“You stupid, stupid, selfish girl. You could have had the world. But not anymore. And this poor child, this poor bastard child.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said, trying to hold back the tears. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t mean to.”
She pulled at the roots of her hair so hard, I thought a clump might come out in her hands. “You can’t go to New York in this condition, you’ll ruin your father’s reputation before he’s even gotten a start. He’ll disown you if he finds out.”
“I have to go to New York,” I said.
“You can’t.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I cried, tears now rolling down my cheeks. “Stay here in Minnesota?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what you’ll do.”
“No!” I cried.
My mother looked off into the distance and rubbed her temples.“You’ll stay here and have the baby, and I don’t know what will happen next for you, I really don’t.”
“Mama, please,” I cried frantically. I couldn’t have a baby, I couldn’t even fathom it, and I certainly couldn’t do it without my mother. I still needed her, I still felt like a child myself.
This was a curse—that man had cursed me, and I had no one to blame but myself for letting it happen.
But over the next week, my mother made the necessary arrangements. I would stay with her widowed sister, my aunt May, in Rockville, a few hours southwest of St. Cloud. There was a place she’d heard of not too far from where Aunt May lived, Birdhouse Lodge, where unwed women went to give birth and put their babies up for adoption. She told my father that Aunt May had taken ill and that someone needed to stay behind and take care of her until she was better. She told my father that she would have to do it, knowing full well that he needed her to set up the new house in Brooklyn and get the boys settled. So she let it be his idea that the only person who could stay behind and care for her sister was me.
I hadn’t seen much of Aunt May after her husband, Henry, died overseas in the war eight years earlier. She’d become something of a recluse since he’d passed, and at first the thought of staying with someone like that for the next seven months made me incredibly uneasy. As a young child, I’d loved her. A few years younger than my mother, she’d been fun and caring and always made the effort to spend time with me away from my brothers, which I’d thoroughlyenjoyed. But after Henry died my mother said she’d changed, and it worried her and frightened me. Her lively, chatty and fun-loving demeanor had been extinguished and what was left was a quiet, dreary and inattentive woman whom no one could recognize.
“Let’s get you settled, then,” she said when I arrived. Her house was simple and a little cluttered with newspapers and magazines. “Yours is the little room at the top of the stairs; we’ll bring your luggage up later. Now I haven’t had many guests over the years so you’ll have to let me know if you need anything.” She looked a little uncomfortable herself, and I longed for my own mother to be there with me, even though in the past few weeks she’d barely been able to stay in the same room as me for more than five minutes.
While I didn’t know anyone in Rockville, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself and couldn’t risk anyone seeing me in my swollen state, in case news got back to my father. So I stayed home mostly, as Aunt May did, with the exception of her early morning walks to the store and her afternoon gardening. We played cards and I read magazines that she picked up at the store for me, and when she was outside gardening I practiced my scales and all the songs I knew from my previous performances.
She was thirty-eight or so, and she had a pretty face, if only she’d tame her wild hair. In a picture she kept on the mantel of Henry and her on their wedding day, she was breathtaking. She told me they’d met at a dance at the church hall and that he’d come calling the next day and every day after for a week. At the end of the week he’d asked her to marry him, and she’d said yes. I smiled at the thought of her, young and giddy with all the possibilities of love waiting for her.
“Thank you,” I said quietly one afternoon as we were having a cup of tea in the living room. “For letting me stay.” I looked down at my slightly protruding belly and sighed. “I got myself into a real mess, Aunt May.”
She pressed her lips together. “Yes, poppet, yes, you did. But it doesn’t look like you had many options.”
She walked over to me and gave my shoulder a squeeze. It was the first act of affection she’d shown toward me in the three weeks I’d been there, after all those hugs and kisses she’d bestowed upon me as a child. I wondered if it was because she’d become so used to being alone that she’d forgotten.
“I’m scared,” I said, finally letting out the words that had been twisting and turning inside my head night after night. “I’m really scared.”
“I know you are,” she said, not offering any empty promises that everything would be all right, and for that I was strangely grateful. “When you were a child you used to get more scrapes and bruises on your legs than your brothers combined. Don’t tell them that I told you this, but they used to cry and cry, and you, well, you just brushed yourself off and got on with whatever it was you were doing. You were the strongest of the four of you, always have been. You’re going to come through this. You’ll be all right, Olive, I know you will.”
When the time finally came, I packed a suitcase as I would if I were going away on a family trip, not to some Catholic boardinghouse where disgraced women gave birth.
“Are you sure I can’t have the baby here at home?” I asked. As the months went by, Aunt May’s house felt like a safe haven and I was terrified of what would happen once I left its confines.
“You’ve got the baby to think of now, Olive,” she said. “They’ll find a home for your child. That is still what you want, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said quietly, though all of this just felt so wrong. I couldn’t raise a child, not like this. I was young, I had no husband, and there were so many things I wanted to do with my life, but the thought of giving my baby away to strangers was excruciating.
“That’s what your mother wants for you, too. She gave me strict instructions to follow, so that you can get back to your family where you belong. The sooner you get through this, the sooner you can get back to your old life. Now, come on”—she put her weight on my suitcase and zipped it closed—“we don’t want you missing that train.”
She placed her hand on my belly, now firm and tight, about the size of a watermelon. “It won’t be long now.”
When I arrived, it was nothing like I’d expected. The name Birdhouse Lodge sounded quaint and peaceful, but women were four or even six to a room in bunk beds, nuns enforcing that everyone take shifts scrubbing the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, cooking in the kitchen and earning their keep right up until they gave birth.
At forty weeks I waited for my turn, terrified of the pain that was to come, that we’d all heard in the screams from the delivery room and that we’d seen in the blood that we’d washed from the sheets and towels. Up until this point it had all felt unreal. I hadn’t discussed my body’s transformation with anyone, not even Aunt May; I’d just watched mystomach grow and grow in stunned silence. But now that I was surrounded by other women with the same fate, hearing their screams, seeing their sadness, it all became frighteningly real. I lay awake at night petrified of dying, of never having the chance to live out my dreams. This is just temporary, I kept telling myself when I was down on my hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, this will be over soon.
And then, one afternoon when I carried the bucket of water to the outdoor drain, I had to set it down suddenly. I’d managed with every task asked of me up until that point, trying to just get on and get this done, but at that moment it all felt too much. Everything felt too heavy—the bucket, my legs, my stomach. Extra weight seemed to be pushing down on me, even my shoulders seemed to be pulling downward. I slumped to the ground.
