There’s only one hit. She clicks on a scan of a news article from the Toronto Star, printed in August 1961.
SCANDAL-PLAGUED
ST. AGNES’S HOME TO CLOSE:
ABUSE, RESIDENT DEATH
St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers in East Toronto will soon shutter its doors after a resident, who claimed she suffered abuse at the home, took her own life. In June, Toronto police received a letter from the woman in question containing allegations of systemic physical and mental abuse. Allegations were also made regarding the illegality of adoption contracts, stating mothers were forced to consent to adoptions under duress and by force, and that children were illegally sold to adoptive families. Investigations are currently underway. None of the allegations has been proven in court.
“Disgusting,” Angela mutters, thinking over what she’s just learned.
She glances at the date of the article. So the home shut down not long after Nancy Mitchell was born to Margaret Roberts; Nancy’s adoptive mother had alluded to the closure in her letter. Angela wonders whether the poor girl might have been able to keep her baby if she had gotten pregnant just a few months later than she did. Although Margaret may then have simply gone to a different maternity home. Were they all this atrocious? And who was the resident who wrote a letter to the police in June 1961, then took her own life immediately afterward? She’s the unnamed whistleblower at the centre of this. Her death triggered the investigation and closure of the home.
Angela needs a break. She stretches her arms up over her head. There’s no one else in the microfilm room, so she lunges across the worn carpet several times to stretch her stiff legs. She can already hear her doctor upbraiding her for neglecting her circulation.
It’s nearly eight o’clock in the evening. The library will be closing at nine, and then she’ll have to go meet Tina once her class gets out. She’s hungry again and needs a fresh coffee. Temporarily abandoning her notebook and coat at the microfilm station, Angela grabs her purse and rides the elevator up to the main floor, where she can buy a stale decaf from the tiny kiosk that slings weak brew, browning bananas, and appallingly caloric cupcakes masquerading as muffins. It’s student fuel, but it’ll do. She’s hungry enough right now to eat her own arm.
Coffee and muffin now in hand, Angela takes the stairs back down to the basement. She walks past two students, the only other people besides Angela in this section of the library. Both are bleary-eyed with teetering stacks of books piled beside their glowing laptop screens.
Back at her desk, she leans over the computer, isolates the article with the cursor, and hits print. She can hear the sleeping printer hum to life in the back corner of the room, a grumbling grandpa reluctantly waking from a nap. She wanders over and lifts the warm page off the printer output.
What next?
Angela swallows a bite of muffin and reconsiders her approach. She’ll have to search for Margaret Roberts directly, though if she does find anything, without details from the home she doesn’t have any information to cross-reference to confirm it’s the woman she’s looking for. Still, she types Margaret Roberts’s name into the search box and begins sifting through the results. The better part of half an hour passes before she clicks on one that causes her finger to freeze, suspended over the mouse.
It’s an obituary published in June 1961.
ROBERTS, Margaret Elizabeth of Toronto, Ont. Unexpectedly in her 20th yr. Survived by parents George and Esther Roberts, and brother John “Jack” Roberts （Lorna）。 Remembered by several uncles, aunts, and cousins. Condolences may be sent to the Roberts family directly. No funeral service to be scheduled.
“Unexpectedly in her twentieth year…” Angela leans in toward the white glow of the screen.
Words like “suddenly at home” in an obituary often mean something like a heart attack. “Surrounded by family” translates to a slow death from cancer. “Tragically” denotes an accident of some kind, but “unexpectedly” is sometimes a euphemism for suicide, which could also explain the lack of funeral service. Angela shakes her head. Things were different in the sixties.
“Shit,” she whispers. Tearing her eyes away from the screen, she picks up the printout of the news article about the closure of St. Agnes’s, scanning it again. The timelines and details align.
Margaret Roberts is dead. She’s the whistleblower whose daughter was taken away from her. She wrote to the police, then killed herself.
Angela heaves a deep sigh. She can’t help Frances Mitchell fulfill her final wish that Nancy reunite with her birth mother. That door closed the day Margaret died.
She gulps her bitter coffee with a wince before giving up on it, rising from the computer chair, and tossing the cup in the garbage bin. She returns to the computer, arms crossed on her chest as though reluctant to sit back down and reread the obituary. If she doesn’t read it again and doesn’t hit print, maybe she can pretend she never saw it.
But Angela can’t pretend. She feels a responsibility to Margaret now. A duty to put the pieces together and make sure that Margaret’s last hope—for her baby girl to know she loved her and never wanted to give her up—is honoured. It’s the least she can do for the poor girl whose life was such a source of shame to her family that her death didn’t even warrant a funeral.
She has to find Nancy Birch.
Angela pulls her scarf closer around her shoulders in a habitual gesture of self-protection before settling herself back down onto the rickety chair. She runs her hands over her midsection, thinking of the baby she’ll hold in her arms this fall, imagining what it would be like to be separated from her child, to die alone without ever knowing what became of it.
She hits print.
* * *
The few responses Angela has received from the Nancy Birches have been the same as the ones she got from the Nancy Mitchells: Not me, sorry. A part of her is grateful; now that she knows Margaret Roberts is dead, she’s in no hurry to be the one to relay such news to the elusive Nancy. For the time being, she’s stashed the obituary and news article printouts in a storage bin under her bed along with the letter and note.
Since Angela works Sundays on a regular basis, Saturday afternoons have become her favourite opportunity to read. She and Tina spent the morning doing their weekly grocery shop and other dull errands, then Tina headed to the gym while Angela tugged on her chunky knit reading socks and curled up on the couch with Grizzly and a steaming mug of tea.
Snow falls outside the living room window. There’s something about a snowy weekend that feels like a freebie; like the earth is saying, Slow down, enjoy yourself, there’s nowhere to go anyway. It’s an invitation Angela warmly accepts as she sinks her teeth into her new book club pick.
The first chapter of The Jane Network is a sweeping survey of the history of women’s reproductive options until 1960, a year before the first iteration of the birth control pill was introduced in America. After that, things changed a bit for women—mostly white—who had the means and legal opportunity to access the pill, a category that certainly did not include unmarried teenage girls.
Captivated, Angela reads about the various homes for unwed mothers, as they were then labelled, which took in pregnant girls and hid them for the duration of their pregnancies. The babies were almost always adopted, and, from what Dr. Taylor describes of her own experience at one of these homes, many of the adoptions occurred under duress, and some blatantly against the mother’s will. Angela thinks of Margaret’s note to her daughter Jane; the one she’s read so many times now that she’s committed it to memory. The haunting lyrics of a mournful goodbye.