Another catastrophe befell the family in August of 1972. The Radcliffes, Pat and Ronnie, the Alfords, and the Coles traveled as usual to White Lake, North Carolina, for the Siler Family Reunion, taking several cars. On the way back home, the car carrying the Coles and Ronnie had a terrible accident. “It happened just south of the North Carolina border,” Debbie remembered. “We had eaten there, and we changed drivers, I drove and everybody went to sleep. . . . We were on the back roads and the last thing I remember is going around a curve and the steering wheel locking, and I couldn’t do anything. I was going seventy-five miles an hour. I remember waking up on top of the hood on my back with my legs down over the steering wheel and my seat belt was still hooked.
. . . My brother got thrown out of the car completely and his whole scalp was pulled back from the glass. He was in the front seat and he went out, Dawn went under the dashboard, and my husband went from the backseat into the dashboard. . . . Finally someone saw my brother walking around in a daze, but we were out there for six hours before they found us. They took us to two different hospitals . . . I broke my back, and Gary broke his neck. Dawn had a skull fracture. I was in the hospital in Florence for four weeks, and in another hospital at home for three months after I had surgery to fuse my back in five places. They put in a metal rod. I had three operations.”
Susan and Bill were the first ones home from the reunion, and they walked into their apartment to a ringing phone. “I had to tell my mother about the accident,” Susan recalled. “I told her that Debbie’s back was probably broken, and she snapped at me, ‘I don’t care about Debbie! I want to know about Ronnie. . . .’ That’s the way she was. Each of the three of us was indispensable to her, but she took turns. At the time of the accident, Debbie didn’t matter, but Ronnie did. I have no idea why.”
No one was ever really sure who had been driving. Some family members thought that Ronnie was, and that Debbie had lied to protect him. They were all lucky to survive the grinding crash.
After that, Pat’s luck seemed to change. Through her contacts in the riding world, she met the man she had been looking for in the fall of 1972: the perfect lover. Her choice might not have been every young woman’s dream; he was as old as Papa—but not nearly as handsome— and he had gray hair, a florid complexion, and a chunky midsection. Put him up next to any one of the men in the horse show crowd and he would come out a distant second as far as looks went. But he had it in his power to give Pat everything she craved.
Hap Brown* was a member of Governor Jimmy Carter’s cabinet, the head of one of the most important departments in the state of Georgia. His name was always in the paper, he sat at the governor’s right hand, and he kept a fine house back in his hometown as well as lavish lodgings in Atlanta. When Hap Brown walked into the Capitol building with its gold leaf-covered dome, people lined up to talk to him and shake his hand. He was known all over Atlanta—all over the state of Georgia, for that matter.
When fifty-eight-year-old Hap Brown’s eye fell on thirty-five-year-old Pat Taylor, he was instantly captivated. She was lush and beautiful, but she moved with a certain class too. Her voice was a soft drawl, a young girl’s sweet voice. When she spoke to him, she looked directly at him with her crystalline green eyes, and then, seeming suddenly embarrassed, she looked down. He liked her directness, and he liked her shyness.
And she obviously liked him. He sensed he could possess her if he chose. Hap knew he would have to be discreet—more than discreet. He was not only a member of Jimmy Carter’s top staff, he was a married man, and Jimmy Carter, his boss, was not the kind of governor who would tolerate a member of his cabinet fooling around. Even more critical, the money in the Brown family came from Mrs. Brown’s side. Hap had his salary and benefits, but Cordelia* controlled their true wealth. She would certainly look upon any intimate arrangement with Pat Taylor with far more disfavor than even Governor Carter.
Hap Brown could not help himself. He was soon completely smitten with Pat. She made him feel like a man twenty years younger. She was the most romantic woman he had ever met, and, at the same time, the most sensuous. She wrote him poems that were tender and symbolic, and then made love to him like a brazen trollop.
Like all those who loved Pat, he was concerned about her well-being. She seemed too delicate and too refined to have to go to work each day, but she needed to work, so Hap created a little public relations job for her. She missed a lot of work. She was often ill, sometimes hospitalized, and he visited his pale, wan mistress, held her hand, and promised her that he would take care of her, although she must understand that their affair would be very, very private.
She always agreed and Hap felt safe, pleased that he had found himself a woman both sultry and sensible. Hap’s government position meant they could be together almost all the time. He had meetings to go to, political functions, reasons that he couldn’t get home in the evenings or on weekends. He and Pat dined out often. His wife was a comforting hour’s commute away from Atlanta and it was highly unlikely that they would run into her or any hometown friends.
Since Pat had no office skills and precious little formal education, there wasn’t much that she could do for the Department of Energy, but there was a lot she could do for the department head. She and Hap took long lunches and whole days off together, driving around the countryside, watching the verdant vegetation of summer change to gold and orange in autumn.
Hap sent Pat flowers—roses. She adored roses. He bought her a gold cameo pendant and she began to collect cameos. She treasured each of his gifts. “She told me they would go out to the country and have a picnic by a stream,” Susan remembered. “He’d put his head in her lap while she read Victorian poems to him. I think she really loved Hap, and she used to tell me that he was going to ‘come for her’ one day, and she’d be waiting for him. It was as if she expected him to come riding up and sweep her into his arms.”
Pat seemed to be truly devoted to Hap Brown. If he was not exactly a knight in shining armor riding to her rescue, maybe she saw him as a father figure who would care for her always. She wanted so much to be the one and only woman in Hap Brown’s life. And sometimes, she seemed to be. Hap looked at her with eyes poleaxed by love. Although he insisted on discretion, she suspected a lot of people knew about them. She saw the lifted eyebrows in the office when she slipped away to meet him. She didn’t care. The sooner his wife faced the truth the better. Then Hap would be free to come for her.
Hap Brown quickly realized he would get only the frostiest welcome at the house on Tell Road. Margureitte was outspoken in her disapproval of the relationship. The Radcliffes were too proper to confront him directly, and if they had, Pat would have thrown the tantrum to end all tantrums. But the message was there: We do not approve.
Pat took instead to entertaining her married lover at Susan and Bill’s apartment. She had used the apartment before to meet other married men, but she prevailed upon Susan to serve drinks and appetizers and to “be nice to Hap.” Susan saw that Hap was “courting” her mother in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He was gallant and kind and generous. But he was still married, and he seemed in no hurry to change that arrangement.
Pat made no secret of her intentions. Susan remembered her mother pleading, “Take me home, Hap. Take me home to North Carolina.” “She wanted to go back with the aunts and back where Grandma Siler was,” Susan sighed. “Hap couldn’t just leave and take her there, and they’d fight and she’d cry.”
Pat enlisted Susan’s aid in her campaign to capture Hap, suggesting that she call Hap “Dad.’' Susan balked at that, and Pat countered, “Well, at least you could say, ‘When are you going to marry my mom and be our father?’ ” Susan already had a father, but she finally got up the nerve to blurt out, “I hear you-all are getting married?”
Hap froze as he reached for an appetizer, drew back his hand, and stared at the floor. He was clearly embarrassed, and for once the voluble politician could find no words. The minutes that followed were a
wkward. Pat looked away and bit her lip, disappointed and frustrated. Susan was mortified. She could see that Hap Brown had no intention—ever—of marrying her mother.
For all the power Hap had, he was alarmed by Pat’s growing possessiveness. He tried to deflect her single minded thrust toward his divorce and remarriage to her.
He put himself out time and again for her and her family. He did his best to help Bill Alford stay in the army when a sweeping reduction in forces hit Fort McPherson. But Bill wasn’t regular army, and even Hap’s senator friends couldn’t buck the trend. Bill left the service in August of 1973 and went to college while Susan managed Colonel Alan’s horse farm in Riverdale—the same Colonel Alan who had once posed so proudly for an article about his daughter’s engagement to Susan’s uncle, Kent Radcliffe.
Over Margureitte’s objections, Hap took Pat along on a business trip to Dallas and they had a wonderful time, but she came home no closer to a commitment from him than before. Sometimes—far too often for Pat—Hap couldn’t be with her. For all her skill at manipulation and seduction, she was either naive or blind to the bleak realities of stolen passion with a married man. Pat would sit forlornly on the wide veranda her ex-husband had built for her and stare through the dark woods toward Tell Road as if she could make the sound of Hap’s car materialize by sheer force of will.
But all she heard was the rain in winter or the cicadas in summer or Fanny Kate Cash calling to her cats.
***
Pat clung desperately to Hap through Christmas of 1972 and into the long spring and summer of 1973. When he was with her she was happy, but when he left, she agonized that he would never come back. She implored him to ask his wife for a divorce. He hedged and gave her reasons why he had to delay such a confrontation.
Miserable, Pat felt her life closing in on her again. She didn’t even have the horse-show circuit any longer. Debbie couldn’t be expected to jump horses with a steel rod in her spine.
Pat had always been able to coerce Susan to ride no matter what. “She even convinced me to ride when I was five months pregnant with Sean,” Susan said. “It was a costume show and Mom had to let out the waist of her long velvet dress and then pin me into it. I was so wobbly and nauseated I thought I was going to pitch forward on my head. Mom was the one who loved costumes, not us.”
But by 1973 Pat’s daughters were both married and mothers and they had no time for horse shows. Pat herself wore the costume that had once almost tripped Susan up. She had designed it in burnt orange velvet and it had a lace jabot and cuffs. With it, she wore a black felt derby with a two-foot-long ostrich plume. She saved and treasured a photograph from that period of herself and Governor Jimmy Carter in a fringe-topped surrey on the Georgia Capitol grounds. Pat was in her glory, smiling graciously as she sat beside the governor while a liveried driver held the reins of a Morgan horse. It was undoubtedly a “photo opportunity” picture of some sort, but for Pat it was proof that she was meant to move in the highest circles of society.
Hap Brown was her entree to those circles and she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything. She beseeched, argued, implored, nagged, even subtly threatened. If Hap Brown didn’t divorce Cordelia, she didn’t know what she might do. Together, she and Hap could have the perfect life. Why was he too blind to see that?
Pat was hardly a typical grandmother; she was far too involved in her affair with Hap. Boppo was the grandmotherly type, and she lavished attention on Dawn and Sean. Debbie and Gary Cole lived with her grandparents sporadically, but their marriage was full of dissension and recrimination. Pat allegedly devised a way to keep her daughter’s husband in line. Nineteen-year-old Gary Cole was severely shaken when his wife’s best friend confided that he should “watch his backside.” The young woman whispered that Pat had put out a hit contract on him and was bragging that she had ordered him killed. Gary walked scared and alert for months, but nothing ever happened. He reconciled with Debbie and they continued their uneasy alliance. He told himself the rumors were only the product of a family that thrived on high drama and flamboyant gestures.
Ronnie tended to get lost in the shuffle. He wasn’t allowed to be with his father, and his mother, whom he adored, had no time for him. He began to get into trouble at school and minor scrapes with the law. Ronnie had never shone in the family. His sisters were the stars as they rode the Morgan horses. They were both extremely beautiful girls, and he was only an average-looking boy.
Spring came again to Georgia, and the woods were full of the pink and white of dogwood and azaleas. Tired of waiting, Pat decided to force Hap Brown’s hand. Backed to the wall, he made a choice, a choice that sounded the death knell for Pat’s plans. She never told anyone what he said to her, but his answer had clearly been no.
Night after night, Pat huddled tearfully on the veranda, her lace handkerchief a sodden lump in her hand. She neither ate nor slept. “Hap’s never coming for me,” she cried to Susan. “He’s not going to come for me.”
Susan tied up the horse she had been exercising in their show ring and looked at her mother. She couldn’t understand how such a young and beautiful woman could be so distraught over an old man. "‘You have your whole life in front of you,” she argued. “Hap’s an old man. You can have anyone.”
But Pat seemed not to hear. “Hap’s not coming for me,” she sobbed. “Never, never, ever again.”
Indeed, he did not. Whatever he had told Pat, it seemed final. Pat took to her bed, and then was hospitalized. Boppo and Papa hovered near, afraid that she would die of a pulmonary embolism if she didn’t stop grieving so.
Pat had gentleman callers flocking to her sickroom. A man from Social Circle, Georgia, came to see her every day, carrying with him a single red rose. A man she described only as “a millionaire who wants to take me to California in his jet plane” often appeared at her bedside. It was no use. They weren’t Hap.
Risen at last from her sickbed, Pat arranged to send Hap one final message through his secretary. “You go tell him that if he doesn’t change his mind and leave Cordelia and his children and his farm and come for me, I’ll be married to Tom Allanson in two weeks. You just tell him that.” Hap did not respond. When Pat devised a harassment campaign with phone calls to his office and his home, she met with only silence.
She had threatened to marry Tom Allanson. Who, Debbie and Susan wondered, was Tom Allanson? They knew him as their feed man and the blacksmith who came to shoe horses from time to time. But that was all. They hadn’t even realized their mother knew his last name. Why on earth would she pick Tom Allanson as a threat to hold over Hap’s head? She couldn’t be serious.
But she was. Pat had decided there could be no better way to get Hap Brown off the dime than to be seen with Tom. Hap was aging and fat and Tom was a magnificent specimen. Pat suspected she could have Tom if she only crooked her finger. She didn’t really want him—not in the beginning. She used him to make Hap jealous. Tom was only a means to an end, a hugely virile male symbol, full of youth and energy. But later, when Pat finally accepted that Hap was never coming for her, she looked more closely at Tom and rethought her options.
PART FOUR
JAIL
CHAPTER 24
Within the space of less than two years, Pat had soared to romantic peaks few women ever dream of, only to plunge downward into deeper abysses of despair. With Hap, she had come so close to having everything she ever wanted and she cried bitter tears when she finally accepted that he was gone. But then she had found Tom and she knew he would never leave her. He gave her Kentwood Farm and passion and true love, and suddenly all that, too, was disappearing, like smoke in a darkening sky.
It seemed to Pat that fate stalked her, deliberately snatching away every shred of happiness she found. It wasn’t fair. Boppo had always told her she was special and a special person deserved to be happy. And yet when she got those things she yearned for, her pleasure lasted no longer than a mouthful of cotton candy. Someone always ruined it for Pat. Something
always made her cry. And she didn’t know why.
After his conviction and sentencing, Tom went with “the chain”—all the prisoners from the Fulton County jail handcuffed and chained together on a bus—bound for the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center at Jackson Prison.
He wasn’t there long. On October 25, 1974, Ed Garland filed a motion for a new trial. He cited twenty-nine errors by the court to substantiate his request. It was a standard ploy, something any good criminal defense attorney would do, but Tom pinned all his hopes on the thought of a second trial. The motion for a new trial meant he could be summoned back from prison to the Fulton County jail, and Pat insisted that that be done at once, even though facilities in Jackson were considerably more modern and comfortable than the crowded county jail; she wanted him close by. Fulton County Sheriff LeRoy N. Stynchcombe was given official orders to travel to Jackson and return with Tom Allanson.
Once he got over the shock of his conviction, Tom held on to an impossible dream that he might be released on bond by Christmas, 1974, pending his appeal. He had been locked up in the Fulton County jail for 103 days. The approaching holiday season made things, if possible, worse. His request for release on bond was refused.
Pat had great difficulty accepting the fact that Tom had been found guilty. The shock she showed the night the jury came back with their verdict had been genuine. She lived in a soap opera kind of world, her every perception colored by what she read and what she watched on television. She had always preferred shows like Perry Mason and Burke's Law where trials ended with a surprise witness and the innocent defendant was reunited with his or her lover. That had not happened. They had taken Tom away from her.