Everything She Ever Wanted (108 page)

delivery room the day you were born, and have said that was one of the

most exciting days of my life.

I could not know then all the grief I would have at the end of my

life.

How could you do this?

... With such deep hurl 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 trans rred 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.
 
My?

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