Intimate Knowledge

By TAD BARTIMUS

We never really know another person.

Oh sure, we think we do. We steer clear of the special chair they always fall asleep in, keep the radio tuned to their classical station and wear blue because it's their favorite color. We give them paperback thrillers because they always read them. We invite familiar dinner guests because we're sure they'll enjoy them. We tell the waiter "heavens no!" when he recommends an escargot appetizer because the ever-predictable latecomer "never touches those things."

In the next moment this person we think we know inside and out shows up carrying a romance novel, wonders "why aren't you wearing red?", enthuses about rap music, asks where all the interesting people have gone, announces enrollment in a yoga class and says "I'll have the snails."

There's no predicting how, why or when another human being will mutate before our eyes. Or behind our back.

We all keep secrets. Charles Kuralt kept a whopper. For 29 years he hid an intimate relationship with Patricia Shannon while staying married to Suzanne "Petie" Baird Kuralt. His two daughters by a previous union had no idea their father was having an affair with a Montana mother of three children, that he called her constantly, that he visited her frequently and that she lived in a cabin they had built together on land he had given her.

"I always thought of it as ours," Kuralt's lover testified at a trial to determine if she or his children should inherit an additional 90 acres adjoining the cabin. "Charles always thought of it as ours."

Montana District Judge John Chistensen heard both sides, read a letter from Kuralt to Shannon written two weeks before he died in which he indicated she should have the land, then affirmed that human beings are capable of total duplicity by siding with Patricia Shannon because "any other conclusion would not make sense and defy logic."

Critics wonder if Kuralt behaved logically when he bought his secret lover property in Ireland and Montana, gave her money to start a business and, by her account, quietly enjoyed fishing, reading, walking, talking and ordinary living with her beside the Big Hole River.

My guess is that he was as normal as apple pie. We're all capable of aberrational behavior; anybody who says they're not is delusional. The Bible is full of "don'ts" because people do – always have, always will.

Besides, we're talking three decades here. Kuralt and Shannon didn't have just a midlife dalliance or a one-time fling. They aged together through sickness and health, arthritic knees, graying hair. Lochinvar's face, not to mention his roly-poly physique, was familiar to millions; he fully understood the risks of being a public figure living a lie. Nevertheless, he gambled his marriage and his children's respect on an ego that bet he was rich enough and smart enough to get away with it and he won. His wife did not learn about his mistress until after his death from lupus on July 4, 1997, at the age of 62.

Was he right to do it, or terrible wrong to do it? Was he good or bad? Human beings need to be careful when they pass judgment; it's that old living-in-a-glass-house thing. Charles Kuralt wasn't the first person to lead a double life, and he certainly won't be the last. We all have stories about friends who come home from an ordinary day at the office and announce "I'm leaving," then disappear off the radar screen after 20 years of marriage. Women as well as men phone home to say "I'm at the airport. Goodbye." I look at people I love convinced I know exactly what they are thinking and I'm wrong by a country mile. They look at me the same way with the same results.

Kuralt's longest on-the-road story reminds us that relationships are fragile, tenuous and unpredictable -- just like the people who enter into them. We can never take another human being for granted because we'll always be capable of shocking ourselves.

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