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By Root 1064 0

of Wichita; from Kansas to Ponca City, Oklahoma, where he worked as a furniture salesman; from Ponca City to Texas, to sell furniture again; from Texas back to El Dorado; from El Dorado to Seattle; and from Seattle to Mercer Island, Washington, where the family touched down for four years before heading westward once again, this time to Hawaii, where Stanley and Madelyn finally settled. By the time Stanley Ann entered Mercer Island High School as a thirteen-year-old freshman in the fall of 1956, she was accustomed to being the outsider and the perpetual other. She had some of the attributes of children of peripatetic parents: She was adaptable and self-sufficient. Experienced in the art of introducing herself, she had developed a preemptive response to the inevitable follow-up question. “I’m Stanley,” she would say. “My father wanted a son, but he got me.” The retort, true or not, revealed something about the speaker. By the time she was a teenager, Stanley Ann was witty and self-contained, with a wry sense of humor. She had other outsider qualities: She was curious about people, and she was tolerant, not leaping to judgment. She had an unusual capacity even as a child, Charles Payne told me, to laugh at herself. She also had a contentious relationship with her father. She had figured out early on how to get under his skin.

Madelyn, Stanley Ann, and Ralph Dunham, Yellowstone National Park, summer 1947

Physically, she resembled him. She had his elongated chin, his compact mouth, his enviable hair. As a child, she was somewhat ungainly, an asthmatic in a household of smokers. As a teenager, she came to loathe the indignities and the regimentation of high school gym. She lacked the makings of an athlete, but she was bright. When Ralph Dunham was a graduate student in educational psychology at UC Berkeley and living in student housing in Richmond, California, with his brother as well as Madelyn and Stanley Ann, he gave his four-year-old niece an intelligence test. “You’re not supposed to give intelligence tests to people you’re related to, but I think I was pretty objective,” he told me. Asked how Stanley Ann did on the test, he said, with visible pride and admiration, “Very well, indeed.” She was curious and lively, with the willfulness of her mother. “She would decide to do something and do it whether anyone wanted her to or not,” Charles Payne said. Until Mercer Island, she was rarely in one place long enough to develop enduring friendships. At a time when little girls were given names like Mary, Betty, and Barbara, Stanley Ann was teased about hers. (She wished she had been named Deborah, she told Maya years later.) She was solitary and bookish, inclined to hole up for hours with back issues of National Geographic, “always traveling in her mind,” as Maya put it. She was independent-minded—though not so much so as to be spared the anxieties of adolescence and the yearning to fit in. As a teenager, she was self-conscious about her appearance; the year she had braces, one friend said, she rarely risked a smile. She had an eye for absurdity and little tolerance for phoniness and glibness. Her humor was arch, sometimes cutting, but not mean-spirited. A look of wry amusement was often on her face. Toward the back of the 1960 Mercer Island High School annual, there is a snapshot of Stanley Ann and a classmate, Marilyn McMeekin, soliciting a yearbook ad from Petram’s Ten Cent Store. Marilyn has presented herself, front and center, next to the cash register and the wire rack of Wrigley’s gum. She is smiling eagerly, engaging a cashier somewhere outside the frame. In the background, slightly out of focus, Stanley Ann has been captured by the camera, visibly rolling her eyes. She was good at rolling her eyes, her high school friend John Hunt told me.

Her father, Stanley, struck his daughter’s friends as jovial, boisterous, a talker. He could be charming and loud, and his humor often involved teasing. Compared with other Mercer Island parents, he and Madelyn seemed, at least to some, more adventurous and hip. They were sharp-witted