“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “But, hey, they didn’t happen all at once.”
“Where do you get the strength?”
“I think it’s just how you’re put together,” she said. “I am disappointed in how my life has turned out. But then, I suppose I could have had this fine, healthy life and good marriage, and got hit by a car. I mean, we don’t know how things are going to end up, so who’s to say this life is worse than some alternative?”
When we left Applebee’s, I saw that as she walked, Patti dragged her left leg a little. I’d seen her do this a few other times when she had been tired or we had walked a lot. She said it was from the chemo; for a while after the last round of treatments, she had used a cane. The parking lot was dark and there were patches of ice, so to steady her on the way to my car, I took her arm.
I don’t recall when I first heard about Patti; it seemed that over several months, a few neighbors mentioned to me a doctor who lived down the street who was ill. One heard she’d diagnosed her own disease and then given up her practice; another thought she was divorced with a couple of kids. I couldn’t locate anyone, however, who actually knew her.
At the O’Dells’ one day, I asked Dave and Deb if they recognized the name of one of our neighbors, Dr. Patricia DiNitto. They didn’t.
Dave asked where she lived.
“Well,” I said. “That’s an interesting thing. I looked her up in the directory and she lives really close: just two doors down from you—three from me—on our same side of the street.”
“Oh, the castle!” said Dave.
All three of us knew the house well—it was one of the handsomest on the street. Constructed of sand- colored stones, it had a slate roof and, built around the front door, a two-story turret.
Dave said he’d never met the people who lived there, but he sometimes had seen a child outside in the morning waiting for the school bus.
I wanted to meet Dr. DiNitto. I was curious about her and upset to think a single mother with breast cancer might be living three doors down from me and I knew nothing about her.
But how to reach her? Her home number, I soon learned, was unlisted and I didn’t think it would be proper—or effective—just to show up at her door.
I called Lou Guzzetta. He was a doctor; maybe he knew her.
“Never have heard of her,” he said. “Should I?”
Jamie Columbus also said she hadn’t met her.
Through an Internet search, I found Dr. DiNitto’s radiology office. It was one of the premier mammography centers in town. Her entry on the website included a curriculum vitae and a photograph. The vitae, which ran four pages, listed many honors and awards, publications, and other distinctions. The photograph showed a young, smiling woman, head tilted self-assuredly to one side. When I called the office, a receptionist told me Dr. DiNitto was on a leave of absence.
I needed her home phone number but I also needed an introduction, perhaps from a mutual friend. I asked friends who were doctors but couldn’t find anyone who knew Dr. DiNitto well enough to introduce me.
As a last resort, I sent an e- mail to the address listed in the neighborhood directory: “I live a couple of houses down from you on Sandringham. I’m a writer and am interested in talking with you in regard to a project I’m working on. Could I give you a call sometime?” Three days later, I received a reply: “Sure, I would like to help if I can,” and she included her home phone number. The next day, I called. We chatted briefly and set up a date to meet at her home the next Sunday afternoon.
When Sunday came, I was just putting on my coat to walk over to Patti DiNitto’s house when she called to say that wouldn’t work. Instead, she would come to my house.
The Patti DiNitto at my front door looked strikingly different from the healthy, vigorous person pictured in her photograph on the clinic website: her once full face was now thin, and her hair was sparse.
“I went through the hair loss twice,” she told me later. “My hair was straight and somewhat wavy, but now it’s just curls.”
Patti agreed right away with my concerns about the neighborhood: she’d lived on the street five years, she said, and hadn’t met a single person, and found it both curious and frustrating. Consequently, she said she had been glad to get my e-mail and would be happy to cooperate with my request to spend time together and write about her. Over the next few weeks, we met several times to talk—went shopping together and had a few other outings—and later when I proposed a sleepover, she agreed without hesitation. She also told me why at the last minute she’d changed the location of our first meeting: after her husband left, she said, she had never finished decorating the house—the dining room, for example, was bare—and she was embarrassed about that.
PATTI’S home—“the castle,” as Dave O’Dell called it—was built in 1930, in the French Eclectic style then popular in American residential architecture. From the central turret’s second floor, a bay of casement windows faced the street. The style borrows both from French country estates and earlier Gothic design.
Following our late dinner, I drove back to Patti’s, parked, and carried Patti’s suitcase and my overnight bag into the house. We said good night to the babysitter, who’d been staying with Patti’s daughter Caitlin. It was nearly midnight; Caitlin was already asleep in her room upstairs.
Then Patti took me up the back stairway, just off the back hall, to show me where I’d be sleeping. The room was once a maid’s room but recently Patti’s brother, Joe, a carpenter and cabinetmaker, had remodeled it. “I couldn’t do any of this without Joey,” she said. Her brother, she explained, was between jobs when Patti’s husband left, and Joe did all the work to fix up the house: he raised the ceilings, built the cabinetry, and remodeled the kitchen. The maid’s room, with Joe’s renovations, now had built-in closets, cabinets, and bookshelves; a private, connecting bath; casement windows facing front and back; and a double bed. Most important for me on that cold winter night, the room—which sat above the garage—was now well insulated and warm.
While Patti checked on Caitlin, I went back down to the kitchen. The counter and tabletops, I noticed, were clean and free of clutter—something I was rarely able to achieve in my own house. Just then, Patti surprised me by entering the kitchen from the other direction—she must have come down the main stairway.
“So what do we do next? Want to watch TV or read?” she asked.
We were two single adults in her house late at night, alone except for her daughter asleep upstairs. The situation, and indeed, the whole relationship, was ripe for confusion.
The potential for misunderstanding had first surfaced a few weeks earlier. One night, as she was arriving home from a previous trip to San Francisco, I’d picked her up at the airport. It was almost midnight, but she was full of energy and wanted to go out for a drink to celebrate having completed four monthly vaccine infusions. I rarely go to bars and had no idea where to take her, but she had a friend who owned a bar in a nearby suburb, so we went there. In a back room, near a fireplace, we found a quiet table. I got a martini for her and a beer for me, and we began to talk. I encouraged her to tell me about her childhood.
She said her parents had both immigrated from a village in Italy—her father at nine years old and her mother, later, at nineteen—and that their marriage in Rochester had been arranged. Her family lived in Greece, New York, a mostly blue-collar Rochester suburb, and she was the fourth of five children. Her father was an engineer and instrument maker at Eastman Kodak—he worked on the original lunar module, Patti said; her mother was a homemaker. In school, math and science had come easily to Patti and she thought of a career in medicine, but her father dissuaded her—he thought it would take too much time and be too risky. He wanted her to be an accountant. Dutifully, Patti began college as a business major, but then switched to pre-med, later becoming the first person in her family to graduate college and also to attend medical school. Through all her schooling, she paid her own way, ending up with one of the highest debt loa
ds of anyone in her medical school class.
At medical school, Patti did well, but she found the environment difficult. “A couple of the profs just didn’t like me,” she recalled. “I was shy and didn’t speak up. What they liked to see was people’s claws out, being aggressive and trying to outdo one another, but that’s not my personality.”
While we spoke at the bar, I asked Patti if her father had lived to see her become a doctor. She paused, and her eyes began to tear.
“No,” she said. “He died after my first year of college. He was just fifty-nine.” She paused again. “Maybe that’s why I do everything I can so each of the kids can spend time with their father, because I felt like I didn’t get to—like I was shortchanged.”
I was struck by the many similarities between Patti’s life and that of Deb O’Dell. Both had come from modest backgrounds and then excelled academically; ambitious and hardworking, both had been inspired by their fathers’ dreams for them, yet both had lost their fathers early, before they themselves had achieved their professional goals. And despite so much in common, Patti and Deb, who had lived two doors down from each other for three years, had never met.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I cry easily. After chemo, like after having a baby, it’s easy to cry at sentimental things.”
It was at that moment I saw just how confusing our relationship could become. I needed to establish for both of us that I was a friend, not a suitor. So I made a point that night in the bar to tell Patti about Marla, the woman I’d recently begun dating. I told her how often I saw Marla, how happy it made me to be with her, and how our relationship seemed to be deepening. Patti said she was glad for me.
NOW, weeks later, there we were: self-consciously standing around in the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do next. To her question about whether I wanted to read or watch TV, I replied, “What would you normally do if I wasn’t here?”
“Well, if you weren’t here,” she said, “I’d go upstairs, unpack my clothes, and go to bed.”
“Then you should do that,” I said. “Just do what you would normally do.”
“But I want to be a good host,” she said.
“I’ll read in the living room while you unpack,” I said. “How’ll that be?”
Patti said it would be fine.
THE living room featured leaded, casement windows, dark wood paneling, and French doors that, in the summer months, opened onto a backyard patio. A fire burned in a marble-fronted gas fireplace. In the middle of the room were playthings for her younger daughter, five-year-old Sarah, including a children’s play table with pink wooden chairs with backs shaped like crowns. Sarah was sleeping at her father’s that night.
As I sank into a leather sofa to read the paper, I suddenly took in the situation as an outsider might see it: a tranquil, domestic scene with Patti in her room upstairs unpacking, Caitlin asleep in her room, and me relaxing in the living room with the newspaper. It felt complete in a way that life in my own house used to feel but didn’t anymore. I wondered if it felt complete in that way for Patti, too.
Patti came downstairs. She was done unpacking. “Well, I guess it’s time for us to go to bed,” I said in a voice that even to me sounded husbandly. She turned off the living room lights, but left the pilot in the gas fireplace burning; it gave the room a dim glow. At the top of the stairs, we said good night. Patti said she’d be up around 6:30, in time to get Caitlin ready for school. She went to her room, which was on one end of the house, and I went to the maid’s room, which was on the other end, and Caitlin was asleep in the middle.
THE front window of my room faced directly onto Sandringham where the street intersects with Ambassador Drive. That’s the spot, Patti told me earlier, where she had seen a news truck parked on the night Bob Wills killed Renan and himself. Patti recalled it this way: “A patient of mine had been calling and calling that night and I just decided not to answer the phone anymore. I knew it could wait until the morning, so I didn’t pick up. Later—I forget what time—I finally did answer because the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. It turned out it was my brother, Joey. He had seen the eleven o’clock news and one of the TV stations had showed a picture of our house and he was thinking the murder was here. It wasn’t impossible to believe because my husband and I at that time were going through a rough period.”
Patti and her husband had moved to Sandringham only a few months before. She told me, “I was thinking to myself, ‘Gee, we just bought a house in this neighborhood and now a murder? ’ In a way, though, that really started the divorce process for us. We separated about two months later.”
Five years earlier, Patti had married on a summer weekend on the shore of Lake Ontario. She kept her family name, DiNitto, she said, because her husband wouldn’t let her take his. When I asked her if that wasn’t a little unusual, she said, “Looking back, yes. I don’t think he was ever planning to stay married.” They lived first in a small, two- bedroom condo in Greece, the suburb where Patti grew up, and then after Sarah was born, they moved to Brighton. With her radiologist’s salary, Patti bought the house on her own, in her own name. “I went from never having a house to having a house on Sandringham,” she said.
They had just begun decorating their new home when the marriage ran into trouble. “I wouldn’t ever know he was mad or upset about something, and then he’d just kind of explode and leave the house,” she recalled. “Once, I took his car keys because I wanted him to sit down and tell me what was wrong, but he called the police and said I was beating him up. He’s a big guy and I was in my stocking feet. The police came and realized he’s so big there’s no way I was beating him up. They came at least twice; it was embarrassing. I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, the neighbors are going to think I’m a nutcase.’ ”
Her husband left on a Sunday afternoon. “I was at work the next morning seeing patients about their breast lumps,” Patti recalled, “and all I wanted to do was scream, ‘Hey, my husband left yesterday, and I’ve got no one to watch my kids. My life is falling apart here!’ ”
Suddenly, Patti had a lot to take care of on her own, including a large, still unfurnished home. “I really can’t thank my brother enough,” she told me. “He was at my house twenty-four/seven. He helped with everything.” Patti also didn’t know how things “were done” on Sandringham. “I didn’t even realize people had lawn services. I mean, where I grew up, people cut their own grass. I asked Joey, ‘Are the neighbors going to throw us out? I don’t want to do anything incorrect here.’ I was almost afraid to walk into my own front yard. Would people be checking us out?”
I asked Patti what she thought might have caused Bob Wills to do what he had done. “I’m sure being a surgeon is very stressful, and then when you have your wife leaving you . . .” she began, not finishing the thought. “If his friends weren’t helping him . . .” she tried again. “Was he finally pushed to the limit?” she asked. “If it wasn’t for my brother helping me, who knows?” She continued, “I felt an empathy. I felt it could have happened to me—I mean, going over the edge in some way. I was praying in thanks that it didn’t.”
Patti’s brother had done a fine job remodeling the guest room. There was even a light over the bed that made it easy to read. Before I turned it off, I called Marla. Lately, whether I was sleeping at home or at a neighbor’s, hers was my last call of the night. I recounted everything that had happened that evening since I picked Patti up at the airport, heard about her day at work and with her teenage daughter, and wished her a sweet good night.
MY cell phone alarm went off at 6 a.m. I showered and dressed and then sat on the bed waiting for Patti and Caitlin to get up. Patti had told me she gets up first, then wakes Caitlin and quickly makes Caitlin’s bed “because otherwise she’ll get back in it.”
With each of the sleepovers, that was often my favorite moment: the first instant in the morning when I greeted my neighbors and wished them “good morning” inside their own houses, often upstairs in a hallway. The inti
macy created by that one act would often set the tone for the whole day.
At 6:20 I heard an odd sound, like waves hitting a beach. I opened the door to my room and, down the hall, saw Patti, dressed in silk pajamas—emerge from Caitlin’s room. “Caitlin’s alarm,” she said, “is supposed to sound like ocean waves. Unfortunately, it wakes me before it wakes her.”
I followed Patti down the back stairway to the kitchen. She brought in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, turned on a light, and suggested I wait there while she and Caitlin got dressed.
On the counter were a newsletter, “Contemporary Diagnostic Radiology,” a Lotto ticket, and a photo of Caitlin on an amusement park roller coaster ride with a man Patti later told me was her former boyfriend, Caitlin’s father. She told me she remained on good terms with the fathers of both her daughters.
In fact, the only mild criticism I’d ever heard her express about Caitlin’s dad was that he didn’t take Caitlin to church often enough. Patti was concerned Caitlin might not meet her requirements for confirmation in the Catholic Church. Patti herself attended church most Sundays.
“I don’t think I’d stand on a street corner and pass out Bibles,” she told me when I asked her once about her faith. “Religion is just a personal thing for me, to help me in life. And that’s what I want for my kids—just to have a faith. We happen to be Catholic—if you don’t want to practice it, that’s fine. If you’d rather study the Jewish faith, that’s fine. It’s just something to fall back on.”
My favorite item in the kitchen was a wall calendar made of wood to resemble a little house. On the top was painted “Patti’s Place,” and then there were tiny, hand-painted wooden tiles that one could place over special days: a pumpkin for Halloween, an apple and book for the first day of school, a tie for Father’s Day. It was February, and the tile over Valentine’s Day—just a few days away—was a single red rose.
In The Neighborhood Page 13