A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases Page 5

  Gabby Moore was Jerilee’s new husband; he married her almost before the ink on her divorce papers was dry. He couldn’t risk the possibility that she would change her mind.

  On September 14, 1974, Jerilee Blankenbaker became Jerilee Moore. Along with Amanda and Rick and Gabby’s sixteen-year-old son, Derek, she and Gabby formed a new family. As he had promised, Gabby bought a house for them all to live in. It wasn’t quite as lavish as he had promised, but it was a nice house.

  Morris’s and Jerilee’s children were very young. They must have been confused to find themselves in a different house, without their daddy, and to see their mother living with the man who had come to stay with them after Christmas.

  The swiftness with which Morris’s marriage had vaporized stunned everyone who knew him. In a big city, the exchange of marital partners might have gone relatively unnoticed, but in Yakima, Washington, everyone seemed to be talking about the scandal.

  Morris moved to Hawaii, a long, long way from his memories of the year just past, from a dozen years of memories of Jerilee. The weather was tropical, the vegetation lush and exotic; nothing looked or smelled or felt the least bit like Yakima, Washington. He figured that maybe there he could forget Jerilee. But this geographical solution to a shattered world didn’t work. Morris was still alone. His pain had followed him every mile of the way.

  Knowing how lonesome Morris was, and missing him, a bunch of his friends withdrew their savings and booked passage to Hawaii to visit him. They had barely arrived when Olive was rushed to the hospital back in Yakima. She warned Morris’s half brothers and her own sisters not to tell Morris she was sick and they promised that they wouldn’t. But Olive’s ex-husband, Ned, came to visit her and he misunderstood the doctors’ assessment of her condition. Ned thought they had said that her condition was terminal.

  “He got on the phone to Morris, and said, ‘Come right home. Your mother is dying.’ I was disgusted,” Olive recalled. “The whole lot of them got on a plane with Morris and came back to see if I was okay. They all came home, after the kids had only been there for one day in Hawaii. Even Morris’s half brother, Mike, sold his car—the only car he’d ever had—so he could go with them and cheer up Morris. I didn’t even want Morris to know I was in the hospital … I wasn’t that sick, and I would have been fine. It spoiled their whole trip.”

  Morris Blankenbaker had grown up in the icy winters of eastern Washington, and in Hawaii he felt like an alien in a foreign land. His world had been turned upside down and it wasn’t better in Hawaii—it was worse. Someday he would have to accept that Jerilee was lost to him. It might as well be sooner as later. He missed his kids. He missed Yakima. He packed up and moved back home.

  Morris found a big house on North Sixth Street, and he rented the extra bedrooms to some of his male friends. It wasn’t the same as living with his own family, but he was a lot less lonely than he had been in Hawaii.

  Morris was given a contract as a physical education teacher at Wapato Intermediate School. He was finally doing what he loved to do, but it was all ashes. Jerilee was gone. He only saw Amanda and Rick on sporadic visits. All the things he had worked for so long were gone.

  His friends urged him to start dating—to stop being such a hermit—but he couldn’t do it. When he tried, he felt as though he were an imposter. The only woman who meant anything to him was his wife—only she wasn’t his wife anymore.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In September 1973, Jerilee Blankenbaker barely knew Gabby Moore; a year later she was divorced from Morris and married to him. Sometimes even she had trouble understanding how it could have happened.

  At first, being with Gabby was romantic. There was no question that he adored Jerilee. She liked his son, Derek, and she thought that probably she and Gabby could make their new his-and-hers family work, although it was only natural that it would take a while for all of them to adjust to each other. Where Morris had been easygoing and predictable, Gabby was moody and mercurial. That had been part of his attraction—in the beginning. The very excitement and the passion of being with this man whose emotions seesawed so wildly had drawn her to him. He had promised her so much. He had talked about their future and their love. His plans were grandiose and breathtaking. She had believed everything he told her. She had no reason not to—not at first.

  In the mid-seventies Gabby Moore was still a very popular and respected man in Yakima. Townspeople crowded in to see his team’s wrestling matches; he had put Yakima on the map with his wrestlers. He made a good salary; he had been at Davis High a long time, almost fifteen years. He was an institution, a tradition, and being his wife made Jerilee proud. Of course, there were those who whispered about how her second marriage had come about. But she held her head high. Her choice had been agonizing, but she had made it and she planned to stick by her new husband.

  Even so, it wasn’t long before Jerilee realized that some of Gabby’s moods could be frightening. He revealed a side of his personality that she had not seen before. And many of his promises never came to fruition. He had led her to believe that he was very well fixed financially—and he wasn’t. He had his salary, and that was about it.

  In a sense, Jerilee was back where she had begun married to a coach, raising a family, working full-time. Only the role of her husband had been recast.

  One thing, however, was vastly different: Gabby Moore’s consumption of alcohol. Morris had said something about it, but he had held back from telling her everything. Jerilee had not known that Gabby drank so heavily. Now she saw what she had not seen before. “He drank so very much. When he drank he became hostile toward anybody. He yelled, and he grabbed hold of whoever was close and shook them.”

  Jerilee had never known anyone who could drink as much bourbon whiskey as Gabby Moore. In a voice still full of disbelief, Jerilee remembered how bad it became. “He even kicked his own family, his daughter and his son, out of the house on Christmas Eve.”

  “He drank very heavily,” she would recall in her light, feminine voice. “Within a two-or three-hour period, he would drink a fifth of bourbon or whatever.”

  And Gabby’s consumption of a bottle of whiskey in a few hours was not a sometime thing. Three or four times a week, he would sit with a bottle beside him, steadily downing shots until it was empty. Jerilee saw now that his moods had a direct correlation to the amount of liquor he put away.

  “He loved you a lot one minute,” she remembered ruefully. “And the next minute he would just kick you out of the house and I was getting a little bit scared of him.”

  Actually, Jerilee Moore was getting a lot scared of her second husband. Like most women married to alcoholics, she soon learned to chart precisely the progression from high spirits and loving sentimentality to suspicion and paranoia. When Gabby got close to the bottom of the whiskey bottle, he was a mean drunk. More than once, she found herself locked out of her own home. More than once, she must have wondered what on earth she had gotten herself into. Gabby could be insanely jealous. Perhaps he felt that she would leave him as easily as she had been lured away from Morris—that some other man could turn her head just as he had. He had stolen her; now he feared someone would steal her from him.

  Three times, Jerilee did leave Gabby, even though she still felt a powerful attraction to him when he was himself. She was a woman torn by conflicting emotions. He could still make her cry when he put on his record that began, “Lay your head upon my pillow …”

  But living in the center of a constant emotional hurricane was far different from the excitement of a rapid courtship, and Jerilee probably found herself longing for Morris’s loving predictability. She saw Morris when he picked up Amanda and Rick or when she dropped them off. She talked to him on the phone, which was only natural since they still shared the responsibility for their children. They had such a long history together, and the longer she stayed away from Morris, the more Jerilee appreciated her first love and his steadfast devotion to her.

  She had cut off so
many ties that she almost felt obligated to make a go of her marriage. And that was not an easy task. When Gabby was out of control and full of rage he actually made her afraid for her life and for her children’s lives. When he threw her out of the house, muttering the imprecations of a befuddled drunk, she had to find somewhere to run. To her family. To friends. Sometimes, she came back later in the night when she figured he would be asleep. Sometimes, she stayed away, hoping she would have the strength not to go back. Gradually, Jerilee began to make tentative moves away from Gabby. At first, she came back after a few days. Once, she managed to stay away for two weeks.

  Each time Jerilee walked away from Gabby, he was instantly contrite. He turned on the charm and worked hard to convince her that he would never mistreat her again. She wanted to believe him.

  It was a familiar pattern, but one that Jerilee had never had an occasion to understand before she fell in love with Gabby Moore. His tears and remorse were so utterly real to her. He knew her weaknesses and her tender heart. If he had been able to win her away from Morris and cut her neatly out of her marriage—and he had—he certainly was adept now at keeping her tied to him. He was her husband. Time after time, Jerilee believed his promises about a new start. Time after time, she went back to him. All that spring of 1975, Jerilee vacillated. Outside, it was so like the spring a year before when she was falling in love with Gabby, when she was so transfixed by him and the way he painted their future together that she had forgotten everything else. But now, she was seeing the Gabby behind the charming mask and she was afraid.

  Gabby had always been caught up in his coaching and his athletes. Having lived with Morris, Jerilee understood that. Coaches were a different breed. But Gabby didn’t even care about sports any longer. Almost every other day, when he got home from work, he pulled a fifth of whiskey out of a brown bag. He usually drank it straight, out of a glass. Sometimes, he added a little Pepsi to the bourbon but it didn’t keep him from getting drunk and argumentative. The worst thing was his unpredictability. Jerilee watched him warily, never knowing what to expect.

  From the moment she fell in love with him, Jerilee had never even imagined she might want to leave Gabby. She had sacrificed her marriage for him; she had betrayed Morris when she committed herself to Gabby. But there came a moment when she listened to his importuning and only stared back coldly. She no longer believed that he was going to change. She had heard his promises too many times, and too many times had watched him turn and reach for his bottle of bourbon an instant later.

  When all the periods of their actually being together were added up, it wasn’t much time at all. Less than a year. Jerilee had married Gabby in September 1974. She left him for good in July of 1975. So when she filed for divorce this time, she would have two divorce decrees within eighteen months.

  Jerilee Blankenbaker Moore had made an appalling decision when she left her first husband, and she saw that with the terrible clarity that the truth can bring. When she finally realized what she had done, she rushed to rectify her error. The longer she had been away from Morris, the more she had missed him and come to realize what a good man he was, that he was the man she loved. She had been momentarily bedazzled, but her eyes were open now.

  In a sequence of events right out of a soap opera script, Jerilee left Gabby Moore’s home and bed and moved back in with Morris Blankenbaker. It was a move that seared Gabby’s soul, one that drove him nearly insane with jealousy. He drank to salve his pain, and drinking made him even more paranoid.

  By 1975—if not earlier—Gabby Moore had come to a point where he saw everything that happened in the world in terms of how it affected him. He had no empathy, no sympathy. He had no rational or emotional ability to step back and view a situation from another person’s point of view. If he had ever felt any guilt over betraying Morris, he fought it down before it could bubble to the surface of his mind. He could not now admit that Jerilee had been Morris’s to begin with and that she had gone back to her husband and the father of her two little children. He could only beat his breast and cry out that he had been deeply wounded. The startling thing about Moore’s position was that he believed that he was absolutely within his rights that he was the injured party. He would have been astounded had anyone suggested otherwise.

  His great love was gone, and he could not allow that to happen. The campaign that Gabby Moore mounted to win Jerilee back was prodigious—he used all of his considerable weapons.

  When Jerilee and the children moved back in with Morris, he was still living in the big frame house on North Sixth. All of his roomers except for one had moved out, and he made plans to move soon. Morris, Jerilee, and the children occupied the downstairs until then.

  If Jerilee had believed that Gabby would let her go without a fight, she soon found out she was mistaken. He called her every day—at the Pacific National Bank in Selah, Washington, where she worked and at the house where she lived with Morris. He made several trips to the bank to confront Jerilee at work. She had a good job as a loan interviewer, and it was embarrassing when one of her coworkers announced that Gabby Moore was waiting to see her.

  She knew what he was going to say. He would ask her, “When are you coming back?” and “Won’t you give me just one more chance?”

  He told Jerilee that he wasn’t going to make it without her, and she caught the manipulative threat. He was telling her that if he couldn’t have her, he didn’t want to live. When she refused to come back to him, he got more specific. He was going to kill himself, he said, and he wanted her to watch—to see what she had done to him.

  Perhaps frightened by his threats of suicide, and worn down by his pleas, Jerilee may not have taken a strong enough stand with him. She may have agreed to meet him to talk more often than she would later admit to. There were those in Yakima who blamed her for being too “wishy-washy,” and for not making the clean break that they felt would have kept Gabby Moore from pining after her.

  Despite his drinking and his depression, Gabby had any number of people who loved him devotedly. His two daughters and his son came to Jerilee as emissaries from their father. Amanda and Rick had always followed Derek Moore around like puppy dogs, and they were thrilled when Gabby sent Derek over to take the children out for an ice-cream cone.

  “I let them go,” Jerilee said. “They thought a lot of Derek.”

  Gabby’s daughters phoned Jerilee. They asked her what she thought she was accomplishing by leaving their father all alone. They blamed her for his pain.

  “They asked me wouldn’t I please go back and give their dad another try?” Jerilee recalled, and she said she simply could not go back to him again—ever.

  She felt sorry for Gabby’s children, and she could understand why they had come to her pleading his case. But there were things they didn’t know. Once she was free of him, there was no way she was going back. She tried so many times to explain that to Gabby. She and Morris made plans to remarry shortly after her divorce from Gabby was final on November 10. They hoped to be married by Christmas. In time, she hoped that the whole episode with Gabby would be only a distant memory.

  “I asked him very definitely to quit bothering me, [told him] that I was trying to start a new life; I wanted my family all back together and would he please quit harassing us.”

  Gabby had just stared at Jerilee as if she were speaking to him in a foreign language. He was never going to let her go. Didn’t she know that? Whatever it took, he would do it. Whatever she wanted, he would get for her. He would not accept that all she wanted from him was her freedom. He just didn’t get it. “He would say,” Jerilee recalled, “‘If it wasn’t for Morris, you would be back with me.’”

  But there was Morris, and she was grateful that he was still there for her. Nevertheless, she would not have stayed with Gabby even if Morris had turned his back on her. She could no longer live with Gabby’s rages and his volatile moods.

  In one of their conversations, Gabby told Jerilee—almost with a flourish—the d
epths to which she had made him sink. “I’m losing my job,” he told her, “and it’s because of you.”

  He told her that he had been asked to resign from Davis High School and that he had been told his contract would not be renewed after the 1975-76 school year. In June of 1976, he would be through. He told her that he had been fired because he’d lost his temper with some of the student drivers, that he’d, grabbed them and shaken them when they were driving and made a mistake. That must have stunned both the students and the administrators. Gabby had always been the soul of patience with his driver-training kids.

  Jerilee suspected that it was more than his behavior in his driver-training sessions that had led to Gabby’s dismissal. Yakima was too small a town for the school administrators not to know about his drinking and his profound personality change. Even so, he was such an institution at Davis that it seemed impossible they would ever ask him to leave. He would have had to do something pretty bad to get fired. But, if Gabby had expected her to come back to him because he’d been fired, he was mistaken. He was the one who had ruined his career.

  Jerilee was afraid of Gabby. He asked her to postpone their divorce date, to give him some time before she finalized it, but she was adamant that she was going ahead. When November 10 came, both Jerilee and Gabby were in the courthouse. One of the things she had requested in her divorce was that she have the name “Blankenbaker” back. When Gabby Moore heard that, he was visibly upset. She had rejected even his name.

  Jerilee got Morris’s last name back and she got her divorce, but Gabby didn’t go away. In fact, he became even more aggressive and insistent that he couldn’t live without her after their divorce than he had been before.