The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames Read online

  Even so, the pleas of women would not be enough to persuade the king. Coram would need to recruit men to his cause—powerful men who owned property, controlled the nation’s assets, held seats in Parliament, and they would not be easily won over. Their influence and prosperity were dependent on primogeniture, the system whereby the eldest male heir inherits his father’s estate. An illegitimate child could alter the future, change fortunes, transfer wealth and power. A system that allowed such a child to be cared for, and perhaps one day to challenge the established lines of succession, was not in their best interest. Leaving that child to die on the streets of London was, for these men, the price of assuring the social order’s smooth functioning.

  Their intransigence would stall Coram’s scheme for seventeen years. But Coram was playing a long game. And when a game-changing opportunity finally arose, he seized it.

  When Coram first took on the cause of London’s abandoned children, the city was mired in financial uncertainty brought on by the failure of a venerable financial institution. After promising vast riches, the celebrated South Sea Company had collapsed, ruining its stockholders and sending economic shock waves throughout Great Britain. The time was not ripe for charity. But in the ensuing years the economy recovered, and a growing confidence in the future allowed the elite to live a little more lavishly. Construction boomed, requiring stonemasons, brickmakers, carpenters, and roofers.

  This rise in prosperity was set against the backdrop of Britain’s desire to build its empire by expanding its influence on the European continent and abroad. Conflict was brewing in North America, and England was already engaged in a series of ongoing territorial wars—the Nine Years’ War against France, then the wars of the Spanish Succession and the Austrian Succession. With war and economic growth came a serious and pressing need for a resource that had become all too scarce: able-bodied men and women—men to fight, and women to wait on a growing elite in need of servants. Thomas Coram was a clever man, and he saw an opportunity within these developments to advance his cause, boldly cloaking his pet project in a brand-new argument. Caring for foundlings, he now maintained, was no mere charitable act but a public good that could address the government’s need by creating “useful members of the commonwealth . . . in order to supply the government plentifully with useful hands on many occasions, and for the better producing good and faithful servants from amongst the poor and miserable cast-off children or foundlings.”12

  The foundlings had been rebranded as servants and soldiers—the essential building blocks for England’s burgeoning empire.

  Coram’s new approach was a success. On July 21, 1739, he submitted three petitions to King George II: one with his own signature; a second with the signatures of dozens of dukes, earls, and knights, the entire Privy Council, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and the prime minister; and the last with signatures from justices of the peace. Less than a month later, on August 14, 1739, the king granted a royal charter officially opening the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children.

  On November 20, 1739, Coram proudly presented the charter to the Duke of Bedford, who served as the hospital’s first president, thereby opening what became England’s first secular charity. Over the next two centuries the Foundling Hospital, as it quickly came to be known, went on to care for thousands of children who likely would have otherwise perished or been consigned to London’s rough streets.

  Coram’s achievement would secure him a place as one of the greatest philanthropists in England’s history, but his success came with a price, one that would be paid for generations to come. While he’d saved these children, he had made a devil’s bargain, committing them to a hard life of scrubbing floors and changing chamber pots, or being sent to war to defend a nation that viewed foundlings as disposable.

  And so a foundling was to begin life disgraced by the illicit union between his mother and father. His parents would be spared the shame of their actions, the child safely tucked away out of society’s notice. But there would be little hope for the foundling, no chance of a better life, only the one already laid out before him in which he would serve the needs of England’s ruling class.

  Two centuries later, a woman with dark brown hair and a pale complexion would abandon her child at the Foundling Hospital to protect the honor of her family. That child would be scorned and belittled for the shame of her birth, her fate as a servant to society’s elite forever sealed, it seemed. She would not even be allowed to keep her own name.

  Instead, she was known as Dorothy Soames.

  6

  Running

  I had no mental image of my grandmother, the color of her hair, whether she was plump or wiry, how her eyes creased when she smiled—or if she smiled at all. As a child, my mind was a sponge, porous, ready to be filled with even the smallest bit of information about her. A passing comment would have been enough to fill my imagination. But the subject was off-limits. My mother never spoke of her. There were no photos on the mantel or stories around the dinner table. I didn’t even know her name.

  Combing through the Foundling Hospital files, holding Lena’s letters in my hand, I felt a growing sense of our kinship. The files contained no photographs of her, but Lena’s spirit, tenacious and determined, had acquired a shape and heft of its own.

  Would I have had the strength to do what Lena did? I wasn’t sure. She had committed one of society’s greatest taboos—bearing a child out of wedlock. But she had also gone against another equally powerful societal norm in abandoning her own flesh and bone, leaving her daughter in the hands of strangers. Our libraries are filled with books that revere women who make sacrifices for their children, and revile those who do not. The artwork on the walls of the world’s most venerated museums deifies the mother as an ethereal, saintly figure, her love able to transform and redeem. The lesson of history is unequivocal—nothing is more sacred than the bond between a mother and her child.

  Lena had abdicated her role as a mother, yet I felt no judgment toward her. She had been shunned by her family and would have been unable to access government resources reserved for mothers whose husbands had died or abandoned them. Had she kept her child, her only certainty would have been a lifetime of hardship and scorn.

  My own decision to break the sacred bond between mother and child, to repeatedly ignore and reject my mother in the name of self-preservation, seemed almost petulant in comparison. While my family wasn’t particularly religious, a biblical verse had been a constant refrain in my head in the years since I sought distance from my mother:

  HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER: THAT THY DAYS MAY BE LONG UPON THE LAND WHICH THE LORD THY GOD GIVETH THEE.

  It wasn’t just any Bible verse. It was one of the Ten Commandments, given the same weight as prohibitions against lying, cheating on your spouse, and murder.

  As a daughter, I had only one job—to honor the woman who’d brought me into this world. She’d kept up her end of the bargain, after all, performing all of her motherly duties. She bore me, she disciplined me without ever raising a hand to me, she clothed me and fed me and tucked me in each night.

  In return, I shunned her.

  I never cut off all contact, and we were never estranged in the typical sense of the word. But we may as well have been—when I finally left, I’d logged five thousand miles by my first stop.

  I was working as a temp for a financial firm in San Francisco shortly after college graduation when I ran into a friend who mentioned his plans to move to Japan. He gave me the name of a company that was hiring Americans to teach English to business professionals and schoolchildren. Less than a month later, I arrived at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport.

  My new employer set me up in a small apartment in the city of Kasukabe, just north of Tokyo. I was instantly spellbound by Japan’s distinctive culture, its sights, smells, and tastes so different from anything I had ever before encountered. A trip to the supermarket was an adventure. I would wander
up and down the aisles, examining row after row of canned goods adorned with kanji characters and unfamiliar images. The fruits and vegetables in the produce section were strange and wonderful, and the massive bags of rice weighing fifty pounds or more posed an insurmountable engineering challenge for my bicycle ride home (solved when I learned that the mini-mart sold “small” five-pound bags). I boldly sampled street food that I had never heard of before—donburi, zaru soba, sesame snacks with tiny whole dried fish in every handful, or natto, gooey fermented soybeans that even the Japanese considered an acquired taste. When I wasn’t teaching, I spent my days exploring nearby Tokyo. At night I would drift off to sleep to the wails of the yakisoba man as he drove through the streets, selling his traditional stir-fried buckwheat noodles to drunken “salarymen.”

  I ate rice and dried fish for breakfast, learned to read and speak Japanese (at least enough to get by), and after a few weeks could navigate the complicated public transportation system like a native. Home was thousands of miles away, and I gave it little thought. It was the late 1980s, and there was no email to keep me connected to family. The phone in my tiny apartment couldn’t receive international calls. My connection to my parents was limited to the occasional letter, and that suited me just fine.

  When I returned to the United States a year later, I brought back a valuable lesson. My happiness increased exponentially with the number of miles between me and my mother. I experienced no guilt at my discovery. That would come later. All I knew was that being away just felt . . . better.

  Then, to make sure the universe got the message, I kept on moving.

  My next plane ticket took me to Washington, DC, for a fellowship with the National Wildlife Federation. Each day I wandered the halls of the Capitol Building, dropping off letters for congressional staffers or taking notes at hearings on environmental legislation. My experience working to protect the environment at the centers of power lit a fire in my belly, and I took the next logical step, applying to law school. Though I was accepted at universities in California, I chose Duke in North Carolina, conveniently located across the country from my family. My mother’s relentless training paid off through the grueling three-year experience. Hard work came naturally to me. I was selected for law review and, after graduating with honors, landed a prestigious clerkship with a federal judge in Nashville, Tennessee.

  With a clerkship under my belt, I was offered a job at one of the South’s oldest and most prominent law firms. I turned it down for a low-paying job in Atlanta that would launch my career as an environmental attorney. I drove through small towns in rural Georgia, took water samples from wells and streams near wastewater treatment plants and factories, paddled canoes through blackwater swamps looking for illegal discharges. I immersed myself in my work, basking in the identity it created for me and rising each morning with an invigorating sense of purpose.

  My preferred line of work had the benefit of introducing me to a world of like-minded people—a core group of friends who would become my new chosen family. There was Ed, my best friend—a quirky and irreverent gay man who’d escaped his fundamentalist upbringing in rural Tennessee to become a respected attorney in Atlanta; Carolyn, whose friendship with me dated back to college, our conversations filled with fits of laughter over an unlimited supply of private jokes; Julie, a respected civic leader who would drive for hours through the Tennessee mountains to be by my side each time I buried a parent; Angie, whose back deck hosted innumerable sessions of late night “drunken Scrabble” with seemingly endless pitchers of margaritas; and “Porch,” the fiercely loyal crew of friends named for our weekly porch parties where we shared food, mirth, and drinks. My family of choice enveloped me with an unconditional love that I freely returned. For the first time, I felt secure enough to let my guard down and be myself.

  My adult life seemed idyllic. I had achieved everything I had ever wanted. I was a successful attorney doing meaningful work, my free time spent with a tight-knit group of friends who were loyal and kind.

  But then it would come in like a wave, with a force that could knock me off my feet. Other times, I feared it would swallow me up like quicksand, pulling me down into the darkness.

  I remember sitting on the back steps of my house, staring down at the stairs, my eyes focused intently on the gray paint whose peeling revealed a dingy layer of cement, trying to hold myself up against the weight of a depression that sat like lead on my shoulders. Shame took a seat on top. I had no right to feel the way that I did, and I mentally ticked off all the good things in my life—particularly the privileged upbringing that would make most people envious. I rarely shared details about my upbringing, unintentionally hiding my upper-crust background behind the cheap haircuts and well-worn clothes that were the hallmarks of a public interest salary and milieu. While I was never dishonest, I would have felt awkward discussing the bevy of private tutors who had filled my childhood days, and I was so successful at hiding my parents’ wealth that sometimes my closest friends were taken by surprise. When I was living in Nashville, a law school classmate came to visit and was wandering around my modest one-bedroom apartment. Before long he emerged from the bedroom with an odd look on his face.

  “There’s a painting of a horse on your wall. It says you’re the owner?”

  My mother had commissioned the portrait of my horse, Chelsea’s Folly, when I was a teenager. I had never liked the painting, but after I left home she shipped it to me, insisting that I hang it on the wall.

  “So your parents are rich?”

  Nothing in our relationship changed, but I felt like a liar.

  Even more than the judgment of others, my own conscience was a constant drumbeat in my head. Keenly aware of the advantages I’d had as a child, I was ashamed of my unhappiness. You should be grateful, I reasoned. Again and again, I presented my brain with a logical argument for the case against depression.

  The dynamic only worsened when I visited my parents in Pebble Beach, where they had retired. Within a day or two the arguments would begin. They were usually set off by my mother’s criticisms on subjects ranging from my clothes to the length of my hair, my weight, or the condition of my skin. There was hardly an area of my body that wasn’t subjected to her scrutiny. Fights would erupt when she would return from a shopping excursion with unasked-for bags full of clothing for her twenty-five-year-old daughter, every item several sizes too big. The point behind her “generous” gesture was hard to miss. I would tell her that the clothes were too large, that I hadn’t asked for them in the first place and didn’t need them. “You’re bigger than me,” she would counter, by way of explaining her innocent mistake. I remember standing half naked in front of her, humiliated, as she forced me to try them on, the items slipping off my body one after the other because they were so wildly oversized. There was no compassion in her eyes as tears streamed down my face. I was ungrateful, she told me, and didn’t appreciate her thoughtfulness.

  The hardest visits would be at the end of the year, when my mother was on edge. Our holiday fights were always more intense, and my depression would accelerate as the leaves turned from green to bright red and orange. To me, fall meant that soon I would be going home.

  And then one Christmas we had a terrible argument, a fight to end all fights. My recollection of the events leading up to the argument has been wiped from my memory bank. But what happened next appears in my mind like a slow-motion playback, as if I’m watching a stranger instead of myself.

  Throwing furniture around the house was usually my mother’s domain. This time it’s not her I see but me, picking up a stool and throwing it across the kitchen with a force that shouldn’t have come from my five-foot-tall self. The room became eerily silent, neither of us saying a word. I retreated to my bedroom, and the event was never mentioned again.

  That was the last time I went home for Christmas.

  The next year I spent the holidays with friends. Making the decision was a relief, and that Christmas was filled with laughter an
d warmth. The spell was soon broken by a flurry of phone calls from my mother, and then my father, telling me that I was cruel, thoughtless, inconsiderate, selfish. What kind of daughter won’t come home for Christmas?

  Their words were potent, and shame seeped into every crevice of my body. But for the first time in my life, the waves of once-intractable depression began to recede. Each time I put additional distance between myself and my mother, it felt like a chink had been chipped away from a stone monolith that had loomed over me for most of my life. I saw glimmers of light inversely related to the amount of time I spent with my family.

  My rules and regulations multiplied as I realized that no amount of physical distance between myself and my mother could ever be enough. She would burst into my workday with a phone call whenever an idea popped into her head, each conversation dragging me back into the depressed state I had fought so hard to keep at bay.

  My parents continued to call me cruel, and sometimes I was. “I will only talk to you on Sundays,” I told them. “If you call on any other day, I will hang up the phone.”

  My parents were devastated by each new addendum, but I stuck to my plan, and another chink in the monolith crumbled. I felt empowered by every limit I enforced. I was clinical in my approach, heartless, severing our connection one piece at a time.