Everything She Ever Wanted

  . . . With such deep hurt and more sadness than I have ever known, I say Good-bye to both of you. . . .

  I will always love you Susan. BUT I will always detest your actions.

  Your Grandmother Boppo

  The Siler Family Reunion celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary at White Lake in 1991, and Margureitte wrote the memorial booklet, typing it on the typewriter. She included, without comment, the Alfords in the listing of descendants, but she did not mention Pat's latest incarceration in a voluminous roundup of catastrophes that had struck various branches of the clan.

  Sean attended, but Susan, Bill, Courtney, and Adam were, naturally, not invited to join the rest of the family at White Lake.

  ***

  When Pat was transferred up to Hardwick, Boppo and Papa resumed their weekly visiting, just as they had before. Not long afterwards, Pat was moved to a hospital facility; she had reportedly had a stroke. “She can't speak,” Boppo said sadly in October 1991, “and she drags one leg. It’s the prison’s fault; they didn’t give her her medicine for days. We’re going to sue them.” She blamed Susan for everything. The decline of the family had begun, of course, with her treachery.

  Debbie and Mike Alexander agreed with the Radcliffes. “Susan needs professional help,” Debbie said succinctly. “She cut the hair off Mom’s dolls, and one night, when I was all alone in my apartment, Susan came over and cut off all the power and lights to my unit. I looked out the window and saw a dark truck, and I knew it was Susan.”

  Not likely. Susan was working as much overtime as she could as a store security officer to make enough money to leave McDonough and the constant surveillance of her outraged family. “Besides,” she said with a laugh, “if I wanted to shut off Debbie’s lights, I wouldn’t have the first idea how to find the thing—the fuse box or whatever—to do it.”

  Pat’s latest conviction appeared to have started a slow winding down of The Family; its gracious facade cracked, and bit by bit chunks fell off, giving a glimpse of what lay beneath. Aunt Lizzie and Margureitte were barely speaking. Aunt Thelma had a stroke and had to be put into a hospital over in Augusta. For a time, Margureitte and Cliff visited her regularly, but she didn’t get any better. Thelma’s surviving sisters got her power of attorney and sold her house and car. Thelma was placed in a nursing home in Elizabethtown, North Carolina.

  Ashlynne still lived with Boppo and Papa; Debbie and her new husband, Mike Alexander, in financial straits, moved in with them in 1992; and Ronnie, disabled by a back injury on a construction job, kept his trailer in their side yard. Boppo and Papa bragged proudly that Sean Alford came every week to play golf with Papa. They did not, of course, encourage him to reconcile with his parents, but urged him to visit his “Grandma Pat” in prison, which he often did.

  Letters sent by outsiders to Pat Taylor in prison were not acknowledged. Margureitte reported that Pat was far too ill to be interviewed, and her speech was so compromised that it was hard to understand her. It was ironic; her condition sounded remarkably like that of Nona Allanson sixteen years earlier, when Pat had poisoned her with arsenic. Pat was apparently still able to continue her hobbies, however. In the summer of 1992, her picture appeared in a Milledgeville paper as she proudly showed off a quilt she had made for the prison craft show.

  Boppo could scarcely believe Pat was back in prison. “I didn’t want her to accept the plea—neither did Mr. Roberts—but they were going to charge Debbie with the 1976 arsenic case, or maybe charge Pat with false imprisonment of her aunt Elizabeth Porter in Warsaw, North Carolina. I can tell you that Bobby, her son, told me that Pat took very, very good care of his mother.”

  “Pat is hurt so deeply that she can’t even be angry,” Margureitte said. “She had to sell over eight thousand dollars’ worth of her dolls and doll clothing in one day— all heirloom sewing—to pay for an attorney.” Margureitte was still stunned by Susan’s treachery. “Susan said her mother was a very good mother. She sang in the choir. She was a Brownie mother. The colonel and I bought groceries for Susan and Bill when they were having a hard time, and the colonel invited them to live with us. They left on Thanksgiving. Susan cut her mother’s dolls’ hair in back, and she called Colonel Radcliffe a bastard!”

  Her voice trailed off to a whisper with the shock of it all.

  “My own prognosis is not good,” Margureitte confided, inhaling smoke. “I have lung cancer, you know. The doctor told me ‘two years’ last year, and Colonel Radcliffe asked him about that in my last checkup, and he just said, ‘I haven’t changed my original estimate.’. . . It’s terrible to think that I may not have my daughter here to take care of me when I reach my last days.”

  Margureitte was a woman of a remarkable will and a strong constitution. Although she arrived at the 1992 Siler family reunion at White Lake in a wheelchair, her sisters commented that they had never seen her look better. When the wheelchair wouldn’t maneuver in the sand, she abandoned it and didn’t use it again during the week-long celebration.

  ***

  Tom Allanson had made the most of his first years of freedom, earning steady promotions and salary increases in his water treatment job—enough so that Liz no longer had to work. They owned a little house out in the country north of Atlanta where they could sit on their back porch and watch the dogwoods bloom and hear the wind in the pine trees. They had a calico cat, a tank of fish, grew roses and vegetables, went to church every Sunday, where Tom was president of the Full Gospel Association, and they seldom thought about the past.

  The last time Tom saw Pat was sometime in 1977, before he went to Buford. Shown a mug shot taken at her most recent arrest in 1991, his jaw dropped. The Pat he remembered had been slender and delicate; this woman was hugely fat.

  “I can’t believe it. That's Pat?" He shook his head, his thoughts unspoken as he handed the picture back.

  Tom saw his son, Russ, regularly, but he still longed to find his daughter, Sherry. “All I know is that she’s married and lives out in Seattle,’’ he said. “I’d sure like to hear from her, but I don’t know where to start.’’

  Tom had only one faded picture of his children when they were small. He had kept it in his wallet for many years. “The rest are gone,” he said. “Pat destroyed every single picture of my children. Russ and Sherry’s godparents were professional photographers and we had wonderful pictures of them every few months when they were growing up. But Pat was jealous and she got rid of them without my knowledge.’’

  Tom Allanson had lost his children and more than a decade and a half of freedom for a woman who said she loved him. By rights, he should have double that to enjoy his life with the woman who had truly loved him all through the years.

  ***

  For Susan, there would be no happy endings. Inexplicably, just as the Alfords had regained their financial footing and might have moved out of McDonough—and away from Boppo’s ubiquitous crystal gaze—Bill announced to Susan that he was leaving her. He could no longer stand her family. She was dumbfounded; she had no family any longer. She had no one at all but Bill and her kids.

  Bill moved out, without really explaining why.

  Susan had to stay in McDonough, ostracized and alone, for six months. Shy and dependent, married since she was eighteen, Susan now proved to be tougher than she ever realized she could be. She packed up what she could take and had a yard sale with the rest. Courtney sold “South Fork,” the dollhouse Pat had given her, for a hundred dollars and gave the money to her mother.

  During the yard sale, the family circled the block—not once but five, ten, fifty times: Debbie and her husband and Ronnie, pointing, laughing, and jeering. The colonel and Ashlynne walked by flying a kite. Boppo drove by, again and again, her nose high in the air.

  Except for Courtney and Adam, Susan was all alone.

  Susan began moving on Mother's Day, 1992, hoping that on that day, at least, Boppo and Papa would be at Hardwick visiting her mother and wouldn't follow her to see where she would be living.
It worked, although she later learned that the relatives who disowned her had tried to get her forwarding address from the post office, her childrens’ school, and her former landlord. Why? Why couldn’t they just let her go?

  When Susan, Courtney, and Adam pulled out of McDonough for the last time two days later, their truck laden down with the last of their possessions, Susan caught a glimpse of a car that looked like Debbie’s in her rearview mirror. She drove a little faster, and switched lanes, trying to lose them. As she headed northeast, and crossed from Henry County into Clayton County, one of the tires exploded. By that point, she had lost sight of the car that looked like Debbie’s. She kept the heavily loaded truck in her lane only with difficulty and drove on the rim onto a feeder road, limping to a service station.

  “I was afraid I didn’t even have enough money left to pay to have the tire changed,” Susan remembered. “And then this man came up and helped me. I call him ‘My Black Angel.’ He just appeared out of nowhere at the Exxon and said he’d help. He put the spare tire on and then he looked at the tread on the bad one and told me it was too thick to blow. He said, ‘Take it back where you bought it, and have them look it over.’ ”

  Susan recalled guiltily that the man was shabbily dressed. “He was the kind of guy I would have looked at twice if I was working a store, and that made me feel awful later. He told me, ‘Everything will be okay now.’ I guess he could see I was beside myself. I offered him the few dollars I had, and he closed my hand over it. I said, ‘Please take it,’and he just smiled and said, ‘There are still some good people left in this world. You just take care of those kids.’ ”

  Susan made her way onto the freeway again. As she took the exit ramp a few miles further, there was no one behind her. When she brought the bad tire back to the dealer the next day to ask why a practically new tire should blow the way it had, the mechanic looked at it and scratched his head. “Lady, if I didn’t know better, I'd say somebody shot this out.”

  AFTERWORD

  ***

  Looking back over Patricia Vann Radcliffe Taylor Allanson’s life, it is only natural to wonder why she behaved as she did, why she seemed compelled to cause so much pain for the people who loved her. Was she given to periods of insanity, or was she simply a supremely selfish woman who would resort to anything, even attempted murder, to get what she wanted? There may never be definitive answers to these questions. Unlike many felons, Pat Taylor apparently never did undergo psychological testing. Aside from the diagnosis of Dr. Ray Loring Johnson—the psychiatrist who examined her after she slashed her wrists and ran wildly through the woods in the spring of 1975—no psychiatric or psychological reports exist in her court records. Dr. Johnson’s assessment was that Pat suffered from “Agitated Depression with possible thought disorder.” She was placed on antipsychotic medication at that time, medication that she discontinued soon after she was released from the clinic. She did not regress.

  It was unlikely that Pat was ever insane. Often hysterical, yes. From the time she was a tiny girl, she whipped herself into emotional tizzies to have her own way. No one ever put limits on her behavior. When Patty cried, the adults in her life gave in. She grew up believing that that was the way the world operated. She viewed herself as special, and why wouldn’t she? All of her life, Patty, Patricia, and then Pat was encouraged to believe she was extraordinary. Beginning with “Mama” Siler, who “next to God, loved Patty the most,” who gave her granddaughter the last Coca Cola, who could not bring herself to spank her precious baby, and who allowed her to subsist on pancakes—Pat never heard the word “No.” When she was five, her mother married Clifford Radcliffe and continued to give Patty everything she asked for—possibly to ease her own guilt at having allowed Mama Siler to raise her child for her first years. Margureitte’s indulgence never faltered, not over the next fifty years.

  Throughout those years, Pat lied, stole, contrived, manipulated, seduced, and betrayed. She married twice and even attempted murder to get what she wanted. She wanted love and happiness, she wanted money and the things that money can buy, and she usually found someone to give them to her. If not, she set out to get them for herself. No one else mattered; people were merely the means to an end. Yet nothing she attained was enough to fill up the emptiness in her life. She was like a vessel with holes in the bottom; love and things and people and money and happiness seeped away. As Boppo once said, “I can’t understand why anyone in this whole wide world would think Pat got whatever she wanted—she never got anything she wanted. Her whole life has been tragic. Why can’t people understand that?”

  In the beginning Pat got her way because the family loved her so; later, they dreaded her sharp tongue, her wrath, and her temper tantrums. In the end, perhaps they could not bring themselves to examine her crimes in a bright light, fearing that they too were in some way responsible. The Radcliffes and Silers always seemed to treat ugly truths like an elephant in their midst. They might comment on the gleam of its eye or the fine ivory in its tusk, but they never acknowledged all of it, only the parts they could deal with comfortably.

  Every family maintains a balancing act; some members need more attention, more affirmation. Others are independent or just plain loners. Usually, individual needs change frequently and different family members become the current “burden” to be kept aloft until the balance shifts once again. In a functional family, problems eventually work out and everyone takes a turn at being the bearing wall or the burden. Pat was never the “bearing wall.” She was never allowed to take responsibility for her own life. At the first sign of trouble, someone—usually Boppo and Papa—rushed forward to save her.

  Pat was always the burden, but as bizarre as her behavior sometimes was, she was far from crazy. When she seemed so, it was a contrived aberrance, which she could slip into when it suited her purposes. Her taped voice in her conversations with Tom, clear over seventeen years of time, alternately imperious and kittenish, and full of throaty laughter, demonstrated the roles she played to manipulate everyone in her life.

  If she was not crazy, however, Pat quite likely suffered from a melange of personality disorders. She did not view the world or her relationship to it the way most people do. She knew the difference between right and wrong, but it didn’t matter. She had been raised to believe that rules were for other people and what mattered was that she got what she wanted.

  A personality disorder, once established in the mind, clings like an intractable fungus. It becomes part of the thought processes, and trying to remove it would be akin to cutting down a tree to eliminate a fungus. It is better to be “crazy” because crazy can be cured. Personality disorders die with the host, entangled for life in the brain’s functioning.

  No one knows for certain where personality disorders come from. Most psychiatrists agree, however, that they are not present at birth but, rather, take root in the first few years of life. Normally, a child of three or four will begin to understand that his or her actions can cause pain to a parent, to another child or a pet—that other creatures hurt too. This understanding and awareness leads to the development of the conscience, the still small voice inside that warns humans that certain actions are cruel, insensitive, and against the mores of their society. It is the conscience that provokes guilt, a much-maligned emotion that is actually vital to the survival of humanity.

  Abused and humiliated children are too busy merely trying to survive to “grow” a conscience or take the first baby steps to empathy. Perhaps children who are never chastised or punished sidestep the conscience-growing process too. Reverend Tasso Siler and his gentle wife Mary were kindness personified and so—according to herself—was Margureitte. Still, one wonders if too much “kindness” cannot warp a child as surely as abuse.

  Whatever stunted her emotional development, it is clear from viewing her behavior that Pat was an antisocial personality. Put simply, she had no conscience. That was why she could goad Tom into a disastrous confrontation with his parents. That was why she c
ould feed arsenic to Paw and Nona and could dose Elizabeth Crist with enough Halcion to leave her virtually unconscious day after day. That was why she could drive her own parents into bankruptcy with her ceaseless demands for money. And why she could concoct accusations against her own daughter, a woman in the grip of clinical depression, and drive her out of the house.

  She could also write the kind of letters that made Susan cry and filled Tom's heart with love. When there is no real feeling and no empathy for the feelings of other people, it is quite easy to play games with their emotions and their lives. Pat had not the faintest inkling of what they were suffering. She had no desire or ability to connect with other peoples’ emotions. Her suffering—even that which she inflicted on herself—was all that mattered, and she used her pain as another weapon to make the people who loved her suffer even more.

  A number of personality disorders often go hand in hand, and Pat was probably also a narcissistic personality. Like Narcissus of the Greek myth, who idolized his own image in a pond, she was quite literally in love with herself. She believed that she deserved whatever she desired. She was shocked when she didn't always get it. Because she could not have everything, no matter how hard those around her scurried to please her, she was often depressed. She thought she knew what she needed to make her happy—but it never had made her happy for even two weeks. By the time Pat met Tom, she had lost the capacity for happiness, if she’d ever had it at all.

  She may have also suffered from another less well known disorder that psychiatric scholars have isolated, one with a long technical name and an impossible-to-pronounce common name: “Chronic Factitious Disorder with Physical Symptoms”—“Munchausen Syndrome.” Unlike most people who dread the antiseptic smell of a hospital corridor, those who suffer from Munchausen’s crave medical settings. They truly enjoy the excitement of hospitals, the attention and the drama of being attended by nurses and doctors. They are so attracted to this milieu that they actually cause themselves pain to get there.