In The Neighborhood Read online

  MY family moved to Sandringham Road in the summer of 1957, just in time for me to start kindergarten in the Town of Brighton. Our move from city to suburb was part of the huge out-migration from cities across the country that occurred from 1950 to 1970, when America’s suburban population doubled. I remember that on Sunday afternoons, during the months when our house was under construction, my father would drive us all—my mother, my older brother and sister, and me—to Sandringham Road to check on the new house.

  It was on one of those Sunday drives, when we were almost at the house, that we hit something. My father pulled the car over in front of a white house. I watched as he walked up the driveway. He said nothing when he returned and drove us back home without stopping at our new house. Later that night, my parents said our car hit a dog—a white poodle—but that the dog was only injured and that its owner was a doctor who would take care of it. Many years later, when I questioned my father about this incident, he confessed he’d actually killed the dog and that its owner—the man in the white house—was Lou Guzzetta. After we’d moved into our new house on Sandringham Road, my father told me, Lou didn’t seem to recognize him as the man who’d hit his dog, so out of embarrassment he never mentioned it again.

  Our move to Sandringham was a big step up for my parents, especially my father. While my mother’s family had been established in Rochester since the mid- 1800s, my father’s parents had come over from Vienna and Budapest in 1910. They entered through Ellis Island, brought little with them, and eventually settled in a poor Jewish neighborhood in downtown Rochester. From age nine, my father—the youngest of three brothers—delivered newspapers, hawked peanuts at the ball park, and later sold shoes. After high school there was no money for college, so he worked various jobs until he and his oldest brother, in October 1936, started a commercial printing business.

  It’s hard now to think of my ninety-something dad as a trend-setter, but he and my uncle borrowed whatever they could to acquire what was then cutting-edge technology: an offset printing press. Their business, Great Lakes Press, was profitable almost from the start. Two decades and three children later, he and my mom were ready and able to leave their comfortably modest home in the city for what my dad described as “a genuinely high-class neighborhood” in the Town of Brighton. “It was immaculately maintained,” he said of Sandringham Road. “Even where there was an empty lot, the area between the lot and the street was kept up by the garden association or something.” To him, the whole neighborhood looked like “a polished diamond.”

  Our new house was typical of the period: a contemporary split-level with brick facade, wide eaves, double front door, and circular driveway. Inside, the house projected space- age optimism: bay and picture windows, curved walls, and an open floor plan with an expanse of white ceiling that swept unbroken from one end of the house nearly to the other.

  On the summer day we moved in, I watched landscapers in front rake the ground in preparation for seeding the lawn and I saw two boys about my own age riding bikes with training wheels. I didn’t know it then, but those boys would become my constant playmates. One, who lived just two houses down, was Lou Guzzetta, the younger.

  My new friends and I spent many afternoons exploring other houses in the neighborhood under construction. Most of the houses, like ours, were contemporary in style, filling in the empty lots between older, more traditional homes. My favorite stage of construction was when the stairway to a house’s second floor was up, but the outer walls, doors, and windows were not yet completed. This allowed us—after workmen had left for the day—to enter the house, climb upstairs, and toss stray nails from the second floor onto cinder blocks that often lay in the dirt beside the foundation walls. Looking back, I was actually inside many of my future neighbors’ homes—even their master bedrooms—before they were.

  In those early days, I spent hours playing with Lou’s son and daughters, but their father was seldom home. “My father’s at the hospital,” his son would say with pride. On the rare times I saw Dr. Guzzetta, there was a bit of the “Great Santini” about him. He could be stern, gruff, even scary—a drill sergeant to his six kids who, after school, often had their blue- and-white Catholic school uniforms on as they rushed around the house doing chores. I remember Edie, their mom, was often busy in the kitchen, sometimes harried, but more often quietly patient, gentle, and kind. I’d see her on a Saturday morning announcing it was time to “go to the stores,” to me a mysteriously vague phrase but one that would cause all the Guzzetta children to load themselves quickly into her wood-paneled station wagon.

  My comfortable upbringing on Sandringham Road continued through 1971, when I graduated from high school and left home. In the next fifteen years, as I went through college, graduate school, and my first employment, I lived in several cities before returning to Rochester with Marie and our eldest daughter, Sarah, intent to raise our children among family.

  The decision to move back to Sandringham Road was not an easy one. My dad and uncle had sold Great Lakes Press—after nearly fifty years in business—and soon thereafter my parents decided to move to an apartment. When they offered to sell Marie and me the house, we were tempted; the timing seemed favorable. We’d been living in a three-bedroom house in the city but wanted to be in Brighton for the good public schools, and with three children by then, we were ready for a bigger home.

  Yet we had concerns. Though the house was a well- built example of 1950s suburban architecture, it wasn’t the style Marie and I would have chosen; our tastes were more traditional. Moreover, though I mostly enjoyed growing up in the house, I was concerned how it would be to return to it as an adult. I recalled one episode of The Twilight Zone in which a man returns to the neighborhood of his childhood. I tracked down the episode: “Mr. Horace Ford has a preoccupation with another time,” intones Rod Serling, “a time of childhood, a time of growing up . . . But in a moment or two he’ll discover that memories . . . can lead into a special province, uncharted and unmapped, a country of both shadow and substance known as . . . the Twilight Zone.”

  We didn’t want a home of “shadow and substance” and haunting background music; we just wanted a nice place to raise our kids. My parents’ house was in good condition and sizable: we imagined soccer games in the backyard, and the basement—big enough for both table tennis and billiards—seemed ideal for teen parties.

  Our hesitation was as much about the neighborhood as the house itself. Several times—a weekday evening, a Saturday morning, a Sunday afternoon—Marie and I walked the neighborhood. It was as lovely as ever: sidewalks, old- fashioned streetlamps, tall lindens and Douglas firs towering above the wide street. But we saw few people. Occasionally, someone jogged by or passed us walking a dog; not many said hello. The neighborhood association sponsored an annual “picnic,” which we attended, but it was like a formal cocktail party, and fewer than half the residents came. We didn’t want to label the whole neighborhood unfriendly, but clearly there wasn’t much street life. By that time, we’d lived nearly ten years in the city and were used to a front- yard neighborhood with lots of people and kids around. This would take some getting used to.

  We procrastinated. My parents offered to sell us the house at a reduced price. That was tempting, but some of the proceeds from the sale of my dad’s business had gone directly to my siblings and me. This left me financially secure and able to buy a nice house in some other neighborhood if I’d wanted to. Yet the possibility of moving back to Sandringham intrigued me. Wouldn’t it be a rare opportunity to feel rooted and to raise another generation in the family home? Or would it just be regressive, like moving backward? And how would Marie do living in what had been her husband’s family home? We debated the issues for weeks—maybe months—and then my parents offered us the house for free. That settled the question. If it didn’t work out, we told ourselves, we could always sell the house and move.

  As it turned out, we did have a few Twilight Zone moments, such as in the first week back when
my daughter asked me to play basketball and I mistakenly ran into my son’s room—my old room—to get my sneakers. After a year or two, Marie and I hired a designer and completely remodeled the house. We moved some walls, redid the kitchen and every other room, and painted over the brick on the outside. Then it began to feel like our home.

  IT was difficult to reconcile the distant memory of my friend’s gruff, scary surgeon- father with the elderly man who was now lying on the couch beside me, quietly retelling the story of his own childhood.

  At his mother’s insistence, Lou entered kindergarten at three years old, and at five began Catholic grammar school, where he sang in the children’s choir.

  “Do you remember what you sang?” I asked.

  Lou lifted his head off the couch and in a childlike falsetto chanted: “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison.”

  He excelled in Catholic schools through high school and at sixteen was able to enter the University of Rochester. On the wall across from Lou’s couch hung a photo of a handsome, smiling, 160-pound Lou Guzzetta standing in black bathing trunks with shoulder straps—a star member of the university’s swim team. Later, Lou attended his father’s alma mater, Tufts Medical School, graduating in 1945 at the impressively young age of twenty-three.

  I asked Lou how he and Edie met. He got quiet, and then I saw tears. We can talk about it later, or not at all, I assured him. I hadn’t meant to upset him.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I can do it.”

  Edith Pinkerton and he met at the university. He was eighteen; she was nineteen. She was from a blue blood family: ancestors on the Mayflower, a Daughter of the American Revolution. “She was a beautiful woman with a touch of the Irish in her face,” said Lou. “Mature, musically talented, and loving.”

  “So why was she attracted to you?” I asked playfully.

  “I was charming, fun to be with—I have no idea! You’d have to ask her,” he said, and then added, “but it’s too late.”

  They dated for a year, and then Lou asked Edie to a dance. He was surprised when she said she couldn’t go. “I thought we were going steady,” he said, “but she had another date. Hey, no one craps on the old man! I said, ‘Good-bye, lady!’ ” They didn’t see each other for a year, but then got back together. “And that was it,” said Lou. “We never looked back.”

  After World War II, during which Lou served as a surgeon with a Marine Corps artillery battalion in northern China, Lou returned to Rochester to practice with his father.

  Office visits were $2; house calls, $5. Lou recalled doing tonsillectomies on children at home. To suck up saliva and blood, he’d hook up a suction device to the kitchen sink. Their practice did well. “I had a lot of confidence in myself even then,” said Lou. “I read seven journals a month: five surgical and two general. I was good, and I knew I was good.”

  Lou and Edie moved to Sandringham Road in 1950. They designed the house themselves. The front and sides are brick-fronted, and painted white. Lou calls it a “contemporary Colonial.”

  I noticed that Lou’s nose was running and asked if he had a cold. “No,” he said, “I think it’s the cigarettes. They irritate the mucous membranes.”

  As a general surgeon, Lou did all kinds of abdominal surgery, operated on breast cancer, repaired hernias, and performed hysterectomies. Still lying on his back, he explained a procedure he favored for appendectomies, demonstrating by tracing a line with his finger over his belly and getting animated as he described it. Each month, St. Mary’s Hospital published a “surgical score sheet.” “It was embarrassing,” said Lou. “I did more surgeries than anyone else.”

  To what did he credit that?

  “Talent. More schmoozing—is that the right word?—of the referring physicians. Look, I was good. I knew I was good. What can I say? When that phone would ring at night, it was great. You’re talking emergency trauma—gunshots, stab wounds. I always came. I never questioned a call. I loved the hospital, especially at night: the trauma cases, the phones ringing. I loved it.”

  I could picture a younger Lou Guzzetta dashing out of his house at night, speeding down Sandringham Road to the hospital.

  “But then it reached a point,” he continued, “I was sixty-three—I just got burned out. I got tired of people, I think. There’s a new breed of doctor who doesn’t care about the patients. The patients have changed, too. Everyone wants a second opinion.” Lou told a story: “One day, this woman came to me with an umbilical hernia. It could strangulate the small bowel. She says, ‘I want a second opinion.’ I said, ‘No, you want a third opinion. Your internist gave you an opinion, he referred you to me, and I gave you my opinion. So now you want a third opinion!’”

  Two years later, at sixty-five, Lou retired.

  “The hospital put on a fantastic retirement party for me,” he said. “There must have been a hundred fifty people there. It was at the Marriott—cocktails, ba-boom ba-bah, the whole bash. They didn’t do it for anyone else. I made a speech but it was pretty half-assed. I think I was drunk by that time.”

  I asked Lou how it had felt to suddenly stop practicing medicine. “You have dreams that you’re still operating,” he said. “You dream a person comes to you and says, ‘You’re the only one who can help me.’ So you do the operation, but you’re scared because you have no insurance and you hope everything goes right. It’s a horrible, recurring dream.”

  THE seat warmer in Lou’s Lexus sedan was a welcome luxury on our way to the YMCA that cold January morning. Lou wore tinted aviator-style glasses. I asked what his license plate, WEAK 2S, meant. “It’s a way of bidding in bridge,” he said, explaining that, after his retirement, he and Edie often played bridge with other couples. “You bid weak twos. It was Edie’s preferred way of bidding.” WEAK 2S had been on Edie’s plate, but after she died, Lou decided to use the phrase on his plate, too. Edie’s original plate now hung on the wall in the garage.

  Just before 10 a.m., gym bag in hand, Lou strode into the Y. In the lobby, four men, all about his age, greeted him. They seemed to have been waiting for him.

  “Hiya, Lou,” said a slight, gray-haired man.

  “Good morning, Doc,” said another.

  “How ya feeling?” Lou asked the first man.

  “Weak. I don’t know,” the man answered in a high- pitched voice.

  “What are you going to do today?” Lou asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can work out,” said Lou. “Do a little on the bike. A slow bike ride will do you good.”

  These men were all retired: a barber, a salesman, an appliance repairman, and a chemist.

  In the locker room, Lou hung up his overcoat and sweater. The men then followed him down a corridor to the “Wellness Center,” a large, open room with treadmills, stationary bikes, and other equipment.

  Everyone else in the Wellness Center—including Lou’s buddies—wore sweats or other exercise gear; Lou alone was in street clothes: polo shirt, khaki pants, and still the tinted aviator glasses. As he walked among the fitness equipment, he stood perfectly erect, hands clasped behind him. Even being overweight—his belt buckle, tucked under “La Bonza,” actually pointed toward the floor—Lou cast a handsome, imposing image. This was a different Lou Guzzetta than I had seen just a half hour earlier lying on the couch in his library. This must have been the Dr. Louis Guzzetta who commanded an operating room staff as he removed bullets from people’s guts in the middle of the night.

  Lou asked a young female attendant to check his blood pressure. Three of his buddies gathered around to watch.

  “How is the doctor as a patient?” I asked as the woman wrapped Lou’s arm in a cuff.

  “He scares me,” she said good-naturedly. “He scares everyone. He intimidates them. That’s how he got so far, I guess.”

  At the free weights, Lou did a few arm curls with 12.5-pound barbells. Then a few pull-downs, and a quick circuit on the Nautilus. Somehow, his hair remained perfectly in place.

  Lou wal
ked among the upper- body machines, greeting people he recognized. He was like the host at a wedding, checking on the guests to be sure everyone was all right and having a good time.

  He encouraged me to work out—I had changed into gym shoes in the locker room—but I said I was just observing. “You got to build up your upper body,” he admonished. “Guys’ll kick sand in your face at the beach!” I did a few curls with the free weights.

  A slender man with thinning auburn hair approached. He was one of Lou’s gang. “My wife had that surgery we talked about,” he said. “Everything went fine.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Lou.

  Lou did ten minutes on an exercise bike.

  “Will this get rid of my stomach?” asked a man riding the bike next to him.

  “Nothing will get rid of our stomachs,” said Lou.

  I noticed on Lou’s hands patches of deeply reddened skin, especially on the tops of his hands. I asked what caused it. “That’s bruising,” he said, explaining that with age the skin thins and the capillaries under it can leak.

  “It’s also from lifting Edie,” he explained. “When she was very ill, she could walk but not stand up. I’d put my hands under her armpits to lift her. What you see is the result of repeated trauma.”

  Lou had worked out for twenty minutes; now it was time for a coffee break, and then a swim. We headed back to the lobby. The other guys were already there, seated at a rectangular table, each holding a foam cup of coffee.

  “Here comes the chairman of the board,” announced one.

  Lou took the seat at the head of the table.

  “Hey, how’d you pull the head of the table?” a buddy asked.

  “Can’t you see what’s happening here?” replied Lou with mock pride. “I’m the star attraction.” At that moment, I better understood why, when Lou earlier had introduced me as a neighbor who “wants to write something about me,” these men all seemed to accept that statement without question, as if of course one day Lou would show up at the Y with his biographer.