The Girls from Ames

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  For years, the tiny Jewish congregation in Ames held services in the lounge of a Baptist church. Later, as the Jewish population grew to sixty families, they moved into a former bowling alley. Jane didn’t have a bat mitzvah. Instead, she was confirmed at age fifteen, with the Ames girls at the ceremony. The confirmation was a reminder to them that Jane was different, and they were curious and respectful; for some of the girls, so accustomed to church, it was as if they were given entrée into a secret society.

  Dr. McCormack was a spiritual man whose faith was based on the wonder of life and the daily practice of the Golden Rule, rather than the precepts of organized religion. He appreciated differences in people’s beliefs, and would tell Jane and her parents that he admired the Jewish people because so many of them valued education and had stable families.

  Marilyn liked to ask Jane questions about Judaism. She followed along closely when she was invited to Passover seders at Jane’s house, and she thought of Jane when she stepped into the world beyond Ames and saw hostility toward Jews. When Marilyn was sixteen, she went alone to Europe for a summer tour, and made a stop at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. Stepping through the bookcases to the Frank family hideaway, she began crying, unable to get Jane out of her head. That night in her journal, she described how enraged she felt. She had the first homicidal urges of her life. If anyone ever comes for Jane and her family, she vowed, “I will kill them first!”

  For Jane and Marilyn, being exposed to each other’s family offered not only lessons in cultural differences, but also in how families overcome obstacles in their own way. Jane saw firsthand that in the decades after losing his son, Dr. McCormack was able to persevere and develop this contagious positive attitude. He came to look at life as a glorious adventure, and he threw himself into hiking, skiing, geology. One of his favorite words was “magnificent.” “Did you catch the sunset tonight? It was magnificent!” “That concerto? Magnificent.” “Marilyn, your friends look magnificent!”

  And when Marilyn was feeling vulnerable or afraid, Jane always encouraged her to talk to her dad. So often, Dr. McCormack knew just the right words to say. A few nights before Marilyn was about to head off to college, she went into her parents’ bedroom. Her dad was there alone, and she asked if he had a minute.

  She’d been accepted at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Jane would be going to Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. “I’m not sure I want to go so far away,” Marilyn said flatly, and a good part of her meant it. “I don’t know that I can be away from my friends or from Ames. I just don’t know that I can be away from home.”

  She was also worried about how her parents would cope with her absence. “Won’t you be sad when I go?”

  “Sad?” her dad replied. “I won’t be sad. Not sad at all. In fact, I can hardly wait!”

  He told her that he was thrilled when he thought about the “magnificent” adventures that awaited her. He said her friends, especially Jane, would remain in her heart, and she could write them every day if she wanted to. She could call them from the dorm phone. She could visit them. She could conjure up her happy memories of them. As for Ames, it would always be there, locked in the middle of Iowa, waiting for her. “Mom and I will be here, too,” he said.

  Marilyn was near tears. “But you’ll be so far away from me.”

  “No, don’t think of it that way,” her dad told her. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’re going to keep you at the end of our fishing line. And if you ever need anything, you just give a little tug and we’ll reel you back in.”

  On the day that Jane got married in 1989, with Marilyn standing at her side, one of the most meaningful moments for her was just after she walked down the aisle, when Dr. McCormack gave her one of his heartfelt bear hugs. He was a man who hugged like he meant it, an uncommon trait for a man of his generation. And in the whir of emotion that surrounded his hug, a clear thought came into Jane’s head: “I’ve really arrived at a good place, haven’t I? I made the right choice in a man, didn’t I? It must be true, because here’s one of my heroes giving me all of his support, all of his approval.”

  When some of the other girls reached adulthood, they would remark to each other that they could never find a doctor they really liked. They figured out why. No one had Dr. McCormack’s bedside manner. No one cared about them like Marilyn’s father had.

  After the girls started having children of their own, they’d take their kids to pediatricians. It didn’t always feel right. One day Karen, now living in Philadelphia, called Marilyn. “I want a doctor for my kids who would be like your father was to me,” she said. Marilyn had been having her own issues finding a good pediatrician for her children. She told Karen, “I’m searching for that, too.”

  By the time Marilyn had her kids—two sons and a daughter—her father was no longer practicing medicine. His retirement was a bit premature because, in the late 1980s, he began showing early signs of dementia. He quit his practice unexpectedly one day in 1989. A boy had come to his office with a minor problem—strep throat or an ear infection—and as usual, Dr. McCormack prescribed amoxicillin. A few hours later, the pharmacist called him, a bit concerned. Dr. McCormack had written the wrong dosage on the prescription, and luckily the pharmacist had caught the error.

  Dr. McCormack, who had written thousands of amoxicillin scrips over the years, knew his mistake was a memory issue. “I don’t ever want to hurt a child,” he told Marilyn’s mom when he got home that night. In that moment, he decided to retire, and he never worked as a doctor again. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

  The disease came upon him gradually, but given his knowledge of medicine, he was well aware of the long, lonely good-bye that awaited him and his family. Marilyn became determined to hold on to whatever gifts his mind could still offer. He was a man who spent his life imparting perfectly stated life lessons. And so, in his final years, Marilyn would sometimes bring a tape recorder and sit with him. “Give me some of your wisdom before you can’t give it to me anymore,” she’d say to him, and for a while, he was able to answer her.

  He’d tell her things like: “When you see your kids, remember me.” Another time he told her: “Remember the things I did for you that made you happy, and do those things for your own children.”

  Marilyn found herself looking back at both her father’s life and her own. She tracked down that doctor in California, by then an old man, who had performed her dad’s vasectomy reversal. She sent him a simple friendly Christmas card, with no explanation about who she was, but he recognized her name and wrote back to her. He told her he recalled her father well, and even said that he remembered the day in April 1963 when she was born.

  By the time her dad got sick, Marilyn and her husband and kids (and her two sisters) had long lived near Minneapolis. She and her siblings convinced her parents to move there so they could help care for their father.

  Marilyn had made new friends in Minnesota, and they were kind and well-meaning women who would often ask how her dad was doing. But they knew him only as an old man with Alzheimer’s. They had no sense of him in his years as a doctor, when he mattered to his community, when he felt free to counsel Marilyn’s friends because he had cared for them all their lives—and because he cared about them.

  During the years her father was fading, Marilyn usually felt fairly strong. But when she would reunite with the girls from Ames, she felt surprisingly emotional. The first sight of them would bring her to tears. In time, she figured out why. They reminded her of her dad when he was vigorous and in his prime. Whenever she talked to Jane, who became a college psychology professor in Massachusetts, they could return together in their minds to the McCormacks’ summer house on Lake Minnewaska in Minnesota.

  In his final years, Dr. McCormack’s lucid moments became rarer and rarer. Still, there were flashes of exuberance that reminded his loved ones of who he had been. One day he was in the car, and Marilyn’s mom was driving and talking to him. She was so engaging and, as alway
s in his eyes, so beautiful. He smiled and stopped her, mid-sentence. Then he spoke to her wistfully but firmly: “You’re a fascinating woman. But I’m married.”

  Dr. McCormack died in Minneapolis in June 2004. He was seventy-nine. Marilyn’s new friends from Minnesota offered their condolences, gave her hugs, wished her well, and told her they’d be there for her. She appreciated that.

  But the girls from Ames—their condolences were so different. It was as if they hardly had to share any words with Marilyn. “Her new friends, they didn’t get it,” says Jane. “They might have met Dr. McCormack in his last few years, but they didn’t know the real man, the man he was. And we did. We knew him as this completely phenomenal human being. And so we knew. We knew what Marilyn had lost.”

  3

  Karla

  Karla is cranky. For starters, it’s too loud for her. The other girls are chattering away, getting caught up on each other’s life and children, laughing long and hard—and loud, so loud. For Karla, this reunion at Angela’s is sensory overload.

  She’s also not getting enough sleep. Most of the other girls are staying up late, talking and talking, dragging her into their conversations. Because the reunion will last only four days, some of them see sleep as a waste of precious time. Karla, on the other hand, needs her rest in order to function.

  “Let me go to bed,” she says every hour or so, starting at ten P.M. But her protestations are ignored. The others figure, and they’re not all wrong, that she doesn’t really want to go to sleep, either. She’d miss too much. (Besides, as Cathy jokes: “The fear of being talked about will keep you up.” Jenny, who got to the reunion eighteen hours after everyone else, called ahead: “Don’t talk about me until I get there.”)

  Karla apologizes for being cranky. Truth is, she’s just being straightforwardly Karla. She needs her coffee. She needs her sleep. She needs them to quiet down.

  There’s another factor at work, too. Not long into the weekend, a part of her is absolutely ready to go home to see her kids. That’s always been an issue for her at these reunions. In the days before cell phones, the girls remember her standing at pay phones outside bars or restaurants, calling home to her kids. Kelly would have to nudge her along: “Come on, Karla, enough! Get off already.”

  “We’re all moms who completely love our kids,” Kelly says. “But Karla, wow, she really loves her kids.”

  Karla isn’t one of those mothers who spoils her children or gets overly involved in their lives. It’s just that her love translates into an urge to spend total time with them. For years now, on Saturday nights, she has never felt compelled to go out for dinner and drinks with her husband and some other couple. “I’d rather spend Saturday nights with my family,” she says. The other girls understand this about her, even if it makes Karla a wet blanket.

  Here at Angela’s, the girls discussed drawing straws to see who slept where and who’d share a bed with whom. But even before partners were chosen, Kelly agreed to sleep in the downstairs bedroom with cranky Karla. “I’m the only one brave enough to stay with you,” she says. Karla smiles slightly and doesn’t argue the point.

  Throughout the weekend, there are flashes of the bubbly, funny Karla they knew when they were kids. But there are times, also, when she’s obviously subdued or a bit disconnected.

  Kelly thinks everyone is giving Karla a little more room to be cranky. “She wants quiet, we’re quiet,” says Kelly. “She wants to sleep, we try to let her sleep.” The girls have been doing this for a few years now, a slight indulgence—actually, an act of love—that has become an unspoken agreement.

  Karla dismisses this. “That’s Kelly,” she says. “She thinks she knows . . .”

  Whatever the case, Karla is tremendously grateful to all of the girls. Her intermittent crankiness aside, she is well aware that they have been in her corner when she needed them the most. Through the hardest moments of her life, their devotion to her has been tested, and they all came through. That’s why, though she’d like to go to bed, and she’d like them to shut up already, and a part of her would like to get home to be with her kids, she’s here, on the porch, with them.

  Like Marilyn, Karla was born into circumstances that set her apart from the other Ames girls. Marilyn was a baby who was desperately wanted; after all, her father had reversed his vasectomy to have her. In a way, Karla’s arrival in the world was the mirror opposite of Marilyn’s.

  She was born on April 25, 1963—just seventeen days after Marilyn and nine days after Jenny—in the same maternity ward at Mary Greeley Hospital. For the five days that followed, Karla was brought to her mother’s side for every feeding. Her mother held her, nursed her and talked to her. And then, on the sixth day, her mother gave her up for adoption and disappeared from her life.

  Now, as a mother herself, Karla finds it almost unfathomable that a woman could nurse and hold a child through all those feedings, and then walk away. That image of abandonment would remain with Karla, informing the woman she became. Decades later, with her own kids, she became a mother who was willing to sleep by their bedside when they were sick, to hold their hands for as long as they needed her, to skip Saturday nights out to be with them.

  Growing up, the Ames girls were always intrigued by the story of Karla’s birth. They didn’t dwell on it, but it was there, in the back of their minds.

  As teens, seven of the girls, including Karla, worked together at Boyd’s Dairy Store. One day a woman came in for ice cream. She stared at Karla, almost as if she knew her. “She kept looking at me and looking at me,” Karla recalls. Everyone noticed. Finally, Cathy broke the silence by saying, “Hey, maybe that’s your biological mother!” There were laughs all around after the mystery woman left, though Karla’s laughter was more self-conscious. The woman never showed up there again.

  Karla knows little about her biological mother, except for tidbits shared by nurses on duty the day she was born. They said the woman was a doctoral student at a college out of town; she came to Ames because her sister lived there. Her pregnancy was the result of an affair with a married professor who was Catholic and had several children. On the night Karla was born, the professor came to the hospital.

  Whether or not the woman was also Catholic is unclear, but the professor had asked that she not have an abortion. It was important to both of Karla’s birth parents that they find adoptive parents who were college-educated. The professor had some kind of double doctorate.

  The day before Karla was born, the phone rang at the home of Barbara and Dale Derby. Mrs. Derby recalls the moment with remarkable clarity, right down to the type of cookies she was baking when the call came: chocolate chip. The birth mother’s doctor was on the phone. He said he had talked to a local attorney, who knew that the Derbys had been looking to adopt. The doctor explained that an available baby would be born, possibly within hours, at Mary Greeley Hospital. But this offer, out of the blue, came with a stipulation. “We can only give you ten minutes to decide,” the doctor said. After that, he’d offer the baby to another couple.

  Unable to have children of their own, the Derbys had just adopted a little girl the year before, from an orphanage. Did they really want another baby so soon? Mrs. Derby hung up the phone and ran outside to find her husband, who was weeding in their garden. She told him about the surprise phone call, the ten minutes to decide, the urges within her to have another child.

  “Well, we’d want a boy,” Mr. Derby said. “How do we know this baby will be a boy?”

  “I don’t care,” Mrs. Derby said. “I want this child. Girl or boy, I know this is our baby.”

  Mr. Derby took a breath, told her that if she wanted another baby, girl or boy, then so did he, and sent her running back into the house. Perhaps seven minutes had passed. Mrs. Derby called the doctor back. Yes, she told him. Yes, they’d take the child.

  She was so nervous that she could hardly hold the receiver in her hand. It was shaking against her ear. She asked if the birth mother had been getting prenatal
care.

  “Do you want this baby?” the doctor asked. “If you do, don’t ask questions.”

  In terms of education, the Derbys fit the criteria requested by the biological parents. Mr. Derby, being a bridge designer, was a civil engineer. Mrs. Derby had a business degree and worked for the phone company. And because this was an adoption that wouldn’t be going through an agency, it was put together without great formality, in the small-town way that things were done then. The nurse who brought Karla to the Derbys’ home had no paperwork. She just handed Mrs. Derby the baby and one extra cloth diaper, then wished her well and drove off. Karla was wearing a thin little dress she’d been given at the hospital. Mrs. Derby stood there, tears running down her cheeks, holding tight to Karla and that extra diaper.

  It would take a year for the adoption to be legal. So for twelve months, Mrs. Derby feared that the biological mother would return and take Karla away.

  During her childhood, Karla felt comforted to know that several of the Ames girls had a connection to her adoption. There was Marilyn, whose dad, as Karla’s pediatrician, helped facilitate the paperwork that permanently placed her with the Derbys. There was Jenny, who was born at Mary Greeley Hospital the week before Karla. In those days, new mothers remained hospitalized for seven days or more; “veterans” with week-old babies would be recruited to push around the juice carts and serve the newer mothers. Karla liked to imagine her biological mother and Jenny’s mother crossing paths or talking—or even rooming together. But Jenny’s mom has no recollection of meeting the birth mother.