Chapter 3 Where the Orphans Came From
In the beginning, when the Winslows went looking for unadopted orphans who would soon become wards of the state, Thomas Winslow wouldn’t look outside of New Hampshire.
They found their first three au pair girls in New Hampshire orphanages.
Constance realized sooner than Thomas that they would need to expand their search for a fourth au pair girl.
She reminded Tommy that there were orphanages in Maine.
The one in St. Cloud’s had been a logging camp for the first half of the nineteenth century—when the woodcutters were doing their damage, before the forest was gone.
St. Cloud’s was one of those river towns that remained after the loggers had moved on.
The sawmill had stayed (only for a little while), along with the lumberyard (for a little longer); a dying mill town was what the loggers left behind.
Their bunkhouses were where the orphans slept; their cookhouse was a kitchen and a dining hall, where the kids ate.
From the orphanages they knew in New Hampshire, the Winslows heard mixed messages about the physician who ran the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine.
First of all, the Winslows were impressed that a doctor was in charge, and they’d been told the doctor was a reader. He read aloud to the children; he encouraged the kids to be readers. But the Winslows were also told that the orphanage physician was “prone to tirades.”
“What about?” Thomas Winslow had asked. To an English teacher, a tirade wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—not if it was justified.
The doctor raved about “the rape of the forest”; he said the logging industry and the paper companies had failed to replace the trees that they had cut down.
“When the river valley surrounding St. Cloud’s was cleared, and the second growth sprang up everywhere, like swamp weed, what was left behind?
” the doctor in charge of the orphanage would ask you.
Then he told you: “The sawdust; the scarred bank of the river, where the log drives had gouged out a new shore; the mill with its broken windows with no screens; the whore hotel; the church, which was Catholic, for the French Canadians, and which looked too clean and unused to belong in St. Cloud’s, where it was never half as popular as the whores, who had the good sense to move on with the loggers.
” And here the orphanage physician paused, to catch his breath or to contain himself.
“Why did the Catholic Church leave town after the whores and the loggers had left?” the doctor asked, almost innocently. The physician who was prone to tirades answered the question himself. “Because there was no one who had anything to confess—an orphan’s conscience is clear.”
“The doctor does sound a little crazy, Tommy,” Constance said.
The Catholic Church had expressed an interest in participating in the running of the orphanage in St. Cloud’s; the orphanage physician had vetoed the idea.
“We’re not an orphanage with a religious affiliation,” was all the doctor said.
The Winslows were not churchgoers; they had no religious affiliation.
They weren’t knowledgeable about the alleged evils of the logging industry or the paper companies.
Maybe the orphanage physician was a little crazy about the rape of the forest, or whose fault it was for failing to plant new trees; the Winslows knew next to nothing about forests or trees.
“I like the sound of the reading—encouraging the kids to be readers doesn’t sound crazy, Connie,” Thomas told his wife.
Constance was the librarian at the Pennacook Public Library—a yellow-brick, late-nineteenth-century building bordering the academy campus on Front Street.
To the townspeople of Pennacook, Constance Winslow was as much of an annoyance as her husband—those two were always telling you what you should read.
“I like the sound of the reading, too, Tommy—I’ll bet you like the sound of an orphanage with no religious affiliation even better,” Constance said.
In addition to hearing her husband say (more times than she could count) that religion was the bane of civilization, she knew he had a grudge against the state of Maine.
“St. Cloud’s is a very hard place to get to—Maine is just too far to go, Connie,” was all Thomas Winslow would say.
(St. Cloud’s is nowhere near anywhere, as they say everywhere in New England.) Inland Maine was snowed in during the winter months—nor was there any spring in that part of Maine, a period of time distinguished by thawing mud.
The old logging roads were impassable, immobilized by the mud.
If you went there in the winter or the spring, you were advised to take the train.
Furthermore, the Winslows were told, your fellow passengers would look down on you if you got on or off the train in St. Cloud’s.
The orphanage was all that was there. You were stigmatized for your association with the orphans.
This forewarning of the passengers’ contempt only served to confirm Thomas Winslow’s grudge against Maine.
Maine’s Public Laws of 1840 and 1841 included the country’s earliest anti-abortion legislation; it made attempting the abortion procedure on any woman “pregnant with child” an offense, “whether such child be quick or not,” regardless of what methods were used.
Performing an abortion was punishable by a year in jail or a one-thousand-dollar fine, or both.
If you were a doctor, you could lose your license to practice.
Other states followed. By 1910, abortion was illegal throughout the United States; it remained so until 1973, when the Roe v.
Wade Supreme Court decision held that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion.
The Winslows were abortion-rights advocates before the townspeople of Pennacook were thinking much about abortion.
If you listened to the town, you would have thought abortion had always been illegal.
The history of abortion in America was not well known to most Americans—the townspeople of Pennacook included.
But abortion didn’t inspire the Town Talks—Constance’s contribution to adult education in the town of Pennacook.
The Winslows were irritating advocates of trying to improve town-gown relations.
The relations between the town of Pennacook and Pennacook Academy were forever strained and in need of improving.
The Town Talks were the librarian’s idea, but the Pennacook Public Library, where silence was the rule, was not an ideal venue for a speakers’ series.
Finding a forum for the Town Talks was easy; the academy’s lecture halls were not in use on weekday nights, during the students’ study hours.
As for choosing subjects for the Town Talks—topics that were mutually agreeable to the townspeople of Pennacook and the academy faculty—this was harder.
“Tommy is the teacher—the subjects are his business,” was all Constance told the town.
The ladies of the town were interested in fiction.
For Thomas Winslow’s Town Talks about novels or novelists, the ladies of the town turned out in droves.
“Women are the fiction readers—we live in our imaginations more than men do,” Constance Winslow said.
(She would have you believe she was speaking strictly as a librarian, oblivious to the fact that the ladies of the town thought her husband was a little doll.)
Thomas gave two Town Talks on Charles Dickens; he had the ladies of the town read Little Dorrit and Great Expectations (in that order), making the case that Great Expectations was the better novel.
Thomas Winslow would discover that the ladies of the town (even the ones who were smitten with him) were not as easily persuaded by their teacher as the academy boys were.
The ladies loved the prison-to-riches story and the kind-hearted Little Dorrit.
There were only three or four men at the Dickens Town Talks.
“You’re talking to a bunch of women, Tommy—women are going to like a marriage melodrama more than a boy’s bildungsroman,” Constance said.
“Right you are, Connie,” Thomas told her.
He gave two Town Talks on George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
There were a surprising number of men in attendance at the first of the Town Talks on the Eliot novel.
“I saw seven or eight men, Connie,” Thomas said.
But no men attended the second Middlemarch talk. Thomas Winslow was crestfallen.
“Maybe the men who came the first time didn’t know George Eliot was a woman, Tommy,” Constance told him.
“Right you are, Connie,” Thomas said. He gave four Town Talks on the Bronte sisters’ best-known novels—the first two talks were on Emily’s Wuthering Heights, the last two on Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.
Constance asked him why he began with Emily.
Didn’t Thomas know that Charlotte was the older of the two—not to mention that Jane Eyre was published a little before Wuthering Heights, if only by a month or two?
“Right you are, Connie,” was all her husband would say.
Constance knew him so well; she knew he had a reason to begin with Emily, but not why he wouldn’t tell her what the reason was.
Thomas was good-humored about the total absence of men at his Town Talks on the Bronte sisters—not one man showed up.
“At last we know exactly how smart the townspeople of Pennacook are, Connie—smart enough to know the Bronte sisters were women,” Thomas told her.
Constance was smiling when she whispered to him, wagging her index finger. “Not something you should say publicly,” she chided gently.