Fortunately for me, Bill’s frugality did not extend to the comfort of his guests. I would be sleeping that night in the maid’s room over the garage—like Patti DiNitto’s, the Frickes’ home was built before the Depression, when maids’ rooms were a common feature of houses on Sandringham. As he finished rinsing the Camry, Bill said that, while he usually kept the heat off in the garage, earlier that afternoon, for my benefit, he had turned it on. “Your room is right above here,” he said, gesturing toward the ceiling, “and there’s no insulation in the floor. So I figured if I turn the heat on, it might keep your room a little warmer tonight.”
WHEN he finished in the garage, Bill washed his hands and said he’d be going to the living room to read. “You can sit in any chair in there you like,” he said, “except the yellow one.”
The Frickes’ home sat at the east end of Sandringham, at the opposite end of the street from me, just across and a few doors down from where Bob and Renan Wills had lived. Their house, a 1926 Tudor Revival, was one of the first built in the Houston Barnard Tract. It had a steeply pitched slate roof with overlapping gables, leaded casement windows, and two massive chimneys. The outside was covered in stucco and decorative half-timbering.
Inside, among nearly 4,500 square feet of living space, were many handsomely furnished rooms. My favorite was the living room. Bill and Susan had made a hobby of learning about Chinese antiques and had filled the room with Oriental rugs and antique Chinese furniture, including a writing desk from the Qing dynasty, a pair of children’s chairs, and a tray table that Bill said was designed as an “opium table.” But the most eye-catching item to me was a gleaming, ebony, Austrian-made Bösendorfer grand piano. “It was the last piano made with real ivory keys,” said Bill. “We had mixed emotions about it because of that, but it’s a richer sound than Steinway.”
I would have liked that evening to ask Bill to play, but Susan had warned against it. “Bill’s a very good musician,” she told me earlier, “but he’ll never play for you, so don’t ask.”
Bill took what was clearly “Dad’s chair”: a large, yellow wingback armchair with ball and claw feet and sculpted wooden legs. He said it was a Chippendale reproduction in the Colonial-Revival style, probably made in the 1920s, and that he’d bought it at a flea market for $10 and had it recovered. Propping his slippered feet onto the “opium table,” which he used as a foot stool, Bill turned on a floor lamp and began reading an article entitled “Protein Electrophoresis in Clinical Diagnosis,” from a science journal.
I needed something to do while Bill read. There was a magazine rack next to the sofa on which I was seated with back copies of Oriental Furniture. I picked one up and had just begun an article when Susan joined us, taking a seat at the other end of the sofa, and settling in with some sewing.
WILLIAM Fricke, born in 1949, grew up in the central Illinois town of Jacksonville, population 20,000. His father was a physician and his mother a social worker. “Life was slow and simple and easy,” he told me earlier. Bill rode his bike to school every day. He was a Boy Scout. He mowed lawns, shoveled snow, and delivered newspapers. For field trips, his class would go to nearby New Salem to see the log houses where Abraham Lincoln lived and worked as a young man, and to Springfield, to view the Lincoln family home. On weekends, “Mom would make us lunch and we’d ride our bikes downtown to a movie or just ride out of town for a couple of miles.” In the summer, Bill’s parents took him and his older sister on car trips, often lasting a month. By the time he was through junior high school, he’d seen most of the country.
At Washington University in Saint Louis, Bill majored in music history and played classical piano. If you looked at his hands, you could easily imagine him as a pianist: they were large, with long, slender fingers. After graduation, he was unsure what to do and traveled around Europe while trying to figure it out. Returning to Jacksonville, Bill got a job as a technician at a local hospital, found he liked it, and went back to Washington University for medical school, but again without much direction. “I was at my wit’s end as to what I was going to specialize in and tried literally everything,” he recalled. A project in the tissue-typing laboratory did the trick: “It turns out I’m interested in how things work—the inner workings of things,” he said, explaining his eventual focus on pathology. “Patho-physiology looks at the basic mechanism of disease. How does blood clot? How do wounds heal? How does the immune system work?”
Bill did a residency in pathology at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His time there was “uneventful—like most of my life,” except that he met another resident, a petite, energetic, smart Jewish girl from suburban New York City. He and Susan Hyman were introduced at a party by a mutual friend. “I don’t remember much about it except that I liked her from the moment we met,” he recalled. When they told their families they were serious about each other, Susan’s father was not pleased. “Susan was afraid her father would disown her,” recalled Bill. The issue was that Bill was not Jewish. “I was raised as a liberal Christian,” he said, “but my mother and I didn’t believe any of it. I’m basically a heretic.” When Bill agreed to raise the couple’s children Jewish and give them a Jewish education at least through Bar Mitzvah, Susan’s father withdrew his objection.
Early in their marriage, Bill and Susan settled in Columbia, Maryland, so that Susan could work in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University. Allison and Bubba were born there. “We nicknamed him ‘Bubba,’ ” Susan explained earlier, “because he was conceived in North Carolina and everyone there is called ‘Bubba.’ ” Bill worked for the National Institutes of Health in a blood-banking fellowship, but eventually tired of the job. “After nearly eight years, I woke up one day and just couldn’t fill out another government form,” he told me earlier. That’s when he found a job in pathology in Rochester.
Susan, reluctant to leave Maryland, nevertheless was offered a job in her specialty—pediatric autism—at Rochester’s largest hospital and agreed to move. Unlike her husband, she had had no uncertainty about her career. Since high school, Susan had known she wanted to be a doctor. At Brown University, she did a combined undergraduate and medical school program, then a residency at Chapel Hill. A main interest all along was what she termed “the biology of behavior.” Now, as a developmental pediatrician, she assessed and treated children with neurological handicaps. Recently, she and colleagues patented a gene they believe is related to autism.
Now, Bill was Associate Director of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Rochester General Hospital. He supervised four assistants and, through them, a staff of nearly a hundred technicians. Through his lab, he estimated, passed the blood samples and tissue biopsies of nearly 40 percent of the population of Rochester. Much of Bill’s workday involved examining blood and tissue samples under a microscope to detect infections, cancer, or other diseases. I once asked him if I could visit at the lab but he tried to dissuade me. “It would be boring,” he said. “There’d be nothing interesting to see.” When I protested that he dealt with issues of life and death, and expressed my admiration for the importance of his work, he turned aside the compliment. “Susan’s the real star,” he said. “I’m just some hack at a hospital.”
At nine o’clock that evening, without saying a word, Bill put down his science journal and went to the piano. He began with scales, then chord progressions. Susan raised both eyebrows at me as if to say, “This is a surprise!” She put down her sewing to listen.
“Oy,” said Bill as he stumbled on a passage.
Bill’s playing lasted about twenty minutes and included portions of a Brahms intermezzo and Bach’s “Well-Tempered Klavier.”
When he was done, I complimented his playing.
“Thanks. I stink,” he said, and sat down again to read in his yellow, wingback chair.
In a stage whisper, Susan said to me, “I’ve never heard him play for anyone but his mother.”
Bill read some more and Susan sewed some more, and then around a quarter to ten, Bill said it was
about time for bed, and Susan agreed. As we all left the living room together, I asked Bill about the origin of the Oriental rugs. The two larger ones were made in Iran, he explained, and the smaller ones in the Caucuses. He said he would like to get one large rug for the whole room. “I would love to go to Iran,” he said. “I saw a trip to northern Iran advertised in—”
“You don’t have enough life insurance to go to Iran,” Susan interrupted, adding to me, “That’s not anywhere he’s going anytime soon.”
EVEN with the heat in the garage turned on, the Frickes’ maid’s room was freezing and I had to use both an electric space heater and an electric blanket to keep warm. It was nicely furnished, though. There was an Oriental rug, and a brass bed that came from Bill’s uncle’s farm in Missouri. Before I climbed into bed, I peeked out a small window that looked onto Sandringham. Across the road, past the glare of the streetlamp, I could see the front of the redbrick Colonial house that had been Bob and Renan Willis’s home.
Bill Fricke—not a big TV watcher—said he hadn’t learned about the murder until the next morning. “I didn’t know a thing about it,” he had told me. “Next day, I went jogging and saw a reporter standing there. I couldn’t believe it.” Bill said he had known Renan only casually. “I had talked to her a couple of times about patients, but I didn’t know her well. I think I heard her husband bounced around to a couple of different jobs—clearly he had problems.”
Susan, who often stayed up later than Bill, had seen police cars on the street the night of the murder but thought some teens might be having a party and that someone had complained. She remembered, “Then at six a.m., a friend called in a panic. She’d heard on the radio that a doctor couple with two young children on Sandringham were killed. She was afraid it was us. The next morning, I told the kids when they left for school that something bad had happened and that Emily’s mommy and daddy were dead but that Emily and her brother were safe. It was awful. Bubba was seven and was very scared.”
Long ago, the Frickes’ house had itself been touched by violence. In December 1971, around 11:30 at night, dynamite exploded near the back of the house—near the room where the Frickes and I had had Sunday dinner. A judge and his wife and their teenage son who lived there then were home, but escaped injury. Police made plaster casts of footprints outside the house, sent bomb fragments to an FBI laboratory in Washington, and tapped the phones of several local felons over whose convictions the judge had presided. The next day, police went up and down Sandringham interviewing neighbors to see if anyone had noticed anything suspicious. Many said they had heard the explosion, but none had anything useful to report. The only person who saw something was a fourteen-year-old newsboy, who had noticed a red Mustang parked on the street and a man standing outside what later would be the Frickes’ house. The boy told police what he’d seen, but nothing ever came of it.
As I looked out the window of the maid’s room that night, I thought of the newsboy and what he saw all those years ago—and I couldn’t help but think of Renan Wills, who had lived across the street. Two homes facing each other, touched by violence a generation apart; one incident benign and the other deadly; one where no one was hurt and one where no one wasn’t.
I made my nightly call to Marla. She said she missed me and asked how the evening had gone. I told her about Bill washing the cars by hand and playing piano. An amateur musician herself, she was impressed to hear of the Bösendorfer and the pieces Bill had played. I didn’t mention how being at the Frickes made me miss having an intact family—I didn’t think she’d want to hear about that. We said we loved each other and wished each other good night. Then I climbed into the brass bed, crawled under the covers, and slept.
AT a few minutes past 6:00 a.m., thirteen-year-old Allison Fricke came down to breakfast in her pajamas and robe. Sleepy-eyed, she held a teddy bear in one arm. She went to the basement and a minute later came back with frozen waffles and put them in the toaster oven. Bubba entered the kitchen next, followed by his father.
Bill wore a T-shirt and running shorts; his hair was tousled, and he looked pale. He turned on the old GE kitchen radio to NPR and began cooking egg whites for the kids; at the same time, he emptied the dishwasher. On the radio, the local NPR station gave the forecast: harsh winds and temperatures in the teens.
By 6:30, the kids were fed and Bill was ready to exercise, but then, realizing he hadn’t heard anything yet from Susan, said, “I better make sure she’s awake,” and went back upstairs. A couple minutes later he returned and I went with him into the basement, where he immediately began riding an exercise bike with two-pound weights strapped to his ankles. “This is easier than riding outside on a day like today,” he said. “I bought this bike for sixty dollars used.” The previous summer, Bill competed in an AARP-sponsored triathlon, and he planned to do another this year if his hip was okay; he’d been having some problems with bursitis.
There wasn’t much for me to do while Bill exercised. Unlike Lou Guzzetta, who had exhorted me to “get in shape” while he worked out at the Y, Bill seemed content to let me watch and ask questions. We listened on NPR to a segment about Senator Joseph Lieberman’s presidential campaign. “I really don’t like these religious types,” Bill said. “They tend to be dangerous. Only Carter turned out to be okay.” Though he and Susan were giving their children a Jewish education, Bill remained a skeptic. “I don’t believe any of it,” he told me earlier. “You know in the synagogue, that glass wall in front that looks out onto those big trees?” he asked. I knew the wall he meant because the Frickes and I belonged to the same Reform synagogue. “Once I heard the rabbi stand up there and say, ‘This is God’s sanctuary,’ but I thought, ‘No, outside is God’s sanctuary. This is just a building made by people.’ ”
Bill lay down on a floor mat—it said MARIE FRICKE and had belonged to his mother—and began doing sit-ups. Then he stood again to do arm curls with orange hand weights. At 6:50, his exercise done, Bill went upstairs to shower and dress.
I returned to the kitchen just as Susan came in, dressed for work. “Good morning,” she said. “I have three minutes to get out of here,” and rushed back upstairs to get something she’d forgotten.
That intensity was more like the Susan I’d come to know on earlier visits than the woman I’d seen the previous night calmly sewing in the living room. In one earlier interview, Susan had sat in a straight-backed chair. As she answered my questions, she rocked back and forth with her hands tucked under her legs as if trying to contain her energy. And that was on her day off.
That morning, she was scheduled to see patients in the hospital. In the afternoon, she would drive to several outlying counties to consult with school staff. “They have six- or seven-year-olds,” she told me, “possibly with reactive attachment disorder—it’s like a junior version of post-traumatic stress syndrome. These kids have experienced fetal alcohol syndrome, foster homes, witnessed all kinds of violence. Now the school’s looking for help and wants to know if the kids are autistic.”
The daily demands of work and her desire to be present and active with her family required Susan to work long hours and do everything efficiently. Four days a week she was at the hospital—two seeing patients and two doing research. On Fridays, her day off—between frequent calls and pages from colleagues—she took care of the house. “I don’t have a cleaning lady,” she told me with evident pride. “I try to get all the housekeeping, laundry, errands, and food shopping done on my day off so we can have better family time on the weekends.” Once, on a Friday, I had happened to see her coming home from the supermarket. The back of her van was completely filled with groceries and it was only 7:30 a.m.
Susan and Bill had hired a nanny to watch their children after school until they got home from work, usually around 6 p.m. The first one home would make dinner. “I try to make a ‘do-ahead’ dinner like lasagna or stew so it can be microwaved,” Susan told me. “Then it’s homework—the kids still require attention. Between seven and nine
p.m. or so, it’s all about them. After they’re in bed, I do my charting, dictate reports, and review abstracts and journal articles.” She usually worked until 1 a.m. Fortunately, she could get by on five or six hours’ sleep a night, and getting to sleep was not a problem. “I can turn it right off,” she said, a skill she learned through hypnosis.
“When it comes right down to it,” she told me, “Bill and I are just working parents. Yes, we’re blessed with these great jobs, but otherwise we schlep and chauffer the same as everyone else. I get up and get the kids off. I do everything normal mothers do. I just do it in less time.”
At 7:02, Susan shepherded Allison and Bubba into the garage; each carried backpacks that contained their lunch as well as dinner. Bubba also carried a grocery bag with a papier- mâché bust of Pablo Picasso. “You saw it,” Susan called back to me as she got into the car, “the ‘tornado’ of how this family gets out in the morning!”
WHEN Bill returned to the kitchen, showered and dressed for work, he fixed hot oatmeal and half a grapefruit for our breakfast. As we ate, at the same simple wooden table at which we’d had dinner the night before, we chatted about the stock market, inflated CEO salaries, and other news of the day.
Before leaving for work, Bill had one more chore to do. “The piano goes out of tune unless we keep the air humidified,” he explained as he filled a bucket of water and carried it to a spot near the living room.
BILL’S route to work that morning took him down Sandringham Road. “Maybe it’s my small-town background,” he said, “but I miss driving down a street in the morning as opposed to a highway. A street is a more personal experience.”
In The Neighborhood Page 17