No Regrets

Ruth’s psychological manipulation had made Rolf paranoid about what might happen if Elinor ever got angry with him. Ruth had succeeded in convincing Rolf that the only way he could feel secure about staying in America would be for him to marry a native-born U.S. citizen. Ruth was an American citizen, born in the heart of America in Illinois. If Rolf married her, he could not be deported.
    And Ruth, of course, was prepared to provide him with that safety net. She herself would marry him.
    Ruth convinced Rolf to marry her in a quiet ceremony on April 24, 1961. He was sixty-two and she was forty-one. And, of course, that legal marriage meant that he could not marry Elinor. Ruth made sure of that.
    “Why didn’t you ask me about this sooner?” Elinor gasped. “I would never have done that to you.” She assured him that Ruth had been lying to him.
    But it was too late. Even though Rolf kept proclaiming his love for the Norwegian beauty who was twenty-five years younger than he was, he continually gave in to what Ruth wanted. It was almost as if Ruth had hypnotized him.
    Ultimately, Elinor refused to go through with a second sham marriage, and stepped aside, her dreams in ashes. Rolf and Ruth were already married to one another, and there was nothing Elinor could do about that.
    Although Ruth scoffed at the idea for years, there is ample evidence that Elinor still loved Rolf and that he cared deeply for her, continuing to visit her and their sons while she remained in Vancouver. It is likely that their forbidden romance continued for decades, but they could never marry. Their route to the altar had met with one blockade after another, the vast majority of them erected by Nettie Ruth Myers.
    Rolf wanted to live in America, but he told Ruth he would never cut his ties to Norway and to his brothers and sister there. And he told Elinor he would never forget her or his two sons.

Two
    Rolf and Ruth moved back to Washington State. Now that she was married to him, she didn’t want him to have anything to do with Elinor, Rolf Junior, or Erik. She kept tabs on him to be sure he wasn’t giving Elinor money to live on. He was giving them money, though, and most of the time Ruth didn’t know. When she discovered from time to time that he was helping Elinor out, she was angry. Once she found a greeting card he planned to send to Elinor and it had five hundred in it. Ruth was furious.
    How on earth had Rolf Neslund, essentially committed to Elinor Ekenes, become so intimately involved with the woman who was now his wife?
    Theirs was a chance meeting, but Ruth had taken it from there. In the late 1950s, Ruth Myers worked for an insurance agency in Seattle. She had planned to have lunch with a man whose offices were in the Smith Tower, but her lunch date was canceled. Fate then placed her on an elevator in the building just as Rolf Neslund stepped in. She often recalled that she was instantly attracted to him. He had a full head of iron-gray hair and a classic jawline, and carried himself like a much younger man. Before Rolf got off that elevator, Ruth first made sure that she knew his name and that he knew hers and how to get in touch with her. And then she asked him out tolunch, boldly showing her interest in him. Flattered, he accepted.
    “She saw Rolf,” Deputy Ray Clever of the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office said many years later, “and she decided she wanted to have him.”
    Even though Rolf Neslund was a generation older than the forty-one-year-old Ruth, that didn’t daunt her. He was an undeniably handsome man who led an active life. She was even more interested in him when she learned he made good money as a pilot on Puget Sound, and he was not without means. Ruth’s hardscrabble background had taught her to appreciate a man who could provide her with a comfortable life. But at first it wasn’t money or security on Ruth’s mind. She wanted him as a lover.
    Ruth could probably have made a fortune teaching a course on how to enchant a man. Nettie Ruth Myers was not a great beauty, but she had a pleasantly curving figure and she was a lot of fun. She had a full face with a sharp chin, a somewhat bulbous nose, and tightly permed hair and she wore glasses with lenses so wide that her eyes sometimes took on an owlish cast. Even though she was no Lana Turner, Ruth had something more important than sheer physical beauty. She knew how to interest a man and how to please him. She had had to perfect that particular