A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [10]
Later that evening, the owner of an auto-painting shop in the same building as Ralph Dunham’s garage noticed Ruth in the office, apparently writing, when he went to put away his car. A half-hour later, George Lawrence, who also parked in the garage, saw her, too. Back in Melvern, Ralph had returned from hunting and learned that his wife had left. He returned to Topeka, found no one at home, and began a search. Shortly before two a.m., he found his wife’s body on the garage office floor, the article stated. Though an ambulance took the body to St. Francis Hospital, the newspaper quoted the county coroner as having said Ruth Dunham had been dead for anywhere between a few minutes and two hours, and that the death was a suicide. She had written a letter saying she had taken poison because her husband no longer loved her, the newspaper reported. She was twenty-six years old.
A rather different version of Ruth’s death appeared on the same day on the second page of the newspaper in El Dorado, where her parents, Harry and Gabriella Armour, lived with Ruth’s sister, Doris, the recently named Miss El Dorado. According to that account, put forward from that time on for public consumption, Ruth died of ptomaine poisoning at home in Topeka. She had spoken by telephone with her parents just hours before, the newspaper reported, “and was apparently in the best of health.” An article in The Wichita Eagle went one step further: “Mrs. Dunham had been feeling well up to a late hour Thursday night and it is believed that food eaten at a Thanksgiving dinner was responsible for her death.”
Stanley Dunham, at age eight, and his brother, Ralph, age ten, went to live with their maternal grandparents—just as Stanley’s grandson, Barack Obama, at age ten, would do forty-five years later. Stanley and Ralph’s father moved to Wichita to run a drugstore with his father; he lived next door to his parents in an apartment above the store. Apparently, the boys inquired as to why they were not living with their father. “My father’s answer to that was that my grandparents dearly loved us and that he wasn’t about to take us away from them,” Ralph Dunham told me. “However, the fact was that he was dead broke at the time, and he couldn’t afford to take proper care of us. And my grandfather had a good job.” After their father remarried and had two more children, Stanley and Ralph barely saw him. “Well, we did once in a while if we were in Wichita or something like that,” Ralph said. “We’d see him. But very rarely.” Asked if he and Stanley had known their half sisters at that time, he said, “No, not at all.”
Recalling that period eighty years later, Ralph skated quickly past his mother’s death and made no mention of suicide. His mother passed away, the Depression happened, his father’s business collapsed, and he and Stanley moved in with their grandparents in El Dorado. When I described the article in the Topeka newspaper, he said simply, “I was only ten years old. Of course, I was told the ptomaine-poisoning story. But that could have been possible.” He knew his mother had left a note, but, he said, he never knew what it said. He seemed to have retained a small child’s distorted memory of that day—small details magnified, central drama swept into the shadows. “Actually, she went to the hospital and died in the hospital, I know that,” he said. “My grandparents came down. Of course, we were glad to see them. We didn’t realize my mother was in the hospital or anything like that. We had seen a game—I can remember it was a board game, and the game was Uncle Wiggily. They gave us some money to go down to the drugstore to buy this Uncle Wiggily game. And when we came back from that, then they told us that my mother had died.”
The boys moved into what became, with their arrival, a four-generation household. It included their grandparents, the boys’ Aunt Doris, and