Moorehead

Moorehead is the name Eileen Dunlop gives to the juvenile correctional facility where she works in late-1964. Though formally a prison for teenage boys, its residents include children as young as nine and a half, and Eileen regards the place as a prison for children. The institution’s imposing, repurposed buildings and tightly controlled routines set the terms of her daily work: she processes records, manages visits, and maintains an outward composure amid a system that treats discipline as a means of reform.

Identity and Setting

Eileen is twenty-four and earns fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at Moorehead. She had begun working there at twenty-one. The institution’s name is not its original one: she says she will call it Moorehead after a terrible landlord she encounters years later. That retrospective naming makes the facility legible as an institution in her account while also reflecting the distance between the younger worker inside it and the older narrator describing it.

The facility stands near the coast, beyond a fenced gravel area and rolling sand dunes. From a distance, Eileen thinks its gray stone exterior could resemble a wealthy person’s summer home. Carved stone details and the surrounding landscape suggest a place suited to quiet or contemplation, but the boys’ confinement overturns that impression. Inside, corridors lead among offices, recreational and study areas, a chapel, a dining hall, and sleeping quarters. The institutional order extends into the residential spaces: painted floor lines indicate where boys should stand for announcements, kneel for prayer, and walk toward the showers and cafeteria.

A Building Reused for Institutions

Eileen recalls that the building was more than a century old and had passed through a series of uses. According to the historical display she remembers in the front corridor, it began as a temperance boardinghouse for seamen, was later expanded into a military hospital, and was subsequently used as a boarding school. She thinks it may have served as an orphanage, a rehabilitation hospital for veterans, and a school for boys before becoming a juvenile prison roughly twenty years before she arrived.

She also remembers traces of a more landscaped exterior: a monument to Emerson, a circular drive, and a fountain with an English garden. These former features sharpen the contrast between the site’s changing public purposes and its later confinement regime. The grounds can appear peaceful from outside, while the facility’s history and present use make it a place of institutional supervision. Eileen even imagines that, had she been born a boy, she might have ended up there herself.

Rules, Discipline, and the Boys’ Daily Lives

Boys remain at Moorehead until their sentences end or they turn eighteen. The warden threatens to transfer larger or troublesome boys to an adult men’s prison, using the prospect of harsher confinement as leverage. The residents come from across the region, and their files contain reports, confessions, and accounts of offenses. Eileen does not say that she speaks with the boys; instead, she learns about them by reading their files. Her descriptions distinguish boys from rough or unstable circumstances from those who appear more domestically settled, but she also recognizes that all are living under the same restrictive system.

The rules reach into ordinary conduct. Boys are forbidden to dance, sing, speak loudly, listen to music, gesture freely, or lie down without permission. Eileen describes many as medicated and placed on strict diets under the care of Dr. Frye. Correctional officers enforce the regime physically, while the warden presents punishment as a route to moral change. When a boy is disciplined, he may be assigned extra kitchen work and confined in an old meat locker called the cave. There, he is largely kept apart from the rest of the institution and allowed out only for limited purposes, including washing dishes. The room’s conversion from a working part of the kitchen into a punishment space makes the building itself an instrument of control.

Eileen’s office duties connect her directly to this system without giving her authority over its major decisions. She maintains a cabinet of files for each inmate and processes paperwork when a new boy arrives. The records let her observe the boys as cases, but her account also stresses their varied circumstances and ordinary human qualities. Moorehead’s paperwork and routines organize their lives while keeping the secretary who handles them at a distance from them.

Visitation and Managed Emotion

Visitation is controlled by restrictive procedures. Only one visit can take place at a time, so families wait in a hallway on molded orange plastic chairs. Eileen remembers mothers waiting, crying, and worrying while she asks them to sign a ledger. She gives some visitors informal questionnaires to occupy them, presenting the forms as state business even though she has devised them herself. The answers are often earnest, and the exercise briefly gives the waiting women a task in a setting where they have little control.

Visits last seven minutes, and parents are not allowed to give children presents or other items. Eileen repeats a security explanation to a mother whose son wants comfort, although she understands that the rule is not really about protecting the boys from the particular object being withheld. She believes the prohibition is meant to keep them desperate and to encourage remorse. In the warden’s doctrine, remorse makes a boy more pliable and therefore more open to transformation. Eileen follows the procedures despite doubting the institution’s moral claims, and she recognizes that her own fear of being challenged helps sustain her obedience.

The emotional demands of this work are visible in Eileen’s self-presentation. She practices a composed expression from plaster death masks and wears what she calls a death mask at work, suppressing the distress she feels around the facility. She has learned to smile, speak politely, and enforce rules while concealing her private reactions. Her routine makes emotional control part of the job: the outwardly neutral secretary helps keep a system of waiting, denial, and discipline running smoothly.

Education, Christmas, and Institutional Contradictions

Moorehead appoints Rebecca Saint John as its first director of education, a position funded by a government donation. Dr. Bradley Morris, a psychiatrist recommended by Dr. Frye, is introduced alongside her. Eileen initially doubts that teaching can succeed when the boys are struggling under the conditions of confinement and views the appointment as poorly matched to their daily reality.

Rebecca later describes the educational assignment as a demand for one blanket curriculum for boys of different ages and abilities. She argues that the residents have minds and that many are already literate, and she wants them to encounter subjects including literature, history, philosophy, and the sciences. Her criticism places the possibility of education against the warden’s punitive approach, which she sees as reducing the boys to objects of management. The disagreement reveals a conflict within Moorehead over whether its residents are children capable of learning or subjects to be controlled.

The Christmas activities expose a similar contradiction. Volunteers decorate the halls with religious and holiday pictures, while Dr. Frye encourages singing and the exchange of cards. Eileen recalls that singing often brings embarrassment and conflict rather than fellowship, and that staff confiscate some cards and circulate them among themselves before filing them. During a performance, the boys sit slumped in the chapel as Eileen operates the spotlight from a stool at the back. The ceremony supplies the appearance of a shared holiday observance, but its staged cheer sits uneasily beside the coercive routines that define the boys’ lives.

Narrative Significance and Departure

Moorehead is the principal workplace through which Eileen observes institutional authority at close range. It also brings her into contact with Rebecca and with Leonard Polk, whose file and confinement become part of the story’s larger developments. The facility’s rules and records shape what Eileen sees, while her retrospective narration distinguishes her younger self’s obedience and misreadings from her later judgment of the institution.

Eileen eventually leaves Moorehead for the last time without recognizing that it is her final day there. She leaves belongings in her locker and desk, and imagines that little fuss will be made when she stops appearing for work. The departure closes her connection to the facility without offering a reform or resolution within its walls. Moorehead remains in her account as a place where children are subjected to severe restrictions, where care and punishment are entangled, and where the routine performance of composure can make an abusive system appear ordinary.