Norma Jeane—Irina

Norma Jeane—Irina is the substitute mother-child attachment that briefly gives Norma Jeane Baker a sustaining sense of identity and belonging. Through walks, songs, public encounters, and a handmade toy, she cares for Irina with evident delight, even as the child’s mother, Harriet, withdraws from both her daughter and the people around her. When Harriet leaves Verdugo Gardens with Irina in March 1944, Norma Jeane loses a relationship she had come to experience as profoundly her own.

A daily practice of care

Norma Jeane’s bond with Irina takes shape in a repeated afternoon ritual: she pushes a squeaking stroller through a small, shabby park, singing to the baby. The place is scarcely idyllic, with meager palms and rubbish scattered everywhere, but its condition does not diminish her pleasure. The routine itself matters. Caring for Irina lets Norma Jeane discover a form of purpose in which what she does and who she is seem to meet.

The book sets this modest domestic scene against the slaughter at Stalingrad in February 1943. In Southern California, the winter brings an almost daily, dazzlingly cold sun; in the stroller, Irina listens to songs and Mother Goose rhymes. The contrast does not make the surrounding world safe, but it gives the ritual a small, protected scale. Norma Jeane can attend to the child’s presence rather than the catastrophe elsewhere.

That care is physical and reciprocal. Norma Jeane bends to kiss Irina’s forehead and offers her slender fingers, which the baby’s plump fingers close around. She sings Little Baby Bunting and Three Blind Mice, and Irina looks at her, smiles, and imitates the name for her mother. The child’s touch and response make the attachment tangible: Norma Jeane is not merely performing a helpful task but receiving signs of affection that she treasures.

Recognition, and the absent father

Walks with Irina also bring Norma Jeane into brief encounters with strangers. They admire the baby and sometimes praise both child and mother. Norma Jeane blushes at the compliments, then answers proudly when asked Irina’s name. She knows the baby is nearly ten months old and will turn one in April. When people ask whether her husband is away, she says that he is serving in New Guinea.

The statement is true, but it conceals a more painful fact: Irina’s father, a United States Army second lieutenant, has officially been missing in action since December. Norma Jeane manages not to dwell on his disappearance. Instead, she concentrates on what is immediately available—the songs, Irina’s smile, the small hand holding hers, and the child’s emerging word for her. Her attachment therefore develops beside an absence she tries to keep at a distance. In the public story of herself as Irina’s mother, she finds a role that others recognize and that the child appears, to her, to confirm.

Care inside Harriet’s household

The attachment exists within an unequal and increasingly strained arrangement. While Norma Jeane takes Irina out, Harriet often remains on a battered living-room sofa in the apartment she shares with two other wives of missing servicemen. She stays inside with the blinds lowered and no radio playing. That silence is especially stark to Norma Jeane, who cannot bear to be alone at home for more than five minutes without turning on the radio.

On returning, Norma Jeane calls cheerfully to Harriet before entering and narrates the walk as she lifts Irina from the stroller. She then places the child in Harriet’s waiting hands. Harriet lies rigid on a sofa soaked with tears of anger and resentment, her face swollen and sallow, her eyes bloodshot; she has gained ten pounds since December. When Irina grows impatient, whimpers, and kicks, Harriet finally takes her as if accepting an unwanted bundle rather than a child. Norma Jeane’s repeated friendliness cannot draw an answer out of her, and the silence makes the contrast between the women’s responses to Irina painfully visible.

Norma Jeane fears that Harriet might harm herself or Irina. When she cautiously raises the matter with Bucky Glazer, he scarcely attends to her concern, dismissing it as women’s business. Norma Jeane does not dare confront Harriet directly because she thinks provoking her may be dangerous. Her care for Irina thus becomes both a source of intimacy and a position of helplessness: she feels responsible for the child but has neither authority nor a safe way to challenge her mother.

The cloth tiger and the breaking point

Norma Jeane makes Irina a cloth tiger using a pattern from Family Circle. She assembles it from orange cotton socks, strips of black fabric, and cotton stuffing; a fabric-covered wire coat hanger forms the tail, while shiny black buttons and pipe cleaners become eyes and whiskers. Irina delights in the toy, clutching it, setting it on the floor, and crawling after it. Watching her play makes Norma Jeane laugh with happiness. Harriet, by contrast, smokes and observes without visible interest.

Harriet’s response to Norma Jeane’s efforts turns their differences into open conflict. She calls Norma Jeane a perfect wife and mother with unmistakable sarcasm. Norma Jeane answers in the manner of Maureen O’Hara in a film, reproaching Harriet for being unhappy despite having such a splendid daughter. Harriet laughs, then sharply tells her to leave. The exchange exposes the precariousness of Norma Jeane’s role: she has invested herself in mothering Irina, but Harriet remains the child’s mother and can reject the help as readily as she can accept it.

In March 1944, Harriet disappears from Verdugo Gardens with Irina, leaving most of her few possessions behind. Norma Jeane is devastated and cannot imagine how she will manage without the child. She knocks repeatedly on the neighbors’ door; Harriet’s roommates are as bewildered and worried as she is. Norma Jeane tries to report a missing mother and daughter to the Mission Hills police, but stammers so badly that she hangs up. She also recognizes the obstacle: Harriet is an adult and Irina’s mother, and the departure appears voluntary. Loving Irina more, as Norma Jeane believes she does, gives her no power to retrieve her.

Absence and its afterlife

After the disappearance, Norma Jeane can scarcely distinguish recollection from dream. She thinks she may once have taken Irina to Gladys and received her blessing, but the memory is vague, and there will be no further blessing now that the child is gone. The father remains officially missing, and his remains are never found. Norma Jeane’s fearful speculation about what may have happened to him is not confirmation of his fate; it belongs to the same unsettled field of uncertainty that surrounds the vanished mother and child.

That uncertainty takes the form of a dream in which Harriet bathes Irina in scalding water. The baby cries in pain and fear, and Norma Jeane runs through a steaming corridor with no doors, unable to reach or rescue her. The scene is explicitly indistinct, perhaps a dream, rather than evidence that Harriet actually harmed Irina. Yet on waking, Norma Jeane goes into the bathroom and climbs into a tub of boiling water herself. Her teeth chatter and her skin burns. At six in the morning Bucky finds her; from his wide-eyed expression, she understands that he must not touch her.

The episode makes the severance more than a remembered sadness: Irina’s imagined danger and Norma Jeane’s failed rescue pass into her own body. The relationship has offered her a temporary experience of being needed, recognized, and answered. Its abrupt end leaves her not only without the child she loves, but without the daily practice through which she had felt most fully herself.