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stared at the floor. He was clearly embarrassed, and for once the
voluble politician could find no words. The minutes that followed were
awkward. Pat looked away and bit her lip, disappointed and
frustrated.
Susan was mortified. She could see that Hap Brown had no
intention-ever-of marrying her mother.
For all the power Hap had, he was alarmed by Pat's growing
possessiveness. He tried to deflect her single-minded thrust toward
his divorce and remarriage to her. He put himself out time and again
for her and her family. He did his best to help Bill Alford stay in
the army when a sweeping reduction in forces hit Fort McPherson. But
Bill wasn't regular army, and even Hap's senator friends couldn't buck
the trend. Bill left the service in August of 1973 and went to college
while Susan managed Colonel Alan's horse farm in Riverdale-the same
Colonel Alan who had once posed so proudly for an article about his
daughter's engagement to Susan's uncle, Kent Radcliffe.
Over Margureitte's objections, Hap took Pat along on a business trip to
Dallas and they had a wonderful time, but she came home no closer to a
commitment from him than before. Some@timesfar too often for Pat-Hap
couldn't be with her. For all her skill at manipulation and seduction,
she was either naive or blind to the bleak realities of stolen passion
with a married man. Pat would sit forlornly on the wide veranda her
ex-husband had built for her and stare through the dark woods toward
Tell Road as if she could make the sound of Hap's car materialize by
sheer force of will.
But all she heard was the rain in winter or the cicadas in summer or
Fanny Kate Cash calling to her cats.
Pat clung desperately to Hap through Christmas of 1972 and into the
long spring and summer of 1973. When he was with her she was happy,
but when he left, she agonized that he would never come back.
She implored him to ask his wife for a divorce.
He hedged and gave her reasons why he had to delay such a
confrontation.
Miserable, Pat felt her life closing in on her again. She didn't even
have the horse-show circuit any longer. Debbie couldn't be expected to
jump horses with a steel rod in her spine.
Pat had always been able to coerce Susan to ride no matter what. "She
even convinced me to ride when I was five months pregnant with Sean,"
Susan said. "It was a costume show and Mom had to let out the waist of
her long velvet dress and then pin me into it. I was so wobbly and
nauseated I thought I was going to pitch forward on my head. Mom was
the one who loved costumes, not us.
But by 1973 Pat's daughters were both married and mothers and they had
no time for horse shows. Pat herself wore the costume that had once
almost tripped Susan up. She had designed it in burnt orange velvet
and it had a lace 'abot and cuffs. With it, she wore a black felt
derby with a two-foot-long ostrich plume ' She saved and treasured a
photograph from that period of herself and Governor Jimmy Carter in a
fringe-topped surrey on the Georgia Capitol grounds. Pat was in her
glory, smiling graciously as she sat beside the governor while a
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liveried driver k held the reins of a Morgan horse. It was undoubtedly
a "photo opportunity" picture of some sort, but for Pat it was proof
that she was meant to move in the highest circles of society.
Hap Brown was her entree to those circles and she wanted him more than
she had ever wanted anything. She beseeched, argued, implored, nagged,
even subtly threatened. If Hap Brown didn't divorce Cordella, she
didn't know what she might do. Together, she and Hap could have the
perfect life. Why was he too blind to see that?
Pat was hardly a typical grandmother; she was far too involved in her
affair with Hap. Boppo was the grandmotherly type, and she lavished
attention on Dawn and Sean. Debbie and Gary Cole lived with her
grandparents sporadically, but their marriage was full of dissension
and recrimination. Pat allegedly devised a way to keep her daughter's
husband in line.
Nineteen-year-old Gary Cole was severely shaken when his wife's best
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