by B. A. Berube
indulgence. It was Dad’s treat. It was his day for White Owl Cigars. It was his evening to
waste himself on cheap beer or wine and, once drunk, to weep about his pitiful lot. We
accorded him no sympathy. We just let him sink in his brew. Inebriation was his opportunity
to force lust and violence on Mom—or that’s what we now believe occurred.
Yet, for all Dad’s penury and so much of his selfishness that we flaunted about him, he
often did scrape up sufficient means to spring twenty cents for Saturday’s movie fare for each
of us seven. After the movies, hamburgers and Nehi root beer or orange sodee awaited us at
home. Lionel was almost never among our fold. Add to Dad’s seeming generosity five cents for one packet of Necco multi-flavored wafers that seven of us would take to the show. We
called them shows, not movies, a throwback to days earlier than ours when movies were called
picture shows. Our absolute favorite theatre was the Strand on Main Street in Lewiston.
That’s where we could count on a monster feature—the volley of Frankenstein, Godzilla,
Dracula, the Blob, and werewolf shows. Nearby was the Empire Theatre that seemed to run
mostly romance movies—we would have none of that. There was also the Ritz on Maple
Street that was the Strand’s competition for our business. Ditto for the Priscilla theatre, a
short walk over the bridge to Auburn. At two feature monster shows, two or three cartoons,
trailers, and dull newsreels, it was a supremely good buy.
Lewiston’s Former Ritz Theatre Lewiston’s Former Empire Theatre
We sometimes remained in the theatre to see at least one of the features a second time; the
theatre management never objected. We also arrived at the theatre a bit early so that we could
discover more in the way of refreshments than the Necco wafers afforded us. We pranced
among the rows of seats looking for lost candies and uncrushed popcorn on the sticky floor.
There was plenty to go around, and it was an added sumptuous extravagance to our family’s
only pleasure. Indeed, we had defined wealth. Yes, it was sometimes sweet.
There may not have been an Easter bunny to grace our home, but we did have a few candies in an Easter basket, gratis brother Lionel’s stealth and uncelebrated generosity. The
basket consistently consisted of candies such as colored marshmallow eggs, yellow
marshmallow chicks (peeps), and assorted jellybeans. That was sufficient cause to celebrate
on returning from the Easter High Mass celebration at church.
Though the average Sunday noon meal at home was as well rounded a meal as we
would ever get, there were actually three other occasions when good food befell us: Easter,
Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The local Elks or Salvation Army could be depended upon
without Dad’s asking. The food basket from these charities consisted of the requisite turkey
(ham for the Easter dinner), many vegetables, stuffing, potatoes, bread, celery sticks with
cream cheese, pie, nuts, and real milk, plus a box of chocolates. One year, however, there was
no Thanksgiving delivery. Nothing. Zip. We were despondently discouraged. Later in the
day, by an event that only a nun would describe as a miracle, a charity showed up with a
sumptuously filled food basket. Thanksgiving had been saved.
The paucity of resources notwithstanding, there was for us the Yuletide season of
seeming wealth. Our apartments always sported a real Christmas tree every year, no matter
what. No family member seems to know where or how we acquired the tree. There were, of
course, no gifts of any consequence under the tree. It was not the gifts we sought; it was the
tempo of the time. One gift, such as an alarm clock, would be Dad’s sole gift for all of us to
share. Fair enough. We valued that overture. Sometimes our spinster Aunt Cécile, a
secretary at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., would mail our family a box of gifts so that
each of us could count on one personal gift each Christmas. We cherished our tree—a real fir—that was thoroughly if not gaudily decorated,
replete with lights and balls of many colors and sizes. That’s what consumed our pleasure. No
need to worry about matching sets of anything, since anything was fair game for the tree. Best
of all were the bubbling lights and the generous distribution of aluminum tin foiled icicles
throughout the tree. I cannot recall how we were able to afford the icicles every year at a
nickel a box, but I suppose Dad found the money for it somewhere. He was also able to bring
home all the finger foods left from his shoe factory co-workers’ Christmas party each year.
Given how frigid our apartment was, we avoided sneezing on our tree in order to manufacture
icicles. Yuk—I know.
The year of Mom’s death made for a cheerless Christmas indeed. Not only was Mom
no longer with us, but also Dad served as the Yuletide Scrooge, the Grinch. As a major
snowstorm struck Lewiston a few days before Christmas, sisters Flora, Florence and Connie
sought a way to get home from the Marcotte Home orphanage for the holidays. No
transportation was available. Desperate to be with all of us, they decided to walk in the hoary
tempest the distance of two or three miles to our Maple Street apartment, carting along a few
bagged necessities. And what a surprise it was for Dad to witness their eventual arrival—
frozen to be sure, but their spirits warmed at the certainty that they had made it safely home
for Christmas to be with family. Not so fast. Dad did not approve of their coming home, and
he clearly did not feel that he needed the whole family at home this year. He was quick to
command them to leave, to return to the Marcotte Home. Not even Cruella could ever have
exercised so great a vindictiveness upon her children and to have been immune to the gross distress his children long endured from that rejection.
Except for the Christmas chasm of 1958, the year Mom passed on, our spirits had
runneth over throughout our household. We found the yuletide cheer everywhere. Yet, the
big one, the one stop for Christmas entertainment was Lewiston’s Salvation Army hall. The
auditorium was always beautifully decorated, replete with the Christmas spirit. The seven of
us showed up—no parents, no big brother, Lionel. The Salvation Army’s focus was on all the
needy kids: providing them with entertainment, lots of candy, and a gift for everyone there.
Sometimes we were able to choose among the donated simple gifts, like puzzles, small table
games, little toys. No questions asked. It was the sole gift any of us ever received for
Christmas during our childhood years. The red wagon we utilized for hauling our bottles and
newspapers and even furniture for our moves was, yes —courtesy of the Salvation Army.
Indeed, the Salvation Army continues to be our family’s preferred charitable organization. If
only we could have given others gifts.
The mother of all Roman Catholic Franco-American observances was Nöel/Christmas.
La joie de vivre peaked with the celebrations of Christmas at St. Louis Home as well as
L’Hospice Marcotte. Christmas was the year’s only holiday of note. For the Marcotte Home,
Christmas was an event for the nuns’ pleasure, where the girls’ Christmas cheer was far less
visible. The nuns partied; the girls did not. Old folks at the adjacent nursing home received
the candies. Our sisters as well as Bobby and I enjoyed elevated spirits for the co
uple of
weeks anticipating our homebound Christmases. Unlike the nuns at the Marcotte Home, St.
Louis Home’s nuns splashed their seemingly munificent and generous Catholic spirit throughout the Yuletide season. Most, but not all, of the revelry and joy was to honor the
birth of Christ. Yes, there were Christmas parties designed for the underprivileged, the
destitute, and those under the care of the Sisters of Charity. It was Christmas for us, too. No
time for melancholy. Not at Christmas. Even the nuns were happy at Christmas—not because
they smiled or laughed, but because they had a mission that seemed right to those of us at this
residential center against our will. They had a Christmas plan for us. That plan started in
early December. Situated in our glossy hardwood floored auditorium at St. Louis Home, the
nuns placed the life-sized manger of baby Jesus surrounded by a collection of real Maine
balsam fir trees, smothered with aluminum foiled icicles—loads of them. A silver painted and
glittered drop cloth covered the top of the manger and draped all the way down a series of
fake steps suffused with fake snow leading to figurines of Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the
Three Wise Men plus animals adorning the hay filled crèche. Not to forget the lighted Angel
Gabriel atop the manger and always a twinkling star nearby. I suppose this white cloth turned
silver was meant to represent the mountainside where the original manger was believed to
have been situated. Not quite a credible setting for the Middle Eastern town of Jerusalem, but
then no one was looking for authenticity.
With inspiration like this, I always felt compelled to create a crèche (manger) for the
occasion while at St. Louis Home. A bit more modest, perhaps, it was a diorama of baby
Jesus in the manger. I used a shoebox and cutouts from Christmas cards to paste together my
nativity scene. Add a little paper star on top, place a bit of grass about the base and voilà—a
manger. It was my kiss-ass gift to Soeur Boulé—little good that it ever achieved. The chapel at St. Louis Home, too, displayed a more tasteful crèche with modest
looking additional crèches set in our classrooms and playroom. The dining room sported a
cardboard fireplace with more lights and decorations. Ditto for the fake fireplace at the
Marcotte Home. The nuns overlooked no object in sight that could hold some sort of
ornamentation. Every light, every window, doorway, walls in the auditorium, dining room,
and reception area were decorated with aluminum icicles, garlands, colored lights and balls,
stickers—anything Christmas. These were ornate if not tawdry garish garnishings.
Christmas busted out here as well as at the Marcotte Home.
In that auditorium, a well-planned Christmas party would occur later that month.
There would be music, candies, and gifts. Sometimes, even used gifts were sort of out of
order for us. Lionel, for example, recalls receiving a high-ticket chemistry set. Bobby and I
recall carefully unwrapping the better gifts so we could re-gift them to take home to our
siblings—a tradition that even former First Lady Nancy Reagan embraced to save money, as
she recycled to friends and dignitaries White House gifts she and the President received.
Given her wealth, I would term her practice cheaply disingenuous; ours was nobly heartfelt.
There were games galore at the annual St. Louis Christmas soirée. Strangers we never
saw would attend; they might smile at us as we played the games and enjoyed a spirit that we
knew was temporary, yet worth exploiting. No reprimands. No punishments. Even Soeur
Boulé was irrelevant.
Some of us were able to leave the orphanages to attend yet more Christmas jamborees
hosted by local charities. The AFLCIO’s local unions hosted several parties for poor kids. Charitable groups caroled before the girls at L’Hospice Marcotte. My sisters were mostly
embarrassed at all the pity inspiring the do-goodism of the visitors. That was not their idea of
Christmas generosity. At St. Louis Home it was sometimes us who performed through
singing or demonstrating choreographed movements for those charitable organizations. It
seemed worth it. For our circus act, we received candies and other sweets. I didn’t notice
their compassion over our family’s misfortune.
The foremost Christmas celebration before we could return from St. Louis Home to
our family in Lewiston, however, was the convent’s Christmas trip to Portland for all of us at
the orphanage. The nuns (or some other charity) arranged for a bus to take us to Portland’s
State Theatre, site of the city’s annual Christmas party for needy children. This event
included a community troupe that featured a comedian and “Spumoni, the Ice Cream Man”
who extolled good humour. His material was well tailored to kids, a chanteurwho would lead
us in Christmas carols, and a children’s movie. For Christmas, the production was surely
made to order for us and no one else. On departing from the movie house, we each received a
large grab bag of assorted goodies—an apple, a banana, an orange, candy bars, soda, cookies,
popcorn, and some small toys. It was a day of jubilation, lots of happiness. ( I cannot summon
up a single rueful Yuletide vibe. No one ever said, “ Va t’en” or “ Sacre-toiton camps.”(“Get
out” or its stronger variant). No one, but no one has ever replicated the Grey Nuns’ skill and
sincerity in kindling a Christmas spirit so powerfully jubilant and magical. Said, Anne Frank,
“Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” On the twelfth month of
each year, that sentiment proved true to my experience at St. Louis Home... bleak times
Most of us fossils of institutions such as St. Louis Home (or L’Hospice Marcotte for
the girls) could invoke a timed exercise of word association at the mere mention of their
names. To that end, our lexis might present itself in rapid fire such as: obedience, authority,
intolerance, prayer, rules, French, anguish, punishment, routine, boredom, fear, inflexibility,
work, negativism, subservience, obsequiousness, silence, sadness, loneliness, and the greatest
of them all—abandonment. The grey nuns at both nunneries accepted their cloistered
environment that a convent such as St. Louis or the Marcotte Home afforded them as part of a
fulfillment of their sacred vows to God. Each having their own chapel on site, little kids to
oversee, and lots of opportunities for work and prayer must have made the environs an
absolute experience of their paradise on earth . For us young lads this was an indefinable and
inexplicable alternative to life they otherwise deserved with presumably loving parents and
siblings. Such institutions were solely a venue defined by agony with few redeeming features.
Yes, St. Louis Home and L’Hospice Marcotte were sites forlorn. No nun ever hugged
us. They expressed no humor and engendered no laughter. There were no counselors—no one
to hear, to understand our seclusion from a world we knew little about. My childhood friend
at St. Louis, Peter at age eight, was my outlet, a companion to me, a seven-year old
confidante—one who seemed to soften the blow of that loneliness. I suspect I did the same
for him.
Our orphanages were places where almost no one knew our names. I shuddered at being belittled with the French label of guinille nillou - vieux pépère (ragged hobo of a
; grandpa) that the nuns so often called me whenever they didn’t call me by my assigned
number, and because my gait appeared to be like that of an old codger. At either convent,
one’s name was rarely uttered; only an assigned number served as an identity. We were
relentlessly identified by our respective numbers—rarely if ever by our family names. When I
asked Florence if she could remember her number at L’Hospice Marcotte, she quipped with
this rejoinder, “They used my number way more than my name; of course, I remember my
number. It was 72.” A common address shouted out would be, “Va t’en numero soixante
douze!” (Get out, number 72!”). To complete our assigned extra labor well would earn a girl
plenary recognition from the nuns at L’Hospice Marcotte, using their surname, rather than
their inmate number. Our labor was God’s work and His reward. Bizarre but true, at St.
Louis Home, Bobby had the identical number that was Florence’s at the Marcotte Home: 72;
Peter was Number 79; Lionel was Number 9. I was Number 20; Mary Ann was Number 5;
Flora was Number 5; Connie was Number 50. Though I have a lapsed memory of telephone
numbers over the years, I, as with my siblings, cannot fail to remember my two-digit ID from
St. Louis.
Obedience to the rules of authority and subservience to the nuns was the fear factor
that defined our relationship with their tormenting cabals of the cloth, no matter the venue or
situation. To have done otherwise, even to question their intent, their rationale, their judgment
would yield grave consequences. Afflicting the comfortable, especially the least socio
economically fortunate, was the unsaid practice. Many incidents with Soeur Boulé illustrate that relationship in the preceding chapters of this volume. Peter recalls how he and
his brothers recall that relationship, though he cannot recall our friendship of a half-century
ago. Peter’s brother Jon tested these themes often, and he was routinely reminded that the
devil’s work he was pursuing would cost him dearly. No matter. Jon frequently ran away.
Not Peter. Not me. Like mine, his was a submissive demeanor.
Peter’s brother Jon was okay when left to his own devices, when not threatened. In