The Girls Who Went Away (36 page)

MADELINE

I
t was 1960 and I had just finished my freshman year of college. I’d gone to the University of Colorado. When I was applying to school my parents gave me the option of either going to William & Mary—which was my grandmother’s college, and I could live with her and go to school—or to the University of Colorado, where all the other airline pilots’ daughters were going.

Now, you have to understand, I was an extremely naïve young woman. I’d been out on maybe three or four dates. I knew nothing at all about the facts of life. My parents shipped me off to the University of Colorado, which was an unbelievable party school. And suddenly I was very popular.

In June of 1960, I was back on Long Island at my parents’ house. I had done all sorts of terrible things, like taken out a charge account and charged five hundred dollars’ worth of stuff at a department store. My parents were just furious with me. I was raised very strictly. We said, “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir.” We just did everything our parents said. I had never done anything wrong in my life and suddenly I had done all these terrible things.

So I came home and my parents insisted that I take two jobs so that I could pay off this debt that I had run up. I got a job as a waitress and a job as a salesgirl in a department-store type place called J.J. Newberry’s. The other thing was, I wasn’t getting my period.

I had had sex. Well, I guess you could call it sex. I had gone out on a date with someone I really liked and he was one of the few young men whom I really trusted. He was sort of like one of my brothers. We were necking at his apartment and I guess we had sex. I mean, he sort of pinned me to the floor and I didn’t really know what was going on; I really had no idea what was happening. He pinned me down and pretty much raped me. We had necked a few times, then this thing happened. Then the next morning, he told my girlfriend that I was nothing but a slut and I was a bad fuck. I was a bad lay
because all I did was lie there. So I guess you’re really wonderful until they can stick it in you and then you’re just this piece of shit.

I got on the plane and I went home to New York. I didn’t really understand about sex and how babies happened and all that business. I was eighteen. I didn’t know. My mother never told me the facts of life. My parents were very affectionate. They hugged, they kissed, but she never told us the facts of life. So I had no idea that that’s what they did with the penis—that they put it in you and you got pregnant. I didn’t know. I mean, it’s so embarrassing.

There I was at home. I had these two jobs and I wasn’t getting my period. I mean, I was just in this sort of state where I was not paying attention to reality. Then I started to get morning sickness. I would be in this place selling men’s underwear and curtains in J.J. Newberry’s department store and I would be throwing up. So in the corner of my mind I knew something was very wrong. Then I started reading books about what happened to girls who got in trouble. And I remember being in my parents’ house and standing at the top of the cellar stairs. I had pillows wrapped around my legs and arms, because I thought if I threw myself down the stairs I would somehow be able to dislodge this baby. So part of me was accepting the fact that I was pregnant and another part was in total denial.

I went back to school. I was four months pregnant, but I wasn’t showing. My roommate noticed that I never used any of my Kotex. So there was this rumor around that I might be in trouble, but I wasn’t admitting it. Then lots of rumors started flying around campus about me. Somehow, I was becoming a slut because of these rumors. I was accused of doing things that, even now, I couldn’t imagine doing.

I stayed with my parents the last two months that I was pregnant. I stayed in my grandmother’s room because my grandmother didn’t live there anymore. I just stayed in bed the whole time. Occasionally, my mother would sneak me out in this plaid coat that went almost to the ground and take me for walks at Jones Beach. My father was just enraged. I mean, you have to imagine, my father was like John Wayne. He was an air force colonel, and at that time he was an airline pilot. He’s a wonderful man but everything with him was black and white; there was no gray. If you wore curlers in your hair and you go out in the street, you’re a whore. So I’m there at home. None of my siblings know. Nobody could know that I’m pregnant.

My mom found this Park Avenue gynecologist where all the nice, Waspy unwed girls go to be taken care of and give their babies away. So I go to see him every couple of weeks. There’s no question that as soon as I deliver this baby, this baby is gone. I mean, there’s no question about whether I can keep this baby. No way. I mean it’s not even considered. It’s just, “You have done the worst thing possible and you’d better be quiet.” My mom said, “This is the closest your father and I have ever come to having problems; you’re killing your father. He’s got to requalify on the jets now and he can’t handle it because of you.” It was horrible. It was really horrible.

Of course, nobody tells me a damn thing about what to expect or what giving birth is like. Nothing, there’s no preparation whatsoever. And the night that I went into labor we had the worst snowstorm that had ever happened in the history of New York. My mother has to call 911 and an ambulance comes and of course all the neighbors are looking out their windows. It’s her worst nightmare. They carry me out on a stretcher. My mother is making up something about my liver or my kidney or some kind of organ failure or something like that. I was supposed to deliver in New York at this fancy hospital. But instead I’m taken to Mineola Hospital. There’s no power. They’re on generators and they’re very short-staffed. I can’t describe it. I mean, still when I think about what it was like…they were so cruel to me. I can’t tell you how they treated me, those nurses. It was so terrible. They tied me to a bed. They abused me verbally. After I delivered my baby, they left me lying in this bed with bloodstained sheets for a day and a half. I mean still, even talking about it…I can’t understand how somebody who was supposed to be in a profession where you have compassion, and care about suffering, could do that. It was like I was fair game for them.

So I had my daughter. I remember very clearly the doctor in the delivery room holding her up and saying, “This is the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. She’s not going to want to give this baby up,” and the nurse just grabbing the baby and wrapping her up so I couldn’t see her. I kept asking to see her, and they wouldn’t let me until it was time for my mother and father to come and take the baby to the agency. They let me come into the room where they were dressing her. It was the same nurses. They wouldn’t let me hold her and they wouldn’t let me touch her. I was across one of those metal tables from them and they said, “I bet you’d like to hold this baby, wouldn’t
you? This baby doesn’t belong to you. This baby is going to a good home.” It was just horrible. It was like a terrible, terrible nightmare.

The only time I got to hold her was when they let me take her out to the car. I carried her down these steps, concrete steps, with this kind of chrome railing, down to my parents’ car. Then my mother took her and I got into the backseat. They dropped me off at the house and they took the baby into the city. I remember the only one I could talk to, and cry to, was our dog.

My mom and dad came back and they never spoke about it. My mom destroyed the papers from the adoption agency right away, all the papers having to do with my daughter. She burned everything, supposedly to protect me. It was never spoken about again. I really wanted to talk about it, but my mom treated it like it was her personal tragedy. I would try to broach the subject and she would say, “You’ll just never know what your father and I went through. You’ll never know. We came very close to separating at that time. Your father could have had a heart attack so easily.” It was always her tragedy.

My daughter was born on February 4, and I spent that spring studying so I could go back to take my exams at the University of Colorado. I took my exams and then I came back and I went to school at Hofstra University, which was within driving distance. My parents weren’t going to let me go anywhere again.

What I did after that…I mean, I’m amazed I’m still alive. It was in the middle of the whole folk period. Bob Dylan made his first album. The whole hippie thing was starting. I was supposed to be a poet and an English teacher; that’s what the women in my family did. You taught English for security and you wrote poetry. I was a really good writer but I took this art class and that was it. I had to lie to my parents. I couldn’t tell them I changed my major to art.

I was going into the city all the time with my art friends, wandering around the Lower East Side. If anybody wanted to sleep with me, I would sleep with them. I had no boundaries—no sexual boundaries, no personal boundaries, nothing. I would just put myself in these incredibly dangerous situations and it was almost like I wanted to be destroyed. I just wanted it to be over. I was filled with the most incredible rage that lasted until I was reunited with my daughter. I was fueled by rage all those years. That was a time
when you could channel it into political protests and the women’s movement and so many other things. But it was really just this unbelievable rage at what had happened and this feeling of being totally powerless.

I met this guy at school and we wound up married to each other for a year. He was a poet. He got me to see someone who could help me. And it’s a good thing he did, because I was really losing it. I mean, I really was very, very disturbed. My parents had no idea that anything was wrong. When my mother found out I was in therapy she was furious at me because I was telling my business to these people.

I think that on a core level I felt so worthless for giving my baby away. I was so beyond redemption that I just deserved nothing. Though I appeared to be very successful, I lived a life of complete lack inside. I couldn’t have what regular people had. I could not have a home, for instance. I could not have something like a washing machine, anything that would make my life easier. That wasn’t for me. I could not have anything, because I really didn’t deserve anything. I never had other children.

When I got married for that one year, everyone started asking me when I was going to have a baby. If I had had a machine gun, I would have just gone out and killed an entire city block full of people. I was so enraged, because that’s when it hit me that it was just a social convention. It had nothing to do with anything. Then later, when people like Madonna were having babies and keeping them and it was trendy, it made me so angry because it was just a matter of years. Now it’s okay.
Then
it was the worst thing imaginable. I have been very angry for a long, long time. I didn’t start out that way as a child. I feel like I lost my soul, in a funny kind of way.

My mom got Alzheimer’s toward the end of her life and she died in 1998. Five days after she died, my daughter called me on the phone. I had been looking for her for years. I contacted the agency in New York and they said all of the paperwork from that era had burned. The records were all destroyed in a fire. I had no information, except I knew her birth date, where she had been born, and the name that had been put on her birth certificate. Then I saw something on television about adoption reunions and the Soundex Registry, so I registered.

As it turns out, my daughter had also seen that program on the Soundex Registry and she sent for the paperwork. But she hadn’t sent the papers in because
she thought she didn’t have enough information. She just held on to them and held on to them. Then she said she woke up one morning and said, “I’ve got to go fill those papers out.” She put all the information that she had on the papers and mailed them. I think they called her the day my mom died.

So five days later I was teaching and I came home and I was really, really tired. I came in the door and my husband said, “Sit down. I have some news for you.” And I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, can’t you just let me get in the door? I’m so tired.” He said, “No. You’re really going to want to hear this.” And I said, “Look, just give me a chance to take my coat off at least.” He said, “Your daughter called.” And I felt like I was going to throw up.

I just had all these mixed emotions. I had thought about it for so long, but then when it happened I was just terrified and excited. These two parts of me were coming into collision. The part of me that felt like this horrible slug underneath a rock that didn’t deserve to peek up into the sunlight, and the part of me that was just, “Oh boy!” were kind of coming up against each other. He said, “You should call her back.” And I said, “I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t call her back.” And he said, “You should call her.” And I said, “I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can. Tell me everything she said.”

He said she had called and had asked for me and he had said, “She’s not home right now. She’s teaching a class.” And my daughter had said, “What is she teaching?” And my husband said, “She’s teaching painting.” And he said she got so excited because she had been raised by two scientists. She was this very creative child in a family of scientists. So she was very excited to find out her mother was an artist. Later, she told me she had never heard anybody speak about somebody with as much love as my husband did about me, which was really sweet.

The first time I drove over to meet her, it was really a shock to see how close she had been all those years. We found out that we both used to jog at the same reservoir. And we both took classes at the same college at the same time. I mean, it’s just so strange.

I think that there’s a thread running through my life that I probably came into this life with, which is the issue of betrayal. That’s something that I feel is a big issue for me. I feel like my parents betrayed me, and then I betrayed my daughter by not being strong enough to keep her. So many of the decisions I made in my life involved not betraying her again. I would never
have other children because that would be a betrayal of my daughter. Because I betrayed her, I really did not deserve to have too much. I should work very, very hard. I should do a lot of things for other people. I should be this force of compassion and protection, especially for other women. For many years I taught courses for women in creativity, in writing, in meditation, and in visual art. I would nurture other women, especially women who didn’t have a voice. I felt a real sense of responsibility to nurture at my own expense, at my own creative expense. I let people take things from me.