Child Bride (4 page)

Her sanctuary was her mother. Priscilla and Ann had an almost mystical bond, distinct from her mother’s love for Donny and the other children who would follow. “She was a love child,” said Michael Edwards, Priscilla’s boyfriend when she was in her thirties, who knew the story of her childhood. “And love children, if you look through history, are always different.” Whether
out of guilt or because Priscilla was her connection to her lost love, Ann Beaulieu doted on her daughter. “My mother has always been a best friend to me,” Priscilla remarked later in life. “She was always there for me, and she always saw my side. Not that I was a perfect kid, but she was always very sensitive to all my feelings.”

The dynamics of the family were established early. A childhood chum of Priscilla’s recalled that Paul Beaulieu was often away on military exercises and that when he was home, he was a remote authoritative presence. Though Ann lived in fear of him and of disturbing the status quo, she was herself a formidable figure in the Beaulieu household. Now that she no longer needed to work, she lavished her attention on her home and her family, predominantly Priscilla. In matters involving her daughter, Ann ruled. “I think he was the man of the house,” as Austin neighbor and friend Dora Keen put it, “but when it came to Priscilla, I think
she
would be the more dominant. She wanted the best and the most and all for Priscilla, and if it was to be done, that would be
her
challenge.”

The family had little money. Priscilla would remember her mother using orange crates as end tables and concealing them with hand-sewn decorative cloths, a simple metaphor for the house of secrets and lies. However much the Beaulieus struggled financially, Ann spared no expense where her daughter’s appearance was concerned. Priscilla as a child was more than pretty; she was exquisite. “She actually did look like a china doll,” observed a grammar school beau, Bob Ellis. “You couldn’t have
drawn
a prettier child.” Ann recognized and exploited that beauty, fashioning for her daughter, at six and seven, coordinated cowgirl costumes and fancy dresses with matching hats and purses and gloves. Priscilla, an early friend remembered, hated to be called Prissy, but the name was perfect for her. In home movies, she waved at the camera, smiling and tilting her head like Shirley Temple, completely at ease in her role as little princess.

By the second grade, Priscilla had gotten a full dose of military life. She had been uprooted from school in the middle of first grade, when Paul Beaulieu was transferred to Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico; the following year she was enrolled in three second-grade classes in three states, ending the year at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas. The moves were difficult for Priscilla, who later said, “It makes you grow
up with a very insecure feeling. You begin to wonder who your friends are—and what are friends.”

One would not have guessed that she felt insecure. Early teachers considered Priscilla extremely friendly, “pleasing,” “cooperative,” “dear.” Pat Conroy, author of
The Great Santini
, identified this paradox—the ability to appear outgoing yet feel isolated—as a common characteristic of military children. They “can engage anyone in a conversation,” he wrote, “become well-liked in a matter of seconds, yet there is a distance … a slight shiver of alienation, of not belonging.” Katherine Patton, Priscilla’s third second-grade teacher, got a glimpse of the lost little girl beneath the sweet, cheery facade. “She was kind of a little clinging vine, she stayed right along by my warm side!”

Ann was ever-present, offering her services as Mrs. Patton’s room mother, volunteering herself and Priscilla for the class operetta. Priscilla’s beauty exacerbated her growing sense of alienation. She was considered “the prettiest girl in school,” she later wrote in her memoir, the one who was “always stared at.” She had no girlfriends, even though people remember that she was nice to everyone. “She was living in her own private little world,” recalled her later boyfriend Michael Edwards, who talked to Priscilla about her childhood. “I think she was always a little dreamer—back, away from everybody. You could see it in her eyes.”

Priscilla, from her earliest childhood, was a boy’s girl. She had the instincts of a born coquette. There were always boys around Priscilla, even when she was five and six. “I don’t know how her parents could have missed that from the time she was a couple of days old, they were going to have to watch her very carefully,” a school friend, Linda Williams, would say. With boys, Priscilla had an instant comfort level that was missing in other areas of her life.

She has said that she felt
different
as a child—beyond being a military kid or feeling prettier than the other girls in school. Her almost angelic demeanor concealed a conflicted and troubled psyche, and the rare beauty that defined Priscilla also confused her. She was aware, even as a small child, that she only slightly resembled her mother. “I had nothing of my
father
,” she remarked later. “Nothing. You start thinking: Well, I’m different. There’s something wrong with me. Why am I different? Why don’t I
look
like them? Why am I different in
looks
than they
are?” She had the odd, unsettling suspicion that she was from another family. It was more than a child’s vivid imagination; Priscilla could
feel
it. She felt separate from her younger brother, Don, and the four siblings who would follow. “Because I knew that I carried—I knew there was something that was different about me.”

“She felt different from her brothers and sisters because of the reality that they weren’t truly her brothers and sisters,” proclaimed Mike Edwards. “I think she sensed that. It’s in the genes—you
know
when you’re really connected. She doesn’t look like her sister, and she doesn’t look like her brothers.”

Priscilla had to wonder why there were so few photographs of her as a young child, aside from the studio portraits Ann submitted to baby contests and a few snapshots of her with her grandmother Iversen. There were no pictures of her with Paul Beaulieu before the age of three. “It was explained to me that there were no photographs of myself taken with my father [because] he was in the military and he was away. And it made sense to me, and I never went any further than that.” Still, Priscilla could not shake the feeling that she did not belong.

Priscilla’s sense of separateness from her family gave rise to the same kind of longing that came with being a child of the military, traveling from post to post. Mary Edwards Wertsch, a captain’s daughter who wrote
Military Brats
, about the effects of growing up inside the military, concluded there is “only one antidote”:
belonging.
“It is not easy for a military brat to learn what that even means, much less to find it. Yet belonging is the single greatest quest of our lives.” For Priscilla Beaulieu, who felt alienated from friends
and
family, the quest to belong, that “powerful unnamed yearning” that Wersch says is found in most military children, was even more profound.

There is no such thing as a secret in a family, according to John Bradshaw, the psychologist and author of
Family Secrets;
there is only denial. Priscilla was five or six when she first became aware of the unusual atmosphere around her house. She knew there was
a secret.
“When there is a secret in a family,” she recalled later, “there’s always this sense of wondering. Of ‘Well, why are they avoiding me?’ or ‘Why hasn’t this question been answered?’ or ‘Why are they being so secretive?’ or ‘Why are they whispering?’ ”

Bradshaw says that when a situation is confusing or a child does not get information, he or she will create fantasies. So it
was with Priscilla. “When you’re left with all these mysteries,” she said later, “you start assuming things
yourself.”
Priscilla imagined she was born to different parents, that her real father was a faraway, unapproachable handsome prince. “My defense was to dream—to slide into a fantasy world, a world always teeming with animals.” She took solace in stray birds and cats, bringing them home to nurse them to health. She found it easier to relate to animals than to people because “animals have no ulterior motives. And once they love you they’re always there.”

When she was five or so, Priscilla discovered a more romantic means of escape. “My father listened to opera. Mario Lanza, Caruso. We had all of their albums. Liberace, too.” Listening to Mario Lanza, the darkly handsome, emotional tenor, sing “Be My Love” during the summer of 1950 touched a chord in the lonely, displaced little girl. “There was such strength in his voice and the songs that he sang. I used to sit down by the record player and listen to them.” Enthralled by the magic of that powerful voice, Priscilla could imagine herself outside the house of whispers, comforted by the virile, masculine image of Mario Lanza. “And then someone said one day that he led a very lonely life, and I just became very fond of him. And had a lot of empathy for him also.” The identification was complete. Not only did Lanza represent her savior, now Priscilla fantasized she could save him. “I used to play his records and talk to him and try to make him feel better.” They were twin souls, lonely kindred spirits.

“She went into her own make-believe world,” asserted Mike Edwards, who derived much from childhood photos of Priscilla. “They weren’t pictures with great smiles—more kind of looking back, withdrawing into her little world. It was almost like she was waiting for someone like Elvis to come along.”

No one outside of Tupelo and Memphis had ever heard of Elvis Presley in 1950. He was a fifteen-year-old boy attending Humes High in Tennessee, plucking at his guitar and singing gospel for his mama. Like Priscilla, Elvis was a lonely child, unusually attached to his mother, with a powerful affinity for Mario Lanza. Years later, during the filming of the 1972 documentary
Elvis on Tour
, he would tell the directors, Pierre Adidge and Bob Abel, that Lanza influenced his musical style more than any other singer.

For Priscilla, Mario Lanza represented a powerful, inchoate longing, a yearning for something she could not identify: the father she never really knew, yet psychically could feel.

There was something else that set Priscilla apart as a child, something more than the recurring flashbacks, the feeling of belonging to another family, the muffled conversations between her parents. Beginning when she was six or seven, an age when most little girls’ imaginations extend no further than dolls and tea parties, Priscilla Ann Beaulieu was seized by an odd presentiment that something extraordinary was going to happen to her. She was not certain what or how or when, but “I just knew that there was something that was going to happen in my
life.
That was going to be very big. And it was going to create a big effect—on me
and
my family.”

Except for her almost supernatural beauty, her birthright from her otherwise forgotten father, there was nothing unique or distinctive about Priscilla Beaulieu as a child that would have given her reason to entertain this premonition.

Time and events, of course, would prove her right.

B
y 1955, when she was ten, Priscilla had attended six schools from Connecticut to Maine to New Mexico to Texas and back. Despite her beauty—or perhaps because of it—she said that she “never fit in. It wasn’t like people accepted me with open arms. I was always the
odd
one. Because, being in the military, you have to always find where you belong, who’s the group that’s going to take you in, where your little niche is.”

She started fifth grade at I. W. Podham in Austin, where she had attended part of the second grade. It was in Austin that a sister, Michelle, was born. While Ann still indulged Priscilla, certain rules and chores were strictly enforced. Most of them were necessary because of the family’s meager finances and Priscilla’s unfortunate position as the eldest child. She was often called upon to baby-sit, “and her allowance would be docked for little things—for instance, if she didn’t close the door right away, letting cool air out,” recalled a Texas friend. “In some ways they were mean to her.”

Still, Carol Ann Heine, a close friend of Priscilla’s from the fifth through the eighth grade, said that in most other ways “Priscilla was pretty much in the bracket of spoiled child. She pretty much had her way; she was very pampered.” Christine Laws, another classmate, remembered that during homemaking class “you could tell she hadn’t been around the kitchen much.”

Ann continued to dress her like a doll, in layers of petticoats and voluminous hoop skirts. If the other girls were wearing shorts, recalled classmate Frances Rhodes, Priscilla’s would be made of gold lamé.

The cult of Priscilla’s beauty also served to bond mother and daughter. Ann shared beauty secrets with Priscilla, tutoring her in the rituals of the toilette, showing her how to rinse her golden brown hair in beer to bring out the sheen. The other fifth-grade girls at the half-country, half-military Popham school looked upon Priscilla’s “beautiful shining hair” in awe, finding her special rinse “exotic.” Ann Beaulieu exaggerated her own glamour, telling her daughter she’d been a photographer’s model in high school, posing for portraits and modeling for department stores. This modeling career, however, escaped the notice of Ann’s best friend Fay, her cousin Margaret, and her other classmates in New London. “Maybe Priscilla meant her mom always
wanted
to [model],” offered Pam Rutherford, Priscilla’s closest childhood friend, whom she met in the fifth grade. Ann, the once-frustrated secretary, was channeling her own thwarted ambitions into Priscilla.

For her part, Priscilla’s interests clearly did not lie in school. She admitted later that she was more interested in having fun. “Grades were not Priscilla’s strong suit,” her classmate Christine said. “And there was not the emphasis at home either. Let’s face facts. If your child is going to do well in school, Mother and Daddy have to be involved.”

Priscilla had a few girlfriends at the start of fifth grade—including Donna Brooke and Linda Williams, both popular, outgoing girls—but still no close friend. Other girls saw her, she would later write in her memoir, as “a rival, afraid I’d take their boyfriends away.” Yet she was not remembered that way. “No, she wasn’t that type of person,” suggested Christine. “You weren’t
jealous
of Priscilla. She was just Priscilla. And she wasn’t snobby; she was friendly and outgoing.” She did gravitate toward boys, though. “And all the little ol’ boys, they liked Priscilla a lot,” said her fifth-grade teacher, Ann George, chuckling. “They really did!”