Everything She Ever Wanted Read online

  But there were times when Pat’s maternal talents were not quite so genteel. Susan recalled riding in a car with her mother when she was twelve or thirteen and asking a question about sex. “We were driving in the car and my class had been studying the population explosion. I didn’t know the first thing about sex, and I said, ‘Well, nobody should blame somebody because God put a baby in her stomach.’ My mother laughed and said, ‘Don’t you know anything? The man puts his penis in the woman’s hole and wiggles up and down.’ She went on telling me about sex in the ugliest, most graphic terms. There was nothing about love or no birds or bees—just a blunt explanation of what men did to women. I was stunned. I don’t know why she told me that way. When I was older, I told Boppo about it and we both laughed.”

  All in all, the years living with Boppo and Papa were good. Neither Debbie nor Susan remembered them as unusual in any way. They adored Boppo. And Boppo told them constantly how much she loved them. Boppo herself was happy. She had her daughter and her grandchildren. Her sisters were an easy drive away and she saw them often. Mama Siler was eighty-six and frail—but still with them. The Silers continued to meet every August at White Lake, North Carolina, for the annual reunion. Aside from missing Kent, life was as good as it had ever been for Boppo. She had never had a house she loved as much as the one on Dodson Drive. She never wanted to leave it—and, apparently, neither did Pat.

  ***

  Sergeant Gilbert Taylor was nothing if not persistent. He still loved Pat, and in his mind, it was only a matter of time until he gathered his family around him again. He knew what it would take, and when he transferred back to Fort McPherson in 1969, he was prepared to give his wife what she wanted. Pat had always dreamed of a house finer than any house a Siler had yet known. Hell, she still wanted her Tara. She always had and she always would, and if he ever hoped to get her out of her mama’s house, he was going to have to find a way to give her what she demanded.

  They went out driving in the country looking for likely properties. Finally, they found some land for sale on Tell Road. They could have missed the place so easily; it was west of East Point in the Ben Hill district, beyond No Name Road, and dead-ended at the Atlanta city limits. It didn’t look like city at all. It was deep country with thick trees up to the road and wetlands that some homeowners had dammed up into algae-covered ponds. The piece for sale was way back in, past a log cabin-like place inhabited by a maiden lady of indeterminate age named Fanny Kate Cash, who had lived there all of her life. It was Fanny Kate who was selling off the back piece of land.

  There was no house, no road, nothing but trees. But Pat wanted it. Here they would build their mansion and create a wonderful riding ring for horse shows. She would give riding lessons to help meet their bills. She assured her husband that the spread at 4189 Tell Road S.W. would be known in horse show circles all over the South.

  Gil had to work three jobs to pay for it: his regular army assignments, of course, and then as a caterer loading meals on airplanes and for the J. C. Penney Company . He had always had dark circles under his eyes, but now they turned almost black. Fearing the pace was going to outright kill him, he tried to explain to Pat, “Honey, I can’t make it. I’m only getting four hours to sleep at night.”

  She shook her head impatiently. “Sure you can. You just have to try harder.”

  He did—and they bought the Tell Road property. They cleared and graded a spot for a riding ring and put up bleachers, bright lights, and fences. However, the mansion Pat visualized was far beyond their means; that would have to wait. In the meantime, they found two houses that were being sold dirt cheap because they had to be moved. One was white and one was red brick, and they were eased precariously down Tell Road on flatbed trucks, past Fanny Kate Cash’s place and up to a knoll back in the woods.

  They soon learned that putting the two houses together would be far more costly than to simply build a house on their land. It didn’t help that Pat insisted on the very best in lighting fixtures, flooring, and fancy trim. When Pat wanted to pave the long gravel driveway, even Boppo threw her hands up and said, “Good Lord! Your mother’s lost her mind! Does she have any idea what that would cost?”

  The road stayed gravel, but Gil had masons lay a red brick foundation under the white frame house and he built a long veranda that faced out on the show ring. They planted boxwood shrubs out in front and hung black shutters like the ones found on the best homes in Atlanta. It wasn’t enough. When it was done, they could see that they didn’t have the mansion that Pat had pictured. All they had was a mishmash that just looked like two houses stuck together. Worse, they had two mortgages they couldn’t keep up with and they were about to go bankrupt and lose it all.

  Pat went to her mother and stepfather in tears. They had to help her. As usual, she blamed Gil for their troubles; he didn't know a damn thing about building and she should have realized that, but it was too late now. She promised Boppo and Papa that she would take care of them in their “golden years” if they would only help her save the Tell Road place.

  Of course, her parents said they would help her as they always had, and the malignant money drain began. In the end, it seemed the only way Margureitte and the colonel could come up with enough money to bail Pat and Gil out would be to sell their Dodson Drive house and move into the Tell Road place with them. It would be a profound loss for Margureitte. She didn’t want to leave her elegant home to move into a half-finished, jerry-built excuse for a house that was so far out in the boondocks that it took almost an hour just to get to a grocery store. She didn’t want to leave the lovely neighborhood just off Headland Drive and have afternoon tea with Fanny K. Cash. “I just want to live in my own house,” she wailed, “and have my grandchildren come to see me like other grandmothers do. I don’t want to move.”

  But she finally acceded to Pat’s pleas. She wanted Pat to be happy. How could she deny her daughter her dream?

  “My mother always used guilt on my grandmother,’’ Susan remembered. “She would start an argument by saying, ‘Mother, why did you go off and leave me all alone with Mama Siler? Who was my father? Didn’t you love me? Why did you leave me?' And Boppo would say, I had no other choice,’ but it hurt Boppo. I always remember my grandmother saying—even when I was a grown-up—‘Why can’t your mother be happy?’ ”

  The Dodson Drive house was snapped up as soon as the Radcliffes put it on the market. They wondered if they should have listed it at a higher price. Boppo and Papa moved out to Tell Road and into Ronnie’s bedroom, sharing the rest of the unfinished tacked-together house with Pat, Gil, Susan, Debbie and Debbie’s boyfriend, Gary Cole, and Ronnie. It was crowded and uncomfortable. Once more Pat was living with her parents, although she felt it was time for her daughters to grow up. She could hardly wait for them to leave home.

  Debbie competed in her last horse show in Hickory, North Carolina, in the late summer of 1970. She was fifteen years old and she was four months pregnant. “I won,” she recalled, “and that was my last show.” She married Gary, a husky blond laborer who was just seventeen, and they found a place of their own.

  Susan was determined to graduate from high school; she would be the first girl in her immediate family to do so. The move to Tell Road meant she had to go to summer school if she hoped to graduate early from Headland High School. Susan was shy, but she set certain standards that no one could talk her out of. She was not going to marry anyone until she had a high school diploma, and she wasn’t going to be pregnant at her wedding. Furthermore, she was truly going to flout tradition by staying single until her eighteenth birthday in March 1971.

  Susan graduated from Headland in October of 1970 and went to work at the PX at Fort Mac to help the family budget. She attended a dance at the fort one night in 1970 with her girlfriend, Sonja Salo. “I met this guy I thought was a maniac,” she remembered, smiling. “He was good-looking all right, but he was dancing with another girl, and he kept turning her around and winking at me and making faces behin
d her back. He was a show-off and a wild dancer too. I finally asked Sonja what on earth was wrong with him, and she laughed and said, ‘Oh, he’s okay. That’s just Bill Alford. He always acts like that.’ ”

  Alford, a first lieutenant, left a note on Susan’s car a few days later and they met at Sonja Salo’s apartment, which was in the building where he lived. Reluctantly, Susan agreed to go out with him. He was six years older than she was, and he was far too much of an extrovert for the shy, soft-spoken Susan. Still, his exuberance was contagious, and in spite of herself, she was soon utterly captivated by the brash young lieutenant.

  So was her mother. Pat took one look at George L. “Bill” Alford and decided he was perfect for Susan. “My mother was the matchmaker,’’ Susan recalled. “She said if she was younger, she’d take him herself. I believe that —but I also think she was clearing the decks. When we came home from our first date, I was mortified to hear her ask Bill if he'd given me an engagement ring! She wanted us all out of the house and on our own. She had plans.”

  On November 6, 1970, Fort McPherson photographers took a picture of Miss Susan Taylor and Colonel John H. Calloway, the base commander, as they pinned the insignia of Bill Alford’s new rank on his uniform. He was Captain Alford now. Pat was pleased. An army captain, still in his early twenties and already on his way up, would make a fine husband for Susan.

  They were married on March 27, 1971, in the Fort McPherson chapel, the same chapel where Susan’s mother and father had been married eighteen and a half years earlier. Pat had been pregnant with Susan then.

  Susan and Bill had a beautiful wedding. The groom and the father of the bride were in full-dress uniform; Susan wore a white dress with a long veil edged in lace, purchased at Rich’s Department Store, and she carried white roses and stephanotis clustered around a huge white orchid. Everyone smiled happily for the photographers with the exception of Margureitte. Her face was fixed in the familiar crystal gaze of the Siler sisters. Perhaps she knew what was about to happen.

  “My reception was a disaster,” Susan recalled many years later. “My mother chose my wedding day to announce to everyone that she was leaving my father. She had a restraining order against him and he had to leave at once. He was absolutely dumbfounded. He didn't see it coming. Even twenty years after, I think he still wondered what he did wrong. He was there, giving me away, and then he was gone. Banished. My mother had a new life planned, and he didn’t belong in it.”

  Her dramatic announcement at her daughter’s wedding was vintage Pat. She did not like anyone else having the spotlight. At some point in the months after they all moved into the house on Tell Road, she had apparently come to the realization that Gil could never provide her with what she needed. He had worked three jobs, complaining all the time. He was a fool. He had been so enthusiastic about the new place, and it turned out to be just an ordinary house in the woods. He had no vision; he had no sense of grandeur. Besides, she didn’t like the way he drank beer. She decided he was probably an alcoholic, while in reality he was only a moderate drinker. When she found a cache of beer cans he had buried out in back, she was sure she was right.

  Both her daughters were married now, and she was only thirty-three years old. She could do so much better.

  CHAPTER 23

  ***

  Pat became a very young grandmother only two days after Susan married Bill Alford. Debbie was hugely pregnant at her sister’s wedding and went into labor a day later. Every generation of Siler women in memory had included fifteen-year-old mothers, and the latest was no exception. Her mother advised her to stay home as long as possible; complications developed and Debbie had to give birth by cesarean section to her baby girl. Dawn.

  Later, five generations of Siler women posed for Susan’s camera; Mama Siler was eighty-six, Boppo was fifty-two, Pat was thirty-three, Debbie was fifteen, and Dawn was a month old. Oddly, not one of them smiled.

  Pat became a grandmother again when Susan gave birth to her son Sean the next year in April. “Mom just wouldn’t let me go to the hospital when my water broke,” Susan recalled. “She kept insisting that I eat this great big steak and relax. Boppo just paced and smoked, telling Mom I had to go. I finally got there less than three hours before Sean was born.”

  The house on Tell Road was much less crowded now that Gil, Susan, Debbie, and Gary had moved out. Only Ronnie, twelve, was left, and he would have been delighted to live with his father, but Pat wouldn’t allow it. Gil had ruined all their plans for a wonderful, country home and he didn’t deserve his son. Pat allowed Ronnie to do pretty much what he pleased. She bought him a motor scooter, and then, when he was fourteen, she let him fake a driver’s license and he was off driving all over Atlanta.

  The colonel was now responsible for the upkeep of Pat’s “plantation.” And Margureitte maintained her air of quiet dignity, smiling her frozen smile as if her life were proceeding exactly as she wanted it to. She would brook no criticism of Pat, nor would she complain about her diminished life-style to anyone beyond Debbie or Susan. They knew how Boppo mourned for the home she had left behind, but appearances were everything and Margureitte made everyone believe that she adored living out in the woods even if her determined smile cracked her face.

  Pat and Gil were soon divorced, but that was not the only change in Pat’s life. It was the early seventies and long gone were the drab skirts and blouses and the bobbed hair of her twenties. She threw away her glasses and wore contact lenses. She had looked radiant at Susan’s wedding in a silver and moss green brocade coat-dress that caught the emerald of her eyes, and she really began to blossom now that she was a newly single woman. She teased and back-combed her thick honey-colored hair until it added a good four or five inches to her height. She wore makeup that accentuated her eyes and full lips.

  Nobody would ever mistake her for somebody’s grandmother. She was a hot-looking woman. In fact, Pat Taylor was already something of a sly conversation piece among the men who moved in the horse show circuit: the owners, trainers, veterinarians. In her slow southern way she was a shameless flirt, but none of them bragged that they had slept with her. If any of them had, they only joked and lied and said that they would like to. They were all married.

  Pat’s metamorphosis continued. As her teased hair rose ever higher, her skirts grew shorter. They barely skimmed her panty line. She made halter tops and wore them without a bra so that her full breasts swayed like ripe peaches clinging to the tree. She wore tight shiny vinyl boots that drew attention to her slender legs. For herself, she designed some very short wraparound dresses, cutting the bodice in such a deep V at the front that men tripped over their own horses as they peered at her breasts. She also liked Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. She listened to love songs as avidly as any teenager. She especially loved “Please Release Me” and “What’s New, Pussycat?” There was no question about it. Pat Taylor was sending out signals that she was most approachable.

  Pat had affairs and fleeting assignations with a number of men. Boppo and Papa pretended they didn’t know. Susan and Debbie knew and were embarrassed. But their newly emancipated mother didn't care. In her mind, she had been held back for twenty years, suffocated in a loveless, go-nowhere marriage. Her changed appearance caused ripples at the Siler Family Reunion in August of 1971. The Righteous Sisters—who had always adored her —were shocked at the skimpiness of her bikini bathing suit and the miniskirts she wore. The beautiful little Patty Radcliffe was now the beautiful Pat Taylor. She knew she was a great-looking woman and she believed that men—or rather, a man—was the only avenue to her heart’s desire.

  That’s what she wanted, and she went after it. As one of her lovers later remarked, “There wasn't any way you could get away from her, even if you wanted to—which I didn’t. Once she made up her mind she was going to bed with you, you didn't have a chance. She liked sex.”

  Pat needed a man. She wasn’t trained to do any kind of work, nor had she ever worked. She was an old-fashioned kind of
woman, she always said, content to do her sewing and fancy work. She had only a junior high school education and she didn’t read anything but historical romance novels, stories about Joan of Arc and Robin Hood, and Victorian poetry. She could sit a horse prettily, but not as competently as she claimed.

  For a southern girl, she wasn’t a very good cook. Her own tastes ran to chili dogs, tuna sandwiches, tomato soup, and take-out Chinese food. If her mother didn't cook for her, she would eat bread spread with pimento cheese or peanut butter or a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich for supper.

  Pat was no longer a military dependent, and without Boppo and Papa she would have had no means of support at all. It would seem that the acquisition of a plantation would be the least of her worries; she needed to find a job. “I guess I’ll have to work at the waffle house,” she often cried to her mother. “I can’t do anything else.” Working in a fast-food restaurant seemed, to Pat, the depths of degradation.

  And then, suddenly, any job was out of the question for Pat. In April of 1972 she fell from one of the horses they still had at Tell Road, and it stomped her. Her injuries freed emboli (blood clots) to float freely through her bloodstream. There was real concern that she might suffer a pulmonary embolism—fatal within minutes if it blocked the flow of blood between her heart and lungs. She complained of such severe pain that it took Percodan and morphine to control it. Her doctors warned Pat and Boppo that she would have to beware of embolisms for some years, possibly for the rest of her life.

  Invalidism suited Pat. She looked especially fetching as she rested languidly on the veranda, the heat—or a touch of fever—dotting her upper lip and forehead with moisture. No one urged her to get up and get on with her life—not with a wayward blood clot threatening to end it without warning. Boppo was, of course, even more solicitous of her daughter, catering to her every whim.

  Pat finally had surgery at Emory University’s hospital. In an extremely delicate operation, surgeons inserted minuscule “umbrellas” through her jugular vein, tiny catch basins that would stop a blood clot before it rushed irrevocably into her pulmonary artery. She spent some time in intensive care but gradually improved.