She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [52]
As a child, Tracey had been horribly violated, and someone she should have been able to count on to protect her did nothing to save her. The experience shaped her, leaving her as jagged inside as shards of glass from a shattered mirror. Her pain defined how she saw the world: as a collage of predators and victims. In the parlance of psychiatry, Tracey became what she’d most needed but never had as a child—a caretaker. Celeste had spent her life looking for someone to take care of her. Tracey cared more about those she loved than about herself, and she would do anything, absolutely anything, to protect them.
“I grew up in a beautiful house, and, from the outside, it looked like a good life. My father was successful, and we lived well. I loved my father. He was a kind, gentle person. My mother … my mother was …” she says pausing. “My mother was the problem.”
The road that led Tracey at the age of forty-one to St. David’s Pavilion and Celeste was a long and tortuous one, beginning when she was growing up in what should have been a privileged world, as the only daughter of a successful attorney, who specialized in international tax law, and his sociable and seemingly carefree wife. When Tracey was born, in May 1957, Kenneth and Mickey Tarlton lived in Ridglea, a posh Fort Worth golf course/country club community, and already had two other children, both boys, eight and ten years old. “I was an afterthought,” Tracey says. “A surprise.”
Of her parents, Mickey was the more gregarious, playing cards with friends, often at the country club, where she dangled a Herbert Taryton cigarette from one hand and held a drink in the other. A stocky blonde with a poodle cut and a craggy face, she resembled Rosemarie on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. In some ways, Mickey was like Celeste, a mom who treated the neighborhood teens like friends. She wanted the teenagers to like her and often slipped them cigarettes, a drink, or the keys to her car.
At the country club, she told the bartender, “George, I want some sour mash. My doctor says I can have all the sour mash I want, but only sour mash.”
“Mickey was an alcoholic,” says Tracey. “And a mean drunk.”
Later, Mickey would be diagnosed as manic depressive. Self-medicating with alcohol, she spiraled from euphoria to the deepest of depression. At times she couldn’t lift her head from the pillow, at other times she was giddy with happiness, and in between there were horrific outbursts of anger that cowered not only her children but her husband. “She’d yell and scream, just shriek at us,” says Tracey. “She verbally abused us, telling us we were nothing, that we would never be any good.”
With her daughter, Mickey did something else: She sexually abused her.
“Sometimes, I think the verbal abuse was worse,” says Tracey. “But the other is, just, well, something I still find it difficult to talk about.”
Whether or not her father knew of the sexual abuse, he knew about the constant verbal battering Mickey administered to his children, and he did nothing to stop it. In fact, he, too, was one of Mickey’s favorite targets. “Mickey would be drunk by the time Dad got home,” says Tracey. “She would just lay into him, and instead of making her stop, doing something, he’d go into the den and read.”
With an abusive mother and a vacant father, home became a place Tracey dreaded. She escaped in books, spending every moment she could reading in her room. Mickey cooked dinner early and then was too drunk to manage the stove. Tracey ate it cold and left the house by four-thirty to play with the boys in the neighborhood. When they played baseball, Mickey screamed at her, calling her names in front of her friends. As night fell, the other children went home. Tracey hid in the darkness until she judged she could stay out no longer. When she entered the house, it was always the same. Her father had secluded himself in the den, and her mother was on a rampage.