Buried Memories (4 page)

The following year, Mrs. Dunevant’s mental illness worsened, forcing her to be institutionalized at Eastern State Hospital in Virginia for three months. To combat her serious problem, the barren public psychiatric hospital had to administer shock therapy and seventeen rounds of deep insulin coma therapy.

Her mother’s mental state was not lost on Betty’s classmates. When they saw Betty, they faked seizures, waving their hands in the air and saying, “Who am I?” The ugliness of her classmates continued and now they made her feel both stupid and crazy. Education for Betty became an excruciating experience that she’d do anything to escape.

Thirteen-year-old Betty Dunevant slammed a kitchen drawer shut as she prepared a dinner of beans and ham. It was the third time that week she had reheated the ham, and the dry meat had begun to taste like sawdust.

Betty found that cooking and cleaning for the family in her mother’s absence was sheer drudgery, and her weight dropped to eighty pounds. Frequently too exhausted to attend classes, she missed many days of school.

Adding to her problems, her father drank heavily to overcome depression about his wife’s condition. When he was drunk, Betty would cringe every time she saw him remove his belt, knowing she had done something to displease him and he’d soon be beating her with the buckle of that belt. After the beatings, he received obedience from her, but unbeknownst to him, he was creating a tough exterior on his daughter. She came to accept that she would be beaten if she didn’t mind him.

Betty dreamed of the day she could escape. That day came when she met a handsome eighteen-year-old, Robert Franklin Branson. Branson’s black hair and olive skin contrasted sharply with Betty’s fair coloring. He was a quiet youth, who worked in a zipper factory. His prospects seemed limited, but fifteen-year-old Betty didn’t mind.

Betty had not yet had her first period and her mother feared that Betty could be pregnant, so she encouraged her young daughter to marry Branson, even though Betty insisted that she had never had sex with anyone. The two married on July 18, 1952, just a month after Betty finished ninth grade.

A year later, their first child, Faye, arrived. Instead of being happy to be married and have a new baby to love, Betty Branson found she had traded one frustrating situation for another. She complained to her husband, “I’m no better off now than when I had to cook and clean for my parents, and having this baby is just like being saddled with my brother and sister.”

Thinking more money would make Betty happier, Robert Branson went to the giant Norfolk shipyard looking for a better paying job. When he signed on, he thought his wife would be pleased that he could shower his small family with a few luxuries. Instead, he came home each night to an angry, disillusioned woman who wanted her freedom. “I’m only sixteen,” she whimpered. She frequently ran into former classmates who would embellish with enticing detail their proms, football rallies, and all the other high school activities Betty was missing.

The young couple’s heated arguments and misunderstandings led to a six-month separation. Betty wasn’t sure what she wanted; she only knew what she had missed. But when forced to take Faye and move back with her parents, she slipped into a deep depression. Spiraling down into her dark mood, she tried to commit suicide by swallowing two bottles of aspirin. Betty’s parents called her husband with word of the suicide attempt, and he rushed to Betty’s bedside and talked her into reconciling.

The next year, Connie came along. With a new baby the Bransons wanted a new start, and Robert found he could make more money with a construction job in Texas. Collecting their two daughters and the few household items they had accumulated, they moved to Mesquite, a small town just southeast of Dallas.

The area looked foreign to them after coming from water-laced Norfolk, Virginia. In Mesquite, trees grew along the sides of creeks that veined the area, but in 1955, few additional trees had been planted, and some residential lots had no trees or shrubbery at all. They rented a plain, unimaginative house no larger than a double-car garage. Frequently, the wood trim became sun damaged, and the paint peeled.

Fortunately, Branson did well in his new profession and Betty could continue as a full-time mother and stay home with her children.

Once in Texas, the family blossomed, and a third daughter, Shirley, arrived in February of 1959. Three years later, Phyllis was born. Finally, their first son, Robert (Robby) Franklin Branson II, entered the family in 1964, and a second son, Bobby, was born in 1966. Now after fourteen years of marriage, they had six children.

Betty was only twenty-nine and still very pretty. She had a knack for choosing clothes that accentuated her figure, a figure that few women would possess after giving birth to six children. Her small waist emphasized her large breasts, and she applied makeup like a professional. She wore four-inch high heels to give the illusion of being taller than five-two.

She bleached her hair to recapture the blond of her childhood, and regular perms gave it an overly fluffy appearance—a look that fit in well at the local bars. She liked to have a good time, and spending all day taking care of six children wasn’t her idea of a good time. She began to crave men who reminded her that she was still sexy and desirable.

For her clandestine activities she recruited her older daughters to babysit her young sons, then put on her Sunday-best cotton dress and drove to The Silver Slipper, a bar in East Dallas.

She strolled inside a room lit by the red-and-blue neon-outlined beer signs, and loud jazz pounded from the jukebox. The men stopped sucking on their long-neck beers and glanced admiringly at her, and some invited her to join their table. They laughed at her jokes, and asked why a pretty thing like her hadn’t been there before. Betty’s charm worked overtime as the men took turns dancing with her, holding her close, and smothering her with compliments. This, she realized, was living.

At last she recaptured the fun she had missed in her teenage years, and her husband made enough money to take her mind off the misery of the poverty she had known as a child.

Gradually, her life away from home became a source of friction at the Branson household. Even the children grew perturbed by her outside interests, and the home she had kept so immaculately fell into disarray.

Branson warned her, “Betty, I’m not going to put up with this. I always thought you were a good wife and I know the kids love you. But I can’t handle how you’re acting while I’m out trying to support our family.”

Her husband had his own romantic options, for he still cut a handsome, lean figure. His full head of black hair complimented his tan, relatively unlined face. In 1969, after seventeen years of marriage, he demanded a divorce and this time there would be no reconciliation. He married a younger woman shortly after the divorce became final.

Betty received full custody of the children and Branson was ordered to pay $350 a month for their support. Now the children suffered through their mother’s muffled sobs. “I still love and miss your daddy,” she told them. Betty kept an eight-by-ten photograph of her ex-husband on a table in the living room. On the photo he had inscribed: “More than yesterday, but less than tomorrow,” a promise that no longer held true. The children thought that their mother never seemed happy with anyone else after that.

Betty’s second daughter, Connie, told a friend, “Most of the good things I remember about my mother were before she and my daddy divorced. Mama worked so hard to please him. When Daddy worked nights, she would put on makeup before she went to bed so when he’d get home around two or three in the morning, she’d look nice for him.”

In those earlier years, the children had benefitted from Betty wanting to be a good wife and mother, but now after the divorce, all the family customs fell apart. They weren’t together for Christmas or Thanksgiving. There were no more big family dinners with turkey and all the trimmings, and no Easter egg hunts at their paternal grandparent’s house. Gone were the picnics and the trips to the zoo.

The children were painfully aware how drastically their parents’ divorce had changed their lives.

Betty was experiencing life without a man, a life that contained many hardships, especially when Branson went months at a time without paying the court-ordered child support.

To forget her problems, she increased her nights of club hopping and drinking and dancing. Before long, her family began disintegrating and fluttered away like birds from a nest.

First, Faye followed in her mother’s footsteps by marrying at fifteen and moving out. Betty sent ten-year-old Phyllis and eight-year-old Robby to live with their father and his new wife. She kissed Robby good-bye, and with tears in his eyes, he asked, “Mama, when can I come home?”

Betty said, “Soon,” but five years would pass before she saw him again and only then for a few minutes. It would be a total of ten years before he moved back with her.

As the family breakup continued, Connie went to live with her sister Faye. Shirley sometimes lived with Betty and sometimes with friends. Bobby, only three at the time of the divorce, had his mother’s eyes, and had obviously stolen her heart, for he was the only child she refused to relinquish to other family members.

After Betty’s divorce, her vulnerability soared, for she spent hours worrying how she’d pay her bills. The financial woes that had shadowed her childhood now followed her into her adult life.

It was a time of short skirts and big hair, and in spite of her financial situation, Betty kept up with both. Every morning after her shower, she pinned a blond hairpiece of cascading curls into her own hair, working each curl into place. Heads turned wherever she went.

FIVE

A house painter named Billy York Lane came courting a year after Betty’s divorce, and he easily swayed her. They both had March birthdays, but he was seven years older. After dating only a few months before deciding to marry, she told her children about her plans.

“Bill is so nice to me,” she said. “He’s real gentle and kind. I know you’re just going to love him.”

Had the courtship lasted longer, she might have glimpsed flashes of Bill Lane’s hot temper and controlling ways before she married him on July 28, 1970.

Now thirty-three, the once trim and curvaceous Betty couldn’t shed the weight she so easily lost after each baby. She began gulping down the diet drug Dexatrim, while still continuing to drink. In her mind, if she took more of the drug than the label suggested, she’d lose weight more rapidly. However, in larger quantities the drug caused insomnia, irritability, restlessness, and headaches.

In addition to the side effects, Betty’s personality began to change. Her children noticed that she became two different people. In an instant she flipped from the caring mother they loved, to a woman who used foul language and screamed at them.

Added to those changes, Bill began slapping her around just days following the wedding. In the next few months, his abusive treatment escalated until he was frequently punching and beating her. Her children were horrified to see Betty covered with bruises.

Lane particularly liked hitting Betty in the face. She always wanted to look her best, so a swollen and bruised face caused more than physical damage. She tried to cover the bruises with makeup, but the dark purplish injuries refused to hide.

Appalled with her life, Betty mustered the courage to take out a restraining order against Lane on October 28, 1970, then divorced him two months later. But even after the divorce, and despite the restraining order, they continued their love-hate relationship, unable to stay apart.

Some nights she would drive home from work and notice a car with its lights out, sitting a half block from her apartment. From the silhouette of the man inside, she knew it was Lane. Other nights, she would look in her rearview mirror and see him following her.

The violence increased, and in May of 1971, he broke her nose.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Betty complained to the doctor treating her. “I get so depressed because I can’t pull myself away from this man, and he keeps hitting me. What can I do?”

The doctor didn’t suggest that she leave Lane or report his abuse, even though hospital records provided sufficient documentation. Instead, he merely prescribed an antidepressant. A few months later, she took another trip to the emergency room after Lane doubled up his fist and hit her left eye. His blow opened a gap that required several stitches to close.

They continued to frequent the same smoky clubs where they’d first met. A country song bellowed from the jukebox, and a neon sign in the window advertised
WOMEN ADMITTED FREE WITHOUT AN ESCORT.
They glared jealously when one or the other danced or talked with someone else. Betty enjoyed watching a rage build within Lane as she danced closely with other men. When she knew he was watching, she would cuddle tighter and look into the men’s eyes until Lane turned crimson. He acted just as vengeful, using other women as she used other men.

Then on January 17, 1972, Lane walked up to her after she had danced with a man he had previously told her to stay away from. He told her to get home or he’d kill her.

“You sorry son of a bitch,” Betty screamed at him, then hurried to her car to go home. On the way, she found a policeman, and honked for him to stop. The officer turned around and pulled up beside her. Betty said, “My ex-husband is following me. I’m going right home now, but could you be on the lookout for a ’57 white Ford?” The officer assured her that he’d watch for the car and keep an eye out on her apartment.

She now lived in the town of Hutchins, not far from Mesquite where she and Branson first settled. She took pride in her recently built apartment that fronted Franklin Street, close to the open fields and farms of rural Hutchins. The buff brick, two-story structure stood on one of the gently rolling hills of the area, and on the opposite end of town from Hutchins’s huge Texas State Jail with its cyclone fences topped with miles of rolled razor wire.