The next morning, I received a summons to the examining room to see a different doctor from the young one who had examined me previously. Grey hairs around his temples suggested that this one was about forty-five, maybe even fifty.
“Let’s see how you are doing,” he said. “Don’t be shy, Julie, is it? Your name is Julie?”
I lay back and tried to relax as he conducted his exam, but his manner was rough and careless. At one point, a cry escaped me.
“I’m not hurting you,” he snapped. “You got yourself into this situation. If you’d kept your legs together, we wouldn’t be doing this.”
The lump in my throat broke. I could not hold back a sob.
“Tears won’t do you any good now. What are you, fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Seventeen,” I managed.
“Old enough to know better. There now, all finished. You can get dressed. Miss Oldenburg will see you in her office in ten minutes.”
“How is he?” I ventured.
“Who?”
“Nicholas. My baby. Is he doing all right?”
“I can’t believe you’ve named this little bastard. Better forget about that. It’ll make it all the harder when the time comes for you to part company with it.”
His words cut through me. Part company? Of course that was the whole idea of my coming here, but the further along I got in my pregnancy, the more wrenching became the thought of parting company with my baby.
I surmised that Miss Oldenburg planned to put the pressure on me to sign the surrender papers. I dressed as quickly as I could, all the while planning my strategy to delay the signing a little longer.
Seated in her office, I waited ten, fifteen, almost twenty minutes before she came in, her stockinged legs swishing beneath her skirt, her heels clacking. She settled into her chair and, opening the file she had brought in with her, she looked at me over the top of her glasses.
“I hear you’ve named the baby.”
“It’s not definite,” I stammered. “He just seems like a Nicholas to me.”
Miss Oldenburg looked back at the file. “It could be a girl, you know.”
“Boy or girl, my baby is sweet,” I answered without hesitation.
“Boy or girl, it’s not yours to keep. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“I know what you mean.”
“I’m not sure you do. You haven’t signed the adoption papers yet. That’s the objective of our meeting this morning.”
“I figured that.”
“Good. Then I assume you brought them with you?”
“No. I didn’t know I was meeting with you until the doctor told me, and he didn’t state the reason for the meeting.”
A dripping sound drew my eyes to the window air conditioner. A brimming bucket sat beneath it. Her tone aggravated, Miss Oldenburg said, “The man is coming to fix it today. Keep your attention on pertinent matters.”
Passing a fresh set of the adoption documents across the desk to me, she said, “Here’s a pen. You’ve had plenty of time to read these. Sign them now, and let’s be done with it.”
The heading across the top of the document read “Permanent Surrender of Child.” The papers appeared to be the same documents she’d given me to read earlier, but I skimmed them nevertheless. Above the signature line were the words “By signing below I hereby forfeit all rights as parent to the child I have birthed.”
Yes, the documents were the same. I laid them on the desk.
“I can’t sign my baby away. It hurts too much.”
“It’s not about your feelings,” Miss Oldenburg said. “It’s about what the child needs that you can’t give it.”
“I am the only one who can give my baby a mother’s love. There’s nothing more important than that.”
“The adoptive parents can give it a better kind of love.”
“What kind of love could that possibly be?”
“Turn the papers over to the back side,” she ordered. “Take the pen, and at the top of the page make two columns. Label one ‘Things I Can Provide for the Baby.’ Label the other ‘Things the Adoptive Parents Can Provide for the Baby.’”
I did as she asked, and then sat staring at the page.
“I don’t want to do this.”
“Your mother is paying her hard-earned money to keep you here, is she not?”
I gave a dumb nod.
“Tell me why.”
I looked up at her. “To escape the shame, of course, if anybody found out.”
“Who brought this shame down on the heads of you and your mother?”
Tears welled in my eyes.
“You did, did you not?” She sounded like a bleating goat. “Your mother is suffering because you made a decision to have carnal relations when you weren’t married.”
I cried harder. Miss Oldenburg passed me her box of tissues.
“I didn’t do it to hurt my mother,” I said, blowing my nose. I looked squarely at her and tried to speak with a conviction I did not possess. “We . . . Farrel and I . . . loved each other.”
“Is that so?” she cut in. “Then where is he now? Why aren’t you in his home as his wife, the two of you awaiting your first child?”
“We’re so young!”
“Precisely,” she said.
I shifted in the chair. “I didn’t tell him about the baby. He would have married me. I didn’t want to ruin his life. He’s working in the oil fields to pay his way to school next year.”
“Oh yes, of course.” Her smile was cynical. “Does he really love you, Julie? Are you entirely sure he would have married you, had you deigned to tell him?”
My arguments dried up and flaked into nothingness as I thought back on Farrel’s excited face when he told me the driving force of his life was to lift himself out of the poverty he and his family were mired in.
“Ahhh,” Miss Oldenburg said. “You’re not sure. You say you didn’t tell him because you didn’t want to ruin his life. I suspect another part of the truth is you didn’t tell him because in your heart of hearts you knew he didn’t love you and you feared he wouldn’t marry you. And who knows? Maybe in your heart of hearts you didn’t want to marry him.”
My courage flailed. She was right. I knew he didn’t love me. I knew he didn’t want to marry me, or anyone at this time in his life. And I didn’t want to marry him either, not the way it would have been. If we were ever to marry, I wanted it to be because we wanted each other for better or for worse, not because we had to.
“Now that we’ve come to terms with that little issue, kindly list in the column labeled ‘Things I Can Provide for the Baby’ all you know you can give it with no education, no job, no home—”
“I have a home!”
“Your mother wouldn’t have sent you here if she’d harbored any inclination at all to raise an illegitimate grandchild. Go ahead, write. And after the two seconds it will take, kindly write in the other column the things the adoptive parents can give the baby.”
In my column I wrote “My love.” After several minutes of being able to come up with nothing else, I focused on the column for the adoptive parents. That list flowed more easily: “A home, clothing, food.”
When I paused, Miss Oldenburg prompted me. “Don’t forget a college education.”
“I’ll be on my feet by that time. I’ll be making enough to put him through school myself.”
“On the salary from a menial job?” She laughed. “I highly doubt it.”
I frowned in confusion, unable to grasp her meaning.
“How quickly we forget,” she said. “You won’t have a decent job because you won’t have an education. You won’t be able to return to high school if you keep the baby, and likely no college will accept you. And as we’ve said before, no decent man will marry you.”
I shook my head in despair. The pen leaked a drop of ink on my finger. In my mind it became a symbol of my blemished self. I was a blot on the world.
Miss Oldenburg continued with her litany. “To that list in the adoptive parents’ column, add toys the baby will eventually want, such as Madame Alexander dolls, and a prom dress, if it’s a girl, or a basketball and goal to practice with, and a bicycle with gears, if it’s a boy. And how about travel to widen the child’s experiences? The couple I have in mind for your baby can take the child to Europe someday. Most important of all, add respectability to the list. With these fine people, the baby won’t be a bastard.”
The realities she was pounding into my brain stunned me. Everything she said was true.
“The adoptive parents will be college educated. They’ll own their own home and have good incomes. They’ll give the baby everything you cannot. You are unfit because you aren’t married. You did wrong. You are not worthy of keeping the child.”
She stepped from behind the desk and, coming closer to me, tried a different tact.
“It’s God’s will, Julie. God chose you,” she gestured to the dorm room above her office, “and all you girls, to bear children for these women who can’t have them. You girls are all miracle workers.”
Still staring at the columned back page, I laid the pen on the desk.
“Don’t put that pen down. Turn the paper over and sign. Don’t add another mistake to your list. Do the right thing for once in your life.”
I knew I was ill-equipped, not just to care for and raise a child, but to perform almost any job other than the cleaning and maintenance chores she had me doing at the home. I knew I had made a terrible mistake by having sex with Farrel. But somewhere in the dark well of my essence, a small flame of the self-confidence that had come to me after the Christmas Eve visit with my father flickered and held steady. That small light was enough. Enough to reveal to me I wasn’t all bad. Like him, I had made a mistake, but also like him, there was good in me too. That feeble light was enough to give me the guts to stare straight into her eyes and say, “I’m not ready to sign away my child. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.”