Norma Jeane's visit to Gladys Mortensen in the nursing home

Norma Jeane Baker’s relationship with Gladys Mortensen is marked by distance, attempted care, and a persistent longing for maternal recognition. At the Lakewood Home, Norma Jeane gives Gladys a white piano and tries to make the visit feel like an ordinary family occasion. Gladys accepts the gesture and her daughter’s embraces, but the closeness remains uneven. Near the novel’s end, a vision returns to Gladys as a younger mother, connecting the nursing-home visit to the childhood revelation that the man in a photograph was Norma Jeane’s father.

The piano as an act of care

When time seems short, Norma Jeane arranges for the white spinet to be delivered to the Lakewood Home and placed in its visiting room as a gift from Gladys Mortensen’s daughter. She has it sent after only two or three telephone calls. Gladys, then sixty-two, seems confused when staff explain the generosity of the gesture. The gift is both practical and intimate: Norma Jeane has kept the instrument in good condition, and its arrival gives her a way to offer something lasting when words alone cannot repair their distance.

Gladys is now a model patient. She has not tried to escape the clinic for years, has caused no further problems for staff or other patients, and is no longer considered a danger to herself. Her earlier crises are not erased, but the visit finds her in a different phase of institutional life: compliant, receptive to other people’s expectations, and ready to appear pleased. Pressed to sit and play, she initially refuses, then hesitantly touches the keys and sounds a few chords with the same careful respect Norma Jeane remembers from her own playing.

Norma Jeane explains to the director and gathered staff that the piano is valuable and has been kept in tune. The scene has not been rehearsed, yet it goes unexpectedly well. The director thanks her on the staff’s behalf, and the room’s attention turns toward the blonde visitor they openly call Miss Monroe. Norma Jeane no longer insists that they use her private name. The piano, austere furniture, and attentive audience make the room resemble a staged scene, but the gesture is real: she has brought her mother an instrument associated with their shared past and with music’s importance to lonely, sensitive people.

Affection received, but not returned

The visit also exposes the limits of what the gift can accomplish. The director holds Norma Jeane’s hand, evidently hoping the famous visitor will stay longer, but she has another appointment. She says goodbye to Gladys by embracing and kissing her. Gladys neither embraces nor kisses her in return, yet allows her daughter to hold her and smiles. Her response gives Norma Jeane a small, ambiguous sign of recognition: she accepts the contact and frames it as the proper conduct of a mother, though the narration suggests that medication may account for some of her manner.

Norma Jeane promises to call soon and to stay longer next time. She puts on sunglasses so those present will not see her eyes, then leaves quickly. The gesture contrasts with her public ease as Miss Monroe: in the visiting room she can produce reassurance for the staff, but departure exposes the feeling she is trying to conceal. A young nurse accompanies her to the parking lot. The nurse, who has taken piano lessons for five years, says she will use the new spinet to teach patients. When she remarks that she thought only films contained such beautiful white pianos, Norma Jeane tells her that this one has a history: it once belonged to Fredric March. The gift thus passes from a private family keepsake into the daily life of the institution, even as its original recipient remains unable to meet her daughter’s affection in kind.

A childhood image and the absent father

Near the ending, the narrative returns to Norma Jeane as a child in a scene that unsettles ordinary chronology. After leaving a cinema, she walks in unfamiliar weather toward what she believes is the right building, mixing up periods and addresses. The entrance is The Hacienda, not the other residence she expects; her recollection also folds together Highland Avenue and the building associated with Gladys’s earlier fears. The confusion leads into a bright circle of light, where Gladys appears younger, smiling and in good spirits. In this remembered or dreamlike moment, what will happen later has not yet happened.

Gladys brings the excited child upstairs, where film posters include Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. The surprise is in the bedroom: Gladys holds Norma Jeane and points to a photograph of a smiling man. She tells the child that he is her father. The disclosure gives the maternal bond a further dimension. Gladys is not only the mother whose later institutionalized self accepts a piano and a kiss; she is also the person who once supplied Norma Jeane with an image and a name for the father whose absence would shape her understanding of belonging.

The relationship’s unresolved form

The two scenes offer different kinds of maternal presence. At the Lakewood Home, Gladys receives care in a state of diminished agency, and Norma Jeane must make the visit work through a gift, a public explanation, and a promise to return. In the childhood scene, Gladys is active and affectionate, creating a moment of excitement and revealing a piece of family identity. Neither scene resolves the relationship: the later embrace is not reciprocated, and the earlier revelation cannot restore the absent father. Together, they make the piano and the photograph more than separate objects. Each carries a version of what Gladys can give her daughter—one a carefully preserved connection through music, the other an account of origin—while leaving the longing between them intact.