When No One Else Will

In the fall of 1939, Mimi Lukas, a former nurse and mother of two, secretly visits a doctor in Chicago to be fitted for a contraceptive diaphragm. Her husband, Stan, a once-celebrated White Sox first baseman, has an unhealed leg injury that has ended his career, and he has sunk into depression as the family's savings dwindle. Mimi forges Stan's signature on the prescription, resolving to keep their family from falling into poverty even if it means acting without his knowledge.

The family's situation worsens rapidly. Repossession agents haul away their electric refrigerator for overdue payments. Stan's agent, Gibbins, confirms that no major league team will sign a 36-year-old with an unhealed leg. When Mimi suggests returning to nursing, Stan erupts, insisting he can still play. After a discouraging search, Mimi lands a night-duty position at Chicago Memorial Hospital, but exhaustion and rustiness lead to repeated mistakes, and she is fired within weeks.

A chance encounter at the hospital changes everything. Mimi runs into Emily Ranus, a lively former nursing school classmate who now works for Dr. Henry Millstone. Emily slips her an address for a clinic that might be hiring, warning her to keep it secret. Mimi throws the paper away, but after losing her job, she searches the phone book and tracks down the office on North State Street. There she meets the office manager, Ada Martin, and the clinic's owner, Dr. Gabler, who reveals the clinic performs illegal abortions for any woman who seeks one. The pay is 45 dollars a week, nearly double Mimi's hospital salary. Shocked, Mimi walks out, but she passes a destitute man on the street and turns back, unwilling to let her family sink into the same desperation.

Her first days at the clinic upend her expectations. The procedures are performed by licensed physicians using sterile instruments, with careful anesthesia and follow-up care. Her colleagues, including nurse Roberta, receptionist Jo Kuder, and nurses Edna and Annie, are competent and compassionate. The patients are not the reckless women Mimi imagined; many are married mothers struggling with poverty. One, Mrs. Dorothy Bates, lives in destitution with several children and barely enough food to feed them. Another is a 12-year-old girl. Each case chips away at Mimi's inherited moral certainty.

The work carries serious legal risk. When police from the city's morals squad raid the clinic, Mimi and a doctor spend a night in jail before being released without charges, thanks to Ada's connections. Those connections involve Officer Daniel Moriarity, a plainclothes detective whom Ada pays a monthly retainer. Mimi is drafted into delivering the bribe money and recognizes Daniel as the officer who freed her from jail. He is married with four daughters and a wife who has a chronic illness. Despite her revulsion at participating in bribery, Mimi finds herself drawn to his candor and quiet steadiness.

Woven through the narrative are Mimi's memories of her older sister, Ginny, who became pregnant after an encounter with a visiting professor, a married man twice her age. As a young girl, Mimi innocently teased Ginny about gaining weight at Easter dinner, prompting their mother to discover the pregnancy. Their parents sent Ginny to an unwed mothers' home in Des Moines, Iowa, where Ginny died along with what the family believed was her stillborn baby. Mimi has carried the guilt of exposing her sister's secret ever since, and this guilt shapes her growing empathy for the clinic's patients.

As months pass, Mimi's marriage remains strained. Stan refuses to look for work and barely speaks to the children. At Holy Trinity Church, where Mimi has never converted to Catholicism and remains an outsider among the Polish parishioners, she encounters Zofina Dabrowski, a fellow parishioner who once excluded her from a charity group. When Zofina arrives at the clinic as a patient, both women are stunned. They promise to keep each other's secret, and afterward Zofina begins greeting Mimi warmly at church.

Mimi and Daniel grow closer, meeting at the zoo with their children and sharing the burdens of their home lives. After a second raid leads to Ada and Jo's arrest, Ada's husband asks Mimi to retrieve cash from Ada's safe and deliver 2,500 dollars to Daniel so he can bribe the assigned state's attorney into dropping the case. When the bribe succeeds, Mimi impulsively kisses Daniel, and he kisses her back. She pulls away, shaken.

At a party at Ada's house weeks later, Mimi is tempted to leave with Daniel but stops herself, recognizing that what they share is loneliness, not love. She drives home and confronts Stan with raw honesty: She almost slept with another man, she secretly obtained a diaphragm, and their children are afraid of him. Stan breaks down, confessing he replays the play that broke his leg endlessly, unable to forgive himself. They agree to rebuild.

Stan's recovery is gradual. A chance meeting between Mimi and Gary Robinson, a former traveling secretary for the Cubs, leads to an invitation for Stan to try out as a line coach at spring training. He goes and thrives. But Mimi's legal troubles accelerate. Police raid Ada's Dearborn Street office, seizing patient records and financial documents. Assistant State's Attorney Papanek convenes a grand jury, and the clinic's operations unravel. Dr. Millstone kills himself, leaving letters that characterize the clinic as a criminal syndicate. Emily, devastated and facing her own charges, poisons herself. Daniel, spiraling under pressure and terrified by Ada's threats to implicate him, forces his way into Ada's home and shoots her daughter, Jennie, mistaking Jennie's bedroom for Ada's. Mimi, who arrived moments before to warn Ada, races upstairs and tries to save the young woman but cannot.

Mimi, Ada, and Jo are indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit criminal abortions. Papanek privately offers Mimi full immunity in exchange for testifying against the others. When Mimi confesses the truth to Stan and her mother-in-law, Halina, Stan is furious, but Halina surprises Mimi with a story about a childhood friend in Poland who was assaulted and forced into marriage. If Mimi was helping women like that, Halina says, what she did was brave. One sleepless night, Mimi opens a box of Ginny's belongings and reads letters her sister wrote from the unwed mothers' home, letters their parents never opened. In one, Ginny forgives Mimi directly. A final official letter reveals that Ginny's baby was born alive, a boy placed in an orphanage when the family failed to claim him. Mimi is stunned to learn she has a living nephew.

Fortified by Ginny's forgiveness, Mimi refuses Papanek's deal, telling him she cannot betray her convictions or her colleagues. At the trial, 25 women testify against the defendants, including Zofina, who identifies Mimi while gnawing her thumb raw with anxiety. Stan arrives in the courtroom, having abandoned a road trip with the Cubs. Judge Haas finds all three women guilty and sentences them to three years in the penitentiary.

In the epilogue, Mimi is one year into her sentence at the Oakdale Reformatory for Women. Daniel is convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Stan, briefly demoted after leaving the team for the trial, is reinstated with the Cubs. Their lawyer appeals the conviction to the Illinois Supreme Court, arguing all evidence was obtained through unconstitutional searches, and the court agrees to hear the case. Mimi writes to the unwed mothers' home seeking information about Ginny's son but is refused. She resolves not to give up until she finds him.