SHE WAS ON the seven o’clock flight. The dinner choices were chicken or beef. She had the chicken. The window shades were down and the cabin lights dimmed, a movie on the screen. The constant drone of the engines.
Aileen had driven with her to the airport and would take the Buick back to the house.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to come out,” she’d said in the car. “Put you to all this trouble. I should have waited. The boy just doesn’t want a lawyer getting involved. He thinks it makes too much of it all, and in truth I have mixed feelings about it too now. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be, Aileen. I understand and it’s all right. Danny seems to be in the clear, and I’m glad about it.”
It was foggy in places, as it often was on this coastal road, especially this time of year. Stands of evergreens with birches among them, shimmering pale among the darkness.
Trees. When she was little she’d had a book about trees that her father had loved as much as she had. The tamarack leaning kindly to the hemlock. The balsam fir joining in. All of them nodding their heads to the same breeze.
Where the fog was dense she turned on the low beams and the flashers, then a mile later the view was clear again. Aileen fiddled with the radio but the signals were poor. She switched it off.
At the airport they got out and embraced. She caught a glint in Aileen’s eye and reached out and gave her another hug.
Less than three hours later she was back in Toronto, in an airline limo already heading south on Avenue Road. Rain against the windows, water splashing up under the car. Night, and the familiar sights of her hometown. Wide intersections, traffic lights, low flat-roofed commercial buildings lining the street. Crossing Lawrence Avenue now, then Eglinton, heading east and south into the pocket of North Toronto where she grew up. Four-bedroom brick homes, mature maple trees lining streets.
Down Yonge Street now, across St. Clair. One of her better early jobs had been at a law office right here, working on immigration cases and white-collar crime.
Those had been struggling years, tough learning years, years that sharpened and hardened her. Andrew was in primary school then. At that place, her desk was one of two in the hallway near the washroom, and men still buttoning up as they walked past kept knocking papers off her desk and not even noticing.
One day a young woman came in the door and spoke to the receptionist, and the girl then turned and pointed out Margaret.
The woman came up and looked at her strangely. “Yes,” she said. “I remember you.”
“You do? From where?”
The woman leaned over the desk and with one of the pencils there wrote something on a piece of paper. She turned it around for Margaret to see.
LAKEWOOD, she’d written. She picked up an eraser and rubbed the word out again.
In the Murray’s at the corner, they sat in a booth by a window. The woman was slim, with red curly hair and freckles. In the window light her eyes were sky-blue. They were drinking coffee and eating toasted cheese sandwiches. It was mid-morning and the restaurant was nearly empty, but they spoke in murmurs anyway.
“You could tell me your first name at least.”
“You were already in your eighth month when I arrived, and you were gone long before me. I’m Florence.”
“Flo. Yes. I do remember you now. How did you find me?”
The woman shook her head. “Just through someone. They said you were doing human rights cases.”
“That’s a lofty term. I work fourteen hours a day doing prep work on immigration and white-collar crime files.” “Back then did you have a baby girl or a boy? What colour was its hair? And did it have all its fingers and toes?”
She stared at the woman.
“No idea, right? Because near the end there was the gauze mask and the spray of chloroform. And then it was all over and the baby was gone. Snatched away so fast. Straight to formula.”
Margaret wiped her fingers on the napkin and sat back. “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t have a lot of money, but I want to hire you to negotiate with them and get the girls holding rights. Twenty-four-hour holding rights, so they can see their babies and hug them. Cry if they want to, but make peace with it. Say hello and goodbye. They can choose not to, but they should have the option.”
“Holding rights.”
“I made up the word.”
“It’s not common practice. I imagine to avoid attachment and to make it easier.”
“Easier for whom? The clinic? Not for the mother or the baby. The baby knows nothing of anything for weeks, as long as it’s swaddled and fed. It’s busy learning to breathe, for heaven’s sake. No, this would be for the mother. It’s a chance I would have loved to have.”
Florence looked out the window for a moment, then back at Margaret.
“I can get you two Ph.D. psychologists who’ll testify that holding rights would be a good idea for the long-term emotional health of most mothers. To help them stop wondering for years and years what the baby looked like, and was it a boy or a girl and was it healthy. How would it have felt to hold that little bundle.”
“Maybe she doesn’t really wonder about any of that. Maybe she’s made her peace with it.”
Florence looked hard at her for a moment, then looked down at the table. She tapped a finger on it. Wiped away some crumbs and looked up.
“Are you married? Did you have other children?”
She nodded yes. “I have a little boy. He’s seven.”
Florence nodded. “Makes all the difference, later. Trust me, I know. And what I also know is that holding their babies, they would all weep. But a healthy weep, a good long cry of enormous release. You think about it. At least they should have the option. That’s all I’m asking.”
She reached into her purse and put a slip of paper with her name and number on the table.
“Call me and I’ll give you the names of the psychologists. And tell me what it’ll cost.”
By the time she was back at her desk she was already considering how to go about it.
The next day, searching for leverage, for something to trade with, she did some research into Muskoka zoning and property tax structures, and the following evening after hours she placed the first call to Lakewood. Someone she did not know answered, but when the matron came to the telephone it was clearly still the same woman. That same crisp voice.
“Holding rights. What on earth are you talking about? What was your name again?”
“Margaret Joubert. I was at Lakewood in the fall and winter of 1946 into ’47. I’m a lawyer now, and my married name is Margaret Bradley.”
She mentioned the name of the law firm. “I can come up on Saturday by car and tell you what I’m proposing.”
“I’m not interested in any proposal, and I’m never in on weekends.”
“Yes, I remember that. So make an exception. You’ll want to hear this. I know you will.”
It took five meetings, the first two on her own time, the others on the law firm’s time, but as a pro bono case. Her psychologists presented their findings without mentioning names from their own cases, findings that met great resistance because they clashed with Lakewood’s long-standing house rules.
In the end it was the forensic accountant who persuaded the matron. Margaret’s firm had used him before as an expert in white-collar crime. He never smiled, and somehow that made him all the more effective. He told the matron that he had looked into public records and learned that Lakewood was enjoying non-profit benefits, when a close audit and an evaluation of bookkeeping practices could probably find years in which the business had in fact made a profit.
The business, he repeated.
Because in that case, he said, Lakewood could be viewed as a profit centre that had lost money in some years, rather than a non-profit centre within a corresponding favourable tax bracket.
And so during the fifth meeting a clause was added to the intake form with Yes and No boxes that gave the girls the right to decide in their eighth and ninth months whether they wanted to make use of the new holding right.
She never charged Flo for her time, but she accepted her offer to pay for the experts. In a handwritten note some time later, Florence told her that on average fourteen out of twenty girls ticked the Yes box. The note was signed, Thank you, thank you, thank you! Sincerely yours, Florence.
She kept the note in her desk drawer for a week and then she photocopied it and described the situation and sent it to Thérèse in Paris.
She was not surprised when Thérèse wrote back that she could completely understand the girls who ticked the No box. That she’d thought there would be more who said no, with quick angry strokes, and that she could probably guess the stories of those who had.
“Almost certainly not a mere mistake with a fresh-faced summer boy, dear Margaret,” she wrote. “But probably a story more like mine.”
On one memorable occasion in her last year at the Sorbonne, she and Thérèse had talked about their stories, as they called them. Thereafter by tacit agreement nothing more was said, mostly because even though the outcomes were the same, their stories themselves were not. They were very different.
Margaret’s main memory of Thérèse’s story was of one horrific confrontation in her parents’ living room: her mother, her father, the father’s so-called friend at first in red-faced denial and then in shame, and Thérèse, at seventeen, having told her parents about her condition and how it had come about in half-hearted confusion but in truth against her will. There had been a bruise on her right upper arm that had turned deep purple and would not go away.
“You asked me what I think of those Yes or No boxes,” Thérèse wrote near the end of her reply, “and I think that perhaps the idea is wrong because it forces the girls to think about having to choose when the entire thing might be a nightmare for them already. Nature has no interest in our happiness, dear Margaret. So that is what I think. But it’s possible that I am still unable to see it clearly.”