Left for Dead Read online

  I hardly recall my father. He had suffered radiation exposure at Oak Ridge, and would die a lingering death in 1951. Mother, then forty-one, had me to support, along with my two older brothers: Howard, who was born in 1941, and Wayne, who came along in 1944. She continued working as a librarian, taught classes and attended night school at Emory, where she received her master’s degree. There was zero money in the house, but I didn’t once hear her complain.

  Ever practical, she suggested that my recently widowed Grandmother Olson come to live with us. Alice Olson would tell me on repeated occasions that when her husband, Carl, died, she had no will to go on living. Coming to help out her daughter-in-law, however, had given Alice a second life, a reason to go on. Still, hardly a day passed until her death in 1980 when she didn’t say, “I sure miss that old Swede of mine.”

  Mother saw her role as our provider. She worked extremely hard and was always gone. She figured that as long as she provided for us, she was doing what was necessary. To this day, she’ll say she did it “for you children.”

  Beck is not unlike my mother in that way. Both are models of practical self-sufficiency.

  She certainly would hug me and tell me that she loved me. But the person who brushed and braided my hair in the morning, and made sure I finished my oatmeal, was my grandmother.

  Alice and I slept together in the same room, with me on the rollaway bed, for as long as I can remember. During the day, she kept herself active doing everything from organizing postcards to looking at picture books with me. She did whatever she could without stepping on my mother’s toes. She always deferred to Edna—probably the only way these two strong-willed women were going to get along under the same roof.

  Big brother Howard—we always called him Howie—was my surrogate father, an essential figure in my girlhood, my adult life and the story of my family. He is key to understanding Beck and me.

  With my mother away most of the time, someone had to drive me to Girl Scout meetings and school functions and otherwise take a hand in guiding my development. Howie did that. I clearly remember showing Howie my report card, where I made all A’s. He said, “Why didn’t you make A-pluses?” I was crushed.

  Early on in my relationship with Peach, I was somewhat competitive with Howard, simply because he was awfully bright and capable. Whenever I’m around somebody like that, I tend to try to compete with him. I enjoy the give-and-take. Peach noticed that and suggested I stop it, and I did. Howard was too kind to correct me. I grew to love him as a brother.

  Peach:

  I realize this upbringing left me incomplete. A child needs two parents.

  Yet it did put starch in my spine. I think my mother, so competent and hardworking and focused on our material well-being, effectively deleted the word quit from my vocabulary. Whatever my situation, particularly my marriage, I make it work. In an odd way, she may also have predisposed me to accept Beck and his own single-minded pursuit of goals, so similar to hers. I certainly had no model at home of what a good marriage should be. As a result, when things later started going bad with Beck, I would think, Who knows? Maybe this is the way they all are.

  I was born in late August, which meant that I always was the youngest one in my class, a disadvantage I made sure not to repeat when our daughter Meg also was born in late August. Meg didn’t start kindergarten until after her sixth birthday.

  I made great grades but was a late bloomer socially, real quiet and shy. I don’t think I had a lot of self-assurance. That didn’t mean I avoided social situations, but I didn’t get much out of them, either. I’d go out with somebody and afterward just think, Yecch! One time, a guy I didn’t even know asked me to marry him. That certainly puzzled me. I remembered wondering what love really was. I was clueless.

  My mother absolutely drove my brothers to attend the best colleges possible. Howie, who was very bright, took an undergraduate degree at Princeton, his master’s at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and earned a doctorate in textile physics at the University of Manchester in England. He’d later design the fabric for a NASA space suit.

  Wayne attended the University of Georgia. When it came to me, Edna said, “You don’t know what you’re going to do; why don’t you go to the University of Georgia and become a teacher? That would fit in nicely with having a family.”

  I wasn’t consumed with either prospect. If anything was on my mind, it was a growing sense that I’d led a much too circumscribed life, that I really needed to get out of Griffin and see something of the world.

  After graduating from Griffin High School, I went to the University of Georgia, where I took an undergraduate degree in political science in 1971. I then took enough courses to be certified as a resource teacher for gifted children, which is what I was doing in 1974 when Beck and I first met.

  The first real go-steady romance of my life was Martha Moyer, whom I met in my sophomore year at Midwestern. She was a beautiful girl with a kind spirit and upbeat manner. What made Martha truly special, however, was that she thought I hung the moon. She could see beyond my nerdiness, past the insecurities, and we connected.

  We stayed together through graduation. Then, when I entered Southwestern, Martha moved to Dallas to teach school. The question of marriage arose, but with the extraordinary demands I knew that eight years of medical training would make on me, I wasn’t ready for the added responsibility of being a husband, too. Martha moved on, and I’m sure she’s glad she did.

  I met Margaret Olson, one of my brother Kit’s patients, in 1974 on a trip home to Griffin. Kit’s wife warned me about Margaret. “I’m not sure about this, Beck,” she said. “Margaret’s the kind of gal you wind up marrying.”

  Margaret Olson was just as pretty as she could be, and very bright, very articulate. She has this quality of being a really good person, and that appealed to me. It wasn’t just knowing right from wrong. She has a sensitivity to other people that I don’t possess. At some level, I could see myself standing next to this person for a lifetime, the mother of my children.

  Peach:

  I really don’t remember our first date. I think we went to Underground Atlanta and probably had dinner or something. But I do remember what I wore: navy-blue hose and a two-piece dress with navy-blue knit sleeves. It was sort of red, white and blue in an argyle pattern. It just gives me the chills to think I once dressed like that.

  I recall a strong sense of Beck’s energy from that date, but no sparks between us. Maybe six months later, Jane called me again to say that Beck was coming to town once more and would like to see me. Just like him to delegate the date making.

  The occasion was to be Kit Weathers’s Georgia Jamboree Show of Shows, a weekend dance where Kit and his band played in an old one-room elementary school in Griffin. Kit had purchased the place so his band would have somewhere to play. I discovered that Beck was a good dancer. After someone handed me a beer—I’m a cheap drunk—I started dancing like I’d never danced before. We danced all night.

  Beck said, “I’ll call you,” and did—every Saturday night at some crazy hour, like two in the morning. Then I’d start waking up at two, waiting for his call. Beck was interesting. He made me laugh. He was never dull. He was always a little elusive, a challenge. He made me think. He was different.

  It would be years before I finally understood that he talks a lot but never says anything about himself. It takes a while to figure that out.

  My medical school buddies at first referred to my future wife as the Georgia Peach. Later, it was G. Peach. And then just Peach. Thus another perfectly good Southern name was lost.

  Peach:

  At the time, I didn’t mind the nicknames at all. It was done in good humor and with affection.

  Later on, however, when my marriage began falling apart, it bothered me quite a lot. I’d lost both my first and last names. Margaret Olson had disappeared.

  On my first visit to Dallas, my mother suggested that I read a number of current periodicals and do abstracts from them on
three-by-five cards to cue myself on world events, in order to be an interesting dinner partner for Beck. I’m sure she meant well.

  Beck and I exchanged three or four visits through 1974, and then I decided to move to Dallas, where I taught for a year at a local private school. I kept my own address, naturally. I’m that kind of Southern girl. Beck was certainly the reason I went to Texas. But whether that was a tangible gesture of love, I don’t know. I really wanted to get out of Griffin. I thought I loved him, though. I thought I was absolutely in love with him.

  When I finished my residency, I was offered a fellowship in Boston. When I told Peach, she said, “Well, chief, I ain’t moving to Boston unless some decisions are made. That’s the way it is.”

  Peach:

  I told him I wasn’t going to Boston with him unless we were married. At first, I was devastated that it required such an ultimatum to make him think. Then I was angry with him. Then I was simply certain my stance was correct. He took a weekend to think it over.

  If she had not made marriage an issue, I would have been happy just to live with her in Boston. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. But actually coming to grips with the concept of being married was a challenge. Eventually, I did conclude that I was a whole lot better off with her than without her. I loved her. But I really didn’t have a clue. It amazed me that I had just taken eight years preparing to start my career, and here I was ready to take at least as big a step with no real preparation whatsoever.

  FOURTEEN

  Peach:

  He never really proposed. He just came back and said, “I can’t live without you.” I think we got married because I was standing in the right place at the right time. That’s not so unusual. I think it happens with a lot of guys.

  At age twenty-six, I was still a girl in many ways, with some Pollyannaish ideas. From that standpoint, we probably were a decent match. He was not real sophisticated emotionally, either. We were both very naive.

  Our wedding was April 24, 1976, at the First Baptist Church. It was a big affair, with four hundred guests, the sort of moment you live for in Griffin. There was no engagement ring, which really didn’t bother me. I used my grandmother’s ring for my wedding ring and I purchased Beck’s for him at a discount jeweler’s in Dallas. If I hadn’t been so in love, I would have realized that the $1,200’s worth of camera equipment he’d just bought himself would have bought a nice little diamond.

  As it turned out, Beck wore his band only on rare, formal occasions. He told me the reason was that he feared getting the ring caught in something, causing injury or, even worse, the loss of a finger.

  Beck also had neglected to get us a hotel room for our wedding night, so we stayed at his parents’ house in Atlanta. That should have told me something.

  The next day, we packed up and drove off for Boston. Our local newspaper, ever eager to report events in the best possible light, informed readers that our honeymoon would consist of “a leisurely drive up the Atlantic seaboard.”

  I rarely had been outside Georgia. Besides vacation trips to Florida and the year I lived in Dallas, I had visited Chicago and New Orleans, and traveled with my mother and Wayne to New Jersey to watch Howie graduate from Princeton. That was it.

  Beck may have been better traveled than I, but he, too, had severely limited horizons. These included an untutored palate. I discovered, for example, that he did not eat fish. The good news was that once I got him started, he’d try anything.

  When we first got to Boston I brought up my interest in finding a teaching job. But positions weren’t plentiful in the local private schools, and they didn’t pay much. Plus, there were lots of couples like us, which meant competition for every available job. Once we compared my likely pay with the cost of commuting and other expenses, it was practically a wash.

  Still, I felt a need to justify my day. If he was putting in long hours, then I would, too. It had to do with my self-esteem. I had to be busy to make it look like I was earning my keep.

  I did some volunteer work at the hospital, and helped Beck assemble his professional research library. This consisted mostly of typing his notes. I was pretty isolated, but I really didn’t mind that. I like being by myself, and had spent a lot of time alone as a girl.

  I love Boston, and I loved where we lived, a third-floor apartment in a row house on Longwood Avenue. That place had a lot of personality. I was also able to walk to work, which I liked. Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, didn’t live far away, and sometimes I’d run into him on his way to the MTA.

  I was not so excited by my work. I was the junior guy, and I soon figured out that all they wanted was a gofer. I ended up doing the autopsies no one else felt like doing, or covering when no one else wanted to work. That included the bicentennial celebration weekend in 1976 when the tall ships came in. Peach and I were on our way out the door when the phone rang.

  “Guess what, fella. You’re it.”

  I spent the entire weekend locked in the morgue, reviewing cases.

  Peach:

  It took me a while to figure out that Beck probably was depressed when we married—and he remained depressed, more or less, from then on. I had never been around a depressed person. I didn’t know what it meant when he’d complain about this hurt or that hurt and would go to bed. I knew he had a lot of trouble sharing feelings, but I took comfort in the fact that he was that way with everyone, not just me. At first I thought it would just fade away. If he learns to trust, I’d think. If he learns that no matter what, I’m here. But it never happened.

  I felt I needed to be working all the time. I’m not equipped to relax and enjoy myself. It is awfully hard on anyone around you if you are not a happy person, and that’s been pretty steady throughout my life.

  But here’s something else. I admire Peach’s emphasis on interpersonal communication. I regard it as one of her strengths. I just have a great deal of trouble emulating her. It is not that I don’t care to do the right thing, or make the appropriate gesture, or say the correct words. I just do not naturally think of it. Never occurs to me. This is an inadvertent part of why I have disappointed and angered Peach so often, and possibly one reason I so often misread her, which I have repeatedly done over the years.

  Peach:

  Boston was supposed to be the beginning of intimacy. Instead it was the beginning of distance. I thought I was to blame. I was not a brilliant conversationalist, certainly not in realms that Beck would consider interesting. My mother made sure I didn’t forget that.

  I did try to talk to him, but he always shut it down. And I felt he was so much smarter than I that I was intimidated. That was not entirely his fault.

  “How was your day?” certainly never got me anywhere. “How were the brain tumors?” wasn’t going to work either.

  One of the reasons I can seem uncommunicative to Peach is that I often have something technical on my mind that I doubt would interest her: “Dear, isn’t it interesting how a GPS satellite works?”

  I know she wants to engage more in “How are you feeling? What is going through your mind right now?” Usually, there’s a big goose egg sitting there. I think she sometimes gives me too much credit for actually having thoughts.

  Peach:

  I’d later learn something else about Beck. He has this strong need not to be answerable, to be independent. He believed all women are controlling, by their very nature.

  As for me, I didn’t have anything with which to compare my marriage. I was not unhappy, and Beck at his best is gentle, generous and undemanding. He’s no autocrat. So for the time being I decided to be content that I’d married a good man who was a good provider—and just hoped that he was steady. The truth is, if you’re looking for someone intuitive and sensitive, marry a woman.

  FIFTEEN

  Much as we liked Boston, I was pleasantly surprised one day to hear from Tom Dickey, a fellow pathologist who’d completed his residency with me at Southwestern. Tom was also a good friend; he and his wife had ho
sted an engagement party for Peach and me.

  Dickey and several other highly capable young pathologists I knew from my days at Southwestern had formed a partnership in Dallas with Jim Ketchersid, whom I knew by reputation to be both a fine doctor and an incredibly honorable guy. Jim has an unwavering instinct for doing the right thing. When Dickey invited me to join their partnership, I accepted without hesitation.

  “Don’t you want to know how much we’re going to pay you?” Tom asked when I didn’t.

  “Not really,” I answered.

  “C’mon.”

  “I figure you guys will pay me what my services are worth at the point they are worth something.”

  I had complete and well-placed faith in my new partners.

  April of 1977, Peach and I returned to Dallas, where I went to work at Medical City Hospital (then more of a village than a city), a three-year-old facility with approximately one hundred beds that soon would morph into a huge complex. It was built on prairie land far enough north of downtown that during dove season, staffers could saunter out just past the parking lot to blast away on their lunch hour.

  Medicine demands a lot of your time. But I had made a reasonable attempt to stay fit, largely by running, which is cheap, doesn’t require much more than a set of sneakers and can be done anywhere.

  During our year in Boston, I ran thirty to forty miles a week, but never in races. I just liked to run.

  When we moved back to Dallas we lived for a year in a house not far from Medical City, and I’d often jog to and from work, about six miles. It was a fairly easy way to force myself to get a little exercise. I certainly did not have an image of myself as an athlete. I just liked to be fit.