The Girls Who Went Away (10 page)

So maybe something short of a week had gone by and my mother is absolutely hysterical. She’s on Valium and diet pills, going absolutely mental. She’s telling my friends I just need to come home. She eventually breaks my weaker girlfriend down. One morning there’s a knock on the door. I open the door and there’s my girlfriend with my mother standing behind her peering into this room with the bare mattresses. My mother is crying and freaking out and my friend is saying, “I didn’t want to tell her, don’t be mad. She made me tell her.”

My mother grabs me and hugs me and says, “I don’t care what’s going on in your life. I know you’re pregnant. You need to come home. We’re gonna take care of this. We’re going to do whatever we need to do.” She sounded like a mother. So I pack my things and I go home. Within a day or so, I’m getting shipped off to Dorchester, Massachusetts, to St. Mary’s home for unwed mothers. In 1968, Dorchester and Roxbury, Massachusetts, were literally burning from race riots. It was like being sent to a war zone.

At the time I went to the maternity home, my dad was commuting to Boston for work. My dad was kind of shut down, but I liked him. I felt a connection with him. He was really smart. He used to help me with my homework and we talked about politics, and he supported me going to art school. My mom didn’t really respect me being an artist, but my dad respected it. He would give me art books—the really big coffee-table kind—on Picasso and on surrealism and Dalí. He didn’t really like or know anything about art, but he supported and respected my interests. So those tiny little
things my dad had done for me cemented our relationship, and I identified with him. My mom used to always say, “Oh, it’s all fine and dandy that you’re an artist, but you’re never going to be able to do anything with it. You need to learn something to fall back on. You need a job with the city.” That was my mother’s mantra: “Get a job with the city.”

The maternity home had really dark woodwork everywhere, dark woodwork railings, and lots and lots of marble stairs. It was attached to the hospital, but it looked more like a house than a hospital. It looked like an old lady’s house in England or something. It had that weird, disapproving grandmother feel to it. They had big dorm rooms where four girls slept in a room. You had a little twin bed with a dresser. Then there was a lunchroom, and they always had stewed tomatoes. They gave us water pills every day so we wouldn’t retain fluids, yet they were feeding us all this high-sodium hospital food.

So, anyway, this is where I am. I’m seventeen, I’m at least five months pregnant, and I’m in this really weird place run by nuns. Their disapproval was palpable. They gave me the name Marsha; everybody was given a fake name. I bonded with my three roommates and, of course, we knew each other’s real names. There were probably about twenty-five girls in the home at that time. The youngest was fourteen and she was one of my roommates. The oldest was in her middle thirties. She was mildly retarded and had been raped. She had been raped and left on the side of the road.

The intake nun was this really hard-looking woman. They all had mustaches. The nuns where I grew up were from this order from Sicily that had lots of facial hair, too. Nuns do not get rid of facial hair. I felt like I was plopped in an environment and given no choices whatsoever. You know, I’ve done the ultimate shameful thing and this is the only answer to my problem, or the problem I’ve caused in my family. There was really never any counseling or therapy, but there was a dialogue and this is what it was: “You’ve done a really bad thing. You have really sinned. You’ve committed the ultimate mortal sin.” There’s a big difference between mortal sins and venial sins. Mortal sins are the really bad sins that you’ve got to really, really make amends for.

I don’t remember any dialogue around having choices. You were here, you were gonna be fed, and you’re going to get your schooling. You were going
to be taken care of, but you were gonna have that baby and you are gonna do the only thing that is right. You’re gonna give that baby to good people, decent people, people who can take care of it because you are so bad and so flawed for just having this happen, that there’s no way you could possibly provide what a child would need. And if you were ever gonna redeem yourself in God’s eyes, you were gonna give this baby to a good Catholic family. I never believed that only a Catholic family was good, but I definitely believed I was flawed. I already believed that from the time I was about five. So it didn’t take a lot to really drill that home.

The father of my child never came to see me. There was no communication with him at all. He knew that I was going away and he knew the phone number. I wrote to him and I think I called him once or twice when I first got there. He never responded, so I just let it alone. That’s what I do, I get invisible. I just got invisible from his life.

So I’m at this home and I make friends. There’s the fourteen-year-old girl—she’s a white girl and a wicked tomboy. She was really fun. Then there was a black girl from Massachusetts who was about my age and who was very pretty—really nice hair with a bouffant like the Supremes. We became very fast and good friends. Then there was this girl from upstate New York. She was brilliant. She reminded me of my best friend from home. She had long, straight strawberry-blond hair, and those Ben Franklin glasses. I always thought that girls my age who wore those kind of glasses were Mensa potential. The four of us really connected. I was also friendly with some of the other people and with the retarded lady who would go from room to room and talk to everybody.

The home had three levels of marble stairs, so there was a lot of exercise involved in going from the classroom to your room, or to the lunchroom. The retarded woman threw herself down those stairs to try to kill her baby. She was only mildly retarded, but that was a time when if you had a freakin’ learning disability you were labeled retarded. I think that was the case with her. She really could have been anything. It was also that time period of a lot of meanness—if you looked different, if you had curly hair like I did, if you were anything but a stupid blond, no offense, blue-eyed, tall, slim cheerleader. The beach-girl thing was happening then. If you looked different, you were ostracized. If you were retarded on top of that, you were really ostracized.
So she wasn’t getting much warmth or compassion from the other girls. She was treated badly and she threw herself down the stairs to try to kill the baby because she was so bad. Because
she
was so bad.

During this time my dad would come to visit me alone, without my mother. It was the only time in my life I was ever with my dad alone. He came to visit me a lot. We weren’t supposed to have any sweets at all. It was off-limits, against the rules. He’d bring dozens and dozens of Dunkin’ Donuts for us. He’d sneak them in, in a big brown paper bag with a handle and he would take me and my three pregnant roommates out. He would sign the four of us out.

So he is going out in the community with a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl, the black girl, the eccentric intellectual, and me his daughter, and we’re all hugely pregnant. He took us to movies. We’d go to Chinatown for dinner. He took us to museums. He wasn’t ashamed. The only glimmer of any happiness that we had was when we knew he was coming. And when he would leave he’d give me a really big hug—the really tight kind where you don’t have to say anything. My mom would always give me that nervous hug. She’d be crying and it was a weird kind of hug, you know? But he was actually there for me.

The day I went into labor my water broke and I thought I had wet my pants. They took me down to the hospital. I was alone there and nobody was friendly. Nobody was nice. Nobody said, “Don’t worry, you’re going be okay.” It wasn’t overt meanness but it was total clinical indifference: “Turn over. Roll over. We’re going to shave you. You’re going to get an enema.” I just felt like I was being led by this invisible rope. Then they gave me a spinal and within minutes I’m numb from the waist down. They tell you that you cannot move. I remember them saying that if I moved there was a chance that I’d have some kind of permanent damage. So I also have this fear that I might be paralyzed for my whole life. You go through this whole process without anybody who is supposed to care about you being there.

I didn’t know it, because I can’t feel anything from the waist down, but I had shit the bed. And that’s just humiliating. I mean, there’s another big shame ball right there—no pun intended. Then my arms were strapped down to the side of the table like in
The Cuckoo’s Nest
and they wheel me into another room and put my feet in the stirrups, and all of a sudden I’m giving
birth to a baby. I remember, vaguely, a suctiony kind of emptying out, and a baby is born and I see this unbelievable mass of black hair on this incredibly beautiful reddish-brown baby. The first thing I saw was this really long, sticking-out, crazy, wild black hair like that boxing promoter guy, Don King. That was my baby. Then after I give birth I’m really, really sore because, you know, they gave me an episiotomy. I’m surprised they don’t sew it completely up on teenage Catholic girls, you know? Just sew the whole damn thing up.

So I’m in my room and my roommates from the home came to see me. It was very weird because it’s not something you should be celebrating, but it was like the end of this whole crazy time. The girls gave me flowers and I remember the retarded girl had her baby and she came in the room and talked to me and she brought me a gift. The girls were really very compassionate. I named my baby Raina Elizabeth—Elizabeth after my girlfriend. I did get to hold her for three days. She was beautiful. She had a little tiny heart-shaped mouth, big dark eyes, beautiful reddish-brown skin, and tons and tons of black hair. I held and fed Raina as much as I could. And then on the third day my parents came. I had everything packed. I knew it was the day that I was leaving the hospital and I was leaving the baby in the nursery.

We walked out of the hospital. My dad got in the driver’s seat and my mom got in on the passenger side. I got in the backseat. We always had Chryslers because they were safe cars—they were like boats, you know, huge. So my dad’s way up there driving, totally white-knuckled, and I’m looking out that back window at the hospital. And seeing the view of the hospital getting smaller and smaller and smaller, I flipped out—it was total, 100 percent, ripped terror, wailing, screaming, crying—and nobody said a word. My mother didn’t even turn around. I could tell she was crying because I could see her shoulders going up and down. My dad was white. He was like a statue driving the car. I just had that kind of cry that was a giant, wailing, screaming, weeping, until you just are totally crumpled in and your whole body is crying.

It was the beginning of it being invisible. It was never, ever, brought up again. It was never talked about—not once, not ever. I was never asked, “How are you? How are you feeling?” I don’t even remember the ride home. I must have gone unconscious inside.

I went back and graduated from school. Then a friend of mine had a 1950 Pontiac Chief, one of those fat cars that had the Indian chief on the hood, and he was going to Aspen, Colorado. He was taking five friends and there was room for one more person in the car. This was the summer of ’69 and there was this rumor that the Beatles were gonna be in Aspen, so I said, “Definitely, sign me up.” I stayed away thirty years.

When I was forty years old, I initiated a search and when I was forty-six I met Raina. When I initiated the search, my daughter from a subsequent marriage was part of the whole thing. I told her the story when she was about thirteen or fourteen in the sex talk. I said, “There’s another reason I want you to be really well informed, because this is my story.…” I shared the whole thing with her. So I got the nonidentifying information about Raina and did the registry thing. I called my mother and I said, “Look, I have to talk to you about something that we’ve never talked about. It’s important to me. I have decided I am going to initiate a search for my daughter.” She doesn’t say anything. I say, “Do you have any documents, anything?” Nobody’s ever mentioned this in all these years. My mom says, “I don’t think I do.” She was very open to it. As a matter of fact, I think it was healing for her, because it gave her a chance to be part of something, and to say that she was really sorry.

Raina was adopted by a family sort of like my family. They’re conservative Catholic, Italian. Raina was light-skinned, and she could pass for Italian. Her parents were told the truth, but they were encouraged to lie. They were dark-skinned Italian like my dad, who’s Sicilian. I grew up with Italians who were darker than my black friend from the home. Catholic Charities told the couple who adopted Raina Elizabeth that there’s no need to tell her that her father was black. I didn’t know they were gonna tell them this. I was just told, “We have a young couple that want her. They know she’s biracial, and they want her.” They never said to me, “We have a biracial couple,” because…who knew biracial couples in 1968? Actually, I did, but my parents certainly didn’t, and Catholic Charities probably wouldn’t let them in the freakin’ door. So maybe it was a naïve assumption, but I assumed that they had somehow found a biracial couple. I remember feeling relieved because they said over and over, “Who’s gonna want this biracial baby? They’re hard to place.”

I’ve met her now, so I know the story. She always knew she was different. She always knew that her skin was darker and her hair was kinkier. She knew she was adopted but she was led to believe that she was Italian. She was adopted by a family who lived maybe a mile down the street from where I had lived and where my mother still lives now. What happened was, when Raina was about nineteen, she had a boyfriend who was Cape Verdean Portuguese and her parents were absolutely ballistic. They said, “Can’t you go out with boys that are your kind, Italian boys?” They were giving her a really hard time, but she’s got this rebel spirit in her—I know where that comes from—and she’s gonna be who she’s gonna be. So they’re having this huge fight because Raina is totally in love with this boy. He’s smart, he’s nice—there’s nothing wrong with him. She can’t understand why her mother doesn’t want her to go out with him. They get into the fight of fights and Raina screams, “What do you have against Portuguese people?” And her mom says, “I don’t have anything against them. You’re Portuguese and I adopted you, didn’t I?” Silence. Raina said, “What?” She got into her car and went to Catholic Charities and said, “I want to know my history. I want to know who I am,” and it was all in her file.