Everything She Ever Wanted (35 page)

husband that there were rats running all over the place, that Pat and

the babies were in "terrible condition.
 
They were the most pitiful

sight when I got there."
 
Susan remembered how happy they all were to

see her grandmother arrive, a one-woman army to the rescue.
 
"We adored

her.
 
When Boppo showed up, we knew that things were going to be under

control again."

When they arrived back in Gary, Kent gave up his bedroom to his sister

and moved into the living room.
 
It would be a horoughly entrenched

pattern.
 
Rescuing Pat from danger was gradually becoming the entire

thrust of Margureitte Radcliffe's life.
 
With her mother's enthusiastic

support, Pat would spend the next several years traveling back and

forth between her parents'home and Gil's duty stations.

Gil was sent to Iceland, Germany, and Washington, D.C and he usually

went by himself.
 
There was a plethora of emergencies, each one only

serving to convince Margureitte that Pat and the children should stay

with her.
 
Pat was driving one day when Deborah accidentally hit the

door handle and fell out into the street.
 
Luckily, there were no cars

behind them.

Susan's baby book bears a cryptic notation.
 
"Age 3. Susan run over by

a truck.
 
Not injured."
 
Susan does not remember being hit by a

truck.

How odd that all of her baby presents, all of her measurements, her

first words, were listed in her baby book, but something as potentially

tragic as being "run over by a truck" has no details at all.

. . .

When Susan was four and Deborah two, Gil was assigned to the

Philippines and he persuaded Pat to bring their little girls and join

him there.
 
Things would be better; he would make her happy.

He adored his beautiful young wife and was thrilled that she would

leave her mother behind and come to him.

While they were in the Philippines, Deborah caught a fungus infection

from her cat and all her hair fell out.
 
She was partially bald for the

next three years, but Pat designed clever hats to cover her hair

loss.

Every dress had its matching hat.

She was a superb seamstress and made most of the two little

girls'clothes.
 
Susan and Deborah always wore either matching or

contrasting outfits for special occasions-dressed not unlike the way

their mother had dressed as a child.
 
Pat took scores of pictures of

her daughters and of the events that marked the passing years of their

lives.
 
Susan and Deborah in Easter coats and bonnets, Valentine's Day

dresses, Christmas dresses-two browneyed little girls looking like

dolls.
 
To glance through the Radcliffe and Taylor family albums was to

see Christmas dinners, Halloweens, Easters, and birthdays right out of

Good Housekeeping.
 
Everyone was smiling.
 
Everyone was dressed

precisely right.
 
Boppo and Pat, of course, wore frilly aprons as they

carved a turkey or carried in a birthday cake.
 
"It was strange," Susan

recalled.
 
"At that time, Mom didn't care how she dressed-but she

always wanted us to look perfect."

Pat went through a period when her clothes were almost matronly.
 
Gone

were the soft dreamy dresses of herearly teens.
 
In her twenties, she

wore high-necked blouses and long skirts in muted colors.
 
She parted

her hair on the side and pulled it back in severe tight curls.
 
Heavy

harlequin glasses hid her green eyes, and her shoes were Cuban heeled

and sensible.
 
And all the while her figure was as slim and attractive

as always.
 
But it was hidden beneath those clothes, her sensuality

blunted.

Despite Deborah's miserable fungus, they all enjoyed the Philippines

for a while.
 
But then it began to unravel.
 
Pat wrote her mother that

she had suffered two miscarriages and she needed Boppo to come help

her.
 
"I was four or five months pregnant, and I was all alone.
 
I

didn't know what to do, so I just sat on the toilet and flushed them

away."

But this time her mother couldn't come; she was in Europe with her

husband at his duty station and she had to choose.
 
For once, she chose

Cliff.

Susan had a vague memory of being injured while they were in the

Philippines.
 
"Somehow, my hand was crushed.
 
I don't know if it got

shut in a car door or what happened.
 
I only know it was Christmas time

and I was in the hospital and I heard them singing carols in the

hall.

My mother came to see me, but I wouldn't look at her.
 
Children

remember things oddly.
 
I heard the carols and I turned my face to the

wall until my mother went away.

Pat wrote again to her mother, saying her doctor had told her that Gil

was an animal and was wearing her out with his insatiable demands for

sex.

Margureitte was horrified, and when Pat became pregnant again, her

mother insisted that she return to the States.
 
Once more Pat and the

girls went back to "family."
 
Boppo and Papa were still in Germany, but

Pat and the girls lived in North Carolina with Mama Siler, who was

delighted to have her precious Patty back.

This time Pat gave birth to a boy.
 
Ronnie Taylor was born in November

of 1958.
 
Pat was twenty-one, immature, indulged, and seemingly

incapable of taking care of her husband and her children without the

support of her family.

She also tended to embroider on the truth a little and was given to

hysteria and histrionics.
 
But her family considered her only a little

highstrung.
 
And, in upper-class southern women, being high-strung was

almost an admirable trait, bespeaking fine genes.
 
The Silers had

produced a number of "high-strung" females.
 
When their antics became

tiresome, the rest of the family intoned, "She needs professional

help."
 
Otherwise, they scarcely noticed a tizzy or two.

In 19S9, Pat and the children again tried living with Gil-in the

Magnolia Gardens Apartments in Falls Church, Virginia.
 
"I think we

were too much for her-without my grandmother to help," Susan

recalled.

There was a new, frenetic quality about Pat.
 
She fought constantly

with a woman who lived in an upstairs apartment.
 
Margureitte, by now

back in the States, was appalled when she visited and heard Pat

screaming insults.
 
"You're actin like a fishwife, Pat," she gently

remonstrated.

Pat kept the door locked all the time, frightening her children with

warnings that someone was trying to get in.
 
Susan yearned to breathe

fresh air and escaped outside whenever she could.
 
She wandered all

over the neighborhood-alone-but felt safer than when she was locked in

with her mother's fears.

There was no one trying to break into the apartment; Pat simply wanted

Gil to come home and help her, and her stories usually got her what she

wanted.

She was often hysterical, but that too served a purpose.
 
When she was

small, she had only to stamp her foot and pitch a fit to get her way.

Now, she was using the same methods.
 
And what Pat really wanted was to

go home, to live with Boppo and Papa and have all the onerous burdens

of parenthood lifted from her shoulders.

She also wanted to be rich.

Pat still dressed her children with exquisite good taste.

She fixated on the way Jackie Kennedy dressed John-John, and she wanted

Ronnie to look just like him.
 
She saved her money to buy her babies

the very best.
 
But on at least one occasion, she was apprehended for

shoplifting in a Falls Church department store.

She had hidden some Feltman Brothers toddlers' outfits in her

clothes.

Among the most expensive children's clothing made, Feltman Brothers'

garments were far beyond Pat's budget.

Margureitte was aghast.
 
"That terrible, terrible, rude store detective

took her to the front office and just treated her very, very badly.
 
We

could have sued them, but we decided not to."

Things in Falls Church were not going well.
 
Ronnie was having

convulsions, which would continue regularly until he was almost twelve,

and Pat wrote that no one in the entire state of Virginia was even

civil to her.
 
When Margureitte heard her daughter's version of her

life in Falls Church, she insisted that she move home to Atlanta at

once.

Of Margureitte's two children, her son was the one who truly needed

some bolstering, but he rarely asked for help and Pat's demands drowned

him out.
 
Now a handsome and powerfully built young man, Kent had come

home from Germany with a broken heart.

He had fallen completely in love-the all-out, noprotective-walls first

love that happens only once.
 
The girl was German, tall and

flaxen-haired.
 
Her name was Marianne Krauss.
 
She loved Kent too.

She was an extremely nice girl and she wanted to marry him.
 
But she

couldn't even imagine leaving her parents to go off to America

forever.

Nor could Kent face never going home again.
 
In the end, when he left

Germany he was as alone as he had ever been.

His troubles piled up and he occasionally drank too much.

Sober, Kent was as gentle as most really big men are; he had nothing to

prove.
 
His strength was awesome.
 
Even a little tipsy, he was

good-natured.
 
But if he drank a few bottles of beer or too many rum