SUPERINTENDENT CHARLES H. BRADLEY SAT AT HIS BIRD’S-EYE maple desk, gluing newspaper clippings into his leather-bound scrapbook. He carefully applied the thinnest sheen of mucilage to the next clipping—just a small paragraph, only as big as two postage stamps—and placed it squarely on a new page. After fanning it a bit with his hand to speed the drying of the glue, he uncapped his fountain pen and made a note in his tiny, spidery hand, squeezed into the margin above the paragraph: Boston Herald, August 18, 1889. Merely a mention of the school band playing at Faneuil Hall last week, entertaining visitors from many states, undeterred by the heat and humidity even in their high-collared uniforms. But Bradley clipped and secured every printed mention of his school, no matter how brief, and had done so since his arrival eighteen months earlier.
It was understandable that Bradley thought of it as his school, since his authority was absolute and there was no other industry on the island. Certainly he answered to the board of trustees—but unlike most other schools, the Farm School was supported entirely by charitable donations, so he was beholden to no one in government. It was this fact, more than any other, that had inspired him to leave his post at the State Primary School in western Massachusetts and move here with Mary. It was Mary who had first pointed out the advantage of that freedom, how they could be liberated from the Commonwealth’s purse strings and do what was in the best interest of the boys.
Ah, Mary! What had he done, he asked himself (and not for the first time), to deserve the blessing of marrying Mary Chilton Brewster? No one else had ever understood his passion for education. Bradley’s father and mother were Vermont farmers and had been surprised to learn that their only son was not interested in a life of agriculture. But when Bradley met Mary at the State Primary School, for the first time he’d been able to speak without restraint about the challenge and thrill of forming young minds, of setting boys on the path of virtue and temperance and productivity, of steering them away from the temptations and evils of city life. Instead of receiving diplomatic murmurs of agreement when expressing these views, he was charmed to find that Mary returned his enthusiasm note for note. It was obvious to Bradley from the first of these conversations with Mary that he would marry her.
As Bradley looked up from his scrapbook, movement at the bottom of the hill caught his eye through the window. When he first was given a tour of the building, it puzzled him that of all the rooms, it was this one that was the superintendent’s office. Others were grander or centrally located. But the first time he sat at the desk, the reason became clear: From his seat, he had a perfect view of the curving road leading down the steep hill to the wharf, and of the wharf itself, which was the official entry point to the island. From here he could see everything arriving onto the island and everything leaving it, and so it was that he saw the two new boys disembarking the steamer.
An unsettling feeling crept up on Bradley as he watched the two boys sling their sacks over their shoulders. The meeting with Reverend Stryker last week had been odd, though Bradley couldn’t put his finger on why. It was not the first time applicants had been accepted before the board had a chance to meet; the superintendent could approve applicants if he deemed there to be urgency in removing the boys from a dangerous environment. And certainly Stryker portrayed the situation of these boys in those terms—their only remaining parent just recently passing, the concern that they would quickly fall into the bad elements of their neighborhood. Last fall, Stryker had made a similar plea on behalf of Francis Burr, who now had the highest grades in the Second Class and was looking likely to win the flower garden prize next month.
And yet . . . the Burr family had been in Stryker’s congregation for years, while these Weston boys belonged to a different church with a different minister. As Stryker explained it, this minister had come to him, knowing that he had arranged for the placement of Francis, and had begged him to make the appeal to Bradley. It all made sense, and it so happened that the boy at the top of the admissions list had a mother that seemed a bit ambivalent about sending her boy off. She was the overprotective type, in Bradley’s estimation, and was likely to want to take her boy back at the slightest change in her financial situation, regardless of the contract she would be required to sign—relinquishing all claims to her son until he was placed out after graduation—before they accepted the boy. Bradley had been struggling with this application and what his recommendation to the board would be on the very day that Stryker came to call. Accepting two boys at this point would put them one over their limit of one hundred students, but Will Thayer would be leaving next week for his apprenticeship at the telegraph company. So what was the problem?
Perhaps the problem was with Stryker himself, thought Bradley. Stryker had been a visiting minister on Sunday mornings since before Bradley’s tenure, and in comparison with the other visiting ministers, he struck Bradley as . . . what? Disingenuous? That was too strong a word. But maybe not as . . . holy as one might expect. Something about his demeanor was just a little more secular than seemed proper for his position. And yet Bradley really had no choice but to welcome him into both the chapel and the office. Stryker had a wealthy congregation, several members of which were substantial donors to the Farm School.
Bradley pushed his meeting with Stryker from his mind, as it seemed a puzzle for which he could find no answer. As was his habit when he was unsettled, he turned his mind to the thing of which he was sure: the boys at the school. The boys were all. They were why he rose in the morning, were usually the last thing he thought of at night. He felt enormous responsibility for the whole island, as if God himself had entrusted a small nation to his care. He felt humbled by the enormity of the task, and in his prayers at night, when he and Mary knelt together beside their bed, he always asked God to guide him in raising these one hundred young men.
But as with most things in life, God had not given Bradley the most detailed road map. Of all the things for which he was responsible—what the boys would learn in school, what they would eat, how much time they would spend working, sleeping, playing, praying—the one that weighed most heavily on him was the question of which boys would be included in the one hundred on the island. Reading the current literature only served to confuse him more. Was Francis Galton correct with his theory of eugenics, that the elements in the blood predetermine one’s character? Or did Charles Loring Brace have the right answer—bringing children out of the city, transporting them on orphan trains to faraway farms so that their characters could be righted by their environment? Everything seemed to hang in the balance. If he believed Galton, he would spend more and more time screening applicants and their parents, looking to exclude those whose heredity would thwart any attempt to produce an upstanding citizen. If he believed Brace, he would simply accept the most needy, perhaps even those who had begun their descent into sin and could benefit most by being set on the path to righteousness.
As the scientific debate raged on, the board was clear in its overall position: acceptable applicants were found among the worthy poor, not the vicious poor. Board members universally agreed that the Farm School’s ability to freely select its population was critical to its success. Indeed, at the State Primary School, Bradley had seen at close range how a degenerate youth could poison the ranks. Soon after Bradley first arrived there, a boy named Johnny McFarland slithered into the population and immediately started exerting his influence on his fellow students. A rumor started and persisted that Johnny had spent some formative years in New York’s Five Points neighborhood. Theft among the boys rose precipitously, grades dropped, punishments increased. It was as if Johnny were a vector for delinquent behavior, culminating in a fire set in one of the classrooms which, fortunately, was extinguished before it could spread. He and another boy, Paul Harkins, a boy who had never before been in serious trouble in his three years at the school, were found to be responsible for the fire and were sent to Westboro. Bradley had heard nothing about them after that. But it troubled him now. Had Johnny been doomed to become a criminal because of what his blood contained? Or had his experiences in Five Points, if that rumor were even true, transformed an innocent child into a moral deviant? And what of his partner in crime, Paul? Was he fated to eventually become vicious, or was it only his exposure to Johnny that had infected him?
One thing was clear: Regardless of why boys like Johnny turned out the way they did, to mix them into a population of virtuous boys was to risk, maybe even guarantee, contamination. Public reformatory institutions in Massachusetts had failed again and again in decades past, and they were failing now for this very reason. The Farm School, meanwhile, had prospered, a model of efficiency and control since 1832, primarily because they could afford to pick and choose who would attend. The mantle of responsibility weighed heavily on Bradley. He sometimes felt he was one applicant away from bringing down the school like a house of cards. When that burden felt too great, he had to remind himself: His contract stated that he could personally expel any boy at any time with only a rudimentary explanation to the board, and even that could be given after the boy’s departure. So far, he had not had occasion to do this, but he was ever vigilant in examining the ranks for trouble, as if looking for the first signs of cholera or smallpox.
Outside his window, the boys meandered up the hill with Mr. Fielding, the groundskeeper who had brought them across on the steamer. Bradley was irritated to see Fielding pointing to all the buildings that were visible from their path—the boat houses, the small corn house with its upslanted sidewalls, the stock barn, the storage barn. He had spoken to Fielding about this before. The new boys were generally too stunned to take much in, and Bradley had requested that they always be brought to his office posthaste. But Fielding still could not resist giving a tour on the way, his words flowing around the boys and off into the air without leaving any impression.
Just then, Bradley heard a squeal of delight from down the hallway, immediately followed by a shushing. He checked his pocket watch—must be Henry’s nap time. He resisted the impulse to walk down the hallway just to see his little face, the face that could now smile back a drooling, one-toothed smile. Mary would not tolerate Bradley throwing him in the air or tickling his round belly before naptime, insisting it took twice as long to get him down when his father did such things.
Henry would have been charming enough to capture Bradley’s heart no matter when he was born, but he brought special joy to his father because his birth seemed an omen confirming their decision to come to the island. Bradley and Mary had been married for several years when the Farm School offered him this job, and during those years, they had both been somewhat surprised that Mary had not conceived. To Bradley this seemed all wrong—how could two people who were so committed to the education of children not be able to have children of their own? Try as he might, he could not believe that this would be God’s plan for them. It was only weeks after they arrived at the school that Mary found she was with child. Though Henry was obviously conceived on the mainland, in Bradley’s mind, it was God’s way of telling him that this school, this island, was where he was meant to be.
That Henry was a boy only further strengthened Bradley’s belief that God was confirming his choice. How would he have raised a girl on an island of one hundred adolescent boys?
Fielding had finally made his way to the building with the two new boys; Bradley could hear them entering through the main door on the floor below. He closed his scrapbook and stored it in the bottom drawer of his desk, then took a deep breath to push away his irritation at Fielding for taking so long—he had delayed a trip into Boston so that he could meet with these boys when they first arrived. But he needed to put that behind him now because this meeting was critical to getting these two boys off on the right foot.
As he heard the three sets of feet creak up the staircase, he willed himself to conjure up an image of the life these brothers had left behind less than an hour ago. He didn’t need to review their file to remember their sad and familiar story: mother recently dead of an unspecified fever, father unknown to his sons, penniless. Before the boys could even get used to a world in which their mother no longer walked and breathed, they had left the only city they had ever known and found themselves in a place that, while a mere mile away, might as well be in the Dakota Territory for all the resemblance it bore to the West End.
Across this desk he had seen the dirty faces of more than a dozen boys during their first hour on the island, and not one of them looked like he fully understood what was going on. And yet Bradley looked forward to these meetings with a feeling that, before coming to the island, he had only experienced kneeling in a pew. It was the feeling of a new beginning, the first day of a new life. This wave of feeling had come over him at an almost painful level when he first held Henry in his arms and smelled his infant head, a sensation so intense that he had to close his eyes until it receded. All his introductory meetings with new boys since Henry’s birth had brought back an unconscious scrap of memory from that day, and sometimes Bradley thought he could smell Henry’s sweet baby scent while he was lecturing them, though more often, the smell of the boys themselves would dominate the room.
A knock at his door brought Bradley back to the present. Here he’d been reminiscing about his baby boy and had not quite finished his mental preparation for this meeting. Well, there was no help for it now. He smoothed his vest down, straightened the papers on his desk, and bid Fielding to enter with the new boys.