Echoes of St. Joseph's
Fran Mascia-Lees
​​Did the officer wrench him from the warmth of his mother’s arms?
Or was there a tender touch, a recognition of the young boy’s despair?
Did the young boy feel the parting kiss of his father’s lips on his forehead?
Or just watch him walk away?
Were they even there?
His mother.
His father.
​
How do I tell my father’s story?
How do I understand his life through a fragment of a first memory?
A five-year-old boy, tears streaking his face, in the firm grip of a policeman’s arms.
Was this the defining moment of my father’s childhood?
The day in 1923 when he was severed from all he knew?
The day he was taken away to his childhood prison?
St. Joseph’s Home
250 South Street
Peekskill, NY
How do I unearth my father’s story when the foundation of his life is built on speculation?
His mother’s absence, a void filled with murmurs of scandal, reverberating through family lore.
Bigamy. A pistol. A prison cell.
Abandoning her son for the forbidden embrace of a lover.
Neglect. Self-indulgence. Betrayal.
Malicious gossip? Truth?
​
His father’s desire to keep his son.
Thwarted by the prejudices of his era?
A poor Italian immigrant man judged unfit to raise him?
Did my father know, then?
That he was wanted?
How do I imagine my father’s story when every reflection fractures my heart?
I picture a forlorn, lonely boy.
​
Small and fearful.
The foreboding gates of St. Joseph’s before him.
The building’s façade ahead, looming like a menacing giant.
Disoriented and alone.
Trapped within towering corridors.
The daunting stares of saints bearing down from frames on cold stone walls.
Bewildered and trembling.
Swallowed in a sea of unfamiliar faces.
Eleven hundred other lost boys.
I hear the clattering of cutlery against cold porcelain bowls. The only sound at mealtimes. Dinners devoid of familiar home-cooked meals. Replaced by the foreign taste of porridge.
My father, hungry.
I see my five-year-old father lying awake in the stillness of a dormitory. Beds lined in rigid formation. Muffled weeping from beneath blankets. His pillow damp with tears.
My father, longing for a comforting touch.
​
I feel a young boy’s spirit buckling under the weight of confinement. My father, hopeless and despairing, his freedom stripped away. His individuality erased. No longer merely, “Antonio.”
My father, now “Inmate” in the orphanage’s ledger.
“Enumeration of Inhabitants,” St. Joseph’s Home, Peekskill, NY, 1925
How do I write my father’s story through my fury?
Knowing my father’s bitter recollections. Reluctantly disclosed.
The harsh discipline at St. Joseph’s.
Inflicted by the unyielding punishments of Franciscan nuns.
Punishments as severe as their conviction in the value of molding young souls
through suffering and penitence.
​
Nuns, rapping my father’s knuckles with a wooden ruler.
The price of a misshapen letter.
Small, bloodied hands.
Struggling to perfect each curve and line.
Pain looming.
Nuns, watching my father bathe with an invasive gaze.
A relentless cycle.
Soap, scrub, rinse. Soap, scrub, rinse.
Scouring his body of their own imagined sins.
Skin red and raw.
Nuns, strict sentinels of control.
My father, a tiny soldier in their regimented world.
Forced to march in endless circles in silence, for hours.
Bearing a broomstick under his arms and across his back.
Aching.
Nuns, mingling toxic saltpeter into his pudding each night.
A vile attempt to suppress carnal urges.
Not yet awakened in an innocent boy.
My father, too young to understand.
Gagging.
One nun, a sole ray of light.
A sister who saw my father’s promise.
Nurtured a passion for learning.
His lifelong salvation.
After five long years, my father’s rescue.
A joyous leap into his father’s arms, across a chasm of time and hardship.
With a new wife by his side.
My grandfather reclaimed his son.
​​
My father with his father, Bronx, NY,
c. 1943
How do I recover my father’s story facing dead ends and encountering obstacles?
​
Seeking answers.
Prison records, archives, newspapers, Ancestry.com.
No help.
Mailing letters. Pleading.
February 25, 1998. Dear Sister Frances Marie, please forward admission and discharge papers.
January 3, 2006. Dear Sister Frances Marie, please provide educational and medical documents.
August 14, 2014. Dear Sister Frances Marie, please, please send any shred of information to help us understand.
No reply.
Incompetence? Apathy? Spite?
The willful destruction of records?
A familiar cover-up.
I write my father’s story through tears.
But not with sorrow alone.
​
I recount it with admiration.
Gratitude and awe.
For a man who, inexplicably, emerged from this trial not with a hardened heart.
But with a tender heart.
An open heart.
For this man, who, despite his brutal beginning—or perhaps because of it—became a father whose hands, once punished for their imperfect script, wrote a new narrative.
Of gentleness, acceptance, and compassion.
That shaped the lives of his five children.
For my father, who transformed the echoes of St. Joseph’s, from haunting refrains of loss and loneliness, into a legacy of understanding.
Of affection, devotion, and love.
For each of us.
This is how I tell my father’s story.
Author’s father (100 years old), listening to her read a piece she wrote
Fran Mascia-Lees is professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She received the American Anthropological Association’s Mayfield Award for “Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology” in 1998 and served as Editor-in-Chief of the American Anthropologist from 2001-2006. From 2006-2011, she was an International Scholar for the Soros Foundation, mentoring young scholars across Eastern Europe as they worked to overcome the long-term legacy of authoritarianism and restrictive academic structures and practices. A prolific scholar, Fran is the author and editor of eight books and numerous articles. After her retirement in 2017, she began writing creative nonfiction. In 2022, she finished a memoir of a critical 10-year period of her life, The Runaway Years. She is currently completing Glimpses: One Woman’s Life, a collection of micro-memoirs.
Meet the author: Fran Mascia-Lees
an interview conducted by Otherwise poetry editor Grace Zhou
