My Three Lost Girls

On a warm Sunday afternoon just before the turn of the millennium, my daughter Diana (then still a doctoral candidate at Harvard) and I revisited the orphanage where I had spent much of my childhood: Angel Guardian Home, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Diana had often expressed curiosity about my days in the orphanage. During her own childhood she had listened wide-eyed to my carefully-edited Disney version of life in “the Home”—as we orphan girls used to call the walled institution that sheltered, fed, and educated us—but which could never provide the love we craved. Now a grown woman, Diana longed to see for herself the reality of this font of fantasy that had spawned so many maternal fairy-tales.

Unlike Diana, I had mixed feelings about beholding Angel Guardian Home once more. Half a century had passed since I had left this place that had been the central locus of my life for five crucial years. Except for my G-rated stories meant to beguile my daughter, I had banished the events of those orphan years to the netherworld of my mind. With that act of will, I had also forsaken my own child self, Little Sophie, condemning her to wander, forever lost, in the dark labyrinth of memory that I had constructed to imprison the ghosts of my painful past.

Busy with my own life as a mature woman, I never thought of Little Sophie anymore. The stories supposedly about her that I had recounted to Diana had nothing to do with the genuine Little Sophie; they were only cartoons of that child who had been me, whose very name I had rejected. Little Sophie, long lost in oblivion, had nothing to do with the woman I had become since leaving the Home. Now, at Diana’s urging, I was to return as an adult to Angel Guardian Home. How might that return affect me? Would I stumble onto long forgotten sorrows? Would I surprise myself by laughing as I recalled the games we girls played, or the songs we sang? Would I bring to mind lost friends whom I had once loved fiercely because we shared the ineradicable loneliness of abandoned children? Would I weep to recollect the innocent prayers we orphans offered to God the Father to whom we little girls clung tenaciously because He alone professed to love us?

Although the prospect of visiting Angel Guardian Home after so many years unsettled me more than I was willing to admit, I was determined to see it through for Diana’s sake. I telephoned the Home about arranging such a visit. I learned that Angel Guardian Home no longer housed orphans, was no longer in fact an “orphanage” as such, but an agency dedicated to providing foster homes for children, as well as related services to “families in crisis”. I also learned that the facility was not open to the public on Sundays—the only day that Diana had available for our expedition.

Despite this disconcerting news, Diana and I decided that even though we would not be able to gain entry to Angel Guardian Home, we would still make the trip to Brooklyn from suburban New Jersey where we lived at the time. At least we could see “the Home” from afar. Diana could satisfy some portion of her curiosity—if only at a distance.

Accordingly we drove to Brooklyn in Diana’s old Subaru. We parked, and found ourselves standing before the tall wrought-iron gates that separated Angel Guardian Home from the outside world.

As I peered through the metal bars, it seemed to me that the buildings and grounds were little changed by time, though considerably smaller than my gigantic childhood picture of them. Still, here was the lofty smokestack of the old laundry, and there the sprawling brick façade of the main building, the green lawns, and the surrounding walls of brick (not nearly so high as I remembered them but still surmounted by barbed wire and shards of glass).

But the very emblem of Angel Guardian Home—a larger-than-life statue of a grave-faced angel sheltering a little girl under a celestial wing—no longer occupied its old place on the front lawn. I experienced an access of disappointment at its absence. Had I not been one of those who sheltered under that angel’s wing? Without the presence of the statue gleaming white in the sun, how could I be sure I was seeing reality through the iron bars that blocked my passage inside?

Minutes later, as Diana took photos of me with the Home as a backdrop, a singular event occurred: a man abruptly appeared on the sidewalk, opened the gate, and let himself into the grounds, allowing the metal barrier to swing shut behind him. But instead of closing all the way as it was supposed to, the gate hung open an inch or two—as if offering admission. I let myself imagine that the spirit of the missing angel was summoning us inside.

Accordingly, speaking no word but sensing something Providential in the circumstances of the moment, Diana and I pushed open the gate and stepped across the boundary onto the forbidden grounds. We followed the long cement pathway to the heavy front door. Would this barrier also open for us? Diana pulled. The portal swung ajar. We walked into a shadowed reception hall.

From a room off to our left we heard male voices in conversation: security guards or watchmen changing shifts. But they hadn’t noticed us. I allowed myself to fancy that the absent angel was guiding us, had once more taken me under his wing.

Treading softly, Diana and I made our way further into the Sunday afternoon silence of the deserted building until we could no longer hear the men talking. All at once, in that heavy quiet, my heart began to race.

Although I was a grown woman, happily married, a mother and a grandmother—and although I had achieved professional success and had traveled widely—I felt myself, without warning, transported back half a century to a time long before I had become Su Anne Sherry, back to a time when I had been Sophie Madison, orphan, the angel’s child.

Suddenly I was seeing with Sophie’s eyes.