The Girls Who Went Away (11 page)

She went back three times. The second time she got the letter that I wrote. The social worker called and said, “I’m calling to let you know that your daughter came in again and we gave her your letter.” She said, “She isn’t ready to meet you and, to be quite honest, she doesn’t know if she ever would be.” I could barely breathe. I could barely freakin’ breathe. I felt rejected, but I thought, “Okay, she’s only twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old.” The social worker said something that led me to believe it might be a loyalty conflict with her mother, and I understood that. I thought, “Okay, I’ve gotta just let her, hopefully, grow beyond this.” The social worker said, “What you can do is write another letter.” The first letter I wrote was basically “I want to meet you.” It was probably just a couple of pages. But when the social worker said to me, “If I were you, I’d write another letter, and I’ll put it in the file,” I sat down and I wrote a novel. And, sure enough, within six months Raina went back and wanted more information and she got that second letter. When she read it, she said to the social worker, “I’m not sure, but I think I might want to go through with this.”

What she was supposed to do was write a letter and take it to the agency
and then they would send it to me. But she’s smart. She had all of the first names of my family members from my nonidentifying letter and she went to the public library, got on microfiche, and goes through all the death notices for July of 1978 until she found my father’s first name, address, and the names of the survivors. She gets into her car and goes right to my mother’s house.

I’m in Colorado working at this boutique when she knocks on my mother’s door. My mother’s making macaroni—what’s new? She comes to the door in her apron and my daughter says, “Are you Claudia’s mother?” She says yes. And she says, “I’m Raina. I’m Claudia’s daughter.” My mother just grabbed her and smothered her with a big hug. Then she immediately calls my sister and says, “You gotta get over here right away. Claudia’s daughter is here. Drop whatever you’re doing. I need you here.”

So I’m closing up the register at work and the phone rings. I pick it up and I hear this voice, “Hello, is this Claudia?” “Yeah.” “This is Raina.” I said, “Oh my God, it’s you, it’s you!” She said, “I’m at your mother’s house.” I said, “You’re what?” She said, “I’m at your mother’s house.” And I say, “Are you okay?” And she starts laughing. In the background, I hear my mother screaming, “Oh my God. She looks just like you did at that age.” And there’s crying and screaming and laughing, and Raina laughs and says, “I’m fine. I grew up just like this.”

We talked for two hours, right then. I couldn’t even think straight; I was mental. I hung up that phone. I closed up that store. I went home and told my daughter what happened. We were both mental. Then I called my friend the travel agent. I said, “I don’t know where I’m gonna get the money, but my daughter and I are flying home within the next two days.”

She met me at the airport. All of a sudden, here comes this beautiful woman. She’s got on Levi’s and a pair of black Doc Martens and a little black leather jacket, and she has hair like mine, really long curly hair down to her waist. She’s got these really big eyebrows and this beautiful smile, which I saw her father in right away, and she’s carrying one rose. We went up to a restaurant and ordered all this food but we didn’t eat anything. We were looking at each other’s fingers. I was looking at her ears. She’s looking at my eyebrows. We’re looking and we’re talking and it was just amazing. It was so amazing. She said, “You know, if we’re gonna have a relationship I want you
to know who I am. I’m gay.” I said, “I don’t care.” And I really don’t care because, oh God, if you can find love you’re lucky.

Raina says to me, “Tell me about my father.” So I tell her. I tell her how magnificently beautiful he was and how I was so in love with him and what an amazing artist he is and she says to me, “I really, really want to meet him but I don’t want to interrupt his life. Even if I could just see him, I don’t want anything from him.” Well, I hadn’t seen him since I was nineteen years old. I contacted a friend of mine who knows him and he says, “I don’t have his phone number, but I know where he works. I’ll take you there, and then you’re on your own.” So my friend picks me up and I’m shaking like a leaf. I’m more nervous about this than I was about meeting my daughter.

It’s about eleven in the morning. I go to the main door and it’s locked. I go to a side door, locked. I go to the back door, locked. So I’m standing in the yard and I see a man with a baseball cap on. I’m way up on the steps and he’s down in the yard. He sees me and he points to a door under the stairs. He says, “That door is open if you want to get in.” I’m thinking, “Maybe he knows him.” So I walk toward him and I go, “Excuse me, sir,” and he looks up from what he’s doing and takes a couple of steps forward and I say, “Maybe you can help me? I’m looking for…” He takes his baseball cap off and he says, “Claudia?” And it’s him. He’s sixty years old. When I knew him he was this gorgeous thirty-one-year-old man. He’s still handsome. He’s still a beautiful man.

He says, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Do you have a minute? We need to talk.” And he says, “You know, I always knew that I would see you again someday.” He says, “I’ve thought about you over the years and I always thought, “One day I’m gonna see Claudia walking down the street.” I said, “Remember when I had the baby in 1968?” And he nods his head, “Yeah,” and his eyes are getting kind of big. I said, “Well, I met her.” He doesn’t say anything. He kind of just leans forward. I said, “She’s an amazing girl. She’s a beautiful, smart, articulate, amazing girl, and she doesn’t want anything from you, but she would love to meet you. Is there any chance that you would be willing to meet her, just meet her?” His eyes fill up with tears and he says, “She’s my family, of course I’m gonna meet her.” Then the very next thing he says is “I have to tell my wife.” He had never told her.

He went home and he told his wife. She called me. Oh yeah, she called me, she’s an amazing woman. They’re amazing people. She was definitely taken aback. She told me that every April she used to think of me and would always say a prayer for me. She told me that she used to even say to him, “Remember Claudia? Remember your friend Claudia, who went to that home for unwed mothers? That was so sad.” He had twenty-nine years to tell her, and he had opportunities, but he never did. Maybe he thought she would leave him. She told me it took a couple of days of praying and being alone and sitting with her rage, and then she said, “Okay, I have another daughter.” And that’s when she called me. When she called me and said, “Claudia?” I just got hysterical. I just started crying. I couldn’t believe the courage. She said, “Look, let me just say right up front, I’m very glad that you came forward. We have a daughter now. We are family. I don’t want you to feel bad about this, because we share a daughter now.”

I’m in the process of some big-time healing now. I moved back here five years ago to help my mom. She’s eighty now. You know, in Italian families there’s usually one who stays home. Now I’m that person. She needs me. She had complete knee replacement five years ago but she’s up and running now. We’re taking Italian lessons together and we’re gonna go back to Italy because she wants to go one more time before she dies.

Discovery and Shame

I called my folks from college in Madison to tell them I was pregnant and my dad said, “Don’t come home.” And my mom would not buck my dad. At the time, my dad was a sheriff. He would be up for reelection and he did not want a daughter like me around. It was fine while I was class valedictorian and the shining star, but not while I was pregnant, no.

—Glory

F
OR SINGLE GIRLS
who became pregnant during these decades, the most common solution was a hasty trip to the altar and the claim that the baby’s birth was premature. One reason that the high number of pregnancies wasn’t socially acknowledged was that so many premarital conceptions were effectively covered up through marriage. On average, 50 percent of these young women were married before the baby was born, leaving only half to be recorded as illegitimate births.
¹
Since the average age of marriage had dropped after the war, it was not at all unusual for young people to get married in their late teens or very early twenties. Throughout the war years and until about 1972, the median age at first marriage for women remained below twenty-one.
²
Those who did not plan to attend college often got married shortly after graduating from high school.

You could always get married to give the baby a name and then get divorced afterward. That’s what was done. That’s what many, many, many girls did.

—Maureen II

For many girls, however, marriage wasn’t an option and the reasons varied. In some cases the young men walked, or ran, away from their pregnant partners. Many simply said they weren’t ready for marriage. In other cases, the young couple wanted to get married but parents or clergy discouraged or prevented their plans from moving forward. Those who were not yet of legal age—which could range from fourteen to twenty-one, depending on their state of residence—needed their parents’ permission to marry.

When I told him I was pregnant, he asked me what the heck I thought he should do. And the next thing I knew he was gone. I was devastated when he just hit the road. I felt so violated, so stupid, so used. I never told anybody. I couldn’t even get it out of my mouth because to
say
I was pregnant might have made it real. I don’t know whether I thought an angel would appear and tell me what to do or, better yet, maybe a truck would run over me. I just thanked God that 1967 was the era of big tent dresses. I never heard from him again except for when I had the baby. I wrote him a note and he called me and said, “You sound so bitter, Lynne. You were never bitter.”

—Lynne

I had been dating the father of the baby for probably a year and a half or two years. He was in Vietnam and he came home to Minnesota on leave and that’s when we started up a more serious relationship. I got pregnant when he came home for good. In the beginning, I sort of fantasized that we would get married. I remember looking through the Sears catalogs at curtains and kitchen tables and things like that. Then it became clear that he didn’t want to get married, so that was that.

—Susan I

I was seventeen when I found out I was pregnant and I was actually not too worried because I had gone out with my boyfriend for four years and we had talked about getting married. I was graduating from high school in a few months and I had gotten a job. My boyfriend had gone into the National Guard because his draft number was something like three. I called him and told him that I was pregnant, and he didn’t say anything. I was just so sure that everything was going to be fine. A week later he came home, but he was still evading it. Then he said, “I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready for this.”

I thought, “Well, he just needs time.” In the meantime, he moved into his own apartment with a couple of his buddies and he still wasn’t talking about what we were going to do. I was just hoping that he was going to call and say that he cared about me and about our baby. But at that point I didn’t really care if he loved me. I just wanted some way to be able to keep this baby.

—Cathy I

I grew up in St. Mark’s parish and later we moved to St. Ann’s. Everything is parishes in Dorchester if you’re familiar with Boston at all. They don’t ask where you’re from in Boston; it’s from what parish. My boyfriend came from a similar background and we met in the fall of 1967 at UMass in Boston. He was my first real boyfriend. We were inseparable. We had been together all summer and didn’t have sexual relations that whole year until December. I suspected immediately because I had never been late in my life. When I told him, he cried. He said, “It’s not happening, it’s got to be something else.” But he said he would stand by me and we would get married.

You have to go through this Pre-Cana stuff with the Catholic Church and they have to talk to you for weeks on end. So we made our first appointment with the priest. I remember him being very suspicious. The next time we went back together, the priest wanted to see my boyfriend by himself. He talked to him for about half an hour and the next day the priest called my father and said, “There is not going to be a wedding. This boy isn’t ready for marriage.”

Then my boyfriend told me about this church for people who are outcast Catholics, or if you’re divorced or some kind of sinner you can go there. There was a long corridor with little counseling rooms and my boyfriend went in and talked to the priest and then he came out and said, “He wants to see you now.” He wasn’t like my parish priest, who wore a black robe and a white collar. He was a Franciscan. He had a brown robe, and sandals, a real rope belt and I think he had a big crucifix and beads hanging around his waist, too. I was a little bit fascinated just by the look of him.

He immediately pointed out to the corridor and said that he was worried about my boyfriend. He started talking about my boyfriend’s mother and about him being her only son, and making me feel that this was all about him. He said he was sure that my boyfriend was a good boy and had strong feelings for me, but I was doing the wrong thing by trying to arrange a marriage. He said, “You must know from your twelve years of Catholic education that you need to take responsibility for yourself.”