At the very least, the Survivors were demanding financial settlements, and a public apology from the Catholic Church.
Public apology! — my father laughed, bitterly. The Church will apologize when hell freezes over.
Both my mother’s and my father’s families had been Catholic — they’d emigrated to Wisconsin from Glasgow in the 1920s — but no longer. My father and his older brother Denis had expressed disgust with the Church for as long as I could remember, and when I was asked my religion on a form I checked None.
In Scotland there are many Catholics. People think that Scotland is all Protestant — this is not so. But lately, since the scandals of the pedophile priests and cover-ups by the Church, there has been a drop in the number of Catholics in Scotland, as in Ireland.
When allegations of abuse and negligence were first made against the Craigmillnar nuns, the diocese had defended the Sisters of Charity. There were Church-retained lawyers, threats of countercharges. The archbishop, who’d been a bishop in Boston at the time of Craigmillnar’s worst abuses, had issued a public statement regretting the “unprofessionalism” of the orphanage, but absolving his predecessor archbishop, now deceased, from any blame associated with its administration. It was leaked to the media that Church officials believed that the Craigmillnar Sisters of Charity were “not representative” of the order; that there’d been in fact a “very small minority” of Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul who’d been involved in this “unprofessional” behavior. Those nuns still living had been “retired” from the order.
In the Eau Claire elder care facility such subjects were not usually discussed. At least not openly.
The former lives of our patients are not our concern unless our patients want to talk about them, as sometimes they do; for it’s important to some of the elderly that their caretakers have some sense of who they once were. For most of them, showing photos of grandchildren and boasting of careers will suffice.
Sister Mary Alphonsus, who’d been a resident at Eau Claire for the past eight years, had never spoken of her former life as mother superior at Craigmillnar — of course. Some time before I’d come to Eau Claire to work as an orderly, there’d been a coalition of investigators who’d sought to interview the elderly nuns in the facility, predominantly Sister Mary Alphonsus, but an attorney hired by the diocese had rebuffed their efforts with the argument that the nuns had long been retired and were not in good health.
In 1997, in the wake of the slow-smoldering scandal, the name of the nuns’ order was legally changed from the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul to the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul.
Still, there was a lingering wonderment not only in Unit D but elsewhere in the facility regarding the sudden death of the former mother superior of the home at Craigmillnar. As if the staff didn’t want to surrender their most notorious resident quite so quickly.
Maybe (some were saying) Sister Mary Alphonsus had had a hand in her own death.
Since there’d been no autopsy, you could conjecture such things, which were not likely to be disproven.
(For what did Dr. Bromwalder know, or care? The senior consultant’s hours at Eau Claire were the very minimum, if not less.)
Managed somehow to cease breathing. And her heart to cease beating.
The gauzy soiled “veil” or “wimple” wound around her head, hiding her face, had to be deliberate — didn’t it?
Could be, Sister Mary Alphonsus felt remorse. For the children she’d had a hand in torturing and letting die of disease.
Could be, Sister Mary Alphonsus’s death was a penance.
Put herself out of her misery?
Speculations wafted about me. But I was too busy working — pushing trolleys, gurneys, wheelchairs — sweeping and mopping floors, disinfecting toilets, hauling away trash to the dumpsters out back — to be distracted.
Honorably discharged from the U.S. Army with the rank of corporal first class when I was twenty-six, four years ago this January.
Because of my training I’d been assigned to the medical unit. The work was tiring but exciting, always unpredictable. You were made to feel For the grace of God, this could be me. It makes you humble, and grateful. It’s a feeling that will never fade. The first time a soldier died in my arms it happened in a way to leave me stunned, I could not talk about it for weeks. I have never talked about it even with my father. I’d thought, Is this what it is? Dying? So easy?
There is nothing so precious as life, you come to know. Firsthand you know this. And a sick feeling, a feeling of rage, that some people treat the lives of others so carelessly, or worse.
My first work back in the States was in Racine, where I trained; my second job was Balsam Lake Nursing Home, twenty miles north of St. Croix, where my family lives. My third job has been here at the Eau Claire elder care facility, where I am currently employed.
When we were growing up in the family my father never spoke of his own childhood. I knew that he’d had a younger brother — who would have been one of my uncles — who’d died when he was a child. But I didn’t know anything more.
Anything of the past was forbidden. We did not ask, but we did not think to ask. My mother had warned us — Your father isn’t a man for looking back. That can be a good thing.
Francis! Come home this weekend, Denis and I have to speak with you.
It was a weeknight in early November. At this time, Sister Mary Alphonsus had not yet passed away in her sleep.
Such urgency in my father’s voice I had never heard before, not even when I’d left for Iraq.
In an exalted mood my father and my uncle Denis brought me with them to the Sign of the Ram, which was their favorite pub, to a booth at the rear of the taproom behind the high-pitched din of the TV above the bar. Leaning our elbows on the scarred table, hunching inward. My father and my uncle Denis on one side of the table, and me on the other.
I felt a mounting unease. The thrill of such intimacy with my father and my uncle was not-right.
In fierce lowered voices they revealed to me their long-kept secret, which no one else knew: not my mother, and not my aunt who was Denis’s wife. Not anyone in the family at the present time, for those who’d known had died, and had taken their knowledge of the secret with them, in shame.
Here was the situation. My father spoke, and my uncle interrupted to complete his sentences. Then, my father interrupted. Then, my uncle. These are not men accustomed to speaking in such a way in lowered voices and with an air of commingled shame and rage. For it seemed articles in the local papers had stirred in them memories of Craigmillnar. TV interviews with “survivors” of the home whose faces were blurred to protect their identities. One night Denis had called his brother during one of these interviews on the local station — Jesus God, I think I know who that is. And you do too.
As boys, Denis, Douglas, and their young brother Patrick had been committed to the Craigmillnar Home for Children. Their father had died in an accident at the St. Croix stone quarry when he was thirty-three. Their mother, only twenty-six when Patrick was born, had had a mental breakdown and could no longer take care of herself and her sons; she began to drink heavily, she fed medications to the boys “to keep them from crying,” she died in 1951 of a drug overdose. One day an uncle came for them to take them to the orphanage, saying there was “no place” for them now — but he would come to get them again soon, in a few months perhaps. In time for Christmas, he’d promised.