by Ann Rule
Jackson’s waste treatment complex was way out on the end of the property and had no fence at all; Tom could hear the rush of the Towaliga River and the roar of cars on the highway. There were no guards out there. He was quite solitary. He was glad that he was still a trusty, but Jackson meant that Liz was a hundred miles away, and visiting was much more difficult for her.
In a way, it was ironic. Tom had worked so hard to improve himself and to get training that would help him find a good job when he was released. Instead, he had made himself invaluable to the Georgia prison system, and it would be a hardship for them to let him go.
PART SEVEN
SUSAN
CHAPTER 42
Pat Allanson served a total of seven years. When Tom was transferred down to Jackson in 1987, she had been out of prison for three years. They had had absolutely no contact for a long time. She had told Tom again and again that she could not live without him, that her old life had ended when she met him and that she would have no life at all without her man. A hundred times—a thousand times—Tom had pleaded with her to hang on, that they would have a life somewhere down the road.
And she had replied only, “If you loved me, you would give up your life for me, and love me on the other side.” Had he surrendered to her demands, he would have been long dead, a suicide at the age of thirty-three.
Despite her dire predictions about her failing health, Pat had not only lived without Tom, she seemed to be thriving. When she left Hardwick in 1984, she went to New Horizons, a halfway house for paroled females in Atlanta, where counseling and training would prepare her to merge gradually back into the world she had left in 1977. Fans were mourning Elvis Presley the summer Pat went to prison, and the world she returned to had made Boy George a star. Miniskirts and big hair were no longer in style, astronauts were floating free in space, Ronald Reagan was president, and, for the first time, a woman— Geraldine Ferraro—was nominated for vice-president.
The romantic, Victorian world that Pat had always aspired to was further away than ever. But she was free—or almost—and her family delighted in her return to Atlanta. She could go on weekend passes from the halfway house, and soon she would really be home, back with Boppo and Papa.
Susan, Debbie, Ronnie, Boppo— the whole family—believed that Pat was on the brink of a wonderful new life. Her involvement with drugs was years behind her, and she was young enough to enjoy her life. She was still beautiful, albeit possessed of a more mature beauty. Even so, she looked far younger than her true age.
Pat habitually called her mother and daughters before 7:00 a.m. from New Horizons. If they were a little grouchy at being awakened, they immediately felt guilty; it meant so much to Pat to be in daily touch with them. It was such a luxury for her to be able to call them whenever she wanted. Susan, especially, devoted herself to helping her mother readjust to the world. She saw Pat as almost childlike; she had been cut off from everyone and everything for so long that she grabbed at life with both hands.
“I’d come get Mom at the halfway house and take her to the Varsity—that’s Atlanta’s favorite place for hot dogs; they’re real greasy but they’re so good—and she’d get chili dogs,” Susan recalled. “When she came to our house for supper, she liked to have me fix her chicken cordon bleu, but even so she always wanted to stop and get a Varsity hot dog on the way home!”
Although Susan and Bill Alford were living in Atlanta in 1984, Bill was about to be transferred once again, the standard peripatetic pattern of the young executive in America. The Alfords were moving to Marion, Indiana, in June, and Susan visited with her mother as much as possible before they left.
As always, Pat was furious with Bill for agreeing to a transfer. “How can Bill do this to me?” she implored. But Pat had made an error in judgment when she put Bill Alford in the category of men she could manipulate. She liked his strength and assumed she could harness it just as she had leaned on Gil, Tom, and Papa. Indeed, in times of trouble she had often cried, “I want my Bill!” But Pat took Bill Alford’s good nature for weakness and never saw that he could be pushed only as far as he was willing. Thereafter, he was an immovable object.
“Just when I finally get home,” Pat complained to Susan. “How can Bill deliberately take you and the children away from me?”
Of course, he had no choice—save resigning. In vain, Susan tried to explain that. She didn’t tell her mother Bill preferred to have at least a thousand miles between himself and Pat. In the time they had left together, she took her mother out to lunch and shopping as much as possible. Despite her huge appetite, Pat had lost a great deal of weight since her release from Hardwick. Susan took her to the Lenox Square shopping mall in the Buckhead neighborhood and bought her all new clothes. Pat was thrilled.
“The last time I saw her before we moved,” Susan remembered, “I took her to the bus stop so she could go to work, and we both started to cry. She looked so lost. I hated to leave her.”
With the often inexplicable reasoning of the parole system, Pat, who now called herself Pat Taylor, was assigned to work as a companion to the elderly—a “sitter.” It had been stipulated in her parole papers that she would work at the Fountainview Convalescent Home in Atlanta. Apparently, no one had researched the crimes that had sent her to prison in the first place. She now cared for wealthy elderly people who lived in their own apartments in the retirement center. She helped them bathe and eat and supervised their medications. On occasion, she even gave insulin shots to diabetic patients. Her clients all spoke highly of her; she became like part of their own families. She seemed to have no emotional life of her own, although she later confessed to Susan her feelings for an Episcopal priest who had supervised New Horizons. “He was probably the only man I could ever have really loved,” Pat said wistfully. “But of course, he wasn’t free to love me.”
In November 1984, when Pat was released from the halfway house and officially paroled, she was forty-seven years old. She had “maxed out.” Under Georgia sentencing guidelines, she had been incarcerated as long as she legally could be. The conditions of her parole dictated that she report to a parole officer in Jonesboro, Georgia, and live with Boppo and Papa on Arrowhead Boulevard in Jonesboro. But Pat told her mother she wouldn’t live in the Radcliffes’ townhouse. “There are too many niggers around here,” she said flatly. “I won’t live here.” So they moved to a little red brick house in the tiny hamlet of McDonough, Georgia. There was an upstairs room with a small bathroom off of it, and that would be Pat’s. She was coming home at last.
Pat continued with her nursing job at Fountainview, and she arranged for her daughter Debbie to work the shifts preceding or following her own. Debbie had separated from and reconciled with her husband innumerable times. She was not yet thirty and Dawn was almost fourteen. Vaguely unhappy with her life, Debbie often came to visit Susan and Bill in the lovely homes they owned far away from Atlanta, and Susan listened sympathetically to her younger sister’s litany of troubles. Debbie had missed her mother acutely while Pat was in Hardwick, so she was happy they would now be working together. Neither Pat nor Debbie had any formal training as licensed practical nurses or nursing assistants. They were learning on the job.
***
Almost from the beginning there were certain problems with Pat’s return to her family. Maybe they were inevitable. For so long, the family had believed that Pat’s home coming would be their happy ending after so many years of bad times, but things didn’t work out that way. She still threw tantrums to get what she wanted. “I thought Pat would be happy when she got out!” Boppo cried out to Susan. “She can never be happy. I’ve done everything I can do for her. If there was something else I could do, I would do it. I just want to live my life now in peace!”
First of all, there was Ashlynne, Ronnie’s daughter. In prison, Pat had been annoyed to learn that her youngest granddaughter was living with Boppo and Papa. When she came home to live, she had to share her mother with the child, and she resented it. Ther
e was no question of sending the little girl to her own mother; two-year-old Ashlynne had been in terrible condition when Boppo started caring for her—unwashed, with diapers unchanged for days, and with head lice. Ronnie lived nearby, but he had been married three or four times—no one was sure just how many—and his life was too unstable to care for his daughter properly. Ashlynne needed Boppo, and as Boppo said so often, “How can someone not love a child?”
Ashlynne wet the bed. Every time she did, Pat removed another of her toys and put it away in a closet. Eventually, Ashlynne had no toys left. Pat bought Ashlynne clothes at garage sales—and there was nothing wrong with that, except that she chose the most faded, most threadbare dresses and little shirts on sale. Dressed by her grandmother, Ashlynne looked like a refugee. When Pat wasn’t looking, Boppo threw the used clothes in the rag bag. Pat continually insisted that Ashlynne should go home and live with Ronnie, that she had no business at all taking up Boppo’s time. All the babies in the family seemed to threaten Pat, as if she feared she would no longer be loved if there were too many of them.
After she came home to McDonough, Pat also became obsessed about her background, nagging at Boppo for proof of who she really was. Boppo threw up her hands and cried, “Why are you digging up the past, Pat? I’ve told you all I know.” Boppo would call Susan or Debbie and agonize over the situation. “Your mother is calling all of her aunts and asking questions about her real father. Now she doubts I’m her real mother, and that Kent was her real brother. All my life I’ve loved your mother. I just don’t know what else I can do. Will she ever be happy?”
Susan tried to comfort her grandmother, but there was no softening Boppo’s despair at the turmoil in her home. “Your Boppo’s very tired, Susan,” she said softly. “My body is worn out, and I’m just so tired. I look in the mirror, and I can’t believe that old lady with the white hair and lines on her face is me. One thing I know for sure —your grandfather and I have been through so much, but we love each other and always have.”
Boppo and Papa were old now, but with Pat back, their lives were far from peaceful. It shouldn’t have been that way. Not from the way Boppo remembered her life. “I’m happiest when there are children around,” she said. “I took the ones that needed me most, and I helped them. I loved them all the same, of course. I just do for the one who needs me most. No matter what happens, they know their Boppo’s there for them.”
And, as it happened, Pat was always the one who needed her most.
***
Pat and Debbie grew even closer. With Susan and Bill’s “silly moves all over the country,” Pat could count on Debbie staying close to her. Gary Cole, Debbie’s long-suffering husband, came home one night to find that his wife, daughter, and furniture were gone. Pat had helped Debbie move into an apartment, encouraging her to take everything she needed.
At Thanksgiving, 1984, Boppo, Papa, and Pat drove north to Marion, Indiana, to have the holiday meal with Bill and Susan. Susan was delighted to see that everything seemed to be fine with her mother. But several weeks later, Pat drove up alone. Somewhere in Kentucky she had one of her “sudden attacks,” and after several anxious hours Susan learned she had been hospitalized.
A day later, Pat came driving up to the Alfords’ as if nothing had happened. Susan felt a familiar chill, but she fought it back. She wanted to believe in her mother—probably more than anyone else in Pat’s family did—but she had to work hard not to see small, disturbing aberrations.
Pat seemed obsessed with retrieving all the things Boppo had given Susan over the years. She said that she would replace everything with new merchandise that didn’t have so much sentimental value. Still, they had a good visit, and Susan enjoyed having her mother there. She had been seeing shadows, she decided, where there were none.
In March of 1985, Pat returned for a long visit. Susan’s friends found her charming. “They loved Mom,” Susan said. “But when they were gone, she told me she hated them—they took up too much of my time. She wanted me to stay in the house with her all the time.”
Pat again insisted on checking through Susan’s cupboards, drawers, and storage areas, even through Bill’s office, looking for Boppo’s gifts. “I’m just straightening up,” she explained when Susan asked her what she was doing. “You don’t want this candelabra—or this silver service, Now that I’m out, you can give this all back to Boppo.”
Susan let her have what she wanted, and Pat did replace a few of the things she carried away, but they came from discount stores, the heavy sterling pieces supplanted by flimsy silver-plated things, nothing like the items she took away. Later, when Susan and Bill packed to move again, this time to Florence, Alabama, Susan realized how many things were missing from her house. Visiting in McDonough, she saw most of her stuff in her mother’s room. She was perplexed, but not really angry. It was all in the family.
Pat and Debbie branched out to private-duty nursing in the homes and condominiums of elderly patients. Susan was immensely grateful that her mother was working and liked her new career. She was in such demand; Pat and Debbie had only a week or so off in between patients. Unfortunately, Pat’s jobs had a built-in obsolescence. The age and degree of infirmity of her employers made it inevitable that they didn’t live long. Both Pat and Debbie took care of Mrs. Mansfield, an elderly woman who lived in a luxurious apartment in a retirement condo in one of Atlanta’s finest neighborhoods. Debbie was with Mrs. Mansfield when she died and cried inconsolably. Pat took it philosophically.
“Debbie really loved Mrs. Mansfield,” Susan recalled. “Debbie had a real tender side.”
***
Bill Alford’s career involved troubleshooting to turn around companies with poor performance records, mostly in the office supply area. It meant moving frequently, but he was good, and he rose steadily in his field. He was happy to be away from Atlanta and the Sturm und Drang of the Siler-Taylor-Radcliffe family crises. When they visited, Susan was always shushing him and whispering, “Be nice to them, Bill!” It did little good, but his sarcasm was so subtle that it often went over her family’s heads.
Pat was a frequent visitor when they moved to Florence, Alabama, in the summer of 1985. The Alfords had a wonderful house, and Susan decorated it in a homey country style, using a number of antiques. Pat enjoyed being there, playing with Sean and Courtney, and having Susan wait on her. The Florence house had a pool and Pat liked to sit beside it on a chaise lounge. She wouldn’t wear a bathing suit—despite her initial weight loss at the halfway house, she had since regained it all and considerably more—but she sometimes jumped in wearing her shorts and blouse.
It was in Florence the next spring that Susan discovered she was pregnant for the third time. She was thirty-three, and they hadn’t planned on more children, but she and Bill were happy. Her mother was not. “You’re too old to have another baby,” Pat said firmly. “I think the only thing is for you to get rid of it.”
“Mom!"
“It will weaken you, I’ll tell you that. You’ll never be healthy again. What about Sean and Courtney? If you die, they’ll have no mother. You’ll cheat them.”
One of the main drawbacks of having yet another grandchild, Pat insisted, was that she was already sewing and embroidering full-time for the family she had; she could never, ever keep up with a fifth grandchild. Susan thought her overblown view of the importance of her sewing projects was almost pathetic. Admittedly, for this family, conception at thirty-three meant an over-the-hill pregnancy, but Pat’s arguments verged on hysteria. She had been a grandmother at that age, although she had always refused to be called “Grandma,” and only recently had begun answering to “Grandma Pat.”
Despite her mother’s dire warnings, Susan carried and gave birth to her second son, Adam, on January 1987. Through complications that had nothing to do with her “advanced age,” Adam was delivered by cesarean section. At Susan’s request, Pat had been barred from the labor room, but she talked her way into the recovery room by explaining to the
doctor that she was a registered nurse.
Susan didn’t want her there. “I can’t say why—maybe it was because she wanted me to abort my baby—but it was like the time I was little in the Philippines and my hand was crushed. I didn’t want to see my mother then, and I didn’t want to see her after Adam was born. I just turned my face to the wall. The obstetrician and pediatrician were personal friends of Bill’s and mine. They told Mom that I was the new mother and they made a policy of letting the mothers have what they wanted.”
Perhaps Pat had been truly worried about Susan’s health. She made such a fuss over Adam that no one would ever have guessed how hard she had fought to have Susan abort him. She cooed over the new baby boy as if she had never had a grandchild before.
Pat was between jobs right after Adam was born and she spent a lot of time in Florence, driving the five hours between Georgia and Alabama by herself. She seemed completely devoted to her newest grandchild. He was a big strapping baby boy, and Susan dressed him in the lacy Victorian gowns and little bonnets her mother made for him only long enough to take pictures—just to keep peace. Pat loved to see him dressed up, but Sean was indignant, and as soon as the photo sessions were over he would put a baseball cap and a sports sweatshirt on his baby brother.
In June of 1987, Susan took her children and drove to McDonough for a visit with Boppo, Papa, and her mother. She had meant to stay only a week, but she got sick. “It was the strangest illness I’d ever had,” she recalled later. “I wanted to head home in July, but I had to stay an extra few days because something was wrong with me. Bill kept calling me and wanting us to come home, and I told him, “I can’t drive. My feet won’t work right.”
