by John Douglas
By the physical evidence, this continued to be true. Jack and Trudy have at least ten or twelve thick photo albums chronicling their children’s growing-up years. There is scarcely a picture of Suzanne anywhere without a radiant smile.
She found it easy to make friends. Trudy enrolled her in a Brownie troop, which she loved. She wanted to wear her uniform all the time and couldn’t understand why it was reserved for meetings.
Whatever took hold of Suzanne’s imagination came easily to her; whatever didn’t interest her was like pulling teeth, and that included her studies. When the family was transferred from Salonika to Athens, she and Stephen went to the Ursuline School. In September or October of their second year there, one of the nuns sent a report home saying that Suzanne couldn’t seem to master the multiplication tables. So when he got home from work that night, Jack said to her, “You’re a smart girl. Why are you having trouble?”
She replied, “Well, I think my brain rotted over the summer.”
Jack said, “Could I hear that again?” She repeated her analysis of the problem. So he told her, “We’re going to play a game together. We’re going to make fun out of the times tables.”
“So I just kept drilling her. Whenever I saw her I’d say, ’Eight times two!’ or ’Nine times six!’ and it became a challenge to her to come up with the right answer. I think it drove Trudy a little mad, but she learned her tables and had fun with it. You always had to challenge her.”
Despite Suzanne’s lack of interest in school, languages came easily to both children. While English was the first language Stephen learned to speak, from his infancy in Lebanon and Syria he understood a good deal of both Arabic and French. He maintained the French, studied it in college and speaks it fluently. Both children took Greek in school and the teachers remarked how quickly and accurately Suzanne had picked up the proper accent and intonation, even better than Stephen had.
By the time they left Greece, Stephen was thirteen and Suzanne was ten. Actually, Jack was glad to be going home. The final two years of his mission in Greece had coincided with a period of Greek political upheaval, the Cyprus crisis and its aftermath. Several Americans had been killed and he didn’t like the trend he was seeing. He was concerned that something could happen where he wouldn’t be able to protect his family and he didn’t like that lack of control.
From Greece, the Collinses moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1976 as part of a new State Department program in which foreign service officers were to learn about government below the federal level so they would be better equipped to explain our grass-roots system overseas. Jack was initially assigned to the governor’s office, and then moved on to become special assistant to the director of the Department of Health and Social Services. He and Trudy both considered themselves conservative and traditional and were wary of what they saw all around them in this liberal college town. They were particularly concerned about the attitudes their kids would pick up in school.
But Madison was beautiful and charming; they made good friends and so did the children. As soon as Suzanne experienced her first McDonald’s she decided that American life was okay. And being a pretty blue-eyed blond, she fit in right away with the indigenous Swedish and German stock. She looked as if she had come right off one of the local dairy farms.
Stephen, on the other hand, had the opposite experience, a Middle Easterner in Middle America. His classmates thought he was Mexican and tormented him unmercifully, though Stephen took it stoically. Actually, he was in high school before he confided to his parents how he’d been treated in Wisconsin and both of them felt very guilty for not having recognized the problem and dealt with it. But as a result, Stephen felt he had to excel in school to prove himself and he was an A student from then on. He even joined the school football squad although he was short and stocky and was regularly pummeled by blond giants all around him. Perhaps as a latent result of his first months of life as a foundling in a Lebanese orphanage, Stephen went through life with the attitude that everything has to be earned and fought for.
The next stop on the odyssey was Springfield, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., when Jack transferred back to State Department headquarters. Suzanne was twelve and Stephen fifteen, and if the two of them ever felt as though they had an actual home base, an actual place to be from, it was to be Springfield.
Jeff Freeman met Steve Collins the summer before they both started tenth grade and they quickly became best friends. And he soon became close with Suzanne, whom he remembers at the time as being a cute little tomboy who always wanted to hang around her big brother and his friends. He also remembers that while Steve might have found this annoying or bothersome from time to time the way older siblings inevitably do, he was always tactful and tried extraordinarily hard to include her and make her feel welcome.
While Stephen continued to do well at Robert E. Lee High School, Suzanne wasn’t lighting any academic fires at Francis Scott Key Intermediate. In repeated meetings with the parents, teachers and counselors told them they were being too strict, that both children, but particularly Suzanne, needed a more unstructured life. Jack and Trudy felt that with her inability or unwillingness to concentrate on her studies, less structure was exactly what she did not need. They felt confused and bewildered, as if all the traditional standards and rules had mysteriously changed or evaporated while they were overseas.
For example, to Suzanne it always seemed a telling point in a parental argument or discussion that “the other kids in school are doing it,” whatever “it” happened to be—wearing makeup, going to the mall alone, staying out late. The reasoning didn’t seem very compelling to Trudy, and that was where the conflict lay. Trudy would do whatever she thought was ultimately best for her children, whether her action turned out to be popular or not. Suzanne would continue to do whatever she set out to do, merely factoring in the discipline or punishment as a price to be paid.
There was the time when Suzanne wanted to sleep over at the house of a girlfriend whose mother had a live-in boyfriend, an absolute taboo as far as Jack and Trudy were concerned. “She had some real problems with that,” Trudy remembers.
Trudy also didn’t want her daughter wearing makeup to junior high school, despite the fact that many of the other girls were doing it. Jeff Freeman now owns his own home construction and remodeling business. He did a lot of renovation work on the Collinses’ house in Springfield before they sold it in 1994. While he was working on a heating vent in the basement he noticed a small package, all wrapped up. He pulled it out and opened it and found a stash of makeup, lipstick, and eyeliner. He wrapped it back up and replaced it where he’d found it, but then called Stephen and described it.
“I’ll bet that was Suzanne’s,” Steve said, recalling that she often went to great and creative lengths to get around her mother’s bans. The traditional and proper Trudy didn’t approve of wearing jeans to school, so Suzanne would sometimes leave the house for school and change into jeans in the bushes.
“Actually,” Steve says, looking back on this period of their lives, “Suzanne was twice as good as I was. I was going out drinking sometimes three or four nights a week. She just didn’t mask it as well as I did. I was getting good grades and it’s easy to mask a lot of things when your grades are good. Suzanne wasn’t getting good grades so she was always under the microscope. They worried more about the decisions she made than mine. I always looked like I was welladjusted, whereas she couldn’t follow the most basic instructions, so she could do something totally dumb.”
Jack wasn’t as worried about Suzanne’s behavior as Trudy was, although he admits that since he was out of town a good deal, she bore the brunt of the monitoring and disciplining. Like Stephen, a part of Jack wished that if his daughter was going to be sneaky about what she wanted to do, that at least she could pull it off so he wouldn’t have to know.
“I really didn’t think we had a major problem,” said Jack, “but as parents, you want everything to be as perfect as possible
and when you see something that isn’t, you want to do something about it. Maybe it was a test of wills. She was saying, I’m growing up now. I’m feeling my oats. I want to stand on my own two feet!’ So that’s what it became—back and forth. She just dug her heels in. She wouldn’t give in and we wouldn’t give in.”
“Sue often said, ’I want to be mistress of my fate,’ “ Trudy remembers. ’” I want to decide what I’m going to do.’ And I would answer, ’Well, there are certain areas where you can’t do that yet. You’re underage and we’re your parents.’ Then she would say, ’But I know what’s good for me.’ I would say, ’Well, that’s debatable. And besides, we’re in charge.’”
“She’d always be saying, ’Steve gets to stay out this late; why can’t I?’” Jeff observed.
Trudy said, “She’d be due home at a certain time and she wouldn’t come home and she wouldn’t call. So when she did finally come home, the riot act was read. We’d say, ’We told you, so next time we’re going to take an hour off.’ But of course, that didn’t matter. She went out and stayed out late anyway.”
Both Steve and Jeff Freeman remember Suzanne frequently being grounded or on restriction for some infraction or other. “She was always getting busted,” Steve remembers. “It got to the point where there was nothing more they could take away from her. They set times for her to do her homework and stood over her until she did it. They loved her so much they wanted things to be perfect for her. But all in all, I think her personality was a lot healthier than mine. I always had to do something one hundred percent. Suzanne had much more of a devil-may-care attitude about things.”
Whether she intended to or not, Suzanne had a knack for pushing all the right buttons with her parents, both positively and negatively. Trudy took pride in the clothes she bought for her daughter and hated it when Suzanne would continually borrow from and swap with the other girls.
“I’d be doing the wash and I’d say to her, ’Where did this come from?’ ’Oh, that’s Sara Jane’s,’ she’d say. And I’d say, ’Haven’t we been over this before? You will not wear other people’s clothing. You will not let other people wear your clothing.’ Well, she didn’t mind me a bit. She’d just say, ’Everybody does it, Mom.’ Do you know how tired I got of hearing that? But nothing deterred her. She’d just keep on doing it.”
But she also knew how to use her charm and naturally affectionate personality. She was always putting her arms around people. Trudy says, “She’d hug me and say, I’m so sorry, Mom.’ I used to tease her and say, ’Don’t try to get around me by giving me a hug. Hugs don’t count when you’re not doing what I asked you to do!’ She’d say, ’They don’t count for anything?’ And then, of course, I’d have to relent and say, ’Well, they count for something.’”
One basis of the conflict with her parents were her grades in school. “The Collinses’ expectations for both of their children was for them always to meet their potential,” Jeff observed. “Steve delivered straight As and Suzanne delivered Cs.”
Other than science class, academics just didn’t turn her on. Says Stephen, “She just wasn’t academically challenged in high school.”
She found all the other aspects of high school tremendously engaging. She was elected to student council each year and ran all the school dances. Through the church, she regularly did volunteer work with retarded children and young adults.
Trudy recalls one church social Suzanne helped organize for these disabled young people: “Some of these boys were probably twenty-six but the doctors said that their intellectual and emotional level was about seven. And Sue told me, ’I would make them get up and dance.’ She said that seemed to please them and she said it worked out so well. And she said, ’I don’t understand why people are afraid of them. You can make their day a little nicer; that’s the important thing.’ I remember I said to her, ’Well, I admire you, Suzanne. I’d probably be hesitant. I’d be afraid of the reaction I’d get.’ She said, ’Well, there’s nothing sexual about it. Mom; it’s nothing like that. They just want someone to care about them and treat them nicely, and I enjoy doing that.’”
She also loved being around and working with the elderly and had a special relationship with Trudy’s parents. She seemed to take great pleasure and satisfaction from giving advice and affecting the lives around her. Suzanne was the school’s primary advisor to the lovelorn and was continually getting caught passing notes in class advising her friends on their relationships. Much of this incriminating evidence would end up being sent home to Trudy with letters from the teachers saying, “Instead of her classwork, this is what Suzanne was doing today.”
One teacher commented, “If school could be just social arrangements, Suzanne would get all As.”
Her room reflected her expansive personality. She had the largest bedroom in the house and filled it with dolls and stuffed animals. After she filled the shelves, she started on the windowsills. Wherever in the world Jack would travel, he’d bring something back for her. “But,” as Trudy noted, “it was an effort for her to stop long enough to hang something up or find a proper place for it, so it would just get shoved in the corner and then she’d close the door and nobody else got to see it."
She had also grown from a cute and tomboyish little girl into a gorgeous young woman. “Very, very pretty, the top one percent,” in her proud brother’s opinion. The opinion was borne out by others. Jeff says, “She blossomed in tenth grade, which gave her renewed self-confidence. I thought she was very cute.”
She did some modeling and possessed an excellent fashion sense. All of this also made Stephen even more protective of her. “I always wanted to know who it was she was with when she went out on a date,” he admits. “Before she’d go out, the guys and I would try to get with whoever it was and roast him in kind of a kidding way, but send him away with the right attitude. A lot of people were interested in her and I was just trying to look out for her and help her out.” Stephen’s concerns for his sister were taken quite seriously by anyone approaching her. He was short and stocky, very strong and athletic, and a weight lifter with biceps like tree trunks.
In her own way, Suzanne was just as athletic as Steve. And when she matured, she matured fast and dramatically. She appeared older than her age and so stopped looking like Steve’s kid sister. Even when she was still in junior high, she fit in more with his crowd, and before long they would say to him, “Why don’t you bring Sue along?” She was very popular. And while there were many aspects of her life which really worried her parents, they always trusted her judgment with boys. On that score, she’d never done anything to alarm them. And besides, they knew Stephen was looking out for her.
According to the time-honored suburban ritual, Stephen got his learner’s permit within days of his sixteenth birthday and his driver’s license shortly after that, then bought himself a huge used Pontiac. Jack and Trudy hoped they could hold out driving privileges as an incentive to Suzanne to get her grades up.
“Every time she’d bring home a report card, I’d say, ’Gee, Sue, you know you’re still sort of far away from what you want. Shouldn’t you be thinking about that?’” said Trudy.
Other than social organizing, Suzanne’s greatest passion in school was sports. She was a hurdler on the high school track team and an outfielder on the women’s softball team. With her long legs and tall, slender frame, she was a natural athlete. This was particularly gratifying to a girl who had spent the first year and a half of her life having to sleep in a leg brace. Being the perky beauty she was, she’d been approached about joining the cheerleading squad, but that wasn’t for her.
“We thought of her as kind of a semi-jock chick,” Jeff Freeman remembers. “Suzanne would always prefer to do rather than watch. She’d always rather participate.”
“She became her own person early,” he adds. “She developed a sense of herself earlier than a lot of kids.” And she had to try everything herself. One day in high school, Suzanne and another girl skipped school, obt
ained a bottle of rum, and proceeded to kill it off between them to see what it would be like. Her next tactical error was showing up for her softball game.
Trudy got a call from the school office: “Your daughter is in a questionable state. We think you’d better come pick her up.” As soon as Trudy saw her, it was obvious what she’d done. “She was blotto.”
When they got home, Suzanne meekly asked, “Are you mad, Mommy?”
“Let’s say I’m very disappointed,” Trudy replied sternly.
“Are you going to punish me?”
“No, Suzanne,” her mother explained. “Because tomorrow morning you are going to be punished by the good Lord.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” Trudy said.
“The next morning, she was so sick, she turned every color of the rainbow, ending up with green. It was terrible, and the hangover lasted for two days. I would get her a cold compress and she would say, ’Mommy, why are you being so nice to me?’ I felt so badly for her.
“When she finally came out of it, she just said, ’I don’t like feeling like that.’ I said, ’I’m very glad to hear that.’ ”
The house in Springfield became a focal point for Steve and Suzanne’s social circle. Perhaps it was because Suzanne was such an organizer, perhaps it was because Jack and Trudy always welcomed their children’s friends and talked to them as intelligent adults. Often, Steve says, there were ten or twelve guys there at one time. Also, there were often friends staying with them. To this day, Suzanne’s and Stephen’s friends continue to visit Jack and Trudy, and often spend the night whenever they’re in town.
When she was in high school, Suzanne commented to her mother that there was a girl in her class named Gina, and that she really liked the name. Trudy told her how interesting that was, since Gina had been her original name.
Suzanne asked, “Do you think it would be possible for me to find out who my birth mother was?”