Don’t Look Behind You

always felt guilty if she had died at my house.”
    Walter and Joann Morrison buried their baby girl in a private ceremony at the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and they stopped at Pat and Louie’s house that evening. Joann seemed to take the loss with a kind of tragic acceptance, and she and Pat grew even closer than they had been before. They spent almost every day together while their husbands were at work, and Pat did her best to comfort her best friend.
    Walter and Joann were complete opposites; he was very laid-back and content to spend all their evenings at home, while Joann longed to go out. She may have been running away from the grief of losing her baby or she may have just been terminally bored with her marriage. One day she admitted to Pat that she had had an affair with a physician in the town where they lived.
    Pat was shocked. This warred with everything Joann had been taught by her parents and by most of her teachers at the Adventist Academy. Not all of her instructors had adhered to the religion’s tenets, however. Joann had also confessed to Pat that she had lost her virginity to one of her professors. No one else knew, and it had been a shock when the man seduced her.
    As lovely as she was, Joann lived a conflicted life. She wanted to be a good mother and have new experiences and a relationship with a man who showed his affection for her. And she wanted to be a “good” woman. She had none of these things after Holly Lou died so suddenly.
    The pressure of stifling her feelings backfired on Joann. One night she got up after midnight and went to her bathroom.
    “She told me that when she looked into the mirror, her reflection was the face of the devil,” Pat recalls. “She got all hysterical and that was the beginning of what we called a nervous breakdown then. Walter took her to a private mental facility in Seattle where they gave her shock treatments.
    “When they brought her back to her room, she was still under the effects of sodium pentothal. That was called ‘truth serum’ in the fifties. Walter sat there and asked her questions. She answered all of them, and some were about whether she had ever been with another man. She confessed her affair with the doctor. When her husband found out about her unfaithfulness, their marriage was over. Right then and there.”
    Her psychiatrist told Joann that her breakdown had been caused by unresolved guilt. He felt that she wanted to live a different kind of life from what she had been taught was right, and she was fighting within herself. When she accepted that she deserved to be happy, her mental problems lessened.
    When Joann was well and left the clinic, she moved into Pat and Louie’s home and lived with them until her divorce from Walter was complete. She then found a job with the telephone company in Auburn and moved into an apartment with her son, Bobby.
    She continued to date prominent men in the south King County area, including corporate heads and attorneys, but none of her relationships worked out. Some of the men belatedly admitted they were married, and the single men had no intention of settling down.
    In time, Pat also found a job with the telephone company.
    “Joann and I had so much fun,” Pat recalls. “Many nights we went dancing, and Joann was always the belle of the ball.”
    In 1957, Pat became pregnant for the third time. “That stopped the partying,” she remembers. “I quit my job and stayed home with my three children. Joann and I still saw each other every day. We were great friends, and I thought we always would be.”
    The two young women did remain close even though Joann got married, too; they got together whenever they could and continued to share each other’s joys and sadnesses.
    They could not know, as none of us can, what lay ahead in the future.

Chapter Three
BOB
    According to Robert Milton Hansen, his early life was far more difficult than his first wife’s. He was born on October 13, 1924, near Eugene, Oregon, to a family who lived on a dairy farm. Lester and Helen Hansen had to work hard to support their two sons—Kenneth and Robert—and their four daughters. Bob’s first faded scrapbook has pictures of him and Kenneth from the time they were two and three years old, a photo of his family posing in front of a Danish Old People’s Home in Oregon, others of their dog, the two boys on new tricycles, and as teenagers. From the pictures, Kenneth and Robert seemed to have had a happy life, but no one can see