One day she found a book that spoke of a land she had heard of only through whispered asides with other girls and conversations overheard in the hallways. The story started on a river that was grander than any Dorothy could have ever imagined, one that spanned farther than the eye could see and flowed for thousands of miles. It was about a young man who, at the age of nineteen, operated a flatboat for $8 a month, traversing the Mississippi, carting farm goods, corn, salt, pork, and other commodities. Dorothy soaked up the stories of this strange and foreign land and the young man who was born in a one-room log cabin. She followed his progress as he worked as a laborer, taught himself the law, and then rose to become the sixteenth president of the United States, eventually emancipating millions of people held in bondage.
To a young girl whose life had already been laid out before her, who was seemingly in bondage herself, it was difficult to imagine that there could be a place where someone poor and insignificant could become great. Her heart leapt at the thought that there might be hope, that maybe she could escape her fate in a place called America.
9
Fear
My antidote for pain was anger, and I ingested it often.
While depression weighed me down like a fifty-pound anchor, anger propelled me forward. It gave me the strength to investigate corporate greed and government corruption, the thrill of discovering injustice masking my fear of taking on powerful interests. But my anger served another purpose—it protected me. It was a shield I used to repel my mother’s criticism and keep her at arm’s length. And so I nurtured it.
I fueled my rage with mental lists of her wrongdoings. I had decades of practice stoking my resentment toward my mother, and the anger became an integral part of my identity, buttressing my narrative that she, not I, was to blame for our family’s dysfunction.
Some of her behaviors were colorful, eccentric, such as her habit of licking the cat. “She likes it,” my mother protested when I scowled with disgust. “She thinks I’m her mother!” Or her certainty that extraterrestrials communicated through crop circles in fields of wheat. These offenses against the norm were harmless. There were times when she cornered my friends, forcing them to watch her crop-circle videos, or one-offs like flying to England to meet with local “croppies,” characters who delighted her with stories of alien encounters she believed even after the true perpetrators (two jovial men in their sixties) revealed how they had created the circles with little more than two wooden boards and a piece of string.
The suicide threats were more disturbing. She left one on my voice mail in the middle of my law school exams.
“I can’t live anymore.”
This wasn’t the elegant and contained voice that she saved for those outside the family, but the frenzied one, wild and unrestrained, at least an octave higher than the one she used in public.
“Why do you do this to me? Why are you so mean?!”
On it went, different versions of the same message: I’m going to just end it all! What have I done so wrong? Why are you so cruel?!
I was never worried that my mother would follow through on her threats. I had no basis for my belief, only an instinct. Or perhaps I had grown wise to her pleas for my attention. Her threats usually followed a phone call I had ignored or an unrequited invitation to visit.
I played one of the messages for a friend who’d come over to study, watching closely as his eyes grew wider, his expression providing little doubt of his opinion of the call.
I asked anyway. “That’s not normal, right?”
“This is anything but normal,” he said. “Your mother is crazy.”
I felt calm hearing those words, if only for an instant, seeing my own world reflected as it felt to me instead of refracted through what sometimes felt like Alice’s looking glass.
But those moments were fleeting, and it was difficult to hold on to the truth that my mother needed help. In moments of clarity I would try to persuade her to talk to a professional, but inevitably we would become locked in a battle of blame, one she would usually win.
The last time I tried, I was home from Berkeley for the weekend. My mother and I were in the guest bedroom that had once been my sister’s room. It was furnished simply and elegantly, with the two twin beds from my childhood bedroom, their flowered comforters replaced with matching coverlets made of thick fabric, a pale peach intertwined with gold brocade that my mother had hand-stitched herself. The beds were near a set of bay windows overlooking the garden, and as we spoke, my eyes remained fixed on a willow tree whose cascading branches had once served as a secret fortress for my childhood play.
My mother’s eyes were lowered as she listened to me make my case. Our conversation seemed to last for hours, the room eerily still. I heard myself presenting evidence as if I were a skilled lawyer instead of a twenty-year-old college student.
Everyone sees a therapist.
It will make you feel better.
It’s just nice to have someone to talk to.
Everything you tell her will be strictly confidential.
I’d started going to therapy during high school, when my bouts of depression made it abundantly clear that I needed some help, and at Berkeley I’d made use of the services available on campus. I used every argument that I could think of, but my mother continued to sit in silence, and so I improvised. I felt a desperate sense that the outcome of this conversation could fix or doom our family.
“If you love me, you will get help.”
My ultimatum was delivered calmly. But my mother remained silent.
“Mom, did you hear me? I am begging you—if you love me, you will get help.”
There was a long pause before she answered. I could hear her slow breaths as she considered my words. She looked up at me and said simply, “I’ll do it.”
The relief I felt was instant, and it spread through my body like a drug. I was empowered with the knowledge that we might never be a perfect family, but there was hope. That’s all I can ask for, I thought.
That night I fell into a dreamless and fitful slumber.
The next morning I found my mother perched on a stool pulled up to the wood-block table that sat in the middle of the kitchen. One hand rested lightly on its edge as she stared into a thickly glazed mug, while the other slowly stirred the plain scorching hot water she drank each morning. She looked up at me. I had seen that look before, and I instinctively recoiled as her eyes began to narrow.
“I have thought about it, and I’m not going to talk to anyone, not ever. Don’t you see? You are the problem,” she hissed. “We would be a happy family if it weren’t for you!”
And so I made lists.
I am four. I’m at a birthday party. It’s my party. There is a piñata. I can see the brightly colored papier-mâché, purples and pinks spinning as children smack it with a stick. I see the smiles on the other children’s faces, but I am sobbing. I look up at her leering down at me. I’ve done something wrong. I can see it in her face, in her disapproving eyes. It’s my fault. The party is ruined.
I am eight. She picks up my Fisher-Price dollhouse and pitches it across the room; miniature beds and tables and tiny plastic figurines hurtle through the air. I remain motionless as the house hits a wall and breaks in two.
I am ten. She is telling me that she should have been famous—like Albert Einstein or Elizabeth Taylor—but it had all been taken from her. The pitch of her voice rises. The look in her eyes frightens me. I lower my gaze and focus on the thick grooves around her mouth set in by her nervous twitch.
I am eighteen. We leave a restaurant because she feels slighted by a guest and has become inconsolable. I remember the look of the maître d’ as we rush toward the exit, his eyes wide and lips curled in disapproval.
Other memories came back even more clearly.
There is a searing pain in my ear, but we have a guest, a classmate of mine from boarding school who missed his connection because the airport was fogged in. I’m holding my hands to my head, ho
ping the pain will recede. I am begging my mother to take me to the emergency room. “Mom! Mom! Please, please, make it stop!” I’m screaming, but she tells me to lower my voice. “Shh! Our guest will hear you! Be quiet!” I’m stunned by her dismissal, as my mother was always at her best during our childhood illnesses. She tells me that we can’t go, it will embarrass my fifteen-year-old classmate. We have to wait. “He won’t care!” I protest, but my words are unpersuasive in the face of her need to maintain appearances. I cry myself to sleep. The next day, when she finally takes me to the doctor, I am told that I was lucky. My eardrum had almost ruptured. I see the look of concern cross the doctor’s face as she delivers the news, and I imagine a mucous membrane spurting out through my ear canal like a small explosion. The white paper from the doctor’s table crinkles under my hands as I clutch the cold metal underneath.
There is a cat that shows up at the back door, hungry and afraid. Each day I lie on the driveway, motionless, speaking softly, coaxing it until the feral creature trusts me. It takes months, but the once-wild cat eventually curls up next to me at night, purring contentedly, loving me unconditionally. Until the day it vanishes, and my mother says that it was dirty. It had to go.
I see my mother’s face. It is contorted as she violently flings the coffee table on its side, blanketing the Oriental rug with glittering shards as the glass top shatters. I don’t know why she is angry, but my father tries to calm her down, tells me to go to my room. When I come out hours later, I am told that my mother has gone shopping in Los Angeles for a few days. She shows up a week later without any shopping bags.
On the list it went, no matter how small the offense, my ever-increasing tally of comforting transgressions, offering me the proof I craved. But none of it was ever enough to silence the voices in my head. What kind of daughter am I, not returning my mother’s phone calls? Perhaps I should visit more often. Maybe if I hadn’t used that tone of voice . . .
Sometimes I secretly wished that my mother had hit me or cut me with a knife. A single bruise or scar would suffice, giving me the evidence to once and for all prove that it wasn’t all my fault.
But as I became more immersed in my mother’s past, I came to understand a truth that had the potential to topple one of my most deeply held views.
Perhaps none of it was really her fault, either.
THE THINGS I read about life at the Foundling Hospital sometimes reminded me of a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale. I had devoured the dystopian novel in college, captivated by the descriptions of Gilead, a fictional authoritarian regime where the Commanders, men of power and wealth, impose their theistic views upon subjugated citizens. Treated like chattel, females are assigned roles based on how they can best serve society. The protagonist, Offred, is a handmaiden, charged with bearing children to populate Gilead in the face of widespread infertility. She is renamed and forced to dress in a habit of red cloth, the fabric chosen to reflect her utility as a fertile female. When she goes out, she dons a white bonnet and walks alongside other handmaidens, always traveling in pairs, communicating in whispers and careful not to upset the Wives, the barren women dressed in blue who control the handmaids’ daily lives. But they are most afraid of the Eyes, who can exact swift punishment for any perceived disloyalty to Gilead.
Unlike the rules imposed on Margaret Atwood’s characters, the strictures governing every aspect of Dorothy’s life were real.
The elite men chosen to oversee the Foundling Hospital had laid out their expectations for the foundlings’ lives in a series of rules dictating the minutest aspects of their upbringing: from their clothing (“in a Manner proper for Labour”) to the time they should rise (“Five o’clock in the Summer, and Seven in the Winter”), be out of the ward (“a Quarter of an Hour after”), begin work (“Half an Hour after Five in the Summer, . . . Seven in the Winter”).22 On it went, days filled with order, each moment accounted for in the endless cycle of established routine.
Over the next two centuries the world that surrounded the Foundling Hospital would be transformed: the industrial revolution would herald in an era of innovation and new technologies, Queen Victoria would reign for six decades, a king would abdicate the throne for his love of an American divorcée, and in Germany, a new leader named Adolf Hitler would come to power.
But life at the Foundling Hospital remained grounded in practices adopted centuries before.
The children were separated by gender, the boys on one side, girls on the other, thirty to a dormitory. Dorothy’s shared living quarters amounted to a military barrack—a long rectangular room furnished only with row after row of small iron beds topped with thin mattresses, each girl assigned to a bed based on her height. Other than the beds, no other furniture was allowed, nor was there any decor to soften the prisonlike setting—no colorful bedspreads, no pictures on the walls. A set of plain windows overlooked a flat gray roof. Each morning at the exact same time, Dorothy would wake and put on her brown serge dress—the color chosen as a reminder of her station in life. On Sundays she would don a white apron and “tippet” (a scarf-like stole worn over the shoulders), and perhaps a cap atop her dark brown hair, cut the same length as that of every other girl at the institution, just above the earlobes, with bangs covering her forehead.
Next, she would line up with the other girls from her dormitory and march to the washroom, grabbing her toothbrush and standing quietly in front of the water basin.
“Taps on!” the dorm supervisor would roar. In unison, each girl leaned forward, turned on the water, and waited.
“Brushes under!” The girls would place their toothbrushes under the cold stream of water that sputtered out of the taps.
“And . . . brush!”
The line of girls would begin cleaning their teeth on cue. Back and forth, up and down, the collective sound of brushing echoing off the tile walls, until they heard their next instruction.
“Rinse!”
“And taps off!”
The room would grow quiet as the spigots went dry.
“March!”
The orders heralded the start of a day that would be spent obeying their superiors—the women, each dressed in blue with a white cap, who enforced rules that had been etched in stone. The girls left the washroom, always in twos—crocodile formation, as it was called at the Foundling Hospital. It was a phrase that I would come across often. In attempting to discover its origin, I found a reference suggesting that the phrase was derived from an ancient Indian warfare technique called makara vyuha. The makara was a legendary sea monster—a crocodile, in modern terms—and vyuha means an arrangement of troops. How the expression made its way to a home for illegitimate children in a country thousands of miles away is a mystery, although England’s colonial presence in India seems a viable link. Regardless of its etymological trajectory, the phrase’s military roots had certainly been preserved. The children were required to maintain the formation in complete silence, under the watchful eye of their supervisor. Down the stairs they would march, through the hallways, and into the oak-paneled dining room, where each would take her place at one of the long tables according to her assigned team, always in the same order—first Hogarth, then Handel, followed by Dickens and then Coram.
In the large hall, the girls would stand soundlessly. There were no whispers or rustling of skirts. The room would be eerily still as they awaited their instructions.
A teacher’s voice would break the silence. Pray!
For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, the girls would respond on cue. Amen.
Sit!
Row upon row, dozens of girls with the same haircut and identical garb would simultaneously turn and sit down, almost without a sound.
Begin!
They would consume their meals in silence, hearing only the clinking of their cutlery, the no-talking rule strictly enforced.
For the children in my household, meals were generally quiet affairs, particularly when we ate in the formal dining room
, at a table that could easily seat a dozen guests. My mother sat at one end of the table, my father at the other, my sister and I in the middle. My parents rarely spoke. To fill the silence, my sister and I created a secret language, just a few words here or there, many based on swear words in French or Spanish. “You’re a merde-head,” my sister would quip, sending us both into uncontrollable fits of laughter. My parents would smile quietly at our disobedience.
A foundling would not be so lucky. A girl caught talking would be moved to a special table—the “odd table,” as it was called. Later she would likely be caned, an example of the importance of obeying the rules. Day in. Day out. Breakfast, dinner, and supper would be eaten in total silence, except on Christmas Day, when as a special treat, the girls were allowed to talk at the table. In the years they would spend at the Foundling Hospital, not once would they sit down to a meal with an adult.
At the end of the meal, on cue, the girls would bow their heads and pray in unison:
For what we have received, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.
Stand up!
March!
After breakfast, it was time to defecate. They knew their instructions—produce a solid. Each morning at the same time, a nurse gave them two pieces of paper and then stood over them, waiting until each had performed to her satisfaction. She would inspect the results. Only she could authorize a flushing, and if her examination of the contents of the toilet bowl dissatisfied her, the offending foundling would be sent to the infirmary for a dose of syrup of fig.
The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames Page 10
