Chapter 2 A Fourth Daughter #2
“It’s a medieval form of Constantia—that’s the Latin,” Hope’s au pair girl, Lucie, had reported.
“It was the name of the daughter of William the Conqueror,” Prudence’s ward of the state, Denise, said, not so shyly.
And then, when Prudence was ten, it became apparent that Constance was, once again, pregnant.
At four months along, she was starting to show.
When she gave birth to a fourth daughter, Prudence was eleven; Faith and Hope were teenagers.
The virtue daughters were old enough to rebel against the very idea that they might be called upon to be the new kid’s babysitter, but (true to their names) they were virtuously eager to do it.
As for those three nannies who’d moved on, one of them had children of her own, yet they all volunteered to come “home” (as they continued to call it).
The old au pair girls were competing with one another; they had a fight over who would be the one to look after the newborn.
“Oh, my dear girls—don’t be silly,” Constance said.
“You have your own lives to lead, dear girls,” Thomas told them.
To the townspeople of Pennacook, the fourth daughter didn’t appear to be planned.
The ladies of the town questioned the possibly premature impression of Thomas Winslow as teacherly; maybe there was something spontaneous about the little doll.
Then along came the cleaning woman; she was the one who told tales about the Winslows’ sleeping arrangements, but not even a small town in New Hampshire could presume to know all there was to know about that.
(Not even a cleaning woman knows everything.)
The ladies of the town had long wondered about the Winslows’ sleeping arrangements.
When the first three daughters were little girls, Thomas Winslow had dorm duty; the whole family lived in a faculty apartment in a Pennacook Academy dormitory.
Imagine one of those underage orphans living in a boys’ dormitory; yet there’d been no fooling around between the academy boys and the au pair girls.
Thomas and Constance must have read the riot act to the boys in the dorm.
The academy boys—the older boys, especially—knew the nannies were off-limits.
Yet the quarters were cramped for a family of five (plus one); faculty housing hadn’t been designed for three small kids (plus an au pair girl).
And the townspeople of Pennacook were left to ponder: Did the academy dock Thomas Winslow’s salary because the nanny ate with the family at their faculty table in the school’s dining hall?
(It irritated the townspeople of Pennacook that the academy’s business was no business of the town’s.)
The Winslow’s long-suffering cleaning woman would let you know she was sorry she’d left Boston; she’d followed her husband north to New Hampshire, but he hadn’t amounted to a pot to piss in, which she would let you know, too.
If you gave her more time, she would tell you why her whole family should have stayed in Kildare.
Gertie Eustis was an Irish woman whose first name had been shortened from Gertrude; she may have been angry about that, too.
She’d been the Winslows’ cleaning woman from the start—in their first days in faculty housing and after they moved off campus into a house of their own in town.
“Those kids have no sleepin’ rules—those Winslows are a liberal family when it comes to sleepin’ arrangements,” Gertie told the town.
“Those kids’ pillows keep movin’ around,” was the way Gertie put it.
To the townspeople of Pennacook, the word liberal was sufficient condemnation, before Gertie got to the part about the pillows movin’ around.
Changing the bed linens was the cleaning woman’s job; Gertie found all the kids’ pillows in one kid’s bed, or in the nanny’s bed.
In the Winslows’ dormitory days, there were never enough bedrooms—there were barely enough beds.
The nanny never had her own room there—just her own bed.
“The so-called au pair girl always has a kid, or all of ’em, climbin’ into her bed—an orphanage sleepin’ situation,” Gertie Eustis called it.
On the centermost streets of Pennacook, there were white colonial houses—like the one with five bedrooms the Winslows would move into when Thomas had paid his dues as a young teacher, when he was done with dorm duty.
Each of the virtue daughters had her own bedroom, although those three shared the same bathroom.
The nanny had not only her own bedroom but her own bathroom, too.
The au pair girl’s “quarters” (as Constance called the nanny’s bedroom and bathroom) were at one end of the second floor, above the kitchen.
The master bedroom and bathroom were at the opposite end of the upstairs.
Like the Puritans themselves (befitting Thomas and Constance Winslow), the seventeenth-century colonial displayed scant external ornamentation.
There was a steep roof with two chimneys, and a front entry with a portico supported by columns.
There were narrow clapboards, painted white, with black shutters on the windows.
Yet the Winslows’ cleaning woman would tell the townspeople of Pennacook that no detail of old New England decorum, or the right number of bedrooms, could persuade those virtue daughters and the teenage ward of the state to stay in their own beds.
“Those kids and the orphan are sleepin’ all over the place,” Gertie told the town.
The cleaning woman saw herself as the Winslows’ personal housekeeper; Gertie had a managerial mindset.
The sheets and pillowcases were in her care; they were her business.
It mattered to Gertie where the kids’ pillows ended up—not to mention the nanny’s pillow.
Most mornings, all the pillows were in one bed—more often than not, the nanny’s bed.
Even after what looked like the last of those orphans went away to college, the virtue daughters piled into the same bed together.
“Migrants sharin’ a bunkhouse have better sleepin’ boundaries—I’m just guessin’,” Gertie Eustis would say, to anyone who listened.
As for the Winslows’ young daughters piling into the same bed, the townspeople of Pennacook didn’t give a hoot.
What got the town’s attention were the new sleepin’ boundaries of Thomas and Constance.
Thomas had moved into the orphan’s vacant quarters.
In Pennacook, there surely were other married couples who slept in separate bedrooms; yet the town talked obsessively about the distance between the two bedrooms where Thomas and Constance slept.
To get to the master bedroom from the former au pair girl’s quarters, Thomas had to tiptoe past the children’s bedrooms, or he had to traipse downstairs and traipse back upstairs, after he’d trekked through the whole house.
Why this journey between bedrooms mattered so much to the townspeople of Pennacook had something to do with how different the fourth daughter turned out to be.
To begin with, the perhaps unplanned (or more spontaneous) daughter didn’t have a virtue name—not exactly.
It may have sounded virtuous to the ladies of the town, but Constance made two things clear: Tommy had named her, and Honor was an “expectation” name.
“Honor is a name like Chastity—an expectation isn’t necessarily a virtue,” was the way Constance put it.
To the townspeople of Pennacook, especially the ladies of the town, Honor nonetheless sounded like a hard name to live up to.
So much for poor Dorothy—the Bradford who went overboard, the young wife who drowned when the Mayflower was anchored in Provincetown Harbor.
The Winslows’ fourth daughter wouldn’t be a Dorothy; she would be an Honor, not the easiest cross to bear.
Surely the townspeople of Pennacook were wondering: What will Tommy and Connie do?
With those two sleeping at opposite ends of their house, who would the Winslows find to look after Honor?
We wouldn’t get another orphan, the ladies of the town were thinking and nodding their heads to one another.
In the town’s judgment, those Winslows would be pushing their luck with a fourth ward of the state.
In truth, the townspeople of Pennacook didn’t know much about orphanages.
But like many folks in small New England towns, the citizens of Pennacook knew only what they had heard, and what they’d heard was good enough for them.