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By Root 1047 0

Kathy Sullivan told me she remembered thinking, “My God, that’s worse than getting pregnant.” Perhaps Stanley Ann had intended, as Charles Payne put it, “to shake up her father.” No one seemed to remember if she was punished. But as senior year wound down, it became apparent that the Dunhams were moving on. Stanley’s work selling furniture in Seattle had dried up. Hawaii, in its newness, was courting transplants. The mayor of Honolulu and a delegation of Hawaii businessmen had been at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in October, talking up business opportunities. Madelyn would have been happy to stay put, her brother Charles remembered. Her career in banking was flourishing. Stanley Ann had no interest in moving, either. Some said she wanted to attend the University of Washington, where many of her closest friends were headed. Or she may have wanted to go east to the University of Chicago. Arlene Payne, who was at the university, getting a Ph.D. in education, remembered Stanley Ann staying with her that year, apparently scouting for schools. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that his mother was offered early admission to the University of Chicago, but “my grandfather forbade her to go, deciding that she was still too young to be living on her own.” Whatever the case, sometime shortly after graduation in 1960, Stanley Ann vanished. “She was upset that she had to move,” Maxine Box remembered. “She didn’t really have any choice.”

Her friends—the first set of close friends she had ever had—moved on, too. Kathy Powell, who had become pregnant in her senior year, had married Jim Sullivan and finished the school year at Edison Technical High School in Seattle. Steve McCord was in San Francisco, studying art. Bill Byers dropped out of the University of Washington and enrolled for a time in a college in Mexico where he had been told that William Burroughs had had a wild time. Later, he returned to Seattle, got a degree in electrical engineering, and went to work for Boeing. Chip Wall joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Washington. He spent two years in India, helping set up chicken-farming cooperatives in a village on the Ganges in Bihar and working in Hyderabad. Upon returning home, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Marilyn McMeekin went to Korea with the Peace Corps, Iona Stenhouse to Sierra Leone. The valedictorian of the class of 1959, the class ahead of theirs, became an anthropologist working in French Polynesia. In the context of Mercer Island, where the idea of conformity was at least in some circles out of fashion, Stanley Ann might almost be seen in retrospect as part of a trend.

Apart from a few fleeting encounters, few of her friends ever saw or heard from her again. “People said she went to Africa and married a black king,” Kathy Sullivan remembered. “We all thought that for years and years.”

Three

East-West

There are ways in which Hawaii’s capital city brings to mind the sun-bleached seediness of Southern California beach towns. But a short drive outside of Honolulu, the fiftieth state feels like another planet. Leaving the city behind, the Pali Highway cuts northeast through the remnants of the Ko‘olau volcano, heading toward the windward coast of the island of O‘ahu. The road climbs several thousand feet toward Pali Pass, disappears briefly into a tunnel, then plunges toward the beach town of Kailua. Jagged volcanic ridges parade against the sky like dinosaurs’ backbones, slopes diving away from the ridgeline in dark, rippling curtains. Smudgy, gray-bottomed clouds congregate upwind of the mountains, sunlight mottling the hillsides in luminous green. In the front yard of a house on a quiet street in Kailua, I met Marilyn McMeekin Bauer, Stanley Ann’s high school classmate. Bauer moved to Hawaii in 1968, straight from two years in the Peace Corps in Korea and eight years after Stanley Ann’s arrival. Looking back, she said, she could not imagine what it was like for Stanley Ann to be airlifted at age seventeen straight from the monochrome insularity of Mercer Island onto