February 19, 2009

• Whatever happened to little Marie?

  Since 2002, when I was blogging the part of my life story in which I “lost” my two daughters, several people have asked me what became of the older of them, Marie.  Longtime readers know that the younger of the two, whom I named Carol, was adopted, had her name changed to Angela, and found me when she was in her thirties.  She has blogged on Xanga under several names, emerging and then going incognito or incommunicado again and again.  She is back on Xanga now, and I’m not sure she wants me to reveal her latest identity.

  But this story is about Marie.  Through the years since I posted about losing her, I have given brief answers to questions about what became of her, if I ever saw her again, etc.  I don’t think I’ve told the whole story, and if I ever did, I didn’t save a link to it.  Today, Phx_Butterfly was the latest to have asked, and rather than put the condensed version in a reply to her comment, I decided to post the whole story.

  After she went away with Bobbie, Marie’s life wasn’t much easier than it had been with me.  Bobbie’s GI husband was transferred and their growing family moved a few times.  Bobbie had believed, when she adopted my daughter, that she couldn’t have children of her own.  She soon had twin boys, and then another son.  By Marie’s own statements and my mother’s, Marie became the Cinderella of the family, a housemaid and unpaid babysitter.

  Then, Bobbie and her husband were divorced.  She moved back to Wichita, where her family lives.  I don’t know what kinds of work she had done to support herself, her three boys and Dorrie (no longer called Marie).  All I know is that at some point she got into the escort business.  She was running an escort service, which in Kansas is a euphemism for out-call prostitution, which is technically illegal but tolerated as long as it is done hypocritically and unobtrusively.

  Dorrie ran away from Bobbie’s house in her teens.  There was a man (one of her “mother’s” clients?) twenty or thirty years her senior, who kept her for some time (…months, a year or two?  I don’t know.) until he died in an industrial accident.  Devastated with grief, destitute when the man’s ex-wife, guardian of his minor heirs, evicted her from his house, she took a job in a fast food joint.

  The manager of that drive-in restaurant, Dennis, became interested in her and she married him.  Up to this point and beyond, I knew nothing of these events.  My mother had maintained contact with Dorrie all along, and had kept the pledge she made to the judge at the adoption hearing to never facilitate any contact between Dorrie and me.  Occasionally, she sent me a photo of her, but the first time my mother shared any information with me was when Dorrie’s first child was born. 

  Reconsidering that pledge given sixteen years previously, since Dorrie was then an adult, married and a parent, Mama wrote me a letter to tell me I was a grandmother at 34, less than a year older than she had been when I was born.  She told me Dorrie had married a man named Dennis, omitting his surname.  She enclosed a picture of Dennis, Jr., taken in the hospital nursery.  It came glued into a paper folder/frame.  I took the folder apart and removed the picture, looked at the back, and there, for the photographer’s record-keeping purposes, was a rubber stamp with the hospital’s name, and a scrawled surname.

  It was an uncommon surname.  The hospital was in Wichita.  I called directory assistance and got Dennis’s phone number.  Dorrie answered.  She was delighted to hear from me.  She said she had been begging my mother for years to tell her where I was.  I traveled to Wichita to reunite with her and meet my grandson when he was eight months old.  The story of that trip is here.

  My mother was living within an hour’s drive of Wichita at the time.  I spent part of my visit at her husband’s farm outside Burrton and part of it in Wichita with Dorrie and Dennis.  Mother gave me a pile of old family photos, including many that had been taken of Dorrie throughout her childhood.  Dorrie filled me in on her life.

  Bobbie and her family had told Dorrie I gave her away because I didn’t love her.  She clung to me and cried within an hour of our reunion, as she told me that and said she never believed them.  She remembered enough about her first three years to believe that I loved her.  She said she didn’t love Dennis, didn’t think she would ever love another man after that father-figure rescuer who had died.  We talked, really communicated on a deep level.  She remarked on the extreme physical difference between us, and I said that I had always wished she had looked more like me and less like her father.  She looked over at Dennis Jr. and said she felt that way about him.

  Dennis seemed likeable at first and barely tolerable after I had been there for a few days, heard the way he verbally abused his wife and son, and saw the man beneath the saccharine veneer.  In retrospect, his behavior seems like NPD.  I quickly adopted the role of protector and defender to Dorrie and the baby.  Dennis would be raging and bitching at them, and would back down as soon as I stepped in.

  I came home after a few weeks in Kansas, and asked Charley if we could have a baby.  My second son, stillborn in Colorado, coming after my having “lost” my daughters and first son, had convinced me I never wanted to give my heart to a child again.  For several years, I had been afraid to have a pet.  I couldn’t stand the prospect of more grief.  Not only had DJ captured my love, the cuddling and giggling we did together had left me with a craving for more of the same.  A year or so later, when Dorrie called to tell me about the birth of my first granddaughter, I told her I was pregnant.

  Doug had been born and was three years old, and Dorrie had one more boy, by the time she decided to leave Dennis.  My mother called me and said she would give Dorrie a plane ticket to Alaska if that was okay with me.  I figured we could find room for Dorrie and share what we had, and there was no way I was going to reject her.  She left her kids in Kansas, spent a few weeks here, and as the date for her divorce hearing approached, waffled back and forth over whether it was hopeless to go back and try to get custody of her kids, or unthinkable not to.

  Mama had spent all she could spare to get Dorrie up here, and Charley and I were broke.  She left behind several suitcases she had brought with her, telling me she would send money to me so I could ship them to her.  I gave her a backpack, and Charley drove her to the H&H truck stop where she hung out until a trucker came through from Fairbanks, headed all the way down the Al-Can Highway.  She called me from Montana, to say he had bought her hamburgers all the way south and gave her a hundred dollars when he dropped her off.  She was in a truck stop, waiting for a ride to Wichita.

  She didn’t get custody of her kids.  I don’t think she made it to the hearing.  She never sent money to have her suitcases shipped.  She moved in with Bobbie and worked as an “escort.”  Occasionally, usually in the middle of the night, I’d get a phone call from her.  The last time she phoned, she said she had a “friend,” who was using cocaine.  She asked me what I thought about it.  I told her I’d tried it and gotten scared off by the way it made my heart stop and then race to catch up.  I said I had read that the stuff caused irreversible brain change and was a miserable addiction to kick.

  Several months later, I got a phone call from a cousin of Bobbie’s telling me that Dorrie had died not long after that last call.  The cause of death was listed as, “heart failure.”  Some time after that, I went through the luggage she left behind.  It had lain untouched in a storage shed since she’d gone back to Kansas.  There was a diary in one of the bags.  One entry mentioned a concert she had attended with Bobbie’s younger sister, who had given Dorrie her first taste of cocaine.  Several later entries mentioned coke as well. 

  No matter how many different ways I think it through, I don’t know if I could have changed anything by snooping in that diary sooner, or if Dorrie had said she was the one doing coke, or if I’d picked up on that subterfuge at the time….

  Dorrie died a few months before she would have turned thirty.  The entry about our reunion was posted on the 48th anniversary of her birth.
  

  • 8:12 pm
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