She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [28]
That spring and summer, Elise’s doctors seemed hopeful. In July, Steve came into the office with good news. “She’s cured,” he told Lisa. “No signs of the tumor.”
“Steve was on cloud nine,” says Lisa. “He was sure they’d gotten it all. Her doctors told Elise she didn’t even have to return for a checkup until December.”
That summer, Steve and Elise took a trip, a Panama Canal cruise. They were thrilled at her progress, believing she’d escaped death and that they had more years together. They celebrated their forty-fifth wedding anniversary and made plans to take the annual radio station trip that fall to Italy. Then, in September, their world fell apart for a second time.
“The cancer was back,” says Paul.
It returned with a vengeance. In the hospital, Elise suffered horrific headaches. One day, McEachern walked in and found Steve tenderly massaging her forehead. As the cancer spread, she grew weaker. Steve stayed beside her, holding her hand and running to get her cool compresses for her head.
As the end approached, Paul flew into Austin. Becky picked him up at the airport. At the hospital, Steve tried to control his mounting grief but couldn’t. “Dad broke down and cried,” says Paul. “He talked about how much he loved her.”
When Paul saw his mother, the cancer had taken a terrible toll. She was pale and weak, and for the second time chemo and radiation had caused her hair to fall out. Still, she’d asked Becky to bring her wig and makeup to the hospital. “She wanted to look good for Dad,” says Paul. “Here she is dying, married all those years, and she still wanted to look pretty for him.”
Finally, on October 13, 1993, Elise Adams Beard died at the age of sixty-seven. Paul, by then back on his aircraft carrier, received a call from Steve.
“She’s gone,” he said.
After the funeral, Steve asked Becky to move to Austin, to live with him. She had a life and a teaching career in Dallas. “I couldn’t just leave everything I’d built there,” she says. “I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t move.”
For the first time in the nearly half a century since he’d met Elise, Steve was alone. That fall, Steve III and his wife took the radio station trip to Italy, and Steve stayed home. He was despondent, and complained to Ray, “I’m the type of person who needs to be married. I need someone to take care of. The saddest thing is a rich, lonely old man.”
To Paul, Steve complained that he was uncomfortable with wealthy women of his age, widows who asked him to escort them to functions or approached him in the local grocery store to offer their condolences then invite him to dinner. “He complained he couldn’t go anywhere without some woman hitting on him,” says Paul.
Steve’s friends worried about him, too, that fall and winter. He appeared lost without Elise, tired and broken. Most nights, he sat alone at the nineteenth-hole dining room at the Austin Country Club, drinking his two vodkas, eating his dinner, and staring out the window, not wanting to look at the couples spread throughout the dining room. Friends invited him to their homes, and he went, but eventually he had to leave, and when he did, it was to go home alone to a dark, empty house. Before long Steve began talking about hiring a house manager to keep the place up for him. One evening at the club he asked a bus girl if she might be interested in the job. She refused, but offered to pass the word around to others on the staff.
The first anyone knew that Steve had hired Celeste Martinez for the job was when she drove into Austin Country Club’s parking lot in his brand new white and gold Explorer with its Channel 42—KBVO placards on the sides. Those who did notice weren’t surprised. Celeste was a beautiful woman, just thirty years old, with a glow about her, tall, with a wispy voice and a playful manner. Still, not everyone at the club believed