It was Brother Peter, who taught him math, and was always reminding him of his good fortune, who told him he’d been found in a garbage can. “Inside a trash bag, stuffed with eggshells and old lettuce and spoiled spaghetti—and you,” Brother Peter said. “In the alley behind the drugstore, you know the one,” even though he didn’t, as he rarely left the monastery.
Later, Brother Michael claimed this wasn’t even true. “You weren’t in the trash bin,” he told him. “You were next to the trash bin.” Yes, he conceded, there had been a trash bag, but he had been atop it, not in it, and at any rate, who knew what was in the trash bag itself, and who cared? More likely it was things thrown away from the pharmacy: cardboard and tissues and twist ties and packing chips. “You mustn’t believe everything Brother Peter says,” he reminded him, as he often did, along with: “You mustn’t indulge this tendency to self-mythologize,” as he said whenever he asked for details of how he’d come to live at the monastery. “You came, and you’re here now, and you should concentrate on your future, and not on the past.”
They had created the past for him. He was found naked, said Brother Peter (or in just a diaper, said Brother Michael), but either way, it was assumed he’d been left to, as they said, let nature have its way with him, because it was mid-April and still freezing, and a newborn couldn’t have survived for long in that weather. He must have been there for only a few minutes, however, because he was still almost warm when they found him, and the snow hadn’t yet filled the car’s tire tracks, nor the footprints (sneakers, probably a woman’s size eight) that led to the trash bin and then away from it. He was lucky they had found him (it was fate they had found him). Everything he had—his name, his birthday (itself an estimate), his shelter, his very life—was because of them. He should be grateful (they didn’t expect him to be grateful to them; they expected him to be grateful to God).
He never knew what they might answer and what they might not. A simple question (Had he been crying when they found him? Had there been a note? Had they looked for whoever had left him?) would be dismissed or unknown or unexplained, but there were declarative answers for the more complicated ones.
“The state couldn’t find anyone to take you.” (Brother Peter, again.) “And so we said we’d keep you here as a temporary measure, and then months turned into years and here you are. The end. Now finish these equations; you’re taking all day.”
But why couldn’t the state find anyone? Theory one (beloved of Brother Peter): There were simply too many unknowns—his ethnicity, his parentage, possible congenital health problems, and on and on. Where had he come from? Nobody knew. None of the local hospitals had recorded a recent live birth that matched his description. And that was worrisome to potential guardians. Theory two (Brother Michael’s): This was a poor town in a poor region in a poor state. No matter the public sympathy—and there had been sympathy, he wasn’t to forget that—it was quite another thing to add an extra child to one’s household, especially when one’s household was already so stretched. Theory three (Father Gabriel’s): He was meant to stay here. It had been God’s will. This was his home. And now he needed to stop asking questions.
Then there was a fourth theory, invoked by almost all of them when he misbehaved: He was bad, and had been bad from the beginning. “You must have done something very bad to be left behind like that,” Brother Peter used to tell him after he hit him with the board, rebuking him as he stood there, sobbing his apologies. “Maybe you cried so much they just couldn’t stand it any longer.” And he’d cry harder, fearing that Brother Peter was correct.
For all their interest in history, they were collectively irritated when he took interest in his own, as if he was persisting in a particularly tiresome hobby that he wasn’t outgrowing at a fast enough rate. Soon he learned not to ask, or at least not to ask directly, although he was always alert to stray pieces of information that he might learn in unlikely moments, from unlikely sources. With Brother Michael, he read Great Expectations, and managed to misdirect the brother into a long segue about what life for an orphan would be like in nineteenth-century London, a place as foreign to him as Pierre, just a hundred-some miles away. The lesson eventually became a lecture, as he knew it would, but from it he did learn that he, like Pip, would have been given to a relative if there were any to be identified or had. So there were none, clearly. He was alone.