Everything She Ever Wanted (78 page)

Sinclair-fish Pat believed were "poisoned" by pollution.
 
The rest of

the menu featured all prisons' ubiquitous oatmeal, grits, potatoes,

spaghetti, macaroni, rice, and heavy bread baked by inmates and

slathered with greasy margarine.

"It's nothing but garbage," she complained to her parents.

"I won't eat it.
 
A lot of the women get sick from eating that fish,

and the meat is rotten."
 
Indeed, Pat told them she fasted until the

weekends came.
 
Boppo always brought in a cooler full of food.
 
When

the matron occasionally demurred at some container or eating utensil,

she would argue, "Surely there's no harm in that.

Each visit, Boppo and Papa brought Pat a large steak from a Bonanza

franchise, hot dogs from the Dairy Queen, a pizza, and whatever else

she had ordered.
 
She ate every bit, even though so much food at once

usually left her bloated with indigestion.

Later, Pat would earn privileges so that she could keep peanut butter,

crackers, and instant coffee in her cell.

Susan and Bill Alford visited as often as they could, Debbie came less

frequently, and Ronnie only rarely.
 
Ronnie adored his mother, and her

incarceration was a terrible blow for him.
 
His alcohol consumption

increased, and he suffered intense grief and loss reactions when he

broke up with girlfriends.
 
Sometimes, he inured himself with knives or

razor blades, cutting into the skin i of his chest.
 
Ever since he was

a child, his role in his mother's life had been to protect her, to run

errands for her.
 
Her absence left a huge empty place.

Debbie was bereft too.
 
Even though she and Susan I had complained and

laughed at their mother's peccadilloes, Debbie had no anchor without

Pat.
 
Her marriage bounced continually from bad to mediocre, and she

left her husband as regularly as the weather changed.
 
When life away

from him didn't meet her expectations, she went back-but grudgingly.

The first Christmas Pat was in prison was very difficult.
 
Susan and

Bill decided to stay home in Atlanta and have their own Christmas

morning with five-year-old Sean, and Pat took their defection as a

blatant omission of love.

When Debbie and Dawn didn't show up for Christmas either, she was

crushed.

Her letters home were seldom overtly chiding, but rather masterpieces

of artful despair.
 
"Dear Susan, Bill, & Sean," she wrote, Wish I could

have been there to see Sean and all his toys.
 
I really was shocked to

nto the visiting room and see Boppo, when Id expected to see the 3 of

you and Debbie and Dawn.... I realize it's a long way though and you

were probably all tired andjust wanted to be home alone.
 
"Alone" is a

word I'm ve?Y familiar with.
 
It's very "alone" here and the only

things that make it bearable are the visits every weekend.... Don't

think I don't realize the hardship & sac?ifice on all of your time, but

there are no words to tell you what it means to me.
 
It's the

difference between making it & not making it.

Handling it or going all to pieces.... I live for those visits.
 
I need

all of you or I'm lost.

I already know I've lost Tom because I can't "do" things for him like I

could.
 
Who will be next?
 
All I have to offer is my love & my

desperate need for all of you.
 
Every visiting day I am dressed &

waiting hours before.

Silly?
 
No.
 
Necessary to survive in this place.... It's so lonely

here.
 
Forgive the teardrops.

Susan felt awful.
 
And guilty.
 
Even though they would have had to take

a toddler 210 miles to visit Pat in prison, they should have gone.
 
Her

mother had felt all alone on Christmas Day, d Ronnie to eat with her at

the prison with only Boppo, Papa, an Christmas dinner.

gone from Pat's life.
 
And not just in a physical Tom was rison north

of Atlanta, sense.
 
He had been moved to Buford P where his

intelligence and education could be utilized, the op had years before

if Pat hadn't blocked oortunity he might have had made him do hard with

the staff His wife's interference w to obey time at Jackson Prison, no

matter how much he tried the rules and keep his mouth shut.
 
"I had

several people tell me, 4That woman is gonna keep you in hereforever,"'

he remembered later.
 
"I began to believe it.
 
Every time I turned

around, it was 'Pat this' and 'Pat that' and conferences in the

warden's office about something else she'd done.
 
When I got

transferred up to Buford, I said I was gonna start over.
 
With the

prison system, you can't escape what's around you, but if you get

transferred, you sometimes get an opportunity to get a fresh start."

Now Pat was also in prison, and trying to deal with his wife, her

counselor, his counselor, and four-way phone calls between r had to

call my counselor two prisons was hellish.
 
"Her counselo and then I

got to sit there in front of the counselor and carry on itn argument on

the phone, and this guy is sitting there writing g notes of my

reactions and stuff.
 
. . . I just didn't down, making need that."

What had begun in a blaze of romantic fervor ended as many such liaisons

do, flatly and with little emotion.
 
"I told her 'I can't handle this

up here could do is go opposite directions."
 
She agreed to it, an hat

was fine, you know.
 
thing I know, I got the divorce papers.
 
T I just

cut all ties completely."

Tom was really alone.
 
His children were gone-he didn't know where-his

family shattered.
 
His grandparents were too sick to visit him, and in

his heart he accepted that Pat had done it to them.
 
Although he could

not forgive that, some last vestige of loyalty kept him from condemning

her out loud.
 
She was paying.
 
He was grateful to be free of her and

let her go her way.
 
Pat's family was gone from him too.
 
Susan and

Debbie had liked "We had to make a choice," Tom, but now they backed

away.

Susan recalled later, "between sticking by our mother or writing to

Tom.
 
She was our mother, so the choice was already made.

Tom said."
 
'The best thing that we d the next Debbie and I took Dawn

and Sean and went to see Tom oncein 1976, when he was in Jackson-and my

mother was so angry with us.
 
She told us she'd called the state police

to head us off.
 
I think that was an exaggeration, but I'm not so

sure.

We were afraid to go back."

Up in Buford, Tom decided to do the best he could; he had accepted the

bleak fact that he would be in prison for a very long time and that he

would be alone.

In January 1978, Pat suffered a painful insect bite that turned out-at

least given her proclivities-to be a stroke of luck.

She was bitten by a brown recluse spider, whose venom is often

deadly.

Tissue surrounding the bite is subject to necrosis, dies, and sloughs

off.
 
With Pat's history of intractable infections, she was sent to the

state hospital in Milledgeville, which had facilities for treating

prisoners.
 
It was a huge, venerable complex, so old it made Hardwick

look like something from the space age.
 
For months, she scarcely had

to acknowledge that she was serving time.
 
She was allowed to wear her

own negligees, and her relatives could come and go whenever they wanted

to visit; Boppo and her aunts brought all manner of delicacies.
 
It was

not like being in prison at all, and her family loved having her

there.

Pat stayed as long as she could.
 
When she recovered from the spider

bite, she developed other symptoms and it took the doctors a long time

to do all the tests they needed to be sure that she was in no danger of

a stroke or a fatal embolism.

Initially, the Radcliffes had planned to sue the state of Georgia for

the pain and suffering Pat had endured because of the brown recluse

bite, but they eventually dropped the idea.
 
Pat did so much better in

the hospital than she had done in prison.
 
She always had seemed to

enjoy her hospital stays.
 
Finally, though, she had to go back to

Hardwick.
 
It was almost worse to go back than it had been to go to

prison in the first place.

. . .

There is a saying among convicts: "No one does more than a year of hard

time.
 
After that, you adjust."
 
i Pat Taylor (she quickly dropped the

Allanson after she and Tom were divorced) adjusted.
 
Her parents and

her children were loyal and supportive, although Pat was shocked when

Susan and Bill Alford were moved to Houston in 1978 by Bill's law

school as he had company.

Although Bill never went to hoped, Susan had worked until he graduated

with a B.A. from Mercer University.
 
She resigned from Eastern when

Bill became very successful as a sales executive in office supplies.

Pat could not believe that Susan could be so cruel as to desert her.

The Alfords would be transferred to Tampa in 1979, and then back to

Atlanta in 1981.
 
But Boppo and Papa were steadfast.
 
They planned all

their weekends around Pat.
 
They posed for pictures with their

daughter, a service offered by prisons in Georgia on visiting days: for

a small price, employees took Polaroid snapshots of inmates with their

families.

Despite her complaints about the inhumanity of the Georgia prison

system, Pat fared amazingly well.
 
She was still very beautiful, and

her hair and makeup were always exquisite.
 
She had to wear the tan

uniform, but she did clever things with scarves and brooches and made