Everything She Ever Wanted (31 page)

"We are all so fortunate," Margureitte wrote in a booklet she typed

herself in 1991 to give out at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the

Siler Family Reunion, "to have had such a wonderful heritage.
 
None of

we children can blame any of our mistakes on our childhood.
 
. . . I

remember when we had a bad storm how Mother would gather us all around

and sing 'Nearer My God to Thee,' while Daddy went to the door and

watched the storm.
 
Mother said Dad was daring the Lord to hit him."

Perhaps more than most families, the Silers had their idiosyncracies,

and they were all very strong-minded.
 
Thelma, who was a perfectly

healthy child, refused to walk until she was five years old.
 
When the

Rev.
 
Tasso Siler dropped dead in his own yard in 1960 at the age of

eighty-one, hundreds of mourners attended his funeral and his widow

took to a wheelchair in her grief.
 
She was not ill; like Thelma, she

simply decided not to walk.
 
Although she eventually got back on her

feet, she never got over his death.
 
But while there might be

eccentricities, arguments, recriminations, and even banishments that

took place inside the Siler family, no one on the outside murt know.

Under the most intense pressure, the Siler women stared back at the

world with a look of inflexible serenity that was inviolable: "the

crystal gaze.

Myrtle Margureitte was next to last in birth order, and arguably the

most beautiful of the Reverend and Mrs.
 
Siler's children.

She had a heart-shaped face with a high rounded forehead, huge blue

eyes, and full lips.
 
Coming into puberty in the darkest years of the

Great Depression in the sexually repressed household of a Baptist

minister, Margureitte was something of a rebel.
 
Her rebellion and her

fertility would cause her gentle and loyal mother pain.

According to family lore, Margureitte ran off to Wilmington with Robert

Lee Vann when she was only fifteen and became pregnant.
 
Vann was a

slight youth, some five years older than Margureitte.
 
It is not clear

whether they ever lived together, but on March 16, 1936, when

Margureitte was sixteen, she gave birth in her parents' house to her

first child, a ten-pound stillborn girl.

She wept and named her dead baby Roberta.

Bereft, she soon became pregnant again.
 
Margureitte felt that somehow

the dead Roberta might have lived if she had only been born in a

hospital.
 
She was insistent that her next child would be, and so,

indeed, she was.
 
The baby was born on August 22, 1937, in the J. W.

M.

Hospital in Wilmington, North Carolina, a city that stands just where

the Cape Fear River widens into the Cape Fear inlet on the Atlantic

Ocean.
 
The baby girl came into the world at 6:18 that morning and her

young mother rejoiced that she was alive and healthy.
 
Margureitte

labored long to bring forth her second ten-pound female child.
 
This

was Patricia, a replacement, some said.
 
The lost Roberta found, some

said.

Margureitte gave her maiden name as Myrtle Margureitte Siler on the

birth certificate, and her age as twenty.
 
She was really just eighteen

when Patty was born.
 
She said that she had been married for three

years to the listed father, Robert Lee Vann, twenty-three, and that he

was employed in a radio store.
 
But some family members wondered

whether the Vann boy was really Patty's father.

If they ever existed, the records of Margureitte's marriage and divorce

to and from Vann were lost.
 
One of Vann's brothers, younger by a

decade, could not recall that Robert Lee was ever married to

Margureitte.
 
He remembered that his brother worked on the railroad but

never in a radio store.
 
His memory may well have been faulty; he would

have been under ten when his older brotherwas with Margureitte.

Although Margureitte has said that Vann was her husband and the father

of her children, Robert Vann may have been an expedient red herring.

Some of her family believed that Margureitte had fallen in love with a

married man.
 
He was a farmer and carpenter in Warsaw, North Carolina,

and his name was John Cam Prigeon, a huge young man with blond hair,

full lips, and protruding ears.

And he was a terror.
 
Prigeon was as wild as Margureitte's father was

pious.
 
A drinker of spirits and a brawler on occasion, he walked along

any path he chose.
 
His wife knew of Margureitte, the preacher's

beautiful daughter, but she said nothing.
 
Her husband had a violent

temper.

In her strict Baptist household, Margureitte's latest misadventure must

have been greeted with dismay.
 
But the family undoubtedly rallied

around her, thinking she would get "Cam" Out of her system.
 
She was,

after all, a Siler, and the teenage mother and her new baby girl

returned to Warsaw in that strange blazing summer of 1937 to live with

her parents.
 
The headlines had been full of disasters and tragedies

for months: five hundred Texas children perished in a school explosion,

Amelia , Earhart was lost over the Pacific Ocean, the Hindenburg

dirigible melted in a fireball of burning hydrogen gas, the king of

England abdicated, movie sex queen Jean Harlow succumbed to uremic

poison at twenty-six, and war was brewing in Europe and Asia.

It was also the year that Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for

Gone With the Wind, at once a historic re-creation of the gracious life

of the Old South and a terrifying tale of its destruction during the

Civil War.
 
Its beautiful heroine, a survivor and woman of intricate

wiles, would become Patricia's life model.

Margureitte had to work, and so Mary Siler raised Patty for the first

five years of her life.
 
Patty called her "Mama," and her grandmother

Siler doted on little Patty to the point of obsession.
 
Patty shared

Mary's life and Mary's bed.
 
She had only to voice her every wish and

it was granted.

The little girl was exquisite.
 
She grew thick taffy-colored curls and

her eyes were bigger even than Margureitte's and as green as new leaves

in April.
 
Mama Siler kept her in rumy dotted Swiss dresses,

sunbonnets, and white Mary janes.
 
Her aunt Ednawho was so much older

than Margureitte that she was more like a mother than a sister-sewed

every stitch of the child's clothing.

Everyone who saw her said she was much prettier than Shirley Temple.

And she was.

Mary Siler made Patty the center of her life.
 
Each of her own thirteen

children paled beside her golden grandchild, "Next to God," she often

said, "I love Patty more than anything in the world."
 
There was always

fruit from the orchard and vegetables brought by parishioners, but

Patty would eat nothing but pancakes.

Her grandmother gave up trying to feed her vegetables, eggs, and

cereal, and served her flapjacks three times a day.

Of all the grandchildren living in or visiting at the parsonage, Patty

was special.
 
When the other youngsters clamored for Cokes, Mary

explained, "No one can have it-because there's only one."
 
And then she

would beckon Patty into the back room and surreptitiously give her that

single Coca-Cola.
 
When the children were naughty, they were sent out

to find their own switch and were whipped.
 
But Patty was never

spanked.
 
Instead, her grandmother picked her up gently and whispered,

"Now bend over, and be sure and cry real loud."
 
She could not bring

herself to strike Patty, so she only pretended to hit her.

While her mother cared for Patty, Margureitte worked at a number of

jobs, looking for a career that would lead her into the life-style she

sought.
 
Born into the country preacher's world of meager circumstances

and self-sacrifice, she yearned for gracious living, fine things and a

lovely home.
 
She was clever and quick, and she had always wondered

what it would be like to be part of the horsey set, riding to the hunt,

performing in shows with jodhpurs and a well-cut jacket.
 
She lopged

for romance and true love, but her days were spent working at a dull

job as a clerk.

As fertile as her mother, Margureitte once again conceived, her third

pregnancy before she was twenty.

This time, Margureitte made no pretense of a husband.
 
She agonized

over the few choices open to her.
 
She had to work and Mama Siler

couldn't take care of two toddlers.
 
Margureitte would have to give

this baby up for adoption.
 
She arranged to stay at the Florence

Crittendon Home at 4759 Reservoir Road in Washington, D.C. Required to

work both before and after her delivery to pay for her board, room, and

medical care, Margureitte chose to take the training the home offered

in practical nursing.
 
It was hard work and arduous for a pregnant

girl, but she was then and always would be a woman who put the best

face on things.
 
"I have nurse's training," she explained confidently

even fifty years later.
 
"I'm not a registered nurse, you understand,

but I have two years'training."

On October 10, 1939, Margureitte was at full term.
 
She was given a

shot of Pituitrin to start labor.
 
"Pit" usually triggers hard and

frequent contractions.
 
After twenty-four hours, a drained Margureitte

gave birth to a nine-pound six-ounce son.
 
The baby's hair was white

blond and his features were bold and masculine.
 
He looked nothing at

all like her delicately pretty daughter.
 
Some people thought he was

the image of Cam.
 
She named him Reginald Kent Vann and would call him

Kent.

She loved him, and could not give hLr baby boy up, not once she had

held him.
 
That was so like Margureitte; right or wrong, she would