In The Neighborhood

by Peter Lovenheim

  When the Willses moved in next door, Jean took cookies over to welcome them, and invited them to dinner. Later, her husband, a leader nationally in sports orthopedics, invited Bob Wills, a younger practitioner in the same field, to play golf. “Ken says you can always tell about a person by how he conducts himself on the golf course,” said Jean. “But after playing with Bob, he felt they had nothing in common, which was ironic because they had so much in common.”

  Although Jean often saw Renan out gardening, the two women did not become close. “I didn’t know her well,” said Jean, “not on a social basis. We were of a different generation, too.” Jean did get to know the Willses’ children, however, particularly Emily. “Emily had a sitter after school and liked baking brownies. Every couple of weeks she’d come over to borrow things: eggs, a stick of butter, chocolate.”

  I asked Jean if she sensed any trouble in the Willses’ household.

  “Not in the least,” she said, shaking her head.

  The night of the shootings, recalled Jean, she and Ken were watching television when Ken heard a loud crack, but they dismissed it as nothing. “This is an old house,” she said. “We hear so many noises.”

  But soon after, the doorbell rang. Ken got up to answer it, looked out the peephole, and saw Peter and Emily Wills dressed in their pajamas.

  “Ken opened the door,” recalled Jean, “and Emily blurted out, ‘My daddy has shot Mommy and has shot himself and my mom’s dead!’ ”

  I asked Jean how she reacted.

  “Evidently,” she said, trying to recall, “it was just ‘Egads!’ and all you can do is hug these kids and pull them away from the door.” Jean said they could already hear sirens, and then the police came.

  “Emily knew our house was a safe haven,” said Jean. “I knew the kids, and Renan had told them that if there was ever a problem, this is where they should go. I asked Emily,” she continued, “‘ Who can you call?’ and she said she knew her grandma’s number. She called them around 11:30. She was emotional, breaking down and crying. Later, Peter was saying, ‘I hate my father! I hate my father!’ Ken and I tried to stress, ‘This is not your father. This is your father emotionally sick and you hate what he did. He loved your mother and he loved you, but he was emotionally sick and couldn’t cope.’ All I could do was hug them both and say, ‘Your father wouldn’t do anything to you and it’s an awful, awful, awful thing he’s done, but he was emotionally sick.’”

  Ertem and Bob Beckman arrived at the DeHavens’ a couple of hours later. They, along with Emily and Peter, spent the night there in two empty rooms upstairs. “There was a whole section of the house we weren’t using,” said Jean. During the night, she recalled, Emily and Peter remembered their two cats. “I’m allergic to cats,” said Jean. “But I told them, ‘Well, if you don’t mind keeping the cats in your room and the door closed, let’s go get them.’ The police went to get the cats. I think they found one cat and brought it over.”

  Meanwhile, television news began reporting on the shootings. “The TV talked of an orthopedic surgeon on Sandringham Road who had killed his wife and himself, and they showed pictures of our front door,” recalled Jean. “Our friends were getting concerned and calling.”

  Jean attended both funerals. She said she made a special point to go to Bob’s. “Not only did [the Willses] lose their son, but they lost their son in absolutely the most horrible tragedy—he did this horrible, horrible thing. They had to feel as bad as Renan’s parents. It was a difficult service to handle. The family ended up just talking about Bob as a wonderful child and young man who had such promise, and they got him married and then—what happened? I think they could have acknowledged what he did and perhaps the mystery of how emotional sickness affects people’s behavior.”

  Ertem and Bob Beckman and the kids and the cat all stayed at the DeHavens’ for the better part of a week. As a result, anyone who was close to the family—and all the neighbors who responded by bringing food—were aware of how much Jean and Ken DeHaven did to help.

  I suggested to Jean that their last name was appropriate. “You and Ken really were a haven for Renan’s family.”

  “Anybody would do exactly the same thing,” she said. She paused, then added, “We knew tragedy. Our son, David, died in ’96.” That would have been just four years before the Willses’ shootings.

  “That shock, when you first hear of the death of anyone close, it’s like nothing else,” said Jean. “But when Emily and Peter came to our door, we could not fathom what they were going through. When we lost our son, our sense had been that we had suffered the worst possible loss—but we had our son for twenty-six years, and he had a good life. But to lose your parents when you are that young, when parents are so important, it’s unfathomable.”

  I told Jean about something that I’d seen on our street a few weeks earlier that had been bothering me. Driving home one evening, I noticed that parked outside a house near the end of the street was an ambulance. I casually knew the family who lived there. They were a professional couple with two children and once had had me to their home for dinner. But I had no knowledge that anyone in the family was ill. What troubled me was that despite thinking about the question of how we should relate to each other as neighbors, I still didn’t know what to do when I saw that ambulance. Should I call my neighbor and ask if everyone was okay? Could I perhaps be of help? Or would I be invading their privacy? And what if the problem wasn’t illness but domestic abuse, or a teenage eating disorder, or an attempted suicide? Wouldn’t my call, in that case, be intrusive and unwelcome? I didn’t call that evening, thinking that perhaps I would call the next day—let a little time go by. But the next day came and went and I still didn’t call. I never called. And when I happened to see this neighbor walking down the street a few weeks later, I didn’t mention having seen the ambulance.

  Having lived through the Willses’ shootings, I wondered, what would Jean have done after seeing that ambulance?

  “I would not have called either,” she said. “It would feel too intrusive. But if you ask me, I think not calling would be a mistake. It would not be good. We have to make those calls. If we don’t, we could miss someone, someone in need.”

  So do you think we have any special obligations to our neighbors just because they are physically close? I asked.

  “Yes,” said Jean, “because they are your neighbors and you’re in a position to see things, to know things”—she glanced toward the Willses’ house—“but I didn’t see anything.”

  Jean paused.

  “Yes,” she continued. “You look kindly on your neighbors, and you look after your neighbors. Why? Because they’re in your living space, and you want your living space to work well and be healthy.”

  SOMETIME later, while he was in Rochester for Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to meet Orhan Beckman, Renan’s younger brother. We sat at a restaurant near his parents’ home. The resemblance between him and Renan was clear: both were slender, with dark hair, narrow faces, brown eyes, and heavy brows.

  Orhan, thirty-six, lived in Vancouver, Washington. A PhD in industrial psychology, he worked at Hewlett- Packard as a “human factors” engineer, helping design new products for ease of use. He was the youngest of the three Beckman children, younger than Renan by twelve years. Growing up, he had, as he put it, a “mother-son” relationship with Renan, at least until she became a real mother when Emily was born.

  On the night of the murder, while on a ski vacation with his wife in Utah, Orhan received a call from his mother. “She and Dad were on their way to Rochester. She said, ‘I think Renan is dead. Bob shot her.’”

  Orhan and Marcia flew to Rochester the next morning and moved into the Arringtons’ home next door; later that night, Emily came over from the DeHavens’ to stay with them.

  “I don’t know what we would have done without the support of the neighbors,” Orhan reflected. “Food, places for family members to sleep, transportation. It made a horrible situation a little
more bearable, and let my mother connect with family and friends without worrying about other things.”

  Yet Orhan acknowledged that his sister had been isolated in the neighborhood. “I know she felt isolated,” he said. “There were some neighbors who knew of and had met her, but I didn’t get the feeling that neighbors knew her as a person or knew them as a family. I think she found her community in the tennis club.

  “So we’re left with the what-ifs,” Orhan concluded. “What if Renan knew some of her neighbors beyond a superficial level and could have found shelter with them that night?”

  Still, there remained the fact of the neighbors’ kindness after the shooting.

  “Yes,” Orhan agreed, “and therein lies the paradox of the neighborhood’s positive response after the fact.”

  And then, as a psychologist, he lapsed into professional jargon, only some of which I could jot down and understand.

  “It speaks to the latent need that isn’t addressed without a strong enough stimulus,” he began, “which is sad. Because another need that was there before was not met. Relationships in the neighborhood existed, but weren’t fostered or developed until there was a tragedy. Then they matured very quickly. The response after the murder was what I hoped would have happened before the murder, and didn’t.”

  Then he said something that was all too clear: “That the marital relationship could fester and steer so far off course in this picture-perfect setting without anyone taking notice—until the results are so obvious that you can’t not react—is a sad statement on the way we live today.”

  And what way was that? I asked.

  “Ours is a society that favors appearances. If you drive down Sandringham Road, you think, ‘Oh, they all have perfect lives: perfect lawns and houses, good jobs and families.’ But look more closely. There’s no place to go just hang out and talk. My yard becomes a barrier between myself and my neighbor, and neighbors can have little or no contact for years. If you run into someone it’s just ‘hi-bye.’ If you look at it as a case study, what does it say about what could be happening in any neighborhood?”

  That lack of street life and contact among neighbors is a component, Orhan explained, of what sociologists call “social capital.” As distinct from financial capital (money) and human capital (labor), social capital refers to the network of contacts and relationships people have with those around them. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, describes social capital as “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” Australian social scientists Jenny Onyx and Paul Bullen call it “the basic raw material of civil society.” Simply put, if you know your neighbors, greet them on the street, keep an eye on their house for them, or invite them to dinner, this builds connections that in good times can enrich your sense of community, and in bad times can give you someone nearby to call for help.

  Social scientists have attempted to measure the level of social capital in different types of neighborhoods. One study asked residents of five neighborhoods questions such as: “If you were caring for a child and needed to go out for a while, would you ask a neighbor for help? Have you visited a neighbor in the past week? In the past six months, have you done a favor for a sick neighbor?” Another suggested a correlation between low social capital and illness when people lack access to immediate, nearby support, and suffer stress from isolation.

  As Orhan described it, Renan and Bob Wills had virtually no neighborhood social network. No one on Sandringham had known them well enough to notice their marriage “fester and steer so far off course”; no one had noticed police cars at their house, or if they had, no one checked in with Renan to see if she was okay; and at the crucial moment, Renan had no one nearby to call, and nowhere to run. Her social capital, invested in the tennis club and perhaps with colleagues at work, was of no help; even Ayesha, her one close friend, when she returned to town that night, was five miles away.

  Still, there was the neighbors’ generous response after the shooting. I asked Orhan how he squared that with such low social capital.

  “Perhaps high social capital is proactive and preventive—it helps prevent tragedy,” he said. “But low social capital is reactive—it only reacts to tragedy.”

  ORHAN and I were still talking in the restaurant when the front door opened and Ertem and Robert Beckman walked in. Ertem wore a heavy, gray winter coat. I could almost feel the weight; not only of the coat, but of the sorrow she carried. With them was Orhan’s wife, Marcia. She was holding the hand of a little girl who had blond, curly hair, and wore a pink coat, jeans, and sneakers. They all came over to our table. Ertem said they were going to get hot drinks, then go to the canal and feed the ducks. I’d met everyone in the family except the little girl. Orhan introduced me. He said, “This is my daughter, Renan.”

  3

  Footprints

  IN the years when I was growing up on Sandringham Road—the late 1950s and ’60s—people didn’t exercise in public the way they do now. You didn’t see adults jogging, biking, or power-walking on the street.

  Except one. Nearly every day, a thin, middle- aged woman of slight build walked rapidly through our neighborhood, usually with her head down. No one knew her name, so we called her The Walker. I’d be sitting with my family at the kitchen table, which faces the street, and my mother would say, “There goes The Walker,” and my brother and sister and I would look out the window to see. Or I’d be playing baseball with my friends and someone would say, “Hey, there’s that walking lady.”

  Even as a kid, I could tell The Walker didn’t live on Sandringham because she didn’t dress at all stylishly. I mostly picture her in a simple blue or yellow dress and I remember when it rained she would wear a clear plastic raincoat with a hood pulled over her head. In the winter I think she wore a long, cloth coat, also with a hood; in driving snow she’d cover her face with a scarf.

  I admired The Walker. She was out in public, in all kinds of weather, keeping fit. I also felt sorry for her. She always walked alone; I never saw anyone stop to talk with her. I think once, when I passed her on the sidewalk riding my bike, I said a weak “Hi,” but I don’t recall if she said anything back. I tried to imagine what kind of life she had—where she lived, who her family was, and why she spent so much time walking on our street.

  When I moved back to Sandringham as an adult, I was amazed to see that the same woman was still walking through the neighborhood. How old she was at that point was hard to guess.

  Then one afternoon—not long after my sleepover at Lou Guzzetta’s—I was pulling out of my driveway just as The Walker passed my house. She walked with a limp. Resolved, finally, to meet her, I drove a few houses down the street, parked the car, and walked back in her direction. I approached her in a casual way so as not to startle her.

  “Excuse me. I just wanted to say hello,” I began.

  She stopped. She looked older, smaller, and frailer than I had imagined.

  I continued, “I’ve lived on this street a long time and have always noticed you walking.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been walking here a long time.”

  Her voice was shaky, but she spoke with a clear diction. She said she’d walked in the neighborhood every day since 1960.

  “You’ve walked on this street every day for more than forty years?” I asked.

  “I didn’t miss many,” she said, smiling.

  I noted her limp. She said last fall while walking she had stepped in a hole “maybe a foot deep” between the sidewalk and the street. “It hurt like the Dickens!” she said. “I crawled across the street to my car—luckily no other cars were coming—and drove myself to the emergency room.”

  She had broken her left ankle in three places and was transferred to a nursing home. Eleven days later she was sent home with a wheelchair, a walker, and a cast. When the cast came off, she started walking again.

  Her name was Grace Field.

  “In just over one mo
re year, I’ll be ninety,” she told me. We walked a little together and talked, and then I told her I was writing a book about the neighborhood and asked if she’d be willing to talk with me about it sometime. I said I could visit at her home or we could meet for coffee. Grace invited me to her apartment, which was just a half mile from Sandringham, the next morning.

  GRACE said she had had to crawl across the street to her car. The street is thirty feet wide. How long might that have taken? Five minutes? Fifteen?

  If there’s a place where an elderly woman with a broken ankle crawls across a street and no one notices, and a middle- aged woman is shot dead in her home and no one’s life is particularly affected, is it fair to call that place a “neighborhood”?

  In the Hebrew Bible, the word most often translated as “neighbor,” rea, can mean variously: friend, tribesman, fellow Israelite—pretty much anyone not a close relative or foreigner. “Love your neighbor as yourself ” (Lev. 19:18), therefore, is a broad injunction to treat kindly most of the people we encounter daily. But rea also has the narrower meaning of a person living nearby. “A close neighbor is better than a distant brother,” advises Proverbs 27:10. (On the other hand, it’s probably just as well I hadn’t seen this other bit of wisdom [Prov. 27:17] before I began the sleepovers: “Visit your neighbor sparingly / Lest he have his surfeit of you and loathe you.”)

  In the New Testament, Jesus is asked, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:25-37) and answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan. In so doing, Jesus broadens the concept of “neighbor” to include everyone of goodwill who acts with compassion toward another. In this sense, anyone who might have helped Grace Field the day she fell would have been, by definition, her neighbor.

  But no one did.

  Our English word “neighbor”—derived from “nigh” (close by) and “boer” (farmer or dweller)—takes as its primary meaning the narrower definition: a person who lives nearby. Yet in general usage, the word retains its broader connotation—a neighbor can be anyone who is in relationship with us as part of the larger community. That’s what we understood Mr. Rogers to be asking each day on his TV show: “Won’t you be my neighbor?”