The church in the photograph was St. Clement, on the hill above the harbor in Duluth, and every person in my family knew it. We had been baptized there, married there, and carried out of its doors in silence. Its bell tower was on the Christmas cards. Grandma Eleanor had walked to Mass there every day of her life, in all weathers, with a black scarf over her hair. But the girl in the photograph was nineteen, in a plain wool coat, standing on the church steps, holding a baby wrapped in a white blanket and looking at the camera with eyes I had never seen on her. Not sad. Not frightened. Fierce.
The hospital bracelet in the box had a tiny pink bead on it, and a paper tag written in the hand of a nurse. Baby Girl Maki, born March 3, 1955, St. Mary Hospital, Duluth. I sat on the floor of the hallway with the box in my lap and counted again. My mother, Gloria, had been born in 1958 to Eleanor and my grandfather Arvid, after their marriage. This child had come three years before. A girl, who would be seventy now. And under the knit baby clothes, at the very bottom of the box, I found a folded letter on pale blue paper, in the careful script of my grandmother.
If you are reading this, Kathy, I have passed, and the vent is open at last. When I was nineteen, I had a daughter in the home run by the sisters at St. Clement. I was not married. My mother said I must give her up or never come home. The sisters placed her with the Franciscans, and I was told she would be raised in their orphanage on the hill. I never held her again. But every Christmas, I left a pie at the convent door, with no name. I did not tell your grandfather. I did not tell Gloria. Please find her, if she is living. Tell her I never stopped.
A heating vent unscrewed in a hillside hallway gave one granddaughter the weekend to bring a lost aunt home to Duluth.
I drove to the convent on Monday, in the first sleet of the winter. The Sisters of St. Francis lived in a gray brick building behind the church, with a long porch and a statue of the saint in the snow. A young nun in a gray cardigan showed me into a parlor that smelled of floor wax and rose water. She asked whom I wished to see. I said I did not know the name of the sister I was looking for. I only knew a date, March 3, 1955. The young woman went still. Then she said, in a small voice, “That is the birthday of Sister Agnes Marie.”
Sister Agnes was seventy years old, a small, round woman with white hair under a short veil and bright blue eyes. I knew her. Everybody in our family knew her. She had taught the third grade at St. Clement school for thirty one years, and she had taught me my times tables. She came into the parlor in her sensible shoes and stopped when she saw the box on my lap. “Kathy Halvorsen,” she said. “Is something wrong?” I could not speak. I held out the photograph. She took it, and looked at it for a long time, and the color slowly drained from her face. “That is the church,” she said. “And that is my mother.”
My Uncle Ted, the eldest son of Eleanor and Arvid, did not take the news well. He is seventy two and lives in Proctor, with a boat on a trailer and strong opinions. He arrived at my house that evening, red faced, and demanded the box. “Mother was senile,” he said. “She hid baby things in a vent because she was confused.” When I refused, he went out to his truck and called the Duluth police. A young officer arrived twenty minutes later and listened politely. Then he read the will of my grandmother, which left the contents of the house to me, and he looked at my uncle. “Sir, the box is hers,” he said.
We all went to the convent on the Saturday before Christmas, my mother Gloria, my uncle, my cousins, and I. Sister Agnes received us in the same parlor, in her best veil, with a plate of cookies. My mother, who is sixty seven, walked straight across the carpet and took her half sister by both hands. “Sister,” she said. “I am Gloria.” Agnes smiled, a wide, shining smile. “I know,” she said. “I have been praying for you since you were born.” The two women stood forehead to forehead. Then my mother began to laugh, and Agnes laughed too. They laughed and laughed, and the rest of us wept.
The money consequences were not large. The house on the hill above the lake came to me under the will, and I sold it to a young couple who loved the porch. I divided the proceeds, three hundred and eighty thousand dollars, among Gloria, Ted and Agnes, according to a note that Eleanor had left in the box. Agnes could not own property, being under a vow, and she asked that her share go to the convent school. It became a scholarship for girls who have no one, and the first recipient, in September, was a child of nine, with a braid down her back and a bright pink backpack.
In the name of my grandmother, Eleanor, who passed in December and who left a pie at a convent door for sixty years, I started the Pie at the Door Fund. It pays for legal help, record searches and counseling for families in St. Louis, Carlton and Lake counties who are searching for children surrendered in the homes of the 1950s. In the first year, we reunited eleven families. A woman of sixty eight, in a wool hat, set a faded photograph of an infant on the desk and said, “I have never stopped looking.” I told her neither had my grandmother.
That Christmas Eve, Agnes came to the house on the hill for supper, in her gray veil, with a basket on her arm. She had made a pie. Apple, with a lattice crust. The whole family gathered around the table, thirty of us, with candles burning, and Gloria set the pie in the center and cut the first slice. She put it on a plate and handed it to her sister. Agnes held the plate in both hands, looking at the steam. Her lips moved. Then she lifted her eyes to the empty chair at the head of the table, where we had set a place for Eleanor, and she said, “Mother, it is warm.”
