Chapter 2 A Fourth Daughter
Constance was the steadfast matriarch of the Pennacook Winslows.
Her maiden name had been Bradford. William Bradford had been onboard the Mayflower.
The townspeople of Pennacook imagined Constance was no less steadfast when she’d been a Bradford; becoming a Winslow merely served to steel her moral certainty.
The woman was unwavering. Constance was the one responsible for the virtue names bestowed on her first three daughters—Faith, Hope, and Prudence (in that order).
Virtue names appeared to matter less to Thomas Winslow, the little man of the household.
Mr. Winslow was the epitome of an English teacher; to the townspeople of Pennacook, the diminutive man was the essence of teacherly.
His forebears didn’t matter to him. “You can’t improve your ancestors—you can only improve yourselves and inspire your children,” Thomas Winslow told his Pennacook Academy students on the first day of every English class he taught.
He meant he could teach them to read well, beginning with what they would read.
“And if you learn to write well, you will speak well, too,” he told those boys.
As for what they would read—the poems, the plays, the stories, the novels—“the more make-believe, the better!” the English teacher told his students.
What Mr. Winslow further said was the gist of his belief in fiction.
“If you can imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, this might make you a better person,” Thomas Winslow would tell those boys.
What grated on the townspeople of Pennacook was the way Thomas Winslow tried to teach them.
The adults of the town didn’t want an English teacher telling them how to improve themselves.
It wasn’t Thomas Winslow’s business to tell the townsfolk how to inspire their children.
The well-to-do adults of the town were most annoyed at the tiny English teacher.
Why would they want to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes?
How did Thomas Winslow dare to make them better people?
And Constance, in her own way, could be a busybody; she got under the skin of the townspeople of Pennacook, too.
Those two were always pushing what they’d read on you.
What they’d read wasn’t all those Winslows were pushing, but the town’s awareness of being pushed began with the books.
Thomas Winslow wasn’t self-conscious about his smallness. It irked the town’s menfolk that Thomas was not a bit bothered by his tiny size.
The women felt differently. Thomas Winslow was handsomeness in miniature to them. “Isn’t he a little doll?” the ladies of the town teased one another. Don’t think Constance didn’t know how the women felt.
Yet the prevailing impression of Thomas Winslow was teacherly.
To the townspeople of Pennacook, the pretty little man did not bring spontaneity to mind.
If Constance was the one who named Faith, Hope, and Prudence, the exactness of the two-year span of time between each of the daughters’ births seemed in keeping with the specificity of detail in those plotted nineteenth-century novels the tiny English teacher loved.
On the surface, the deliberate difference in the ages of those virtue girls was characteristic of Thomas Winslow, wasn’t it?
After Prudence (the third virtue daughter) was born, the townspeople of Pennacook counted the years.
Given their esteem for Thomas as a little doll, the ladies of the town kept the closest count.
Two years after Prudence was born, it looked like the Winslows were done having children.
Prudence was five when the Winslows let the last of their nannies go.
When those virtue daughters were little girls, they had a succession of nannies—three in a row.
Constance insisted on calling them “au pair girls.” The au pair designation caused a hullabaloo in town.
For one thing, it was inaccurate—they weren’t foreign girls, they spoke English, and (above all) those girls were orphans.
To the townspeople of Pennacook, where the Winslows’ nannies came from mattered.
Constance, of course, could not be criticized for her use of language.
“I call our girls au pair, from the French—literally, ‘on equal terms.’ Our girls help with housework or childcare in exchange for room and board—they’re part of our family,” Constance said; she would not use the word adopted, nor did she ever say the Winslows were a foster family for those girls.
“We don’t give our girls a salary—we give them an allowance, the same as you would give your older children,” Constance told anyone who would listen.
“These girls are like our children,” Constance said of those orphans—to the consternation of the townspeople of Pennacook.
“We buy their clothes, we help them with their homework—all our children know school is important,” Constance couldn’t stop herself from saying.
The Winslows would see to it that their au pair girls got into college; those nannies knew they were expected to do well in college, too.
There had to be something wrong with one of the Winslows’ orphans, or so the townspeople of Pennacook hoped.
Not enough was known about where those orphans came from.
With orphans, too much is missing; there’s always something you don’t know.
The townspeople of Pennacook understood (albeit vaguely) what happened to unadopted orphans; when they were only fourteen or fifteen, they became what was called “wards of the state.” That didn’t sound good.
There were ladies in the town who said childcare was too important a job for minors.
And you would be asked, or you might think to yourself: Would you let wards of the state look after your children?
Not a speck of dirt could be found on the Winslows’ first three nannies.
Those three were model students in the Pennacook public schools; the way they sailed through college (they got into good graduate schools, too), you would have thought they were Winslows.
The way those three unadopted orphans came “home” (as they called it) for Christmas or their vacations sorely vexed the townspeople of Pennacook, too.
The way those three virtue daughters adored seeing their old au pair girls, you would have thought the Winslow kids were like sisters to those wards of the state.
And those nannies spoke no ill of their treatment in the Winslow household. “I felt accepted from the beginning, like I’d always been part of the family—and now I always will be,” the oldest of those orphans had said. She’d been the nanny for Faith, the firstborn.
“You can’t just give someone a home, not someone like me, who’s never had a home, but that’s what they gave me—they made me feel I was home,” Hope’s nanny, Lucie, told the mothers of her friends at school, the ladies of the town, who (for once) were speechless.
Then there was Denise, the au pair girl for Prudence, the youngest of the virtue daughters.
Denise was the taciturn one. Her reticence to speak made the townspeople of Pennacook imagine she might have something to hide.
Yet the quietest of those orphans was just a shy girl, reserved in her speech; if she seemed reluctant to join a conversation, she was wise to be wary of the ladies of the town (and their penchant for gossip).
“I was treated like one of the kids—we were all treated equally,” the youngest of the Winslows’ three nannies said.
“I was just supposed to be one of the more responsible kids, because I was a little older.”
Grasping at straws, the way the ladies of a small town will do, one of the older women inevitably asked: “But what do you call Mr. and Mrs. Winslow—how are you supposed to address those two?”
“Oh, those two are just bigger kids—I call them Tommy and Connie, like they call each other!” the suddenly excited nanny said; she was not so taciturn anymore.
The ladies of the town wouldn’t dream of calling Constance Winslow Connie, no more than the menfolk could imagine Thomas Winslow—the little boss man of the English language—as a Tommy.
And the Winslows’ wards of the state even embraced Constance’s maiden name—her Bradford business, her Mayflower lineage.
To hear those orphans talk, you would have thought their ancestors—from those families that had given them up or abandoned them—had sailed on the Mayflower.
“Poor Dorothy!” those au pair girls exclaimed, bemoaning the fate of William Bradford’s first wife.
She was only sixteen when she married Mr. Bradford.
They’d left a three-year-old back in Holland with Dorothy’s parents.
Dorothy drowned; she fell (or she jumped) overboard when the Mayflower was anchored offshore in Provincetown Harbor.
There was no doubt in the minds of the townspeople of Pennacook—Dorothy definitely jumped overboard!
She could see from the ship what a wilderness awaited her; she knew she would never see her darling three-year-old again.
We would have jumped, the ladies of the town were thinking and nodding their heads to one another.
Not those nannies. They would have gone ashore and faced the wilderness. “William Bradford remarried!” Faith’s au pair girl declared, as if a man’s remarriage were an act of heroism.
“William Bradford became the governor of Plymouth, and he wrote a history of the Plymouth Colony—Of Plymouth Plantation,” Lucie had told the entire town.
“Bradford’s history is still taught in collegiate American-history courses!” Denise would add—still a shy girl, but less reticent over the years.
Even Constance’s first name had some ancestry attached to it. “Constance comes from the French, via Latin,” Faith’s nanny was the first to say, dutifully repeating what she’d been told.