My Dad Got Me to a Nunnery
Page 17
occasional fling, her stay with Irene was indeed temporary. Mary Ann soon became the
perennial waitress, always in debt, who took to smoking at sixteen and to drinking shortly
thereafter usually with the ubiquitous variety of boyfriends she succeeded in attracting. She
was, after all, the quintessence of pulchritude. Junior and Bob were the adventuresome ones
staying at home. After only a few months of Dad’s attempts at pawning off his children to
others, we four brothers and Mary Ann managed to stay right there, at the Maple Street
apartment, no matter how it may have angered Dad to have us there. My brothers and Mary
Ann had their routines pretty well set. I was a sideliner. I only came along with them when
invited. Mostly, my older siblings were good to me.
Dad came home only on weekends to pay bills and guesstimate the amount of food we
would need for the week. Each Saturday afternoon, we would all accompany Dad to the Mom
and Pop store in the neighborhood to purchase victuals for the week. We would cart home
grocery bags containing two loaves of bread, Spam, deviled meat, possibly a pound of each— hamburg with rolls, a large Hires root beer for us kids (Saturday night supper), canned cheese
macaroni, spaghetti with canned sauce, a box of laundry soap (We would wash everything by
hand, then hang them out to dry outdoors, regardless of the weather.), maybe one box of
cereal (We might sneak a box in that had a free toy inside.), a quart of milk (no more than
that), a meat to roast (pork or chicken) for Dad on Sunday, and a dozen eggs (for Dad and us
on Sunday morning), and probably nothing else except—oops, almost forgot: two or three
quarts of Narragansett beer for Dad’s solo Saturday evening binge and, if he were in a good
mood and he had enough money he would spring for a movie for us. In this way, he could
drink alone while we were at the movie house, uninterrupted by our shenanigans. When we
returned home in the early evening after our movie, we invariably found him weeping. He
would attempt to convince us that it was we who killed Mom—too many kids, too much
noise. To be fair to him, Dad may have uttered these mean-spirited comments recalling that
we did fool with Mom’s eyes and giggled during the wake as she lie in her grey cloth-covered
pine coffin. We must have been incorrigible even in our deepest grief for our vanished
mother.
Dad repeatedly threatened to “break up the family”— his words. Indeed, he warned us
that when we turned sixteen, we could no longer attend school. After all, we owed him a great
debt for raising us, absent our late Mom. Furthermore, we would have to work at the textile
mills for our subsistence and to support him with local factory wages. That was his
aspirations vision. Besides, “College is for fairies,” he often quipped. Any ambition toward
higher learning for any of us was as remote an idea as a hippopotamus marrying a polliwog. Knowing no other alternative, toiling in a factory seemed a fair plan to me. I could hardly wait
until I could make money nearly four years hence. Yeah, I must have had aspirations, by
golly.
None of us made any local friends, except maybe that Mary Ann and Bob were more
gregarious than the twins and I were. Having dropped out of school shortly after Mom’s
death, Mary Ann had accumulated a few friends—sort of. She chased many post-adolescent
guys. I was her look-out guy for a dime—to check to see if Lionel was coming, as Mary Ann
had invited a boy friend or two to join her at our Maple Street apartment. I didn’t know why it
was so private—only that Lionel disapproved of her bawdy behavior and that she was scared
of her big brother like the rest of us.
I also attended to other errands that Mary Ann assigned to me. One was to charge
cigarettes to her account at the store across the street. Credit cards did not exist back then.
She would throw in some ice cream with that—flavor of the month. That would net me
another dime, plus a taste of the ice cream. When she received her paycheck, she invited me
to join her as she shopped, exhausting most if not all of her earnings. She even promised me a
lunch in a local restaurant. Wow! That meant, of course, a hot dog and a coke. Sometimes, a
dime was added to that because Mary Ann loved me. On rarer occasions, she bought us hot
pizza pie, as it was called then. No one could ever beat pizza pies of the sixties in the
Lewiston family-owned stores. There were no Pizza Huts, Dominoes or any other pizza
chains at that time.
Although I made no new friends, I did keep up with Peter for a time, both at St. Louis
Home and later at his Westbrook home. Since neither of us had transportation to visit each other or had telephones, that friendship would inevitably dissolve over time., The Gamache
family, whose cognitively disabled son I tended to at St. Louis Home, would drive by our
apartment on certain weekends to see if I might like to spend the weekend at their house. In
retrospect, I am sure that their generosity was propelled by their observation of my pitiable lot
in life at my Maple Street home—wearing poorly fitted and torn clothing with unmatched and
multi-colored shirt buttons, little food, and evidently a street kid at best. I always accepted
their kind offer. After all, they provided me with decent food, sometimes new clothes, a guest
room, and hospitable treatment all-around. They seemed perfectly good middle-class folk.
I once unintentially carried my oppression to the classrooms at Jordan Junior High School in
Lewiston. Although the Maple Street apartment featured no rats, there were, however,
roaches just like all the other apartments that had come before. One day, while in my seventh
grade class at school, I involuntarily transported a shimmering brown cockroach to school. It
crawled along the back of my shirt, much to the horror of the girl sitting behind me. She
screamed. I was embarrassed and was, for the first time ever, ashamed of the home from
which I came. My peers shunned me. That may seem a trifling event to some, but it was a
traumatic incident unlike any I faced from peers at St. Louis Home. As a roach-infested
recluse, I would just have to wait out my days at Jordan Junior High School. I had been
unmistakably branded a tramp.
My homeroom and geography teacher at Jordan was Mrs. Wentworth. Though
rational, she was from time to time obstinate. Yet, I liked her. She often rewarded good
behavior, effort, and good grades by posting colored stars next to our names. Spelling tests, for example, might have earned red stars, as washing the blackboard might have yielded
green ones. The stars to collect were the coveted gold stars. I did not receive many gold stars.
Yet, I wanted to earn them—sort of. One day at the downtown F. W. Woolworth five and
dime department store, I spotted a little matchbox size container containing gold stars, just
like the ones Mrs. Wentworth doled out from time to time to the well-behaved among us.
With a lapse in my pursuit of Christian values and my failure in honoring the seventh
commandment, I pilfered that little box as an honorably well-intended little offering for Mrs.
Wentworth. Yes, I must have felt that I could “earn” one of those if lots of them belonged to
her to share; besides it didn’t seem to make much sense to award the stars to myself. Just as I
had hoped, Mrs. Wentworth was thrilled on
receiving this modest offering, and so was I. On
reflection, I can’t recall collecting any gold stars as a result of my simple sycophantic scheme.
I later did have a bit of misfortune for which Mrs. Wentworth shared no empathy.
When picture-taking day for the seventh graders took place, I demurely indicated to her that
my family would not be buying the pictures. For an 8” x 10,” two 5” x 7’s,” and at least 24 an
outlay of cash might as well have been a request for a thousand dollars. No school pictures.
Period. The policy at school was that everyone was required to take the pictures home and to
either return them to school or to pay for them. Not wanting to take them home, I placed the
pictures in my school desk in order to return them to Mrs. Wentworth the following day. As I
let Mrs. Wentworth know that day as I did the day before, “I am not wallet sized pictures, the
sum of $ 3.64 from my poverty-stricken father, for so imprudent buying the school pictures,
which are right here, or here, or… “Where are they?!” I exclaimed. “Someone took my pictures, Mrs. Wentworth. Honest.” Her rejoinder was abrupt, “You will bring those pictures
back tomorrow or the payment of $ 3. 64. No ifs…” I was telling the truth, and I had no
money, no pictures. What was I to do? Mrs. Wentworth was a no-nonsense lady, and I knew
I had to own up, but to what? She surely was no Soeur Boulé, but I learned to fear such
women in authority. I had to find $ 3.64. Time for creative problem-solving. I surely
wanted the pictures, but I did not need them. Knowing this distinction, I knew better than to
ask for Dad’s intervention. Besides, Dad would have chastised me for losing them and would
not have paid for them. Why try? Case closed. As it happened, I had a kind, distant aunt in
Lewiston who lived in a clean and modest apartment. For this reason, she probably was
financially better off than us. In fact, I thought that she just might have a little capital on
hand. I Idecided to approach her with an untrue story—that my father could not pay this
month’s electrical bill for which our power was about to be disconnected, lest he pay the $
3.64, and not a penny more, that he presumably owed the utility company. Would she help
us? Indeed, she was much obliged. The following day, I submitted the $ 3.64 to Mrs.
Wentworth, after which she accepted the money and reminded me to always be truthful. How
puzzling.
Unlike my school years at St. Louis Home, I was not a very good student at Jordan
Junior High School. In my independence, I sorted my priorities with education being dead
last. Top immediate priority was coming home to our black and white television. Three TV
stations: count ‘em—three. Long-term priority: quit school and work the textile mills where
real wealth could be earned. I could live at home, pay Dad, say, $ 5.00 a week and keep the rest of my weekly wage of, say, $ 20.00. That inventive fantasy swiftly collapsed.
I followed Bobby and his friend whom he kept telling me was our cousin to school. Dad said
we had no such cousin. They were in eighth grade at Jordan; to them, I suppose I was a
skinny incommodious seventh grade snot they had to tag along. Actually, they were both
good to me—better than tolerant. On our long walk to school, they always stopped by a mom
and pop variety store to pick up a couple of candy bars as Bobby’s cousin/friend also picked
up cigarettes. One could smoke any time and any where at any age at that time. I thought
Bobby’s buddy had money, what with candy and cigarettes at his disposal every day before
starting school. In fact, we three stopped at a local pizza and spaghetti café to relax for a few
minutes over candy bits as the presumed cousin smoked. In his generosity, Bobby always
broke off a piece of the Hershey’s chocolate bar to share with me. I never questioned where
they had the resources to do this every day, or why the pizza shop owner let us sit at one of his
booths without buying anything. Many years later, Bobby explained to me that I was left
outside waiting for them at the variety store to spare me the corruption of their shoplifting of
the candies and cigarettes. Add to that his friend’s gobbling down of meatballs right from the
pot of spaghetti sauce as the owner was unsuspectingly fiddling about in his freezer or
storeroom. I never noticed.
Like a few of my siblings, I was a good speller; that was all I cared about tending to at
junior high school. When report cards were issued, I had a fair share of “C’s” and “D’s.”
Since the cards were completed by ink pen, it was easy enough for me to add a “+” to a given
grade. When my father came home for the weekend, he signed the report card with hardly a flourish, leaving me all set for the next term. Not so if Lionel reviewed the card. He was hard
to avoid and impossible to deceive. There was hell to pay for poor performance.
Sometimes Bobby and I decided to play hooky from school. I was never that
enterprising on my own. Of course, there was little to do at home. So, Brother Bob decided
how we would spend our time. A favorite of his was for us to trek down to tidy up our
apartment building’s cellar. While there, Bob would monkey about with his b-b gun.
Sometimes he would fire it out a window at passers by. Sometimes he’d have me dance to the
shots as he would just miss my legs in the process. He also shot at street lights with that gun.
In fact, that b-b gun was Bobby’s source of continual malfeasance: he broke a window at F.W.
Woolworth—yes, the fine store that years ago provided many damaged cookies and
doughnuts for us. For breaking the store’s window, a cop caught him. Bobby tried to
convince him that he only “found” the gun. Unconvinced, the officer took the gun away.
Relief!
I hated Bobby’s gun. I hated playing hooky. I learned from the streets that school
was in fact better. No contest. Besides, what we did not know was that the city’s truant
officer circled the neighborhood of the miscreants with the authority to return them to the
school himself. Driving his black sedan about town, he was a creepy chap, though of
seemingly grand stature. He caught us! Downstairs. Off to Jordan Junior High we went. The
embarrassment of getting to school at midday with everyone knowing that we skipped school
was, to me, sufficient retribution. Mrs. Wentworth, too, made known her disappointment with
me. I had been punished enough. But, no. Mr. McMahon, the principal, had other ideas. Under his direction, Bobby and I were required to wash the blackboards of every classroom
after school until we consumed the amount of time that we were out. Clearly, there was no
good cause to stay out of school.
Bobby and Junior and I, to our childhood credit, took the independent initiative for
maintaining a clean home environment. Our mother had left us with that lasting lesson. You
can’t help being poor, but you can help being dirty. And so we applied that counsel to our
care of the alley separating our tenement building from that of our neighbors. Many tenants,
in fact, tossed debris from their porches overlooking the dismal alley. Over time, the trash
became unsightly; we would do something about it. We secured or borrowed tools that we
used as rakes to conduct the cleanup. I recall that after one of those daylong cleanups we
completed during the summer vacation, we were going to honorably reward ours
elves.
Here is what we did. Junior found a couple of large, clean refrigerator-sized cardboard
boxes. He proposed that we use them to craft a tent under the porch of the first floor
tenement. Bobby and I leaped to the idea of accepting his plan. We had, after all, made the
entire area quite clean, fit for a family to celebrate through an overnight campout. The
cardboard fit nicely in the space we selected—with all four walls of cardboard, plus a
cardboard floor space. We were little giddy adolescent kids over our achievement. We
cleaned ourselves up back to our upstairs second-floor apartment and returned to our “tent”
with the bedding we’d need for the night as well as a flashlight we would hang from the porch
beam overhead, and some assorted munchies to feast on as our supper in this charming
newfound abode. After a time of necessary chatter, the comfortable accommodations and ambience left us to fall quietly asleep. During our collective midsummer night’s dream, at
say, post midnight, we three were suddenly awakened. A loud thrust against our tent forced
its collapse. As soon as we were sufficiently awake to realize our fright, came the
exclamation, “Get out of there, you idiots. Get up to your rooms before I kick the shit out of
each one of you.” Lionel’s pronouncement stuck. We followed his order. Our adventure
was ended. We long reviled him for what he so unfairly had done. In fact, Junior and he
engaged in an altercation the next day that would cause Junior to report him to the city police.
That was our most lasting grudge against our big brother. We would acknowledge much later
that Lionel, too, was frightened at our absence from the apartment that night. His finding us
down in that pit took some creative detective work on his part. Lionel was but a parent in
training—an experience that would permit him to become a terrific caregiver to others.
Despite this misadventure, there was some degree of fun to our other independent
engagements, especially since Dad was home only on weekends, and Lionel was mostly out of
our way. The down side of this arrangement was that in our creative misadventures about
town, we picked fermented foods, especially wasted fruit, from the alleys behind restaurants.