Everything She Ever Wanted (22 page)

1968.

I had this idea," he said, "that I could change her.
 
I could stop her

drinking.
 
I could sober her up and she wouldn't never have a problem,

'cause I was going to take care of her.
 
You can't do that if they

don't want to change."

They moved back to Atlanta and Tom went to work for Ralston Purina.

The fourth Walter-Walter Russell Allanson, called Russ-was born in

1970.
 
When he was just a baby, Carolyn and Tom had so much trouble

getting along that they separated, and Tom asked his father to file

divorce papers for him.
 
He moved Carolyn and Russ up to Athens and

figured his second marriage was over.
 
"But I just couldn't stand being

away from my baby boy," Tom remembered.
 
"I went back up to Athens and

got her and brought her back home, and then a year passed and another

baby was born.
 
My daddy had the divorce papers in a drawer; he'd never

filed them."

Tom's second child, Sherry Lynette, was born in 1972.
 
Though Tom's

parents didn't particularly approve of Carolyn, either as a wife or as

a mother, they did want to see him settled down.
 
Big Carolyn and

Walter were pleased to have grandchildren.
 
However, when Little

Carolyn wrecked her mother-inlaw's car, Walter was livid.
 
Why couldn't

Tom have picked a wife with at least a lick of sense?

Tom himself was beginning to rethink his reconciliation.
 
All he had

wanted was a peaceful home to come to after a hard day's work, but what

he got was a complaining nag.
 
The house was messy and the kids were

crying.
 
He found it difficult even to remember the pretty little

blonde he had fallen in love with.

One night, Carolyn drank too much and, according to Tom, she started

waving a gun around.
 
Worried for Russ and Sherry, Tom tucked a baby

under each arm and headed out the front door.
 
He was in the doorway

when his wife pegged a shot at him with his own .357.
 
The doorframe

splintered beside him and he took flight, his long legs landing the

three of them beyond the front porch.

Nobody was hurt, but his stomach turned over when he thought of what

might have happened.
 
Tom knew he couldn't go on in the marriage, but

he had no idea how he was going to escape it without hurting his

kids.

He didn't want to file charges against Little Carolyn, though, and

wondered what he was going to do.

He wasn't yet thirty years old, and the love he longed for was still

somewhere off in the distance, tantalizing and elusive and always

beyond his grasp.

By the summer of 1973, Tom had finally come to a place where he knew he

had to walk away from his five-year-old marriage or die trying,

literally die.
 
In his mind at least, that was well within the realm of

possibility.
 
The fragile blond he had married who "looked like Grace

Kelly" regarded him with unveiled disinterest if not frank malice.

Anytime a woman sights down on a man and pulls the trigger, he has to

figure the magic has gone out of their relationship.
 
Tom was going to

have to stop picking his women for the way they looked and concentrate

on more permanent attributes.
 
He acknowledged that he had made another

major mistake with Carolyn.
 
Their marriage had been dead for a long

time.

On September 23, 1973, Tom left Carolyn.
 
He couldn't support two

households; he had nowhere to go for the moment but back to his boyhood

home on Norman Berry Drive.
 
He dreaded it.
 
He was a head taller than

his father, but Walter could still diminish him with a word or even a

scornful glance.
 
Tom didn't expect to find shoulders there to cry on

or someone who felt concern for his situation.
 
The most he hoped for

was some breathing space to get his feet on the ground and figure out

his future.
 
He didn't find what he needed.

Tom's parents had not been much upset by his first divorce.

He was a college boy then, and the marriage was over quickly.
 
But when

he went to his father asking for legal advice about his Plans to

divorce Carolyn, he found that the rules had changed.
 
Walter

disapproved mightily.
 
Tom had children, and that made it a completely

different situation.
 
Walter leveled his cool bluegray eyes at his son

and intoned, "You can get a divorce any day in the week as long as you

don't have children.
 
If you have children, you live in it [your

marriage]-no matter what the circumstances are.
 
I don't care if your

life is threatened, you live in it."

Walter refused to listen to any of Tom's quite cogent reasons for

wanting to be free.
 
He didn't care if Carolyn sometimes drank too

much, and he didn't care if she had fired a gun at Tom.

Hell, he didn't care if she ran over him with a truck.
 
Tom was a big

boy and he should have been able to handle his wife.

"I want no part of a divorce case for Tom," Walter confided to a

lifelong friend.
 
"I wouldn't touch it.
 
I told Tom's wife, You're

twenty-one years old.
 
Get you an attorney of your own.
 
'I won't have

a voice in it this way or that."

At length, Walter had grudgingly said he would look into the divorce

matter for his son.
 
But in truth, Walter did everything he could to

block a divorce, even while he kept promising Tom he would file for

him.
 
He was actually trying to delay long enough so that his son might

change his mind.
 
He had spent more than half his life supporting Tom,

and he didn't relish supporting Tom's ex and his two children.
 
Walter

knew it would come to that; he wasn't the kind of man who let his kin

go on welfare, and Little Carolyn surely couldn't keep herself and the

kids afloat alone.
 
Walter would take care of his own if he had to, or

at least those who couldn't do for themselves.
 
His grandchildren would

never go hungry, but he would seethe at the imposition and resent the

son he blamed for it.

He hadn't been happy to have Tom back in their house anyway.

His son was thirty years old-a grown man.
 
Tom tried to help around the

place, and he had gone up to Lake Lanier and worked on the dock "just

like a horse," according to Jake Dailey, Walter's old friend.
 
But

almost everything else Tom did aggravated his father.

Tom's only emotional support came from his grandparentsPaw and Nona.

And when he found out that his father had done nothing about his

divorce papers, he went to another attorney, who filed for his

divorce.

His father was furious.
 
Still working for Ralston Purina selling feed,

and shoeing horses in a second job, Tom contributed as much as he felt

he could to his family, but not enough, in his father's estimation.

Just before Thanksgiving, 1973, Walter ordered Tom to move out of his

house.
 
After saying he would not take sides in his son's dispute with

his estranged wife, it was apparent that he had done just that.
 
Tom's

parents declared Little Carolyn the injured party and rallied around

her.

Fortunately-or so it seemed at the time-Tom had had somewhere to go.

He had known and worked for the Radcliffes for several years, but until

recently he had known their married daughter, Pat, only slightly.
 
Now

she was unmarried, and he had been pleasantly surprised when she let

him know that she was interested in him.
 
They had begun to date.
 
Tom

liked her whole family.
 
The Radcliffes approved of him, probably more

so because they felt the need for some kind of stability in Pat's

life.

Tom wasn't literally single, but he was the next best thing to it.

When his father and mother ordered him out, the Radcliffes said Tom

could stay at their place temporarily.
 
He could sleep on the sofa in

their den.
 
It was, allegedly, an arrangement of convenience.
 
Of

course it was a smoke screen.
 
Pat had declared her intention to marry

Tom Allanson six months earlier, long before he had any idea of even

dating her.
 
She had dedicated herself to seducing him and captivating

him and he had been a sitting duck.
 
For all his headlong rushes into

marriage, Tom was essentially naive.
 
Pat was six years older than he

was, had grown children and a twenty-year marriage behind her, but she

knew how to cajole and steer a man over the jumps of any emotional

obstacle course she devised.

"I guess you could call her an aggressive/assertive woman," Tom said

many years later.
 
"She was very much aggressive in that she knew what

she wanted and she'd go after it.
 
In a way, I kind of admired that in

a person."

Tom had been just about the lonesomest man in Atlanta when Pat decided

she wanted him.
 
By his own admission, he was virtually "starving" for

affection.
 
"Pat was so cool about the way she did things that you

didn't know what was happening to you," he remembered.
 
"You were in

quicksand really before you realized you'd got your feet wet.
 
Because

of the way she did.
 
I'm just saying .
 
so nice, so gentle, so calm,

and so innocent.
 
And then this little piece went here, this little

piece went here, and this one went here, and everything-and then all of

a sudden you were not in control.

And she turned it a little bit tighter, a little bit tighter.

. . . You didn't feel it as it was turning, but then- And I never knew

what hit me."

During their courtship, Pat displayed an absolute devotion to his

needs, and Tom reveled in it.