Everybody liked Kent; he was as noncombative and lovable as a big Saint Bernard puppy. He never caused a fuss. In college, he studied engineering and played varsity football. Then he suffered another crushing disappointment, which everyone else had seen coming. Despite his hearing loss, Kent had clung to his belief that he would one day be a soldier. But when the time for his physical examination came, there was no way he could pass the stringent hearing tests. His profound deafness kept him out of the army. All the men in his life were career army, and he had wanted so to move into that world. But he couldn’t hear. It was that simple, and that final.
That disappointment added to the loneliness he still felt from the loss of Marianne. It helped when he made a firm platonic friend in Cindi Alan.* Both of them were uncomfortable with their fathers, who were both colonels and as unbending and unemotional as stone. Their mutual problems drew Cindi and Kent together. It wasn’t a romance, but it was a haven.
After a while, Kent wanted more than a buddy and he began dating another girl. Cindi wasn’t hurt when on July 3, 1961, Kent, now almost twenty-two, married Meta Raye Crawford, the daughter of yet another colonel stationed at Fort McPherson. Meta Raye was a dainty, dark haired girl, very pretty, and both sets of parents smiled on the match. Kent was the second of Margureitte and Cliff s children to be married in the chapel at Fort McPherson. But sadly for Kent, the union lasted only a year. There were no recriminations; the marriage simply wound down. Kent had never forgotten Marianne and he could not have Marianne.
After graduating from college, Kent worked as a draftsman for a construction company, and he was as talented with a pencil as Pat was with a needle and thread. His huge hands could produce the most precise and delicate drawings. But even with his parents back in the States, Kent's life became free-floating. He would have liked to be with them more. But he often felt that he was crowding people at their house. Pat and her children lived there most of the time. Her crises and emotional tizzies had begun to accelerate; whenever she was far away from home, something went wrong.
Gil's parents were assigned to the Orlando/Lakeland, Florida, area—where they would eventually retire—and they were understandably eager to see their grandchildren. From time to time, Pat gave in to Eunice Downing's pleas and agreed to bring the children down for a visit. Susan remembered that visits to her other grandparents were fraught with scenes and high drama. “Grandma Downing loved my mother and us and she was a wonderful cook—I got my love of cooking from her—but we hardly ever got to eat there. Somehow, my mother always took offense at something that was said, or she'd get into fights with my dad’s brothers' wives. She’d tell us to get into the car because we were leaving. We’d cry because we were hungry and we wanted to eat, but we’d end up driving around and around the block while Grandma Downing would be out on her front porch begging us to come back.”
On one of the ill-fated visits to the Downings, Pat called home for help, relating a bizarre story about her mother-in-law: “I think she's trying to poison me!"'
Pat's cries of murder never failed her. Although Margureitte and the colonel were on overseas assignment, Margureitte’s sister, Aunt Lizzie Porter, drove all night from North Carolina to Florida to “rescue1' Pat once again.
Aunt Lizzie Porter was a slender, patrician woman who worked for the telephone company and raised her son, Bobby, by herself after her husband left her. Bobby commented that no matter how many times his cousin insisted someone was trying to kill her, no one ever called the police or paramedics—or any authority. Instead, Margureitte or one of the Righteous Sisters would leap into a car and drive great distances to save Pat.
Eunice Downing was bewildered: she never could figure out what she had done to upset her daughter-in-law, but she kept trying to bridge the communication gap—and was invariably left with a table laden with rapidly cooling food and the sight of her small grandchildren sobbing out the back window of a disappearing car.
***
In 1963, Gil Taylor was transferred to Germany, to Bad Tolz—and then to Bad Aibling, near Frankfurt. Pat agreed to go with him. For a while, things went well, but soon Pat was embroiled in feuds with the neighbors. She almost seemed to seek out confrontations deliberately. On occasion, she fought physically with neighbor women, scratching and pulling hair. She told Gil that their husbands were flirting with her and hinted that some had gone further. She was furious when he seemed doubtful.
A theme was emerging. More and more, Pat portrayed herself as an innocent beauty besieged by sex-crazed males who couldn’t keep their hands off her. Gil had heard so many of his wife’s dramatic stories and seen the most minuscule of problems blown into huge scenes too many times. That was just Pat. She craved upheaval, hysteria, and emotional fireworks. And she had to be the center of it all. He was an unsophisticated man and at a loss to know how to deal with her. Usually things blew over if he just ducked and sought cover.
They seldom had a pleasant family outing. When they took weekend trips to Lake Kimsey, Pat accused Gil of drinking. Actually, he scarcely drank at all—and if he did, he had to sneak off to drink one beer. Or they would be in the midst of a happy picnic in an Alpine meadow when Pat would cry out that she had eaten bad mushrooms and been poisoned, probably fatally. It was not the stuff of which happy memories are made. Invariably, their holidays ended in shambles.
When her parents were nearby for backup, Pat could maintain a tentatively even keel, but alone, she invariably turned day-to-day life into chaos. She begged Boppo and Papa to get a transfer back to Frankfurt. She needed them.
Of course they would come. Clifford Radcliffe put in at once for a new assignment. But things continued to go wrong until they arrived. A huge grandfather’s clock fell over on Susan, but luckily she was just far enough past it when it fell that she was scarcely hurt. Her mother explained that the uneven floors of the army housing had caused it to tilt.
The Radcliffes were soon in Frankfurt. Their headlong rushes to come to Pat’s rescue were, in a sense, their finest hours. It seemed to them that it was what they were meant to do. If it also meant that Margureitte had to give up any semblance of a life of her own, well, she would make the sacrifice. Her daughter came before anything. This time, however, even her mother conceded that Pat was out of control and had her committed to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. But not for long. Indignantly, Margureitte proclaimed the doctor “as cuckoo as anyone I ever saw! He actually asked Pat if she saw pink elephants! Imagine . . . ”
With her parents nearby, Pat seemed much better. Then there was a blowup with Gil, and Pat and the children moved in with Boppo and Papa in their house in Falkenstein. She expected that Gil would come to beg her forgiveness, and she would eventually relent and give him one more chance. When he didn’t, she was furious. “Your father’s no good,” she told Debbie and Susan. “He lost your German shepherd gambling.”
Boppo bought two poodle puppies for Susan and Debbie, but they both died. Their grandmother felt so sorry for them as they sobbed, bereft, that she bought them two more. “I can’t stand to see your brokenhearted little faces,” she said.
This time, the puppies survived.
CHAPTER 21
***
Pat wrote to Gil and told him he should come get her. The children missed him and they were too much for her to handle without him. More than that, the men in her parents’ neighborhood frightened her. She hinted that someone was trying to kill her. She wrote her husband that she lived in terror of being raped. She prophesied that Gil would live to regret it if he left her alone.
There was no question that men noticed twenty-six-year-old Pat Taylor. With her clear green eyes, pouty lips, and slight overbite, and the sensual recklessness she exuded, men always looked twice—even though their second look elicited only a cold stare from her. But it was doubtful that she was being sexually stalked. It was even less likely that anyone was plotting to murder her. She had cried wolf too many times.
Susan and Debbie liked Germany and, at ten
and eight, they weren’t particularly disturbed by their mother’s mood swings. They had never known anything else. However, one day Susan and a German friend Dorte, also ten, returned to her grandparents’ house earlier than they were expected. Dorte skipped up the path ahead of Susan but stopped suddenly. When she whirled back toward Susan, she had a bewildered look on her face. She pointed toward a bedroom window and said, “Your mutta—your mutta.”
“What about my mother?’’ Susan asked.
“Look—in the window.” The little girls peeked in the window and saw Pat, alone, hitting herself all over her body with pots and pans. Hard. Susan was embarrassed. She couldn’t explain it to Dorte because she didn’t under stand it herself.
Soon they heard sirens and saw German police cars with their lights flashing screech to a halt outside the house. The next morning, Pat’s body was a mass of bruises, scratches, and welts. She looked as if she had been run over by a truck. She gave a statement to the German detectives about a salesman who had forced his way in, beaten her, and then sexually attacked her.
“Boppo and Papa took her to the hospital and notified my father,” Susan recalled. “I guess he believed that men had been hurting her. He showed up the next day, and we went back to live with him.” But there were no physical signs that Pat had been raped. No semen. No labial or vaginal contusions, none of the characteristic inner thigh bruising that is found in rape victims.
Susan said nothing about what she had seen in the window. She was ashamed, but she didn’t really know why.
***
Pat and Gil had been married over a decade. He was no longer a teenager in love. He had been through the mill with Pat’s theatrics and bizarre stories—but he loved her, and he loved his three children. When Pat was sweet to him, no man could ask for more. If anything, she was even more beautiful than when he married her.
It seemed sometimes to Gil that if he could find out what it was that would make Pat happy and serene—and then give it to her—they could have a good marriage. He knew she needed to be around her family, and that was a start. When they left Germany in 1965 and flew to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for reassignment, Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe remained in Germany, finishing the colonel’s tour of duty there. Gil wondered how Pat would manage without them. After all, they had asked for the Frankfurt post so they could be near her, and now she was heading back to the States.
But it worked out all right. Pat was delighted when they were sent to Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Mama Siler was there and all of her beloved aunts. If her mother and stepfather weren’t close by, she had, at least, the second string.
Gil and Pat even bought a little brick house near Fort Bragg. The house, of course, wasn’t anywhere near what Pat had envisioned. She had become increasingly obsessed with having her own estate—a plantation—a lavish spread of green fields and horse barns with a main house where she could entertain. She had never been able to take care of even an apartment without her mother’s help, but she knew she would be happy if she could only live the way Scarlett O’Hara had lived at Tara before the Civil War.
While driving through the countryside near Warsaw one day, Pat saw the house she really wanted. It was a Victorian mansion surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. The porch roof was supported with tall columns, there was a fountain in the front yard, and even a carriage house—but it was in terrible condition, with peeling paint and a sagging roof. The rose garden was overgrown with weeds and the foundation listed to one side.
Pat had to have it. Gil checked it out and, despite the house’s decrepit condition, the asking price was far beyond anything an enlisted man could manage. He tried to explain that to his wife, but Pat sulked: If only she could have that house, she would be happy. If he loved her, he would find a way to get it for her.
Whatever Gil did for her, it wasn’t enough.
Later, when Pat showed the house to Margureitte, her mother paled and said, “Pat, are you crazy?’’
The house was a stone’s throw from where John Cam Prigeon still lived with his family. Pat probably did not know the significance of that proximity at the time, but her mother was vehement that Warsaw, North Carolina, was no place for her to even think about living.
There is no evidence that Pat Taylor had had anything but imaginary encounters with men other than her husband. She used her stories of men’s unwelcome attentions to keep Gil in line. But at Fort Bragg, she ran into her old boyfriend. He was now a captain, while Gil was only a sergeant. Gil had always been jealous of the man, even though he had long since been convinced that Susan was his own offspring.
That evening there was a terrible scene when Pat and Gil went out to eat with her aunts at Sneads Ferry. Hearing that the captain still found their niece fascinating, the aunts urged her to encourage his interest. In the long run, they advised, she would have a much more solid future than with an enlisted man. They dismissed the fact of her marriage to the father of her three children with the wave of a hand. If being married to an officer would make Pat happy, then that was what they wanted for her.
Gil might as well have been invisible.
Pat was miserable. She didn’t like marriage, and she didn’t like being alone either. She wasn’t interested in the captain. What she really wanted was to be home with Boppo and Papa.
***
The Radcliffes left Germany and were reassigned to Fort McPherson, their last duty station before the colonel’s retirement. They bought a small house near Atlanta, but when they realized that Pat and the children were again planning to move in with them, they knew it wouldn’t be nearly large enough.
They found a house in East Point that Margureitte fell in love with, a low brick rambler with white shutters. It was set far back from the street—Dodson Drive—and the half-acre of land that came with it was dotted with pine and maple trees. After all the years of fixing up and making do with army housing, Margureitte at last had her own home. She would have been happy to live on Dodson Drive for the rest of her life. The house was lovely and the neighborhood was very upper-middle-class.
Kent came to live with them, at least part of the time, and a familiar pattern was soon reestablished. Every time Pat and her children appeared to stay with Boppo and Papa, Kent obligingly moved out of their way. Space was always maintained for Pat.
Kent loved Pat’s kids, but he tried to avoid her. If she had been known to hurt her cousins’ feelings, she invariably aimed directly at Kent’s very gut. “He tried to stay away from her,” Susan recalled. “But she’d follow him from room to room, and if he went outside, she’d find him there too. I think she was trying to drive him out of the house forever. He was so kind and nice, and all my girlfriends had crushes on him. They were only about twelve, but they could see how handsome he was and they just followed him around.”
Pat had no women friends. She had never really had girlfriends, and she had never missed them. She really didn’t like women. She had Boppo and Papa, and she spent a lot of time with her daughters. Susan and Debbie’s friends could not believe that Pat was a mother; she looked like a teenager, and she was so pretty. To young visitors, the ambiance at the Radcliffes’ house seemed wonderful: the great-looking uncle, the darling young mother, and the grandma and grandpa who were so kind. Susan and Debbie were the envy of their friends.
Both of Pat’s daughters would remember her as a good mother. She led a Brownie troop and she delivered her children to Sunday school and picked them up afterward. She gave wonderful birthday parties, and she loved to decorate the house for special occasions. And, of course, she sewed for them. She often told them how wonderful they were, and that they could achieve anything they wanted in the whole wide world.
The one thing Pat wouldn’t allow was anyone interfering with her three children. No one could discipline them but her, not even Boppo. Susan and Debbie and Ronnie belonged to her and she would see to their raising. But Boppo belonged to her too, and she wasn’t going to allow anyone to i
nterfere with that. Subtly but steadily, Pat began to edge Kent out. “She set him up so many times,” Susan recalled. “If she wanted him out of the house, she'd start a fight and then make it look as though he was at fault. Then Papa would say, ‘Kent, why don’t you just leave?’ ”
Kent knew all too well that his presence aggravated Pat. His mother seemed incapable of opposing her. Margureitte was pulled in too many directions, and she was not a woman comfortable with direct confrontation. She had other ways of letting her family know she was unhappy. She would slam the kitchen cupboard doors loudly and mutter under her breath. This never bothered Pat; it made Kent terribly ill at ease. Driven too far, Margureitte also had a histrionic side. She would drop to her knees, hold out her arms, and cry, “What about me? Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me what I want?”
Kent took every word to heart. He would gladly have given her what she wanted—if only he could have. He knew, he told Susan, that if he could just be as good and kind as Boppo was, he would be a better person. Susan and Debbie believed it too. Their grandmother was the most selfless person they had ever known.
Kent usually assumed that his departure would ease things in the house, and so he would leave. Kent could look out for himself, but Pat was so helpless. Boppo had to take care of Pat; anyone could see that.
Choices are like dominoes, one tumbling against the next and then the next until events go out of human control. Margureitte would never really have dominion over her life again. That her own choices had set the scene for tragedy would never occur to her. She would only cry out again and again, “Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me what I want?”
No one ever would.
***
In 1964, Kent had reestablished his relationship with Cindi Alan, and this time their friendship had blossomed into a romance. At twenty-five, Kent was probably happier than he had been since he fell in love with Marianne in Germany. Cindi was attractive and blond and she always had a smile on her face. They were not physically intimate, but Kent believed they soon would be. They had fun together. Cindi was so proud to be seen with Kent. Her parents approved. His parents approved.