Buried Memories - Irene Pence

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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.

      That night, the Dallas County sheriff answered an emergency call from Betty’s apartment at 1:45 A.M. When deputies arrived, they found a man lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the apartment’s rear door. He had been shot and had fallen from a small concrete stoop, then down three steps.

      Two Dallas sheriff’s deputies walked into Betty’s apartment ready to slap handcuffs on her.

      “Okay, who is he and what happened?” a deputy said.

      “That’s Bill Lane,” Betty stammered. “He flew into a jealous rage. Here’s what happened. Tonight I was dancing with this man at the Slipper Club.” Betty assumed the policeman would know which bar she meant since it sat on a seedy stretch of broken sidewalk on Industrial Boulevard and the manager frequently called police to squelch brawls.

      “I was headed

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