Cruel Doubt
* * *
There had been Bateses in Welcome as long as there had been a town, most of them living along Hoover Road, which you got to by turning off Center Church Road (not that there were any signs to point the way).
Bonnie’s grandfather Baxter Bates had been a carpenter. The family well remembered the story of how he bought his first car. It was, of course, a Model T Ford. A man drove it into the front yard and Baxter Bates stepped right up and paid cash.
The woman Baxter married, Zealla Sowers, had been born in a log cabin right there on Hoover Road. The family was still living in the cabin when Zealla gave birth to her second child, George, who would become Bonnie’s father.
Baxter not only believed, but would state with frequency, “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” He’d go off to do his carpentry in the morning and leave his five children to tend the fields. Zealla died when George was eleven years old, but that only made the Bates children work harder because it meant one less person to keep the home.
The children would sing as they tended the crops of tobacco, sweet potatoes, corn, and even cotton. “When we worked,” one of Bonnie’s aunts would later say, “the hills echoed with the sound of music.”
They might have sung, but they didn’t talk. At least not about anything that mattered. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been a Bates family trait not to display emotion. This was something that Baxter Bates taught his children, maybe so he wouldn’t have to hear a lot of wailing and keening as their mother slowly sickened and died of stomach cancer.
“You kept your emotions inside,” Bonnie’s aunt said. “There was no time to talk about how you felt about something, or to cry. There was just too much work to get done.”
As a grown man, George Bates, Sr., Bonnie’s father, would pass this trait on to his five children. “It is better to be still and be thought a fool,” he would tell them, “than to speak and remove all doubt.”
In 1941, George had married a tiny eighteen-year-old girl named Annie Erris Moose, from Stony Point, North Carolina. She wasn’t even five feet tall, but she was pretty and smart and was made of strong stuff. He had met her at a Methodist church camp. She fell in love with his blue eyes, if not his way with words.
George Bates was a mason. With his own hands, he built the town’s Methodist church—the Center United Methodist Church—brick by brick. In Welcome, such an accomplishment brought a man lifelong renown. He sang in the church choir, and Bonnie’s mother, who came to be called Polly Bates, was the church organist for many years.
They were good people, the Bateses; solid, reliable, respected, and liked. Bonnie was the second oldest of five children, with one older sister, Sylvia, two younger sisters, Kitty and Ramona, and a younger brother, George Jr.
Welcome was too small to have its own high school, so Bonnie attended one in nearby Lexington, graduating in 1962. The adjective most widely used to describe her by classmates who wrote inscriptions in her yearbook was nice. In later years, she came to realize that she must not have made much of an impression.
After high school, she started nurse’s training in Winston-Salem. In her first month on the hospital floor she came upon a girl she’d just graduated with, now dying of leukemia. Then there was the dying old man with the high fever whom she had to pack in ice. And the two infants, joined at the tops of their heads. Depressed by it all, she quit in less than six months.
Her next job was as a salesclerk at the Raylass Department Store in Lexington. Here, her mother noticed, she started to bloom. Bonnie was never going to be an extrovert, but at least she developed enough self-assurance to carry on a conversation with a stranger.
Briefly, with a girlfriend who had relatives in the town, she moved to Decatur, Illinois, where she worked as a ward clerk in a hospital. For a member of the Bates family, this was daring: none of the children had ever before lived outside the county, much less the state. Her parents kept urging her to come back. After six months, she did.
She’d saved $500 in Decatur and used it to buy her first car, a Mercury Monterey, the first car that was not a Ford and the first with an automatic transmission ever owned by a member of her family. In her own quiet way, Bonnie was expanding her horizons.
Her big leap, however, was to enroll in an IBM keypunch course at the Lexington Business College. This led to a job with the Integon insurance company in Winston-Salem. Suddenly, Bonnie Lou Bates was a commuter, driving back and forth to a big-city office job every day.
She was an exceptional worker. Reliable, intelligent, and always looking to learn more. Strange, she’d never known she had ambition, but there it was. She stayed at Integon for fifteen years, moving into data processing when the field of data processing came into being. By the time she left, married by then to Lieth Von Stein, she was supervisor of Property and Casualty Systems, the only person in the office at that level of management who didn’t have a college degree.
But back in late fall of 1965, another event of great importance occurred. Driving down Winston-Salem’s Main Street, Bonnie looked into a car showroom window and spotted a brand-new teal green ‘66 Chevy Chevelle SS 396 with four on the floor and a 360-horsepower engine. Much to her surprise, it was love at first sight.
She knew it wasn’t appropriate. She knew it was a boy’s car, not a girl’s car, but she also knew she had to have it, and right away. Her father was horrified, her mother embarrassed. But Bonnie Lou Bates, twenty-one years old now and gainfully employed, insisted on something for the first time in her life.
The dealer didn’t want to sell it to her. He said she was too much of a lady for that car. In fact, the dealer said, he didn’t want to sell it to anyone. It was a great attention-getter and he wanted to keep it on the showroom floor.
But Bonnie would not be denied. She worked out a deal with her father whereby he traded his ‘56 Ford, which, like every other object he’d ever owned, he’d kept in impeccable condition, and she traded him her Mercury Monterey, and he cosigned the car loan and Bonnie zoomed off in her brand-new Chevelle. It was the hottest car that Welcome had seen in years. The car made heads turn when it passed. And then . . . when they saw who was driving it! Was that really . . .? Could it be . . .? Bonnie Lou Bates?
The next summer, she and Ramona were cruising along the main street of Lexington in her Chevelle, trying to be noticed. Being noticed in Lexington—population 15,000—was considerably more gratifying than being noticed in Welcome—where everybody already knew you anyway.
The cruising section was generally considered to be that six-block area bordered on each end by a drive-in restaurant. After making several passes up and down this boulevard, you’d pull into the parking lot of one restaurant or the other (in Lexington, in 1966, it was either the Old Hickory or the Bar B Que Center) and park next to the neatest-looking car you could spot and then place your order by speaking into a little microphone attached to a pole that stuck up from the ground.
While waiting for your order to be delivered by the high school girl who was working as a waitress, you’d strike up a conversation with whoever was sitting in the neat-looking car you’d parked next to.
Since Bonnie’s teal green Chevelle SS 396 with the 360-horsepower engine was by far the neatest-looking car in the lot of either the Old Hickory or the Bar B Que Center, she found that, even being shy and plain, she had a lot of conversations struck up with her.
On this July night, she saw a car she liked almost as much as her own and pulled in next to it at the Old Hickory.
There were two high school boys in the car. One of them, Steve Pritchard, knew Bonnie’s younger sister, Ramona. He was sixteen and about to start his junior year at Lexington West. Bonnie, though twenty-one, had done very little dating in her life. In Winston-Salem, no men paid attention to her. In Welcome, there just were no young men.
Steve Pritchard had already lived a hard life, invo
lving an alcoholic father and foster homes and the sort of turmoil that the emotionally sheltered Bonnie Lou Bates had never known. Even at sixteen, he had developed a smooth-talking veneer to deal with the world at large and with women in particular.
He was no virgin and Bonnie was. He was good-looking and Bonnie wasn’t. And he could, in the words of Bonnie’s mother, “charm the horns off a billy goat and the skin off a snake.”
Everybody Bonnie knew from high school was already married and having children. She had a good job and a hot car, but it looked as if she’d still be living with her parents when she was forty.
Ramona introduced Bonnie to Steve Pritchard, and the two of them began to date. The following summer, a month after Bonnie had turned twenty-three, and when Steve was still seventeen, they got married. Everybody in Bonnie’s family told her they thought Steve was no good and she was crazy. She responded that Steve was wonderful and she wasn’t crazy, only lonely. Besides, she said, she was in love.
Although they lived only a few miles apart while dating and saw each other almost every day, she would, on occasion, write letters to him, such as this one from January 1967:
Hi Tiger,
Don’t expect too much from one of my letters ’cause I’m not quite all right at the moment. You see, I’ve met this wonderful person whom I love very much. Because of him, I can’t quite keep my brain and heart clicking in the same direction. I don’t remember his name but they call him Steve Pritchard, or something almost like that.
Hey, do you know him? He has big beautiful brown eyes and lots of cute little freckles on the handsomest nose in the Junior class at West!
I’ll go to the next page now and change the tempo a little. Maybe it’ll make a little more sense.
I sat by the fire but it was too lonesome without you there to help keep me warm. The fire could only warm me Outside. Steve, you worry me. You work too long and get too little rest. Hope you’re strong enough to take it because we’ll never make it if you are forced to take a year or two out to recuperate in a psychiatric ward. I love you too much to lose you that way, so please take it easy and don’t worry so much.
You and I will probably have to prove ourselves to our parents before they can really accept our attitudes. You know I love you and I know you love me, but it’ll be hard to convince them that we can really make it work for a lifetime. I guess it goes back to the same old solution—time. I just get so tired of waiting for everything. I know anything that really means a lot to me is worth waiting for but it’s so hard. Much harder than waiting for anything before.
Smile for me now and let’s face the future together . . .
Till Friday—
Love always,
Bonnie
In retrospect, what’s most surprising is that the marriage lasted almost five years. During the first year, Steve was still in high school. They lived in a rented mobile home. Once he graduated, Steve jumped quickly from job to job, working first for an oil company, then for a dry cleaner, then for a photographer.
As time passed, Bonnie came to suspect that Steve was also jumping from girl to girl, but it was not until the summer of 1972, when Chris was three and a half years old and Angela almost two, that Steve walked out of the new house they’d bought in the Winchester Downs section of Lexington (even though they couldn’t nearly afford it), and into the arms of the newest girl he had waiting on the side. The divorce was the first in Bates family history, and as sympathetic as everyone was, there was the whiff of a certain “I told you so” in the air.
At first, Bonnie wouldn’t even admit to anyone that it had happened. But her father, whose instinct told him a lot about his children, came over one day and wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help. Bonnie broke down and cried her heart out.
In the years that followed, she proved she wasn’t just nice, but tough. She paid every bill Steve left her with and even kept up the mortgage payments on the house. Much later, in her understated way, she would say that the period after Steve abandoned her was “a very lean couple of years.”
Steve Pritchard paid neither alimony nor child support. Seldom did he return to see his children. Though surrounded by her family, Bonnie was too proud ever to ask for help. She was a divorced mother of two preschoolers, in rural North Carolina, at a time when women in such circumstances were rarities and viewed with mistrust at best.
She also was not the sort to leave a debt unpaid, even those incurred by her ex-husband. Bonnie worked extra hours and studied at night, trying to master this new field of data processing, all the while telling everybody things were fine. They were eating a lot of beans and potatoes, she said, but they were eating.
Her mother believed her until the night she stopped by—knowing Bonnie was sick with flu—and found little Angela asleep inside the open refrigerator, where apparently she’d gone in a futile search for food.
* * *
When you’re a girl from a small town such as Welcome and you take the first big risk of your life by marrying a junior in high school when you yourself are twenty-three and then he leaves you for another woman, in addition to all your other problems you have to deal with the fact that in the eyes of many you’ve made a damned fool of yourself.
For a while, this made Bonnie bitter. For a while, she felt sorry for herself. She had loved him, in her own way, which was no less real for being not the way of others. She had loved him in the way she’d later love stray cats. People had thought she was strange about Steve. Later, people would think she was strange about cats. But that was Bonnie. If you seemed the least bit helpless or downtrodden, her heart went out. If she could feed you, care for you, give you a warm bed to sleep in, she would. True, her emotions were somewhat inaccessible, not only to others but to herself, but an element of essential kindness was at her core. To many who focused more of their energies on themselves, this made her seem a bit peculiar.
Bonnie had wanted a way to love and still be safe. In Steve Pritchard, she’d thought she’d found it. She hadn’t yet had enough experience to recognize that hers was an impossible goal, nor to sense that, at best, Steve was just a restless adolescent with his eye on the main chance, which was always just over the next hill, or in the bar a little farther down the street.
She’d gambled and lost was what it came down to, and it would be some time before she’d gamble again.
For four years, she had almost no life of her own. So much was demanded by her children and her job, and there seemed never enough money or energy. She had refused to sell the house in Lexington because she hadn’t wanted Chris and Angela to lose their home just after losing their father—and because she was too proud and too stubborn to give it up.
But that meant leaving at seven every morning for Winston-Salem, dropping the kids off at Salem Baptist, which ran a day-care center and elementary school, then going to Integon and working all day and sometimes far into the night.
Too often, she’d pick up Chris and Angela hours after all the other children had left, then drive home exhausted, feed them whatever cheap starch she could find, and collapse into bed by herself.
Quite a shock, then, to discover that one of Integon’s financial executives—the highly regarded and industrious Lieth Von Stein—was expressing an interest in her.
* * *
Toward the end of the Depression, Lieth Von Stein’s uncle Richard moved to Winston-Salem from New York City. For almost no money at all, he bought a storefront dry-cleaning establishment called Camel City Dry Cleaners & Laundry. The camel was a reference not to any nearby desert, but to the brand of cigarette that had become the mainstay of the Winston-Salem economy.
Through the war and after it, the business grew. Richard added a second location, then a third. He realized he needed someone to run bookkeeping. He convinced Lieth’s father—a graduate of Brown University who had lost everything in the stock marke
t crash of ‘29—to leave New York and join him in Winston-Salem. Together, they built Camel City Dry Cleaners into a regional chain, and Lieth Von Stein, who should have grown up in the borough of Queens, grew up instead in Winston-Salem.
He was an only child and convivial. He played a little football in high school, despite being only five foot six, and got on well with classmates and teachers.
After high school, he enrolled at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, intending to major in engineering. He fared poorly, dropped out, served in the Army (Europe, not Vietnam), and finally earned a degree from a small but well-regarded North Carolina college named Guilford. Then he returned to Winston-Salem and went to work. He was twenty-six, a year younger than Bonnie, but on a considerably faster professional track, when he first became aware of her.
Despite her circumstances, Bonnie had developed into an appealing young woman, with long hair, strong features, a quick mind. She’d come to believe, however, that she would always be just a little country girl who liked hard work: someone of interest only to her parents and her children, and maybe to her brother and sisters. She understood that some men might wish to keep company with her—though she hadn’t run into many since Steve had left—but never one as worthy as Lieth Von Stein.
Lieth not only was going places professionally that Bonnie, no matter how hard she worked, could never reach, but he came from much higher social strata. If you grew up in Welcome as a bricklayer’s daughter, then the heir to the largest dry-cleaning chain in Winston-Salem seemed like a prince of the realm.
She’d seen him at work but had never considered that she might be of romantic interest to him. She’d just assumed, she said later, that “classy young ladies would interest him.” And with her lonely children waiting for her every night at Salem Baptist, and after four years of isolation, exhaustion, and semistarvation, Bonnie Von Stein did not consider herself a classy young lady.