Disappearing people

Do you ever think about places or events or people from your past and wonder if you dreamed them? So many of the everyday places of my childhood have a dreamlike quality for me. I remember riding my bike through alleys behind rowhouses, and it seemed that I never actually rode on the street, just one narrow back alley connecting to another, a network of secret passages set aside for 10-year-olds on their bikes. It’s not possible that none of those alleys ever intersected with the street. That’s just how I remember it. 

I remember riding down one of those alleys and ending up on a pine needle-carpeted path through the woods. This is possible, actually. My grandmother’s neighborhood backed up on city parkland. What doesn’t seem possible is that I rode past an opera house and heard the singers rehearsing inside. I’ve never been able to find any evidence that this opera house existed but I remember what I heard. 

Was it real? I don’t know. It was probably just a house in which someone was listening to opera. Although I lived right in the middle of a city, in a very working class neighborhood. Houses were on the street, not in the woods; and we weren’t much given to opera or other high culture. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about it, except that I’m older now and I think about the past sometimes.

*****

One day last week, a name popped into my head. The name was the name of a classmate - a girl - from my class at St. John the Baptist parish school in Philadelphia. SJB is closed now - the church is still there but the school closed a long time ago. 

St. John the Baptist school, may it rest in peace, was an old-fashioned Irish Catholic uniform-wearing Mass-before-school nuns-with-rulers throwback to another time. St. John’s was old-fashioned (and just old) even when I went there, which was a long time ago. Now, I think, people my children’s ages would simply not believe me if I told them about piano lessons in the convent, where you didn’t speak in a voice louder than a whisper; or Chinese jump rope in a cement schoolyard surrounded by that same convent, a rectory, and a graveyard; or the veils that we had to pin to our hair for Mass and confession. If you’ve seen “Doubt,” you’ll have some idea of what it was like to be a working-class child at a Philadelphia archdiocesan Catholic school in the middle of the last century. Many years later, I found out that we even had a creepy molesting priest. Though I think we all knew about him even then - or rather, we knew that there was something terribly wrong about him but we couldn’t put it into words. Some of us (girls) could avoid him. Some of us (altar boys) could not. I believe he’s dead now. God will judge him. I certainly have. 

When my mother went to SJB, it had a lower school (first through eighth grade) and a high school (two separate high schools, actually - the boys’ school on Manayunk Avenue and the girls’ school next door to the lower school). After the high schools were closed (my mother’s class, 1962, was the last to graduate from SJB), the boys’ school was torn down and replaced by an apartment building, and the girls’ school building was used to expand the lower school. When I was at SJB, first through fourth grades were in the old lower school building, and the high school building housed the fifth through eighth grades. Even then, the building was really old, and openly acknowledged to be unsafe. There was an auditorium on the top floor, permanently closed, the stairway blocked off. We were frequently (almost daily) warned not to try to climb those stairs and not to enter that auditorium because the floor was in such bad shape that no one was sure that it could accommodate a person’s weight, even a 7th grader’s weight. 

Normally we’d have taken any such warning as an invitation but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone ever trying to break into the auditorium. I also don’t remember anyone wringing their hands about our safety or demanding that the parish get us out of that manifestly unsafe building. The 70s were different, you know? We were the original free-range children, like a bunch of wild chickens.  

*****

Those buildings are all still standing. I was just there last year, in fact, for my grandmother’s funeral. So there’s no confusion between reality and dreams when I think about SJB in a physical sense. It’s all solidly real, 150-year-old stone and ironwork and cement. But the time that I spent there, eight years of school that felt like 20 at the time, seems remote and dim, steeped in unreality. I remember in a broad general sense what it was like to be an eighth grader, for example, but I can’t clearly recall more than a handful of days or even moments. I know that I spent eight years in that school, in a plaid uniform jumper and navy blue kneesocks and a rosary looped around the button placket on the skirt of my jumper and of course those veils on Mass day. I have photos to prove it. But it’s all a haze. 

*****

I look up classmates from St. John’s and sometimes I find them but often I don’t. An astonishing number of my childhood friends and classmates seem to have managed to avoid the internet altogether, leaving absolutely no trace of themselves - no Facebook, no Twitter, no LinkedIn - nothing. Maybe they don’t exist. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing after all. Or maybe my old classmates are too smart to leave a breadcrumb trail on the internet. Maybe that school taught us something after all. 

I never did find the person I was looking for. She’s not on Facebook; or maybe she just uses her married name without inserting her maiden name in parentheses like most women of my age. She doesn’t seem to be on LInkedIn or Twitter or Instagram. So I stopped looking. Maybe she’s in witness protection. Maybe she just doesn’t want to be found. I just wanted to see if she was anything like the girl I remembered. Sometimes, I want to see if anything is as I remember it, anything at all.