Everything She Ever Wanted (36 page)

and Cokes over his limit and someone put him down, he went wild.
 
Kent

could level a bar in no time.

But that really wasn't him.
 
The episodes were aberrations.

Kent, when in emotional pain, was far more likely to turn inwardto

blame himself for whatever went wrong.

If there were secrets among the members of the Siler clan, and indeed

there were, the world was allowed to see only their staunch loyalty and

sense of family.
 
Charity toward others and religious devotion were

also prominently on display.
 
Susan and Deborah, as very little girls,

delighted in car trips with their great-aunts.

"They sang-oh, how they sang," Susan recalled.
 
"We'd be going to

Sneads Ferry for a fish dinner and the car was always alive with

music.

Hymns, you know-like'The Old Rugged Cross,' and 'We Will Gather at the

River,' and 'Amazing Grace."
 
We loved those times.

Each aunt would try to outdo the others, and it just made us feel safe

and happy."

Their aunts-"the Righteous Sisters"-often made Susan itnd Debbie

giggle.
 
Susan's favorite was her great-aunt Thelma, who generally did

and said what she felt at the moment-even to complete strangers.
 
She

said grace at the lunch counter at Rose's Dime Store in Jacksonville,

because that was the Christian thing to do and she didn't care who

snickered.
 
Thelma often went up to fat women and said, "I know I'm a

stranger, but I just have to tell you that you have such a pretty face

it's a shame you went and let yourself get so stout."
 
She had been

known to offer intimate marital counseling to couples at her church

when they hadn't asked for it.
 
She never failed to be amazed when

people did not seem to appreciate her Christian concern.
 
"But I loved

her so," Susan recalled.
 
"She didn't think she was pretty at all-not

like my other aunts-but she was just so good."

Hospital visits and funerals were always a large part of the Silers'

social life.
 
The Rev.
 
and Mrs. Siler had, of course, raised their

brood to care tenderly for the sick and to give the recently deceased a

properly somberbut loving-goodbye.
 
"I know it sounds awful," Susan

said, "but I never saw Boppo happier than when she was on her way to do

for the sick.
 
She'd go sit all day in the hospital with people she

barely knew, but she'd always say they were practically her best

friends.
 
Of course, if they were sick too long, it got to be old and

she lost some of her enthusiasm.
 
And she always took a hot dish to the

house when somebody died.
 
I was mortified once when she stood there

and gave the whole recipe for the escalloped corn she brought-it had to

be shoe-peg corn and all-to these people who were grieving.

Since the Silers lavished such caring on strangers, they were

absolutely steadfast in their support of one another.
 
Pat Taylor's

closest relatives were a brick wall against the outside world-her

mother and stepfather, her grandparents, her aunts.
 
Whatever pickle

she got herself into, they came running.

There were those in her extended family, however, who looked upon her

with slightly less enthusiasm.
 
Pat's peers in the Siler family

thoroughly disliked her.
 
Beginning in August 1966, the huge Siler

Family Reunion would be held in White Lake, North Carolina.
 
It was an

annual tribute to the late Rev.
 
Siler and a celebration on a grand

scale, with mouth-watering barbecue, fried chicken, potato salad,

"heavenly hash," biscuits, and every pie known to mankind.
 
Women

cooked in shifts, and family members brought handcrafted items to be

auctioned off in the Siler Auction.
 
The proceeds were used to put fine

young men through Baptist Bible colleges.

Pat's things always drew the highest bids at the auctions and perhaps

that was cause for some resentment.
 
But over the years Pat's female

cousins had stored away anecdotes about her that gradually became Siler

folklore.
 
Little Patty Radcliffe, the "beautiful" cousin, apparently

managed either to anger or to hurt the feelings of most of her plainer

kin.
 
When Susan and Deborah grew older, they were invariably

buttonholed at the Siler reunions by someone still smarting from Pat's

cruel-but deft-tongue.

"No one ever seemed to forget whatever it was Mom did to them," Susan

said.
 
"They'd always want to tell us all about it.
 
And Debbie and I'd

say, 'Wait a minute.
 
We weren't even born at the time you're talking

about."
 
Mom just had a way of riling people, and getting under their

skin.
 
The aunts still loved her like they always did-but, well, you

have to understand the Silers.

The cousins would say they loved her too, but they didn't like her.

Nobody in our family would ever, ever admit they didn't love another

Siler."

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 The names of some individuals have been changed.

At their first mention in this book, these names are marked with an

asterisk.

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 "rescue" 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 Tholz 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