She wandered into the neighboring village on her walk. It was still early and the shops weren’t open yet, but the librarian was sweeping off the front steps of the library and had just opened the doors. Not knowing what else to do, Hattie walked in, and smiled at the librarian when she came to the desk after her sweeping. She was a tall thin woman with a sharp face, who glanced at Hattie with suspicion, and recognized immediately that she was a stranger in their midst. She looked old enough to have been there when Saint Blaise’s was an adoption mill, and Hattie decided to be bold and take the chance, and dove in.
“Have you worked here long?” Hattie asked her, trying to sound casual.
“Long enough. Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious about Saint Blaise’s,” Hattie said, getting right to the point. “A friend of my mother’s adopted a baby here.”
“A lot of people did. Americans mostly. Rich ones, and even some movie stars. Everybody around here knows that. It’s not a secret.” No, but everything else about it was. “You’re American,” she added. “Was your mother’s friend a movie star?”
Hattie smiled at that. “No, but they had money. I understand people paid the Church a fortune for those babies.” As she said it, she could see the librarian bristle.
“Are you a reporter?”
“No, I’m not.” She thought of telling her she was a nun, but decided it was a bad idea.
“Every few years, someone goes on a witch hunt about those adoptions. Ever since that traitor wrote a book about it, and left the Church.”
“There’s a book?” Hattie asked her. The only one she knew of was the one Melissa had mentioned, written by a reporter. But when Hattie had asked her sister about it, she couldn’t remember the author or the title and said she had thrown it away.
“It’s garbage. All lies. Banned by the Church,” the librarian answered. “She was one of the nuns here back then, and then she turned on them. You’re not a Catholic, are you?” she asked Hattie accusingly.
“Yes, I am,” Hattie said simply.
“Then you shouldn’t be snooping around what doesn’t concern you, and happened a long time ago, and trying to vilify the Church. They did a good thing for all those unfortunate, sinful girls, and put the babies in good homes. That’s all that matters. The rest is nobody’s business.”
“What’s the name of the book?” Hattie persisted.
“Babies for Sale. Catholics aren’t allowed to read it. And a good Catholic wouldn’t want to.”
“Thank you,” Hattie said politely, and walked out of the small library as the woman stared at her angrily.
Hattie walked farther into the village and stopped at a bookstore. A young girl was dusting off the books as Hattie walked in and asked if she had a copy of the book the librarian had mentioned. She wondered if it was out of print. The girl said she’d check in the back, and returned a few minutes later with a dusty copy. She grinned mischievously.
“We’re not supposed to have it. It’s banned by the Church, but the owner likes keeping books like that in the back. I think it’s about some scandal around here.” Hattie paid for it, put it in her purse, and walked back to the convent. She sat in the garden reading it, as younger nuns brought the elderly ones in wheelchairs outdoors to get a little morning sun. Hattie was so engrossed in the book she barely noticed them. The book was written by a woman named Fiona Eckles, and the blurb on the back said that she had questioned her vocation after serving at Saint Blaise’s as a nurse and midwife, and ultimately left the Church. It said she taught literature at Dublin University now. In the photograph, she looked to be in her late sixties, if the photo was recent. The book was only a few years old. It said it had taken her years to write about it. The few pages Hattie read corroborated what her sister had said about Saint Blaise’s and the adoptions that took place there.
Hattie called Dublin information on the cellphone she had rented at the airport. She got Fiona Eckles’s phone number, and left her a message. She was packing her bag when the author called her, and Hattie asked if she could meet with her, about her book. Fiona Eckles hesitated for an instant, and asked if she was a reporter. Hattie said she wasn’t, but that her sister had been at Saint Blaise’s in the late 1980s.
“I was there then, but I doubt if I can provide much information. I delivered the babies, but I was never privy to the records or the names of the adopting parents.” She said she’d had calls like this one before, from women desperate for information about where their babies had gone. “My fellow nuns covered their tracks pretty well. That was part of the deal. Some of the couples who adopted were very well known. We recognized the movie stars, but not the others. It was a booming business for a while. The Church doesn’t want anyone talking about it. If I hadn’t left, they probably would have excommunicated me,” she said with a wry laugh. “I couldn’t stay after what I’d seen.” Hattie wondered if she knew Melissa or would have remembered her. She had brought a photograph of Melissa at sixteen, just in case. She kept several photographs of her and their parents at the convent in New York.
Fiona agreed to meet with her at six o’clock that night, in a hotel lobby in Dublin. After the call, Hattie walked around the convent, to get a better feel of it in the daylight. It was just as grim and depressing as it was at night. She left a note for the mother superior, thanking her for allowing her to stay, with a small donation for the convent. She picked up her bag then, and called for a taxi to take her to the bus terminal. She caught a bus to Dublin, and checked in to a small hotel in time to meet Fiona Eckles at the Harding Hotel for a drink. She couldn’t wait to meet her now and hear what she had to say. She felt mildly guilty for staying at a hotel, but didn’t have time to contact a convent, despite her promise to Mother Elizabeth.
Hattie recognized the woman easily from the photograph on the book. Fiona Eckles had short snowy white hair and bright blue eyes. She had a ready smile and laugh lines around her eyes. She looked like a happy person, not a tortured soul, and like a well-dressed grandmother in a navy linen suit. She had a trim figure. Hattie thought she might be seventy by then, and nothing about her style or demeanor suggested that she’d ever been a nun. She could have been a banker or an executive, and had been a college professor now for many years. She wrote nonfiction, and had published a total of four controversial books, the most recent one about wayward priests. It had been a bestseller. The writing style was simple, clear, and direct.
“I hope I can help you,” Fiona Eckles said kindly when they sat down, “but I doubt I can. I delivered hundreds of babies, maybe a thousand, while I was at Saint Blaise’s. The uncomplicated ones. The high-risk cases went to the hospital, and were seen by a doctor. And I had very little contact with the girls until they were in labor, and I knew nothing at all about the adopting parents, and never met them. Except the movie stars of course. There were a number of those. We all recognized them, and it always provided a buzz around the place when one of them showed up. We knew who they were even when they used false names.”
“My sister was there in 1988,” Hattie said, after their initial introductions, and they each ordered a glass of wine.
“I was there then, delivering babies night and day.”
“My sister calls it a baby mill.”
“She isn’t wrong,” Fiona Eckles said with a small sigh. “In the end, I thought that too. They brought them in, they made them work and go to school, delivered their babies, and charged their parents a hefty fee for keeping the girls there for several months. Then they took their babies, collected a huge fee from the adopting parents, for the Church of course, and sent the girls home two weeks after they delivered as though nothing had happened. No therapy, no counseling, just in the stirrups and out the door, while a lot of money changed hands, from wealthy people who couldn’t have babies of their own. I guess it suited everyone’s needs at the time. But I know from talking to the
m when they were in labor that a lot of those girls didn’t want to give their babies up, but they had no other choice. Their parents wouldn’t let them come home until they did. One girl went on a hunger strike and nearly died, and refused to sign the papers. She did in the end, though. They all did. It broke my heart to see the look on their faces when we took the babies away minutes after we delivered them. I tried to at least let the girls see them, and hold them when I could get away with it. Our orders were to take the babies away immediately, with no contact between mother and child, after everything they’d been through. We practiced natural childbirth, so there was less liability for us. The adoptive parents were usually waiting in the nursery. That was the end of it for the girls from that point on. They had no contact with their babies, no chance to hold them or say goodbye. It was very traumatic for most of the girls. All of them probably.
“After a while, I just couldn’t do it, it was too painful to watch, worse than labor and delivery. I let the nursing nuns take the babies from them. I couldn’t. I gave up midwifery and the Church when I left. In a way, it destroyed me too. I recovered, but it took a long time, and I never really forgave myself for being part of it. We had very strict orders about our protocols. That’s why I wrote the book. I wanted to make people aware, and maybe to get absolution. The Church claimed we were providing a noble service, but they never admitted how much money they made. I think we’d be even more horrified if we knew how much they made in all those years.”
“Were there local girls there too?” Hattie asked her.
“Very few. Most of their parents couldn’t afford it. There were a few socialites and aristocrats from London, the occasional French girl, or Spaniard or Italian, but mainly Americans. They could pay more to send their daughters away, and the Americans who adopted the babies liked adopting from other Americans. It was mainly a business for the Church.”
“Why did they burn the records?” Hattie asked in a sad voice. She hated to think of what her sister had been through.
“Why do you think? So no one could be contacted, no one would talk. The girls’ parents didn’t want anyone to know their daughters had given birth out of wedlock. And a lot of the adopting parents often pretended the babies were their own. They disappeared for six months, and then suddenly reappeared with a baby. Burning the records protected everyone, including the Church for what they’d made. They did it for decades, long before I got there, and when I realized what was happening, and how it was handled, I finally gave up and left. It took me another year to give up my vows and ask to be released. It soured me forever on everything I believed about the goodness and innocence of the Church. I didn’t want to be part of it. It turned my years as a nun into a travesty. I felt as though I did more harm than good and had been part of a cabal to coerce those girls into giving up babies they wanted. Their parents didn’t even show up to pick them up after what they’d been through. We just put them on a plane and sent them home, two weeks after delivery. Stand ’em up and out the door. Next. It was heartless and profitable. Be careful,” she warned Hattie, “if you read too much about it, it may do the same to you. I didn’t want to be part of a church that did things like that for pure profit. Maybe, if they’d done it for free, out of ignorance and some archaic beliefs, I could have forgiven them. But not for profit to the degree it was. I’m sure there were some innocents involved, but the nuns who ran Saint Blaise’s then knew what they were doing. They didn’t care at all about the girls, just about the babies they could sell to rich, desperate couples. The truth is ugly,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice, but her eyes were sad when she talked about the girls.
Hattie showed her the photograph of Melissa at sixteen then, and Fiona shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember her. The only thing I remember about that year is who the movie stars were that we gave babies to. I think there were three major stars that year.” She named them, and Hattie was startled by who they were. All three were very famous Hollywood actresses. “If you do some research, you might dig something up that way. See who adopted daughters. It might be a backhanded way to find your sister’s child, if she was adopted by a major Hollywood figure. If not, I don’t think there’s any way to track her down. There are still some nuns around who were part of it, but most of them are ancient now. The really old ones have died, and they’ve spread the living ones around. I tried to find them when I wrote the book, but I found very few, and none of them would talk to me. The Church tried to discredit me, and claimed that I was psychiatrically unbalanced, but they didn’t get far with that. The bottom line is that it’s not a pretty thing the Church did, however good their original intentions were, and they don’t want anyone to know about it. It’s been swept under the rug, and they won’t tolerate anyone uncovering it now. It doesn’t make them look good. That’s why they burned the records. They had too much to hide to preserve them.” It was a wartime tactic, and it worked. All evidence that might have led to Melissa’s baby had turned to ash in the fire.
They talked for a while then about the future of the Church, and Hattie’s work in Africa. Two hours after they had met, Hattie and Fiona Eckles parted, and Hattie thanked her for all the information she’d provided.
“Check out those movie stars, and see if you can find anything out that way,” Fiona encouraged her. “It’s worth a shot.”
“I will,” Hattie promised, and stopped at an Internet café on the way back to her hotel. She signed on, and googled the names of the three actresses Fiona had mentioned. The first one had been dead for fifteen years, but it mentioned that her daughter was an actress too, and had starred in a recent film. She was the right age. The other two stars were still alive, one had retired recently, the other was still working, and nothing was said about their children. But all three were leads that Hattie intended to follow up on. If Melissa’s baby hadn’t been adopted by a famous actress, the trail would end there. But in the meantime, there was always hope that Ashley had been one of the lucky ones adopted by a famous mother, which would make her easier to find. Hattie printed out the information and went back to her hotel.
She had nightmares that night about her sister as a teenager, screaming in pain during the delivery, and nuns running away with her baby while she tried to crawl after them and couldn’t. Hattie awoke in the throes of a rising wave of panic, crying for Melissa. And like Fiona, it made her feel guilty by association. How could nuns do something like that? The venal cruelty of it all overwhelmed Hattie and made her suddenly ashamed to be a nun. She wanted to throw her habit away. She wanted to go home to the safety of her convent, but she couldn’t yet. She was on a mission, and had a job to do. She knew she had to follow it through to the end. She didn’t know if she would ever tell Melissa all that she had learned. But she loved her as never before for all that she’d endured. And Hattie knew what she had to do next. She couldn’t go back to New York, at least not yet. She had to go to L.A., and track down the two living actresses, and the three adopted children if they had been born in 1988.
In the morning, she exchanged her return ticket to New York for one from Dublin to L.A., with stops in London and Chicago on the way. She hated L.A., after her one visit there as a young actress, but it didn’t matter. She would have gone to the ends of the earth now to find Ashley for her sister. And Fiona Eckles had given her the only leads she had. It had been a stroke of luck finding her at all, and learning about her book from the librarian. And lucky too that the book shop had a copy, and Fiona agreed to see her.
Hattie sent an email to Mother Elizabeth saying that she was on her way to Los Angeles to gather more information. And all she could do was pray that the needle in the haystack she was seeking might be there. Once she found her, if she did, she was going to give Melissa the information, and it would be up to her to decide what she wanted to do next. And that was only if the leads Fiona had given her panned out, and if the needle in the haystack turned up. It was going to tak
e more than luck for that to happen. It was going to take a miracle. Hattie closed her eyes and prayed as her plane to L.A. took off. The trip to Dublin had been productive after all.
Chapter 6
Hattie slept fitfully on the flight from Dublin to L.A. They changed planes at Heathrow, and she had a screaming baby next to her for most of the flight. She was tired and felt physically sick when they landed in L.A., after their stop in Chicago. She had been to L.A. for a screen test when she was young, and had hated it so much she had sworn she’d never return. But she was here now for Melissa, and forced all other thoughts from her mind. She would have done anything for her sister. She felt as close to her now as she had when they were young girls.
She took a bus to downtown L.A., and checked in to a hotel on Sunset Strip. The area looked questionable, with homeless people on the streets, but the hotel was cheap. And she knew none of the convents in the city. It was simpler to stay at a hotel. She changed into her habit, thinking it might protect her when she left the hotel for dinner at a diner nearby. She always felt safe and invisible when she wore it, and the waitress poured her a free cup of coffee because she was a nun, and wouldn’t let her leave a tip.
She used the business center when she got back to her hotel, dazed by the time difference and the long trip. She researched the three actresses online, and saw that the actress who had recently retired had a thirty-three-year-old son. So Fiona hadn’t been wrong. She had obviously adopted a baby the year Ashley was born, but it was a boy. The young actress whose famous mother had died lived in Beverly Hills and was the girlfriend of a punk rock star. Hattie found her phone number and address online, on a website that listed celebrities and their private information, which was not unusual to find online, home addresses and phone numbers. She stared when she saw the information. The girl was beautiful in photographs, but looked nothing like Melissa.
Finding Ashley Page 8