by Ann Rule
Susan and the kids headed for Alabama, and they did all right until she got on the expressway. The speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, and Susan had great difficulty getting past thirty-five. Her foot wouldn’t press hard enough on the accelerator. She tried to force her foot down on the pedal. “I finally had to reach down and just take my hands and mash my foot on the accelerator. I thought we’d never get home.”
Susan’s hands ached too. For some time after she got home she had to hold her hands together and squeeze them, rub her legs, and massage her feet to get some relief. It was the worst, bone-aching flu she had ever had. Her skin turned gray and her eyes stared back at her from the mirror like two dead things. Time after time she told Bill, “I just can’t stand the pain in my feet. I can hardly walk.”
Susan’s doctor tried one antibiotic after another, but she got worse. Finally, he said she was probably over medicated. “I’m just taking you off antibiotics entirely. You’ve just got a really bad case of the flu.”
“But I had no energy,” Susan recalled. “I could hardly even get to the doctor’s office. Bill was so worried. He said, ‘I’ve got to get you well, 'cause you’ve got a six- month-old and two kids at home.’ Finally, I gradually began to get better.”
It took Susan about six weeks to get back on her feet.
Adam worried the Alfords too. At two weeks, he had had unexplained bleeding from the lower intestinal tract. They were frightened that it might be something really serious. The doctors tested him for everything under the sun and finally put him on a special formula. That seemed to work, but he couldn’t digest solid food until he was almost a year old. Since Debbie had also had bouts with bloody colitis, the doctors suggested that Susan and Bill check their families’ medical histories to see if there were any other relatives who had suffered from rectal bleeding.
“In 1987,” Susan recalled, “I had two projects. The first was to go back through all our ancestors to see if any of them had ever had anything like Adam did; the second was to write a book. I wanted to write a really upbeat, inspirational book about my mother and the family. She had been through so much, and then all those years in prison, and she had a good job, helping people, and she’d even helped people in prison with the classes she taught. The rest of us had suffered too; we were still emotionally exhausted from those bad years. I wanted to write a happy-ending kind of book about a family that had triumphed over one member’s mental illness and drug addiction. My family wasn’t perfect—nobody’s is—and Lord knows we certainly had our eccentricities, but I thought we had come through it all just fine.
“I repressed my fears; I still ignored the warnings. I just wanted so much for us all to be all right.”
CHAPTER 43
***
Pat Taylor hit a bad patch in 1987. After Mrs. Mansfield died, she couldn’t find another “sitting” job. If she wanted to, Debbie could always work as a receptionist in a doctor’s office; she was young and attractive with a terrific figure. It wasn’t nearly so easy for Pat. She had only a tenth-grade education and she was fifty. She had put on so much weight that she looked her age and more. Almost overnight, she had gone from a slender, almost ethereal woman of a certain age to a stolid, solid middle-aged woman. She still loved exquisite period dresses with lace and hand stitching, and she had a beautiful wedding gown, circa 1880, on a mannequin in her bedroom in Papa and Boppo’s house, a white ghost figure standing in a dark corner. The antique dress was about a size 8, and Pat wore a 22. She reveled in her costumes, but she could no longer squeeze into them. If she dreamed of romance and perfect love, she no longer spoke of it.
Way back in the days when Pat and her children, Susan, Debbie, and Ronnie were living with Boppo and Papa, Pat had often accused her parents of resenting the money they spent on her and her children. “If we’re too much for you to support,” she would cry, “I’ll just go work in a Waffle House!” It was only an idle threat. Then. For Pat, a job at the Waffle House was the most desperate strait in which an upper-class woman could find herself. Twenty years later in 1987, she was forced to take a job as an assistant manager at a Pizza Hut up I-75 in Stockbridge. She told her children that she would earn close to twenty thousand dollars a year, if you included benefits.
How she hated it. If anything, it was far worse than a Waffle House. The steel bowls of pizza dough were heavy and hurt her back. The smell of tomato sauce and oregano clung to her auburn hair and seeped into her very skin. She couldn’t get along with the younger managers and the other workers.
Life didn’t seem fair to Pat. Susan had a fine house and a good husband, Debbie was tanned and wild and sexy as Pat had once been, and Boppo had a man who loved her beyond reason. But Pat?
Pat had nothing. She had no love, no future, no money, and she had lost the only home she ever wanted. She had become fascinated with antique dolls and wanted to collect them. And then she wanted to own real antique carousel horses. She wanted to be a true southern lady. There were so many things she wanted. Somehow, there had to be a way to get them.
CHAPTER 44
***
“Pat didn’t want to go to work for the Crists, you know,” Margureitte Radcliffe recalled. “I believe it was their son who called her—because she had such wonderful references from her looking after other elderly people—and he just pleaded with her, begged her, to take care of his parents. A very fine old family. Very, very wealthy.”
Pat resigned from the Pizza Hut, glad to be rid of the smell of tomato sauce and oregano (despite what her mother later said), and went to work for Elizabeth and James Crist.
***
The Crists had lived for decades in a mansion on a huge, rambling spread of manicured grounds on Nancy Creek Road near Atlanta’s Peachtree Country Club. Once, a long time ago, Pat Taylor had designed the kind of estate she wanted, but all her efforts to make it come to life had fallen short. Her dream plantation was very like the Crists’ estate. Their home was built of pale green wood siding, three stories high, with wings, dormers, bay windows, and a “Florida room.” The main house had maids’ quarters and an attached garage with room for four cars, and the grounds featured a pond, a pool, a barbecue area, and every other possible nicety for gracious living. The mansion was set at least five hundred feet back from Nancy Creek Road. A circular driveway led through the pine trees, oak trees, holly bushes, and huge rhododendrons that sheltered the vast green stretch of lawn. The view from the rear of the house was into private woods. The Crists were, indeed, “very, very wealthy.”
In the spring of 1987 the Crists found they needed assistance. James Crist suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Betty Crist called a friend of hers who worked at the Peachtree Plaza and asked if she had any suggestions. “Yes,” the woman answered. “There’s a woman named Patricia Taylor who’s supposed to be awfully good.”
Armed with Pat Taylor’s phone number at the Radcliffes’, Betty Crist called her and arranged an interview. The buxom applicant seemed competent and intelligent. She had a certain air of quiet good breeding about her, and seemed unimpressed by the plush surroundings of the Crists’ home. Pat Taylor was hired. She would receive, as a beginning salary, ten dollars an hour and meals. She began working for the Crists on May 1, 1987. Debbie soon joined her, working the night shift.
The Crists had two sons and a daughter and they agreed that Pat Taylor seemed to be the perfect solution to their father’s health care. He would be able to stay in the house on Nancy Creek Road and wouldn’t have to go into a nursing home.
Elizabeth Crist was seventy-six, a cheerful, healthy, and intelligent woman. She needed no care at all herself—but she had a bad knee and had suffered herniated spinal disks in the past so she couldn’t lift her husband. They had been married a very long time and loved each other devotedly. Having Pat on duty would allow Betty to be with her husband for company in the days he had left.
***
Susan and Bill Alford were still living in Florence, Alabama, in 1987, and they brea
thed a sigh of relief when there was a period of respite from the family problems that usually bubbled up out of Georgia. Pat seemed to adore Adam and grudgingly agreed that childbirth hadn’t killed Susan after all, although Susan had had that one bad “sinking spell” six months after his birth when she visited at Boppo’s. No one had ever diagnosed what had caused her illness.
Susan and Bill were also pleased to learn that apparently both Pat and Debbie had jobs they liked, working as nurse’s aides for a wealthy couple near the Peachtree Country Club. That was good news. Susan was hardly worried when she got a phone call from Boppo.
“Susan,” her grandmother asked, “do you know how much money your mother makes where she's working?”
“No, she’s never mentioned it.”
“Well, Debbie says she makes a lot of money—that your mother is making as much as Bill does.”
“Oh,” Susan said. “I don’t think so. You know how Mom exaggerates. Debbie does too. I’m just grateful they both have a job they like and they can work together.”
Pat did seem to be making a little more money than she had in the past. At that summer’s Siler Family Reunion at White Lake, North Carolina, she proudly announced that she was taking care of her mother and father in “their old age. I have a big glass jar and I keep it filled with money. Mother can reach in there anytime she wants and get herself a handful of money.”
Susan knew that was ridiculous. Despite the fortune they had lost in legal fees for Pat, Boppo and Papa were still supporting her mother. The money she made she spent mostly on herself. There was a money jar, but Boppo dipped into it only to please Pat. Susan tried not to borrow trouble. Her mother had a tendency to be grandiose and there was no way that Pat could be supporting Boppo and Papa; maybe it made her mother feel important to tell all the aunts and cousins that she was. Pat was over fifty, and she had always been dependent on her parents. If she put some quarters and fifty-cent pieces in a jar for Boppo, what real harm was there in that?
Pat also became suddenly generous with the rest of the family, giving them little bits and pieces of jewelry and old books—the kind of things she liked. She gave her grandchildren funny old-fashioned toys that they soon discarded for plastic fads from Toys “R” Us. But her own collection of treasures of another era was growing larger. Besides her Victorian cards and her dolls, she added another collection: antique hatpins. She said the late Mrs. Mansfield had given her—and Debbie—so many things they admired.
Through the fall and winter of 1987, Pat worked longer and longer hours at the Crists. She explained that Elizabeth Crist’s health had begun to fail too so there was a lot more work to do. It no longer sounded like the ideal job; Pat and Debbie both complained that the elderly Crists were penny-pinchers, pointing out how “common” it was the way they lined their garbage cans with newspapers instead of plastic trash can liners. They said they had no place to sleep except a lumpy little couch. Still, Pat and Debbie stayed on the job. It was the longest-running job Pat had ever had.
It ended in mid-June of 1988. Pat explained to her family that it was unfortunate, but there had been a problem with the Crists’ medical insurance. “The company just refused to pay for aides anymore,” she said. “So the Crists couldn’t keep us on.”
Colonel Radcliffe turned seventy-five in July. The whole family showed up at a restaurant to honor Papa. Pat had saved up to get him a wonderful surprise, an eighteen-karat gold lapis stone ring. He was very pleased. He held his hand up for Susan’s camcorder and described the ring, right down to the intricate carving beside the blue stone.
Papa didn’t look seventy-five. He barely looked sixty —fit and handsome—as he posed for yet another group of happy family pictures with Bill, Susan, Debbie, Pat, Sean, Courtney, Adam, Ronnie and Ashlynne, and Boppo. They toasted each other with iced tea in Mason jars. It was a happy night.
With no further practical nursing prospects in sight, Pat started her own business in her parents’ home in McDonough. She called her enterprise Patty’s Play Pals and had business cards made up. She sewed doll clothes and worked on antique dolls, restoring them to their original condition. She was wonderfully clever with her dolls. Boppo and Papa gave her the room off their recreation room and it soon became a “nursery” of sorts.
Dozens of dolls, their fixed eyes bright and staring, filled that room. Being there was like stepping back in time—to the 1930s and then further and further back until this century seemed not to exist at all. Pat seemed happiest in her doll room, or in the windowless closet adjoining it that she turned into a stuffy little sewing room. She sewed far into the night, her work area lit by a bare light bulb swinging from an extension cord.
On weekends, Pat carefully packed up her Play Pals and drove to hobby shows, swap meets, and flea markets. “That made me sad,” Susan remembered. “To see my mother at her age going around to flea markets with her dolls. It seemed so humbling for her—almost worse than it was when she was working at the pizza parlor. She’d go to those tailgate sales or swap meets and she was selling her doll things out of the trunk of her car.”
Although there were no more men in Pat’s life, she made a very close woman friend, a teacher named Miss Loretta.* Miss Loretta also collected antique dolls and they had much in common. They were both plump, middle-aged women with lonely lives and unfulfilled dreams. Miss Loretta had never been married.
Pat rapidly became as possessive of Miss Loretta as she had once been of Hap Brown and Tom Allanson, and as she still was of her mother. She had never been able to hold lightly onto important people in her life. It was no different with Miss Loretta. Pat clutched and clung. She could not bear for “her” people to have lives away from her; she had to know about every detail of their activities.
Although some of Pat’s exquisitely restored dolls sold for hundreds—even thousands—of dollars, Patty’s Play Pals wasn't a consistent source of income, and Pat had to take another job. She went to work for the Golden Memories shop in Stockbridge, a pawnshop and consignment store that sold old jewelry, small items, and just plain junk that people brought in, keeping a percentage. At least it was more in keeping with Pat’s interests than making pizza. The pizza parlor was right across the street, and she shuddered to think she had ever worked there. She made forty-five dollars a day at Golden Memories. At the end of each day, she would open the cash register by punching the No Sale key, and pay herself in cash. She had grown so heavy that it was hard for her to be on her feet all day. Pat bought herself a folding chair at the Wal-Mart Drugstore and sat on that between customers.
If Tom Allanson had walked into Golden Memories, he probably wouldn’t have recognized his former wife. The frail and beautiful southern belle had long since been buried under folds of flesh. Even the sweet voice that had once reduced him to tears was vastly changed. Pat either gave imperious commands or she sighed with dull fatigue, her voice harsh and flat.
But, after fourteen years, Tom was still in prison. And he was married—at least common-law—to another woman. Surprisingly, he held no grudge against Pat. He was not a man to hold grudges. What might have been more devastating—if she had known about it—was that Tom never thought about Pat at all.
CHAPTER 45
***
Once, in a moment of searing revelation, Margureitte Radcliffe had confessed to Susan her own worst fear. “I have nightmares about being accused of a crime—falsely—and being sent to prison. That’s what I’m most afraid of.”
Susan wasn’t surprised. Sometimes it seemed as though her mother and grandmother shared one brain. Although Boppo could hold a stubborn grudge against even one of her own sisters, she had always forgiven her daughter anything, and she had always absorbed Pat’s pain. Of course Boppo feared the worst thing that had ever happened to Pat. Wherever Pat’s emotions plunged, her mother’s followed. She had practically gone to prison herself when Pat did.
Susan didn’t confide her worst fear to Boppo—she didn’t dare. Boppo would have been outraged. “
It wasn’t a rational fear,” Susan admitted. “At least I didn’t think it was then. I was afraid that Bill would die, and my mother would move in and take over my house and my life. I could picture her locking the doors and not letting anyone in to see me—and not ever letting me out. It was a suffocating feeling.”
Bill Alford was transferred once again—this time back to the Atlanta area. The Alfords bought a lovely home in the Brookstone Country Club area. Sean was in high school; he had grown up to be a tall, extremely handsome young man who often played golf with his father at the Brookstone private golf course. Courtney played golf too, the only girl in her age category, and she took ballet lessons. Adam was an adorable little blue-eyed toddler.
Pat was still working at the Golden Memories consignment store, and she kept her doll business going, sewing far into the night as she had done at Hardwick. She visited Susan’s new house often and complained how she hated having to work all the time. “I just want time to spend with my grandchildren,” she sighed. “I can’t stand working anymore. It’s just too hard.” Locked up in prison, Pat had missed most of the growing-up years of her older grandchildren. But she seemed to dote on all of them, with one exception. She still had no affinity for Ronnie’s daughter, Ashlynne, and argued peevishly that the child had no business living with Boppo and Papa. Boppo ignored her complaints. Ashlynne was going to stay living with them, and that was that. Ashlynne was the only thing Boppo defied her daughter about. “I think Boppo loved Ashlynne the way she once loved Mom,” Susan later mused. “And my mother knew it.”
