Gladys Mortensen’s refusal to consent to Norma Jeane Baker’s adoption turns a hopeful appeal into a painful assertion of maternal possession. Norma Jeane has found a possible home with Mr. and Mrs. Mount, a kind couple who have applied to make her their daughter. Gladys’s reply does not merely reject that future: it insists that, despite her absence and illness, she remains the mother with the right to decide what happens to Norma Jeane.

The Appeal for a Home

Norma Jeane’s letter to Gladys presents her life at the orphanage in reassuring detail. She writes that she has friends there and at Hurst Elementary, where she is in sixth grade and among the tallest pupils in her class. She sings in the church choir, though she is still not a confident singer, and describes school as difficult in arithmetic but also enjoyable. Her grades are good apart from arithmetic, a subject whose mark she is too embarrassed to disclose. These particulars make the letter more than a request: they show a child trying to account for herself to a mother whose response matters deeply to her.

The letter also mentions the people who visit. Jess Flynn sometimes takes Norma Jeane to the cinema, and Clive Pearce has come to see her. The most consequential part, however, concerns Mr. and Mrs. Mount. They live in Pasadena, where Mr. Mount works as a lawyer; Mrs. Mount has a large garden, especially full of roses. On Sunday outings, the couple have taken Norma Jeane to see their spacious home, which has a pond. They have formally applied to have her live with them as their daughter. Norma Jeane says that they hope Gladys will agree and makes clear that she hopes so too.

Edith Mittelstadt reads the letter before it is sent. Norma Jeane shows it to her timidly, expecting criticism, but Edith praises its composition, offers to correct a couple of mistakes, and recommends ending with a prayer. Norma Jeane follows that advice. The prayer thus becomes part of a carefully prepared appeal: she is not only asking to join a family but trying to speak in a manner the adults around her have taught her is proper.

Gladys’s Reply

Twelve days pass before an answer arrives. It is the first and last letter Gladys writes to Norma Jeane while she is in the orphanage. The physical paper and handwriting make the response feel markedly different from the child’s considered appeal: Gladys’s letter is on crumpled yellow paper, its cramped lines wavering across the page. Its opening accuses Norma Jeane of having no shame before the world for what she has written.

Gladys calls the appeal filthy and declares that, for as long as she is alive and able to fight, she will not allow her daughter to be adopted. Her argument rests on a promise of a future that has not yet arrived: she says she is still alive, expects to recover, and will become strong enough to take Norma Jeane home. In this account, Gladys’s present absence is temporary, while adoption would make the separation an insult she refuses to accept. The letter converts a child’s hope for a stable household into a challenge to Gladys’s claim over her daughter.

The rejection is also directed at the religious language in Norma Jeane’s letter. Gladys angrily dismisses the God, blessings, and curses invoked in it, says she will take a lawyer, and insists that she will keep what is hers until death. Her bitterly sarcastic sign-off imitates the affectionate closing Norma Jeane had used, but turns that expression of attachment into a rebuke. The answer offers no comfort or practical arrangement for reunion; it makes resistance, legal action, and possession its terms.

Aftermath and the Broken Promise of Prayer

After Gladys refuses to sign the adoption permission, neither mother nor daughter resumes ordinary correspondence. Norma Jeane sends the customary Christmas and birthday cards, but receives nothing in return. The silence that follows extends the refusal beyond the letter itself: the Mounts’ application has opened the possibility of another home, but Gladys’s answer leaves Norma Jeane still emotionally oriented toward a mother who does not answer her.

When Norma Jeane later recalls the episode, her anger and tears astonish Edith Mittelstadt, who had known her as docile and shy. Norma Jeane sees the refusal as an injustice: she believes that a cruel, sick mother, confined in a psychiatric hospital and perhaps never to leave it, is nevertheless allowed by law to control her life. She also suspects that Gladys resents the Mounts and hates her. Those are Norma Jeane’s anguished interpretations, not explanations established by the letter; what the episode makes plain is the disparity between the child’s hope and the mother’s forceful rejection of adoption.

The failure of the appeal also unsettles the lesson attached to its prayer. Norma Jeane reminds Edith that she prayed as advised, repeatedly, yet the response was rejection. Edith rebukes her for what she calls blind, selfish emotion and explains that, according to Christian Science, prayer cannot change the Science of being but can help a person attain greater harmony with it. The explanation does not resolve the child’s immediate loss. Norma Jeane silently wonders what prayer is for if it cannot change the decision that governs her future.

Significance

The episode’s central reversal is intimate but consequential: a prospective family has offered Norma Jeane a home, and the mother she wants to please blocks that possibility while promising a reunion she cannot yet provide. Gladys’s letter makes biological motherhood a claim of authority, whereas Norma Jeane’s appeal treats belonging as something that might be made through care, shared outings, and a place in a household. The Mounts’ roses and pond stand in the letter as concrete signs of the life she hopes to enter, not as proof that the adoption will succeed.

The later silence and the child’s unanswered holiday greetings keep the conflict alive after the initial refusal. The event also binds familial disappointment to a crisis of belief: prayer has been recommended as the proper ending to the appeal, but cannot secure its desired outcome. In that gap between the language of faith and the powerlessness Norma Jeane experiences, the scene exposes how little control a child has over the adults and institutions deciding where she belongs.