Free A Singular Woman by Janny Scott

had to be sent away and that the boy’s family had arranged it. Judy Ware, whose parents were Mercer Island bridge-playing friends of Madelyn and Stanley Dunham’s, told me that she became pregnant in her senior year. An abortion, still against the law and often unsafe, would have required making arrangements through intermediaries. Judy, anxious to please her parents, stalled before telling them she was pregnant. They arranged for her to be married secretly—no siblings, few photographs—some distance from Seattle. She graduated at five months pregnant.

    Stanley Ann (left), age fourteen, at a slumber party, summer 1957

    â€œWe were growing up in that Leave It to Beaver, June Cleaver kind of society,” Ware told me. “We just weren’t very well prepared.”
    The Dunhams were not, however, the Cleavers. They may have played bridge with the Hansons and the Farners, but they did not match any Mercer Island template. Steve McCord recalled an evening he spent with the Dunhams in the summer of 1959. A good student, he was not an athlete and never felt that he quite fit in. He would have preferred to have grown up on a farm or someplace where, he imagined, people were “looser and less inhibited, less anxious about themselves.” Madelyn and Stanley struck him as more colorful, interesting, liberal-minded. “Closet bohemians, maybe,” he said. That evening, they smoked a lot of cigarettes and talked. “He had a slightly rotten sense of humor that I liked, a dirty mind,” McCord remembered of Stanley Dunham. “They weren’t your run-of-the-mill Ozzie and Harriet by any stretch of the imagination. I remember at one point, the conversation was getting goofy. We talked about a lot of things. I said something about prehensile toes. And Stanley turned it around and said ‘pretensile hose,’ making sort of a phallic reference. It was a silly little dirty joke. And immediately, I think Madelyn pretended to be offended and hissed, ‘Stanley!’” There was some discussion of the possibility that the Dunhams might leave Mercer Island after Stanley Ann’s graduation. Didn’t Madelyn mind dropping everything and starting over? McCord asked her. In an answer that would strike him years later as prescient in light of what became of Madelyn’s daughter, she said, “We Dunhams usually bob to the surface.”
    That was true of Madelyn, certainly. When Stanley had enrolled at UC Berkeley, she had taken a job in the admissions office at the university while Stanley Ann was still a toddler. Back in Kansas, she had worked in a real estate office in Wichita. Mack Gilkeson, who knew her from Augusta, remembered running into her at a restaurant where she was working as a hostess. In Ponca City, even though Stanley was making enough money that Madelyn no longer needed to be employed, she announced to a relative that she was going back to work. “The evening cocktail hour gets earlier every day,” she said. “If I don’t work, I’ll turn into an alcoholic.” She modeled shoes, broadcast community news on the radio, may have worked for a newspaper, and got her first job in banking in Texas, Charles Payne told me. When the family moved to Seattle, she parlayed her banking experience into a job in the escrow department of a savings and loan. She was elegant, slim, and well dressed, and she enjoyed her work. At the same time, she kept close track of Stanley Ann’s grades. She seemed interested in enabling her daughter to go well beyond what she and Stanley had accomplished. Madelyn had inherited their mother’s intelligence, Charles Payne said. Ralph Dunham described her as brilliant. But if she was smarter than Stanley, some said, she was careful not to overplay that advantage in the interest of keeping the peace.
    Stanley had brought the family west so he could take a job selling furniture in a department store in downtown