Everything She Ever Wanted (37 page)

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-today 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.

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 understand 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 he r. 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 herthey 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 Slier 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 nly live the way Scarlett O'Hara had lived at

Tara before the 0

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 eeling 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