by B. A. Berube
work in Maine. Soeur D’Youville was a deeply holy woman, committed to helping the poor,
the aged, and the infirm. Pope John XXIII granted her beatification as “blessed” in the eyes
of the Catholic Church in 1959—a prelude to sainthood. After a young woman stricken
with leukemia was mysteriously cured—a miracle was declared and attributed to Blessed
Marguerite D’Youville. Hence, in 1990 she earned sainthood under the holiness of Pope John
Paul II. According to the website, Catholic-forum.com she has become the patron saint for
many causes: death of children, difficult marriages, loss of parents, people ridiculed for their
piety, victims of adultery, widows, victims of infidelity, and even in-law problems. My
favorite among the categories best associated with Saint D’Youville is that she is patron saint
to those in opposition to church authority. As the reader will discover in subsequent pages that distinction attributed to this noteworthy saint is a remarkable irony, when attributed to the
Grey Nuns that she founded and, in particular, for those who came to Scarborough, ME to
carry on Marguerite D’Youville’s opusDei.
There was ostensibly much good work that the order of the Grey Nuns, the Sisters of
Charity performed on the North American continent. Indeed, it was the Grey Nuns who
founded the first orphanage for boys and another for girls. They also founded the first Franco
American hospital, the first school for nurses, and the first home for the aged, according to an
August 18, 1928 story in the Lewiston Evening Journal and the University of Southern
Maine’s Lewiston/Auburn Franco-American Collection’s Timeline. They founded the
Hospice Marcotte, an elderly persons’ nursing facility in Lewiston, Maine in 1926. Two
The Former Marcotte Home and St. Joseph Orphanage at Lewisotn, Maine
years later, they established St. Joseph’s
Orphanage for Girls on the same site as the
Marcotte Home. Most local folks generally
referred to the orphanage as simply the
Marcotte Home or L’Hospice Marcotte,
though both institutions were separate. One
Marcotte Home wing was to accommodate
200 beds for the elders; the orphanage side accommodated 250 girls, though fewer than half
that number was in place when my sisters resided in that facility. Some would say these
beginnings of charitable work of the Grey Nuns were impressively good deeds. Some of these
feats were, of course, admirable. Some others? My sisters have a credible saga to recount. But I get ahead of myself.
These nuns founded orphanages throughout New England as habitats for little
castaways. Orphanages were to become a popular haven for many among the unwanted, the
abandoned children. Over time, orphanages managed by the Catholic Church accommodated
poor children of all stripes, less occasioned by the agony of their parents having left the
Canadian homeland. Their intentions at the outset were indubitably sacredly inspired. So
ends the formal history. My memory begins here.
Why these women in tan with black trimmed ankle-long habits were called the Grey
Nuns remains one of the less important though elusive mysteries about them. They were not
wearing grey clothes.
A grey nun graces the front entrance to the Marcotte
Home.
They donned six layers—count them—six layers of long light
chocolate colored robes from the wimple about the neck to the ankles. A
black cloth strip served as a sort of black ribbon dangling vertically to
one side. Also dangling was the obligatory black set of rosary beads
suspended about the waist. A white bonnet-like covering enveloped all
but the face; over this was a starched black mesh wimple serving as a
bow held there with straight pins. The neck was never exposed. This
assuredly had to have been most uncomfortable, especially during the
hot summer months—giving me some hindsight on why they were so
often so moody and so mean. No accommodations in their vestments were made for Maine’s
coldwinter months. No goose down jackets for them! Not even any other kind of jacket or
coat. They wore a black hooded cape (no buttons or zippers). Nothing else to battle the cold. I guess this, too, must have been part of their vows—to be dreadfully uncomfortable.
We so often wondered how they slept, how they could use the latrine (if they ever did) in
some creative way. We also knew that there was no hair under that bonnet. We knew better
than to ask a nun to confirm our suppositions about how they carried out their routines. We
never saw them eat, drink, laugh, or cry. Nothing personal about them was ever revealed.
Oddly enough, I had the company of family at St. Louis Home, something I never
recall knowing prior to my arrival that summer. That was by brother Bobby, two years my
senior, who resided with the “big boys.” He didn’t matter much actually, because we were
physically separated. Ignorance of his presence helped support an illusion of our coalition, I
guess—an illusion that I had a support person to lean on.
St. Louis Home was the incontestable base for our affinity faction. If we were to be
treated equally, we all had to be thought of as, I suppose, orphans, though some of us did have
parents. No mother, no father at a home? Not to worry: there was at least a mother. These
nuns, given their sensitivity to the parentless state of most of us on their turf, opted to require
that we address them as Mère(mother). Even the non-francophone among us,
always used Mère as the upright noun of address. If one needed, for example, permission for
any cause, one’s right elbow would have to be obsequiously raised with open palm to ask,
“Mère, may I have a drink of water?” In this instance, the motherly lady would invariably
respond, “ Non! Và t’en.” (No! Get out of here). On hot summer days, a request for a swig of
water was often denied, though the water fountain was close by—just a few steps away from
the toilet. Too thirsty to risk disobedience, we’d be granted the okay to go to the toilet. There, we would sip the water from the flush.
On my side of the campus, by a seeming default, Soeur St. Croix was to become my
primary caregiver for the next couple of years along with the other little ones. This nun was a
good woman—nothing unusual or even wonderful—just a decent lady who decided to commit
her life to God as caregiver of young mostly orphaned boys that no one else seemed to want.
In retrospect, I was the model customer for her life’s sacrifice.
Many anecdotal revelations about St. Louis Home are presented in the pages to follow.
Those disclosures may hint that this environment was decidedly an abhorrent detention center
incarcerating innocent children. Though we all felt in some measure or other cheated by our
parents or other authorities that placed us here, only the nuns and we knew what this “home”
was really all about.
Many years after I left St. Louis, I dared pose the question, “Why?” to the mother of
Danny, the learning disabled child who attended the convent when I did. After all, how could
one reject an opportunity so sacred, so inspiring as the free guidance and hospitality of the
ladies of the holy cloth? Here were the nuns, devoted to their faith, to charity, to offering a
home for the destitute children, children like me mired in poverty. This is tha
t woman’s
appraisal, “Regard toi-mêmeaujourd’hui. Siça seraitpaspourlesbonnessoeurscommes
SoeurCantinpuisSoeurSt.Patriquequ’ilstondoncdonnétant—pense-tu quet’auraifaitde
bon avecta vie?”[“Look at yourself today. If it hadn’t been for the good nuns like Soeur
Cantin and Soeur St. Patrique who have given you so much, do you think you would have
done as well with your life?”]. This, the mother of poor Danny, had no notion about the truths behind the veneer of St. Louis Home. Her son, at least, had reason to be clueless. More
later in this volume about the character of this lady who would eventually become my
guardian.
My brother Bobby and I clearly did not like being at St. Louis Home. We surely
didn’t know why we were there. Bobby knew, perhaps better than I did, as a kid of about
eight years old, that to be released from this “home” to travel to our real, warm, embracing
domicile with our siblings was a treasure that riches could never buy. It was an inexorable
longing we held on to virtually every day.
Wanting to provide his little brother with an opportunity to anticipate such rare joy,
one Friday afternoon Bob instructed me to change into my good clothes for travel; we were
going home for the weekend. Danny’s parents, Mr. & Mrs. Gamache, would arrive in their
station wagon to pick us up. I leaped jubilantly at the prospect. We both changed our clothes
and washed up with great expediency. We both waited patiently in a designated waiting area
for at least a couple of hours, Bob smilingly at my side. Then came the head nun whom you
will meet in a subsequent chapter, Soeur Boulé [Sister Boulé], who queried us in puzzlement,
“Quest-ce que tu faites icitte? [“What are you doing here?”] I took it upon myself to reassure
her that we were waiting for Mr. and Mrs. Gamache to transport us to our homes in Lewiston.
Less informed than I was, she oddly enough offered no response other than to send us off to
supper where we could continue to wait. Still nothing. At the end of the supper, Bob
admitted to his tasteless and hurtful prank. Whiney kid that I was, all I could do as I returned
to change back into my old clothes was to weep. Indeed, why would any loving parent or guardian place their five to twelve year old in
this cloistered hole? None in my family knew why we were sent to our respective orphanages.
Seeking a response that might be different from ours, I posed this question to Peter, a friend I
was acquainted with at St. Louis Home and rediscovered forty years later. When he arrived at
this institution at age seven, his parents had been divorced—one living five miles west of the
convent, the other four miles east of it. His mom, in her early twenties at the time, believed
this to be an honorable way out, given her inability to provide for her three sons and her
husband’s relinquishment of his paternal duties. I would surmise that this scenario was likely
universal for most kids at this “home.”
As a matter of fairness, a case could be easily made for placing one’s five to twelve
year old child at a cloistered hole like St. Louis or L’Hospice Marcotte if one’s parents know
no alternative and cannot envisage raising the child lovingly and responsibly. In our case, we
were in current parlance, underprivileged. Ergo: profoundly poor paupers, peasants. That
was a major credential for entering St. Louis. For others, a decision to abandon their children
might be spun differently. For example, with families of Franco-American backgrounds from
which most of the poverty-stricken children of St. Louis came, another rationale for turning to
the nuns as their loco parentiswas oddly compelling. Important to most Franco-American
families of Northern New England during the fifties was their adherence to a firmness of
discipline, Catholic indoctrination in Catholic-run schools, a guarantee of literacy (and some
biliteracy), and an unassailable, absolute respect for authority. Add to that the example of my
father’s resolve for abrogating his responsibility as a parent. Voilà the convent’s
raison d’être.
This man, my father, the one who returned my wedding invitation with “0” persons
planning to attend, long remained steadfast about the correct path to child-rearing. When he
was 73, he advised me about how I might intervene with his daughter Flora as her adolescent
son challenged his parents’ will and their values. Dad wrote: You have the background and ability to push this thing through. You fit in with lawmakers and the governor. Flora has weakness in family management. What I was thinking is that you may be able to put her son in an institution with the state of Maine providing board and room. He may not like it, but he will have to get used to it like we all did.
His thinking at 73 did not vary much from his thinking at 43, when he sent us away.
The route to take was to warmly accept the provision of food, clothing, and shelter for his
children to the care of nuns. To him, St. Louis Home at Scarborough and the Marcotte Home
at Lewiston were the best child incarceration deals in town, no question. When asked forty
years later about this decision, Dad shamelessly affirmed that he would do it all over again.
After all, this institution taught children an apparent love of God, love of service, and love of
tending to the needy. The only missing ingredient from the totality of the experience at these institutions was love of children. To his deathbed, Dad never understood that.
navigating our “ home”
A back story about this St. Louis Home and nunnery may be fitting. Rodney
Laughton of the Scarborough, Maine Historical Society places the founding of St. Louis
Home at 1920 by Maine’s diocesan bishop, Louis Walsh. In 1935, Bishop Walsh’s goal for
managing that facility in West Scarborough would be to create a home for orphaned boys.
Ten years later, the bishop’s plan came to fruition: the facility would become home to Les
SoeursdelaCharités— the “Grey Nuns” who were based in Lewiston, where they had
experience in managing L’HospiceMarcotte, an orphanage for girls. According to an
unpublished Master’s thesis written in 1934 at the University of Maine, the original grange
like facility was destined to become a K-8 school. Documents at the Scarborough Historical
Society revealed that the converted barn was first a restaurant and boarding house, dubbed the
Wayland Dunstan Restaurant. The eatery, operating from 1913 to 1920, was a popular
stagecoach stop in its day. The front façade of the main building changed little since nearly a
century ago. For its first fifteen years, the Sisters of Mercy, not the Sisters of Charity,
managed the institution. No longer a restaurant or boarding house, the facility was retrofitted
as St. Louis Home for boys. Schooling was limited to lads entering grades K-6.
St. Louis Home was a convent, orphanage, and school designed to welcome abandoned boys.
That was its mission. Its namesake was taken, not from Bishop Louis Walsh, its founder, but
from King Louis XI, a thirteenth century king. Its doors opened to fifty-one orphan boys
thirty-two years before I was dropped off. St. Louis Home was to become my seven-year stay, beginning with kindergarten and
ending upon completing Grade 6. Twenty years before my arrival, the tuition rates at St.
Louis ranged from $ 3.50 to $ 7.00 per week. According to a 1956 Portland Evening Express
story, the convent and schoo
l at St. Louis Home in West Scarborough, where brother Bob and
I lived for seven years, was said to have enrolled primarily “helpless victims of broken
homes,” orphans, sick mothers of children, and a few children from families who were able
to pay tuition and board. Brother Bob and I, of course, qualified for free room and board and
Catholic schooling. This home of ours was set on seventy-seven countrified acres of
frontage and rolling fields.
When interviewed from outsiders, the nuns portrayed the living conditions of us kids
as breathtakingly and bounteously joyful. In an newspaper reporter’s Interview in the 1950’s
with St. Louis Home’s chief, Mother Superior Luc—a lady I well knew, noted to the reporter
that, “A favorite spot is the workshop where boys learn woodcraft.” A workshop?
Woodcraft? Was this facility hidden at St. Louis during my seven years there? No one among
us ever saw a woodshop at this home, and we surely never learned anything about woodcraft.
Was this history? Or was this the genesis of institutional lies and deceit? I would soon find
out a whole lot more about St. Louis Home.
The feature news story continues. Assisted by eleven church parishes, Do-gooders for
a Catholic Charities fundraiser in 1956 succeeded in raising $ 3,000 for new pews for a
remodeled chapel at St. Louis. I was impressed with our new pews and the chapel’s cheery
ambience. I do remember that makeover. Imposing, too, was St. Louis Home’s log cabin in a nearby wooded area that was built for the nuns’ enjoyment. Perhaps this attractive log
cabin nestled in the woods was really a summer retreat campsite for the nuns—an escape from
us maybe? We couldn’t be sure of what went on in that cabin, since none of us kids were ever
permitted to enter that space, though we did have a space for play on a few summer afternoons
at that forest. Surely, the nuns’ furtively protected frivolities occurring inside were well
guarded. There was no “facility” for the children—though we were occasionally taken to this
outback for a picnic, consisting of white bread spreaded with mustard, plus a fruit..
Although St. Louis Home was a frugally managed institution, there were paid
personnel on staff. There was also pro bono staff. That is to say that nuns’s were unpaid for
