Maribeth Robertson and her father’s relationship

Maribeth Robertson’s relationship with her father, Bert Robertson, moves from paternal authority enforced through shame and separation toward a tentative, emotionally exposed reconciliation. His ban on contact makes her pregnancy a condition for exclusion from her family; after she gives birth and places her daughter, Kate, for adoption, his decision to come for her and his tearful welcome do not erase the harm, but allow their estranged relationship to begin changing.

Separation and the Terms of Contact

Bert’s prohibition defines the terms of Maribeth’s separation from home: she is not to call until the pregnancy is over and she has “gotten rid of it.” His language reduces the baby to a problem to be disposed of and makes return conditional on the outcome he demands. When Maribeth phones home at Thanksgiving, hoping to speak with her mother, Bert takes the receiver and asks whether it is over. She tries to explain that she only wanted to wish him a happy Thanksgiving, but he repeats the prohibition and ends the call while she is still pleading. The call leaves her crying, with Tommy Whittaker returning to find her devastated.

The exchange is especially painful because Maribeth is seeking a small connection, not asking her father to approve of what happened. She wants to talk to her mother and sister, Noelle Robertson, and says she does not care about speaking with her brother, Ryan Robertson. Yet Bert’s rule cuts her off from the family as a whole. The gap between her longing for ordinary contact and his insistence that she remain silent turns his authority into isolation.

Shame, Fear, and a Foreclosed Future

Maribeth understands Bert’s rejection partly as an attempt to protect the rest of the family from her “mistakes,” and partly as embarrassment about the pregnancy. She admits that she too feels ashamed, but that shame does not cancel her attachment to her mother and sister. His response leaves her imagining not just a difficult return but a life permanently narrowed by the scandal: she fears people in town will talk, that boys will consider her sexually available and girls will despise her, and that Bert will refuse to let her attend college. In the future she pictures, she will be expected to work in his shop or stay home helping her mother, repeating a life she sees as confined and buried.

That fear has a particular force because Maribeth is sixteen and still depends on adults for her choices. She predicts that Bert will use the pregnancy against her, as he has used the marriages of her aunts to embarrass them. One aunt wept under his comments; another confronted him and warned that her husband would beat him if he continued. Maribeth notes that he stopped making remarks about the second aunt afterward. Her account makes the household’s shame more than an abstract threat: it is a pattern of humiliation that can persist unless someone resists it. The possibility of confronting him is difficult for her, but the example also suggests that his power is not unchangeable.

The Adoption Decision and a Second Call

The decision to place the baby gives the conflict with Bert a concrete outcome, but it is not simply compliance with his demand. At first the adoption process is impersonal: at the Sisters of Charity, Maribeth sees a newborn taken away to waiting adoptive parents without the young mother ever seeing her child, a practice she experiences as barbaric and secretive. Later, gifts for her own baby make the choice intimate and real. The clothes, blanket, toys, diapers, teddy bear, and high chair make her understand what she will not see her child use, and prompt her to contact Dr. Avery MacLean about finding adoptive parents.

Maribeth ultimately makes a different arrangement from the one suggested by the convent’s anonymous procedure. She asks Liz Whittaker and John Whittaker to adopt the baby, and after Kate’s birth signs the adoption papers three days later, waiving the waiting period. The decision is accompanied by grief, not indifference: she asks that the nurse not bring Kate to her that day because she needs time to mourn. When the Whittakers take Kate home, Maribeth tries not to respond to the baby’s cries, knowing that she must create distance from the child she has given up. Her choice is shaped by her wish for Kate to be loved and secure, as well as by the support and future the Whittakers offer her. Bert’s demand that she “get rid of it” and Maribeth’s deliberate adoption arrangement may converge in the fact of separation, but the story distinguishes his coercive language from her painful, considered decision.

After Kate’s birth, Maribeth calls her father again and tells him plainly that the baby is a girl and has been adopted by friends. Bert asks whether she has “given it away,” and she feels what she has ever felt for him turn to ashes. She is still frightened of leaving the Whittakers, and squeezes Tommy’s hand as she tells Bert she will come home in a few days. His blunt response initially appears to confirm that little has changed; then he surprises her by saying that he and her mother will come to collect her the following weekend. Maribeth does not know that the Whittakers have argued she should not travel back alone and that her mother has pressed Bert to come. When she asks whether Noelle can come too, he gives no firm answer.

Return and Tentative Reconciliation

The change in Bert becomes clearest when he arrives to take Maribeth home. She has received the Whittakers’ promise that she can return to them and that she will have money for college, but she still dreads going back and expects her father to be harsh. The Whittakers believe he has recognized that she made a mistake and wants her home, though they do not claim that he has forgotten or forgiven the pregnancy. His arrival does not resolve those uncertainties; it changes the immediate encounter from a forced departure into a family reunion that he participates in.

As Maribeth prepares to leave the Whittakers, she hugs them and says she loves them. Bert touches her arm gently and tells her, with tears in his eyes, “Come on, Maribeth, let's go home,” then adds, “We missed you.” His words stand in sharp contrast to the earlier order not to call until she had taken care of the pregnancy. For the first time in the evidence of their estrangement, he expresses not only authority or judgment but his own vulnerability and longing. The narrative allows Maribeth to reconsider him as a flawed man rather than the ogre she had remembered, while leaving open how their relationship will fare after they return home.

What the Relationship Makes Possible—and What It Does Not

Bert’s changing response matters because Maribeth’s fears about him are bound to her ideas about adulthood and autonomy. She worries that he will prevent her from going to college and confine her to the same domestic life she associates with her mother. The Whittakers directly counter that prospect: John tells her that the education fund originally set aside for Annie Whittaker will help her attend college, and that she may return to stay with them or apply elsewhere. They expect her to finish school and then choose her own path. Bert’s willingness to come for her makes a return to her family possible, but it does not itself guarantee that she will receive the independence she wants.

The relationship therefore ends not with a complete pardon or a settled future but with a changed gesture. Bert has required silence, then asks his daughter to come home; Maribeth accepts the ride while still carrying fear, grief, and attachment to the people she is leaving behind. His tears and admission that the family missed her offer evidence of feeling without proving that the old pattern of shaming has disappeared. Their reunion opens the possibility of making peace, while the provision for Maribeth’s education preserves a future beyond her father’s control. The movement from exclusion to a tearful welcome is real, but tentative: reconciliation begins as an invitation to return, not as proof that every wound has healed.