All Saints is a Catholic boys’ home in Sioux City, Iowa, whose place in the story emerges through the separate histories of Calvin Evans, Avery Parker, and Madeline Zott. Calvin was sent there after the deaths of his adoptive parents and aunt; he experienced abuse by priests before growing large enough to stop it. The institution thus stands at the intersection of bereavement, religious authority, and a childhood shaped by separation. It is also where rowing entered Calvin’s life, eventually helping him reach Cambridge on a scholarship. Decades later, Madeline’s efforts to understand her father’s origins bring the home’s history into the open and connect it to Avery’s search for the son she had been told was dead.

Identity and Institutional Context

All Saints is identified as a Catholic boys’ home in Sioux City, Iowa. The available account gives no detailed description of its buildings or daily routine, but establishes the institution’s role in housing boys separated from their families. Calvin’s placement there followed the deaths of his adoptive parents and then his aunt. The sequence matters: the home was not simply a place he attended, but the destination of a child left without the relatives who had been raising him.

The institution is also situated within a wider network of Catholic charities and orphanages. Avery Parker later explained that her parents had funded homes for unwed mothers and orphanages, believing that this support made them benevolent. In her account, their allegiance to the Catholic Church nevertheless helped produce the separation that made Calvin an orphan and brought him to All Saints. The story therefore sets charitable provision beside the harm that could accompany the institutions and policies surrounding it. Funding a home did not undo the consequences of the system in which it operated.

Calvin’s Placement and Experience

Calvin reached All Saints after losing first his adoptive parents and then his aunt. The orphanage placement followed these deaths, making the institution a defining part of his childhood rather than a temporary detail in his biography. As an adult, he carried a lasting grievance associated with the man he believed to be his father. His diary and correspondence with Reverend Wakely later helped Elizabeth understand the depth and persistence of that resentment. Calvin’s childhood history, as Elizabeth recounted it to Roth, included abuse by priests at the boys’ home. He eventually became large enough to stop it, a change that marks a limit to the abuse described, not an erasure of what he had endured.

The home’s significance is conveyed partly through what Calvin’s later records preserve. His diary, found among the boxes Elizabeth and Miss Frask had taken, was written in a childish hand that could be difficult to decipher; Elizabeth nevertheless recognized the sorrow within it. The diary and letters do not make the home a fully described setting, but they disclose the lasting emotional consequences of Calvin’s early losses and institutional experience. All Saints becomes legible through the traces left by the child who lived there, and through the adult relationships that eventually allow others to interpret those traces.

Rowing and Calvin’s Education

All Saints was also where the boys learned to row. Avery explained that Calvin’s biological father had been an athlete and a rower, and that rowing at the home was a gesture in his honor. The practice therefore connected the boys’ institutional life to a story of biological ancestry that Calvin himself had not known. For Avery, it had been a memorial gesture; for Calvin, it became an activity with consequences beyond the home.

When Avery described the rowing, Elizabeth recognized its connection to Calvin’s later education. She recalled that he had earned a rowing scholarship to Cambridge. The route from the boys’ home to the university gives the rowing detail a particular weight: an activity introduced at All Saints in the name of a father Calvin had never known became part of the means by which he continued his education. The account does not suggest that rowing repaired the losses or abuse of his childhood. Instead, it establishes a specific and unexpected connection between the institution, the family history Calvin lacked, and the opportunity that shaped his adult life.

Rediscovery and Narrative Significance

All Saints re-enters the story through Madeline’s family-tree assignment. After learning that Wilson had funded the boys’ home, Madeline wrote to him with details about her father’s connection to it. She wanted to thank him and explain that the Parker Foundation belonged on her family tree. Her letter prompted further investigation: because adoptions were sealed, a private investigator used the information Madeline supplied to uncover the connection between Avery and Calvin. The home thus becomes a point of convergence between a child’s school assignment and an adult’s search for the son she believed she had lost.

Avery’s history explains why that discovery carries more than genealogical significance. As a pregnant seventeen-year-old, she had refused to sign the form surrendering her baby. The home for unwed mothers told her the baby had been stillborn, but a nurse contacted her ten years later and revealed that the child had been adopted. After his adoptive parents and aunt died, he was sent to All Saints. Avery then began searching for her son. She had funded his memorial before learning that he was alive, and later directed memorial funds toward science education and exercise. The revelations link institutional records, family separation, and belated recognition without making biological descent the only measure of family.

At the meeting where Avery explains her history, Elizabeth identifies the boys’ home in Sioux City as the place named in Calvin’s history. The disclosure helps Avery understand how rowing led Calvin to Cambridge; it also enables Elizabeth to connect the young man she remembers with the son Avery had sought. Madeline had already made room for Avery in her understanding of family: Elizabeth tells Avery that she, rather than Wilson, is on Madeline’s family tree. All Saints is therefore both a place of childhood loss and a crucial link in the later reconstruction of kinship. Its history shows how an institution can separate people, preserve traces of that separation, and unexpectedly become part of the route by which a family recognizes itself.