Home > The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames(3)

The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames(3)
Author: Justine Cowan

None of that mattered to Patrick, who never batted an eye as I slowly unraveled the complexities of my family dynamics.

As we descended into London, he reached over and took my hand, squeezing it as the plane touched down on the tarmac.

We stayed in Westminster, in a boutique hotel overlooking the Royal Mews of Buckingham Palace. Brimming with old English charm and replete with cozy rooms and the requisite afternoon tea, it was staffed by an attentive doorman clad in traditional livery, complete with a top hat. His accent delighted me, a thick cockney brogue that sounded like it belonged in a Dickens novel.

My mother would have disapproved.

I could easily see her curling her lip, raising an eyebrow ever so slightly to register her displeasure as the doorman gave us directions to Victoria Station. I’d been taught at an early age that a person’s status in society could be discerned by his or her diction, and my mother took particular objection to those who spoke with a cockney accent. Riffraff, she called them. She had little tolerance for the working class, in any context.

I heard her voice as we wandered through London’s narrow alleys or popped into a pub to escape the wintry rain. The fish and chips we feasted on brought back the tastes and smells of my early childhood. Our cupboards were always stocked with the malt vinegar we used to generously anoint the lightly battered cod she regularly served for dinner. The vinegar’s pungent odor would linger on my fingers for hours.

Like a ghost, she appeared in Harrods in a small hallway at the bottom of an escalator, where a memorial statue of Princess Diana and her lover, Dodi Fayed, had been erected several years after their deaths. Just for a moment, I saw my mother’s large brown eyes, pools of tears spilling down her face when she heard the news.

And so my mother had gotten her way, traveling with us through London. Hers was a constant and familiar voice in my head, fading only when our plane landed back in the States. We had gone together, after all.

As the wheels touched the ground, I reflexively reached for my phone.

My mother would always call after my adventures, sometimes several times, ostensibly to make sure I had arrived home safely. I resented those calls, knowing they would inevitably lead to arguments, harsh words, tears, and phones slammed down onto the receiver, followed by the inevitable follow-up call from my father. Why couldn’t you just keep the peace? As soon as technology gave me the gift of caller ID, I would send her straight to voice mail, only calling her back when guilt overcame my misgivings.

This time there would be no call from my mother. No one checking to see if I’d made it home in one piece. My older sister and I had been estranged since my father’s funeral, eleven months after my mother’s. In the space of a single year, my birth family had vanished.

I’d have expected to feel relief in my mother’s absence. Instead warm tears streamed down my face as the plane taxied toward the gate.

I had spent a lifetime loathing my mother, moving thousands of miles away to be rid of her, only to be haunted by her after she was gone.

When I returned home, instead of organizing photos or turning my focus back to work, I began my search for Dorothy Soames.

 

IT STARTED SLOWLY, as small chunks of time surfing the web. I don’t know what I expected to find, or even exactly what I was looking for. My efforts amounted to aimless googling of a few words in various combinations—“Dorothy Soames” and “England,” for example—each of which yielded disappointing results. I found a reference to Lady Mary Spencer-Churchill Soames, best known as a member of London society and the daughter of Winston Churchill. A connection to Winston Churchill wouldn’t have been unwelcome, but even if his daughter had married into a Soames clan with some relationship to my mother, it was difficult to imagine how they could have been connected. My search uncovered various other people named Dorothy or Soames, but none of them wound up giving me any clues into my mother’s past.

I could have stopped there. At that point, my level of curiosity hadn’t progressed beyond a vague interest. But ever since I returned from London, I had felt a growing sense of unease. My mother’s letter, the one she sent all those years ago, kept on tickling the back of my brain—along with the specific word she had used to describe herself.

I stared at the computer screen, the cursor blinking as if awaiting instructions. I placed my fingers gently on the keyboard and typed:

Foundling London

And there they were, right there at the top of the page, the words that would take me back across the Atlantic to find the answers to questions I didn’t yet know I had: the Foundling Hospital.

 

“I THINK SHE may have been my mother.”

I had no idea if anyone at Coram would be able to help me when I sent an email through the general contact channels, asking for any information about a girl named Dorothy Soames.

The Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children, or the Foundling Hospital, as it was commonly called, was founded by a shipbuilder named Thomas Coram and granted a royal charter in 1739. Its stated mission was to care for “helpless Infants daily exposed to Destruction.”1 More than two hundred and fifty years later, the institution still exists, though now it’s known simply as Coram, in honor of its founder.

I waited for a reply, checking my in-box multiple times a day.

A few days later, it came. Yes, someone would look into the files to see if the institution had records on Dorothy Soames. But the promise of assistance came with a caution—don’t expect much. Even if they could find her records, it would be unusual for a search to unearth many details. The most I could hope for would be a confirmation of whether and when a child had been at the Foundling Hospital. Only in exceptional circumstances would there be anything more.

At the time, Patrick and I were living in Florida. He had landed a job on a team creating high-end video games, and we’d packed everything up and headed south from Atlanta. Leaving behind my position as the director of a nonprofit environmental law firm had been a difficult decision to make. Holding polluters accountable had once been my dream job, the reason I’d gone to law school. I filed lawsuits against unscrupulous paper mills, coal plants, and waste management companies for spewing dangerous toxins like mercury, arsenic, and lead into the air and water. Each case was grueling, the stakes always high, and my never-ending responsibilities ran the gamut from supervising staff to drafting briefs, managing the budget, and raising money for the cause. I was filled with an intoxicating sense of purpose. But after thirteen years, I was exhausted.

Overnight, my life morphed from a continuous flurry of court hearings, meetings, and phone calls to days with seemingly endless hours to fill. We’d moved to Orlando’s historic district, a tree-lined neighborhood with an eclectic mix of 1920s Craftsman bungalows and Mediterranean-style homes. I took on a few clients, but spent most days roaming the brick streets shaded by ancient oaks laden with Spanish moss, their sturdy branches fanning out above me as the humid air weighed me down like a blanket. I sat for long hours on a bench at a nearby lake, monitoring the progress of a pair of swans giving flying lessons to their cygnets. I wandered through the old cemetery, where I discovered an eagle’s nest in the fork of a lone pine tree and a pair of nesting owls perched on the branch of a cypress. The days spread out with a slow pulsing rhythm, my mind freed from the specter of endless meetings and impending court deadlines.

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