“Shannon,” Father said, squeezing her hand tightly, “this is my good friend, Sue.” Suzanne opened the door and they went in. Shannon could see Suzanne was trying to smile, but the facial expression seemed somehow forced. Well, maybe she doesn’t really want to sell, thought Shannon. Vernie didn’t seem to notice as he bubbled around. He was so sociable. He was already on good terms with the lady of the house, Shannon thought. She resigned herself and thought it wouldn’t be so bad moving to this place.
Shannon started to move through the kitchen, thinking they would go on a tour of their new house, but Suzanne showed them to the kitchen table, where there were some vanilla-sandwich store-bought cookies thrown on a plate. Her mother would be humiliated to serve such dross to guests. Several mismatched glasses had been filled with Tang, noticeable from its distinctive fake-orange color and acidic smell. On the counter behind, in no discernible order, were salt and pepper shakers, a jar of steak sauce, garlic, loose keys, two lightbulbs, a coffee can, a Lipton Tea box, and several candy bars.
Shannon sat down. Vernie let go of her hand and walked to where he was almost on top of Suzanne, or so it seemed. Then he kissed her. Not on the cheek like Europeans did in the movies, but full on the lips, and for more than a polite second. It was one of those passionate kisses that made other people very uncomfortable, especially a daughter who thought she was on a real estate excursion. Shannon froze as if strong electrical currents suddenly went through her body and she was powerless to move.
Somehow their coats got thrown over an empty chair. Maybe a son or two of Suzanne’s appeared, but Shannon didn’t remember anything. It took the whole weekend for the reality to coalesce in her brain. Her father had a girlfriend? Vernie didn’t seem to notice how distraught Shannon was. Many years later, as Shannon and I discussed this, we realized he was in the flames of passion and was too completely overwhelmed by volcanic hormones to pay attention to her needs. After he drove her back to Beloit on Sunday, and gave her another big bear hug, Shannon cut off contact with him. He showed up at a YMCA party in Beloit where he knew she’d be, and she did talk to him for a while in his car. But that was the last time she ever saw him.
“When I was young like that, I thought I knew what was right and wrong,” she told me later. “But as you get older, you realize life is more complicated, and I regret I did not see my father those last years of his life.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Another Death and More Planning
If she had been born fifty years later, Suzanne could have been a CEO. She knew how to plan for the future and how to maximize resources. Each of her husbands had more status and financial potential than the previous one. The tapestry of her life seemed to be woven around ambition.
She started out with L. Harry Chappington, who was a cabinetmaker, and doubtless someone who could get her out of Mount Hope, Wisconsin, population 218. When I drove to Mount Hope in 2015 and saw a clump of houses sticking out in the middle of mile after mile of corn and soybean crops, I understood why a smart and striving little girl would want more, would want to be where she would find action, challenges, and other smart people. Each of the four times I talked to her, Suzanne told me her story about how she got to Boscobel High School. She said she’d had longings most of her life, and when she was twelve, she finally convinced her parents, James and Annabelle Brandon, to send her to a better high school. They found a family she could board with and she started high school thirty minutes away in the thriving metropolis (pop. 2,400) of Boscobel, Wisconsin, best known as the home of the Gideon Bible movement.
It wasn’t until much later that I started to doubt this account. Though I discovered fairly quickly that what she told me might not be the truth, somehow I didn’t realize she might be covering up something in her youth besides an illegitimate child. I grew up in Wisconsin, about twenty years after she did, and in a rural area. Even though I was acutely unhappy at home and bored beyond toleration in my country elementary school, which had three grades in one room and one teacher, it never occurred to me to get my parents to board me so I could go to another school. And I never knew of anyone, anywhere in Wisconsin, besides Suzanne, who lived with another family, merely to attend another high school. Not back then, anyway. Generally, when a child was sent away like that, it was because of some behavioral problems. But this is all speculation on my part. However, I did find out later that Suzanne’s mother told the police how selfish her daughter was, creating chaos everywhere, and how’d she do things such as break all the dishes in the house when she got upset. It’s not such a stretch to imagine such a girl causing problems in her small grade school, which perhaps was the real impetus to get her out of Mount Hope.
After high school graduation, Elmira insisted on going to college, which was highly unusual in working-class families in 1946. Even finishing high school, which neither of my parents did, was a big deal. But Suzanne always got her way. In order to raise extra money for her, her father took on extra roofing work. After one semester she married Chappington and moved with him to Marinette, Wisconsin. Louisa was born eighteen months later, when Elmira was nineteen. Even though Marinette is three times the size of Boscobel, it didn’t take long for Suzanne to feel like a caged chicken and realize Harry was not going to take her far. Within two years they were divorced. Before you could snap and shuck a bowl of green peas, Elmira was back in Madison, across and down the street from the family of Jocelyn Rhoades, the little black girl who played such an important role in Suzanne’s life.
* * *
One year later she was engaged to John Briggs, doctoral student at UW–Madison, in what was then called the Commerce School. Someone on the verge of receiving his Ph.D. was definitely more suitable to her aspirations than a carpenter. After John’s doctorate was completed, he taught at UW for a while and then worked as an executive at an insurance company in New York City. Around this time she was “sent away” to John’s family in Tennessee (which included his brother Joseph, who had very important information for me when I interviewed him during my search), because Suzanne said baby David made John nervous. None of it makes sense. Why wouldn’t she insist on going to be with her own family? I knew she was eminently capable of asserting and manipulating her wishes to family members. When I tried to get more information from Suzanne, I could never get a straight answer from Louisa or Suzanne about when they left New York and why, but John Briggs definitely stayed behind. Perhaps Suzanne couldn’t make enough of a splash in the huge city of New York. Or she got so bored with “the Dumbbell” (her oft-used term for him), she could barely stand to be in the same room with him. Or maybe she just missed Wisconsin and what was familiar.
* * *
Not long after she was back in Madison, Suzanne found husband number three, Mr. Gast. It is commonly accepted among his family that he was never much of a breadwinner, but he had the attractive quality of having an extremely rich father, Abraham. Knowing Suzanne, she was looking ahead to her husband’s inheritance. Abe was already old, and he took a shine to Suzanne, at least by Suzanne’s accounts. She did have a way with men. She knew how to reel them in, and Abe was a big one.
During that first meeting I had with Suzanne and her family in Tennessee, I noticed a thumbtacked photocopied picture of an elderly man on her wall. His hair was slicked back and he had the beginning of a smile. Was that Ronald, husband number five? It didn’t look like the same man as the one in the framed photo with Suzanne on her table. That other man seemed more gentle, more open. Suzanne said it was Ronald, “the keeper,” and I could see he had a long, narrow visage with gray curls that lined his face, though I imagine the hairline had receded, and he had on intellectual-looking round brown glasses. Naturally, there were no photos of Vernie anywhere to be seen. I asked about the wall picture and she said it was Abraham Gast, her former father-in-law. When she talked about Abraham, she smiled more than during any other part of the conversation. Abraham really loved Danny, she told me. Suzanne was alone with Abraham November 17,
1962, the night he died.
* * *
After Abe died and she divorced number three, she moved with her three children—around January 1964—to the most expensive home in Oregon, Wisconsin, a place that easily made her a center of attention, a 150-year-old Queen Anne mansion with gables and a wraparound porch. Initially, it was part of a land contract. Vernie couldn’t have helped, because he was still embroiled in his own divorce and property settlement, which took another eighteen months.
The torrid affair with Suzanne was way before no-fault divorce. Everyone in the family told Jenylle not to give him a divorce, that Vernie would eventually get tired of “that tramp” and come back to her. But I think Jenylle was under a burdensome pain that went on for several years, watching the only man she’d ever loved fall hopelessly under the spell of a woman who’d already had three divorces, and one child by each of her husbands, by age thirty-five. Jenylle had married her high school sweetheart at age nineteen (Vernie was twenty) and likely never so much as smiled flirtatiously at another man.
Vernie must have felt under a great deal of financial pressure to give Jenylle a decent settlement. In the divorce decree he gave Jenylle his half of their Beloit house, free and clear. That tells you something about his generosity, his idea of duty, or sense of guilt, or all three. I don’t know whose idea it was, but Suzanne loaned him some money during the months around the divorce. Maybe in her mind it was a payoff to get rid of Vernie’s wife, but I think to Vernie it was the lifeline he needed to compensate the woman he had loved for so many years and the mother of his beloved daughter. In a sadistic twist, Suzanne used the documentation on those loans as collateral to post bail after she was charged with first-degree murder. As I read about her bail in court documents, I wondered who would keep such careful files for six years on money exchanges between lovers who expected to be married soon? As she sat in jail and looked through the steel bars, how was she able to find that paperwork in such a short time so as to be out on bail within a couple of weeks? Was this all part of some plan?
I also wondered how Suzanne could have possibly afforded that house and given money to Vernie. She was working as a secretary, or a secretary supervisor, so she couldn’t have been earning enough to buy the grandest house in town, and she couldn’t have gotten much in a settlement from Briggs, because he had just started out in his career. Her birth family didn’t have any money, so what happened? I can’t confirm the scenario that makes sense to me in the face of all the data, but I’m going to describe it, anyway.
Her father-in-law Abraham Gast was under the influence of Suzanne, and I think there is a high possibility that he had an affair with her, but even if not, she had him wrapped as tightly as a milking machine grabs a cow’s udders. But then along came Vernie, who was some big shot on his way to the attorney general’s office, and he was a long way up from number three, who could barely hold down a job. Vernie was hot for Suzanne in a way she knew how to control, and she couldn’t let this opportunity pass by, especially because Vernie was willing to divorce Jenylle—a life eruption that not all of her boyfriends would consider.
Just get rid of number three and move on, she could have pondered, because it sounded like a reasonable course of action. But Mensa-level, strategic-thinker Suzanne might have considered Abe’s $90,000 estate, which is $744,000 in 2018 dollars. And she wanted that status-achieving house in Oregon, which was not cheap. What to do? Well, Abe was old and rather infirm, so maybe he’d be kind and die before she got divorced. Then she’d have enough money to live in her dream mansion. But really, how long could she wait for Abe to expire? Did she ask her sexual puppet, Vernie, for help? I’ll never know, but I am certain he wouldn’t have obliged, because there is no evidence I could find of him even so much as having a traffic ticket. And even as sexually obsessed as he was, I never saw any evidence of him going over a legal line for her. All of the kids in the Stordock family were almost overly honest. My mother might have lacked self-reflection regarding her alcoholism, but she was what they call “cash-register honest.” I remember one time in a phone booth she found a wallet with a lot of money in it, tracked down the owner, and delivered it to him personally. Vernie was the same.
Perhaps Suzanne got impatient. She was alone with Abe that night in the hospital. As a convert, she knew that Abraham’s family were observant Jews and would not allow an autopsy. So what if somebody would put a pillow over his face? Or maybe Abe just happened to die very conveniently for Suzanne’s timetable.
Abe passed on November 17, 1962, and by April, Suzanne received $124,000 (in 2018 dollars) from Abe’s estate. She waited a few months, maybe for decorum, to divorce number three and legally bought the Oregon house in March 1964.
All that was left was to marry Vernie and she’d have everything. But that’s where my research got stuck. I’d been trying for more than two years to find any documentation for that union, and have tried everything, including subscribing to public record archives, searching on various state and national vital records websites, turning in written requests to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Nevada, and other states, and I can find no record of Suzanne and Vernie ever marrying. No one knew when they got married, not Shannon, not David, not Louisa, whose answer to me was “I never knew when she married any of her husbands. She’d just show up one day and say, ‘Oh, by the way, this is your new father.’”
I questioned whether I was ever going to find the answer. I finally got up the courage to ask Suzanne, “So when did you and Vernie get married?” She looked at me with that “gee whiz” stare as she played with her long plait of hair and said she couldn’t remember. I persisted and asked if she remembered anything else around the time she got married, or even an approximation of a general time frame. Nope.
How can it be that Suzanne easily recalled tiny details about my brother’s friend Kenny, who visited Vernie and Suzanne a few times back in the ’60s, or incidents involving my brother Raymond, who died before she even met him, but she couldn’t remember when she and Vernie got married?
CHAPTER NINE
Jenylle and Change
I’ve known Shannon and Jenylle my entire life and spent a great deal of time in their Beloit house before the divorce. And even after the divorce I’d see Jenylle on one of my frequent trips to Beloit to visit Grandma. From my personal experience and from all the things family members have told me, this is how I imagine Vernie broke the news of his affair to his wife of eighteen years.
It was a hot August day when Vernie asked for a divorce, the kind of day when you needed to press your large white puff on the talcum powder before patting it all over your body, which was sweating more than a lady was allowed to perspire.
Jenylle was dressed in a freshly ironed gray housedress with buttons neatly lined up from top to bottom, and she was wearing the silver locket that Vernie had given her on their tenth anniversary. She looked away from frying the chicken in the fresh Crisco, wondering if the crackling sounds had twisted the words—words that could not actually be coming from her husband, sitting there in his suit with the gun holster just under his right armpit, this man who might have looked at a woman now and then, but nothing more than any decent man would engage in.
“Jenylle, I’m in love with someone else,” I imagine he’d said, using words that wouldn’t quite connect in her mind. All she could think was, He knows how much concentration I need to make a meal in this humid Wisconsin sweltfest.
She was spearing the chicken breast and then the thigh, which was Vernie’s favorite part, from the sizzling skillet, when he touched her arm ever so lightly, with his thumb and middle finger, in a way that signaled annoyance, something he’d done for years and she’d learned to ignore. But then he raised his voice: “Jenylle!”
That’s when she dropped the thigh right on the floor she had waxed not two hours before. She abruptly threw the chicken into the tall garbage can, in case it was contaminated with chemicals.
“Jenylle, I’m moving to Madison.”
>
What is he talking about?
“Vernie, we can all move there. I know the commute is hard on you.”
“I wanna be with Sue.”
She pulled the aluminum skillet off the stove, the new Tappan that Vernie had given her for her birthday last year, and she remembered what a thoughtful husband he was. For Christmas he’d gotten her the Philco clothes dryer, so she wouldn’t have to stand outside in the subzero Januaries, pulling frozen blue jeans off the clothesline.
“Vernie, can you just let me be until I get the dinner on the table?” she said, worried the chicken would get cold. She pulled the macaroni salad with celery out of the fridge and laid the cotton place mats on the kitchen table.
“Sue and I are going to get married.”
Weddings—ours was the most beautiful, she thought. Eighteen years ago, she in her white gown, with bouffant tulle, and Vernie all decked out in that striking dark blue U.S. Navy uniform, with the bright white belt. She remembered how in love they were, and how she couldn’t stop staring at her movie-star-handsome husband. A year later their sweet Shannon was born, that little girl who brought a smile to Vernie unlike any others she’d ever seen.
“Jenylle, I want a divorce.”
She plumped down on the kitchen chair and was grateful for the extra padding, even though the plastic would stick to your legs in the heat if you weren’t careful to make sure your dress covered it all. Vernie had insisted on the new set two years ago, so he wouldn’t have to worry about scratching the wooden surface of their previous chairs, because sometimes he still wore his handgun.
He never should have left the police department, but he was never specific on why he wanted to take that job in Madison with the attorney general’s office. She knew it was a lot more money, but all that driving, and those crazy hours, when sometimes they had him stay overnight.
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