My Dad Got Me to a Nunnery Read online

  My Dad Got Me to a Nunnery.

  Tet Dates

  Tiger 2010 February 14

  Cat 2011 February 3

  Dragon 2012 January 23

  Snake 2013 February 10

  Horse 2014 January 31

  Goat 2015 February 19

  Monkey 2016 February 8

  Cinderfella’s Fiery Tales

  of Bondage and Desertion

  B. A. Bérubé

  2012 by B.A. Bérubé

  All rights are reserved, including the right to reproduce this volume or portions therof in any form whatsoever.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Title ID: 3876755

  ISBN-13 978-14-77459942

  ISBN-10 1477459944 Credits for photographs appear in the chapters where displayed.

  For this Volume: A Heritage Appropriately Worth Appropriating, Sequenced by Age

  Mom Dad

  Lionel Mary Ann

  Francis (Bob) Constance (Connie)

  Walter, Jr. Barney

  Flora Florence

  Mai Thuy

  Kyra Chantal

  Zach Khiana

  Table of Contents

  Preface i

  Why? 1

  Navigating Our “Home” 13

  Of Catholicism, Sins, and Prayers 26

  Grey Nuns 53

  Our Little Canada 70

  Boulé the Bully 86

  Eleven Months Without Christmas 109

  Bleak Times 130

  Insouciance 145

  The Quest Toward Resilience 164

  Deliverance 180 Preface

  Hop in . Let’s take a reflective Maine joy ride, not quite joyful—yet a vicariously

  untroubled ride all the same. As I mused about three authors with tremendous bragging rights

  for having grown up on the breadline, I think James Baldwin, Frank McCourt, and Horatio

  Alger. All three: rags to riches. Baldwin, a highly succesful black, gay, atheist author

  quipped, “ If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you

  can. go.” As a teenager, Baldwin knew well the sometimes harsh streets of Harlem. His

  early adulthood brought him to serve in the Korean war during the fifties. Frank McCourt, left

  his Irish homeland for New York—penniless, a pauper supported by his drunken father who

  drank his factory earnings, leaving his children to starve. Upon his departure from the U.K,

  he became a school teacher in the U.S ., and he became a civil rights activist after having

  taught English in six New York schools. No longer a pauper, McCourt later published two

  best sellers, plus a movie. Horatio Alger, whose father was a flat broke minister, grew up

  determined to make his way to the middle class. Alger the younger was a closet gay squire

  whose resolve during his ragged youth was to enter Harvard and become a popular writer.

  Done. He was best known for his serial book, Ragged Dick.”— seems a curious title for a

  closet gay author of the nineteenth century. I mention these three successful writers because

  they are worthy exemplars of life patterns similar to mine. For me, from 1952 to 1965 : what a

  ride ! Hey, Frank, Horatio, Jimmy, I need your inspiration from wherever you are..

  Once upon a life, I learned as an adult that, “…there’s no greater sorrow on earth

  i than the loss of one’s native land.” That’s a sentiment that harks back to four centuries before

  the advent of Jesus Christ., a truth coined by Euripedes, one of the world’s greatest classical

  tragedians. I would prefer that Euripedes wasn’t a tragedian—could be a bummer.

  Nevertheless, his precision is about as distant in time as one can project the cheerless theme

  of abandonment that I attempt to revive in this volume. No, these pages offer no tale of woe,

  nor a victim’s saga of repression and oppression, though these circumstances play out in this

  chronicling of the events of an eighteen-year journey. Mine was, as it were, an eminent

  sorrow. The sorrow was in the long, albeit temporary loss of family to homes that were not

  my family’s native habitat. The sorrow was that my parents disposed of my siblings and me

  when we reached school age. The sorrow was that we siblings failed to understand why our

  tenderly affectionate mother would abandon us. The sorrow was that both parents knowingly

  escorted our brood to bullpen-like institutions where we were decidedly unwelcome. The

  sorrow was in the consent of the Catholic Church to have us serve as drones for the nuns, and

  for their queen bee in particular. Much more about her later.

  Ours was a doting family of ten, ostensibly mired in hardship and adversity. There

  were benefits to being poor; we were the beneficiaries of faith-based charities and other non

  government organizations whose missions were to aid the poor and disenfranchised. Because

  we were Roman Catholics of Franco-American descent, our environment and behaviors were

  largely shaped by those cultural realities. As hyphenated Americans of the fifties, we were

  quasi-orphaned kids relegated in early childhood to a convent life. Hey, life just happens,

  and poverty sucks. We effortlessly got used to it.

  ii William Shakespeare’s Hamlet wasn’t the only guy famous for uttering the command

  to his subordinate, “Get thee to a nunnery!” My dad surely got me and six others of my

  family to a nunnery. Poor young Catholic boys of the fifties don’t typically call home a

  nunnery, though they did anoint it their inescapable convent. I did. My brother did. My

  sisters did, too. Their holy robes and prayers, however, failed to entice us to become ministers

  of the lord. Fifty years after our departure from these cloisters, the Catholic Church continues

  to house 800,000 women in nunneries—or more delicately put, “religious sanctuaries.”

  The orphanages/convents that my brothers and sisters were to endure for several years

  were situated in Scarborough and Lewiston, Maine— the former about sixty miles south of

  Lewiston and ten miles south of Portland, the latter about forty miles west of Portland. The

  behaviors of others that we witnessed at these cloistered institutions and those we directly

  experienced were genuinely gut-wrenching, exacerbated by our simple fishbowl presence

  among the nuns. Know that the themes and anecdotals presented in these pages are limited to

  those experienced by your narrator, his kin, and friends. That is to say, there remain scores of

  untold tales of others absent in this narrative who participated in similar struggles as well as

  rare but sometimes radiant celebrations.

  In this volume, I share those edifying influences: the peculiar dichotomy of bilingualism, the

  ethos of poverty, Catholicism, a convent existence despite our family unit, honor our shared

  but conflicting cultures of subservience and endurance.

  In these pages I apologize for little. Any order for summoning vengeance as justice

  the nuns of the Sisters of Charity, and an ambivalence about their expression of devotion to

  iii God, counterbalanced by their abhorrence of the work that was their calling. I struggle to

  upon those institutions has long passed. Besides, those perpetrators are dead. This is no

  ranting tale to haunt the deceased for their improprieties as was recorded
by the tell-all

  survivors such as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Horatio Alger, James Baldwin, and countless

  others like them. Yes, a word of caution: be kind to your children; else, one of them may

  write a book about you. That, however, is not my mission. Mine is to provide a context for

  viewing our past only as prologue rather than as a vacant vendetta.

  Though I acquaint the reader with our orphanage experiences under the diocesan

  bishop’s bloodsucking nuns, I attempt to reflect on those experiences as sometimes colorful

  tales, though many were indeed sordid events I would wish upon no one. If Anne Frank, a

  martyr of the Holocaust saw some good among the most wicked of her day, I could, too. Yes,

  I frequently smiled as I presented characters and episodes in this volume that have afforded

  periodic comic relief. Others depicted may be of more conventional interest. The most

  egregious characters I have portrayed here such as my Dad and Soeur Boulé in particular, do

  earn a measure of rare but tender recognition for demonstrating some selective level of

  humanity. Above all, this retrospective is not based on a true story. It is a true story. It is my

  unabridged, uncensored, and unsanitized narrative that I believe merits a uncompromising

  permanence of memory. Three words: distress resilience; and deliverance

  iv

  why?

  We needed a hand up—someone who might feed and clothe poor folk like us. Oh,

  yes, and obedience and prayer in a convent setting would make us grow up as fine Roman

  Catholics. The magic miracle? Enter the good nuns of New England with a respectable

  reputation as caregivers of poor, abandoned children. Indeed, our well-intended parents

  handed us cute little darlings over to the cloistered houses among the mother superiors

  harbored at Lewiston and Scarborough, Maine. It was a genesis of good intentions.

  The year was 1952. Here my brother Bobby and I were at St. Louis Home, a school

  for boys and a convent for the Grey Nuns. My brother Bobby had already been there for

  about two years, though I was unaware of it. Day one at St. Louis was an oddly memorable

  sunny mid-August afternoon. Indeed, there the facility was: two barn-red buildings with light

  yellow trim. Parading about the campus there must have been up to twenty of tan and blacked

  robed women occupying that complex along with a young chaplain. Two nuns lived in the

  orphanage building, separate from the convent where the other cloistered nuns resided. These

  two nuns were assigned to this building to oversee some eighty boys. That’s where the bus

  taken by Mom and me, her cute well-mannered five-year old son, stopped on that day, a half

  century ago.

  Mom must have been directed to meet with the nun in charge of the little boys. That’s

  what they called us—the little boys. About thirty of us, aged 5-7. There were the big boys on

  the other side of the campus. Fifty of them, aged 8-12. The nun in charge was Soeur St. Croix. She was called by her French name, which means Sister of the Holy Cross. She was a

  sweet lady who spoke very little English. She was an older, limited English proficient nun.

  She greeted us in some sort of very clean, large reception area. I guess Mom and she talked a

  bit, most likely about me. Of course, the reason for Mom’s encounter with Soeur St. Croix

  was unknown to me. I thought I was just there for a most uncommon treat—a ride from our

  home base in one of Maine’s more depraved and maligned cities: Lewiston. Destination:

  West Scarborough, a bucolic but bizarre setting an hour’s ride away from home.

  My recollection of the specifics of that warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in August

  remains acute. Mom’s and Soeur St. Croix’s mysterious conversation opener seemed to have

  ended abruptly. I was within listening distance of their encounter as I observed how Mom

  graciously asked the good sister to be excused, as she presumably needed to use the lavatory.

  Soeur St. Croix was happy to oblige. In doing so, she simply asked that I just wait a few

  moments for Mom’s return. And so I did. As directed, I was to await her return. I ambled

  directly to a tall, rugged swing set situated 75 yards from and parallel to U.S. Route One. I sat

  on the first of six swings—the far left one facing eastward. No one else joined me on the

  swing set. The other kids were amusing themselves on the monkey bars, the merry-go-round,

  or the seesaw among the seemingly delightful attractions the yard offered. Me, I simply

  swayed to and fro very slowly, head down, dangling my feet close to the ground. I waited.

  And waited, and waited, and waited, and waited. I fixed my eyes on this campus with limited

  fascination—remaining interested in Mom’s doings with the old nun. Finally, the anticipation

  ended as Soeur St. Croix emerged from the welcoming center, smiling at me, even comforting me. With eyes surely watering, and with an inchoate desire to regain my umbilical cord, I

  queried, “Where’s my Mom?” The good nun simply responded that soon supper would be

  ready, and I could join all the other kids. A fawning wee preschooler, I acceded to her

  command without question. . Mom’s surreptitious exit was my entry into a life of seclusion

  with nuns at their convent—a crucible which was to last the next seven years. A rite of

  passage like this did not appear befitting a five-year-old. Mom and Dad, in effect entreated

  me thus, “ Va t’en.”[“Get out.”], albeit with a deafening silence.

  Launched by that command, this was to be the commencement of my distressing

  experience as victim of “The big lie.” What made Mom’s act a capital mendacity is that this

  collaborative, devious plan originated with my submissive mom. Analyzing the reason for her

  behavior for all the years that followed was always a useless academic exercise. I could not,

  for the next seven years, forgive her for that thoughtless transgression against her son, this

  unsuspecting toddler. The subject never resurfaced between us; I never confronted her; she

  never apologized for awarding me the most memorably painful moment of my childhood—

  her underhanded exit. This was raw desertion committed in the spirit of maternal love; it was,

  nevertheless, abandonment.

  I later learned that when my oldest brother Lionel was ten, he was prepared for a short

  spell at St. Louis Home—very short! Mom and Dad assured him that this was to be a terrific

  school. Brother Bob, two years younger, accompanied him to this convent doubling as a

  school. On arrival Bob wept profusely while waiting for Mom’s presumed return from the

  lavatory. Yes, that’s the same bathroom tale I recalled. But for Bobby, he witnessed Mom’s boarding the bus to Lewiston just across the street from our playground. Lionel, as

  the older brother and model, had to demonstrate a strength and courage that was difficult for

  him to sustain in this environment, but he managed to contain the tears.

  Not only for my brothers but also for my sisters, lessons in abandonment and deceit

  were quickly learned—wounds that time alone could never heal. On day one at St. Joseph’s

  Orphanage also known as L’Hospice Marcotte, a girls’ orphanage in Lewiston similar to St.

  Louis Home, Mom dropped my sisters Flora and Florence off by simply directing them

  toward the swing sets. After several minutes, presumably visiting with the head nun, Mom

  was gone. The girls didn’t know they would be forc
ed to live there. The other girls in the

  playground left them with a churlish truth: “You’re here like the rest of us”. What more could

  my sisters do but to weep?

  Curiously, Mom wouldn’t surrender my oldest sister Mary Ann to the Marcotte

  Home. Mary Ann actually wanted to go there to accompany our little twin sisters Flora and

  Florence, not knowing what would await her once she enrolled. When she was ten years old,

  Mary Ann, indeed, would go to the Lewiston orphanage to join her sisters who had been there

  a few years already. Dad insisted on it. Mom was, curiously, opposed to it—for my sisters.

  They would take the little ones under their wing—these children of newcomers from

  the north—French-dominant Roman Catholic immigrants from the Canadian province of

  Québec. In the late 1800s, they abandoned their unfulfilling farms and their Canadian

  homeland, yearning to put bleak times past them and to build a more promising future for their

  families. They hoped that their misery would be replaced by bliss and economic contentment through the pursuit of hard factory labor here. They would need the Church to help them

  along that difficult path. Enter the ladies of the cloth—les Soeurs Grises (the Grey Nuns).

  Theirs was a religious order commonly known as Les Soeurs de la

  Charité (The Sisters of Charity) founded nearly three centuries ago by one

  of the Catholic church’s pantheon of heroines, the venerable Soeur

  Marguerite D’Youville. This lady, originator of the tan and black habit in The habit of Saint MarieMarguerite D’Youville, Founder of the Sisters of Charity, worn in the 1700’s was the same as that of her followers in the 1950’s.

  the 1700’s, came from the Canadian province of Québec (PQ) to

  perform God’s most praiseworthy work. She was a deeply holy

  woman. Many of these Soeurs Grises left PQ to the U.S. in 1878

  to continue that mission. A little bio on Soeur D’Youville may

  offer a measure of fairness in chronicling the Grey Nuns’ seminal contribution to the Lord’s