Chapter 3 Where the Orphans Came From #2
It surprised her how her Tommy began the first of his Town Talks on the Bronte sisters.
The lecture hall was packed to the topmost (hindmost) tier.
Constance admired how her husband stood, with no notes, in front of the lectern; if he’d stood behind it, he was so small that the ladies in the first row of seats could not have seen him.
“I wonder if you can tell me whether Emily or Charlotte wrote this,” he began.
When he started reciting, from memory, his eyes never strayed from the faces of those women in his audience.
Thomas Winslow was quoting what Emily or Charlotte Bronte had written, but Constance could see what her husband was doing; he was reading the expressions on those women’s faces.
From where she sat—in a lone chair on the speaker’s platform, to one side of the lectern—Constance could see the women’s faces, too.
The ladies of the town were caught off guard by what they were hearing; for once, the artful faces of those women could not conceal what they were feeling.
By no means were all the thoughts of the ladies of the town revealed—only the ones who were affronted by what they heard, only those women who felt resistance or hostility to what the English teacher told them.
“ ‘Conventionality is not morality,’ ” he recited, noticing the ladies who looked like they’d been slapped. “ ‘Self-righteousness is not religion,’ ” Thomas continued. “ ‘To attack the first is not to assail the last,’ ” Thomas concluded his recitation in a reprimanding tone of voice.
That was when Constance recognized the churchwomen in the audience, the ladies who’d pursed their lips and narrowed their eyes; the churchwomen were the ones her husband’s recitation had exposed.
Constance Winslow had studied the ladies of the town more closely than her husband had.
He’d wanted to draw them out, Constance understood—to identify who the churchwomen were.
But why did this matter to him? Constance wondered.
They were only reading the Bronte sisters.
And the passage he’d recited puzzled Constance—only at first, and not for long.
The ladies of the town had been instructed to start reading Emily Bronte.
In the first talk, some of the women wouldn’t have finished reading Wuthering Heights—almost no one had dived into Jane Eyre, except those women who might have read the novel when they were in high school or college.
And what would they remember from Jane Eyre?
Constance was imagining. Maybe that novel’s wonderful first sentence, Constance thought—her lips moving slightly, as she silently repeated it to herself.
(“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”)
Why would her Tommy quote from Charlotte Bronte’s preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre to a group of ladies who were only starting to read Wuthering Heights?
That was when Constance saw why he began with Emily.
Thomas Winslow wanted Charlotte’s didactic themes of conventionality and morality, of self-righteousness and religion, to catch all the women in his audience by surprise.
Constance knew her husband’s thoughts about the religious ending of Jane Eyre.
Constance understood that Thomas was setting the table for what he would say about Jane’s conflicted feelings about Christianity.
Jane chooses to be happily married to Rochester, on her own terms, and not to marry St. John, whom she very much admires (in her Christian way).
Jane doesn’t choose to join him in India, where St. John is dying—awaiting his dear Lord Jesus.
Constance loved what a good teacher her husband was, but she knew her Tommy too well.
He wasn’t only setting up his talk on the ending of Jane Eyre—when he hadn’t yet said a word about the beginning of Wuthering Heights.
Constance knew Thomas was a planner. He was looking farther ahead than his talk on the ending of Jane Eyre; Constance saw that he was setting up his talk about the history of abortion in America.
She knew he was worried about that one; she was worried about it, too.
Constance also saw that not one of the ladies in the lecture hall would venture to guess which Bronte sister wrote what Thomas had recited to them.
Those women were dreaming of Heathcliff and Catherine, or they’d read far enough in Wuthering Heights to be having nightmares about that monster of a man.
Those women weren’t thinking about Jane Eyre, much less Charlotte Bronte’s preface to the second edition.
“I suppose Connie knows which Bronte it is,” Thomas said, not turning to look at her. (Her Tommy was committing to memory the indignant faces of those churchwomen, Constance could see.)
“It sounds like Charlotte to me, Tommy,” Constance told him.
“Right you are, Connie,” he said, sighing.
There were titters from the assembled women, the ones who thought he was a little doll, but Thomas Winslow moved on.
“Charlotte will wait her turn,” Thomas told the ladies of the town.
“Emily is our Bronte girl today—what a Gothic story she has written!” he suddenly cried, raising his arms above his head.
“But don’t dwell on what a monster Heathcliff is,” he exhorted them.
“It’s Catherine you should care about—poor Catherine,” he said softly.
Constance saw the ladies’ lips move. Inwardly and involuntarily, without a sound, those women were repeating what he’d told them—poor Catherine.
In her heart, Constance could hear Catherine’s own words—when Catherine is ill and remembering the past, when she could freely be with Heathcliff.
(“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free,” Catherine says.)
Her empathy for Catherine notwithstanding, Constance willed herself to go against her husband’s teacherly instructions.
While she sat unmoving on the speaker’s platform, while Thomas talked on and on, Constance allowed herself to dwell on Heathcliff.
Constance knew the most troubling aspect of Heathcliff to dwell on.
Heathcliff is an orphan—not a good one, as it turns out.
The more immediate matter of concern in the Winslows’ life was Honor, their fourth daughter; with former au pair girls overrunning the house, offering unasked-for assistance, the back bedroom often had two grown women sleeping in a queen-size bed.
Worse, the Winslows were hearing it from Faith and Hope (even from Prudence) that they, their own children, were perfectly capable of looking after a newborn sister.
Thomas was once more sleeping in the master bedroom.
At night, if Honor cried, you could get trampled rushing to the dear child’s assistance.
If the townspeople of Pennacook imagined the Winslows were pushing their luck with a fourth ward of the state, luck wasn’t what Constance worried about.
Constance knew her whole family had benefited from three terrific au pair girls, now three wonderful young women.
Yet Constance understood why those orphans hadn’t been adopted.
People who were brave enough to adopt an orphan usually wanted one of the newborns.
They wanted a kid with a clean slate—not one who’d been abandoned at the orphanage, not a kid who was old enough to remember a previous life (and the people in it).
Weren’t the orphans who remembered being abandoned the ones who might be full of rage?
You couldn’t blame one of those orphans if they were angry, Constance couldn’t help thinking; she just didn’t want to bring a bad one into her family, knowing this was the last orphan she and Thomas would endeavor to save.
Oh, Tommy, Constance thought, because she didn’t believe in prayer—please give up the grudge you have against Maine!
Her lips weren’t moving; facing the ladies of the town, she sat as still as a stone.
Constance wanted to give the orphanage physician in St. Cloud’s a try—the reader, as she thought of the doctor who ran the place.
Constance didn’t care how hard it was to get there, or that you had to take the train.
She shared her husband’s grudge against religious institutions.
The Winslows weren’t believers; they were wary of those people who thought nothing of imposing their religion on you.
As for the orphanage physician in charge of St. Cloud’s, the nonreligious part surely appealed to the Winslows; only the Maine part stood in their way.