by John Bloom
Then Allan met Betty. For a man who had had so little experience with women, it was not hard to see why he fell so completely: she worshipped him. To a girl living away from home for the first time, Allan represented all those vistas beyond Norwich that she had always assumed would be hers. Betty had always had an enormous respect for intelligence and found a great security in the assurances of older men. To Allan, Betty was innocence itself: uncomplicated, sympathetic, happy. She wanted kids and so did he. She wanted to be a teacher and he admired her ambition. She had a good solid Kansas family. Both of them had passive personalities, and they shared the naive hope of long, quiet evenings before a fireplace in the country. While dating, they never did anything more ambitious than go to the movies in Wichita; usually they would just spend their evenings at the library. There was nothing torrid about the engagement; they just drifted into it.
A few of Betty’s friends in Norwich were secretly surprised when she brought Allan home for the first time. Betty’s brothers didn’t say much at the time, but they didn’t think Allan was much of a physical specimen. One of Betty’s girlfriends agreed. Allan was a small, plain man with horn-rim glasses and puffy cheeks and, even at the age of twenty-one, the signs of a receding hairline. He was also shy, which often made him come across as stern or aloof or even snobbish, and he had trouble carrying on a conversation with Betty’s parents. To Bob Pomeroy, that was tantamount to being a sissy. At one point Bob remarked to Bertha that, for a guy who grew up in Larned, Allan Gore didn’t seem like a farm boy. But he was Betty’s choice, the same Betty who, Bob rightly assumed, could have had her pick of most of the boys at Southwestern. So they tried to make him feel at home. On one occasion Allan even offered to help out with the work at the Standard station, because he said he felt guilty about accepting the Pomeroys’ hospitality and not doing anything in return. So one Saturday Bob put Allan to work stacking a new shipment of tires, a job that had Allan totally exhausted by the end of the day. Bob and the boys would tell that story and chuckle about it when Betty wasn’t around. Allan never asked to help out again.
The last entry in Betty’s six-year diary was dated May 16, 1969: “Received Allan Gore’s ring. Allan graduated May 25th from S.C. with a major in business & math.” The only reason they didn’t plan a wedding right away is that Allan, like most young men his age, was busy trying to avoid the military draft. Fortunately, he had banged up his knee when he was a freshman, so that summer he flunked his draft physical in Kansas City. He celebrated by asking Betty to join him there, and they spent the next day going from store to store, looking for wedding rings.
In the meantime, Allan had enrolled in graduate school at Kansas State University in Manhattan, and so Betty made plans to transfer there in the spring. Whatever else she did, she was determined not to let anything come between her and her teaching degree. For the next two years, they would have to live on the meager stipend that Allan received for being a graduate teaching assistant, and whatever else they could pick up doing odd jobs. They were young enough not to care.
The wedding was on January 25, 1970, in Norwich Methodist Church among all the friends and acquaintances of Betty’s youth. It was a proper wedding in every respect; even though Allan and Betty had been intimate twice, once in a car and once at the Pomeroy house while her parents were away, they didn’t consider the marriage consummated until the honeymoon. All they could afford was two days in a motel room in Hutchinson, fifty miles north on the highway, and then they continued on upstate and settled into a one-bedroom basement apartment near the K-State campus. Betty got a job working in a downtown drug store, and for the next two years they managed on about $300 a month. What with Allan’s teaching and research, and Betty’s classes and job, they saw each other infrequently but made the most of weekends. Meanwhile, Allan exhausted his interest in statistics, after deciding the field was too dry and impersonal, and became increasingly preoccupied with computer analysis. By his second year as a graduate student, he had decided to make a career of it, and soon he was ready to start putting out feelers for jobs.
Betty didn’t like contingencies of any kind. She enjoyed the security of knowing where Allan was at all times, of having meals at exactly the same time every day, of knowing not only where she would be tomorrow but where they, as a couple, would be next year. She took great comfort in the regularity of a weekly paycheck and the certitude of a deadline. When she was assigned a paper in her classes, she would characteristically have it completed weeks before it was due. When she and Allan planned a vacation, she would insist that they have all the details decided months in advance. While living in Norwich this had been second nature to her—the Pomeroys’ schedule had been the same for years, and the family generally did everything together—but as she and Allan began their dual careers, her punctiliousness began to cause friction.
In February 1971, Allan was invited for an interview at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where job openings would soon be available for analysts who could design programs to test the safety of the nation’s ballistic missile system. In March he and Betty visited White Sands together so she could check into transferring to New Mexico State University in the event they moved there. After the interview, Allan was told that the job was his, but that the final offer would have to await the usual security checks and approvals from Washington. Allan and Betty returned to Manhattan to finish the spring semester and wait on further instructions from White Sands, but there were the usual red-tape delays common in the military. By May there was still no final offer, and Betty started to grow very upset. She talked about it all the time, nagged Allan to call White Sands once a week, and was still unsatisfied when he reported back their assurances that he indeed had the job but there was simply a foulup in the paperwork. She began to suspect that Allan didn’t really have a job at all and that soon they would have no money. At one point Betty became so worried about the delay that she and Allan had words. Increasingly the lack of an offer became a source of tension that hung over the marriage despite any soothing reassurances Allan could come up with.
In June two things happened: Allan finished his master’s degree, and Betty became seriously ill with an ailment known as spastic stomach, which made it impossible for her to digest all her food. When her stomach started becoming distended, Allan took her to a doctor in Larned, who diagnosed appendicitis and wanted to operate. But Betty refused until she got a second opinion from her family doctor in Harper; he said it was the beginning of an ulcer and put her in the hospital. She remained there a week but cried whenever Allan would visit, insisting that he get her out. Shortly thereafter Allan got the final job offer, and Betty’s illness cleared up.
There was nothing in the first twenty years of Betty’s life to indicate any serious medical problems, at least none of the magnitude that began to afflict her in the spring of 1971. She was prone to colds, menstrual cramps, and minor viruses, but she had no history of ulcers or psychosomatic illnesses beyond one extended period of stomach sickness. It had occurred about the time she broke up with Jimmy Sheetz and when she was starting to make plans to leave home.
Betty and Allan moved to Las Cruces that fall and rented an apartment near the New Mexico State campus. For a while their life reverted to the quiet routine of Manhattan. Allan’s assignment was to develop computer software programs that would be used to monitor the private contractor building the Safeguard missile system. Most of the time—when he wasn’t simply reading memoranda or passing along routine progress reports—he felt challenged by the work, and Betty enjoyed the life of the new campus. For the first time they had some spending money—Allan got a princely $10,400 per year—which they used to sample the Las Cruces restaurants. They had no close friends, but they occasionally attended campus activities with Betty’s classmates.
Then, after a few months, Allan had to leave Las Cruces on a six-week business trip, and Betty’s world started to come apart again. When he would call, she would whine and sometimes cry, begging
him to come home as soon as possible. She intimated that such long separations weren’t proper in a marriage. And then she did something that, in retrospect, was one of the most uncharacteristic acts of her life: while Allan was still out of town, she went home one night with a younger student. Two days after Allan returned, she confessed her transgression, saying she had been confused and scared and hadn’t really meant it, and begged for forgiveness. At the time Allan was hurt, but he got over it quickly. In later years he would sometimes wonder whether the incident hadn’t been not so much an act of desperation as a calculated attempt to control his behavior. In any event, it never happened again.
Shortly thereafter they moved into their first home, a $9,000 trailer house, and Betty concentrated all her energies on doing her student teaching and completing her degree. When she did, in the spring of 1973, the entire Pomeroy family came down from Kansas for the commencement ceremonies. Betty was the first Pomeroy ever to receive a college diploma, and with high honors at that. To Bob and Bertha, she also seemed happier than they had seen her in some time. She loved the climate and working with the poor Mexican-American kids in her student classroom, and she had even been nominated for a book called Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities. Bob was proud enough to buy a copy. The parents were still perplexed by Allan, since he seemed to shrink into the shadows whenever they were around, but they couldn’t help but like a boy who was making Betty so happy.
The novelty of military work soon wore off, though, and Allan grew fearful that he would simply continue indefinitely on the same project, without any new intellectual challenges. So one day he found a list of the major American electronics corporations, typed up his resume, and sent it around the country. Most of the companies never responded, but one that did was Collins Radio (later to be merged with Rockwell International), which was headquartered in Richardson, Texas, a bedroom suburb of Dallas. Two months later he stopped there while on a business trip, and Collins offered him a job on the spot. The salary was identical to what he was making, around $14,000, but Allan figured the future opportunities would be a lot greater. As the seventies began, Richardson was just emerging as a major world electronics center, alongside the more established centers of suburban Boston and Palo Alto. Allan and Betty made a house-hunting trip and found a three-bedroom tract home in the booming suburb of Plano, a town just north of Richardson where some of the streets were so new that front yards were solid mud and the only trees were little leafless saplings held erect with guy-wires.
Once settled, Betty couldn’t wait to get a teaching job. She applied immediately to all the nearby school districts (except Dallas, which she considered too large and impersonal), but since the 1973–74 school year was less than two months away, the best she could get was a substitute teaching job at one of Plano’s elementary schools. She contented herself with that, and with selling Avon products door-to-door; even though the sales work made her nervous, she wanted to be out of the house during the day. Allan, it turned out, wasn’t too thrilled with his new job, either, especially after he found out he wouldn’t be doing any computer programming at all. He was assigned to a division that handled telephone message-switching systems, and he was just one step up from a salesman, writing up evaluations of “customer requirements.” He was disgusted, and felt a little betrayed, but he bit the bullet and hoped for a reassignment.
Two months after the move to Plano, Betty started seeing a doctor. Her complaints were varied: earache, sore throat, multiple allergies (which seemed to be proliferating as she grew older), occasional upset stomach, fevers. By November 1973, she was receiving regular prescriptions for various decongestants, antibiotics, mild tranquilizers, and other drugs, and she soon had an additional problem: she was pregnant. At first it was cause for celebration—she and Allan had always wanted children, and now that they were settled, the time seemed right. But Betty quickly developed an unusually strong case of morning sickness. The first month of pregnancy brought fainting spells, and soon she was on the verge of a full-blown depression. She switched to a female gynecologist, who made her feel more comfortable than her male physician, and she was given more drugs for the depression.
Outwardly Betty showed the same cheerful countenance and confided her bouts of depression to no one but Allan. She had always been secretive about her problems, even back to her earliest childhood. Allan assumed that her condition would ameliorate as soon as the difficult early months of pregnancy passed and when Betty was able to get her long-desired teaching job. In the meantime they shopped for a church, not so much because of any void in their lives but because they felt they should reestablish some ties for the sake of the children. The one they settled on was Briarwood Methodist, and for a while it helped a great deal.
The main attraction at Briarwood was a minister named Weldon Haynes, an affable, easy-going sort popular with the younger couples for his laissez-faire attitude toward church management. His programs and sermons were contemporary and entertaining, and he pretty much let the members themselves determine the events beyond the sanctuary. Allan and Betty both liked him immediately, and they soon began making friends for the first time since they were married. Among them were Richard Garlington, an engineer at Texas Instruments, and his wife JoAnn. JoAnn was a brassy, self-confident woman, and Richard seemed kind and outgoing. They befriended Allan right away, but at first Betty kept her distance. Then the Gores and the Garlingtons spent a weekend together at a church campout on Lake Texoma, and Betty came out of her shell. By this time, Allan and Betty had almost reversed their roles of five years before: now he was the social animal, while Betty seemed more like the loner.
Nothing improved at home, though. Betty was called as a substitute teacher very infrequently, and even then she considered the job demeaning: she did little more than babysit until the regular teacher returned. For a while she gave special tutoring to the daughter of Catherine Cooper, a teacher at Davis Elementary, but it was no replacement for a classroom of her own. Late that spring Betty returned to her physician complaining of simple depression, much of it caused by her pregnancy and the physical fact she didn’t want to face: she was becoming enormous. For Betty, who had always been considered attractive, the disfigurement of bearing a child was just one more turn of bad luck. She decided at one point to use natural childbirth methods, but when the time came that summer, she was so nervous and overwrought that she couldn’t relax, and delivery was unbearably painful and troublesome. She finally asked the doctor for an anesthetic.
It was a girl. They named her Alisa, and for a while she restored Betty’s spirits entirely. Then Catherine Cooper helped Betty get accepted as a second-grade teacher at Davis Elementary, and she started the 1974–75 school year with new optimism. But it faded fast. Betty was placed in a school that used open classrooms and team-teaching methods, systems she had never learned, and she could never adjust. She had been given a class of second graders, and she found them extremely difficult. When they were noisy, or didn’t pay attention, she felt helpless and disgusted. When they didn’t finish their lessons by the time for recess, she would hold her class over while all the other students went outdoors. When a student misbehaved in the lunch line, most teachers would simply correct him with a word or two and then look the other way, but Betty would pull him out of line and send a note home to his mother. Some of her fellow teachers considered Betty too stern, but she was simply practicing the same kind of perfectionism that prevailed at home: she couldn’t abide her lesson plans being disrupted or her rules being flouted. When it caused friction between her and the children, or her and the parents, she became all the more frustrated and blamed her problems on the open-classroom system, for which she had whole-hearted contempt.
At the same time Allan was unwittingly adding to Betty’s burden, first by starting to travel again (his job sometimes called for three- or four-day business trips), and by his increasing involvement in the church. Like most eager newcomers, Allan had been quickly appointed to com
mittees and elected to offices, until eventually he was the chairman of the Council on Ministries, highest lay office in the church. This meant that he was frequently at the church for evening meetings, leaving Betty home with Alisa. What with teaching, trying to care for the baby, and worrying once again about being left alone while Allan traveled to faraway cities or got involved in church politics, Betty became even more bitter. In the fall of 1974 she fell into the deepest depression yet. Her gynecologist diagnosed it as postpartum depression, told Betty to stop taking birth-control pills, and prescribed estrogen and Valium. Her family doctor diagnosed it as “heavy child syndrome,” an ailment common to women who have had their first child, and gave her drugs to help relieve her complaints of soreness.
For the next year, Betty would return to the doctor repeatedly, sometimes two or three times a month, with various complaints, including “nervous stomach,” sinus troubles, sore throat, swollen glands, tiredness, fear of pregnancy (unfounded), neck soreness, chest soreness, a wart (surgically removed), back spasms (for which she started taking tranquilizers), vaginal itching, laryngitis, breast soreness, fever, earache, sinus problems, and “tingling” in her left arm. Her doctor’s usual prescription was drugs and understanding. As time went on, his notes would occasionally include the phrase “anxiety-induced” before the name of the particular ailment she complained of, and he also had the growing sense that sometimes she visited his office as much to talk to him about her ailments and get reassurances as to receive any medication. As if that weren’t enough, in the summer of 1975 Betty was told that she had been turned down for permanent employment by the Plano school district. Even more insulting was that the woman hired for the job that Betty wanted was fresh out of college, with less teaching experience. Betty’s troubled year of team teaching had ended, finally, in the first formal rejection of her life.