The garments were strangely familiar to me.
I had grown up in a wealthy family, but while other children at my school wore clothes purchased at upscale department stores, my mother frequently sewed my clothes by hand. I remember watching her work, hunched over her sewing table, lips pursed as she skillfully guided the fabric under the rapidly dancing needle. The clothes were flawless, with tight stitches and straight hems, but always brown and loose-fitting. I would plead with her to let me wear something else. The drab and shapeless clothes would make me the target of ridicule, I told her. She told me that I was too fat to wear anything else, and that children wouldn’t tease me. Both statements were equally false.
I remember standing in the center of the playground, wearing one of the brown skirts that my mother had carefully sewn for me. The hem fell below the knees, too long to be fashionable. The outfit was completed by an oversized shirt, plain white socks, and sturdy brown shoes, which did nothing to help the cause.
My eyes were fixated on the rectangles forming a hopscotch pattern in the asphalt beneath me. I counted the numbers drawn in brightly colored chalk as I tried to drown out the taunts of my classmates.
When my mother picked me up, she had a different take on the playground dynamics. I wasn’t the freak, the weirdo in ill-fitting clothes—and the children’s taunts were just a cover. “It’s because you play the violin,” she whispered as if she were sharing a secret. “They’re just jealous.” I turned my head and watched her as she spoke, but the expression on her face revealed nothing other than a pure, fiery certainty in her convictions. I remember it vividly, her breathless voice and wide eyes. It was a small, insignificant moment, but it may have been my first realization that I wasn’t the only member of my family who was out of step with the outside world.
As I gently ran my fingers over the uniforms the foundlings had worn, I wondered whether they were the reason my mother had dressed me as she did. Perhaps, for her, coarse brown sacks that might as well have been used to transport potatoes were simply what children wore.
I headed upstairs to the Court Room, the place where the “governors” of the Foundling Hospital had conducted their business. This room, where the men responsible for the administration of the hospital had spent countless hours debating the fates of their charges, had a familiarity about it as well—the formal furniture and lush Persian rugs reminded me of pieces my mother had chosen to decorate our home.
As I wandered into the picture gallery, adorned with large-scale portraits and a marble fireplace, my breath caught in my chest at the sight of two tall, ornate chairs. Featured prominently in the center of the expansive room, with intricate carvings that crept up their upright backs, they looked stately, like wooden thrones. They’d been used in the chapel, I was told. The resemblance was more than uncanny. The chairs were indistinguishable from a pair that were prominently displayed in the living room of my childhood home.
Wandering through the museum, I was overcome with a certainty that this was the place where it had begun—the darkness that consumed my mother, smothering any chance for tenderness or affection in our household.
Everyone I encountered treated me with kindness—the docent who showed me around the museum, the curator I met with later that afternoon. They must have known my interest wasn’t purely academic. Maybe my reddened eyes gave me away. Some appeared to know to exactly what had brought me to the museum. One woman approached me and explained that she herself had been a ward of the hospital in the early 1950s. We chatted for a while.
“We were fortunate,” she volunteered. “Where else would we have gone?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the woman’s gratitude to the institution. I’d passed right by Coram’s motto that very morning: “Better chances for children since 1739.” And as I roamed through the halls of the museum, I was surrounded by portraits of the dukes, earls, and other noble men extolled for their roles in creating and managing the Foundling Hospital throughout the centuries. The men in their elegant clothing, perched atop richly brocaded furniture, seemed to radiate pride in their philanthropic achievement.
I stood for a long time under the portrait of Thomas Coram, depicted in his later years, with white hair and a ruddy face, wearing a sturdy coat spun of worsted wool, and surrounded by evidence of his travels and station in life. The oil painting was mounted in a burnished golden frame. As I contemplated the face of the man whose vision had carved out a place for children like my mother, I felt a familiar bitterness rise up in my chest.
3
Secrets
I began my life two miles from the epicenter of the sexual revolution, in 1966. As I was taking my first steps, tens of thousands of the movement’s foot soldiers had converged on San Francisco for the Summer of Love. The drug-fueled Haight-Ashbury district had become ground zero for a cultural revolution in which activists, artists, and half-lucid dreamers challenged deep-seated norms of behavior. Almost overnight, stigmas that had haunted women for centuries began to lose their power, and several years later one of the revolution’s cornerstone tenets would be ratified into law. An unmarried woman who found herself pregnant and alone would no longer be forced to bear a child in the shadows, only to leave it at the doorstep of a parish church or, worse, seek out a back-alley abortion that could leave her disfigured or dead.
But in Forest Hill, an affluent neighborhood of gracefully curved streets atop one of San Francisco’s famous peaks where I spent the first six years of my childhood, life went on as it always had. Lawyers and bankers left their imposing homes, many with ocean views, to make their daily trek to the financial district, while mothers took their children to feed the swans at the Palace of Fine Arts, untouched by the turmoil brewing a short drive away.
The sexual revolution had come too late for my mother, anyway. Her fate had been sealed centuries before, by the stroke of a king’s quill pen and the accident of her birth.
No one told me that my mother was illegitimate. It wasn’t a topic to be brought up at the dinner table or in casual conversation. Yet from my earliest memory, the fact of her illegitimacy was an integral part of my family’s narrative. Somehow we just knew, perhaps because the clues simply spilled out into our daily lives.
Unlike other kids, in my world there were no grandparents bearing gifts or sending cards on birthdays or at Christmas. My paternal grandmother had died giving birth to my father, and my paternal grandfather had succumbed to a heart attack years later. I’d heard stories about them and would ask my father about his dad from time to time, questions any child might ask. What was he like? Do you look like him? How old was he when he died? But to bring up my mother’s parentage was taboo. What were their names? Where did they live? Were they alive or dead? I didn’t know the answers to even the most basic questions.
From time to time, I’d overhear tidbits about my mother’s heritage. She was a descendant of Welsh nobility, but her rightful place in society had been taken from her—stolen, she would say. We had blue blood pulsing through our veins, she declared, and that no one could change.
I didn’t know what she meant, and imagined that my blood was somehow different from that of other children. I had no reason to doubt her, not back then, given the precision of her speech and the high-toned nature of her extracurricular pursuits. She was as skilled at sketching with a pencil as she was at oil painting, and she played the piano with an effortless grace. Her tales of her studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music, England’s oldest conservatory, founded by the 11th Earl of Westmorland in 1822, only served to fuel my fantasies. So did her obsession with her Welsh ancestry and a long-running effort to help restore a crumbling Welsh castle. She would occasionally show me photographs of the imposing turreted stone structure, set on a vast empty moor, and over the years she spent thousands of dollars organizing posh dinner parties to raise funds for rebuilding the castle to its former glory.