Small-town life had its benefits, Bill offered. “In a little town, people can be controlling, snoopy, and there’s an incredible lack of privacy. On the other hand, they are your friends when you’re sick. When you get a little dowdy in your old age, that’s where your support comes from. One of the tragedies of modern life is that kind of network becomes very hard to maintain. Instead, we live too much as strangers to each other.”
That was the second time Bill had used that phrase—“live as strangers to each other”—with me, and this time I had to ask him about it.
I pointed out various houses on Sandringham: “Do you know them?” I asked. “How about them?” His reply was nearly always no. Perhaps that’s why, I thought, the list of emergency contact numbers taped to the Frickes’ refrigerator—with multiple numbers each for Bill, Susan, and the nanny—included no neighbors. What few neighbors he knew, Bill said, were dog owners whom he’d met while walking Pumpkin. “Without a dog, you could live next to someone for years and never know who they are.”
It made me wonder how the Frickes had ended up in the neighborhood. Susan had told me that when she and Bill moved to Rochester, their real estate agent showed them Sandringham right away. “The agent said, ‘Oh, two doctors, you’ve got to look at the Houston Barnard neighborhood,’ ” she recalled.
“The truth is,” said Bill, “people live in this neighborhood for a variety of reasons. Some think it’s ‘the place’ to live. I’ve met people who say they never thought they’d live on Sandringham—that is, they’re so pleased they’ve ‘made it—they’ve arrived.’ For us, though,” he continued, “we just liked it because it has trees, sidewalks, older homes, yards of reasonable size, and is quiet.”
Yet, after seven years, he was still living among strangers. I asked Bill what he might do about it.
“Well, one of my goals,” he began, “is to build a network of people—people who you like and who like you, friendly and unpretentious people who can be your surrogate family. I don’t have that.” If he couldn’t find a network like that within the neighborhood—which certainly would be convenient, he acknowledged—then he’d work to build it among a wider circle of colleagues and acquaintances. “I can enjoy most people,” he said. “I have the belief that everybody is basically good.” Bill paused, adding, “Sometimes, though, people get into a situation or find themselves in circumstances that give them no outlet, like Bob Wills. Clearly he had psychological problems, and probably didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to deal with whatever his problem was in a nondestructive way.”
Bill pulled onto the expressway. A car cut us off as it swerved to change lanes. “If we were walking on an airport conveyor,” mused Bill, “or taking a bus or train, we’d at least see who that person is and maybe he wouldn’t act that way. But everyone driving in their separate cars, we move in isolation from each other. It’s easy to behave that way to strangers.”
THERE was little about the size or signage of Bill’s basement office to indicate his authority as the hospital’s Associate Director of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. DR. W. FRICKE, said the sign on the door. KNOCK, THEN ENTER. His office was of modest size, and windowless, similar to those of the ten other staff pathologists. Furnishings included an L-shaped desk and a microscope table. Over the desk hung a framed print of “View of Toledo” by El Greco. “Susan didn’t much like the painting at home,” he said, “and when I moved in here, there was a hook on the wall, so I brought it in and hung it.”
On the back wall, between diplomas, was a framed page from a child’s book of Mad Libs—those games where kids fill in blanks to make silly sentences. It said, “My dad is as handsome as blank” and in a child’s scrawl was written “movie star.” Then “He weighs blank and is blank feet tall,” and it said, “50 lbs.” and “10 feet.” The page was signed “Allison, 6 years old.”
Bill looked at a few biopsy slides from a study set—slides from older, interesting cases—and thanks to a two-headed microscope, I had the ability to see what he was seeing: a slice of a lymph node from a seventeen-year-old male, which looked like a circle of purple dots, some overlapping and some larger and darker than others. The dots and the spaces between them formed patterns that reminded me of a kaleidoscope, or a splatter painting. It was a close-up viewing of another world.
Later, I joined Bill at his desk. Another thought had occurred: Was there a connection—perhaps aesthetically—between his interests in pathology and Oriental rugs?
“I’m very much visually oriented,” he began, “and ninety percent of pathology is a visual process. With cell and protein patterns, you have to look and interpret them. And with rugs, you look at the curves and geometric figures and you have to ask yourself: Does this design make sense? Do the shades of color have aesthetic appeal?”
He continued, “With the blood patterns, every once in a while you look under the microscope and see something aesthetically appealing. I remember as a resident looking at a pap smear once and thinking it had some of the qualities of Cézanne’s painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain in southern France. Cézanne was a pre-Cubist. He’d break down landscapes, including mountains, into planes—breaking things up into geometric shapes. The cells on that pap smear had the same quality to me.”
I was pretty sure that if Bill Fricke could look at dots on a pap smear and see a Cézanne painting, he must be able to see how the pieces of his own life—wife, children, home, career—fit together to make a beautiful picture, a precious whole. That beautiful picture had captivated me since the evening before when we’d sat together at Sunday dinner. I’d envied it and also felt rebuked by it. Somehow, my wife and I had not seen how precious our own family had been; we’d let the dots of our lives fall off the slide, drop to the ground, and spatter. Yet it was maddening that Bill, with his constant talk about how boring everything was—his home, the routines of family life, work—perhaps was not appreciating all that he had. I hoped, and strongly suspected, that his “boring” talk was just an odd mannerism or a form of self-deprecation born of Midwestern modesty. I wanted to know that in that big Tudor house that anchored my street lived a man who himself was an anchor. It would be a letdown to find that my towering, Lincolnesque neighbor, who could see life and death in a drop of blood, was blind to what was so precious in his own life.
My time in Bill’s lab was almost up. On our way in that morning, he’d said I’d have to leave by 8:30 when he had a pathology staff meeting. Just a few minutes remained.
“Bill, you’ve got this great family and home,” I began, “and you seem interested in so many things—pathology, rugs, furniture, music. How can you keep saying your life is boring?”
He looked at me and smiled.
“Well, I say that with a certain amount of dissembling,” he began. “Most of us live these mundane lives that we slog through, get to the end of, and then die. But the truth is I’m extraordinarily happy.”
“You are? You’re happy?” I asked, happy that he was happy.
“Of course, I am,” he said. “What does it take, after all, to be happy? Family, career, health, a degree of financial security. I really don’t have any complaints—as I said, the only thing I’m looking for is sort of a network of people—that sort of surrogate family you maybe take for granted in a small town. But that’s about it. What else could I want?”
“So why do you say everything is so boring?”
He smiled again.
“Well, it’s just that on a daily basis, you know, we get up, get the kids up and out, go to work, come home, do homework, fall into bed, and do the same thing all over the next day. I suppose Susan and I could do like some people—many of our neighbors, I’m sure—who go to the lake every weekend, or a weekend of skiing, then to an expensive restaurant for dinner, then to a concert. Or on the weekend they hop a plane to New York to catch a show. Honestly, that would get boring, too, after a while.”
And the house on Sandringham, his investments—where did all that fi
t in?
“The money’s just so the kids can grow up and do what they’re happy doing. If Allison wants to teach art in college, I’d like her to do that and be able to afford a house and replace her car if it breaks down. But most of what I can give her—an education, a strong sense of family—these don’t cost anything.”
I’d recently seen Bill give his daughter an extraordinary gift that didn’t cost anything. Bill had pledged to Susan’s father that he would raise their children Jewish, and he had kept his word. The previous November, Allison Fricke celebrated becoming Bat Mitzvah. I hadn’t been invited; at the time the Frickes and I were merely acquaintances. Still, I was curious to see how Bill, who had said of religion that he “didn’t believe any of it,” would conduct himself at his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah service. As a member of the same synagogue, it was entirely appropriate for me to attend.
I arrived at the synagogue a little late and took a seat in the back. Small, slender Allison was already standing in front of the congregation on the raised dais called a bimah, ready to read in Biblical Hebrew her assigned portion from the holy scroll—the Torah. She had a quiet little voice, and teenage boys sitting near me were talking and shuffling their feet, so I had to strain to hear.
She started out well enough, but the further Allison went, the more difficult it appeared to be for her. She read more and more slowly, and her voice began to shake. Then she stopped and began softly to weep. I’d been to a lot of Bar and Bat Mitzvah services. Most kids are nervous—I was nervous at my own—but I’d rarely seen someone actually break down and stop. In the synagogue, there was complete silence. All eyes were on the rabbi, seated behind Allison, to see what he would do. But it was Susan, sitting in the front row next to Bill, who made the first move. Up to the bimah went Susan to hand her daughter a tissue. In a tiny voice, Allison resumed reading, and managed to make it through that section and the next one, too.
Then it was time for Bill and Susan to stand beside their daughter and make a little speech. Susan spoke first. I strained to hear, but being so far back and with the boys nearby talking and shuffling, I could hardly hear anything she said. Then Bill spoke. His voice was louder and I could make out a few phrases: “a daughter grows up and has a life of her own,” and “you grew up too fast.”
But then Bill stopped, and began to cry. The congregation again became silent. From a pocket in her dress, Susan retrieved a second tissue and handed it to Bill. He took a deep breath, and continued with his speech. As he did, I could see on Allison the effect of what had happened: her face relaxed and her back straightened. Her father, in breaking down, had made it okay for her to have done the same thing. He may not “believe any of it,” but Bill Fricke caught the exact emotion of the moment and, even if inadvertently, had given his daughter the perfect Bat Mitzvah gift. After her parents sat down, she read the rest of the Torah portion in a strong, confident voice. Then she chanted another Bible portion—about Kind David choosing an heir—flawlessly.
BILL had just a moment left before he had to leave for his staff meeting.
He continued, “Really, we don’t need any of this stuff we have. A big house is nice. A fancy neighborhood is nice. But I’d be perfectly happy living in just about any area of this general community. We forget the difference between our wants and our needs. When you can’t afford to go to Barnes and Noble, well, that’s why they have libraries. If you can’t afford to downhill ski, there are sledding hills and cross- country skiing. People have fancy houses on the Finger Lakes with powerboats, but there’s no way I’d want one of those. You can get in a lake and swim around, and enjoy it without spending a gazillion dollars.”
Bill said he and his family planned to spend part of next summer on a small, private lake in Pennsylvania where they were going to build a cabin.
“We looked at log cabins,” he said.
Oh, my goodness! My vision of Bill Fricke as Abraham Lincoln might literally come true—he was going to spend the summers in a log cabin.
“They’re expensive, though,” he said.
Of course, the frugality thing again.
Instead, the Frickes had purchased a 1,100-square-foot modular home.
“Modular houses are great—better than site-built houses,” he said. “This one will have false log cabin siding, so it will look like a log cabin.”
Bill Fricke in a house that looks like a log cabin. That would do.
9
Misdirected Mail
POSTAL carrier Ralph Pascale parked his truck across from the Willses’ old house at 52 Sandringham, got out, and walked up the driveway to the front door. As I stood beside the truck watching, I couldn’t help thinking that this driveway on which my mailman was so calmly walking was the same one that years earlier the Wills children had run down, screaming into the night.
Earlier, I’d asked Ralph what he remembered of the shootings. “I was watching TV that night,” he said, “and, my God, when I saw the interview about the murder-suicide, I couldn’t believe it. I knew them casually, like I knew you. I knew she played tennis a lot because when I’d come by in the afternoon, she’d sometimes be doing a little gardening and would still have her tennis outfit on. We’d exchange pleasantries. The husband I didn’t see much.” A new family lived in the house now. The husband, a building contractor, bought it to fix it up and resell, but ended up liking it enough so that he and his family moved in.
Ralph dropped the mail into a box beside the door, then turned and walked back down the driveway to his truck.
FOR all the years I’d lived on Sandringham as an adult, and for many years before that, Ralph Pascale had delivered the mail. What did he think of the neighborhood? I wondered. What did he know about it that we residents perhaps did not? As I had with Brian Kenyon, the newspaper carrier, I approached Ralph and asked if I could accompany him on his daily rounds. He agreed, but with one limitation that initially disappointed me: I couldn’t ride in the truck because it was against Postal Service regulations. As it turned out, though, it was easy enough just to walk alongside the truck because that part of the route I wanted to see—Sandringham Road—Ralph delivered by the method known in postal jargon as “bounding,” that is, he parked in the street in front of each house or sometimes pulled up into a driveway, and got out to deliver the mail. Either way, it involved short drives and stops—easy enough to keep up with on foot.
I met Ralph, as we’d planned, on a weekday in mid-October at the far end of Sandringham Road, in front of Bill Fricke’s house. The neighborhood was quiet, the street still wet from rain the night before. In the truck, Ralph ran the wipers once against a light mist. He pulled up the Frickes’ driveway and stopped in front of the garage. I pictured Bill inside the garage on the next Sunday evening in rubber boots and gloves washing the cars. But now it was Thursday, midafternoon; the Fricke house was quiet and dark. Bill and Susan were at work and the kids were still at school. As Ralph dropped the mail into a box near the side door, I heard from Pumpkin, the Frickes’ dog, a weak, obligatory bark.
The 36 houses on Sandringham were just a part of Ralph’s daily route, which in total included 211 stops. That sounded like a lot of houses to me, but Ralph said it was less than half the number of stops of a typical postal route in the city. The difference, he explained, is that upscale, suburban neighborhoods get a “ton of mail,” often twenty to thirty catalogs plus ten to fifteen letter-size pieces of mail a day. But he wasn’t complaining.
Nearly forty years earlier, as a rookie carrier, Ralph’s initial postal assignment had been a public housing project. “Back then, you got the worst neighborhoods at first,” he explained. Then, during the height of the Vietnam War, at age twenty- two, he was drafted into the Army. When his tour was done, Ralph returned to Rochester and the Postal Service, and was transferred to a blue-collar suburb. Fifteen years later, he was eligible for a new route: Brighton’s Houston Barnard Tract.
“I didn’t even know where Sandringham Road was,” he said. “I took it comp
letely blind. A woman in the office said it was a nice neighborhood with nice people. But when I walked into the station and saw the mail for that route, I was ready to walk out. My other, blue- collar route was working- class people who get the usual type of mail: a bank statement, a catalog or two, maybe a magazine, and one or two letter-size pieces of mail. But yours is a wealthy neighborhood and it’s just piles of mail! Tons of financial mail: stock statements, bank statements, circulars, credit card offers, between five and forty catalogs, and on average ten pieces of letter-size mail. It just blew me away.”
But he adjusted. “I figured, ‘If I’m going to be a mailman, I’m in the right place: gorgeous homes, lovely yards, nice people.’ And the first question people ask me when I tell them where my route is, is ‘How’s Christmas?’ ”
“So how is Christmas?” I asked Ralph, walking beside the truck as we approached another house. I tried to recall what I had tipped him last year and hoped it wasn’t too far off the average.
“Christmas is very good,” he said, “but actually it’s good all year-round. For people in your neighborhood, mail is important, and they’ll reward for good service.”
Over the years, Ralph said, he’d received tickets to the Ryder Cup and PGA golf tournaments “with full hospitality privileges,” season tickets to the theater and philharmonic, tickets to Syracuse University basketball games (“a game of my choice—behind the bench”), and an invitation to play golf at the Country Club of Rochester—the club where Deb O’Dell played paddle tennis and a stop on Ralph’s route. Customers also sometimes gave Ralph stock tips.
At the home of the stockbroker who had described himself to me as “pathologically private,” Ralph pushed an exceptionally large pile of mail through a slot in the back door, along with a treat for the dog. Later, glancing in the back of the truck, I noticed a box of dog treats with a Post-it note stuck to the front that said, “For Ralph, from Tris.”
In The Neighborhood Page 18