With nervous excitement and a day off, Tim Hoyt helped his wife to their 1958 Pontiac at 7:30 the morning of Saturday, October 17, 1964. They sped down Davis Hollow Road, heading for the maternity ward of Tompkins County Hospital in Ithaca, a three-story stucco-and-stone building erected originally as a tuberculosis hospital in the 1930s. It was built into rolling grounds at the edge of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, and was more evocative of an English country school than a municipal hospital. From some of the rooms, patients could take in a postcard view of the lake, with the venerable stone buildings of Cornell University nestled in the hills beyond.
Neta’s pregnancy had been the usual thirty-eight-week mixture of happy anticipation and seemingly endless physical stress. Like many expectant mothers, she complained freely as time went on, eager to have it over with, and at 6:16 that Saturday evening, ten hours and forty minutes after the contractions began, she got her wish. Leaning in under the lights of the delivery room as Tim waited outside, Dr. Noah Kassman presented Neta with a boy weighing an even seven pounds, twenty and a half inches long, with a cap of blond hair and a solid 9 on the Apgar scale. A bracelet was wrapped around the baby’s tiny wrist—“Hoyt, Baby Boy”—and when the nurse asked what name she had chosen, Neta said, “Eric Allen.”
Dr. Roger Perry, a pediatrician recommended by Dr. Kassman, came for his first visit on Sunday morning. He looked the baby over, listened through his stethoscope, chatted a bit with Waneta. Then he picked up a clipboard and whipped off a single straight line through fourteen boxes where any abnormalities were to be noted. General appearance, eyes, thorax, heart, genitals, trunk and spine, extremities, reflexes—all were fine. On Tuesday morning, Neta was back in the Pontiac, her three-day-old baby in her lap.
She proved an exceptionally orderly mother, meticulous about feeding and clothing. Even Eric’s bibs were clean; if someone happened to drop by and see a bit of spitup, she would apologize. She was conscientious about the minutiae of motherhood, the patting, the burping, the changing. She carried out these duties in a quiet, matter-of-fact way. Though the baby was by acclamation sweet-natured and full of young life, growing amazingly fast, his presence in his mother’s life did not make her any more animated than usual. Tim, on the other hand, would hold Eric and beam, make silly faces to induce a smile for the camera. It came effortlessly. Neta was not that way. Her lips were naturally downturned and tight, her smiles often half-smiles. “She was sitting in my brown chair rocking the baby and talking to him, but she wasn’t mushy over him or anything like that,” Tim’s sister Janet remembered many years later. “That just wasn’t Neta.” Janet thought a moment, then added, “God, she had the cleanest kids.”
Neta was vigilant when it came to matters of health. In fact, her nurturing bordered on overprotection. Whether she had reason to be so chary was something her relatives couldn’t quite decide. The baby’s nose was stuffy; it appeared he had a cold. But somehow colds turned into something more, at least in the telling. By the time he was two months old, it seemed she had him to Dr. Hartnagel on a regular basis. He was checking the baby’s heart, Neta informed the family. “Doc Hartnagel thought he had a heart problem,” Tim would later say. “By listening through his stethoscope, and like that.”
One day around Christmastime, Neta and Tim visited Janet with the baby. “We just got through taking Eric to the hospital,” Neta said, stepping in from the cold. When Janet asked why, Neta said, “He’s sick. We had to get an ambulance.”
Janet thought: Well, he must be pretty sick. My kids get sick, they give ’em something and send ’em home.
Betty and Rodney Lane lived on Davis Hollow Road, across the street from the Hoyts. Rodney built homes up on the hill, inexpensive little houses that sold well in Newark Valley. Despite their proximity, the Lanes and the Hoyts were not close. In fact, the two families did not like each other very much. The animosity was of such long standing by the time Waneta moved in that it wasn’t until the early afternoon of Tuesday, January 26, 1965, that she had any contact with the Lanes.
Betty was doing housework when she heard the screams. She went to the front door, and saw Waneta on the dirt driveway in front of the Hoyt farmhouse. “Somebody help!” Waneta was calling.
Betty came out and asked what was wrong. “Something’s the matter with my baby!” Waneta said, and turned back toward the house. Betty followed her inside. The baby was lying on a table, limp and lifeless. Betty had never seen the infant before, didn’t even know if it was a boy or girl.
“Did you try to revive him?” she asked nervously.
“No,” Waneta said. She stood a few feet away, shaken, Betty thought, but in control.
Betty picked up Eric, laid him back down on the table, and put her mouth to his. She noticed a white substance like thick cereal, with pinkish streaks, coming out of his mouth and nostrils. Wiping it away, she blew into his mouth, but after a few puffs without response, she told Waneta, “I think he’s dead.” She dashed out of the house, went across the street, and told her husband to phone the rescue squad. She never went back.
Margaret Horton’s husband, Howard, was Newark Valley’s part-time police chief, and she was the town’s emergency dispatcher. The calls came to Margaret in her kitchen; then she’d call over to the firehouse, where bells would ring and anyone on the squad who heard them would hightail it over and jump into the ambulance. Margaret got the call from Rodney Lane that day, and a few minutes later, a pair of squad members pulled up to the Hoyt house. They repeated the mouth-to-mouth and felt for a pulse, but it was clear that the baby, three months and ten days old, was gone.
Chuck Hoyt was working at a gas station in town when he got the news. He realized he had to be the one to tell his kid brother. Tim was now working at Endicott Forging, just a half mile from Ideal Hospital, where the rescue workers were bringing the baby. Waneta rode with them, and Chuck followed most of the way.
He went up to the office at the forging works and asked the secretary to summon Tim from the shop. But when Chuck saw his brother, he couldn’t say the words. “We’ve got to go to the hospital,” was all he could manage.
“Tim,” he said finally, a little later when they were in the hospital elevator, headed for the third floor, “Eric died.”
Tim looked at his brother and burst into tears. Chuck put his arms around him and said nothing more. When the elevator doors opened at the third floor, Tim saw Waneta. She began to tremble. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “He just turned blue … I went for help.”
The death was certified by Dr. Hartnagel, acting as coroner. Waneta told him that Eric “wasn’t breathing right,” and then he had just stopped breathing altogether. Babies could die unexpectedly, Hartnagel knew, and he told the grieving young parents that it was an unexplainable act of God, that they should not blame themselves. Hartnagel considered the family history. Waneta had told him that one of her brothers had lost a two-month-old baby to “heart problems.” On Eric’s death certificate, Hartnagel wrote, in clear block letters, CONGENITAL ANOMALIES OF THE HEART.
That he could offer only supposition as the foundation for this opinion was probably not an issue for Hartnagel. “Congenital anomalies of the heart” sounded better than “crib death.” It certainly sounded better than “unknown” or “unexplained.” In cases such as this, it was not an uncommon practice to offer a plausible (if undemonstrated) cause of death that might satisfy both the bureaucratic requirements of the Office of Vital Records and the emotional requirements of the parents. Hartnagel saw no good reason for a pathologist to take a knife to the body of Eric Allen Hoyt. Babies died suddenly, and it was the considered opinion of the medical world, country doctors and prestigous authorities alike, that when they did, they left no clues behind.
The land that became Highland Cemetery was once farmed by Albert Nixon, Waneta’s great-grandfather. In 1889, he sold the parcel to Wallace Pierce and Clarence Finch, who formed a cemetery association with half a dozen other men. At their first meeting, they voted to set the price of a square foot of prime cemetery space at fifteen cents, and that summer a team of horses dragging a metal scraper leveled the first section of the burial ground. Albert Nixon chose not to buy space in the cemetery, but his son Archie, Waneta’s grandfather, became an active member of the association. Some years later his son Albert purchased a plot in the southwestern corner, next to Clarence Lacey’s. So far, there was only one grave marker in Albert and Dorothy Nixon’s plot, that of their young son who had died of meningitis just after Waneta’s birth in 1946. The gravestone, flush to the ground, read simply bobby. The rest of the plot, beneath a tall Norway spruce tree, was wide open.
Neil MacPherson picked up Eric’s body at Ideal Hospital and brought it back to Newark Valley in his Cadillac hearse. The MacPherson Funeral Home was on Whig Street, just up the street from the Central School. In consideration of the age of the deceased and the limited means of his parents, MacPherson decided to charge only fifty dollars for Eric’s funeral, not including the cost of the gravestone, and accepted five dollars from Tim as a down payment, the balance to be paid on time. Two days after the baby’s death, the family gathered for a brief service, and all eyes were on Neta. She stood beside the tiny casket and wept, and Tim comforted her. The relatives came by, one by one, and Neta accepted embraces from them all. From his view at the service, Chuck Hoyt sensed that for Neta, the pity was a salve. He didn’t find this terribly surprising. His wife, Loretta, could not shake the chilling image of the tiny casket. The baby had come and gone so quickly. Born as the leaves were in full fall color, gone by the dead of winter. The mourners climbed into their cars for the ten-mile journey to Highland Cemetery, where Clarence Lacey had dug a fresh grave. An hour later, Eric’s remains were buried a few feet from the grave of Bobby Nixon, in the earth their ancestors had once farmed.
A month later, Neta and Tim moved out of his mother’s house. Eric’s death was still in the air of the old farmhouse, and they wanted to make a fresh start. They bought a used trailer, forty-two feet long, with a living room, kitchen, bath, and two small bedrooms; set it next to his mother’s house, and went down to Bern’s Furniture in Owego and opened an account. Life would go on, Tim told Neta; they would have other children. He felt he had to be strong for her, and for him to dwell on the sadness would do her no good.
Soon, things were looking up. With Chuck’s help, Tim got into the laborers’ union, which boosted his pay from the $1.95 an hour he was getting running the big shears at Endicott Forging to the $3.33 he’d earn working on state road construction projects. Route 17—AMERICA’S MOST SCENIC ROAD 1964–65, said the signs—was coming west, and there would be plenty of work along the Southern Tier.
Neta was a project herself. By now, Tim knew that his wife needed more than the usual amount of attention, and it could not be entirely blamed on the tragedy that had befallen them. She complained routinely of generalized aches and pains, and visited doctors as a matter of course, moving from one to the next when none could find anything wrong. She was not shy about sharing her distress, whether it was over a card table with family gathered around, or during a visit to town. “If you had a cold, she had the flu; if your knee hurt, her knee, her elbow, and her neck hurt,” remembered one acquaintance. She owned a medical dictionary and consulted it often. At a family get-together, Tim’s sisters Ann, Janet, and Marion tired of merely rolling their eyes at her endless complaints and decided to have some fun. They concocted a fictitious illness, giving it an elaborate name. When Neta was in earshot, Marion waxed lamentable about her symptoms, ascribing the problem to the polysyllabic diagnosis. Sure enough, a week later, word made its way around the family that Neta had the bogus malady. It worked so well that the women made a regular game of it. Sometimes the news of Neta’s latest illness came from Tim. It was Chuck’s sense that his brother believed Neta and catered to her needs with unquestioning devotion. Good thing the laborers’ union has good medical coverage, Chuck thought.
If Tim’s father had been the black sheep of the family, his wife was the odd duck. Neta’s personal relationships were strange at times, difficult in a way that people found hard to clarify. At various moments she could fit into many of the usual personality categories—pleasant, aloof, attentive, self-centered—and yet, taking her as a whole, none of these characterizations really fit. It was as though her responses to life were askew. She was capable of being affronted by the most innocuous remark, though the offender might not realize the transgression until days or weeks later, when Neta would serve up a biting rejoinder, leaving the recipient to figure out what had just happened. “You had to choose your words so carefully,” Loretta Hoyt observed. “So we just backed off. We didn’t want the retaliation.”
Neta possessed an acerbic sense of humor and a willfulness that sometimes seemed out of kilter with her generally reserved disposition. People who knew her casually perceived her as solicitous and needy, while others considered her a study in control. Loretta experienced both sides. Years later, she would remember getting a number of calls from Tim while he was at work. Neta’s talking about suicide again, Tim would say. Can you check on her? Loretta would walk over to the trailer, and find Neta in a reasonably chipper mood. Once, they wound up playing cards and laughing. Another time, they went for a pleasant drive. The encounters left Loretta more puzzled than unsettled. “What am I doing here?” she asked herself each time. For years afterward, Neta would take Loretta’s hand and thank her for saving her life. And for years, Loretta urged Tim to get psychiatric help for Neta.
There was this joke among some in the family: If you saw Neta wearing a maternity dress, it meant she and Tim had had sex the night before. It was meant as both a commentary on Neta’s imagination—she could dream up pregnancy as well as illness—and on the pleasure she derived from being pregnant. It wasn’t the baby that seemed to be the payoff, so much as the attention she got from pregnancy itself. And she had little trouble getting her wish. If her imagination was fertile territory, so was her body. By the end of the summer following Eric’s death, just seven months after his burial in Highland Cemetery, Neta was pregnant. She would try again to fulfill the destiny her mother had laid out for her.
Natalie and Art Hilliard were new to the neighborhood. A young couple with a baby son, they’d bought one of Rodney Lane’s houses and moved to Davis Hollow Road shortly before Christmas 1964. One day a month or so later, a woman came to their door, welcomed Natalie to the neighborhood, and asked if she would like to make a contribution to the Hoyt family. Waneta and Tim had just lost their baby son, she said, and the neighbors were taking up a collection for flowers.
Natalie expressed her sorrow and went for her pocketbook. “Where do they live?” she asked her new neighbor.
“Right over there,” the woman said, gesturing across the street and up maybe fifty yards. The Hoyts and the Hilliards were practically next-door neighbors.
Art Hilliard was a happy-go-lucky sort with a thousand-watt grin and a joyous cackle of a laugh. Natalie was ballast for Art’s exuberance. She was quieter, her temperament more subtle. They’d gone together since they were both fourteen, Newark Valley townies who had each grown up within walking distance of the Central School. They were two years older than Tim, six ahead of Neta, and while they knew of the Hoyts by reputation, mainly through Tim’s and Neta’s older siblings, it wasn’t until after they contributed to the collection following Eric’s death that they actually met.
Whether it was that Waneta spared Natalie the behavior others found peculiar or that Natalie saw her way past it, the two women formed a friendship that belied their age disparity and some basic differences in their backgrounds. Natalie’s father operated a successful business, the bowling alley in town. She had an associate’s degree in nursery education and taught nursery school before her baby was born, a job she planned to return to one day. At eighteen, Waneta was a high school dropout with few interests. But to Natalie and Art, attentive and nonjudgmental people by nature, she was a nice young woman with a good heart and a sharp sense of humor, who’d been dealt a cruel blow and deserved their compassion and friendship. Their son Dana had been born just before Eric. They brought Waneta and Tim into their church, the United Methodist in Newark Valley, and introduced them to their pastor, Gary Kuhns.
Neta and Natalie spent hours on end, drinking coffee in each other’s kitchens, chatting away the time. And time Waneta had. Soon after Eric’s death, she had gotten a job at Endicott Johnson. It was the first job she’d ever had, but it didn’t last long. She decided she couldn’t handle what she would later describe as “the pressure” of working with so many people, and quit. Housewife was the only job she wanted.
Art and Tim were also becoming good friends. They were both avid hunters, and up on Davis Hollow you could just about walk out your door and start shooting. They managed to bag a deer apiece once a season, which was the quota. They’d skin and gut the deer, use their kitchen tables to cube the meat, and then can it for winter. One brutally cold day late in the season, the wind howling and the temperature well below zero, Tim and Art went out into the fields around their houses, looking for deer. Tim was on one side of the field, Art on the other, close enough to see each other but too far to hear. Not too long into it they realized it was colder than they’d imagined and started losing interest in anything other than going home to a hot cup of coffee. The only thing was, neither of them was willing to be the first one to surrender to the elements. They prowled the edge of the field for game, more often looking across the field at each other, sustaining the standoff. Finally, Tim saw Art waving his arms, motioning to pack it in. Thank God, Tim muttered to himself. Their bond was sealed.
In time, the Hoyts and the Hilliards became a rural version of all those recognizable urban TV neighbors: the Ricardos and the Mertzes, the Kramdens and the Nortons. It was Art Hilliard’s nightly ritual to look out his front door until he saw Neta or Tim in their window across the road, and then he’d flick the porch light on and off, a signal that supper was over and it was time for cards. Pretty soon the Hoyts would come wandering down the hill for a night of canasta.
At 9:00 on the night of Memorial Day 1966, Waneta and Tim celebrated the birth of their second child in Tompkins County Hospital.
Dr. Kassman delivered James Avery Hoyt after Neta labored three hours and thirty-two minutes, a birth nearly identical to the one two years before. At his first full exam the next day, James, like his brother, received fourteen check marks signifying the absence of any significant problems. But this time, the pediatrician on hand, Dr. Thomas Mosher, went further. Given the “congenital anomalies of the heart” that had apparently killed the baby’s older brother at three months of age, he ordered an electrocardiogram. The nurses struggled to attach the leads to the squirming newborn, but the EKG revealed nothing abnormal, and four days after his birth Waneta and Tim brought him home.
They called him Jimmy. He was an ebullient baby, blond and robust, healthier, it seemed, than his brother. The veins in Eric’s head had bulged; nearly everyone in the family wondered if that was somehow related to his sudden death. Jimmy’s head was perfectly smooth. As his face began to take shape, the definition favored his father’s broad features. Tim was square-jawed and wide-eyed, and Jimmy seemed to come from the same mold.
The first three months of Jimmy’s life were surrounded by an air of anxiety, but as summer passed and the baby advanced beyond the age at which Eric had died, life in the Hoyt trailer began to take on the pleasant routine of any young family. Tim went to work on the newest section of Route 17, and Neta stayed home with the baby, cleaned the house, and whiled away mornings with Natalie Hilliard and the other young mothers of Davis Hollow. She had a second chance at motherhood. Once again, she carried out the duties in her quiet, diligent way. Patting the baby was her favored form of interaction, and years later it would be this that one of her sisters-in-law would remember most vividly as evidence that Neta enjoyed being a mother—that she was a good mother. “She did a better job burping her babies than I ever did mine,” Janet would say with evident admiration. Most in the family did not know that Neta had been physically abusive on at least one occasion. One of her sisters-in-law saw her slam Jimmy against a wall in anger. The baby, less than a year old, had soiled his diaper.
His first birthday was a cause for both celebration and relief in the Hoyt and Nixon families. He had lived a year, and the sharp pain of Eric’s death, if not the memory itself, was beginning to fade. On Memorial Day there was a large gathering at the Hoyt farm, featuring a birthday cake with a resolute candle planted in the icing. Ella Hoyt snapped pictures, which she proudly displayed a few weeks later for the ladies she worked with at Endicott Johnson.
Tim’s mother was developing an especially close relationship with Jimmy, and when he began to walk, and then to run, it was most often to grandma’s house he headed. By the time he neared his second birthday, he was scooting across the field separating the trailer from the farmhouse, where his grandmother would scoop him up, take his hand, and lead him on an exploration of the acreage. Unlike his mother, Jimmy’s grandmother didn’t mind getting down on her hands and knees to look for bugs and snakes and go “rock hunting,” as she called it. They’d take a paper sack and collect stones as if they were jewels. If they got dirty, they’d wash off in a mud puddle—that’s what mud puddles were for, it seemed to Grandma Hoyt. If he fell and cried, she’d say, “Y’aren’t bleeding, are ya?” Jimmy would pull up his pant leg and say, “No,” through his tears. “All right then,” she’d say, and they’d resume the hunt for the finest rocks on Davis Hollow Road.
Jimmy’s first friend, aside from his grandmother, was Dana Hilliard, Natalie and Art’s son. Dana was an only child and Jimmy, two years his junior, was the next best thing to a little brother. While their mothers drank coffee, Dana would take his two-year-old pal by the hand. “C’mon, Jimmy,” he’d say, “this is what we’re gonna do today.” In the summer, they splashed in the plastic kiddie pool beside the trailer, the kind you brought home on the roof of your car.
Jimmy was a happy little kid and an early talker, and some in the family thought him remarkably independent considering the way Neta watched over him. At the first sniffle, she would have him to Doc Hartnagel’s office. But it was a mystifying brand of vigilance. On one occasion when Jimmy took a spill and began to cry, Loretta picked him up and comforted him. She had never before held him—Neta had not allowed it—and Neta yanked him from her arms. “Leave him alone,” she said curtly. “He fell, he’ll be fine. He’s got to learn for himself. Just don’t touch him.”
Health, though, was nothing like the issue it had been with Eric. Jimmy was fit and sturdy, much to his father’s relief.
Tim was enthralled with his son. He took pictures of Jimmy at play, at family gatherings, with Neta on the couch. The three of them were in the kitchen one day when Tim asked his mother to snap a photo. He scooped Jimmy up and held him close with his right arm so that their heads were at the same level, Jimmy’s feet dangling, as if standing on air. They smiled and waved. Neta stood next to them, slightly to the side, eating a piece of cake.
Jimmy adored his father. When Tim came home from work, his little boy would start walking like him. “What did you and grandma look at today?” Tim would ask, and Jimmy would show him his pockets full of rocks, then take his father by the hand and show him where each of the best ones had been discovered, where they’d seen a jackrabbit or spied a snake.
These were to be Waneta’s and Tim’s best days. They had a fine, healthy son and a new home. Working two construction jobs, Tim had saved enough money to buy a brand-new trailer for $7,200 cash, a fourteen-by-seventy-foot model that he and Waneta kept immaculate. The good fortune would continue. In the summer of 1968, shortly after Jimmy’s second birthday, Neta was in the last stages of her third pregnancy. After two boys, she was hoping for a girl. In fact, she told her sister-in-law Janet, who had two girls herself and was also pregnant again, she was betting on it. Shortly before their due dates, the two women went belly-to-belly for the camera. Janet was considerably bigger. She figured Neta would have the smaller and better-looking baby. Neta’s babies always came out just gorgeous, Janet thought.
Janet gave birth to her third daughter on July 17, and two days later, Dr. Kassman did the honors for Neta once again. Her third baby was a seven-pound girl her parents named Julie Marie. “See,” Neta told Janet, “I got my girl.”
Janet looked at the baby and melted. Her own baby was a whopper, nine pounds, five ounces, “and Neta had this little doll that was so beautiful.” Julie’s weight was average and her health perfectly fine, but her face was so tiny and her features so delicate that she seemed smaller and more fragile than usual.
“My God,” Loretta said when she saw the baby, “I didn’t know they made them that small.”