Before He Wakes (21 page)

Barbara started work on June 16 and made a quick impression on her bosses. They thought her to be efficient, thorough, creative, self-directed and ambitious. Her coworkers found her to be friendly and helpful. She talked a lot about her sons and her husband, they would say later. She told them about gifts that Russ bought her and all the things they did together. All of Barbara’s coworkers got the impression that she had an ideal marriage.

Russ was not viewing his marriage in exactly those terms that summer. He was more torn than his mother ever had seen him. He came to her in confidence one day and told her about catching Barbara with her lover at the stadium.

“Mother,” he said, “she’s sleeping all over town.”

He had no proof of that, though, and indeed Barbara was successfully beginning to suppress this aspect of her personality. But aided by Russ’s own weakness for spending, her other compulsion was as strong as ever. They had fallen deeply in debt again, Russ now told his mother. Once again they were members of a country club, this time at Willowhaven, just down the street from their house (the boys could ride their bikes there to swim, Barbara noted). Barbara had traded her Oldsmobile for a new one. She had had new hardwood floors put in the house, a Jenn-Air range installed in the kitchen. Al had been noting these new extravagances and had been bringing them up to Russ, warning that he was heading toward trouble again. Now Russ was telling his mother that he couldn’t control Barbara. She kept taking the key to the post office box and getting the mail before he could get to it, he said. He couldn’t be sure what she was doing.

“Russell,” his mother said, “leave her.”

He was silent for a few moments.

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t hurt those boys. They’re mine now.”

Not long after spilling his troubles to his mother, Russ turned to the other woman who had played a major role in his life: his first wife, Jo Lynn.

After their divorce in 1979, she also had remarried later that year. She and her new husband had moved to Winston-Salem, then to Chicago. Russ and Jo Lynn had lost touch with each other for a few years, but late in 1982, soon after the financial crisis and the book deception, Russ had called Jo Lynn’s parents to get her telephone number. He called her in Chicago. Although he likely called intending to talk about the troubles he was having, he apparently changed his mind, for he only chatted amiably and mentioned no problems.

When Jo Lynn told him that she was planning to come home for Christmas, Russ said that he would like to see her, and they made plans to get together.

They met for pizza at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh. Jo Lynn saw immediately that Russ had changed.

“Russ always had a light around him that said, ‘I’m so glad to be alive,’ ” she recalled years later. “That seemed dimmed.”

Still, he spoke of no problems. They laughed and reminisced about happy times. Both realized that they still cared for each other and promised to keep in touch.

Russ called Jo Lynn again in the fall of 1983, after she had separated from her second husband. With a breaking voice he told her that Sampson, the German shepherd they had raised from a puppy, had died.

Jo Lynn returned to North Carolina soon after that. She got a job and moved into a small apartment in Raleigh with her young son by her second husband.

One Sunday evening in July 1984, Jo Lynn’s doorbell rang. She answered to find Russ standing before her in camouflage military fatigues. He was just on his way home from his National Guard drill in Raleigh, he said, and thought he’d drop by.

Jo Lynn was happy to see him, but she could tell that something was wrong. Russ seemed worried. She invited him in.

Although she wouldn’t realize it until later, she came to believe that Russ reached out to her instinctively when he was troubled, as if he needed to reconnect to the more innocent and happy time when they had been together.

When Jo Lynn inquired how things had been going, Russ indicated that they hadn’t been going well at all. She knew how closemouthed Russ was, how he held so many things inside, and his admission surprised her. Soon it all was pouring out of him: the book episode, the unpaid bills under the chair, the rendezvous at County Stadium.

“Russ was a very trusting person,” Jo Lynn recalled later. “To find out he had been deceived in so many ways, he was overwhelmed. It was almost a disbelief that anybody could do so many things.”

He had thought about leaving Barbara, he told Jo Lynn, and if it weren’t for the boys, he would. Jo Lynn knew from the way Russ had talked about Bryan and Jason that he loved them deeply. He was clearly devoted to them and he thought they felt the same way about him. They had already lost one father, he said, and he didn’t want them to lose another.

Russ also talked about the father they had lost. Barbara had told him that Larry shot himself while cleaning a gun, he said, but he was beginning to wonder about that.

“I know it sounds crazy,” he said, “but if anything ever happens to me, I want you to look into it.”

Jo Lynn didn’t know what to say. All she could do was offer a sympathetic ear and consolation, but his last comment unnerved her. Could he truly be in danger? Was Barbara just disturbed or truly crazy? It bothered her so much that after Russ left, she called a close friend to talk about it. Later she also told her parents about her concerns.

Several weeks after his first visit, Russ again showed up at Jo Lynn’s door after a Sunday drill. Again she listened as he went on and on about Barbara. He couldn’t believe that there were people like her, he said. He was sure that the ordeal he was going through was a payback for what he had done to Jo Lynn when they were married. He was to blame for the failure of their marriage, he admitted. If only he had been more mature, if only he had been a stronger person, they might still be together and happy.

“What goes around, comes around,” he said, using one of his favorite expressions to explain his situation.

As he was getting ready to leave, Russ turned to Jo Lynn and paused, as if uncertain about what he was going to say.

“If you would give me another chance,” he suddenly blurted, “I could be gone in a weekend.”

Jo Lynn was taken aback. She was seeing somebody else, but she still loved Russ, wanted to be his caring friend and confidant. They could be closer as friends, she thought, than as husband and wife.

“We both made mistakes,” she said, and his eyes told her that he understood. There would be no quick and easy escapes to happiness. He would have to find some other way out of the mire in which he had trapped himself.

15

Russ always preached to his players never to give up when the going got tough, and he was not too big to heed his own lessons. After he realized that he never could return to his innocent and happy past, he resolved to work things out with Barbara. His determination would pay off, just as he had told his players that it would, and things would grow dramatically better for both of them in the next few years. But gradually, insidiously, old patterns would creep back that eventually would lead him to wonder if sometimes it was not better to be a quitter.

As he always had done in time of need, he turned to God for help, and by the fall of 1984, he and Barbara vowed to rededicate themselves to God, the church and each other. They began teaching Sunday school together at Rose of Sharon Church and took part in almost all of the other activities there.

As their relationship improved, they began to dream new dreams together.

Neither ever had been happy in the small house on Bivens Road, and fantasy house shopping became a favorite pastime for them. They often went riding through Durham’s better neighborhoods, looking for houses that they liked. When they saw one for sale that caught their eye, they would call the realtor and make an appointment to look at it, just to see how their furnishings would go with the interior.

Early in the summer of 1985, they found a house that Barbara couldn’t resist. It had the contemporary design that she favored above all others. Both liked the layout, the openness that the huge windows gave to the living areas, the stone fireplace and cathedral ceiling in the living room, and deck off the master bedroom.

The house was in a new subdivision, quiet and wooded, within walking distance of Willowhaven Country Club, only a mile or so from Russ’s parents’ house. And although the lot wasn’t huge, the house’s hillside location and the surrounding trees gave it a sense of privacy.

Best of all, the price was right. Russ and Barbara were sure that they could get it for not much more than $100,000. Their house on Bivens Road ought to bring at least $85,000. They would make money on their present house, and although they would have to take a bigger mortgage, their payments wouldn’t be that much more than they were making now.

They made a bid on the house at 2833 Fox Drive, and a price of $101,500 was finally agreed upon. When Russ’s parents heard about the new house, they were dubious. Al particularly made known to his son his doubts about the wisdom of this move, and as the time neared for signing papers and making a deposit, Russ began to have second thoughts. At Sunday dinner at his parents’ house, he suggested to Barbara that maybe they should back out of the deal.

“We can’t,” Barbara said, pointing out that the real estate agent was a friend of hers and it would embarrass her.

“I thought I was your friend, too,” Russ said.

He soon acquiesced, though, as his parents knew he would. What Barbara wanted, she usually got—and quickly. “She had no patience,” Doris later recalled. “She wanted everything right now.”

Russ and Barbara paid a deposit on the new house and put their house on the market. Their house sold so quickly and at such a good price—$89,500—that they found themselves moving much sooner than they expected, early in July.

They barely had time to get settled in the new house before their lives were overtaken by hectic new schedules.

Barbara’s bosses had seen for some time that they needed to provide her with greater opportunities if they wanted to keep her. That summer she was offered a new job as an administrative secretary in the division of surgical nursing, a step up, with an increase in pay. One major benefit of the job was that Barbara could arrange her schedule to allow her to return to college.

That fall, sixteen years after she had dropped out of Appalachian State University to get married and have a baby, Barbara enrolled as a full-time student at North Carolina Central University, where Russ was attending night classes, working on his master’s degree. That decision had been made upon the advice of the Christian counselor that Barbara’s parents had arranged for her to begin seeing to help her deal with her spending problems after the financial crisis she and Russ had suffered through, she wrote in answer to a letter from her former in-laws. They still were trying to keep in touch with her, still hoping to arrange a visit with their grandchildren, although Barbara had been making excuses to keep that from happening for more than seven years now. The counselor thought that she was resentful because she had not been able to finish college.

Barbara was convinced that her life was now set on a new and far better course. “I think I am really getting myself into perspective, and am finally the person the Lord wants me to be,” she wrote to the Fords. “I have learned to be honest, totally honest with myself.”

In keeping with her new honesty, she acknowledged that she had rushed into her marriage with Russ for the sake of her sons, but she was not sorry for it. “We have a really good life now,” she wrote, “although it was shaky for a few years.”

Russ was much happier, too, not only because things had turned around with Barbara, but because he was back at Durham High, this time as coach of the baseball team, assistant coach of the football team and instructor in driver’s education—and at a higher salary.

His hectic schedule had caused him to leave the National Guard in the fall of 1984 and transfer back to the Army Reserves, which he had left in 1976. He had been assigned first to a reserve group in Durham, then to another unit in Gamer, just east of Raleigh. In the summer of 1985, at his request, he had gone into a control group in St. Louis, Missouri, which would allow him to continue his service toward retirement but didn’t require him to attend drills. His life had become far too busy to spend weekends training.

By the beginning of 1986, however, Russ had only one semester remaining to complete his classwork, and at the end of January he rejoined the National Guard. Bryan, now a high school senior more than six feet tall, joined with him, hoping to better his chance to win an ROTC scholarship. A serious and wry young man, Bryan once had entertained ideas of attending West Point, but now he was dreaming, like his real father before him, of attending flight school after college.

As a result of all their activities, Barbara and Russ were seeing relatively little of each other. Their schedules were keeping them apart until they fell in bed exhausted at night. But they were always together at church on Sunday morning, and during the week Barbara called Russ at his office in the basement of the gym to chat every day at lunch.

Keeping busy was good for Barbara. She was not only making top grades in her classes at North Carolina Central, she also was continuing to make good impressions at her new job at Duke. Her boss, Judith Rohlf, considered her to be especially bright and hard working, the fastest clerical assistant she had ever had.