Deja Vu In A Dream: A True Short Story Read online

  DÉJÀ VU IN A DREAM

  A True Short Story

  By

  T. St. Laurent

  DÉJÀ VU IN A DREAM

  © 2010 T. St. Laurent

  Cover illustration: Oil painting by T. St. Laurent

  Cover design: Brian Gibbons

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author.

  Somewhere, some time, I wrote a little poem, not profoundly poetic but at least iambic--if you read it properly--and good enough for me. I don’t remember how old I was when I wrote it, though I know I was very young. And I never forgot the words:

  I need no armies,

  No allies, no friends.

  I have truth.

  And vengeance will be mine.

  Some things stay with you forever--like what I was thinking when I wrote those lines. Even then, I know, the memory was an old one.

  In the late 1950s, more than fifty years ago, I attended a parochial school run by a Roman Catholic religious order, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. The group originated in Lyons, France about 1820 and spawned in the United States and Canada in the early 1890s, charged with a mission to educate youth, with especial emphasis on the tenets of the Catholic faith. The school I attended in southern New Hampshire, Sacred Heart Academy, sprouted in 1891, immediately upon the Brothers’ arrival in these Chaotic States of America, a place teeming with what the Brothers surely found was way too much decadent liberty and dangerous individualism, especially for traditional moralists from Europe, with their long history of oppression by church and state. In fact, these old-fashioned moralists were so accustomed to their own suppressed existence that they actually felt security in its personal limitations, and they believed that schools should be established to train children in becoming as miserable as themselves.

  By the middle of the twentieth century, when I arrived on the scene to start first grade, America had come a long way from the Puritans, those famous misguided moralists of Massachusetts who were not above leading a few eccentrics to the gallows, oddballs like grouchy old ladies, unpopular loners, mysterious strangers, religious skeptics (those would be the “heretics”) and a variety of other nonconformists, sometimes because they were accused of casting magic spells (those would be the “witches”).The Brothers of the Sacred Heart seemed like the Puritans’ direct descendents, though less fearful and without the power of life and death, a power which comes only from governments, unlawful gangs or local murderers--or, on the other hand, from doctors of medicine.

  Yet, by the early 1950s, America was roaring with revolutionary life beyond European mindsets. We were independent. And we were rich, apparently, rich enough to rebuild Europe with our own money after their despicable habit of launching wars had reached a climax of death and destruction in World War Two, which killed about 50 million people from five continents. At home, our parents held jobs generated by creative enterprise and unpredictable individualism so that we could afford ridiculous looking two-tone automobiles sparkling with chrome and sporting outrageous rocket fins, powered by overgrown combustion engines that could take you down a quarter-mile of straight, flat asphalt in very few seconds. My father owned a brand new 1956 Ford convertible with a V-8 engine, red and black, unequipped with seat belts, and my two brothers and I tumbled around and wrestled in the backseat with the top down, even at 60 miles per hour. The only rule barked over my father’s shoulder, very loud and very often, was “no standing up on the seat!” --just in case the wind blew us away, I guess, or, our standing on the seat would make it too easy to toss an offensive brother overboard. The battery operated transistor radio had just been invented--or just marketed to the general public--replacing the home radio that was big and heavy enough to pose as furniture, so that we could listen to popular music anywhere, even on the street, not just in the living room or from the monophonic record player. Through the tiny speaker of a “transistor,” as we nicknamed the amazingly small radio, the size of a paperback book, Elvis begged us to understand his rhythm and blues, his pain and his adolescent, rebellious emotions, and we loved it, even as my father performed a hilarious parody of Elvis’ gyrations in our living room, from an Elvis performance we had all witnessed on our black and white television full of vacuum tubes.

  The transistor was a transition, indeed, from the easy-going swing music of our parents to the aggressive backbeat of rock’n roll, easily appreciated on the crude little speaker of a “transistor.” It was as if we finally got to talk back. Fast food joints had not yet been invented but hot dog stands and small diners proliferated, offering sides of french fries and cheap burgers, and we flocked to them as often as possible. In fact, our unsuspecting parents led us to them. They liked them, too, especially the convenience. Meals at home, as superior and fundamental as they were, blessed by Mom’s cooking, had to be garishly spiced up once in a while with excursions to the community troughs, where neighbors could be spotted and hailed as they, too, lived the affluent life. What our parents never suspected was that while they thought they were the final, definitive generation of enlightened social evolution, there was another generation right behind them poised to kick their asses.

  But, first, we had to go to school. Before I graduated to Sacred Heart Academy in the fourth grade, I had to serve three years with the Sisters of the Holy Cross at St. Aloysius de Gonzaga School, nicknamed St. Louis, which was planted on the same city block as Sacred Heart Academy. St. Aloysius was the patron saint of Catholic youth, probably because he defied his rich old father in the middle ages, a “Marquis” in the feudal states of Italy, to become a Jesuit priest who died at the tender age of twenty-three while tending to victims of the Black Plague. To me, as I explored the grounds at recesses, the Brothers’ and Sisters’ schools and this entire city block seemed somber and foreboding, as if transplanted from plague-ridden medieval Europe and plopped wholesale into the middle of my bright American hometown, so full of healthy life, liberty, swimming holes in summer, sledding hills in winter, and competing “five and dime” stores on Main Street all year long--Newbury’s right across the street from Woolworth’s.

  My very Catholic city block was dominated by St. Aloysius Church facing the street, a soaring gothic structure with customary steeples and a cross on top. The church had huge, darkly stained, heavy wooden doors, embellished with elaborate carvings and twice the height of a man. Inside, the ceiling soared to magnificent height, vaulted and decorated with gold leaf, with massive faux marble columns holding it up. It was a building obviously not designed for people--not for daily living--more to impress everyone with colossal size and unlimited frills. The most impressive--and oppressive--features of the interior were the subdued light and the mandatory hush. The dim light was filtered through beautifully colored stained glass windows, all depicting biblical scenes from the New Testament, though the most obvious testimony was that all the bright light existed somewhere outside the window, if you could only get out there. And, the slightest sound would echo intrusively. I knew about the sound because whenever I got bored at Catholic mass and played with the spring-action hat clips on the back of the benches, an accidental click would reverberate all over the place and alert the entire congregation, as righteous heads turned.

  “Hey, some little shit is playing with the hat clips instead of paying attention to the ceremony!”

  All in all, the Catholic mass was uninspiring, very slow and muted, lifeless and spoken entirely in Latin--gibberish to me. It was altogether too ceremonial, and I didn’t like it, especi
ally the music. They seemed to play nothing but ponderous dirges on the gigantic organ that wheezed from the back of the balcony, which was definitely not an encouragement to get up and dance--more conducive to shuffling your feet to your own grave. Even the procession of the priest in heavy robes along the center aisle seemed interminable, with an acolyte swinging a slowly clinking pendulum of musty incense along the way. Thick ropes from the dark, lofty heights of the bell tower dangled silently at one end of the entryway, and I wanted to leap like a monkey on them to make the bells ring, like the idiot, Quasimodo, in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, but we were forbidden from such impulses.

  I couldn’t say exactly why, but I got sick often in the church. As the ceremonies dragged on, I would break into a cold sweat knowing what was coming and trying to resist the necessity of leaving the pew. My breathing became shallow and I’d wipe my forehead, wondering why I was perspiring when I felt so cold. When I couldn’t wait any longer, I’d thread through my classmates, who had to get off their knees to let me by, and hurry up the aisle without stopping to ask anyone’s permission. Often, I’d barely make it out the door and halfway down the concrete steps before lurching over the rail and hurling my latest meal down into the alleyway, coughing and spitting. I never went back into the ceremony after vomiting because I felt desperate for fresh air, and I wondered if it was the incense that made me sick. Even at the formal ceremony of my Confirmation, when I became an official member of the Roman Catholic Church, dressed in white shirt, tie and robe, I broke up the formality by bustling out to the aisle leading to the basement stairs, heading for the restroom. On my way, though, I encountered what looked like vomit on the stairs, which triggered my own contribution. When I reached the basement to gather my senses, I discovered my parents standing over my younger brother, Ray, who sat in a folding chair holding his head, sick like me, though I never knew him to have a sensitive stomach. We could eat rancid lard and like it, but, apparently, we couldn’t snort incense for very long.

  My disappointment with religious trappings may have been the result of my other introduction to the Great Big Outside World beyond parents, which came not from my peers or my neighborhood or my hometown but from television. I watched Hopalong Cassidy, dressed in a silver-spangled black outfit knock down bad guys in the Old West and ride a pure white horse like a bracing wind for justice, and I watched Howdy Doody, the freckled-faced marionette in cowboy garb, trying to be reasonable while a bunch of dopes and clowns cavorted all around him. When Clarabelle, a real live, mute clown, barged onto the Howdy Doody set honking his rubber horn and squirting his seltzer bottle, wreaking havoc on the real live host Buffalo Bob and his pal, Chief Thunderthud, the audience of kids in the “peanut gallery” squealed with anxious delight, fearing and hoping that they, too, would get squirted, while at home, we laughed and bounced on the edges of our seats. Clarabelle! Outrageous! Other marionettes, too, promised a colorful world of action and Howdy-style common sense, characters like Dilly Dally , a silly, whacky marionette who invariably needed Howdy’s advice, or Mister Bluster, the old grouch, archetypal stuffed shirt who probably owned the factory where most of the folks in town worked, somehow elevated to Mayor of Doodyville. I was charmed by a very pretty marionette called Princess Summerfallwinterspring, and I rooted for Howdy and the Princess to get together in a perfect match.

  But, my favorite video encounter with larger than life characters from the Great Big Outside World was Andy’s Gang, starring Andy Devine and featuring my true hero, Froggy the Gremlin, who could perform practical jokes by magic. Froggy was sheer delight. He was a funny rubber frog standing upright on hind legs with a vest and a bow-tie who appeared in a puff of smoke on top of a grandfather clock, cackling and dancing joyfully from side to side and sticking out his tongue. Froggy disrupted everything, including Andy, the host. Along with exotic filmed episodes of boyhood adventures, Andy featured regular live guests, all pompous asses who stood beside the grandfather clock and narrated self-aggrandizing stories about their own heroic adventures. Froggy blanched at their stories and invariably interrupted with wise-ass comments, then stuck out his tongue noisily and disappeared in a puff of smoke when the frustrated story-teller tried to strangle him.

  Go, Froggy!

  I loved him. When I woke up one Christmas morning, staggered across the kitchen in my pajamas and saw my father’s hand sticking through a doorway squeezing a rubber Froggy, which stuck out its tongue and made a rude noise, I screamed with delight thinking that it was the one and only Froggy. I had no idea that Froggies could be mass produced. And I didn’t see Froggy’s match on television until years later when Audrey Meadows, as the wisecracking Alice, regularly skewered her blowhard husband, Ralph Kramden, played by Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners, one of the most popular shows of the 1950s.

  But my Great Big Outside World at the Sisters’ school, known by local kids as the “French School,” bore no resemblance to television fare, not even to the beloved broadcasts of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the very popular Catholic priest who appeared on TV each week and riveted my attention with his lectures on Catholic faith, complete with chalk, blackboard and a surprising sense of humor. The Sisters of the Holy Cross seemed to have no sense of humor whatsoever. And no wonder. They were locked in a primal struggle to tame the behavior of hordes of impulsive children, new to the world and half-wild, stampeding noisily in and out of classrooms, many of them expectant, looking for excitement, new places, new people, and new activities beyond the homestead. Back when my mother handed me over to a nun to start first grade in a dim, empty hallway of the Sisters’ school, Mumma laughed at me from the bottom of the stairs, probably thinking she could have handed me over to Jack the Ripper and I would have gone along quietly, totally trusting. She kept asking, “Are you okay?” while she giggled at my blank expression. Well, yes, of course I was okay. Why shouldn’t I be? Like she told me, I was going to school, where I would learn all the stuff my parents already knew, where I could become a real person, like adults, reap the harvest of human knowledge which blessed my elders and even my ancestors, maybe even grow up and plow new fields of insight in the dark brown earth.

  Yeah! I would plow! Gouge the ground!

  And, exactly as advertised, school was exciting and wonderful and fun--at first. I wanted more in a hurry. They taught me all about the little black gewgaws on a white page, only 26 of them, each representing a sound that could be combined into any word you could utter or imagine. What a gift! They taught me how numbers could represent all things and about little tricks to add them, subtract them, multiply or divide them, bringing the world to my fingertips, I thought--a far cry from E=mc2, but a good start. They taught me the beauty of music notation and how it merged with simple math. And they taught us to sing rounds, dividing the class into sections to start an identical melody a few notes behind the previous section, songs like Row Row Row Your Boat, and my favorite, Frere Jacques. We sang Frere Jacques in French, and I didn’t understand a word of it because my mother was English, and my father only spoke French when his parents were around, but the tune works in both languages:

  Brother John

  Brother John

  Are you sleeping

  Are you sleeping

  Morning bells are ringing

  Morning bells are ringing

  Ding Dang Dong

  Ding Dang Dong

  The end of the round was overwhelming, almost euphoric, bells and notes ringing from every direction. I loved it, and the bells would occasionally echo in my head for the rest of my life (maybe that’s why I love the bell at the end of Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” from Pictures at an Exhibition. Love those bells and timpanis. Ding dang dong).

  Not so, Dick and Jane, the characters in the primer they used to teach us Reading, complete with illustrations. Those kids were boring beyond anyone you could imagine. The only real story in those whitewashed narratives, the only hint of excitement I can remember was about a cat up a tree that was rescued by fireme
n--not quite comparable to a galloping, gun-blazing mission of justice by Hopalong Cassidy. Dick and Jane seemed like very nice kids but much too bland to be real. A smudge of dirt on a knee, or--God forbid--a scrape that needed a band-aid was a real crisis to these characters, and I didn’t find them interesting in the least. Worse still was the style of the narrative, simplistic in the extreme and repetitive enough to induce skull-thudding ennui. It was based on a theory of “whole word recognition” as an aide to phonetics, as if we had to see the word play ten-thousand times to know what it said. The Sisters made us read aloud from the primer, one line each around the class, and I always hoped for a long, complicated sentence to show off my skill, something like, See the ball bounce, after which the next sucker in my row would be stuck with, Bounce, bounce, bounce. The repetition sounded totally unnatural to me, totally silly, and I dreaded voicing such a redundant sentence, which would make me sound ridiculous. Once, though, as I listened to my classmates read, mostly haltingly, I counted the lines and discovered that my turn would fall on the sentence, Run, run, run, as in:

  See Spot run.

  Run, run, run.

  Deflated, I vowed not to utter such a dopey sentence. I would demonstrate to the teacher that I knew how to read the word run and leave it at that. But while I waited gloomily, the boy ahead of me stalled on his line. He miraculously got through See, but got stuck on Spot, and I sank lower in my seat, trying to be patient, but very frustrated.

  “Sssssssss…,” he hissed.

  “Sssssssss…,” like the air leaking out of my patience.

  “Sssssssss….” I wanted to jump up and yell, “It’s ‘Spot,’ you idiot! Look at the gewgaws!”

  After the Sister rescued him by reading for him, it was my turn, and I said “Run.”

  “Read the rest of the sentence,” she said.

  “It’s the same word,” I said.

  “Read the sentence,” she insisted.