• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1063 0

and unconventional, if less educated and more middle class than upper-middle class. Madelyn was the brains in the family, by most accounts, and the reliable breadwinner. But Stanley called at least some of the shots. In his white convertible, he ferried Stanley Ann and her friends to and from high school basketball and football games. Occasionally, he would let some of them take the wheel, sitting in his lap. They enjoyed his attention; he enjoyed theirs. “Eventually, he sort of sucked up all the air in the car,” Susan Botkin Blake, a classmate and friend of Stanley Ann’s, told me. “He was one of those people that, given an audience, he’d take it.” He embarrassed his daughter, not least with his familiarity with her friends. He was strict and overprotective, Ralph Dunham said. Behind his back, to friends who called her Stan, she referred to Stanley half mockingly as “Big Stan.” Kathy Sullivan, a close friend in high school, remembered Stanley Ann glancing at her sideways in Stanley Dunham’s car, out of his view, and making a face. Kathy had her own burden of parental embarrassment. Her mother, who had grown up in a farming community in Illinois, still hung the family’s laundry on a clothesline. She did not appear, to her teenage daughter, to know the right way to talk. Her mother did not fit in on Mercer Island, Kathy felt, and neither did Stanley Ann’s father. It made Kathy feel better that she and Stanley Ann shared these mortifications. “Stanley hated her father at the time that I knew her,” she told me. “She hated her father as only a teenager can hate.”

Both the time and the geography of the place shaped the experience of coming of age on Mercer Island in the latter half of the 1950s. When the Dunhams arrived in 1956, Mercer Island was almost rural—a 6.2-square-mile slab of wooded land, the shape of a steak, just east of Seattle in Lake Washington. The population was about eight thousand, mostly scattered along the perimeter in handsome waterfront houses and more modest wood-frame cottages. Everyone, just about, was white. Classmates of Stanley Ann’s remembered one black student in the entire high school by the year they graduated. The local paper, the Mercer Island Reporter, was dense with news of Parent-Teacher Association smorgasbords, ballroom dancing classes, and Camp Fire Girls’ “Dad and Daughter” suppers. Ads in the personal section said things like, “Respectable lady interested in forming a card club.” Editorials opined earnestly on topics like “Our Vanishing Morals.” When the high school French teacher, Madame White, escorted a group of students to Europe one summer, the girls boarded the plane in hats, pumps, and white gloves. Crime was almost nonexistent. Children could spend the night in sleeping bags down by the water or disappear into the woods for an entire day. Susan Botkin’s family, she said, did not even have a key to their house. When they went on vacation, her mother would throw the bolt on the front door, set the button lock on the back door on the way out, and leave one clerestory window ajar for her brother to enter through when they returned. The only direct transportation link to Seattle had been a ferry until 1940, when the “floating bridge” between Seattle and the island opened. Roads on the island were tar and gravel. Mercer Island had a small town center, a few stores, little public transportation, no movie theaters, few televisions. “I can remember going with some of my college buddies to Mercer Island. It was almost a feeling that it was a different country,” said Jim Sullivan, who would drive his Alfa Romeo convertible from the University of Washington across the pontoon bridge to pick up his girlfriend, Kathy Powell, Stanley Ann’s friend. “There were a lot of subtle controls dictated by geography.”

Yet change was coming. The great postwar suburbanization of America was under way, and the communities east of Seattle in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains were expanding. Boeing, with its airplane-manufacturing site in Renton, Washington, was building up its commercial-airliner division