The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  The separation between boys and girls was strictly enforced. Many children had spent their first five years in the countryside forging sibling bonds with foster children of the opposite sex. Those early bonds were severed without warning or explanation when they entered the Foundling Hospital. Dorothy had spent her first five years being raised with two foster brothers, both of whom ended up at the Foundling Hospital. During their years at the institution, they never spoke. Only a few exceptions to the separation of the sexes popped up in the accounts I read. Boys in their first year at the hospital ate at a boys-only “infant table” on the girls’ side of the dining hall, although no talking was allowed. I also read of an instance in which fraternal twins, a boy and a girl who’d been raised by different foster families, were allowed to meet for the first time since their births over a birthday cake—a rare moment of kindness on the part of the staff, who typically did not acknowledge birthdays. The movable oak doors in the dining hall were folded back for the occasion, and the two were allowed to peek at each other at close range for the first time, their heads cocked at identical but opposite angles, with identical grins.

  The boys and girls were effectively raised in two separate schools and supervised by two separate sets of staff members. By many accounts, the abuse suffered by the boys may have been worse. The boys’ headmaster was considered particularly cruel, and was given to beating the boys with a cricket stump—a thick stick that could easily break a bone. During one of my trips to England, I met a former foundling who recounted an incident when she had peered into the gym, where she saw a boy hanging upside down, being brutally beaten by the gym teacher.

  Despite the hospital’s efforts to completely separate the sexes, hormones led to natural curiosity on the rare occasions when male and female foundlings did cross paths, an event that usually took place in the chapel. Centrally and prominently located, the building was the crown jewel of the Foundling Hospital campus. With wide and lofty interiors and high arched ceilings, it comfortably accommodated all of the students and staff. Dorothy would spend much of her time during daily chapel services gazing at the colors that cascaded through the magnificent stained-glass windows along the side walls. A central aisle separated the boys and girls, and when Dorothy was about eleven or twelve, she began to make furtive eye contact with a boy across the aisle.

  A few months before her departure, the staff allowed for a rare exception to the otherwise rigid segregation of the sexes during a Christmas event held in the assembly hall.

  The seating was moved and the entire school, including boys, gathered around a tall decorated Christmas tree. . . . We sang all the well-known, well-loved carols, received candies and were free to socialize. Possibly we were at liberty to mingle with the boys, but I recall we mostly stayed apart, out of shyness. . . . I remember looking for the boy I exchanged smiles with in church. I daringly dashed over to him and gave him one of my candies then swiftly raced back. When I turned around he was still standing there, smiling at me.

  Naturally Dorothy and her fellow foundlings were kept in the dark about sex. There was no instruction on the differences between boys and girls or about menstruation and reproduction, and discussion of such matters was strictly forbidden. Sharing information about menstruation, a major transgression, would result in a caning. Girls who had started their periods were separated, branded as “infirmary girls,” as they were required to wash in the infirmary during their menstrual cycles, rather than with the other girls in the dormitory.

  My mother had a dim view of these practices:

  What might the answer be to the puzzling question of why we girls were kept ignorant about the workings of our bodies and, most crucially, of reproduction? Was this appalling policy a matter of prudence rather than prudishness as I had at first thought? Could the withholding of such vital information from the girls, as well as the obsessive segregation of the boys and girls, have been because the Governors wanted to prevent future alliances with the opposite sex, not to have them even think about sex? Could the Hospital’s thinking have been that such alliances among Foundlings might on leaving the school lead to marriages and offspring and a desire for independent living, thus likely causing the loss of valuable domestic servants they had placed, and for the boys, drop-outs from the military?

  As my mother recognized, the institution was willing to go to great lengths to safeguard its investment in future servants, an investment that would be greatly devalued by an imprudent pregnancy.

  There were unintended consequences to the hospital’s policies, however. As my mother remarked in her recollections, the refusal to discuss the differences between the sexes left female foundlings “vulnerable to every kind of mistreatment and exploitation.” Interviews with former foundlings supported my mother’s view, revealing that many were uncomfortable speaking and interacting with the opposite sex. Some felt profound shame, their illegitimacy a secret that had to be hidden. Others fell victim to their own ignorance. There were reports of foundlings who didn’t know that they were pregnant until it was pointed out by a friend or colleague. One thought that a condom was a receptacle for a man’s menstrual blood, as she had no understanding that only women menstruated and certainly no concept of what a condom was. Yet another was raped, but didn’t understand that until many years later.

  As for my mother, who hinted at “further difficulties in dealing with the opposite sex,” the hospital’s rigid segregation led to what she termed an “acute awkwardness and discomfort” around men. In her early years, there was only one occasion during which she experienced joy and comfort in the company of the opposite sex. It’s no wonder where her dreams would lead her.

  I DON’T KNOW when or how my mother traveled to the United States, but I do know why.

  It all began with those kind American servicemen at Bovingdon Aerodrome. Because of them it eventually culminated in my emigration to America. America offered hope, opportunity, acceptance and liberation from the rigid British system.

  My mother emigrated in the 1950s, but I was not able to find her name on any government records. Whether she traveled by ship and how she found the money to pay for her passage are equally unknown to me. These subjects were never discussed in my family, and her manuscript skips over that entire period. Somehow, at some point, my mother made her way to San Francisco.

  She found a job at a bank in the financial district and shared a small apartment with a few other young women. She was independent and free, with a fresh start that would allow her to leave her painful past behind. But the transition was not without difficulties. “Despite my inexpressible joy at being in America,” she wrote, “I remember there was at the same time an intense emptiness in my life. More than anything I wanted a home of my own and an American husband of the kind that touched my heart as a child in England.”

  She didn’t have long to wait. In the spring of 1960 after dinner at a little Italian restaurant in the lively North Beach area of San Francisco, my mother and a coworker decided to hop on a cable car to visit the Buena Vista, a popular pub-like bistro famous for its trendy Irish coffee. Inside, there was a long bar and a row of round tables with views of Alcatraz and the San Francisco Bay. The two women found seats and had begun to chat when a well-dressed man with dark hair and large blue eyes approached my mother.

  “Excuse me, may I sit in this chair?” he asked above the din. My mother nodded, and he extended his hand and introduced himself—though she was so nervous she missed his name. She told him hers. Eager to shed her identity as a foundling, when she came to the United States she’d let go of the name Dorothy Soames and adopted the name I assume she had been given at birth—Eileen Mary Weston.

  The young man had served in World War II, he revealed, and the two talked until he asked if he could take her to dinner some night.

  It wasn’t the story I’d been told as a child. The version enshrined in family lore had them meeting at a party on Nob Hill, an affluent neighborhood of San Francisco first settled by ra
ilroad barons in the 1870s. Perched above the city, the location seemed like the perfect place for my parents to have met. But it was just another fib designed to hide my mother’s shame, though this particular fabrication was run-of-the-mill, a harmless cover for my mother’s embarrassment over having met her husband in a bar. I discovered the lie when I was thirty-nine years old, over dinner at a seafood restaurant in Ghirardelli Square. I had brought a friend along who innocently asked how my parents had met. I jumped in, ready to share the well-worn story of their courtship, until I noticed my parents smiling oddly. Only then did the truth come out.

  As the day of their first date arrived, Eileen was excited, filled with hope for a future with a dashing young American GI. She was also fearful that she’d make a mistake and ruin everything. She didn’t even know his name! Would he be offended by that? She had so little experience with men, she didn’t know what to expect.

  The night of their date, the handsome GI walked her to his car and opened her door. At the time, a person was required to have a copy of his license affixed to the steering wheel. While he walked around to the driver’s side of the car, Eileen quickly leaned over and got a glimpse of his name—John Alderson Thompson. It was a nice name, she thought. John got into the car, none the wiser.

  Several months later, my mother would take her third name in her lifetime, becoming Eileen Weston Thompson.

  “WHY DID YOU marry her?” I asked my father when I was about fifteen. The question could have been interpreted benignly, a simple request for a story about how my mother and father had met, why he loved her so much. But my father knew what I meant.

  “She can be quite charming, you know.”

  His explanation sounded hollow, too simple. I assumed he meant that my mother had tricked him.

  The truth was more complex, but a facile gloss over the dynamic governing my parents’ marriage suited me back then. A deeper understanding wouldn’t emerge until I’d sifted through both of their backgrounds for clues. My father spoke often of his past, and the stories of his childhood and the years before he moved to California remained fresh in my mind. But as I revisited those memories through a new lens, my views of my parents’ marriage slowly began to change.

  Like my mother, my father had been separated from his mother not long after he was born, in the town of Rogersville, Tennessee. Originally settled in the 1780s, Rogersville is one Tennessee’s oldest towns, and home to the state’s first newspaper. Due to its remote location near the Great Smoky Mountains, the town was still sparsely populated, with only about fourteen hundred residents, in 1921, the year my father was born.

  With no hospitals in the vicinity, John Alderson Thompson came into this world in the downstairs bedroom of his parents’ home. Six days after his birth, his mother died of a postpartum hemorrhage, an event that cloaked my father’s life in guilt, as if he had caused the blood to spill from her womb in the days following his birth. Some sixty years later, he shared with me his belief about what had happened in those last days of his mother’s life. She must have known that she was dying, he told me, and he liked to believe she spent those six days holding him, loving him, and that as she took her last breath, she prayed for him.

  John would soon be without a father as well. A man wasn’t expected to raise a child on his own, so within months “Baby John” was moved to his aunt Azalea’s house to be raised by Azalea and her husband, Hubert. The couple already had three sons of their own: Griff (born just six weeks after my father), Joe, and another John. To avoid confusion, my father would be called Johnnie and his cousin John T., and Griff and my father would be raised as twins. John thrived under Aunt Azalea’s kindness and care, in the company of cousins whom he knew as brothers.

  But his happiness was cut short at the age of six, when he was taken from the only mother he had known. His father had remarried, and John was summoned back to his birthplace, where he would be raised by a stern and mercurial woman named Jessie who had little love for her stepson. When John’s father died a little over a decade later, she packed up and left, never to be heard from again. John would have to make his own way in life. He volunteered for the war against the Nazis and Japanese along with Griff, John T., and Joe. Griff was shot down over Czechoslovakia, perishing along with the rest of the crew of a B-24 bomber on a mission to Odertal, Germany. Joe came home from the war, but the horrors he had witnessed in the Pacific caused him to take his own life. Only Johnnie and John T. would make it back alive.

  My paternal grandfather had been a prominent figure in East Tennessee before he died, a successful attorney and a member of the Tennessee legislature. When John returned from the war, he had no money; his stepmother had taken everything except a small plot of land that had been left specifically to him. But he was driven, taking advantage of the GI Bill that sent more than eight million World War II veterans to school. Before long he was a respected attorney who, like his father, was elected to serve in the Tennessee legislature. He also became a delegate of the 1953 Tennessee Constitutional Convention, which amended the state’s constitution to eliminate the poll tax.

  John was restless, however. During the war, he was stationed in the China-Burma-India theater, supporting China in its battle against the Japanese. He had traveled to Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan, eventually ending up in India. One of his first impressions of India, as he peered out of a transport plane flying at low altitude, was the sight of the Taj Mahal in full moonlight. For most of the war John was stationed in Assam, in the northeastern region of India. The American camp was surrounded by a jungle filled with venomous snakes—krait and cobra—and rumored to be crawling with tribal headhunters. There were always monkeys, hundreds of them, their incessant chatter providing a backdrop to the daily lives of the soldiers. Occasionally John would see a tiger or an elephant. Once he watched Tibetans walk single file near the camp, learning later that they had traveled hundreds of miles across the Himalayas to shop in the small town of Tezpur.

  John had seen the world, and the small town of Rogersville would not contain him for long, and so he packed up his bags and made his way to California.

  MY MOTHER HAD dreamed of meeting an American GI from the time that first convoy passed by the Foundling Hospital. Americans were kind and gentle, she decided, and John was no exception. He spoke softly to her, rarely raising his voice in anger, instead praising her cooking and her choices in design, always supporting her thoughts and opinions. And with a successful law practice, he became wealthy, allowing my mother to hire servants to meet her every need and never take a job of her own, something I viewed in a new light, given what I now knew about her past.

  In addition to security and love, John gave my mother something she had always yearned for—respectability. She was the wife of a distinguished lawyer who came from a line of respectable men, prominent attorneys and politicians, a man whose great-great-great-grandfather Archibald Thompson had fought in the American Revolution. What a relief it must have been to marry into a family with a history, and a name that no one would ever question.

  Seen from the outside, my parents’ lives were ideal. My sister was born about a year after my parents married; I followed four years later. My mother took on the traditional role of a housewife, caring for us as my father made his way to work each day. His success allowed our family to live luxuriously, with expensive cars and homes, and vacations to exotic places where we would stay in the finest hotels—a far cry from the life Miss Wright had envisioned for Dorothy.

  From my vantage point, their marriage was unhappy, but in the years closer to his death, my father told me often how much he loved my mother. Perhaps they shared a bond that I could never understand, both having lost their mothers at an early age, their formative years filled with heartbreak. At her funeral, he called out to her as they lowered the casket, his lonesome wails powerful, an animal cry coming from somewhere deep within his soul.

  Love can take many forms, and though for much of my life I viewed my parents’ marriage as a f
ailed enterprise, I see things differently now. Both figures are more complex than I ever imagined, the bond between them formed by time and habit, but also through a shared journey of tragedy and loss. It’s only in the shadow of their absence that I can reinterpret their union as an imperfect fairy tale. My mother’s childhood dream had come true. She had married her American GI, and she was cared for and loved.

  17

  Reunions and Reckonings

  My mother and I were about the same age when we each felt an irresistible pull to understand the past, and how it had shaped who we had become.

  I can’t claim to fully understand what finally compelled me to uncover my mother’s secrets, an obsession that spanned the course of two years. I do know that the anger I’d shouldered for much of my life had taken its toll. The sheer intensity of my feelings for my mother, the loathing that was always simmering just under the surface, were burdens with a palpable weight. Perhaps I hoped that understanding my mother’s past might provide me with a sense of peace.

  But my mother’s journey was not about anger—it was about shame.

  Because I had spent most of my life not wanting to remember and didn’t want anyone to know about this period in my history I had always tried to keep the Foundling Hospital years out of my thoughts. This was not only because of the shame I felt by being illegitimate, but also because of the fact that I was “allowed” to leave school two years early on account of what I believed was my bad conduct. I thought these reasons both degraded me and would cause me to lose esteem in the eyes of others. As a result, I have lived a life of lies.

  That shame, she wrote, was also the reason she went to such great lengths to conceal the truth about her background. “However,” she concluded, “in recent years and much to my surprise, I have been drawn back to those days and have tried to make sense of them.”