No Regrets (3 page)

Blond and ruddy, Rolf Neslund was a ladies’ man—at least when he was in port long enough to meet women. He looked a great deal like a movie star of the forties: Paul Henreid, the actor most remembered for lighting two cigarettes at once in a three-handkerchief movie entitled
Now Voyager.
Henreid’s character handed one smoldering cigarette to sloe-eyed Bette Davis in a movie scene considered one of the most romantic of all time. It was the kind of gesture Rolf was capable of, too.

When Rolf wore his captain’s uniform with four gold stripes on his left sleeve, his cap loaded with more gold braid and insignia, he was handsome enough to rival any screen hero. This was the man who had dazzled eleven-year-old Elinor and who fascinated her again as an attractive grown woman.

Rolf Neslund was a man full of the lust for life, one with scores of friends, and he took the time and trouble to keep his friendships alive. For many years, he sent out 550 Christmas cards, painstakingly addressing them himself. He also made sure that elderly friends and relatives had birthday cards each year. Everyone liked him.

Margot Neslund became chronically ill, and Rolf persuaded Elinor to move in with them in their home north of Seattle. Margot needed someone to care for her, and who better than her own sister? Elinor had grown up to become a willowy blonde, quite pretty in a quiet way.

Rolf was a virile man and the forced celibacy that came about because of his wife’s long illness was proving difficult for him. He was in his fifties when Elinor moved into
the Neslund home. Rolf was not blind to Elinor’s attractiveness and he saw that she watched him when she didn’t think he was aware of it.

It was probably inevitable that Rolf and Elinor would become intimate, living so close together, each of them longing for passion and sexual fulfillment. Whether Rolf’s wife was aware in the beginning that her sister and her husband were having an affair is questionable. She probably knew and chose to look away. But Elinor took good care of Margot, and the first Mrs. Neslund may have made up her mind to leave things alone and pretend not to see. At least for a time.

By the time Margot Neslund finally realized the affair wasn’t going to end and filed for divorce, Elinor was pregnant, an obvious condition that made it impossible for Margot to rationalize her suspicions away.

While the Neslund divorce was in the works, Elinor held her head up, ignoring the buzz of local gossips. She and Rolf were married in Finland that year—1958—and she gave birth to a son, and named him after his father: Rolf. Two years later, she was pregnant with a second son, Erik. At sixty, Rolf Neslund was the father of two young boys.

Elinor was living temporarily in Norway, and Rolf was often working as a ship’s pilot in one faraway port or another. What Elinor didn’t know—nor, perhaps, did Rolf— was that she and Rolf were not legally married. At the time of their Finnish wedding ceremony, Rolf’s divorce from Margot was not yet final.

Elinor had high hopes for their marriage when Rolf sent for her and little Rolf to come to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was happy that their second baby would be born there with his father close by.

Rolf bought plane tickets to bring the pregnant Elinor and their little boy to Vancouver, the Canadian city about 140 miles north of Seattle. Many people hoping to emigrate to America go first to Canada because it’s easier to cross its borders.

Elinor was shocked, almost speechless, when Rolf admitted to her that he had learned they weren’t really married. But he quickly explained that he was now divorced from her older sister and he wanted to marry her legally. He had even obtained a Canadian marriage license.

It should have been a rather romantic happy ending— except for the fact that Rolf had yet another woman in his life, someone he had met in Seattle while Elinor was in Norway. Her name was Nettie Ruth Myers, and, like Elinor, she was a generation younger than Rolf.

Outside of her immediate family, she seldom answered to “Nettie,” and preferred to be called “Ruth.” Ruth had a very strong personality and a native cunning that made her much more talented in getting what she wanted than Elinor was.

And what Ruth wanted was Rolf.

Despite Rolf’s denials, Elinor suspected that from the beginning. Ruth was omnipresent in their lives, and when Rolf introduced Ruth to Elinor, he explained that she was a close business associate of his. But Elinor wondered what kind of business that could be, since Rolf cared only about his ships and wasn’t in any way a businessman.

Worse, Elinor, heavily pregnant and feeling unattractive and awkward, was suspicious when Rolf said he had hired Ruth to be a kind of “housekeeper” who would help Elinor until after their baby was born. She didn’t want Ruth around and she didn’t need her, but Ruth moved into their Vancouver house and made herself at home.

Elinor was worried—and she had reason to be. She herself had become intimate with Rolf when she was in his first wife’s home, caring for her own sister. If he had cheated with her, how could she be sure he wouldn’t cheat on her with another woman? The whole plan was too much like the one Elinor had lived through in Seattle; the only thing that would change would be that now Elinor would be Rolf’s wife, and Ruth would be the other woman living in their home. Elinor didn’t care for Ruth at all. Ruth wasn’t friendly and she seemed to wield more power over Rolf than Elinor herself ever had. Ruth did very little housekeeping and she certainly didn’t appear to be doing any business with Rolf. After Elinor gave birth to her second son, Erik, Ruth Myers didn’t leave. In fact, Ruth became even more entrenched in their lives. She gave her opinions very freely on what should have been private matters.

“Once,” Elinor later recalled, “Ruth suggested that I return to Norway and have the children adopted out! It was a very miserable situation for me.”

Elinor wouldn’t think of giving up her boys. She loved Rolf and Eric; they were Rolf’s natural sons. And Rolf seemed to care for Elinor and the little boys. Still, however outrageous Ruth’s remarks were, Rolf never asked Ruth to move out.

It was a stressful time—two women, each of whom wanted to marry the man they shared a house with. It was a standoff, but neither woman gave up.

In 1961, Rolf obtained another Canadian wedding license, and told Elinor that he really did want to marry her. It seemed that Elinor had won her man back. But there was
much more than a slight hitch in his plan to marry her. To Elinor’s horror, Rolf confessed that he was already married to Ruth Myers, and had been for months.

That didn’t mean, he said with truly flawed reasoning, that he couldn’t marry Elinor, too!

“I was so suspicious of their relationship all along,” Elinor said. “When I found out that they were married, I knew I didn’t want to marry him again.”

Rolf assured Elinor that he’d had no choice but to marry Ruth. It wasn’t that he loved her, but she had threatened to expose him—and told him that Elinor would, too. He wanted to stay in America, his adopted country, but Ruth lied and said that Elinor was threatening to turn him over to immigration authorities for fraud.

“Ruth says you’re going to tell them about how I lied about my age way back when I stowed away on the ships from Norway,” he told Elinor. “She said they’ll deport me for that.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Elinor breathed. “How could you believe I would betray you?”

But 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.

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 to
lunch, 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 talent to lift herself out of the poverty of her youth. Perhaps, most of all, it was her forte as a consummate actress that helped her get what she wanted. Throughout her life, Ruth was able to be whatever she sensed people wanted her to be—seductive, sweet, cozy and comfy, sharp in business deals, stubborn, controlling, or compliant. And she would always have both her detractors and her supporters, some who declared she was the devil and others who swore she was an angel on earth.

•  •  •

Nettie Ruth Myers started her life in the Midwest. She was born on February 8, 1920, in Beardstown, Illinois, about fifty miles northwest of Springfield, a small town in Cass County with just a few thousand residents. It was hard by the Illinois River and the site of the Lincoln Courthouse and Museum, but it wasn’t the kind of town where young people tended to stay. Most of them grew up and moved away to bigger cities where salaries were higher and there was more to do.

Life itself was a challenge for Nettie Ruth. There were ten children in her family—some born in Ohio and some in Illinois: Mamie, Mary, Robert, Walter, Asa, Paula, Carl, Enoch, Paul, and, finally, Nettie Ruth. Some of them remained in the Ohio and Illinois area, but most moved to places as far-flung as Biloxi, Mississippi, Rockaway, Oregon, and Los Angeles, California.

One of Ruth’s siblings didn’t live to adulthood. Like most families whose children were born in the early part of the twentieth century, the Myerses lost a baby: Enoch. He died at the age of one year. Another brother simply disappeared. Carl Myers walked away from his family home during World War I.

“He left home and never came back,” Ruth recalled. “He was just—he just went missing. [They] sent his trunk back and all of his possessions. That was in 1919. We don’t know whether he’s dead.”

Ruth and her brother Paul were the youngest of the Myers children; she was the youngest girl and he was the last boy to be born. Ruth explained that their positions in the family birth order had made them quite close.

Ruth left the Midwest for Louisiana and moved in with a man named Morris Daniels when she was in her midteens.
She had her first child a year later: Morris Daniels, Jr. Warren “Butch” Daniels was born when she was twenty. Whether she raised her boys from infancy to maturity isn’t known. They were in their twenties by the time Ruth met Rolf in Seattle. It’s quite possible that she had left them behind for their father to raise; as grown men, they still lived in Louisiana while their mother was in Washington State. Still, as adults, her sons—particularly Butch—were steadfast in their allegiance to her and she was in close touch with them.