In The Neighborhood

by Peter Lovenheim

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Waking at Lou’s

  Chapter 2 - “A Considerable Trauma”

  Chapter 3 - Footprints

  Chapter 4 - The Top of Their Games

  Chapter 5 - No Bed, No Breakfast

  Chapter 6 - The Woman in the Castle

  Chapter 7 - Motion Sickness

  Chapter 8 - A Father Ten Feet Tall

  Chapter 9 - Misdirected Mail

  Chapter 10 - Connections

  Epilogue

  SOURCES/RESOURCES

  A PERIGEE BOOK

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2010 by Peter Lovenheim

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  PERIGEE is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lovenheim, Peter.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18667-1

  1. Community—United States. 2. Neighborliness—United States. 3. Neighborhoods—United States. 4. Social networks—United States. I. Title.

  HM756.L69 2010

  307.3’3620973—dc22 2009032267

  This book describes the real experiences of real people. The author has disguised the identities of some, but none of these changes has affected the truthfulness and accuracy of his story. Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Most Perigee books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special Markets, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

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  In fond memory of

  Dr. Louis R. Guzzetta

  Dr. Patricia DiNitto

  and

  Dr. Renan Beckman Wills

  And to Irina

  One must seek out a good neighbor, even more than a good companion.

  —Machzor Vitry, commenting on the Talmud, Pirkei Avot

  (Sayings of the Fathers), 2:13

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For the many hours they spent with me discussing the initial concept for this book, I thank Rabbi Raphael Adler, Rafe Martin, and Mark Kramer.

  This book went through many drafts and I am indebted to friends and colleagues who slogged through them and offered their good counsel: Guy Kettelhack, Andrew and June Lovenheim, Robert Lovenheim, Larry Merrill, Susan Kramarsky, Jan Goldberg, Andrea Barrett, Joan Brumberg, David Brumberg, Eli Cohn-Wein, Amy Mantell, Marie Lovenheim, Susan London Gordon, Irina Novozhenets, and Mark Kramer.

  I especially thank my friend Byron Rubin, who read two complete drafts and spent many hours discussing with me what might be done to improve things. Patricia McClary also read multiple drafts. Her insight and humor were of great value. Similarly, I thank my late cousin and friend, Herbert Siegel, for his careful reading and excellent editing. As an editor, Herbert was patient, kind, and generous, as he was in life. And to my lifelong friend, Rabbi David Katz, I am indebted for countless hours of stimulating and helpful discussion, debate, and encouragement as we puzzled out together the pieces and direction of this story.

  Along the way, I was privileged to engage the services of Sarah Flynn, writer and editor, whose excellent editorial help both improved the manuscript and sustained me when it was unclear if the book would ever find an audience.

  I also thank my Writers’ Group, who listened to early chapter drafts and offered suggestions and encouragement: Zena Collier, Kathy Johncox, Marianne Zeitlin, Rahul Menta, Lisa Rubiner, and Gail Hosking Gilberg. And I remain grateful to a few special teachers and editors who taught and inspired me: first and foremost, Clayton O’Dell, as well as Elizabeth Hart, Sandy Tropp, Mary Anna Towler, and Howard White.

  Thank you to William Maley, Brighton Town Attorney, for assisting with access to public records; to Tom Low, Brighton Commissioner of Public Works, for letting me view archival sewage inspection footage; and Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton Town Historian, for helping me learn about the history of my neighborhood. Moreover, I thank Dave, Doug, and Mike McEwen for sharing with me their memories and artifacts of the real Houston Barnard. And thank you to Tony Toscano for his skillful efforts with computerized imaging as I sought to capture an entire street in one photograph.

  I’m not sure this book would have been published if my daughter Sarah’s friend, Lisa Bonos, of the Washington Post, had not turned to me at dinner one evening and said, “This book you’re writing about sleeping over at your neighbors’ houses might make an interesting essay for the paper.” And I thank the Op-Ed Page staff of the New York Times—editor David Shipley and Mary Duenwald—for publishing the piece and for their superb editing.

  How can I thank the neighbors who opened their doors and their lives to me? I value our deepened friendships; I hope I have honored your trust. Thank you to: Lou Guzzetta, Deb and Dave O’Dell, Jamie Columbus, Bill Fricke and Susan Hyman, and Patricia DiNitto. Also, my thanks to a few neighbors whose stories did not make it into the book, but whose help and encouragement I nonetheless appreciate: Rose-Marie Klipstein, Carol and Michael Yunker, Pat and Irene Burke. I thank Phil Marshall, musician and music therapist, for his compassion toward my neighbor, and that unforgettable bedside rendering of “Love Me Do.”

  When I began this project, I hoped that out of a tragedy something positive might emerge. For Ertem and Robert Beckman’s trust in allowing me to attempt that, I am honored and deeply grateful. To Ertem, Robert, Orhan, Marcia, Peter, and Kendall: thank you. Similarly, thank you to Ayesha Mayadas and Bill Kenny.

 
; That brings me to two people without whom none of this would be possible. My agent, Geri Thoma, who persevered long after others might have given up, and Marian Lizzi, my editor at Perigee—what a privilege and pleasure it has been to work together.

  Finally, I thank my children, who always inspire and sustain me: Sarah, Val, and Ben—your curiosity, humor, steadfastness, and love make it all worthwhile. To each other, may you always be good neighbors.

  INTRODUCTION

  THAT first evening, as I left the house, the last words I heard before I shut the door were, “Dad, you’re crazy!” from Valerie, my teenage daughter. Sure, the sight of your fifty-year-old father leaving with an overnight bag to sleep at a neighbor’s would embarrass any teenager, but “crazy”? I didn’t think so.

  There’s talk today about how as a society we’ve become fragmented by income, ethnicity, city versus suburb, red state versus blue. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.

  It was a calamity on my street, in a middle-class suburb of Rochester, New York, that got me thinking about this. At about 10:45 on the evening of February 29, 2000—the Millennial Leap Day—I was out walking my dog, Champ. We’d gone about halfway around the block when I saw news trucks, their satellite dishes elevated, parked at the end of my street. Police cars and ambulances with red lights flashing were parked there, too. “Some kind of shooting,” an officer said. Neither he nor others would say more. I hurried home, told my wife, Marie, what I’d seen, and turned on the television. The eleven o’clock news led with the story: “In the town of Brighton tonight, on Sandringham Road, an apparent murder-suicide . . .” My neighbor had shot and killed his wife, and then himself. Their two young children had run screaming into the night.

  Though the couple—both physicians—had lived on our street for seven years, my wife and I hardly knew them. We’d see them jogging together. Sometimes our children would car-pool. Some of the neighbors attended the funerals and called on relatives. Someone laid a single bunch of yellow flowers at the family’s front door, but nothing else was done to mark the loss. Within weeks, the children had moved with their grandparents to another part of town. The only indication that anything had changed was the FOR SALE sign on the lawn.

  A family had vanished, yet the impact on our neighborhood was slight. How could that be? Did I live in a community or just in a house on a street surrounded by people whose lives were entirely separate? Few of my neighbors, I later learned, knew each other more than casually; many didn’t know even the names of those a few doors down.

  According to social scientists, from 1974 to 1998 the frequency with which Americans spent a social evening with neighbors fell by about one third. Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, a groundbreaking study of the disintegration of the American social fabric, suggests that the decline actually began twenty years earlier, so that neighborhood ties today are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s.

  Why is it that in an age of cheap long- distance rates, discount airlines, and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?

  It was not a fluke that the neighbors involved in the shootings were physicians; many of the people who live on my street are physicians, business owners, and other professionals. I understood that as busy people they valued their privacy; for many, privacy was one of the reasons they had moved here. Indeed, the physical design of our street promoted this. By code, houses had to be set back from the street at least fifty feet. Lots were wide; outdoor activity, if any, occurred in backyards. And as in many suburban neighborhoods, there was no public space to congregate. In short, despite its being upscale, my street reflected the reality on many streets in America today: people were cordial, but they liked their privacy and went about their lives largely detached from those living around them.

  And the neighborhood had been that way for some time; I knew it because at that point I was once again living in the house I’d grown up in. My parents had moved out just at the time my wife and I were looking for a larger home, and so we accepted their offer to take the house. I’d been away from the neighborhood for twenty-five years, and in that time, ownership of nearly all the homes on the street had turned over, but as far as I could tell, the neighborhood hadn’t changed much; people kept to themselves.

  Maybe my neighbors didn’t mind living that way, but I did. I wanted to get to know the people whose houses I passed each day—not just what they did for a living and how many children they had, but the depth of their experience and what kind of people they were.

  What would it take, I wondered, to penetrate the barriers between us? I thought about childhood sleepovers and the insight I used to get from waking up inside a friend’s home. More recently, my family and I had done summer house exchanges with families in Europe—they stayed in our house while we stayed in theirs. After living in these strangers’ homes—waking in their beds, fixing meals in their kitchens, and walking in their neighborhoods—we had a strong sense of what their lives were about, something that would have been impossible to achieve just through conversation.

  But would my neighbors let me sleep over and write about their lives from inside their houses? In fact, they did, and the understanding I gained—and the lasting connections that were made—validated my hunch that sleeping over would be essential.

  In the second year after the murder-suicide, I began to telephone my neighbors and send e-mail messages; in some cases, I simply walked up to the door and rang the bell. Not all my neighbors said yes to my request, of course, but remarkably, more than half of those I approached did. The first one turned me down, but the next one, who lived just two doors down from me, said yes. His name was Lou Guzzetta, an eighty-one-year-old retired surgeon—one of the few neighbors still living on the street from when I’d grown up there. I’d been friends with his son, but had known Dr. Guzzetta only slightly. Now he was a widower living alone.

  That was the beginning of a kind of social experiment, a journey of discovery down my own suburban street. (All the principal people are identified, with their permission, most by their real names. In a few instances, I’ve changed time sequences for narrative purposes.)

  Eventually, I met a woman living three doors away who was seriously ill with breast cancer and in need of help. She had recently divorced and had two young daughters. My goal shifted: could we build a supportive community around her—in effect, patch together a real neighborhood?

  This is the story of my journey.

  1

  Waking at Lou’s

  THE alarm on my cell phone rang at 5:50 a.m., and I awoke to find myself in a twin bed in a spare room at my neighbor Lou’s house.

  Lou was eighty-one. His six children were grown and scattered around the country, and he lived alone, two doors down from me. His wife, Edie, had died five years earlier. “When people learn you’ve lost your wife,” he told me, “they all ask the same question. ‘How long were you married?’ And when you tell them fifty-two years, they say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful!’ But I tell them no, it isn’t. I was just getting to know her.”

  At 6 a.m., a grandfather clock on the first floor struck. It played the eight-tone Westminster Chime and then bonged out the hour.

  Lou had said he gets up at six, but I heard nothing from his room down the hall. Had he died? He had a heart ailment, but generally was in good health. With a full head of silver-gray hair, bright hazel-blue eyes, and a broad chest, he walked with the confident bearing of a man who had enjoyed a long and satisfying career as a surgeon.

  My legs and feet were cold. That was because I was wearing a night shirt. I’d never worn one before, but Lou had made me. All night long it twisted and bunched up around my waist, leaving me half-uncovered.

  THE previous evening, when I’d arrived with my overnight bag, Lou had welcomed me right away. He hung up my winter coat
and showed me in. His little gray schnauzer, Heidi, yapped and jumped at my feet.

  In the living room, Lou sat on the sofa; Heidi lay nearby. He wore a Christmas red, button-down sweater over an olive green polo shirt and khaki slacks. He sipped a gin and tonic. His speech was slurred—frankly, he seemed a little drunk—and he was coughing. The cough, he said, was because he’d started smoking again.

  When I had first approached Lou to ask if he’d let me observe him from inside his house as part of a book about how people live as neighbors today, he readily agreed. He warned, however, that there might not be much to see.

  “You can write about me,” he said, “but it will be boring. I have nothing going on in my life—nothing. My life is zero. I don’t do anything.”

  That turned out not to be true, but I understood what he meant: in recent years, the pace of Lou’s life had slowed.

  LOU and Edie had six children—five girls and a boy. One daughter, who lived in Portland, Oregon, called that day. So did another, his youngest, from California. Only two of Lou’s children lived nearby, both about twenty minutes away. They would stop by to visit, he told me, but more often in the summer than the winter.

  “How long can you go this time of year without anyone coming to the house?” I asked.

  “Three or four weeks?” he replied.

  Lou might have been exaggerating. Later, I observed that at least one of his children who lived nearby seemed to visit weekly. But a week alone was still for him a long stretch of solitude.

  Lou once told me he never stayed up past nine o’clock, but at half past nine, we were still talking. I was concerned about keeping him up too late and suggested we turn in. “But tonight I have you here,” he said. “I don’t want to go to bed.” So we talked some more.