The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  As Lydia and I wandered the halls, from time to time we would come upon framed photos of foundlings affixed to the walls, reminding the current occupants of the building’s history. Most featured groups of identically clad girls and boys, lined up to meet distinguished visitors in the chapel or perched behind desks in their classrooms. One featured a few girls playing with toys.

  “There I am,” Lydia interjected as we leaned forward to get a closer look. “It was all staged, you know.”

  Most of the photographs of the foundlings were publicity shots, she explained, taken to accompany cheerful newspaper accounts extoling the virtues of the Foundling Hospital.

  “They took the toys away from us after they took the pictures,” she added. “They couldn’t even let us keep the toys, that’s how bad it was.”

  Our conversation meandered as we wandered through the halls where my mother had once lived, and occasionally Lydia would ask for details about my project. By now she knew all about the pile of dog-eared books, the countless files I had reviewed, the emotional journey that had brought me to these very halls.

  As we walked down the staircase, my hands gently skimming the banister where foundlings had once risked a caning just to feel the elation of gliding down the slick wood, Lydia paused, looking up at me. “Your mother would have been so pleased that you came all this way,” she finally said. “It would have meant so much to her.”

  My stomach tightened in response. She thinks this is a journey of love. How could I possibly tell her the truth? But silence would have been a lie, a betrayal of the trust Lydia had offered me, and so I confessed. “Our relationship was difficult,” I said, searching for the right words. “It was . . . troubled.”

  I tensed as she turned toward me, preparing myself for the reprobation I had come to expect. Instead, she smiled and rested her hand gently on my arm.

  “Of course it was,” she said. “How would she have known how to be a mother?”

  It was so simple and matter-of-fact, no platitudes about motherhood or stories about the intrinsic difficulties of mother-daughter relationships. I uttered no response, but on the inside, I experienced a sea change. Instead of the usual voices filling my head, damning and defending myself all at once, there was only a stunned silence.

  When I’d gathered myself, I asked Lydia whether she remembered the day my mother had gone home to live with her biological mother.

  “We called it being ‘reclaimed’ back then, not that it happened often. Your mother was the first that I remember during my time there. It happened again, after your mother left, but that time they didn’t tell us anything. It was another girl, about our age. One day she was there, the next day she was gone. She just disappeared! It was years later before we found out what happened to her, at a reunion or something of that sort, that she had been reclaimed by her mother. It hadn’t gone well, I heard. Her mother was a terrible person, treated her badly. It rarely went well. Too much time had passed, I suppose.”

  “Do you know what happened to my mother when she left? What her life was like with her mother?”

  “I’m not quite sure, but you know, she sent me her book. It’s probably in there.”

  The same book that my mother had sent me all those years ago—maybe Lydia’s version would be complete.

  “Why don’t you and Patrick come over for a cup of tea, and I’ll have a look for it.”

  Patrick and I sank into the soft couch in Lydia’s cozy living room as her husband, Don, served us tea and cakes. As we waited for Lydia, Don shared that he too had grown up parentless, an orphan raised at a children’s home in India. Lydia and Don had been married for sixty years, and I wondered whether their shared losses in childhood had created an uncommon bond, as had been the case for my own parents.

  I listened as Don told us stories of his life in India as a child, but it was difficult to concentrate. Would my mother have censored Lydia’s manuscript in the same way she had mine? And if she hadn’t, would I finally learn the truth about those missing years?

  “Here it is!” Lydia exclaimed as she bounded into the room, a broad smile on her face. I immediately recognized the sheath of papers in her hands as the same pages my mother had given to me. But as I thumbed through the pages, I saw the same handwritten note that had been in my copy where the chapters of her time in Shropshire should have been: “Not included.”

  Lydia was puzzled that my mother had kept the details of the reunification hidden.

  “It’s odd. We went through so much together. I wonder why she wouldn’t want us to know?”

  My mother had shared stories of beatings and brutality, of shame and disgrace. What secrets were contained in those pages that were worse than she had already admitted? If she couldn’t share her secrets with the girls who had suffered alongside her all those years ago, who could she tell?

  We left Lydia’s house with promises to stay in touch, and I tossed and turned that night as I reckoned with the awareness that my journey was coming to an end.

  Before it could, there would be one more stop.

  The following morning, Patrick and I arrived at London’s Euston Station to catch the train to Polegate, a small town a couple of hours south of the city, to meet my namesake, Isabel, now called Bernice. I scanned a gigantic timetable in the station’s atrium for our platform. Unable to find it, I approached a man dressed in a conductor’s uniform.

  “You’re at the wrong station,” he explained. “Your train leaves from Victoria.”

  Instantly, anxiety-fueled adrenaline filled my veins with such speed that I became light-headed. How could I have made such a stupid mistake? What was wrong with me? But before my mind could leap into the darkness, I felt Patrick’s arm around my shoulder.

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  “I should have double-checked last night,” I countered. “It’s my fault. What if we don’t make the train? What if we miss Bernice, and we came all this way and we never see her?”

  As my mind raced with endless scenarios flowing from my carelessness, Patrick pulled me closer, resting his forehead against mine so that I could hear him above the din of one of London’s busiest train stations. My heart rate calmed as I listened to his voice. People rushed past us, but their forms became shapeless blurs.

  “It’s not your fault. You’re human, that’s all. And it’s going to be okay.”

  There are people out there who doubt whether their husbands or wives love them. I am not one of those people. Patrick loves me even more than the day we walked down the aisle, and I am sure of that. I see it in the way he looks at me—not when I am dressed up for a night out, or laughing at one of his silly jokes, but when I am huddled in the dark abyss of self-doubt.

  In the early years of our relationship I would resist his tender words, allowing my mind instead to wander through well-trodden grooves that instinctively assessed guilt or innocence to the smallest of missteps. But Patrick has shown me another way, a paradigm that isn’t based on culpability. “Love isn’t about blame,” he says often. I have an uneasy truce with the voices from my past, and it takes vigilance to keep them at bay. I rarely experience the destructive emotions that afflicted me in the early years of my adulthood—an achievement I attribute largely to a skilled therapist. But I credit Patrick’s love with my ability to view myself with compassion. I can now look into the mirror with an unfamiliar confidence and admire my smooth brown hair and blue-green eyes, or take pride in my accomplishments—and more often than not, allow myself to make a few mistakes.

  We made our connection at Victoria Station with seconds to spare, and an hour and a half later we pulled into Polegate. Isabel, or Bernice, as she now preferred to be called, met us at the station and hurried toward me as if we were lifelong friends. She was small and delicate, standing less than five feet tall. Her voice was soft, but, I soon learned, her wit was sharp.

  We had lunch in a modest country manor that had been converted into a restaurant, where Patrick and I listened inte
ntly as Bernice recounted stories of her childhood and the cruel indifference of the Foundling Hospital staff. After lunch, we headed back to her small but comfortable apartment. Bernice showed us a collection of figurines she had carefully arranged on a sideboard in the living room. She picked up two small five-inch-tall dolls depicting a boy and a girl, each clad in the unmistakable brown clothing with white caps that the foundlings had once worn. As she cradled them in her hands, Bernice started whispering to them, calling each by name—Isabel, her own childhood name, along with the name of the boy who was her schoolgirl crush. I imagined them stealing glances across the aisle in the chapel, risking punishment for a tiny sliver of joy in an otherwise dreary existence. Bernice never married, but her eyes lit up as she murmured to the figurines.

  The remainder of the afternoon was spent over tea, learning more about Bernice and her life after the Foundling Hospital. At the age of fourteen, she had been placed as a domestic in a house with many servants, where she scrubbed floors and changed linens for a wealthy family.

  “It was just awful, and after about six months, I’d had enough,” she said. “So one day I told ’em that they damn well needed to do their own cleaning.” She giggled as she recounted her tale, holding her hand in front of her mouth. “And I told the Foundling Hospital that they could forget about putting me in another house, that I was done with them, too!”

  Bernice was not alone in rebelling against the path that the governors of the Foundling Hospital had set for her. Lydia, whom we had met earlier that week, proudly embraced her status as illegitimate, refusing to accept the arcane narrative that her background was a shameful secret. And of course there was my mother, who had beaten all the odds, marrying her American GI and becoming wealthy beyond her dreams. I had come across other stories as well, of foundlings who became nurses, teachers, and engineers, and who were happily married with children. While none escaped the painful wounds of the past, I was struck by the number of foundlings who did more than just survive.

  As the afternoon progressed, Bernice and I spoke comfortably, like we were old friends chatting about the past. From time to time, I would slip up and call her Isabel, instead of Bernice. But she didn’t mind.

  “I was never keen on Isabel, but now I have changed my mind. It brings back memories of your mother, my dear friend, and brought into being a lovely meeting with you.”

  Bernice insisted on walking us to the train station. It was a cold and blustery day, and the wind was picking up as storm clouds formed above us, but I was filled with a sense of warmth as we walked side by side. We said our goodbyes, and as I was about to make my way through the turnstile, Bernice pulled me toward her and whispered in my ear, “I knew it was you when I saw you at the station. I said to myself, there she is. There’s Dorothy.”

  Tears streamed down my face as Patrick and I stood on the platform, the cold wind stinging my cheeks. But I hardly noticed as I stepped onto the train and headed back to London.

  18

  Love

  I dreamt of my mother.

  I was sitting in my favorite room of my childhood home, the breakfast room, small and cozy, with none of the grandeur of the rest of the house. Instead, it was furnished with a plain oval oak table surrounded by four wooden chairs, the only decor a simple vase with a rose from my mother’s garden. Along one side of the room stood a row of windows with sheer white curtains that allowed the morning light to spill in, and in the glow was my mother, sitting across from me. Her face was at ease, with no sign of her usual frown or pursed lips. There was a pewter teapot next to her, and we both sipped hot tea as I listened to her tell me stories of her childhood. I interrupted her only to ask the questions that had been replayed so many times in my mind. Did my grandmother know about me? Why didn’t you tell me about her? How did you get to San Francisco? Who taught you to paint, and to play the piano?

  In the dream, she patiently answered my questions until finally, drained but with a sense of peace I had rarely experienced in my waking life, I realized that I now knew everything she had gone through. I looked at her and smiled. She smiled back.

  In real life, my mother and I never spoke about her past as Dorothy Soames. Not when I first saw the name that portentous day when I was nineteen, not when she reached out to me with her story a decade later, nor when Alzheimer’s began to chip away at her memory.

  I often think about what our relationship would have been like had I dared to ask those questions, and had she dared to answer. But by the time my interest in her past was finally stirred, it was simply too late.

  It was a Tuesday afternoon when I got the call—there wasn’t much time left. My mother, who was now in a nursing home for the memory-impaired, had taken a turn for the worse and wasn’t expected to hang on for longer than a few days.

  My father was staying nearby at my sister’s house in New Orleans, where we had relocated my parents when they were no longer able to care for themselves. In those last years, I visited often, every few weeks. With my mother in a facility, I was free to see my father alone for the first time in more than a decade. But our time together was bittersweet, at times filled with palpable regret, his ninety-year-old mind having lost its once characteristic sharpness.

  Visits with my mother would last only an hour or so. The initial facility she lived in boasted a plentiful array of amenities, an attentive staff, and daily field trips. The rooms were bright and airy, the hallways thoughtfully decorated with articles of clothing and knickknacks from the 1930s and ’40s, on the theory that being surrounded by familiar objects from the past is soothing for someone with Alzheimer’s. But in the months before her death, when her condition had declined, she was moved to another facility, drab and joyless, with hospital-green walls and a more restrictive type of care, where the inhabitants rarely ventured into the sunlight. I sometimes wonder if the place reminded my mother of the Foundling Hospital, if the sense of being cloistered from the outside world in an institutional setting brought her back to her unhappiest memories, even if she could no longer quite grasp them. A few weeks before she died, I was told that my mother had become resentful, feeling that she was trapped. She had walked purposefully into the administrator’s office and with a look of defiance pulled down her pants and peed, right there in the middle of the room. I was amused at the time. But looking back, I believe this may have been my mother’s last moment of defiance. Could she have been seeing Miss Wright’s stern face when she contemptuously emptied her bladder?

  By the time I arrived at her bedside for the visit that would be our last, she was no longer speaking. Her face was gaunt, her breathing sporadic and raspy, her head tipped slightly to the side. Occasionally, a nurse wandered in to wet her lips with a Q-tip or adjust a pillow to make her more comfortable. The scene was almost more than I could bear, but I knew what I had to do. I approached the bed and looked down at my mother’s hand, wrinkled and peppered with large brown age spots. I took it in mine, gently squeezing as I whispered, “I love you, Mom.”

  My words were a lie, a balm for a dying old woman.

  After that, there was nothing left to do but sit and watch my mother slowly die. Suddenly her head jerked to face me, and she stared into my eyes. I felt as if she were trying to tell me something, but no words came as a tear rolled down her cheek.

  Minutes later, she was gone.

  I didn’t know at the time what had happened to her as a child, that her wounds were too deep for her to look beyond her own anguish. I can only hope that my lie was convincing enough, that my mother died believing that she was loved by me.

  Now I understand why I grieved her death so intently, why pain coursed through my body, leaving me exhausted and frail those weeks after she closed her eyes for the last time. I mourned not the loss of what I once had, but what had been taken from me before I drew my first breath or took my first steps.

  It is lonely to have no love for one’s mother. While I had hoped that my feelings would change, love cannot be forced or conjure
d up. Perhaps she was not the only one with wounds too deep to heal.

  But in my quest to learn about my mother’s past, I realized that I had come to know somebody special. Someone I wanted to hold, to comfort and protect. That person was a girl with a smattering of freckles and silky brown hair, feisty and courageous and, improbably, full of dreams. I had grown to love that little girl.

  Her name was Dorothy Soames.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I would like to thank my talented publishing team, Sara Nelson at Harper, Sarah Savitt and Rose Tomaszewska at Virago, and my agent, Mollie Glick, at Creative Artists Agency, for their attentive reading, astute observations, and unwavering support.

  Special thanks to Coram, in particular Val Payman, for setting me on my path; to Lydia Carmichael and Bernice Cunningham, my mother’s former classmates at the Foundling Hospital, for showing me the meaning of courage and resilience; to Alison Duke at the Foundling Museum, Katharine Hogg at the General Coke Handel Collection, and Janette Bright, who were so generous with their time, confirming details buried in the past; and to Ashlyns School, for allowing me to wander the hallways and classrooms where my mother once roamed.

  My eternal gratitude to Arielle Eckstut and Savannah Ashour for their thoughtful insights and indispensable wit.

  More thanks than can be made to all those who listened, read, advised, and encouraged, including Michael Alvear, Lisa Baudot, Rabbi Mark Bloom, Lisa Pujol Boe, John Coburn, the Cowan Clan (Cara, Dan, Ian, Jen, Kathleen, Meg, Paul, and Tesla), Laura Coyle, Paula Derrow, Alex Djordjevich, Samuela Eckstut, Izak Epstein, Angie Fallows, Zoe Lee Francis, the Fort family, Nancy Frehner, Sarah Gill, Hollis Gillespie, Mary Gresham, Denean Hanson, Katherine Hoogerwerf, Angela Hunnicutt, Sondra Jarvis, Lisa Kern, Laura Klein, Lisa Mackin, Julie Mayfield, Carolyn Murchison, Darcy and George Nichols, Emilie Rider, Amy Paradysz, Robin Steinberg-Epstein, Midge and John Sweet, T. Edward Smith, David Henry Sterry, Olive Sterry, Suzi Sublette, Valerie Suttee, Scott Sykes, Ashley Vann, and Cary Barbor Zahaby.