The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  She spoke fondly of my mother and was deeply saddened to hear that she had died. Over the next few weeks, she answered some of my questions about my mother’s past—but I soon learned that my mother had been as secretive with others as she had been with me. Patricia had never heard the name Dorothy Soames, nor had she heard of the Foundling Hospital. She knew nothing of the Weston family, but had always assumed that they were well-to-do—my mother had talked of going on “hunts” in her youth, and her friend had assumed she’d been well educated at an elite private school. Well into her eighties, Patricia’s health was failing, and she was unable to offer much more.

  I could only assume that my mother’s tales of fox hunting were just another sliver of the narrative she had meticulously constructed detailing her aristocratic past. There were no horses at the Foundling Hospital, and while she may have learned to ride on the Weston family farm, it’s unlikely that Lena would have had the means to introduce her daughter to a sport that was generally reserved for only the wealthiest members of society. It wasn’t a fib shared within my family. I had been riding horses since the age of six, practicing dressage and show jumping on countless childhood afternoons. One summer my mother even sent me to a camp so that I could spend two weeks learning the art of steeplechase with four other children. But in all that time, I’d never seen my mother so much as touch a horse.

  I had all but given up hope of finding anyone who could fill in the missing pieces of my mother’s story when I received another unexpected call, this time from England.

  “My name is Bernice, and I knew your mother.”

  She had gotten my telephone number from the secretary of the Old Coram Association, an organization comprised of former foundlings and their family members. I had written to them early on in my search, hoping to find someone who knew my mother as a child, but nothing had come of it, the inquiries that I had sent over a two-year period remaining largely unanswered.

  I was at the gym when I answered Bernice’s call. Not wanting to put off the precious chance of a conversation with someone who’d known my mother back then, I huddled on a ramp outside. It was unseasonably cold in Florida, where I was living at the time, and there was a light drizzle. I barely noticed the raindrops dripping over the eaves onto my bare legs as I listened to her steady voice, her memory surprisingly sharp as she recounted events that had happened eighty years ago.

  Bernice wasn’t a name I recognized—but of course it wasn’t her name at the time.

  “Back then, my name was Isabel,” she told me. “Isabel Hockley.”

  She was the little girl who lived on Carpenter Lane when Dorothy was still with her foster mother. My mother’s best friend—and possibly my namesake, I realized in that moment. My middle name is Isabelle, and my eyes welled up as I wondered whether, despite the spelling difference, I had been named after her.

  I listened intently as she described the cast of characters that I had learned about through my research and from reading my mother’s memoir. She remembered Miss Wright, flat hair parted down the middle with waves on each side. “We called her ‘The Rook’ because of her pointed face,” she said. I envisioned Miss Wright, with a nose like the bird’s long beak, her eyes round and beady.

  “Now, Miss Douthie, we called her ‘The Cat.’”

  “Why ‘The Cat?’”

  “It was her hands, you see.” She went on to describe the hospital’s central staircase, which still stands today, its thick banister and slick veneer too tempting for a child to resist. “We would slide down the banister. It was such fun!” I heard the joy in her voice as she recounted what I assumed was one of the few happy moments in her childhood.

  “One time I had climbed onto the top of the banister, and Miss Douthie caught me just as I was about to slide down. Her hands were like claws as they grabbed me. They just snatched me up! That’s why we called her ‘The Cat,’ because of her claw-like hands.

  “We were really quite naughty,” she added. “Always getting into trouble, which meant the cane. But we couldn’t help ourselves, I suppose.”

  Like my mother, Bernice had only kind words for Miss Douthie. “She was really wonderful, so different than the others.” When I pressed her on why, her answer was simple. “I suppose it’s because she cared.”

  I interspersed questions throughout our conversation, hoping to discover even the smallest sliver of new information: What was my mother like? Intelligent and clever. What did you eat during your midnight feasts? Anything we could find. Did you go to Bovingdon Air Force Base for Christmas? Yes, it was one of the best nights of my life!

  But I grew silent as she described the abuses she suffered at the hands of Nurse Rance, who she described as cruel, beating the girls with a hairbrush or cane. And how during swim lessons, Miss Woodward wouldn’t allow the girls to jump in the pool themselves. Instead, she would line them up and walk down the line, sadistically pushing them in, one after the next, taking pleasure in the fear she invoked.

  She also told me of the day she was dropped off at the Foundling Hospital. Her foster mother left without a word. “She just disappeared, and that was that. I was never the same.”

  “How so? How were you different?”

  “I’m not sure. But I loved my foster mum, and I know that she loved me, so when she left without so much as a word, it just finished me. It’s why I became so foul-tempered, I suppose.”

  She described my mother as one of her closest friends, but with the caveat that they were only as close as they could be. After all, life at the Foundling Hospital was so regimented and uninteresting. For Bernice, life wasn’t much “worth living” during those dark years. “There wasn’t much to talk about. You just got through the days the best you could.”

  Bernice confirmed many of the details of my mother’s early years, yet I longed to know more, whether she knew what happened after my mother left the Foundling Hospital. But she had little to offer, nothing that could help me put the pieces together, only that she remembered when my mother was reclaimed, how astonishing it was.

  “And you, what happened next for you?”

  Bernice was a retired nurse. She had never married or had any children. “I had bad luck with men, you see. One of ’em knocked me around and I swore ’em off after that.”

  We ended our call with a promise to see each other during my next visit to England. Disappointed at not finding the answers to my lingering questions, I reread my mother’s unfinished manuscript, hoping to glean a missed detail. I learned nothing new, but grew increasingly curious about where she had learned to write so eloquently. The children at the Foundling Hospital were taught only rudimentary life skills, and after rejoining her mother, Dorothy likely never attended school again. How had she learned to express the details of her past with such skill, clarity, and grace? My mother’s written reflections were so different in tone from the volatile outbursts of the secretive woman I had known my whole life.

  Some of the missing pieces came together on their own. Searching online genealogy sites, I found a record of my grandmother’s death. Lena Weston died in 1973, unmarried and alone, her brother, Harry, preceding her by several years. At the time of her death, I was seven, and my mother was forty-one. My grandmother had been alive when I was a child, and it was her death my mother mourned when I came upon her crying in the hallway all those years ago.

  The Shropshire farm that was the subject of the letter I’d found in my father’s files—the property I’d naively assumed to be a grand estate, proof of my mother’s aristocratic heritage—was described in Foundling Hospital reports as untidy, with no indoor plumbing or electricity. Her claims of noble lineage, which as a child I’d regarded as tantalizingly plausible, now seemed far-fetched. True, her unknown father might have been a duke or an earl who had an illicit affair with Lena and refused to acknowledge the child. But I found no evidence of that.

  I now understood my mother’s tales in a different light. They served to hide the shame of her illegitimacy whi
le buttressing her sense of self-worth. But what I couldn’t understand was why she had kept the knowledge of my grandmother completely hidden from my sister and me. Lena Weston died when I was seven years old. It would have meant something to me to know I had a grandparent, to have met her. I could only assume the two women had become estranged. There was no record of Lena having written to my mother after she’d left the farm and moved to the United States, a stark contrast to those stacks of letters, spanning twelve years of separation, she’d sent when Dorothy was at the Foundling Hospital. Despite the denied requests for visits and terse typewritten responses, the letters had kept on coming. What could have come between these two women, after Lena had fought so tirelessly for their reunification?

  Other questions I pondered revolved around me. Had my grandmother known that she had a granddaughter? Had she written to ask about me?

  Hoping to understand the missing pieces of my mother’s story, I did a bit of research on the reunification of parents and children who have been in government custody. I was unable to uncover anything from my mother’s time, but there was no shortage of materials from the last few decades. The volume of information was overwhelming, both in the United Kingdom and the United States. There were scholarly articles, sociological studies, even fact sheets for parents on what to expect when bringing their child home from foster care, and tip sheets for foster parents on how to make the process go more smoothly for the biological family. While I found little to shed light on reunifications during my mother’s childhood, I did glean a few key points from my research. Family reunifications should not be abrupt; instead they should be the result of a gradual process in which the child is refamiliarized with his or her family of origin through a series of parental visits. Following reunification, there should also be competent case management and a care plan developed with input from the parents, along with after-care support for parents from one or more governmental agencies. Even with all of these resources, studies found that many reunifications—anywhere from a third to a half, or even more—fail. The reasons are many, and include parental instability and drug use. Comparisons between children in modern foster care and the systematized abuse my mother experienced certainly wouldn’t stand up to academic scrutiny, but one thing my reading made clear was that once the bond between a parent and child has been broken, it is difficult to mend.

  When Lena and Dorothy were reunited, the statistics were already against them, their reunification all the more likely to fail due to the absence of any kind of support. There was no gradual reintroduction of a mother and daughter who were strangers to each other, no advice given on what to expect once the pair returned home. Lena’s only instructions consisted of when and where to fetch her daughter.

  Again, scouring my mother’s would-be book, I found one small clue embedded in a sentence she had written. The line wasn’t about her own experience of reunification, but about other foundlings who had been reunited in the 1950s, just after long-needed reforms had finally been instituted at the Foundling Hospital. When policies were liberalized in the wake of a scandal following the death of a child—abused not at the Foundling Hospital but under the care of an ill-chosen foster family—birth mothers were given the option of contacting their foundling children. Many did. But, as my mother noted, “most of these meetings were not successful in that bonding and lasting relationships between mother and child failed to take place.”

  Maybe that was my mother’s way of telling me what went wrong. Lena and Dorothy had tried to repair their bond, but the wounds from Dorothy’s early separation and mistreatment had been too ragged to heal. It was a possibility that filled me with a compassion I’d never felt for my mother while she was alive. I thought of Lena—how she had longed to be with her daughter, and how heartbreaking it must have been to lose her, not once but twice. And I thought of my own mother, not the woman who continually criticized me, but the lonely girl yearning for a family to heal the trauma of her past. In that moment, sitting with Dorothy’s heartbreak, I entertained the thought that perhaps she could have been a good mother, had her fate not been sealed centuries before.

  As for me, I never became a mother. Given the resentment I’d long harbored toward my own, I had an intractable fear that any child of mine would reject me. In my thirties, my doubts were briefly eclipsed by a longing for a family of my own, and I explored the concept of adoption. I remember feeling hopeful after attending a workshop for prospective adoptive parents. Anticipating the feeling of motherhood, the chance of the rewards that my friends with children had described to me, I began to imagine that maybe I could be a good mother.

  I’ll be careful, I thought. I won’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

  I reached out to my parents to ask for financial support, the costs of adoption being too great for me to carry on my public interest salary. My father had always been generous, paying for my private school education and the down payment on my house. There was good reason for me to believe that he would help.

  A week later, I received my answer. The white starched paper contained only one paragraph, typed on my father’s law-firm letterhead, explaining that they could provide me with a small sum, a token, for my “project.” But the letter came with a warning, a plea to reconsider. At the time, the news was filled with horror stories about conditions in orphanages in Romania and elsewhere, children abused and neglected and then pawned off on unwitting Americans eager to adopt. The child might be “defective,” the letter said. What then?

  I never filled out the paperwork. By the time I met my husband, I was well into my forties. Even if we could have conceived, running around after a toddler seemed like a stretch, and my desire to adopt had long since passed.

  It had also been too late for Dorothy and Lena, who would never find happiness as mother and daughter. I don’t know if Lena died bitterly regretting the decision she had made all those years ago. But for Dorothy, there was still a bright light of hope—the same hope that had fueled her during the bleak days and nights at Berkhamsted, when she sneaked into the library to read about a distant land called America or called out for gum from smiling soldiers in passing convoys. That hope eventually took her on a journey across an ocean, where she would finally find what she had been searching for.

  16

  Belonging

  I refused to go, too embarrassed to be seen with her. The barbeque, a Fourth of July celebration, was just up the street, and all the neighbors would be there. There would be hot dogs and hamburgers, sparklers, roman candles, and my favorite, the small pellets that turn into magic snakes as they wriggle around on the pavement. But a few minutes before the party started, my mother had come down the hall to show off her outfit—a floppy hat and a wool overcoat adorned with tattered patches she had apparently sewn on. Underneath the coat she wore a vintage dress from the 1930s or ’40s, the outfit completed with lace-up boots. She was carrying a mini American flag in one hand, and in the other a small leather suitcase with a sign pasted to one side:

  Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

  “I’m an immigrant landing on Ellis Island!” she exclaimed, her face beaming with pride at her cleverness and creativity. The only problem with her getup was that the barbeque wasn’t a costume party. I rolled my eyes as any teenager might, but my mother was undeterred.

  “I owe my life to this country, and I am not ashamed to let everyone know that!”

  Though she rarely shared anything personal with me, I had always known how she felt about being an American. When it came time to take her citizenship test, she studied for weeks, boasting afterward of her perfect score. She wore her citizenship with pride, speaking often of how lucky she was.

  Her ardent patriotism took on a different hue as I learned more about the secrets she
’d kept so hidden. For her, America was a land of kind people, like the soldiers she had met at that long-ago party. It was also a place that would allow her to forget her past.

  FOUNDLINGS DIDN’T MINGLE with the opposite sex, not on the playground, the classroom, or in the hallways. Born out of wedlock, they were thought to be prone to sin by the circumstance of their births. A bastard would only beget more bastards, or so the thinking went, and in any case, foundlings were being trained for a solitary life. The girls could expect long hours as domestic servants and masters who frequently prohibited staff from having boyfriends, or “followers,” as they were called at the time. The boys might spend long months in military service or at sea. There was no room in their futures for dreams of marriage and children.

  From the day that the Foundling Hospital opened its doors, boys and girls had been kept in different wings, each a mirror image of the other. The construction of the separate dormitories had been funded by one of the hospital’s governors, Thomas Emerson, a wealthy merchant who was particularly sympathetic to the plight of women ruined by “unscrupulous” men. He viewed himself as a protector of women, and left annuities for his sister and a servant that were off-limits to their husbands. (It’s likely that his progressive views were limited to white women, however, given that he earned his massive fortune from sugar plantations in the Americas that operated on African slave labor.)

  Even foundlings who passed away under the hospital’s care were segregated by gender, buried in different sections of the cemetery. In the early years the children dined in different wings of the hospital, but at Berkhamsted, perhaps for the convenience of the kitchen staff, the children were seated in a single large dining hall, divided down the middle by a pair of folding oak doors. The top half of the doors was outfitted with panels of opaque glass, turning the figures on the other side into shadows. In the everyday world of the Foundling Hospital, the opposite sex was visible only as a blurred outline glimpsed through a pane of frosted glass.