The Home for Unwanted Girls

by Joanna Goodman

  His eyes close and he starts to snore unevenly. “That’s how it worked,” he murmurs, half awake again. “We didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. But then nothing worked out how I thought it would.”

  Before long, he’s snoring loudly, his throat rattling. As Maggie steps out of the room, she collides with her mother. She’s got a Crown Royal bottle in one hand and a glass of ice cubes in the other.

  “He’s asleep,” Maggie says, closing the door.

  “What did he tell you?” her mother wants to know.

  “Everything.”

  “We didn’t think we were doing anything wrong,” her mother defends. “We were just trying to clean up your mess the best way we knew how, Maggie.”

  “My mess? It’s possible it was Yvon’s fault!”

  Maggie may be able to forgive her father for having taken Elodie to the orphanage, but she won’t afford her mother the same courtesy for having chosen to believe Yvon over her own daughter. “I guess it’s more convenient for you to blame Gabriel instead of your beloved brother-in-law,” Maggie says.

  “He’s my sister’s husband, Maggie.”

  “I’m your daughter.”

  Maman looks away.

  “I’m going to find her,” Maggie says.

  “You won’t be able to,” her mother warns. “They probably changed her name, wiped away her history. No one in this province wants you to know where that child is, or what’s happened to her.”

  Maggie glares at her mother for a moment, and then repeats with authority, “I’m going to find her.”

  Chapter 38

  Maggie brings the car to a stop in front of the Hôpital Mentale Saint-Sulpice, and sits there for several minutes, trying to collect herself. Its redbrick facade and inviting front yard make Maggie think it was probably quite a charming home once. If not for the bars on the dormer windows, it still could be.

  A quick phone call to the foundling home in Cowansville revealed that a three-week-old baby girl had arrived there in April of 1950 and was transferred a month later to Saint-Sulpice, as her father had guessed. In 1954, its name—and, with it, its vocation—was officially changed to the Hôpital Mentale Saint-Sulpice.

  Maggie gets out of the car and stands at the front door for a long time, imagining her infant daughter being brought here all those years ago in the arms of a stranger. She takes a breath and bangs the knocker. Almost immediately, someone opens the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  Maggie is surprised to find herself facing a middle-aged man with an Elvis pompadour. She’d been expecting a nun.

  “Is there someone in charge I can speak to?” she asks him. “One of the sisters?”

  “I’m the caretaker.”

  “I’d like some information about my daughter.”

  The man frowns. He has tired eyes, a hard expression. He must get women like Maggie showing up all the time looking for their long-lost children, especially since the commissions of inquiry are just being made public. “We don’t give out information,” he says. “It’s against the law.”

  She steps toward him and presses a fifty-dollar bill into his hand. “Please accept this donation,” she says nervously. “Anything you can tell me would be appreciated.”

  He hesitates a moment and then quickly pockets the money. “Come with me,” he says.

  Maggie follows him inside, noting the grim interior—dim lighting, neglected furniture, a strong odor of mildew—as they make their way to an office at the back. He tugs on a cord, and a bare bulb illuminates a narrow room lined with wooden filing cabinets. Maggie scans the cabinets, envisioning their sanctified contents—babies’ names, birth parents’ names, adoptive families’ names, dates of birth, places of birth, hospital records, birth certificates; all of it off-limits to the very people who most want access.

  “Name?” the man says.

  “Maggie Larsson.”

  “The girl’s name,” he says impatiently. “Did she have one?”

  “Elodie.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “March 6th, 1950.”

  He kneels down in front of the cabinet marked 1948–1950 and flips through the manila file folders until he finds what he’s looking for. Maggie holds her breath.

  “Here,” he says, handing her the file. He leans back up against the cabinets and lights a cigarette. “Hurry up before Sister Tata and the others get back. Most of them are still at the morning service.”

  Exactly what she was hoping. Maggie opens the file with shaking hands. There are two documents inside. The first is a copy of the birth certificate. Name, Elodie. Date of birth, March 6th, 1950. Place of birth, Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital. Cowansville, Quebec. Mother: unknown. Father: unknown.

  The other paper in the folder is a Record of Transfer. “What is this?” Maggie asks. “It’s dated October 1957.”

  “A lot of children were transferred to the mental hospitals in Montreal,” he says. “After the conversion.”

  “Does that mean she wasn’t adopted?”

  “Not if there’s a Record of Transfer.”

  “But why would she have been transferred?”

  “To make room for more patients,” he responds. “After ’55, they started sending real mental patients here. They had to start shipping orphans to the asylums in the city to make space. We weren’t equipped to handle them all.”

  “Were you here then?” she asks him. “Do you think you might remember her?”

  “I’ve only been here two years,” he tells her. “I was working at an orphanage in Valleyfield before that, but I remember the day the nuns there told the children.”

  He stubs out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray and opens his pack for another. He hands her one and lights it. It feels good in her lungs. It’s the first deep breath she’s taken in hours.

  “I remember one of the nuns going from classroom to classroom that morning, announcing to the children that they were all going to be declared mentally deficient. Imagine? The nuns were upset, they knew they were doing something wrong.”

  He shakes his head at the memory. “One day they were all sitting in class, getting an education,” he says. “The next, just like that, no more school. They were treated like retards from then on. Bars went up on the windows, as you can see. Gates around the property. It wasn’t long after that when they started sending them to asylums in Montreal, cramming them into wards already overcrowded with real mental patients.”

  The small room is cloudy with their cigarette smoke. “Why?” she asks, knowing the answer. Hating it.

  “Why is the easy part,” he says. “The province paid the nuns a pittance to care for orphans, and more than three times as much to care for mental patients. That’s why Mount Providence turned itself into a mental institution, and why so many orphanages in Quebec followed suit. It’s always about money, isn’t it?”

  “That can’t have been legal?”

  He lets out a hard laugh. “Legal?” he says. “Who do you think benefited most from the whole thing? The moment those kids’ records were changed to classify them as mentally deficient, the church and Duplessis started to line their pockets. The province got giant subsidies from the federal government to build hospitals, so it could certainly afford to pay the church more than triple for taking care of mental patients than it used to pay for orphans.”

  “Where was she taken?” Maggie asks him. “Why doesn’t it say on this Record of Transfer?”

  “They wouldn’t have included that information. Nothing that might lead someone like you to your child was ever kept.”

  “Where are the rest of the documents?” Maggie wants to know. “Shouldn’t there be more?”

  “A lot of the records were destroyed after the orphanages were converted. It’s possible hers were transferred to the asylum with her, but as you can see, if there was a Record of Transfer left here, it would be quite vague.”

  Maggie closes the file and hands it back to him. She feels as hollow as she
did the day Elodie was taken from her eleven years ago. “Do you have any idea where she might have been sent?” she asks him. “Any idea at all?”

  “Maybe Saint-Nazarius or Mercy. Those were the two where most of our orphans were transferred. I doubt you’ll find her, though. They’re all fortresses, those places. Besides, most of the records on that end are all lies anyway. I’ve seen files describing normal, healthy kids as severely retarded, a danger to themselves and others. All made up. Real records were expunged. A lot of those orphans were given new names when they got to the hospitals—starting with A for the babies born in January, B for February, and so on.”

  Maggie’s spirits plummet. How will she ever find Elodie if Elodie was given a new name? If her records—her identity—were wiped clean?

  “The church has to keep covering this up,” the caretaker says. “You won’t be able to pay them off the way you did me.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You could write to Quebec City.”

  “Where will that get me?” she sniffs. “Since when does the government get involved with helping orphans?”

  “Since Duplessis died,” he says. “A commission of psychiatrists has been investigating some of the province’s mental hospitals. At Mount Providence they’ve already concluded that most of the five hundred children they examined are perfectly normal. Big surprise, heh?”

  “What are they doing about it?”

  “I’m not sure. I think the plan is to put the younger ones into foster care. Let the older ones fend for themselves.” He shrugs, his expression cynical. “The new government has only just revealed these kids don’t belong in mental institutions. There are still hundreds of hospitals to investigate.”

  “My God. So I may be able to get her back,” Maggie says.

  “If you manage to find her,” he says. “But believe me, the nuns will do everything in their power to stop you.”

  Outside, Maggie takes several deep breaths before jumping in her car and driving home, where she immediately starts firing off letters to the provincial government, demanding to see her daughter’s files and to learn where she was transferred in 1957.

  Chapter 39

  Maggie’s breasts are engorged; she’s hoping the baby will wake up soon so she can offload some of this milk. She’s been reading Godbout’s latest manuscript to distract herself, making notes here and there, mulling over how she might handle it. She asked for sign credit this time and Godbout promised to discuss it with his publisher. He’s become a champion of her literary career.

  She’s still trying to decide what to do about her father’s store. She’s certainly tempted to take over the reins, but Peter wants to sell it and give the money to their mother. He doesn’t seem too interested in what their father wants, given he’s never thought the business had the potential to turn a substantial profit. Although Maggie is inclined to believe keeping it in the family would be a better long-term investment, generating a decent income for their mother, she hasn’t fought for it yet. She’s still not sure how she would manage motherhood and running a very demanding retail business. Her father was never home, which is not an option for Maggie, but the thought of selling the store to a stranger doesn’t sit right.

  James Gabriel is plump and solid now, with fine golden hair, eyes that hover between blue and gray, and bright pink cheeks. Maggie’s mother even declared him to be cuter than Peter was as a baby. Life since his arrival has become one long sequence of breastfeeding, sleep deprivation, hormonal madness, stunning confusion, loneliness, and ferocious, almost painful devotion to this self-centered little creature. There’s been scant time to prepare for her father’s death, if such a thing is even possible. There’s also been no time to ruminate over Gabriel or Elodie’s whereabouts. In many ways, Maggie is grateful for her zombielike state and the suspension of reality.

  Her sisters have been a great help. Now that Vi has her driver’s license, she visits almost every day, often bringing Nicole with her, Geri, too, if she can get away from school. Sometimes one of them will stay by their father’s sickbed so that her mother can visit the baby, too. They fight over who gets to hold James and change his diapers and fetch him from his naps, especially Maman, who lavishes him with affection. Maggie and her sisters think she’s going soft in her old age.

  Violet comes into the kitchen carrying a laundry basket filled to overflowing with freshly washed diapers, burp cloths, layettes, and baby blankets.

  “Oh, Vi, you’re a lifesaver,” Maggie says.

  Vi sets the basket down and removes her glasses, which are fogged up. “I love folding his little things,” she says.

  “You’re such a natural with him.”

  “I don’t know how you do it without a husband,” she says. “I’ll drop by tomorrow after work.” And then the door slams behind her and the house falls silent. James Gabriel sleeps on, undisturbed.

  Maggie returns to Godbout’s book. About half an hour goes by and there’s a knock at the door. Maggie notices Violet’s glasses sitting on the edge of the table and grabs them as she gets up. She quickly pats her nipples with a dish towel and rushes to the door.

  More knocking.

  “Coming, Vi!” she says, exasperated. She reaches the door and opens it, glasses in hand. “I just noticed them, otherwise I would have called to—”

  She stops midsentence when she realizes it’s not Violet. Instinctively, she looks down at herself—her leaking breasts and stained shirt—and regrets opening the door.

  “Maggie,” Gabriel says.

  Maggie makes an effort to compose herself, but her entire body is shaking.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call in advance,” he says. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”

  “Of course I want to see you,” she says, her voice choked with emotion. At the same time, her eyes sweep over him, taking a quick inventory from head to foot. He’s wearing an army jacket and jeans with a Montreal Canadiens tuque pulled down low over his brow. Still gorgeous. His shoulders seem broader, his eyes bluer, his lips fuller. Or does she just imagine it to be so? Part of her wants to fling herself into his arms; the other, to smash her fist into his face. She has no idea where they stand.

  “Come in,” she says, opening the door.

  “Nice place,” he comments, following her to the kitchen. “You’ve done a good job decorating it.”

  Maggie’s like her mother that way. She likes to sew her own curtains and buy vintage fabrics and use lots of ruffles; she buys antiques from flea markets and auctions, and paints and restores them.

  “New translation?” he asks, eyeing her notes on the kitchen table. “I read your last one. You did a brilliant job.”

  “I’m glad you liked it,” she says, feeling her anger mounting.

  “How have you been?” he asks, as though he’s just gotten back from a fishing trip.

  “A lot’s happened.”

  “I heard about your father. I’m sorry.”

  “Where have you been?” she blurts out. “Do you know the lengths I went to trying to find you? How often I harassed your sisters? You just vanished!”

  Gabriel pulls off his cap and tousles his hair, which has grown out since she last saw him, but he doesn’t say anything. He sits down at her kitchen table without waiting to be asked.

  “I called everywhere,” she says, sitting down as well. “I even spoke to your wife. I went to Canadair, the place on Papineau—”

  “I know.”

  “You quit the factory and didn’t tell anybody? You just disappeared. Why?”

  “Everything fell apart after it ended between us. I left Annie. I couldn’t stand being there, couldn’t stand driving the cab anymore, the factory. I had to get out.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “It was you I had to get away from most of all,” Gabriel admits. “I believed it could never work between us. You were used to a different kind of life. You had expectations I couldn’t meet.”

  Maggie looks away
.

  “But I’ve made my peace,” he says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “With who I am.”

  “I see,” she responds, not sure what he’s trying to tell her.

  “You were still married, Maggie. What did I have to offer? I had nothing.”

  “You could have come back to Dunham, to your family’s farm.”

  “To have to answer to my big sister for the rest of my life? To have absolutely no say while she makes all the decisions, like I’m still fourteen? Or to steal you away from your wealthy banker husband and support you? How? With what?”

  “I left him,” she says. “I’d already told him I was going to. I didn’t care about the stuff. I only wanted you. I waited and waited for you.”

  “It just didn’t seem like such a great plan at the time.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Gaspé.”

  She glances up at him, allowing herself to really look at him for the first time.

  “I got a job cod fishing,” he says.

  “You didn’t even tell your sisters where you were?”

  “Clémentine and I weren’t speaking. Angèle knew, but she would never tell anyone if I asked her not to. Not even Clem. I just needed to be alone.”

  “You did a good job.”

  “That was the point.” He adds some milk to his tea. “But I feel okay now,” he says. “Pretty good, actually. The physical work is good. I love living by the sea, working outdoors. Far from Montreal.”

  “And from me.”

  “At first. I needed to get some clarity, absorb everything.”

  “And now?”

  “I bought some land in the Gaspé.”

  Hearing this, Maggie feels the same acute sense of loss she felt the first time he left her. She wants more than anything to beg him to stay, but he’s bought land, extinguishing their second chance at love.

  “I don’t want to drive a taxi or spend the rest of my life at Canadair,” he tells her. “It’s the one thing I was able to get really clear about while I was gone.”