Free A Singular Woman by Janny Scott Page A

Seattle. But he seemed to be around more than Madelyn. To Stanley Ann’s friends, he was handsome and jolly, yet Maxine Box described him “as you would a used-car salesman—blustery, but what is behind it all?” He would go a little too far to make Stanley Ann’s friends laugh. She was on the receiving end of a disproportionate share of his teasing. He was not averse to issuing orders. “I can’t do that because of my father,” Iona Stenhouse remembered Stanley Ann saying. “I have to be home because of my dad.” From an early age, she ran circles around him. She would trick him, he would become angry, she would play innocent, he would stomp up and down. “If she wanted to do something, he would say no for no reason,” one relative said. “She would say things she knew would irritate him. She was able with a straight face to tease him in a way that he didn’t know he was being teased, and he would get furious.” In high school, when she wanted to go out with a group of friends, she would enlist John Hunt to pretend to be her date and get her out of the house without too much fatherly interrogation. “When I’d get sucked into a conversation with Stan, she’d roll her eyes: ‘Don’t!’” John Hunt told me. He said, “Big Stan wanted to know about her life, her friends. She kept him locked off.” She was like a lot of her friends, Chip Wall said: “We wanted to get out from under the thumb of our parents.” Ralph Dunham was especially fond of his niece, whom he had known well as a small child when they were all living in Richmond, California. Years later, Ralph said, Stanley Ann told him it might have been easier if he had been her father. “He was overprotective,” Ralph said of Stanley. He tried to control where she went, what hours she kept, whom she was with. He added, “Stanley was very strict with her—which is probably why she maybe tried to break out of the mold once she got older.”
    Stanley and Madelyn’s marriage was stormy. He could be opinionated and stubborn, and had what Obama described years later as a violent temper. He did not like losing arguments and was not in the habit of agreeing to disagree. It was not unknown for him and Madelyn to ruin a family holiday by waging a protracted argument over a period of hours in the presence of out-of-town relatives. Ralph Dunham told me his brother dropped out of UC Berkeley because of a language requirement, but others said Madelyn complained that she had ended up writing too many of Stanley’s term papers while he sprawled on the couch, reading murder mysteries. She pulled the plug on Berkeley, it was said, and he did not forgive her for insisting they return to Kansas. “What can you do if your wife won’t support you to get an education?” he complained more than once. In the summer of 1957, Madelyn’s parents, her aunt Ruth, and her younger brother, Jon, stopped in Seattle on their annual summer road trip. Jon, a few years older than Stanley Ann and more like a cousin than an uncle, had left the University of Kansas and was scheduled to report to the Air Force the following February. He found a job selling menswear at a department store in Seattle and spent four months sleeping on the Dunhams’ couch. To him, Madelyn and Stanley’s marriage at that time looked shaky. There was loud arguing, not infrequently about money. Stanley Ann would sometimes bolt from the apartment or shut herself in her room. “I think she maybe just didn’t want to hear it,” Jon Payne told me. Stanley Ann reached the conclusion early on, Kathy Powell Sullivan said, that her parents’ marriage was not a model she intended to follow.
    Mercer Island was politically conservative but not extreme. In the spring of 1955, a year before the Dunhams moved to Mercer Island, John Stenhouse, a member of the school board and the father