The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  3

  Secrets

  I began my life two miles from the epicenter of the sexual revolution, in 1966. As I was taking my first steps, tens of thousands of the movement’s foot soldiers had converged on San Francisco for the Summer of Love. The drug-fueled Haight-Ashbury district had become ground zero for a cultural revolution in which activists, artists, and half-lucid dreamers challenged deep-seated norms of behavior. Almost overnight, stigmas that had haunted women for centuries began to lose their power, and several years later one of the revolution’s cornerstone tenets would be ratified into law. An unmarried woman who found herself pregnant and alone would no longer be forced to bear a child in the shadows, only to leave it at the doorstep of a parish church or, worse, seek out a back-alley abortion that could leave her disfigured or dead.

  But in Forest Hill, an affluent neighborhood of gracefully curved streets atop one of San Francisco’s famous peaks where I spent the first six years of my childhood, life went on as it always had. Lawyers and bankers left their imposing homes, many with ocean views, to make their daily trek to the financial district, while mothers took their children to feed the swans at the Palace of Fine Arts, untouched by the turmoil brewing a short drive away.

  The sexual revolution had come too late for my mother, anyway. Her fate had been sealed centuries before, by the stroke of a king’s quill pen and the accident of her birth.

  No one told me that my mother was illegitimate. It wasn’t a topic to be brought up at the dinner table or in casual conversation. Yet from my earliest memory, the fact of her illegitimacy was an integral part of my family’s narrative. Somehow we just knew, perhaps because the clues simply spilled out into our daily lives.

  Unlike other kids, in my world there were no grandparents bearing gifts or sending cards on birthdays or at Christmas. My paternal grandmother had died giving birth to my father, and my paternal grandfather had succumbed to a heart attack years later. I’d heard stories about them and would ask my father about his dad from time to time, questions any child might ask. What was he like? Do you look like him? How old was he when he died? But to bring up my mother’s parentage was taboo. What were their names? Where did they live? Were they alive or dead? I didn’t know the answers to even the most basic questions.

  From time to time, I’d overhear tidbits about my mother’s heritage. She was a descendant of Welsh nobility, but her rightful place in society had been taken from her—stolen, she would say. We had blue blood pulsing through our veins, she declared, and that no one could change.

  I didn’t know what she meant, and imagined that my blood was somehow different from that of other children. I had no reason to doubt her, not back then, given the precision of her speech and the high-toned nature of her extracurricular pursuits. She was as skilled at sketching with a pencil as she was at oil painting, and she played the piano with an effortless grace. Her tales of her studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music, England’s oldest conservatory, founded by the 11th Earl of Westmorland in 1822, only served to fuel my fantasies. So did her obsession with her Welsh ancestry and a long-running effort to help restore a crumbling Welsh castle. She would occasionally show me photographs of the imposing turreted stone structure, set on a vast empty moor, and over the years she spent thousands of dollars organizing posh dinner parties to raise funds for rebuilding the castle to its former glory.

  When I was about eleven, I found a letter that hinted at the unknowns percolating in the background of my family life. The composition of the blood that surged through my veins was in question, it turned out. My parents had gone on an errand, and I’d taken the opportunity to snoop around my father’s office. It was a bold move on my part, uncharacteristic of my rule-abiding nature. I glanced nervously out the window to make sure the coast was clear and then opened and closed a few desk drawers before turning to my father’s file cabinet. This imposing piece of furniture was made of shiny lacquered oak, with antique brass handles on each of its four drawers. The cabinet had always seemed mysterious to me, so different from the gray industrial cabinets that lined the halls of my father’s law office in San Francisco’s financial district. Unsure of what I was looking for, I reached over and pulled on the top drawer.

  “Bills,” “House,” “Insurance.” The contents were mundane, but a file all the way in the back, at the very end of the alphabet, caught my eye. Its label sported a single name: “Weston.”

  Carefully sliding the file out of the cabinet, I sat on the hardwood floor and thumbed through its contents—a few articles about England that didn’t seem particularly important, then a copy of a letter on my father’s stationery. The letter was addressed to someone in England, and it began with a formal salutation: “Dear Sir.”

  “We are confident . . .” “The evidence shows . . .” The topic was a property in a place called Shropshire, and I managed to piece together that my father was trying to prove that my mother was somehow entitled to this land. Near the end of the letter was the string of words I found most surprising of all: “even her daughter looks like a Weston.”

  I’d always been told that I looked like my mother, a comparison I resented and one that my sister used as a taunt. “You’re just like Mom” was the ultimate insult in our home. My sister and I had never been close; we were separated by four years, and then by geography when she was sent off to boarding school in Arizona as a young teen. We would never live in the same house again, or even in the same city. By the time she returned, I was off at boarding school myself. But my sister’s words were seared into my memory, and I secretly clung to the hope that despite her assertions I was, in fact, nothing like my mother. The physical resemblance, however, was irrefutable. I had the same smooth brown hair, the same pale skin splattered with freckles. We both had large eyes and thick black eyebrows, although her eyes were brown and mine blue-green, like my father’s. And now I looked “like a Weston,” whatever that meant. Despite the sting of confirmation, my wish for individuation faded slightly as I realized my possible role in proving my mother’s noble birthright.

  Her claims had never seemed strange or unusual, and I had never questioned her status as a member of the aristocracy. After all, she made her disdain for the poor crystal clear (while reserving her greatest derision for the nouveau riche, calling them the “tackiest of the lot”). Her concern with the social strata was all-consuming, infiltrating every aspect of our home life. In fact a great deal of the misery in our household, at least as it applied to me, centered around my mother’s enduring attempts to turn me into a proper upper-crust British girl—presumably the kind of girl she’d been raised to be.

  OUR MORNING ROUTINE began before dawn. My mother would wake me, shaking me gently, breakfast already on the table.

  There was no conversation as the car moved silently through the empty streets. My nose pressed up against the window, I’d watch as the moon followed us closely behind, dodging in and out from between passing trees and houses whose windows were still dark.

  I was six when we started our early-morning treks to the home of Dr. Haderer, a respected professor of music who had studied in Japan with the renowned Dr. Shinichi Suzuki. At the time, few teachers had been trained in Suzuki’s innovative “mother-tongue” approach, a theory of instruction that uses principles of language acquisition such as listening and repetition in teaching children violin. Dr. Haderer was in high demand, but my mother would settle for nothing but the best, even if that meant taking a six-in-the-morning slot.

  After the lessons we would rush to the series of prestigious schools I attended. Always punctual, my mother would be back on the curb when classes let out, silently handing me a thermos full of warm split-pea soup as we headed to the next lesson—ballet, tap, tennis, horseback riding. Weekends or evenings, tutors were ushered into the dining room, where we’d work at the long oak table under the soft light of the vintage gold sconces and large chandelier. My skin pressed uncomfortably against the carvings that wound up the stiff back of my wo
oden chair as we went over my French, creative writing, and drawing assignments to ensure that no area be neglected.

  Among the revolving cast was a private handwriting tutor who taught me how to hold a pen, how much pressure to exert on the paper, and the exact stroke needed to create a perfectly shaped letter. My lessons took place at her home, a cream-colored mansion with a red-tiled roof. Once through the spacious foyer, I would follow her long white hair and free-flowing gray tunic up a spiral staircase to a cozy room in a tower overlooking the forest behind her house. We would sit side by side at an antique desk as she gently pressed her hand on top of mine to guide my writing instrument. The lessons were painless, but they still caused me worry. Handwriting had never been my forte, and my mother was highly critical of my deficiencies, down to the last pen stroke.

  She was relentless in her quest to mold me into an accomplished and refined young lady, going so far as to teach me to spell using the Queen’s English. When my teachers at school would correct me—“It’s t-h-e-a-t-e-r, not t-h-e-a-t-r-e”—I’d insist that my version was “real” English. “This is America,” they would sensibly respond, and so I learned to spell one way for my mother, another for my teachers.

  Once the tutors had gone and we’d cleared my notebooks off the dinner table, our in-house curriculum began. How to butter bread (break off a bite-sized piece first), which fork to use, and how to get that last drop of soup in the bowl (never tip the bowl toward you).

  After dinner, the lessons would turn to diction. “Repeat after me,” she would begin:

  Betty had a bit of butter

  But the butter was too bitter

  So, Betty bought some better butter to make the bitter butter better.

  Our routine was repeated night after night. Where my tutors were patient, encouraging, my mother would ridicule. “It’s not bud-d-d-d-der,” she would mock, drawing out the “d,” her face rumpled in disdain. “Say it again, but properly this time.” Yet I could never quite get it right, my tone of voice or accent unrefined, too American.

  As early as first grade, teachers started sending me home with notes expressing concern over my habit of worrying, the way an inconsequential error would send me into a chasm of self-doubt and anxiety. The smallest mistake would cause acute physical pain that left me weakened and anguished for days after the inciting event. This was a pattern that would be repeated throughout my life, the slightest criticism sending me into a spiral of defensiveness and shame. Work supervisors admonished me for being “too sensitive” to feedback. Friends and coworkers told me not to worry so much or take it so hard. Their well-intentioned suggestions did little to quiet the critical voices in my head. Sometimes I could prevent myself from spiraling by digging a thumbnail into the palm of my hand to create a dull throbbing, or counting cracks in the sidewalk as I walked to and from meetings—anything to distract myself from my inner thoughts. These efforts weren’t always successful, and occasionally my fears and anxieties would seep out as harsh words directed at colleagues or inopportune tears when I discovered a missed typo. A few times my panic landed me in the emergency room when my symptoms too closely resembled those of a heart attack. I would spend decades on a therapist’s couch, working to overcome the intractable belief that I was a failure, unworthy of love and respect. But no matter how hard I tried to silence the voices in my head, I carried around my list of personal defects like a thousand-pound weight.

  I saw my anxieties as a byproduct of my mother’s relentless criticism, her unending desire to mold me into a person I never wanted to be, fashioned in her own image. I placed all of my miseries squarely upon her shoulders. But I would come to discover that any real mistakes she made paled in comparison to the injustices she had endured in the past.

  4

  Scrutiny

  A burst of adrenaline would rush through my tiny body when I heard the front door latch each day around six o’clock. Promptly putting a stop to whatever I was doing, I would sprint to the front of the house on my stubby legs and hurl myself into my father’s arms, breathlessly offering to carry his briefcase. With both of my hands gripping the well-worn leather handle, we would walk slowly down the long hallway as he listened intently to the highlights of my day—what I’d learned in school or a picture I had drawn in art class.

  An old-fashioned lawyer, a true gentleman, and a statesman built on a bygone template, my father was brilliant and honorable. He never had a bad word to say about anyone, and he was honest to a fault. He would return a nickel if it were given to him in error, or leave a note if he barely nicked the paint on another car.

  He held me to the same exacting ethical standards. Even an inconsequential lapse in judgment would become a teaching moment, a reminder of the importance of living a life of integrity.

  I spent most of my weekend days at an equestrian center in nearby Woodside, a small town known for its horse culture, with trails in place of sidewalks and hitching posts for parking meters. When I was ready to be picked up, I would call my father from a pay phone located near the barn’s tack room. A friend gave me an idea on how to save money—call collect, and when the operator connects the call, just hang up. The aborted call would send the signal that I was ready. A clever way to save a quarter, it seemed.

  “We can’t do that,” my father explained patiently when I proposed the idea. “That would be cheating the phone company, which is wrong.”

  His corrections were always gentle, delivered without anger or judgment.

  My favorite time of day was just before I drifted off to sleep, when my father would knock softly on my bedroom door, kiss me gently on the forehead, then prop himself up on the second twin bed. Curling onto my side, I could just make out his silhouette in the moonlight streaming in through the sheer white curtains. Resting my head on my clasped hands, I would let the slow and deliberate droning of his voice soothe me like a lullaby.

  “Do you know what asbestos is?”

  Instead of listening to fairy tales, each night I learned about what happened when a worker was injured on the job. My father was the managing partner of one of the leading workers’ compensation defense firms in California. Some of his stories were mundane—details on the burgeoning field of litigation due to the common use of asbestos, a mineral considered an excellent fire retardant that was commonly mixed with cement and used in construction. The “magic mineral” likely prevented thousands of untimely deaths by fire, but it was later discovered that the material’s tiny fibers could be inhaled, damaging workers’ and residents’ lungs and making them sick. When I discovered that the pipes leading to our own furnace were wrapped with asbestos, I worried that our entire family would fall sick, maybe even die. My father assured me that they had been properly covered, the hazard long since contained, but I still was fearful each time I ventured down into the basement. Some of his cases seemed like scenes out of a TV show, like the time he hired a private investigator and caught a man doing aerobics when he had claimed he was too injured to work. I imagined the investigator slinking between the bushes outside a gym, snapping photos of the con artist as he did knee raises and grapevines, oblivious to the fact that he had been caught red-handed. Another time, my father exposed a fraudulent claim by a member of the Mafia and was advised to hire a bodyguard. (He didn’t.)

  Some of the bedtime stories came from the time before my father moved to California, when he served in the Tennessee legislature. There was corruption everywhere, he said. It was like the Wild West. Men would walk into the capitol building with canvas bags filled with cash ready to be delivered to legislators whose votes could be bought. Not long after my father took office, a former Tennessee Supreme Court justice approached him with promises of campaign contributions if my father could just “find a way” to support an upcoming bill. My father refused in no uncertain terms, establishing his reputation as a man whose vote wasn’t for sale.

  I dreamed of becoming a workers’ compensation attorney, commuting each day to an office building in the San F
rancisco financial district, working alongside my father at his firm. That’s when I learned a new word: nepotism. “I don’t believe in it,” he explained when I asked him if he would hire me. “If you work hard, and you are the best candidate for the job, then you can work for me.”

  I was disappointed, crestfallen actually, but my father told me that his work was boring, that if he could do it all over again, he would have joined the Peace Corps. Or, he went on, perhaps he would have taken a parallel path, but become a public interest lawyer.

  “Do something good with your life,” he urged me. “Use what you have to help people.”

  Following in the footsteps of my father’s dream career twenty years later, I knew that he had been right. Sorting through government files and reviewing inspection reports and toxicology records was exhilarating. I treated each case like a treasure hunt as I searched for data I would use to right a wrong. I would spend hours navigating bureaucratic mazes, making phone calls, camping out in government offices, and chatting up file clerks to uncover evidence of environmental improprieties.

  Digging for gold amid dusty files and combing through volumes in search of empirical evidence was second nature to me—so much so that applying those same skills to the documentation I brought home from that second trip to London felt like finding an old friend. Many of the accounts of the Foundling Hospital’s history were out of print, written decades or generations ago. I looked forward to hearing the doorbell ring, and finding brown-papered packages from used-book sellers on the doorstep. Soon my desk was covered with books by historians, academic researchers, and learned governors who’d led the institution centuries ago—men whose names I didn’t recognize, like Jonas Hanway and John Brownlow. No book was too obscure for my notice.

  The Foundling Hospital had been established in the middle of the eighteenth century to fill a dire need, I quickly learned. An unwed mother of limited means would have had few options in providing for her infant at the time. She would likely have been shunned by her family, perhaps forced out of her home. Existing poorhouses were frequently filthy and dangerous—temporary shelters filled with vagrants and lunatics, the aged and the ill. In contrast, the Foundling Hospital offered a clean and orderly environment, and women desperate to find a home for an unwanted infant flocked to its doors in great numbers. Administrators couldn’t keep up with the quickly escalating demand, and it wasn’t unheard of for fights to break out among waiting mothers desperate to give their children a safe home. On the sideline of the melee would be fashionably attired spectators who paid a fee to watch the admission process unfold.