Everything She Ever Wanted (40 page)

reminder of his existence was a picture of him as a shy grade school

boy that Margureitte kept constantly in view.
 
Margureitte had borne

three children.
 
Two of them were dead.
 
She refused tranquilizers.

"Why do I want to numb the pain?"
 
she asked hopelessly.
 
"Kent's

dead.

In the morning, he will still be dead.
 
Nothing will change.
 
Why numb

the pain?"

Pat grieved dramatically for her brother, sobbing about what a tragedy

it was.
 
She blamed Cindi.
 
"She killed him with a broken heart!"
 
But

Margureitte was not unaware of the rancor that Pat had always felt for

Kent.
 
She stared blankly at her daughter's tearful face.

Margureitte now devoted all her energies to Pat and Pat's children.

Besides Clifford and her sisters, they were all she had left.
 
And now

Pat had her mother all to herself.
 
None of her histrionics and

machinations had done real harm to anyone before.

Rather, she had been just an inadequate young woman, self-absorbed and

hysterical, who seemed her own worst enemy.

But now, with her brother's suicide, her overwhelming selfishness had,

quite literally, drawn blood.

Life went on on Dodson Drive.

It was 1966 and Pat was twenty-nine years old.
 
The war in Vietnam

raged far away.
 
Gil Taylor, cut adrift from his family, spent a large

chunk of his life in that war.
 
"From the time I was eleven or twelve,"

Susan recalled of that year, "we mostly lived on Dodson Drive with my

grandparents.
 
My father dropped in occasionally and he sent money.
 
We

kids missed him."

Pat used Gil's money for her own needs; she told her parents that he

contributed nothing to his family's support-a lie.
 
Boppo and Papa

supported her and the children.

The Taylor family made sporadic attempts to reunite, but they were

always back with Pat's parents within a few months.

Gil signed on for another tour in Vietnam.
 
On their fifteenth

anniversary, he sent Pat a picture of himself in fatigues standing

outside the mess tent.

On the back he wrote, 6 Sept.
 
1967.
 
My Darling, It.
 
Levine took this

of me this morning.

ANNV.
 
PRESENT.
 
Ha!
 
I love you.
 
Happy Anniversary, My love.

Pat had not lived with him for more than a fraction of those fifteen

years.

Colonel Radcliffe retired from the army and dabbled in real estate.

Margureitte decorated the Dodson Drive house so that every room pleased

her.
 
There were three bedrooms a'nd a den.

Ronnie, seven, slept in Pat's room; Susan and Debbie had shared a room

until Kent moved out, and then Susan got his room.
 
After he died, she

had bad dreams.
 
She cried for him for a long time.
 
But no one spoke

about Kent very much.
 
Certainly no one discussed why he had killed

himself.
 
What was the point?

Through her granddaughters, Margureitte lived out her old dreams of

being a horsewoman.
 
She prevailed upon the colonel to invest in a

horse, not much more than a plug.
 
They named him Sam, and Susan,

Debbie, and Ronnie rode him.
 
Margureitte's job as a receptionist for a

local dentist provided money for her grandchildren's riding lessons.

Pat took lessons too, reveling in her image, but she had no real flair

for riding.
 
She could ride sidesaddle and look pretty, no more than

that.
 
Her children were good-particularly Susan and Debbie.
 
They

studied with some of the most prestigious trainers in the South, and

learned English-style riding, jumping, and equestrienne.
 
Seeing her

granddaughters in their jodhpurs, tailed 'jackets, and fedoras, Boppo

beamed.
 
She never missed a competition if she could help it and was

very proud when they won blue ribbon after blue ribbon.
 
"My girls

always pinned high," she recalled fondly.
 
There was r,omething so

refined about this sport; the best people in Georgia participated.

Debbie and Susan got along as well as most teenage sisters.

Susan's two-year advantage in age gave her more privileges, which

Debbie resented mightily.
 
Neither girl inherited her mother's green

eyes; they had dark brown eyes.
 
Susan had thick, almost black hair,

and Debbie's was light brown.
 
They were both very pretty.
 
Susan

tended to be quiet and Debbie feisty.

Many years later, Colonel Radcliffe laughed when he recalled that Susan

and her girlfriends used to sneak out on the porch so they could peek

at him while he was in the shower.
 
An adult Susan shook her head in

bewilderment.
 
"We never did that.
 
Why would we?
 
Why would he say

that?
 
Maybe my girlfriends would have liked to peek at Kent-but they

never did.
 
And they sure didn't want to see my grandfather naked."

Ronnie's seizures continued sporadically, and many times his andparents

and his mother held a tongue depressor between gr his teeth, wrapped

him in blankets, and sped away to the hospital.
 
"They would never tell

us what was wrong with him," Susan said.
 
"And, after a while, it

didn't happen anymore."

The girls' weekends were taken up with riding lessons and shows.
 
Sam

was relegated to pasture, and they rode their own Morgan horses now: La

Petite and Biscayne.
 
Debbie and Susan were so good that they rode in

shows for other owners too.
 
They went to the best tack shops for their

English riding uniforms and had them tailored to fit.
 
Pat drove them

to their lessons and competitions and Boppo and Papa paid for

everything.
 
They @ I bought the horses and took care of their board

and vet bills.

"I was the Georgia youth champion for riding Morgans when I was

fourteen," Debbie remembered.
 
"And then the world youth champion.
 
I

was riding someone else's horse when I won; it was Lippit Moro Alert,

owned by Ronald Blackman."
 
But Biscayne threw Debbie and she broke her

arm.
 
Despite the pressure at home, she refused to ride her again.

usan e t the pus to win too.
 
Although she loved the jumping events

because they made her feel "free," she was often frightened on the

obstacle courses.
 
"I faked it once-if my mother had found out, she

would have killed me because it was a very elite show in Atlanta.

Biscayne and I made the first few jumps, but we were coming up on a

solid brick wall and I just knew she couldn't spread out enough to make

it.
 
I was terrified, and I clamped my knees down and made it look like

she'd balked.
 
Everybody blamed her but I was the one who was scared.

I felt guilty about humiliating her that way."

With time, the pain from Kent's suicide became less acute for

Margureitte, although she never truly recovered from the loss.
 
But she

still had Pat and the colonel, who accepted her grandchildren as his

own.
 
He called Susan "Poogie," Debbie "Diddie," and Ronnie "Sam

Houston Texas Taylor."
 
As for Pat, she was so much more serene when

she lived with her parents.
 
Her own parenting sometimes seemed

quixotic.
 
She continued to sew for her daughters, wonderful special

dresses that would have cost hundreds of dollars in a store, and she

encouraged their efforts.
 
"She was always telling me I could do

anything," Susan said.
 
"She was so proud of us when we did well."

But there were times when Pat's maternal talents were not quite so

genteel.
 
Susan recalled riding in a car with her mother when she was

twelve or thirteen and asking a question about sex.

"We were driving in the car and my class had been studying the

population explosion.
 
I didn't know the first thing ibout sex, and I

said, 'Well, nobody should blame somebody because God put a baby in her

stomach."
 
My mother laughed and said, 'Don't you know anything?
 
The

man puts his penis in the woman's hole and wiggles up and down."
 
She

went on telling me about sex in the ugliest, most graphic terms.
 
There

was nothing about love or no birds or bees-just a blunt explanation of

what men did to women.
 
I was stunned.
 
I don't know why she told me

that way.
 
When I was older, I told Boppo about it and we both

laughed.

All in all, the years living with Boppo and Papa were good.

Neither Debbie nor Susan remembered them as unusual in any way.

They adored Boppo.
 
And Boppo told them constantly how much she loved

them.
 
Boppo herself was happy.
 
She had her daughter and her

grandchildren.
 
Her sisters were an easy drive away and she saw them

often.
 
Mama Siler was eighty-six and frail-but still with them.
 
The

Silers continued to meet every August at White Lake, North Carolina,

for the annual reunion.
 
Aside from missing Kent, life was as good as

it had ever been for Boppo.
 
She had never had a house she loved as

much as the one on Dodson Drive.

She never wanted to leave it-and, apparently, neither did Pat.

Sergeant Gilbert Taylor was nothing if not persistent.
 
He still loved

Pat, and in his mind, it was only a matter of time until he gathered

his family around him again.
 
He knew what it would take, and when he

transferred back to Fort McPherson in 1969, he was prepared to give his