A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [28]
Stanley Ann, often the only girl in the group, shared the boys’ highbrow pretensions and what Byers described as their us-against-them outlook toward “the dominant culture, the not-very-thoughtful people doing not-very-thoughtful things.” He said, “I think it was a big issue for her—these kinds of people that she disliked. My feeling is she did feel ostracized—that she felt that she could never have been one of them even if she had wanted to be one of them, that type of feeling.” Unconventional in many ways, she also had a conservative streak. Once, Byers drove her out to Bellevue to meet some friends he had made who were in the process of becoming, in effect, early hippies. Their style of living fascinated Byers. Stanley Ann looked the scene over. “You know, I couldn’t live in that place,” she told him later. “It’s filthy.” Which was true, Byers remembered later. “Somewhere, fundamentally, she had a fairly rock-solid, realistic, even conservative outlook,” he said. “She knew where the line was, it seemed. She was right about those people. By their lights, they were living free of all these restraints. But of course, that meant free of . . .”
He paused.
“. . . hygiene.”
By senior year, Stanley Ann’s friendship with Kathy Powell had cooled. Kathy had met Jim Sullivan, a fraternity man from the University of Washington, at the Pancake Corral. Because he was five years older than she was, she had lied to him about her age. Now she was wearing his fraternity pin. In Stanley Ann’s eyes, Kathy Sullivan told me, she had sold out. Stanley Ann defined herself by her intellect, Sullivan said. If she had any romantic interest in boys, she did not let on. In the spring of 1959, Jim Sullivan suggested to Kathy that he fix up some of his fraternity brothers with her friends. When Kathy suggested including Stanley Ann, Jim dropped her from the list in favor of a girl thought to be the most beautiful in the school. “She wasn’t a radiant beauty by any means,” Byers said of Stanley Ann. “But, probably more to the point, she was very intellectual, and she could cut people down. She didn’t suffer fools gladly.” She would have needed some coaching, Kathy felt, not to be supercilious and disdainful to Jim’s fraternity friends.
In early 2009, I heard the name Allen Yonge. If Stanley Ann had ever had a boyfriend in high school, I was told, it could have been Allen. He was a year or two older than she was and lived in Bellevue, though no one seemed to remember how they had met. For a time, friends of theirs said, he developed a crush on Stanley Ann. She seemed willing, sort of, to give it a try. I found an address for Mr. Yonge and sent him a letter asking if he would speak with me. In early March, I received an e-mail from his wife, Penelope Yonge. Her husband was astounded to get my letter, she said: “Allen is enthusiastic about Obama, but he had never connected his Mercer Island friend Stanley with the president, so this came as quite a surprise.” However, he was recovering from an accident and not in a condition to talk. He would get back to me, she said, when he was in better shape. Several months later, I wrote to her to say I was still interested whenever her husband felt up to speaking. She e-mailed back two days later to tell me that he had died. “He had been looking forward to talking to you about Stanley,” she said. “He remembered her with great affection and admiration—he called her ‘brainy’ and ‘intellectual’ and ‘adventurous’ and ‘a whole lot of