Small Sacrifices (21 page)

Diane's visits to her Arizona gynecologist indicated that the baby might arrive early. At twenty-five, she was in her fifth pregnancy. The baby's head had dropped and was engaged in the pelvic girdle. Labor could begin at any time. If it did, there was no way Diane could get on a plane to fly across America even though her contract specified that the optimum situation was for the delivery to take place in Kentucky, with the parents at hand. It was risky for Diane to remain in Chandler any longer. She flew East in the first week of May--almost two years to the day since she'd first written to the clinic offering to become a surrogate mother.

The first week of May is the best of all possible times to arrive in Louisville. The Kentucky Derby takes place on the first Saturday in May, the city and countryside are bright with flowers and the first tender leaves of oaks and silver maples, the grass is velvety and blue green.

Diane was admitted to the Audubon Hospital on May 7, 1982. It was a new hospital, smaller than the other facilities owned by the huge Humana group, removed from the hullabaloo of the artificial heart implants, designed to be cozy and welcoming. From her room Diane could see the flat, historic city below. The buildings were old and narrow, fancied up with fretwork and cornices-some painted, some brick, and some with cast iron facades bolted on all in a piece. Far off, down near the Ohio river, the little fish restaurants advertised themselves with thousands of tiny white lightbulbs tracing their roof lines, windows, doorways--shimmering in the night.

It was like a magical carnival; the princess had come here to give birth to a perfect child. Louisville welcomed her with flowers and lights.

Diane's cervix was already one-and-a-half-fingers dilated. Her labor was induced--an elective delivery. A nick in the thinned amniotic sac, and the fluid gushed out. Her contractions began t. y; almost at once.

Just before midnight, Diane was rolled into the delivery room-There, holding onto the

"other mother's" hand, she gave birth to

a baby girl. With tears rolling down her face, Diane held the baby

for a moment, and then she placed it in the arms of the real mother who was to raise this child.

"I looked at the baby, between my knees down there, and my first thought was of the mother. There were tears running down her face, and she wouldn't let go of my hand. All she could say was 'Thank you.'

"They put the baby in a little clear cradle, and I looked over at her and thought, 'What if I regret this?' and I said, 'No, that's just not mine. I'm not going to psych myself into believing that I'm giving up a child.' "

For the first time, Diane saw now the face of the man whose sperm had united with her ovum to make a baby. He wasn't movie-star handsome. He was only a man. Diane described him as ". . . ahhh plain . . . not somebody I would ever pick up off the street . . . but I have to admit I was very curious." Diane and the parents talked for hours after the birth. By comparison, Steve had been almost bored at the births of her three children; she'd never known such euphoria as this. At last, she had not one—but two—people to share her feelings. It was as if she had never had a baby before.

Three days later, Diane asked to see the baby girl one more time before she left the hospital. She walked to the nursery with the slightly apprehensive new parents. Diane gazed silently at her fourth living child, wondering if this was the lost Carrie drawn'

back from the misty place she'd gone to. No. The baby was the image of her father. Her eyes were dark, and her hair was jetblack. She didn't resemble Christie or Cheryl or Danny.

Diane decided she wasn't Carrie.

The RN in charge had been reticent about letting Diane in to see the baby, but she had no legal right to keep her out. She hovered nearby, nervous too, watching Diane cuddle the baby.

"I hadn't terminated my rights as a mother. In Kentucky, it takes five days," Diane smiles. "So the child was still my child." I . Would Diane Downs give up this baby? The psychiatrists had given their warnings, concerned that this dramatic, possibly neurotic

^man might not, in the end, release the child born of her own womb.

Five days went by ...

^ane honored her contract. She signed all the papers proffered to

"cr, and received her $10,000 fee. She flew home to Arizona, having her raven-haired daughter behind.

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Diane immediately broke one of the rules. She bought an

expensive layette for the new baby and mailed it to an address she'd ferreted out for the legal parents. The package came back marked: "Moved. No Forwarding Address."

Diane seemed to have no trace of postpartum depression, no grief over giving up her child. She felt only joy and such a sense of well-being.

She could hardly wait to be inseminated again.

ic... it's never totally successful. In fact there usually is a grief reaction with the women Pm following.

So far, there have been no severe psychiatric reactions

when a woman gives up the baby. I mean--no one's

ended-up in a psychiatric hospital. But it's only a matter of time."

--Philip Parker, M.D. psychiatrist, on surrogate mothers Diane went back to work in Arizona three weeks after she gave birth. It was June and full summer. She was slim again and feeling wonderful. She shouldered her heavy mail bags easily. Willadene was to have kept Christie and Cheryl while Diane recuperated, but Diane was lonesome. She sent for the little girls and fetched Danny back from Steve's care.

Diane sold the Palomino Street house back to Steve. She had the $10,000 payment for the baby, but she still owed Mack $5,000. She used the rest of the baby money for a vacation and a down Payment on a new mobile home. The expandable mobile home I had beige siding that blended into the scrabbly half-desert just beyond the manicured splendor of the Sunshine Valley Trailer ^rk at 18250 South Arizona Avenue in Chandler. When its two halves were joined, her mobile home was as big as a mediumsized

house.

Everything inside was new--most of it on credit. Diane's iving-room furniture was heavy, rough-hewn wood and leather°k vinyl, the cushions of sturdy brown and tan plaid. She hung 142 ANN RULE

white organdy curtains in the kitchen window and planted scarlet bougainvillea so that it would espalier against the outside walls. Space 363. The Four Musketeers were locked safe inside.

Diane recalls how they played games in air-conditioned coolness^ Outside it was unremittingly hot, and the sky above had no clouds

at all.

Nor did Diane seem to have any clouds in her life. The trailer removed the pressure of the hefty mortgage payments. Everything smelled so new and clean it enhanced the illusion of a fresh start. She had never lived here with Steve. At last, they were divorced!

Five years after the fact, Diane had expunged her guilt over the abortion of Carrie. She hadn't accomplished that with Clanny's birth, because she'd kept Danny. But she'd given Jennifer---her name for the surrogate baby--away, symbolically undoing

any harm she'd done. It was a mystical process, and it had taken her a while to figure it out.

Diane realized that she could trade babies for babies after all!

If there was ever a time when Diane Downs had the opportunity for a new start--her guilt atoned for and all of the negative influences that depressed her relegated to the past--it was the summer of 1982. She was surrounded by choices.

Almost without exception, Diane chose the wrong doors.

"I wanted to study pre-med . . . My dad said I should go to summer school to see if I really liked college. I went two nights a week from seven to nine. Steve took care of the kids." She took English and math courses first. She had been out of school for a while, and she needed to brush up. Diane's English course was basic composition. She wrote several papers: one on women's liberation, one on her aversion to "dumb rules," and a long essay on child abuse. She was quite good--particularly when her prose was compared with that of other freshmen who were eight years younger.

Diane's essay on "dumb rules" helped her vent her anger when she was not allowed to fence her yard at the trailer park, and when postal employees were forbidden to hang out in the coffee room when they were off duty. Diane had hated rules throughout her childhood; she had somehow expected that adults would be free of them.

She was particularly incensed about the new post office rules:

"The most recent ideas they came up with are the absolute

dumbest. Try this one: 'After an employee punches off the clock, he or she must leave the building immediately.' We may not even go to the break room to talk. Now, I abide by the rule of not talking while on the clock, so why do they chase us outside into the heat to talk?"

Diane's social life was entirely dependent on her coworkers, and she looked forward to having coffee and shooting the breeze with the men she worked with. A new rule forced them out into the scorching Arizona sun, and conversations were understandably foreshortened.

Diane was starving for much more intense communication.

She grabbed with both hands for new experience, but especially for some kind of connection with other human beings. She wanted so much. Friends. Fun. Lovers. Money. And her career as a physician. She planned to work her way through pre-med entirely in night school. Then she would go to medical school. She had no college credits to begin with; getting four years of college credits in night school might take years. She would find shortcuts. Diane wanted her dream house too. And soon. She drew the plans for her perfect house on the back of one of her essays. A huge complex--a square built of four wings surrounding an open courtyard. The smallest room was ten by seventeen ("kids' playroom") while the master bedroom was fifteen by twenty. There

were four bathrooms and a sun deck. Interestingly, there was no kitchen. The master bedroom was separated from the children's quarters by a catwalk suspended high above the forty-foot-long living room. Christie, Cheryl, and Danny would be relegated to the furthest corner of the mansion from the master bedroom. Any farther and they would be housed in a separate building entirely. Diane describes her feelings toward men that summer of '82 as "flirty and playful." In truth, her behavior verged on nymphomania.

Diane set out to work her way sexually through the male

employees of the Chandler post office.

She went about it very badly, setting herself up in "no win" ^tuations. She attracted her lovers easily by being available,

submissive, and gigglingly flirtatious, but her relationships foundered when intimacy began and her compliant exterior cracked ^d fell away. Men who expected a bubbly cheerleader were "nderstandably turned off when they found themselves alone with he ^minatrix who could--and often did--draw blood. The U.S. Post Office in Chandler, Arizona, is flat roofed and luare, constructed of stucco, brick and rock, and shaded by date

144 ANN RULE

palms and jacaranda trees. There are more than a dozen red white, and blue rigs parked out behind the loading dock early in the morning before the mounted carriers begin their routes. A hundred employees work inside, many of them men between

twenty-five and forty-five.

Detectives who have talked at length with the men who

moved through Diane's life agree that they were all "nice guys, kind of easy going, friendly guys," tall, mostly bearded, good looking, but not exceptionally handsome. Diane's men were salt-ofthe-earth kind of men, dependable and unsophisticated. With one

sole exception, they were all married.

One of Diane's short-lived affairs that summer was with

twenty-eight-year-old Cal Powell, who had a degree in behavioral science. He transferred into the Chandler post office shortly after Diane had returned from Kentucky. Diane was the aggressor. She went to his apartment and told him that she needed advice on college, confiding too that she was lonely and had no one to talk to. They made a date for Powell to come to Diane's mobile home to discuss her educational options.

Powell was a little surprised to see Christie, Cheryl, and Danny when he arrived--but Diane quickly took them next door.

Diane outlined her plans for med school. She wondered how many courses she could take at a time, how she might work out credit packages so that she could have her degree as soon as possible. She wanted to take twenty-two hours a quarter--an oppressive load even for a solid student who has no outside job. Cal suggested that she take a maximum of twelve to begin with. She sloughed off his suggestions. Didn't he understand she had no time"!

Diane suddenly became "very sexually aggressive" and Powell responded. They moved to the waterbed in Diane's room.

Powell discovered that Diane was wild--dangerous--in bed. She scratched him on his back and buttocks, leaving bloody tracks. He yelped and asked her to stop, and she obliged--but only for a minute or two.

"She started scratching me again, and it made me mad ... I put my clothes on ... She just laughed and said, 'Oh, another guy who doesn't like marks?' "

Diane had confided in Powell about the psychiatrist who

tested her before she was accepted into the surrogate mother's program.

"He told her she was intelligent, but a borderline psycho.

She thought it was funny ... I had the feeling she was angry at ^en--that she wanted to castrate them."

Diane worked closely with Jack Lenta and Lew Lewiston. The trio prided themselves on being the swiftest mail carriers in the Chandler post office.

At first, Diane was more attracted to Jack Lenta. He went to night summer classes at Mesa Community College too.

Lenta remembers: "I had been working there about four months when she just walked up and said, 'I want to go to bed with you.' I was kind of shocked . . . We got together about a month later."

Beneath Diane's cheerful patter, Lenta found her "very depressed, very lonely," a woman who talked of wanting a husband to come home to. Since he had no plans to leave his wife, he pulled back.