Kent’s presence grated on Pat because he took so much of her mother’s time away from her and her baby. If it weren’t for him, things would have been perfect. Margureitte did the cooking and the housework and rocked Susan when she was fussy. It was almost as if Pat hadn’t gotten married at all, and she liked the cozy feeling of being a little girl again.
When she became a grandmother, Margureitte took on another name. Clifford still called her Margureitte or “Reit,” or sometimes “Reichen” with a German touch of endearment. Her sisters continued to call her Margureitte. But soon tiny Susan would call her “Boppo.”
The colonel was called “Papa.” Boppo and Papa fell easily into the role of matriarch and patriarch of an expanding family. It became them, and they seemed transformed overnight from youth to late middle age even though they still made a handsome pair. They would have been happy to stay on permanent assignment at Fort McPherson in Atlanta.
Pat liked everything about the home Margureitte and the colonel made. No matter how many times they were reassigned by the army, Margureitte always managed to decorate with taste and elan. Sometimes they lived in big old barracks-like barns, and sometimes on bases where the officers' housing was splendid. The Radcliffes had collected exquisite pieces in their travels around the world—fine china, paintings, objets d’art, Japanese screens, silver tea sets, thick rugs, and gleaming furniture. Later, when the colonel’s mother passed away, her full china closets and family heirlooms came to the Radcliffes.
Margureitte had vowed to live graciously a long time back, and she had succeeded. Wives of younger officers saw her charm and poise as a goal to aim for. Why wouldn’t Pat want to live in her family home, instead of in a cramped apartment or some tinny trailer somewhere? She had grown up with the very best. She had been groomed her whole life for elegance. Moreover, she had been imbued with the absolute belief that she was special. She was, after all, a colonel’s only daughter.
And Kent—as far as he knew—was a colonel’s son. There was nothing he wanted more than to enlist one day in the army himself. He thought that would please his father.
Kent shot up like a young sapling in his mid-teens. Almost overnight, he went from being a little blond boy to an awkward, acne-scarred teenager. With his thick glasses and the burr haircut that accentuated his protruding ears, his appearance gave scant promise of the good-looking man he would become. He competed on the swimming team in high school; he had the wide shoulders and flexible muscles for it. He was much taller than the colonel, but he still looked to Cliff for approval. He rarely got it.
***
After a year, Gil Taylor came home from Korea unscathed and reclaimed his family. He moved Pat and Susan to Shirley, Massachusetts, to his next post. There, they lived in a minuscule apartment, and Pat seemed to enjoy playing at being a housewife. Like most young service families, they had almost nothing in the way of furniture or possessions: a cheap orange and avocado upholstered couch with maple-stained arms, triangular Formica end tables, and Melmac dinnerware.
Gil had filled out. He was tanned and muscular and probably thirty pounds heavier than the skinny kid Pat had married, an attractive man. Pat soon became pregnant again. On June 14, 1955—just over two years after Susan was born—she gave birth to a second daughter, Deborah Dawn.
Boppo and Papa were stationed in Gary, Indiana, and Margureitte worried herself sick about how her little girl was doing. Pat was only seventeen, with two babies to take care of; it seemed she faced one traumatic situation after another. She had always had a flair for the dramatic; she experienced no emotion moderately. If she and Gil ran low on food toward the end of the month, she translated their predicament into abject poverty and called home for help.
There were many “emergencies,” like the time Pat was “overcome” by paint fumes when she tried to brighten up her apartment. She wrote her mother that they didn’t have enough to eat—that sometimes it got so bad they had to scavenge for windfalls in apple orchards. “If we can afford meat at all, it’s only a half pound of hamburger or one pork chop. . . . If there’s one piece of bread, the kids get it.” That just tore Margureitte up inside, the thought that her daughter and the babies might be hungry.
It seemed as though Boppo was constantly burning up the highways between Gary, Indiana, and Shirley, Massachusetts. She was horrified on her first visit to see where Pat and Gil were living; their apartment was in a building whose other residents looked highly suspicious to her. She reported to the colonel, “Cliff, I believe they’re living in a whorehouse. It’s not a fit place for them.”
She had returned home alone only reluctantly that time. But then Pat called and said she had almost choked to death on a pork chop—served at one of her “single pork chop” meals—and Margureitte drove all night to get to her. This time she insisted that Pat and the babies must come back to Indiana with her, and Gil let them go. Margureitte told her husband that there were rats running all over the place, that Pat and the babies were in “terrible condition. They were the most pitiful sight when I got there.” Susan remembered how happy they all were to see her grandmother arrive, a one-woman army to the rescue. “We adored her. When Boppo showed up, we knew that things were going to be under control again.”
When they arrived back in Gary, Kent gave up his bedroom to his sister and moved into the living room. It would be a thoroughly entrenched pattern. Rescuing Pat from danger was gradually becoming the entire thrust of Margureitte Radcliffe’s life. With her mother’s enthusiastic support, Pat would spend the next several years traveling back and forth between her parents’ home and Gil’s duty stations.
Gil was sent to Iceland, Germany, and Washington, D.C., and he usually went by himself. There was a plethora of emergencies, each one only serving to convince Margureitte that Pat and the children should stay with her. Pat was driving one day when Deborah accidentally hit the door handle and fell out into the street. Luckily, there were no cars behind them.
Susan’s baby book bears a cryptic notation. “Age 3. Susan run over by a truck. Not injured.” Susan does not remember being hit by a truck. How odd that all of her baby presents, all of her measurements, her first words, were listed in her baby book, but something as potentially tragic as being “run over by a truck” has no details at all.
***
When Susan was four and Deborah two, Gil was as signed to the Philippines and he persuaded Pat to bring their little girls and join him there. Things would be better; he would make her happy. He adored his beautiful young wife and was thrilled that she would leave her mother behind and come to him.
While they were in the Philippines, Deborah caught a fungus infection from her cat and all her hair fell out. She was partially bald for the next three years, but Pat designed clever hats to cover her hair loss. Every dress had its matching hat. She was a superb seamstress and made most of the two little girls' clothes. Susan and Deborah always wore either matching or contrasting outfits for special occasions—dressed not unlike the way their mother had dressed as a child. Pat took scores of pictures of her daughters and of the events that marked the passing years of their lives. Susan and Deborah in Easter coats and bonnets, Valentine's Day dresses, Christmas dresses—two brown-eyed little girls looking like dolls. To glance through the Radcliffe and Taylor family albums was to see Christmas dinners, Halloweens, Easters, and birthdays right out of Good Housekeeping. Everyone was smiling. Everyone was dressed precisely right. Boppo and Pat, of course, wore frilly aprons as they carved a turkey or carried in a birthday cake. “It was strange," Susan recalled. “At that time, Mom didn't care how she dressed—but she always wanted us to look perfect.”
Pat went through a period when her clothes were almost matronly. Gone were the soft dreamy dresses of her early teens. In her twenties, she wore high-necked blouses and long skirts in muted colors. She parted her hair on the side and pulled it back in severe tight curls. Heavy harlequin glasses hid her green eyes, and her shoes were Cuban heeled and sensible. And all t
he while her figure was as slim and attractive as always. But it was hidden beneath those clothes, her sensuality blunted.
Despite Deborah's miserable fungus, they all enjoyed the Philippines for a while. But then it began to unravel. Pat wrote her mother that she had suffered two miscarriages and she needed Boppo to come help her. “I was four or five months pregnant, and I was all alone. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat on the toilet and flushed them away.”
But this time her mother couldn't come; she was in Europe with her husband at his duty station and she had to choose. For once, she chose Cliff.
Susan had a vague memory of being injured while they were in the Philippines. “Somehow, my hand was crushed. I don’t know if it got shut in a car door or what happened. I only know it was Christmastime and I was in the hospital and I heard them singing carols in the hall. My mother came to see me, but I wouldn’t look at her. Children remember things oddly. I heard the carols and I turned my face to the wall until my mother went away.”
Pat wrote again to her mother, saying her doctor had told her that Gil was an animal and was wearing her out with his insatiable demands for sex. Margureitte was horrified, and when Pat became pregnant again, her mother insisted that she return to the States. Once more Pat and the girls went back to “family.” Boppo and Papa were still in Germany, but Pat and the girls lived in North Carolina with Mama Siler, who was delighted to have her precious Patty back.
This time Pat gave birth to a boy. Ronnie Taylor was born in November of 1958. Pat was twenty-one, immature, indulged, and seemingly incapable of taking care of her husband and her children without the support of her family. She also tended to embroider on the truth a little and was given to hysteria and histrionics. But her family considered her only a little high-strung. And, in upper-class southern women, being high-strung was almost an admirable trait, bespeaking fine genes. The Silers had produced a number of “high-strung’’ females. When their antics became tiresome, the rest of the family intoned, “She needs professional help.’’ Otherwise, they scarcely noticed a tizzy or two.
***
In 1959, Pat and the children again tried living with Gil—in the Magnolia Gardens Apartments in Falls Church, Virginia. “I think we were too much for her—without my grandmother to help,” Susan recalled. There was a new, frenetic quality about Pat. She fought constantly with a woman who lived in an upstairs apartment. Margureitte, by now back in the States, was appalled when she visited and heard Pat screaming insults. “You’re acting like a fishwife, Pat,” she gently remonstrated.
Pat kept the door locked all the time, frightening her children with warnings that someone was trying to get in. Susan yearned to breathe fresh air and escaped outside whenever she could. She wandered all over the neighborhood—alone—but felt safer than when she was locked in with her mother’s fears.
There was no one trying to break into the apartment; Pat simply wanted Gil to come home and help her, and her stories usually got her what she wanted. She was often hysterical, but that too served a purpose. When she was small, she had only to stamp her foot and pitch a fit to get her way. Now, she was using the same methods. And what Pat really wanted was to go home, to live with Boppo and Papa and have all the onerous burdens of parenthood lifted from her shoulders.
She also wanted to be rich.
Pat still dressed her children with exquisite good taste. She fixated on the way Jackie Kennedy dressed John-John, and she wanted Ronnie to look just like him. She saved her money to buy her babies the very best. But on at least one occasion, she was apprehended for shoplifting in a Falls Church department store. She had hidden some Feltman Brothers toddlers outfits in her clothes. Among the most expensive children’s clothing made, Feltman Brothers’ garments were far beyond Pat's budget. Margureitte was aghast. “That terrible, terrible, rude store detective took her to the front office and just treated her very, very badly. We could have sued them, but we decided not to.”
Things in Falls Church were not going well. Ronnie was having convulsions, which would continue regularly until he was almost twelve, and Pat wrote that no one in the entire state of Virginia was even civil to her. When Margureitte heard her daughter’s version of her life in Falls Church, she insisted that she move home to Atlanta at once.
Of Margureitte’s two children, her son was the one who truly needed some bolstering, but he rarely asked for help and Pat’s demands drowned him out. Now a handsome and powerfully built young man, Kent had come home from Germany with a broken heart. He had fallen completely in love—the all-out, no-protective-walls first love that happens only once. The girl was German, tall and flaxen-haired. Her name was Marianne Krauss. She loved Kent too. She was an extremely nice girl and she wanted to marry him. But she couldn’t even imagine leaving her parents to go off to America forever. Nor could Kent face never going home again. In the end, when he left Germany he was as alone as he had ever been.
His troubles piled up and he occasionally drank too much. Sober, Kent was as gentle as most really big men are; he had nothing to prove. His strength was awesome. Even a little tipsy, he was good-natured. But if he drank a few bottles of beer or too many rum 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 inward—to blame himself for whatever went wrong.
CHAPTER 20
***
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 and 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 somber—but 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.
&
nbsp; 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.”