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.