Bert Robertson

Bert Robertson is Maribeth Robertson’s father and a successful car-repair-shop owner in Onawa, Iowa. He embodies a household order in which a daughter’s behavior and ambitions are tightly policed while a son’s freedom is taken for granted. When Maribeth becomes pregnant at sixteen, his insistence on secrecy, family respectability, and punishment drives her away from home; later, he takes part in a more generous plan for her education and future.

Identity and Family Order

Bert runs the most successful car repair shop in Onawa, charging three dollars an hour and taking pride in a business that lets him hold his head up around town. Though not rich, he values respectability and a conventional division of family roles. He is proud that his wife, Margaret Robertson, has never worked, and imagines that Maribeth might eventually help with the shop’s books, but not pursue ambitions that carry her beyond the role he has chosen for her.

That arrangement is sharply gendered. Bert’s son Ryan Robertson works alongside him, regards himself as a mechanic as capable as his father, and shares hunting and fishing weekends with him. Bert and Ryan get on well. His daughters, by contrast, are expected to behave, avoid sexual scandal, marry, and care for their households and children. Bert warns Ryan not to marry a “wild girl” or get someone pregnant unless he intends to marry her, but applies a different standard to his daughters: they must not become sexually “wild” at all.

Control of Maribeth’s Choices

The conflict is visible before Maribeth’s pregnancy. On the night of her spring dance, Bert objects to her borrowed peacock-blue dress and makeup, ordering her to change into something decent or stay home. The dress, borrowed from a friend’s older sister, is a little too large, and its matching shoes hurt her feet; what makes it unacceptable to him is its revealing bodice. Maribeth’s mother feels she should have been allowed to wear it, but does not challenge Bert once he has decided.

Bert’s rules extend beyond clothing and sexuality to education. He accepts some schooling if it helps Maribeth with bookkeeping, and dismisses the idea of college and professions such as medicine, engineering, law, or even nursing as unreasonable for women. He believes women should learn enough, then marry and raise children. Maribeth’s teachers have encouraged her sense of her own ability, and her ideas about what women can do unsettle the limited future Bert considers suitable. His disapproval is not simply a response to one dress or one mistake; it reflects a larger effort to set the boundaries of his daughter’s life.

Pregnancy and Expulsion from Home

When Ryan tells Bert that Maribeth is pregnant, Bert comes home in a rage and confronts her in the living room. Margaret is already crying, and Ryan looks grim. Bert blames Maribeth for disgracing the family, compares her to his sisters, and demands the father’s identity. Maribeth refuses to name Paul Browne. She had wanted him to love her, but he is marrying someone else; she does not want marriage to him to become the condition for her future. She has decided to have the baby and give it up for adoption.

Maribeth asks what she is supposed to do, explaining that she cannot undo what happened and sees no way to make it better. Bert’s answer is that she must have the child and place it for adoption. He will not accept her proposal to stay with nuns while continuing school and later explain her absence as illness: he is preoccupied with what people will say and the family’s reputation. He tells her not to expect support until she has paid for her actions, and arranges her stay at the Sisters of Charity. Eight hundred dollars will cover six months’ room and board, expenses, and the delivery; the convent says the baby will go to an adoptive family and that Maribeth can return a week after the birth if there are no complications.

Bert gives her the money in a white envelope and orders her to leave the next morning. He tells her to say she is going away to school, not to tell Noelle Robertson the truth, and to return in six months. Maribeth is being sent away from the family home at the point when she most needs support. Her fear of losing contact with her mother and younger sister is part of the cost of his decision, even as Bert presents the departure as a practical solution to a problem he regards as a family disgrace.

Separation and Changed Circumstances

Maribeth does not remain at the convent. After seeing the harsh conditions other pregnant girls face there, she leaves with her remaining money and a small bag, then buys an open-ended bus ticket to Chicago. She writes postcards to her mother and Noelle, promising an address once she has one. Away from home, she finds work, continues her education with Tommy Whittaker’s help, and begins to build a life that does not follow the path Bert had prescribed.

Her independence does not erase the pressures that first drove her away. At sixteen, she is separated from her family, has no settled home, and is carrying a baby she does not plan to raise. Tommy is also sixteen, but has a family, a home, and a route back to school; the difference in their circumstances clarifies how much of Maribeth’s future has been determined by pregnancy and family rejection. With Tommy, she keeps up with schoolwork by completing the same assignments and using his books, strengthening an educational ambition Bert had treated as impractical.

Reconciliation and Future

After Maribeth gives birth to Kate, she asks Liz Whittaker and John Whittaker to adopt the baby. She signs the adoption papers three days after the birth, waiving the waiting period, and needs time to mourn before seeing the child again. The Whittakers agree that Kate will be told Maribeth is their friend, not her birth mother, at least for the time being. Maribeth’s separation from Kate therefore becomes a deliberate family arrangement, not the anonymous placement Bert initially set in motion at the convent.

The Whittakers also help reopen the future Bert had narrowed. John tells Maribeth that he and Bert have discussed her return home: she is to finish school that spring, and after that she may go to college, come back to stay with the Whittakers, or apply elsewhere. The Whittakers offer her the money they had set aside for Annie Whittaker’s education. John acknowledges that Bert has not forgotten what happened, but believes he would like Maribeth to come home and that the family may begin making peace. Maribeth admits that she hates the thought of returning, while Tommy promises to visit. Bert’s later willingness to participate in her return and educational prospects marks a change from outright expulsion, although the available account does not establish that their relationship has been fully repaired.