Даниэла Стил - Finding Ashley [calibre]

“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 take 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.