Everything She Ever Wanted (48 page)

Papa and Boppo were with her that night and tried to stop the storm

they knew was coming.
 
Pat was seething and hysterical.
 
She demanded

to see the chief of J'all operations.

Tom watched helplessly.
 
The more she rocked the boat in the Fulton

County jail, the more likely he was to be shipped off to prison.

But Pat was completely out of control.
 
With all the histrionics going

on in their house, the strain on his wife, the physical confrontations,

Colonel Radcliffe temporarily lost his usual detached air and his

self-control.
 
Somebody had to shut Pat up.
 
When she continued to rage

as they walked down the long passageway from the visitors' area, he

suddenly flung his hand back and caught her full in the face, smacking

her in the eye.

Pat was struck dumb, and then she started to sob.
 
All the way home,

she threatened to move out and go over to Paw and Nona's and take

Ronnie with her.
 
When Tom called, she sobbed to him about being

struck.
 
"He hit me full force before we even got out of the jail," she

complained.
 
"Walking down the hallway.

He said I was terrible to you and about everything I did to you, and

everything was my fault.
 
I just finally went into tears and said, 'Get

off my back."
 
He said he was going to have me committed to

Metropolitan.
 
I told him it would be over my dead body.

"I didn't mean for all that to happen, Sugar."

I worked so hard to get pretty and everything for you."

"Please forgive me, Shug.
 
First things first, remember."

She sobbed into the phone, but she smiled as she hung up, a smile that

Tom, of course, could not see.

. . .

Pat almost convinced Tom that he should fire Ed Garland.

Garland was rarely available to her when she called, would not listen

to her suggestions, and she detested him.
 
She phoned another attorney

and asked to make an appointment with him.
 
She explained that Tom was

still represented by Garland, but she saw no reason why she couldn't

hire the second attorney to be her adviser.
 
"My father-who used to be

with counter intelligence-told me that."

The attorney said he could represent Tom after he dismissed Garland,

but he explained that he could not ethically sue Ed Garland to get back

fifteen thousand dollars Pat said she had coming.
 
He also suggested

that Tom's college degree and skill at blacksmithing would make him a

natural to teach in prison as part of the new Georgia Youthful

Offenders Program.
 
That way, Tom could be outside more, pending any

appeal.
 
It would be far easier on him than being locked up in the

crowded Fulton County jail.

"That would be up at Buford Prison," he added.
 
"It's an accredited

high school.
 
He could teach, and it'would be better for him.
 
It's

only thirty minutes away."

"My physical condition is quite critical, and while he's in Fulton

County jail I can see him once a week and talk on the phone four times

a week," Pat said, quashing the suggestion at once.

The attorney explained that Tom could have almost unlimited visits and

phone calls in Buford.

@4 His big thing is contact with me," she countered.
 
"If he has to go

to Jackson [prison] first, he'd be down there for six weeks and he

couldn't see me.
 
. . . I could go at any minute."

With a start, the attorney realized this woman was saying she might die

at any minute.
 
She sounded healthy enough on the phone.

It scarcely seemed possible.

Pat never told Tom that he had a choice to go directly to a teaching

job at Buford; she simply explained firmly to the attorney who

suggested it that Tom would always choose to be near herno matter what

conditions he himself was in.
 
Nor would she tell that attorney

specifically who her doctors were.
 
She had many.

She had "specialists."

The climate at the Tell Road farm was not good.
 
The one thing that

Clifford Radcliffe would not allow was for anyone to criticize his

wife."
 
Reit, " as he called her, was the most beautiful woman, the

kindest, the most well bred, and his sweetheart.
 
Usually he went along

with anything she wanted, and protecting her daughter at all costs was

the most important thing she wanted.
 
But Pat's outbursts were wearing

her mother down.

Pat had chased after both Boppo and Papa with a knife and an umbrella

when she didn't get her way.
 
Her behavior at the jail had been

inexcusable.

The colonel had to make a trip out of state.
 
It was an unfortunate

time for him to be gone.
 
Pat continued to insist that she was moving

out and going to Nona and Paw's.
 
Boppo pleaded with her to be

reasonable.
 
On April 10, Pat disappeared into her room and slammed the

door, and the trouble-at least for that night-seemed to be over.

But then Pat emerged, wearing a diaphanous red nightgown held up with

spaghetti straps.
 
She was barefoot, And there were thin crimson

stripes of blood welling up on each wrist.
 
Before Boppo could stop

her, and despite her crutches, Pat ran from the house and disappeared

into the piney woods and quarry area behind.
 
It was April, but it was

a nasty evening, full of sleety rain.
 
There was a power company

right-of-way back behind the trees, a wide clear swath where the towers

that carried the lines pierced the dusk.
 
Pat half-ran, half-hopped, a

blur of red in the fading ugh t, over the stubble-cut grass, too fast

for her mother who ran behind her, begging her to stop.

Boppo phoned for help and rounded up a number of neighbor men.
 
They

hurried to their cars and headed up Tell Road.
 
The only place for Pat

to go was along the power lines; a mile or so further on she would come

out to railroad tracks and a veterinar.

p ian s clinic.
 
The Radcliffes knew the vet well-he had taken care of

their horses-but nobody would be there at that time.

After hollering back and forth in the lowering twilight, they finally

found Pat, still running and hobbling, her hair streaming behind her

and her wrists dripping blood.
 
She had worked herself into an

ultimately hysterical state.

Still dressed in her nightgown, Pat was admitted on a court order to

the Metropolitan Psychiatric Center in Atlanta for evalnation of her

dangerousness to herself.
 
Pat wouldn't be staying in a "psycho ward"

in some city hospital; Metropolitan was decorated like a fine hotel,

and it was very, very expensive.

When she was admitted, she had superficial slash marks on her wrists,

and she appeared anxious, agitated, and extremely talkative.

She complained that she could not see out of her left eye because her

father had struck her.
 
The clinic physician was more aghast at the

festering abscess on her right buttock.

Pat was disheveled and talked a mile a minute, but her response to what

was happening around her was flat.
 
She gave the admitting physician a

long history of her'life.
 
By her own reckoning, she had always been

the victim, assailed by bad luck and other people's insensitivity.
 
Her

husband was in jail, she said, convicted of two murders he had not

committed.
 
They had only been married eleven months, and right after

the wedding, she recalled, she had been in a terrible automobile

accident.
 
"I've paid my lawyers forty-five thousand dollars and given

them property worth thirty-five thousand more to appeal my husband's

case to the highest courts," she declared.

Margureitte told the doctor that Pat hadn't been taking care of

herself; she was obsessed with getting her husband out of jail.

"She's been talking a lot, and she's just had a lot of negative

thoughts.

Pat insisted on calling her daughters.
 
"They're trying to kill me!"

she told Susan breathlessly.
 
"I was raped when I was only a child,"

she whispered into the phone, and told Susan she would kill her if she

didn't come down and get her out of the hospital.
 
Doctors listening in

noted that she was grossly distorting the severity of her injuries to

them.

Asked about the abscess on her buttock, Pat said that it and the sores

on her thigh had been caused by penicillin shots she had received from

her regular doctor, Dr. Taylor.
 
A check with Taylor's office revealed

that Pat had received no penicillin shots, but she had been under

treatment for the mysterious sores.

She complained of terrible pain and was given injections of Demerol.

Pat was admitted with a tentative diagnosis of "Agitated depression

with possible thought disorder."
 
It was a catchall diagnosis, not to

be found in the DSM-II, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental

Disorders, the bible of the psychiatric world.
 
Two psychiatrists did

concur that she was "not able to take care of herself at this time."

A physical examination revealed that "the patient is afebrile (has no

fever] with no acute infections present.
 
Chronic subcutaneous and

muscular cold abscess formations under treatment with incision and

drainage, and antibiotic coverage is also noted.
 
. .

. There was no evidence of thrombophlebitis .
 
. . there was no

evidence of pathological process involving the left eye."

Papa's thrown-back hand had done no real damage to Pat's eye; she could

see out of it perfectly well, and even though Pat had convinced Tom

that she had only a few years-perhaps months-to live, a complete