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  My striped tiger! My Christmas present from him.

  The candy cane and the candied apple were taken from Norma Jeane by girls in the dorm. Devoured in a few quick bites.

  She didn’t care: it was the striped tiger she loved.

  Yet the tiger, too, disappeared after a few days.

  She’d taken care to hide it far inside her bed, with her doll, yet one day when she came upstairs from work duty, her bed had been torn open and the tiger was gone. (The doll was untouched.) Through the Home in the wake of Christmas there were numerous striped tigers—as there were pandas, rabbits, dogs, dolls—these gifts earmarked for younger orphans while the older ones received pens, pencil boxes, games, but even if she could have identified her own striped tiger she would not have dared to claim it out of another’s hand, nor would she have wished to steal it, as someone had stolen from her.

  Why hurt another person? It’s enough to be hurt yourself.

  THE ORPHAN

  And these signs shall follow them that believe:

  In my name shall they cast out devils;

  they shall speak with new tongues;

  they shall take up serpents;

  and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them;

  they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

  —Christ Jesus

  Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.

  —Mary Baker Eddy,

  Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

  1

  “Norma Jeane, your mother has requested one more day to consider.”

  Another day! But Dr. Mittelstadt spoke encouragingly. She was not one to show doubt, weakness, worry; in her presence, you were meant to be optimistic. You were meant to dispel negative thoughts. Norma Jeane smiled as Dr. Mittelstadt spoke of having heard from the head psychiatrist at Norwalk that Gladys Mortensen was not so “delusional” and “vindictive-minded” as she’d been; there was the hope this time, the third time that Norma Jeane was up for adoption, that Mrs. Mortensen would be reasonable and grant permission. “For of course your mother loves you, dear, and wants you to be happy. She must wish the best for you—as we do.” Dr. Mittelstadt paused and sighed, an eager catch in her voice as she said what she’d been leading up to say: “So, child, shall we pray together?”

  Dr. Mittelstadt was a devout Christian Scientist but she did not press her religious beliefs upon any but her favored girls, and upon these girls very lightly, as one might offer morsels of food to starving persons.

  Four months before, on Norma Jeane’s eleventh birthday, Dr. Mittelstadt had called the girl into her office and given her a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Inscribed on the inside cover was, in Dr. Mittelstadt’s perfect hand:

  To Norma Jeane on her birthday!

  “Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil.” Psalms xxiii, 4.

  This great American Book of Wisdom will change your life as it has changed mine!

  Edith Mittelstadt, Ph.D.

  June 1, 1937

  Every night, Norma Jeane read in the book before bed, and every night she whispered aloud the inscription. I love you, Dr. Mittelstadt. She would think of this book as the first true gift of her life. And of that birthday, her happiest day since she’d been brought to the Home.

  “We will pray for a right decision, child. And for the strength to abide with whatever the decision is, granted us by the Father.”

  Norma Jeane knelt on the carpet. Dr. Mittelstadt, joints stiff with arthritis, remained behind her desk, head bowed and hands clasped in passionate prayer. She was only fifty years old yet reminded Norma Jeane of her grandmother Della: that mysteriously bulky female flesh, shapeless but for the restraint of a corset, the immense sunken bosom, the raddled kindly face, hair faded gray, fattish legs vein-splotched inside thick support hose. Yet those eyes of yearning and hope. I love you, Norma Jeane. Like my own daughter.

  Had she uttered these words aloud? She had not.

  Had she embraced Norma Jeane and kissed her? She had not.

  Dr. Mittelstadt leaned forward in her creaking chair with a sigh to lead Norma Jeane in the Christian Science prayer that was her greatest gift to the child, as it had been God’s great gift to her.

  Our Father which art in heaven,

  Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious,

  Hallowed be Thy name.

  Adorable One.

  Thy Kingdom come.

  Thy kingdom is come, Thou art ever-present.

  Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

  Enable us to know—as in heaven, so on earth—God is omnipotent, supreme.

  Give us this day our daily bread,

  Give us grace for today; feed the famished affections.

  And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

  And Love is reflected in love.

  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil;

  And God leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth us from sin, disease, and death.

  For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.

  For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love over all, and All.

  Amen!

  Norma Jeane dared to murmur, in a softer echo, “Amen.”

  2

  Where do you go when you disappear?

  And wherever you are, are you alone?

  Three days of waiting for Gladys Mortensen to make her decision. Whether to release her daughter for adoption. Days that might be broken down into hours and even minutes to be endured like an indrawn breath.

  Mary Baker Eddy, Norma Jeane Baker. Oh, that was an obvious sign!

  Fleece and Debra Mae, knowing how Norma Jeane was scared, told her fortune with their stolen deck of cards.

  You were allowed to play hearts, gin rummy, and fish at the Home but not poker or euchre, which were men’s gambling games, nor were you allowed to tell fortunes, which was “magic” and an offense to Christ. So the girls’ fortune-telling was done after lights out, in thrilling stealth.

  Norma Jeane didn’t really want her fortune told by her friends because the cards might interfere with her prayers and because, if the fortune was bad, she’d rather not know until she had no choice except to know.

  But Fleece and Debra Mae insisted. They believed in the magic of cards a lot more than they believed in the magic of Jesus Christ. Fleece shuffled the deck, had Debra Mae cut, and Fleece reshuffled, dealing cards in front of Norma Jeane, who waited without daring to breathe: a queen of diamonds, a seven of hearts, an ace of hearts, a four of diamonds—“They’re all red, see? That means good news for Mouse.”

  Was Fleece lying? Norma Jeane adored her friend, who teased and often tormented her but protected her at the Home and at school, where the younger orphan girls required protection, but Norma Jeane didn’t trust her. Fleece wants me to stay in this prison with her. Because nobody will ever adopt her.

  It was true, sad but true. No couple would ever adopt Fleece, or Janette, or Jewell, or Linda, or even Debra Mae, who was a pretty freckle-faced red-haired twelve-year-old, for these were no longer children but girls; girls who were too old, girls with “the look” in their eyes giving away they’d been hurt by adults and weren’t going to forgive. But mainly they were just too old. They’d been in foster homes that hadn’t “worked out” and they’d been returned to the orphanage and would be wards of the county until they were old enough to support themselves at sixteen. To be older than three or four, in the orphanage, was old. Adoptive parents wanted babies, or children so young they had no distinct personalities, no speech, and therefore no memory. It was a miracle, in fact, that anyone wanted to adopt Norma Jeane. Yet since she’d been made a ward of the county, she’d been requested by three couples. These couples had fallen in love with her, they’d claimed, and were willing to ignore the fact that she was nine years old, and ten years old, and now
eleven years old; and that her mother was living and identified, committed to the California State Psychiatric Hospital at Norwalk, where her official diagnosis was, “Acute chronic paranoid schizophrenia with probable alcoholic and drug-induced neurological impairment” (for such records were available to prospective adoptive parents upon request).

  It did seem a miracle. Except if you observed, as did the staff, the way that little mouse Norma Jeane lit up in the visitors’ room! Though she might have been sad-faced just before, truly Norma Jeane turned on like a lightbulb in the presence of important visitors. Her sweet face, a perfect moon face, and her eager blue eyes, and her quick shy smile and manners that made you think of a more subdued Shirley Temple—“Just such an angel!”

  There was the pleading in those eyes: Love me! Already, I love you.

  The first couple who’d applied to adopt Norma Jeane Baker were from Burbank, where they owned a thousand-acre fruit farm; they’d fallen in love with the girl, they said, because she looked just like the daughter Cynthia Rose they’d lost at the age of eight to polio. (They’d showed Norma Jeane the dead child’s snapshot and Norma Jeane came to believe that maybe she was their little girl, maybe it was possible; if she went to live with the couple her name would be changed to Cynthia Rose and this she looked forward to! “Cynthia Rose” was a magic name.) The couple had hoped for a younger child, but as soon as they’d laid eyes on Norma Jeane, “It was like Cynthia Rose reborn, restored to us. A miracle!” But word came from Norwalk that Gladys Mortensen refused to sign papers releasing her daughter for adoption. The couple had been heartbroken, it was like “Cynthia Rose being taken from us a second time,” but there was nothing to be done.

  Norma Jeane hid away to cry. She’d wanted to be Cynthia Rose so badly! And live on a thousand-acre fruit farm in a place called Burbank with a mother and father who loved her.

  The second couple, from Torrance, who boasted of being “comfortably well off” even in this rotten economy, since the husband was a Ford dealer, had plenty of children of their own—five boys!—but the wife yearned for just one more, a girl. They, too, had wanted to adopt a younger child but when the woman laid eyes on Norma Jeane she was it: “Just such an angel!” The woman asked Norma Jeane please to call her Mamita—maybe this was Spanish for “Momma”?—and so Norma Jeane did. The very word was magic to her: Mamita! Now I will have a real Momma. Mamita! Norma Jeane loved this fattish fortyish woman who’d come searching for her, as she said, out of loneliness, living in a household bursting with males: she had a sunburnt, creased face yet a smile hopeful and radiant as Norma Jeane’s; she was in the habit of touching Norma Jeane often, squeezing the girl’s little hand and giving her gifts, a child’s white handkerchief embroidered with the initials NJ, a box of colored pencils, nickels and dimes, chocolate kisses wrapped in tinfoil that Norma Jeane couldn’t wait to share with Fleece and the other girls, to make them less jealous of her.

  But this adoption, too, Gladys Mortensen had blocked, in the spring of 1936. Not in person but by way of a Norwalk administrator who told Dr. Mittelstadt that Mrs. Mortensen was very sick, with intermittent hallucinations, one of them that Martians had landed in spaceships to take away human children; another that her daughter’s own father wanted to take her away to some secret place, where she, the girl’s true mother, would never see her again. Mrs. Mortensen’s “only identity is that of Norma Jeane’s mother and she isn’t strong enough just yet to surrender that.”

  Another time Norma Jeane hid away to cry. But this was more than a broken heart! She was ten years old, old enough to be bitter, and angry, and to feel the injustice of her fate. She’d been cheated of Mamita, who loved her, by the cruel, cold woman who’d never allowed her to call her Momma. She would not be my mother. Yet she would not let me have a real mother. She would not let me have a mother, a father, a family, a real home.

  There was a secret way to crawl out onto the roof of the orphanage, outside the third-floor girls’ lavatory, and to hide behind a tall stained brick chimney. By night the RKO flashing neon came direct to this place; you could feel its pulsing heat on your outstretched hands and shut eyelids. Panting Fleece caught up with Norma Jeane to hug her in lean, strong arms like a boy’s. Fleece whose underarms and greasy hair you could always smell, Fleece with rough comforting ways like a big dog. Norma Jeane began to cry helplessly. “I wish she was dead! I hate her so.”

  Fleece rubbed her warm face against Norma Jeane’s. “Yeah! I hate the bitch too.”

  Did they plot, that night, how they’d hitchhike to Norwalk, to set the hospital on fire? Or did Norma Jeane remember this wrong? Maybe it was a dream. And she’d been there: the flames, the screams, the naked woman running, and her hair aflame, and her eyes mad yet knowing. Those screams! All I did was, I pressed my hands against my ears. I shut my eyes.

  Years later when she visited Gladys at Norwalk and spoke with the ward nurses, Norma Jeane would learn that in the spring of 1936 Gladys had tried to commit suicide by “lacerating” her wrists and throat with hairpins and had lost “a good deal of blood” before she was discovered in the furnace room of the hospital.

  3

  October 11, 1937

  Dear Mother,

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you—Nobody—too?

  Then there’s a pair of us!

  Don’t tell! they’d banish us—you know!

  This is my favorite poem in your book, remember the Little Treasury of American Verse? Aunt Jess brought it to me and I read it all the time and think of how you read the poems to me, I loved them so. When I read them I think of you Mother.

  How are you? I think about you all the time and hope you are feeling much better. I am well and would surprise you how tall I am! I have made many friends here at the Home and at my school which is Hurst Elementary. I am in 6th grade and one of the tallest girls. There is a very nice Director at our Home and a nice staff. They are strict sometimes but it is necessary, there are so many of us. We go to church and I have been singing in the choir. You know I am not very musical! Aunt Jess comes to see me sometimes and takes me to the movies and school is a little hard for me, arthmetic [sic] especially but fun. Except for arthmetic my grades are all B’s, I am ashamed to say what my arthmetic grade is. I think that Mr. Pearce has been here to see me, too.

  There is a very nice couple named Mr. and Mrs. Josiah Mount who live in Pasadena where Mr. Mount is a lawyer and Mrs. Mount has a big garden mostly of roses. They have taken me on Sunday drives and to visit their house which is very large overlooking a pond. Mr. and Mrs. Mount are asking that I come home with them to live as their daughter. They are hoping that you will say Yes and I hope so, too.

  Norma Jeane couldn’t think of anything more to write to Gladys. She showed the letter shyly to Dr. Mittelstadt for criticism, and Dr. Mittelstadt praised her, saying it was a “very nice letter” with just a few mistakes she would correct, but she believed that Norma Jeane should end with a prayer.

  So Norma Jeane added,

  I am praying for us both Mother hoping that you will give permission for me to be adopted. I will thank you from the bottom of my heart and pray for God to bless you forever Amen.

  Your loving daughter Norma Jeane

  Twelve days later came the reply, the first and the last letter Gladys Mortensen would write to Norma Jeane in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. A letter on torn-out yellow paper, in a downward-slanted shaky handwriting like a procession of staggering ants:

  Dear Norma Jeane, if you are not ashamed to say thats who you are in the eyes of the World—

  I have rec’d your filthy letter & so long as I am alive & able to fight this insult will never be allowed my Daughter to be adopted! How can she be “adopted”—she has her MOTHER who is living & will be well & strong enough soon to bring her home again.

  Please do not insult me with these requests as they are hurtful & hateful to me. I have no need of your shitty God for his blessing or his curse I thumb my nose! I hope
I still have a nose to thumb, & a thumb! I will retain a Lawyer you can be sure to keep what is mine until Death.

  “Your loving mother” YOU KNOW WHO

  THE CURSE

  “Look at the ass on that one, the little blonde!”

  Hearing, yet blushing and indignant not-hearing. On El Centro returning to the Home from school. In her white blouse, blue jumper (tight at the bust and hips, overnight it seemed), and white anklet socks. Twelve years old. Yet in her heart hardly more than eight or nine, as if her true growth ceased at the time she’d been expelled from Gladys’s bedroom to run naked screaming for help from strangers. Running from steam and scalding water and a burning bed meant to be her funeral pyre.

  Shame, shame!

  There came the day. The second week of September when she’d just started seventh grade. She wasn’t wholly unprepared, though she was disbelieving. Hadn’t she been hearing for years older girls speaking of this, and the crude jokes of the boys? Hadn’t she been repelled, fascinated by the ugly bloodstained “sanitary napkins” wrapped in toilet paper, and sometimes not wrapped, in the trash containers in the girls’ lavatories?

  Hadn’t she, made to carry trash downstairs to the rear of the Home, been sickened by the stink of stale blood?

  A curse in the blood Fleece was always saying with a smirk you can’t escape.

  But Norma Jeane inwardly rejoiced in her knowledge. Yes you can escape. There is a way!

  Among her friends at the Home and at school (for Norma Jeane had friends among children with families, “real” homes) she never spoke of the way which was the way of Christian Science, which was a wisdom revealed to her by Edith Mittelstadt. That God is Mind, and Mind is all, and mere “matter” does not exist.

  That God heals us through Jesus Christ. If only we believe utterly in Him.