Left for Dead (15 page)

At the time, I didn’t mind the nicknames at all. It was done in good humor and with affection.

Later on, however, when my marriage began falling apart, it bothered me quite a lot. I’d lost
both
my first and last names. Margaret Olson had disappeared.

On my first visit to Dallas, my mother suggested that I read a number of current periodicals and do abstracts from them on three-by-five cards to cue myself on world events, in order to be an interesting dinner partner for Beck. I’m sure she meant well.

Beck and I exchanged three or four visits through 1974, and then I decided to move to Dallas, where I taught for a year at a local private school. I kept my own address, naturally. I’m that kind of Southern girl. Beck was certainly the reason I went to Texas. But whether that was a tangible gesture of love, I don’t know. I really wanted to get out of Griffin. I thought I loved him, though. I thought I was absolutely in love with him.

When I finished my residency, I was offered a fellowship in Boston. When I told Peach, she said, “Well, chief, I ain’t moving to Boston unless some decisions are made. That’s the way it is.”

I told him I wasn’t going to Boston with him unless we were married. At first, I was devastated that it required such an ultimatum to make him think. Then I was angry with him. Then I was simply certain my stance was correct. He took a weekend to think it over.

If she had not made marriage an issue, I would have been happy just to live with her in Boston. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. But actually coming to grips with the concept of being married was a challenge. Eventually, I did conclude that I was a whole lot better off with her than without her. I loved her. But I really didn’t have a clue. It amazed me that I had just taken eight years preparing to start my career, and here I was ready to take at least as big a step with no real preparation whatsoever.

He never really proposed. He just came back and said, “I can’t live without you.” I think we got married because I was standing in the right place at the right time. That’s not so unusual. I think it happens with a lot of guys.

At age twenty-six, I was still a girl in many ways, with some Pollyannaish ideas. From that standpoint, we probably were a decent match. He was not real sophisticated emotionally, either. We were both very naive.

Our wedding was April 24, 1976, at the First Baptist Church. It was a big affair, with four hundred guests, the sort of moment you live for in Griffin. There was no engagement ring, which really didn’t bother me. I used my grandmother’s ring for my wedding ring and I purchased Beck’s for him at a discount jeweler’s in Dallas. If I hadn’t been so in love, I would have realized that the $1,200’s worth of camera equipment
he’d just bought himself would have bought a nice little diamond.

As it turned out, Beck wore his band only on rare, formal occasions. He told me the reason was that he feared getting the ring caught in something, causing injury or, even worse, the loss of a finger.

Beck also had neglected to get us a hotel room for our wedding night, so we stayed at his parents’ house in Atlanta. That should have told me something.

The next day, we packed up and drove off for Boston. Our local newspaper, ever eager to report events in the best possible light, informed readers that our honeymoon would consist of “a leisurely drive up the Atlantic seaboard.”

I rarely had been outside Georgia. Besides vacation trips to Florida and the year I lived in Dallas, I had visited Chicago and New Orleans, and traveled with my mother and Wayne to New Jersey to watch Howie graduate from Princeton. That was it.

Beck may have been better traveled than I, but he, too, had severely limited horizons. These included an untutored palate. I discovered, for example, that he did not eat fish. The good news was that once I got him started, he’d try anything.

When we first got to Boston I brought up my interest in finding a teaching job. But positions weren’t plentiful in the local private schools, and they didn’t pay much. Plus, there were lots of couples like us, which meant competition for every available job. Once we compared my likely pay with the cost of commuting and other expenses, it was practically a wash.

Still, I felt a need to justify my day. If he was putting in long hours, then I would, too. It had to do with my self-esteem. I had to be busy to make it look like I was earning my keep.

I did some volunteer work at the hospital, and helped Beck assemble his professional research library. This consisted mostly of typing his notes. I was pretty isolated, but I really didn’t mind that. I like being by myself, and had spent a lot of time alone as a girl.

I love Boston, and I loved where we lived, a third-floor apartment in a row house on Longwood Avenue. That place had a lot of personality. I was also able to walk to work, which I liked. Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, didn’t live far away, and sometimes I’d run into him on his way to the MTA.

I was not so excited by my work. I was the junior guy, and I soon figured out that all they wanted was a gofer. I ended up doing the autopsies no one else felt like doing, or covering when no one else wanted to work. That included the bicentennial celebration weekend in 1976 when the tall ships came in. Peach and I were on our way out the door when the phone rang.

“Guess what, fella. You’re it.”

I spent the entire weekend locked in the morgue, reviewing cases.

It took me a while to figure out that Beck probably was depressed when we married—and he remained depressed, more or less, from then on. I had never been around a depressed person. I didn’t know what it meant when he’d complain about this hurt or that hurt and would go to bed. I knew he had a lot of trouble sharing feelings, but I took comfort in the fact that he was that way with everyone, not just me. At first I thought it would just fade away. If he learns to trust, I’d think. If he learns that no matter what, I’m here. But it never happened.

I felt I needed to be working all the time. I’m not equipped to relax and enjoy myself. It is awfully hard on anyone around you if you are not a happy person, and that’s been pretty steady throughout my life.

But here’s something else. I admire Peach’s emphasis on interpersonal communication. I regard it as one of her strengths. I just have a great deal of trouble emulating her. It is not that I don’t care to do the right thing, or make the appropriate gesture, or say the correct words. I just do not naturally think of it. Never occurs to me. This is an inadvertent part of why I have disappointed and angered Peach so often, and possibly one reason I so often misread her, which I have repeatedly done over the years.

Boston was supposed to be the beginning of intimacy. Instead it was the beginning of distance. I thought I was to blame. I was not a brilliant conversationalist, certainly not in realms that Beck would consider interesting. My mother made sure I didn’t forget that.

I did try to talk to him, but he always shut it down. And I felt he was so much smarter than I that I was intimidated. That was not entirely his fault.

“How was your day?” certainly never got me anywhere. “How were the brain tumors?” wasn’t going to work either.

One of the reasons I can seem uncommunicative to Peach is that I often have something technical on my mind that I doubt would interest her: “Dear, isn’t it interesting how a GPS satellite works?”

I know she wants to engage more in “How are you feeling? What is going through your mind right now?” Usually, there’s a big goose egg sitting there. I think she sometimes gives me too much credit for actually having thoughts.

I’d later learn something else about Beck. He has this strong need not to be answerable, to be independent. He believed all women are controlling, by their very nature.

As for me, I didn’t have anything with which to compare my
marriage. I was not unhappy, and Beck at his best is gentle, generous and undemanding. He’s no autocrat. So for the time being I decided to be content that I’d married a good man who was a good provider—and just hoped that he was steady. The truth is, if you’re looking for someone intuitive and sensitive, marry a woman.

Much as we liked Boston, I was pleasantly surprised one day to hear from Tom Dickey, a fellow pathologist who’d completed his residency with me at Southwestern. Tom was also a good friend; he and his wife had hosted an engagement party for Peach and me.

Dickey and several other highly capable young pathologists I knew from my days at Southwestern had formed a partnership in Dallas with Jim Ketchersid, whom I knew by reputation to be both a fine doctor and an incredibly honorable guy. Jim has an unwavering instinct for doing the right thing. When Dickey invited me to join their partnership, I accepted without hesitation.

“Don’t you want to know how much we’re going to pay you?” Tom asked when I didn’t.

“Not really,” I answered.

“C’mon.”

“I figure you guys will pay me what my services are worth at the point they are worth something.”