“Did Carson know?” Hattie asked her, curious. She had always wondered and never dared ask. Their mother hadn’t told Hattie at the time that Melissa left home for seven months because she was pregnant, but Melissa had told her herself when Hattie was sixteen. Melissa had warned her sternly not to let the same thing happen to her. Hattie still remembered how shocked she had been when Melissa told her the whole story when she was old enough to understand.
“Of course he knew,” Melissa answered her. “I told Carson after he proposed. I would never have married him with a secret like that. And I guess I only had two good eggs in me. We tried but I never got pregnant again after Robbie. Carson was very nice about it when I told him. She would have been sixteen when Carson and I got married, and he asked me if I wanted to try to contact her. He said she’d be welcome to visit. I tried, I called Saint Blaise’s, and spoke to the mother superior, and she said there was no way to find her. All the records had been destroyed in a fire a few years after I’d been there. She said she had no idea where the baby went, or the name of the people who adopted her. I’ve heard that from other women since, and I even read a book about it. It was an exposé of those convents and mother and baby homes in Ireland and England, written by a reporter who was a fallen Catholic. There were many convents like it in Ireland then. They were baby mills. It had been going on since the late forties. Mine was probably among the last of them. Nice Catholic girls from respectable families who got in trouble, and the Church offered a perfect solution. We went to Ireland for the pregnancy, disappeared from our schools at home, and left the babies with them, which made everything nice and simple for our parents, and the nuns had the babies adopted by wealthy American couples, and even a number of movie stars. The adoptive parents gave very large donations to the Church, and everyone was happy, except the girls who gave up their babies when they were too young to know better or have a voice in it. The adoptive parents got what people call today ‘designer babies,’ no drugs or girls from bad homes, all white middle and upper class Catholic girls. The pregnant girls’ parents who could afford to paid a hefty sum to the convent for keeping us, and then the adoptive parents paid a fortune for healthy white babies from decent families.
“The youngest girl when I was there was thirteen. She told me she’d been raped by her uncle, her mother’s brother. Her parents said she was in boarding school for a year, which was what Mom told her friends too. She told them my grades were slipping because I was boy crazy, so they sent me to a good school in Ireland for a year, and I was an angel when I came home. There was only ever one boy. I loved him. And I only had sex with him once. We were too scared to do it again, and I got pregnant the first time. His parents sent him to military school in Mississippi, and Annapolis for college. I never heard from him again. I never had sex again until I was a junior in college at Columbia five years later. I was too traumatized to even date. The baby’s father and I were just children. He was even more afraid of his parents than I was of ours. They sent him away two days after he told them. He snuck out to tell me. The school he was going to sounded like a military prison. His father was a retired naval officer. They treated us like criminals. We thought we were in love, but who knows what that means at sixteen? Mom and Dad shipped me off pretty fast too.”
“I remember,” Hattie said with tears in her eyes for her sister.
“Saint Blaise’s was a nightmare, worse than I feared. And the nuns had the adoption all set up before I gave birth. They wouldn’t tell me anything about the family, just that they were ‘lovely people,’ and they were going to name her Ashley. They were at the convent, waiting, when I had her. The moment the midwife delivered her, they rushed her out of the room to them. They said it would be a sin to let me hold her and rejoice in what I’d done. I never got to hold her and I only got a glimpse of her wrapped in a blanket as one of the nuns took her away.” Melissa had had dreams of it for years. “I was never allowed to meet the adoptive parents, and they took her away to the States when she was a week old. They stayed with her at a hotel in Dublin, until she was old enough to fly back to the States with them. I never even knew what city they lived in. I knew nothing about them, except that they were American.
“There were seventy or eighty girls at the school, from all over the United States, and one girl from Paris who cried all the time. They had two nuns who were midwives right on the premises, so we never left the convent, even to give birth, unless a girl was having twins, or something went seriously wrong during the delivery, and then they’d take them to a hospital. They treated us like criminals, bad girls who needed to be punished, and worked us like slaves. There was no counseling, no therapy. We just stayed for the duration of the pregnancy, went to classes in the morning so we could go back to our schools when we went home, and worked for the rest of the day. After the baby was born, they shipped us home again two weeks later, our hearts broken forever.
“I read somewhere that the Church started getting nervous about it. Forty or fifty years of high-priced adoptions, which must have brought in a fortune, given the donations they accepted in exchange for healthy newborns to be adopted. The nuns covered their tracks by burning all the records, so no one could find the babies that were adopted later on. All trace of them was erased, including the names of the wealthy people who adopted them.
“Saint Blaise’s still exists, I checked. It’s a home for elderly, retired nuns now. They don’t do adoptions anymore. No one in the Church likes to talk about it, but you hear about it from time to time. Most of the girls who went there were too ashamed to talk about it, even now, years later. And probably the men they married later didn’t know.”
Melissa looked devastated while she told Hattie the details she hadn’t told her before. Hattie was deeply moved by what she said. It was an awful story if what she said was true. And Hattie thought that it was. It made her feel almost guilty for being a nun herself, but things happened sometimes even in the Church that were hard to explain, or justify. And she believed what Melissa said, that they had covered it up. She’d heard about some of those convents and mother and baby homes herself. They had served a purpose at one time, but no longer made sense in today’s more liberal world.
“I never forgave Mom for it, I don’t think I ever would have, even if she were alive today,” Melissa said in a broken voice. Talking about it tore her heart out all over again.
“The nuns probably meant well, and it met a need in the early days. What seems wrong is their making money from it, even if it all went to the Church. And destroying the records. But in those days, people weren’t looking for the babies they’d given up, or their birth parents. That’s new, even in adoptions by the state. Those records used to be sealed, and no one could get that information, until the laws were changed,” Hattie said quietly.
“Burning the records was a very efficient way to seal the records forever,” Melissa said bitterly. “I’ve hated even the sight of nuns ever since. I stopped believing in God, and never went to church again when I came home. Mom didn’t dare press that point. Dad acted like he knew nothing, and Mom got sick a few months after I got back, so we never talked about it. You and Carson are the only ones who know.”