said, something that would hold out better hope for a decent job. She was, after all, a mother of two children with no husband. Susie scoffed at her mother’s suggestions, reminding Florence that she was an adult fully capable of making her own decisions.

  “Susie didn’t tend to set limits on herself,” said her friend Annette Hunt, who had been the only person to support Susie in her earlier decision to go to Taiwan. “Aim for the stars and see what happens, that was Susie. What seems ridiculous to most of us did not seem ridiculous to Susie. She did not put a lid on her jar.”

  Bob judiciously avoided involving himself in the differences between his wife and daughter.

  “Bob just absolutely thought Susie could do no wrong,” explained Annette.

  “Bob just doted on her,” said a neighbor. “He just thought the sun rose and set in Susie.”

  He was glad to have Susie home again, but Susie was not so pleased. She’d rather have a place of her own, she told friends, but that was simply financially impossible until she got her settlement from Tom.

  Tom was in no condition to make a settlement at that time. His financial situation, if anything, had grown worse since he had been sending $500 monthly to Susie. He was relieved when he heard that she was returning early from Taiwan. In her first months there, she had written him a couple of times with news of the boys, and once she even arranged for him to telephone them. But it had been months since he’d talked with them and nearly a year since he’d seen them, and as soon as she returned to Greensboro he called and said he wanted the boys to come for a visit.

  “There was a tremendous blowup,” he recalled. “She said, ‘Oh, no! There’s no way. You can come and see them anytime you want, but they’re not going to come out to New Mexico.’ I got all upset. I didn’t know what I could do. I mean, these were my kids. I ought to be able to see them. I thought I’d just call her up and we could arrange a visit and they could spend a month or so out here and we’d have a good time. There was never a question in my mind that there would be a problem.”

  In late August, Tom received a letter from Susie’s lawyer, Sandy Sands, saying that Tom was not living up to the separation agreement. Sands noted that Tom had not sent Susie the title to her Audi Fox, that he hadn’t paid the $1,500 for furniture she left behind, and that she needed an additional $300 a month for school and child-care expenses.

  “Another problem, which will have to be determined shortly, is the disposition of the house,” Sands wrote.

  By then, Tom had consulted a lawyer, Mike Rueckhaus. A native of Albuquerque, Rueckhaus was thirty-eight, the father of three sons. Other local lawyers called him the Barracuda. “I don’t know if it’s deserved or not,” he said with a grin, “but I sure want ’em to think I’m going to cut ’em up and spit ’em out.”

  His legal aggressiveness eventually led him to grow impatient with Tom.

  “He’s a rough son-of-a-gun to represent because he’s too nice,” he complained. “He’s the kind of guy who’s going to be able to get up and look himself in the eye in the mirror every morning. Mr. Nice Guy. Mr. Passive. He kept believing what she was telling him. He always wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, and he was too willing to give in. When you’ve got somebody like Susie on the other side, that’s just like throwing gasoline on a fire. Every time he gives in, it just gets worse.”

  Rueckhaus thought the best course was to get the jump on Susie by filing for divorce before she did, and on September 25, 1980, he filed in Bernalillo County. But he chose not to have notice served on Susie for two reasons: Tom didn’t have the money to make a settlement and still hoped that Susie would let the boys come visit him at Christmas and didn’t want to alienate her.

  John and Jim had settled happily with their grandparents, John particularly so. He craved male attention and became close to his grandfather. Florence didn’t like being called Grandma, so she told the boys to call her GG, for gorgeous grandmother. That went back to her high school days in Reidsville when she was in a play called The Flapper Grandmother, in which the main character insisted on being called GG.

  Although Florence was glad to have Susie and the boys living in her house, the old, familiar clash of wills between mother and daughter soon surfaced. Florence was distressed about her daughter’s slovenly housekeeping habits. Susie wouldn’t pick up after herself, Florence complained. Susie allowed the boys to leave messes. And she seemed to expect meals to be cooked and laundry done with no contribution of her own. Things had to change, Florence said. There could be no misunderstanding about whose house this was and who was in charge. Susie’s resentment about living with her parents grew deeper with her mother’s ultimatums.

  John started school late that summer, and Susie found a child-care center at a nearby church for Jim. Susie had some night classes, including one so late that she spent one night a week at Nanna’s to keep from driving the twenty-five miles back to Greensboro. It had been only six months since Paw-Paw died, and Susie worried about Nanna being alone. On the night she stayed at Nanna’s, Bob and Florence looked after the boys. They also were happy to keep them when Susie went out with Guy Martin.

  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.