A Perfect Husband

by Aphrodite Jones

  George Ratliff was on a top secret mission outside Panama—he was there during the time when the United States was making preparations for an invasion of the island of Grenada.

  George’s friend Bruce Berner hadn’t flown that particular mission, known as “Goat Rope,” because his wife, Amybeth, had suffered a serious back injury and was hospitalized in Wiesbaden for a month. Bruce had to stay at home to care for Amybeth until she could get back on her feet again. On the day George Ratliff died, Bruce Berner happened to be at his unit’s highly secured building on the base, working in the room where messages were transmitted. Often his squadron would receive directives from the Pentagon. But on that given day, when his commander took the call, Bruce Berner learned that George Ratliff, his thirty-four-year-old buddy, had mysteriously died in his sleep.

  When Bruce’s commander told the rest of the squadron about the sudden death, there was a lot of silence that followed. No one else had died on the mission, and there was no reasonable explanation why George Ratliff had died so young. There would be an autopsy report to follow, but because of the secret nature of George Ratliff’s work, that information would not be released for years.

  When the word of George’s death reached Liz, she couldn’t accept it as true. Bruce was the person who helped break the news. Others surrounded her, trying to console Liz—but it was as if her own heart melted away when she heard that her husband had died. George’s friend Randy Durham received a one-day clearance to Panama to retrieve Captain Ratliff’s personal effects, and then to accompany his body back to Bay City, Texas.

  In Germany, with no one else to turn to, Elizabeth leaned on Michael Peterson, who helped her make the necessary arrangements for handling all the military paperwork, and for flying back to the United States for the funeral. At a loss because the military would not reveal any details whatsoever about George Ratliff’s death, Elizabeth’s other friends felt grateful that Michael was able to pick up some of the slack for the widow. Being a former marine, Peterson was good at dealing with military red tape. Michael had always been close with Liz. They were mutual admirers of each other, and he took on her plight without question.

  But Michael’s shoulder was not strong enough. From the moment of George’s death, everyone around her could see that Elizabeth had no real will to live. At the burial ceremony in Texas, on October 27, 1983, Randy Durham presented Elizabeth with the American flag that had been draped over George’s coffin. The widow was accompanied by Michael Peterson. She had been greeted by members of the Ratliff family, people who, understandably, shared her shock and grief. But Liz could not be calmed. Her grief was overwhelming. Her tears wouldn’t end.

  Just before she left Texas to return to Germany, Liz confessed to her sister-in-law, Connie Ratliff, that she wished to join her husband in death. Liz confided that she had roamed the Ratliffs’ expansive property, hoping and praying for the universe to take her to Heaven.

  But Elizabeth had her girls.

  She knew she had to return home to them.

  Liz felt she couldn’t bear to go back to her house, so she sent word through Michael and asked that her friends have all of her belongings moved out of the cottage in Klein-Gerau. A crew of people got together and packed everything up, knowing that Liz was unable to face that pretty cottage alone. As for her girls, they were too young to know what was happening. People were pitching in, doing whatever they could to make life more bearable for Liz and her daughters. But of course, the girls would never remember any of that.

  Michael was helping with the money Liz had gotten from George’s insurance policy and what was owed to Liz from the military. And Patricia was helpful with the girls, trying to get them settled in a row house, located just a few doors away from the Peterson place, in Graefenhausen. But for Elizabeth—her life, as she knew it, had ended. Her days of being a stay-at-home mom were over, she would return back to teaching, and she began hiding behind a wall. Amybeth, who had lost her dad at a young age, knew how devastated someone could feel. Amybeth would go over and talk to Liz every day, trying to see if there was anything she could say to raise her friend’s spirits.

  “I know that you feel really bad,” Amybeth would tell Liz, “and death is a horrible thing. But I know that eventually you’re going to feel better.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Liz would insist, “he was the love of my life.”

  And so it was that Liz could not be consoled. She would somehow go on, for the sake of her girls, but Liz was only going through the motions of existence. She would set special breakfast tables, she would sing little songs, she would spend weekends stitching pretty quilts—but having to do all of that at the end of every workday just left Liz feeling even more drained and depleted. As the weeks passed, and the holiday season approached, Liz began to slide into a deep depression.

  Her sadness became greater. And there seemed to be no end in sight.

  Liz had asked that most of George’s things be placed in a special room in the house. She also had his clothes placed in her bedroom. She had some of them put away in closets and drawers. She had a pair of George’s eyeglasses and other little items of his strewn around the room, as if George were still living with her.

  Michael Peterson thought Liz was crazy. He had trouble dealing with Liz’s mood swings. Other people would talk to her about her moods at length, trying to get her encouraged about being a new mom, trying to make Liz realize how fortunate it was that she had two beautiful daughters. She needed to celebrate Christmas, to have parties for their birthdays; there was so much life ahead of her.

  Her good friends Thomas and Cheryl Appel-Schumacher, who also were connected with the air force base, tried their best to support Liz emotionally. They wanted her to be strong for her girls, and because Liz was so tearful and sad, they had grown quite worried about Margaret and Martha. Being one of the most practical of Liz’s friends, Cheryl didn’t want to see Liz grieving all the time. She knew it was unhealthy for the girls to see their mom so tearful. Cheryl would insist that Liz not allow herself to go to that dark place. She would encourage Liz to concentrate on the future, helping Liz regain her sense of faith.

  But Liz loved George so much, she was so lost without him. She retreated into negative thoughts about herself. She began telling people that she’d lost hope. Elizabeth didn’t think that anything would get better. She blamed herself for not being a good enough person. She started to believe that she had never deserved a man as wonderful as George.

  Twenty-seven

  Just months before George Ratliff died, Michael Peterson had published his first novel. The folks at the military base were impressed, particularly since the book was published in America by Signet, and was released as a mass-market paperback. It seemed that Peterson was on his way to a promising career, and to the people who counted on him, like Patricia and Elizabeth, that was a wonderful thing.

  However, having a book on the stands about Vietnam didn’t mean that Peterson was absolutely admired by the military personnel around him. Many thought of Peterson as a braggart. They would hear him go into details about the Central Intelligence Agency and would cut him off. Ranking officers in the military didn’t need to hear any of that kind of bunk. In any context, trying to sound connected to the CIA was ludicrous, yet Peterson would sometimes assert just that. For certain people, Peterson was a complete turnoff. He might have had some success as a writer, but he was largely considered a misfit. For one thing, Peterson was a night owl, he kept strange hours. For another, he often seemed to disappear on weekends, he was somewhat shady. To most straight military people, Michael Peterson was a wannabe. He joked a lot and was fun to be around, but he wasn’t the type of guy anyone would want to get close to.

  “I saw him as the husband of a schoolteacher who was trying to make a living at writing,” Bruce Berner confided. “I wasn’t interested in reading any of his books, or any of his stories, because I saw him as an oddball. It wasn’t that I had anything against Michael at the ti
me. It’s just that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable talking to him intimately.”

  As it turned out, even though they were next-door neighbors, Bruce and Amybeth Berner didn’t really see Peterson all that much. Michael Peterson would usually sleep in the day and work in the evening. Bruce and Amybeth would notice that Michael would spend hours away from home, either at the air force gym or away on some mysterious business.

  No one in their group recalled seeing Michael Peterson on any regular schedule. He often let his wife and kids do things on their own, only occasionally accompanying his family, even on their trips to other parts of Europe. In fact, it was Bruce and Amybeth Berner who took Patricia, Clayton, and Todd on one of their very first visits to Paris. The boys were young, and Bruce had his two girls from his first marriage staying with him, so the two families made the trip together, doing all the usual tourist things, seeing the Eiffel Tower, eating at fine French restaurants.

  “The fact that Michael wasn’t available to go to Paris, I probably didn’t think too much about it,” Bruce recalled. “I had already decided that the guy was going to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, and it wasn’t going to make any sense to me. He would get up late in the day. He would decide he’d go out and exercise in the gym late at night. Maybe he’d go out and run at two in the morning. I mean, this is the way he was.”

  Everyone around the Petersons pretty much accepted that Patricia was the breadwinner, and Michael was the free spirit. That was the nature of their relationship. They didn’t seem to act in unison, especially when it came to sharing the responsibility of raising the boys. In terms of communication, one-on-one, Michael was good with his boys. But Patricia doted on the boys, and babied Todd and Clayton even up to the time that they were ages eight and ten.

  As for the day-to-day drudgery of household chores, most of that fell on Patricia. Michael had become preoccupied, even more so after George’s death, when he took on all the responsibility of caring for Elizabeth and the girls, and the Ratliff estate. Michael had become intensely involved with the military, fighting to get Liz paid, fighting to get George’s autopsy, fighting to discover the truth behind his death.

  It would be years later that people would learn that George Ratliff was found to have had traces of cyanide in his system, that George had died of a sudden heart attack, that he had been taking special medication for a heart condition, prescribed to him by doctors in Germany. People later wondered if George’s medication had been tampered with before he left on his mission.

  Because Michael was put off about doing any household chores, friends felt sorry for Patricia. Friends got the impression that Patricia was pleasant, that she had her hands full with her kids, but she wasn’t entirely happy. When weekend events would come up, if Michael was not around, Patricia would make up excuses for him. She would never really say what her husband was busy doing, but neighbors would know that Michael Peterson’s silver Mercedes was gone, that he was off on a romp somewhere.

  Some people thought it was sad, the way Patricia would be alone so much, the way she had to take on most of the housework and the breadwinning of the Peterson household. They saw her as a very nice lady, but also as a passive person, easily controlled by Michael. It was strange that Patricia, as close as she felt to George Ratliff, had opted not to go to the funeral in Texas. It was weird that she never questioned Michael’s time spent with Elizabeth, which grew more and more frequent as the months after George’s death passed.

  Patricia, in a sense, had become Michael’s shadow. Amybeth saw her as a odd woman, someone who rarely changed her outfits, someone who wasn’t very good at taking care of herself. Amybeth couldn’t really picture Michael with Patricia, especially since he was so buff, such a good-looking man with a well-kept physique. Patricia dressed in prairie-style clothes, and was the opposite of Michael in every way. Amybeth and other people sometimes wondered if Michael had become romantically interested in Liz.

  Not that Liz would consider it. Not for a second.

  But folks were talking, through the grapevine, and finding out little things that led them to believe that Michael might have developed a secret crush on Liz. There was the knowledge that even though Patricia was Elizabeth’s matron of honor, Michael deliberately chose not to attend George and Elizabeth’s wedding. Later after the wedding reception, Patricia made up excuses about Michael being busy at the gym.

  “It was almost like Patricia wore blinders,” Amybeth recalled. “She wouldn’t see anything bad, she would only see good. It was like she refused to look at things that were bad or difficult. She only wanted to be sweet.”

  But if people suspected anything about Michael, they didn’t talk about it very much. They knew better than to suspect that Liz would be interested in her best friend’s husband, and watching the interaction, they would notice that Liz, like Patricia, was usually quiet and passive around Michael. If anything, Liz was pursuing Patricia’s friendship more than she was Michael’s. But since Michael had a “take-charge” personality, it was easy to see how he could control the communication and intrude among the three of them. As for Liz’s girls, Margaret and Martha, obviously it was Michael, with his take-charge attitude, more than Patricia, who would be the one to look over their well-being.

  As days and months went by, Elizabeth was shifting her perspective somewhat, trying to participate in the lives of her daughters, even bringing them to social gatherings at friends’ homes in Graefenhausen. Whenever Michael was present, he would become the center of attention, the entertainer at any given dinner or birthday party. People liked to sit around and let Michael tell stories. He was that type of guy, filled with tales of exotic travel, and he had a bellowing voice that took over any room.

  People noticed that Michael never really gave them any personal details about his life. His stories were always focused on political events, or on details about a certain place in time. There was nothing ever said about his childhood, about his schooling, or even about his Vietnam experiences. But then, no one ever paid it much thought. Michael was a tremendous storyteller; he was witty, bawdy, intense, and very insightful.

  Finding herself always tired and overwhelmed, Elizabeth decided to try out a nanny, Barbara O’Hara, a beautiful young woman who was unhappy working for a family who lived just down the street. Barbara loved the two little girls and was very good with children, and Barbara and Elizabeth hit it off right away. Within a week, Elizabeth decided that it would be best for Barbara to move in with her full-time. The girls needed constant attention and Liz couldn’t keep burdening her neighbors while she was busy teaching.

  The arrangement with Barbara O’Hara turned out to work very well for Liz. Her girls loved Barbara, they were learning new things with her every day, and Barbara fit right in with the group of Elizabeth’s friends as well—the Berners, the Appel-Schumachers, and the Petersons.

  With Barbara around, there was music played in the house, there was some semblance of normalcy again, and everyone was happy to see that. Michael took a fond liking to Barbara, and even though she was much younger, the two became buddies. Michael and Barbara would sometimes go out together on weekends. There was nothing sexual about their relationship, but the two shared their own bond. Whenever Barbara wasn’t baby-sitting, it seemed, she’d find time to run off to Darmstadt or somewhere, often tooling around with Michael.

  Amybeth would recall thinking it was strange—seeing the two of them together. Amybeth and Barbara had also become friendly, and she would sometimes question Barbara, wondering why the young woman was spending so much time with Michael.

  Peterson seemed to act like a kid around Elizabeth’s nanny. He would hang around with her alot . . . but Amybeth could never get a straight answer about what the two of them did together.

  Twenty-eight

  As a nanny, Barbara O’Hara grew close to Margaret and Martha, but as she continued to work for Elizabeth Ratliff, eventually their opposite lifestyles began to clash. Barbara was younger and full o
f life. She was staying out late; she was still a party girl. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was a homebody. She still didn’t like to hear loud music. She didn’t like to hear noise. Still somewhat pensive and brooding, Liz wanted order in her life. After a number of months of uncertainty, Michael suggested that perhaps Barbara should find her own place. Actually, it was Michael who helped Barbara move out. He was the one who found her a perfect apartment close to Liz’s place.

  Things worked out better that way, for everybody. Liz could have her peaceful weekends, her quiet weeknights. And Barbara, after a weekend of fun, would appear chipper every Monday morning, ready for a week of full-time work. Even as small children, Margaret and Martha were happy with the arrangement. They loved Barbara, their nanny spoiled them. But there was nothing better than spending time with their mom, who made sure they were dressed up like little dolls, showing them off to all her friends who would stop by for visits.

  By the time Barbara was happily living on her own, working for Elizabeth as a daytime nanny, almost two years had gone by since George’s death. It was a time period when Elizabeth was finally having some breakthroughs. With her daughters getting older, walking and talking independently, and looking so much like George, Liz was beginning to come around to see the positive side of life. As a surprise, Liz decided she would throw a big anniversary party for her friends Tom and Cheryl Appel-Schumacher. It was just before Thanksgiving, the start of a new holiday season, and it would be the first joyful event Liz was hosting since she became a widow.

  As Liz had always done in the past, she put all of her heart and soul into the party, going to great lengths to make it an event. Liz wasn’t just throwing a wedding anniversary celebration for Cheryl and Tom, she was opening her home to all of their family and all of her dearest friends. Cheryl and Tom had just arrived back from the States, and Liz had the party completely under wraps. Liz had everything arranged so they would be totally surprised. It was something she was doing as a welcome-home gift for them.