Before He Wakes (6 page)

5

In the same way Larry had backed into his relationship with Barbara, he would continue having reservations about their marriage. His unhappiness with it as time went on would lead him to withdraw ever more inward. Neither would Barbara find marriage what she hoped it would be, but she would react in a different way, her dissatisfaction and overpowering desires pushing her outward for gratification that could never be achieved.

The need to please and impress others that Barbara had absorbed from her mother would evolve into twin compulsions that would prove Larry right in his reservations. Barbara’s strong sexual urges would drive the first wedge into their relationship, but it would be her second compulsion—her spending—that eventually would prove more damaging.

No signs of the coming strife were evident in their early days together, however. They were consumed by the immediate problems they faced. With a baby on the way, Larry had to find a job. He and Barbara had to have a car, a place to live, furniture and all the other accoutrements necessary to start a household, a family. There would be obstetrician bills to pay, baby things to buy. For a brief period after Larry finished his sophomore year, he and Barbara moved in with his parents. He got a job at Varco-Pruden, a manufacturing plant in nearby Kemersville. Barbara went to work at Wesley Long Hospital in Greensboro, filing insurance forms for emergency room patients.

Although less than pleased about their daughter’s hasty marriage, Barbara’s parents stood by her, making the best of the situation. Her father helped her and Larry to buy a used mobile home in Durham, and Larry had it moved to a rented lot not far from his parents’ house. With a finance company loan, Larry also bought a used car, his first, a Rambler. With their combined incomes, Larry and Barbara made enough not only to get by but to save a little for the baby and to ensure that Larry would be able to return to college in the fall.

When summer ended, they decided that Barbara should keep her job and remain in Colfax so that she would be near her doctor. Larry would return to Boone alone to start his junior year at Appalachian, going back to life in the dorm. His parents would help to look after Barbara.

Larry’s sister Jane, a senior in high school, sometimes spent nights with Barbara to keep her company and to help out if she could. Jane liked her new sister-in-law, found her to be perky and peppy and sometimes giggly. She could talk with Barbara about things that she would have been embarrassed to bring up with her mother or others, and Barbara made her feel good about herself. Jane looked up to her. “I guess I really put her on a pedestal,” she said years later.

But Jane recognized that despite her upbeat facade, Barbara was unhappy with the way her own life was going. Only a year before, Barbara had been excitedly starting college with a bright future. Now she was out of school, married, seven months pregnant, feeling that she had let her mother down, living among strangers in a trailer in the country, driving miles to work at a job that was mostly drudgery. Larry, meanwhile, was off at college, seeing his friends, having a good time, as if nothing had changed.

Barbara never voiced her feelings to Larry’s parents, but they knew that she was unhappy. She clearly resented her situation, hated living in a trailer, detested her isolation, disliked the hovering presence of her watchful in-laws. She was resentful that Larry was able to go on with his life while she was trapped by economics and the child in her belly. Larry’s place, she thought, was at her side, and she said so to Jane. But he remained at college, coming home only on weekends.

In October, Barbara quit her job at the hospital, citing complications with her pregnancy, although the Fords would not be able to remember any complications other than that her feet sometimes swelled. After that, she spent most of her time alone in her trailer watching TV, growing more miserable by the day.

Barbara finally gave birth to a boy on December 2, 1968, at Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro. She was twenty, the same age her mother had been when she was born. The child was named James Bryan in honor of her father, and he would be called Bryan. Larry barely made it to the hospital before his son was born. His mother had called to tell him that Barbara was going into labor, and he drove home so fast that he thought he might have set a new speed record for the stretch of U.S. 421 that separated Boone from Greensboro. On the way in, he stopped at his parents’ house and picked up his sister Jane, who became terrified of his driving, especially after he ran a red light.

His family couldn’t recall seeing Larry quite so exultant as when he first gazed upon his son.

“He was proud,” Jane recalled, “really excited, just on cloud nine.”

When Doris and Henry went with their son to see the baby on the day after his birth, they were startled that Barbara grabbed Larry and began kissing him passionately, even trying to put hickeys on his neck as he pulled away, protesting good-naturedly.

“It wasn’t normal,” Henry recalled. “It just wasn’t normal.”

After Christmas, Larry got a job managing Ivy Hall, an ivy-covered brick building on the edge of the Appalachian campus. It was owned by Barbara’s Greensboro obstetrician, who operated it as a private men’s dorm. The job offered a small salary and a free three-room apartment on the first floor. Larry sold the trailer and moved his family into the apartment. They had to share a bath with the students on the hall.

The new parents were having a tough time making ends meet, so Barbara found somebody to keep Bryan and took a job as a clerk at Sears. As for Larry, the pressure of living on a tight budget while being a husband, father, full-time student and boardinghouse manager was showing. His grades fell from their usual high marks. He wasn’t able to carry as heavy a schedule of classes. To make up for this, he decided to remain in Boone after finishing spring classes in 1969 so that he could attend summer school. Larry’s parents saw him only when they went to the mountains for occasional visits. Larry couldn’t afford trips home.

Larry’s sister Jane enrolled at Appalachian that fall and spent time when she could with Larry and Barbara, sometimes baby-sitting for them. One change that she noticed right away in Barbara was that now that she wasn’t pregnant, she was brazen about sex.

One weekend, Jane recalled, she and her new boyfriend went for a ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway with Larry and Barbara. Barbara kept teasing Larry, grabbing at his crotch and giggling about it. Larry protested lamely, clearly embarrassed. It was obvious that he did not share Barbara’s openness. Worse, although he had not yet admitted it to anyone, he now realized that Barbara’s sexual needs were far greater than his, and the first indications that she would transgress all marital bounds to satisfy them soon began to appear.

That fall, Jane baby-sat one Saturday while Larry and Barbara went to a campus football game. Afterward, Barbara claimed to have spotted a young man in the crowd whom she recognized. The man had attempted to rape her while she was in high school, she said. Now she was certain that he had come to Boone looking for her.

What concerned Larry about her story, he later told his mother, was that Barbara had seemed not so much frightened by the incident as excited by it, as if it were a scene in some TV show in which she was the star—or some high school fantasy coming true.

This was not the first time that Barbara had told him about men who supposedly had sexual designs on her. Several times she had mentioned that “dirty old men” had said suggestive things while she was working at Sears. Was it actually happening, or was she saying it only to make Larry jealous and whet his interest? Was she projecting onto stray men what she wanted herself?

In October, Barbara took a better-paying job as a teller at a Boone branch of the First National Bank of Eastern North Carolina, later to become Northwestern Bank. Soon Larry would begin hearing about men who made suggestive remarks to her there as well. Before the year was out, Barbara would insist that he do something about the sexual harassment she was suffering from her boss at the bank. “How many times did you do it last night?” she claimed he would ask her with a leer. Finally, Larry went to the bank and confronted the man, he later told his parents, only to have him deny it.

In the spring of 1970, Larry finally finished his classwork. All that stood between him and his career was a semester of student teaching, and that could be done anywhere in North Carolina. He and Barbara left their cramped apartment and returned to Guilford County to live briefly again with his parents, intending to work and save money that summer. Larry went back to work at Varco-Pruden. Barbara got a job as a secretary at Pilot Freight Company in Kernersville.

Larry was concerned about one thing that summer: the draft. With the war continuing to escalate in Vietnam, he was certain that he was going to face military service soon. His college deferment would be gone as soon as he finished his student teaching. He was fascinated with airplanes, and long had dreamed of becoming a military pilot. When he mentioned this to Barbara, though, his parents later claimed, “she threw a fit.”

“You’ll be gone four years,” she said.

Nevertheless, Larry took Air Force aptitude tests. When he was told that he was qualified for navigator training but not pilot training, he tried to hide his disappointment, but decided that he didn’t want to commit four years to become a navigator.

One day early that summer, Barbara returned from a trip to Greensboro and said that she had checked by the draft board and had bad news. Larry was about to be called up.

Larry talked to his father, who urged him to see about a deferment. After all, his father noted, he had a wife and child and was still technically a full-time student, at least for another six months.

But Larry said that he would have to face his military obligation sooner or later, and he might as well go ahead and get it behind him. He didn’t want to go into the army and risk becoming fodder for jungle patrols in Vietnam, so he joined the Marine Reserves. That way, he figured, he only would have to be away for six months of active duty, then he could return to do his student teaching and finish his degree.

Later, the Fords would learn that Larry had been in no danger of being drafted. Clearly, Barbara had made up the whole thing. But to what purpose? Was she trying to get Larry to make some bold move to break from his home and parents, much as she had done? Was she simply trying to get him away to free herself to see others? The Fords would come to suspect the latter.

Late that summer, Larry went to San Diego for basic training, leaving Barbara and his twenty-month-old son to live with his parents, who still had three children at home. Doris and Henry were glad to have Barbara, but she was resentful and frustrated about being there. Sometimes she would go out at night, leaving Bryan in their care, and would return late, “all bubbly.” They suspected that she was seeing other men, but they had no proof and were reluctant to confront her about it. They were equally reluctant to mention their suspicions to Larry for fear that they might be wrong and he might think they were trying to turn him against Barbara.

In October, she announced that she had a dinner appointment for a job interview in High Point. She got a permanent and left for the appointment in her best clothes.

“She came in excited,” Henry later recalled. “Boy, she was high.” She had gotten the job, she said. It was at a bank. She showed off a set of sheets and pillowcases that she had gotten for taking it, along with $300 in cash that she said was a salary advance. This would be only the first of several times that Barbara would claim to have received expensive gifts from grateful employers.

She would have to live in High Point, and she started looking for an apartment immediately. The Fords were relieved that she no longer would be where they could observe so many of her activities. Some of them, they’d begun to believe, were things that they’d just as soon not know about.

Early in October 1970, Barbara moved all of her belongings out of the Fords’ house and into a new two-bedroom apartment in High Point, a city famed for its furniture market, the largest in the world. On October 16, she started her new job at North Carolina National Bank, or NCNB, as a clerk in the consumer loan department of the bank’s North Main Street branch.

Larry returned from his Marine training four months later, in February, and settled into the apartment with Barbara. It was too late for him to do his student teaching that year, so he took a job at Sears in downtown High Point, selling draperies, carpet and furniture.

The two fell into a low-key lifestyle dictated by their limited income and centered on their two-year-old son. They occasionally played cards or went out to eat with a friend of Larry’s from work, James Whitley, and his wife, who lived in the same apartment complex. During this time Larry and James developed an interest in karate and began talking about signing up for classes. And on Sundays Larry and Barbara went regularly to visit his parents for the big dinners that Doris cooked.

This was not the kind of life that Barbara had envisioned for herself, and she soon felt stifled by it. She clearly wanted something grander, more exciting, more important. And she wanted to move toward it much faster than her means allowed.

To Larry’s family, she was always “putting on airs.” They thought that she considered herself to be from a higher social class, and that her mother thought Barbara had “married down” when she chose Larry. Barbara tried to prove that she was better than others by buying things.