Whichever, their eyes did meet and lock across a crowded room. It was love at first sight. The young army officer was a half-dozen years older than Margureitte and very handsome with classically aquiline features, dark hair and eyes. In fact, he looked like the movie stars who were portraying gallant army officers in films of the forties. He wasn’t terribly tall, but at five feet ten inches, he was certainly taller than Margureitte. Clifford was from an old family in Westchester County, New York, whose ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. He had a deep and cultured speaking voice and he gazed at her as if he were utterly fascinated.
As indeed he was. He was not deterred by the fact that she had two small children. Not at all. They were married on January 8, 1942, in the Fort Bragg chapel, and Margureitte broke the news to her mother that now she could raise her own babies. She had a husband and they planned to take both Kent and Patty with them wherever Clifford was stationed.
When Cliff was transferred to Texas, it was time for Patty to leave Mama Siler and be her real mother’s little girl. It was stunning news. Margureitte's sisters begged her not to do it. “Don't hurt Mama like that—she has a bad heart," they cried. "You'll kill her if you take that child away from her.”
But Margureitte was obdurate. She had worked and waited years for this moment. She and Clifford took the children with them when they left by train for Clifford’s duty station in Mineral Wells, Texas. Patty was five and a half and had very firm ideas of her own. She turned up her nose at everything on the menu in the dining car. She wanted pancakes. She wouldn't eat anything else. Margureitte was afraid Patty would starve if she didn't relent. Patty got her flapjacks. That, was all she ate for the entire trip across America. And for weeks after.
She still cried for “Mama."
Back home in Siler City, Mama Siler was inconsolable. They had taken her baby away. She lay in bed for days, mourning her loss. But she didn't die; she lived for many decades more. Margureitte now had her little daughter back and, if she was sometimes willful, the young mother would blame Mama Siler for that. “It wasn't natural for my mother to be so obsessed with Patty."
CHAPTER 18
***
Although Patty and Kent were only two years apart in age, they were vastly different in temperament. Patty was stubborn and spoiled rotten, used to having her own way. Everyone in her small world had always catered to her. First her grandmother and her aunts, and now her mother. It was hard not to. She was such a dainty, beautiful child. Her mother liked to use a southern expression to describe her: “Patty’s so pretty she can’t whistle.” When she was happy, her laughter was like bells. When she cried, she could break your heart. It was impossible to say no to Patty.
Kent was a sensitive, studious boy. He was blond as a Scandinavian and his big ears stuck out. He was never cute—his bone structure was too rough-hewn—but he was an endearing little boy whose gaze was straight on. He willingly took a backseat to his sister.
Patty had scant patience with her little brother. In her mind, she was meant to be an only child, and she grew cranky when attention moved away from her. Those first five years in Mama Siler’s house had ruined her for sharing. She needed her spotlight, and she felt cold without it. She looked upon her brother as an interloper. It was more than the normal sibling infighting. “She hated him,” one relative said flatly. “She always wanted him gone.”
He almost went. Kent, who had been born perfect, contracted meningitis shortly after the family arrived in Mineral Wells. The army base was in the grip of a massive epidemic. Kent’s fever raged above 105 degrees for days and he came very, very close to dying. When he finally recovered, the doctors told Margureitte that he was almost totally deaf. After that, Kent always wore hearing aids, but he became adept at reading lips. People could not sense how profoundly deaf he was unless they turned away as they spoke to him. Then he was lost.
Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe let Patty and Kent grow up believing that he was their natural father. He had accepted her children so readily that it seemed the reasonable thing to do. After all, Margureitte was Patty and Kent’s mother, and Clifford was the only father they had ever known. There was no point in bringing up Patty and Kent’s real father. It would only confuse them.
When “Daddy Cliff’ was away in the war, Margureitte often took the children and stayed near his family in Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York. Her in-laws accepted her only grudgingly, not pleased to have their son marry a woman they thought was divorced, but they eventually admitted she was a gracious and refined young woman who took marvelous care of her children. She was an utterly devoted mother. It is quite possible that they, too, believed Clifford was Patty and Kent’s natural father; they often remarked on certain physical traits the children shared with their son.
The children were all any grandparents could ask for. Patty always looked perfect, like a child in the society pages in her starched pinafores and black patent leather Mary Janes or in a bowler hat and fitted coat. His mother put Kent in the proper clothing too. Photos show him with a Buster Brown haircut grimacing into the camera as he wore a tailored tweed coat and a matching Eton cap. His knobby knees look ridiculous above long dark stockings. He wasn’t a boy meant to be dressed up like a fancy pants kid, and he looked uncomfortable and self-conscious.
Kent idolized his stepfather. Although he was a rather small-boned man, he was larger than life to Kent. Clifford was often far away fighting a war, and when he was home he was an awesome figure in his impeccable uniform, an austere—even cold—man who had little patience with small boys. Clifford Radcliffe's own father had been just such a cold man, and generation unto generation it had continued.
Clifford did enjoy little girls because they could be dressed up as pretty as dolls and carried around. He remonstrated with his wife if their clothes weren't perfect and clean; he hated to find tears or holes in their dresses or panties. He found no such charm in rough-and-tumble little boys. But Kent desperately wanted Clifford's approval. He was an intense boy. Early on, he set impossible goals for himself. And even as he set such high standards, he seemed to know already he would never meet them.
***
The Second World War was a lonely time for Margureitte Radcliffe, but not nearly as lonely as the years before she met Clifford. While he was in Germany, she knew he would come back to her—if he could. She believed in her heart that Clifford had been telling her the truth when he said he had adored her from the very beginning, and that he always would. And she was grateful that it was so.
And then Clifford Radcliffe was listed as missing in action, and Margureitte didn't know if he was alive or dead. Word finally came that he had been injured in Germany; he had suffered a facial wound. She would love him no matter how he looked, of course, but Clifford had been so handsome that it seemed especially tragic that he would be disfigured. Margureitte was told only that her husband had been sent to a hospital in England.
His homecoming was as romantic as a love song. One day, she heard a cane rattling against her door. She ran to open it and it was Clifford. Home safe! He had grown a moustache and it completely hid any remaining scars. Everything was all right after all.
Margureitte had a place in the world. She was a married woman, an officer's wife, and she had her foot on a solid rung in the social hierarchy of service wives. Together, she and Clifford moved up through the army ranks. After the war, the family was transferred from one duty station to another as Clifford’s orders came through—to Germany, Japan, Atlanta, Alabama, and back to Germany. They had no children together, but even though Margureitte never bore Clifford’s natural child, he always treated Patty and Kent as his very own.
Clifford would eventually become Colonel Radcliffe; he worked in military intelligence, the most elite and mysterious specialty in the army. He was well suited for it, with his keen mind and a certain natural distrust of the obvious. When he strode the streets of Frankfurt, Germany, in his trench coat, the wind slightly ruffling his iron gra
y hair, Colonel Clifford Radcliffe looked as if he had stepped from the screen of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. And woe be unto any underling who couldn’t adhere absolutely to his interpretation of army regulations.
Margureitte was the ideal colonel’s lady. She never lost her southern accent and her voice was dulcet-toned and graciously modulated. When Clifford and Margureitte stepped out for an army social function, they looked like a million dollars. Her figure was perfect for her strapless chiffon evening gowns, her gorgeous legs looked even more so in her ankle-strapped shoes with three-inch heels, and Clifford was imperiously handsome in full dress blues.
Margureitte would recall later to her granddaughters that, wherever they were stationed, men made passes at her. “Your grandfather was insanely jealous of me at the officers’ club—if I danced with another man, he would become quite upset. It was just easier not to dance with other men, even if they were friends of ours. . . . I loved Papa and I did not want to upset him—I had to lavish all the attention on him.”
Patty seemed to thrive on the peripatetic life-style of an army family. She was such an enchanting child that she was welcome wherever they went. People made a fuss over her just as her grandmother and aunts back home in North Carolina had. Margureitte couldn’t bring herself to cut Patty's golden brown hair and it grew past her waist. Usually, she wore it in tight, long braids looped up with ribbons and barrettes. Sometimes she coaxed Margureitte to let it hang free in thick waves. When they were stationed in Japan, the Japanese reached out shyly to touch Patty's radiant hair with wonder.
The Colonel Radcliffes moved in rarefied circles in the Far East. It was in Japan where Patty became the tennis partner of the young crown prince. Margureitte and Cliff were thrilled to see their lovely daughter accepted by royalty. Patty herself took it for granted; she had always been treated like a little princess. She was not awed by the young prince. When the Radcliffes were reassigned, the royal family presented Patty with a full ceremonial Japanese kimono, obi, and sandals. The heavy satin garments rested in tissue paper in her bureau drawer wherever she lived. Patty loved costumes.
When she reached puberty, she didn't get chubby or sprout pimples. She moved gracefully into her teens and became, if anything, more flawless. At thirteen, the planes of her face changed subtly from the roundness of childhood to the classically defined cheekbones of a genuine beauty. She posed for a snapshot wearing a white organza gown and stole, the fitted party dress held up by two narrow spaghetti straps over creamy white shoulders.
Patty’s hair was cut, finally, and swept back from her face in shimmering waves and then combed under in a pageboy. She wore bright red lipstick and her green eyes were arresting in their intensity. She had a slight overbite but it scarcely detracted from her beauty. Rather, it gave her a pouting, sensuous look. She was fully developed, a southern beauty blooming early.
She looked at least eighteen.
Patty was sweet and loving with adults, but she could sometimes be artless, even cruel, with her peers. She was far and away the prettiest of the many girl cousins in the Siler clan, and she knew it. She had heard it often enough. Once, when she noticed an ugly-duckling cousin staring at her as she combed her hair, Patty turned and whispered, “You might be as pretty as I am someday.”
She pretended to be shocked when the girl ran away crying. But she seemed to be adroit at finding the other girls’ sore spots. Early on, there was something in Patty that went for the jugular, detecting weakness in an adversary and moving in relentlessly.
Patty had never been much of a student, although she was smart enough. She loved sewing and crafts, and she was very talented artistically. She preferred reading romantic stories and poems and, in her mind, she became the heroine. She was Scarlett O'Hara and she was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She was the Highwayman’s sweetheart waiting at her window in the dark of the moon for her lover to come take her away.
Not surprisingly, Patty was fascinated with boys. And they with her. Most of the eighth-grade girls were flat chested and gawky, but Patty Radcliffe looked like a movie star. And, as always, Kent took a backseat to his sister. He was shy and hesitant about asserting himself. His hearing loss, although very well hidden, made him just a little slower on the uptake than his peers. Patty still detested him. Everything he said or did seemed to irritate his older sister.
***
When Patty was in her early teens, Colonel Radcliffe was ordered back to Fort McPherson in Atlanta. It was a happy move for the family; the Atlanta area had become home. And there, history would repeat itself. The Siler women all seemed to blossom early. It was more usual than not for them to bear their first children in their mid teens. When Patty was fifteen, Margureitte was only thirty-three and nervously aware of the dangers of having a beautiful teenage daughter who looked years older than she was. But what could Margureitte do? Patty had never had any rules to follow, no brakes at all to slow her impetuous pursuit of whatever caught her fancy.
She met eighteen-year-old Gilbert Taylor at a party on the Fort Mac base; he was an army brat too, a lanky, skinny young man whom Patty found terribly handsome. She put all her romantic fantasies into the relationship and Gil fell hard for the lovely and seductive teenager.
Suddenly she stepped from childhood to womanhood. She would not answer to “Patty” any longer; she was Pat, or, when the moment called for it, she asked to be called Patricia.
Pat became pregnant almost immediately. She didn’t mind; it meant she could get married. Gil was both proud and jealous. He wanted to believe this was his baby, but he knew Pat had been dating another young man too, a soldier. It was Gil’s baby, but his insecurity with Pat never quite went away. As much as he wanted to believe in her, she kept him slightly off-balance, letting him wonder.
Her parents would have preferred that she marry into an officer’s family. A hearty, boisterous man, Gil’s stepfather, Mike Downing, was only a sergeant and his mother, Eunice, a buxom, flamboyant woman—not the kind Margureitte would have picked as a friend. Eunice dressed to show off her hourglass figure. She was pretty in a flashy way, a great cook, and good-hearted, the very antithesis of the properly reserved colonel’s wife Margureitte had become.
The sergeant worshiped his wife. “I thank God every night for Eunice,” Mike often said. He showered Eunice with presents, including diamonds and a new Cadillac every four years. Eunice had beautiful things, nicer than a lot of officers’ wives. Privately, Margureitte found it all a little vulgar, but there it was. Colonel and Mrs. Radcliffe accepted the inevitable. It could have been worse. Eunice was very well thought of in enlisted circles, and active in projects to benefit army dependents.
A wedding was hastily planned, to be held in the Fort McPherson chapel on September 6, 1952. “All they had in common was physical attraction,” Margureitte later commented ruefully. “Pat was vastly superior in IQ.” The colonel had wanted her to go to a fine school to study art; she was so talented. He felt Pat’s future was ruined by this unfortunate marriage.
Pat wore a white satin gown with a three-quarter-length skirt and an off-the-shoulder neckline edged in net ruching. A short veil fell from her Juliet cap and she carried white orchids. Her white satin pumps matched her gown.
She looked lovely and at least twenty-two. The bridegroom was less regal in a suit two sizes too big for him, a white carnation boutonniere, and saddle shoes—which he had forgotten to change before the ceremony. Gil looked like a kid dressed in his dad’s clothes.
The newlyweds had very little time together. To support his growing family, Gil—whom Eunice called Junior —enlisted in the army. He was sent almost immediately to Korea, and Pat moved back home with her parents. Nothing had really changed. Margureitte and Clifford took care of her, and she used her allotment check for things she wanted.
Of course, there was a baby on the way. Pat was adamant that she wouldn’t go to an army hospital. She didn’t want to be on an assembly line and have some doctor she didn’t even know walk in at the la
st minute to deliver her baby. She had heard the army even made the new mothers get up and take care of their own babies and eat their meals in the cafeteria! She saved her own money so she could have her baby in a nice civilian hospital, Georgia Baptist. Unfortunately, she thought she was in labor twice and was rushed to the hospital each time. As a result, Pat had spent all her savings before she was really ready to have her baby, so she ended up having to go to an army hospital anyway.
When Pat went into actual labor on March 4, 1953, Junior Taylor was far away, but her mother and the colonel drove her to the hospital. She rolled in the backseat, sobbing about how cruel Gil was to put her through such pain. After assuring the doctors that she had extensive nurse’s training, Margureitte was allowed to be right there in the delivery room with Pat. It was, perhaps, the first time that Margureitte was unable to absorb all her daughter’s pain.
The child was finally born, a dark-haired baby girl. Susan. Her mother was sixteen, her grandmother thirty-four. “How I loved that baby,” Margureitte recalled in a gentle, pained voice nearly four decades later. “I don’t know what happened. Susan just became pure evil. Just evil. Of course, I can’t forgive that.”
But the early affection between Susan and her grandmother was mutual. For the first three decades of her life, Susan found Margureitte the “sweetest, kindest person in my whole life. I thought she was perfect.”
CHAPTER 19
***
Unlike his sister, Kent was a diligent student and got excellent grades. He was thirteen when Pat and her baby returned from the hospital. He adored his little niece and gingerly held Susan, grinning with delight at how small she was. Pat let him play with the baby, but she was vaguely annoyed whenever he was around. Pat was a married woman and a mother, only visiting in her parents’ house, marking time until Gil came home; it wasn’t really her home anymore. But she didn’t see it that way. As always, she viewed her brother as the interloper.