Paris, my mother and father, and the south of France
I’ve written and posted about much of this before, but I never put it all in one place. No fan of Lenin, but he was right about “weeks where decades happen.” Three months that changed my life unalterably for all the years since.
What was it all about? Paris? My parents? Life and death suddenly encountered? Puppy love that was somehow more? It began when I was still nine years old. All over when I was barely ten, with a fortyish sequel. Who remembers? I remember. It’s all engraved in me. Suddenly brought back to memory by the nonsensical opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. I will never, would never, return to the City of Lights that once was and is no more.
1963. A hugely important year in American history, ending in November when my mother picked us up at school when as a rule we would have taken the bus. The President had been shot. Learned of his death on the radio on the way home. Not how the year began.
We learned, my sister and I, that we were moving to Paris in the spring of that year. My Dad was being transferred by DuPont to work with French engineers on a joint project. They didn’t know much about computers. My Dad did. He’d been spending weeks at a time overseas for the previous year, so the news of a next step wasn’t that surprising, just shocking, like a second shoe that drops much more heavily than you’d imagined it could.
We would be living there for a full year at least. We had hurry-up lessons in French, not the fake conversational French we’d been getting in school, but French for comprehension and speaking to French people. Weekly sessions with Madame Zandler in Bridgeton. We were going to be enrolled in French schools. Had to know the language. We didn’t. Couldn’t till we got there and had to. So we looked at each other and shrugged, underwent rounds of vaccination shots that more than once knocked us off our feet into bed. I had a typhoid shot that drenched my shirt with blood underneath my school jacket, then immobilized me for two days, unable to move my arm without considerable pain.
Then there was all the leave-taking. We rented the house Susie and I had grown up in to some neighbors. There was a party for us at the Hine pool, where we got gifts from people who scarcely knew us. Did we have a lot of family meetings to prepare us for the transition? No. We got to meet my Dad’s work friend Jay, who’d been living in Paris for years, and he made it all seem like a wonderful lark. He didn’t seem to have any wife or children though. But we believed him because we wanted to.
The ship was sailing on the 3rd of July. First class on the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the longest ocean liner in the world. Exciting. We spent the night before at the Westbury Hotel in Manhattan. We felt like celebrities.
Oh. The ship.
I was nine going on ten. What did I know about thousand foot long ocean liners? But a great many years later I was not surprised by photos of the grand staircase on the Titanic in that movie. In fact, I had already written a book report about “A Night to Remember.” Got a 100. My first of two from my British fifth grade teacher Gwendolyn Fennessy, who crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary every summer.
Why this recital of my time in France is occurring in a different context now. A word about writing. The 20th century ideal was probably best expressed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose editor was Maxwell Perkins, the man who told us great writing was not about nouns or adjectives but verbs. That was then. I believe Fitzgerald wrote the best American novel, “Tender Is the Night,” which oddly enough was set in the nation of France. Me? I admire verbs, but I do not write with them. I write with prepositions, which are the indicators of relations between and among ideas and people, seeking precision with regard to agency, intimation, resonance, and synchrony. Verbs are immediate, emotional, and sensory. Prepositions hint at echoes under, over, behind, and between the moments increasingly lazy writers think of as stand-ins for truth. Hyperlinks are high-tech prepositions. A way to expand the world of meaning in an age that loudly denounces the possibility of meaning.
That first week is a blur. Vivid but full of dissolves. Paneled cabins, one for my parents, one for Susie and me, black tie (required) dinners in first class, a Maître D who took orders for dessert from every one of us the first night, to be served to the family each night in turn. My Dad Baked Alaska, my mother Cherries Jubilee, Susie brownies, me cherry pie á la mode. All were exquisite, made from scratch. Our cabin steward was an elderly Jeeves. He was unused to children as clients. I ordered Rice Krispies for breakfast, and he delivered them with fresh cream. Best I ever had. On our last night he leaned over and kissed me on top of my head, not at all creepy but grandfatherly. Yet even the world’s most glamorous ocean liner can be boring, and my Dad detected I was bored, promised me a swim in the Cunard Line’s most famous indoor pool. Bust. Bad day at sea. Water sloshing in geysers from the dimly lit pool. He tried. Our dog got sick and was unwell when we disembarked at Cherbourg. We had lunch in a bistro with one table, first taste of French cuisine, and it was outstanding. Followed by the spectacular view of the D-Day cemeteries, which stretched farther into the distance than I knew distance existed. Thence to Paris.
Reminding you, this is just five days from our stay at the Westbury Hotel. Long way to go for a boy who would turn ten in two days.
Can’t find our old address. But this looks like it.
Now begins one of the major themes of this “decade within weeks.” My mother. How she used our time in Paris is still amazing to me. My Dad had to go to work with the French engineers. My mother had to do what she always did. Maximum experience in minimum time. We’d been through the drill before. Washington DC in one weekend. All the presidential memorials, the blossoming cherry trees, the Capitol and the White House (outside only because no time), the National Gallery because art, art, art was more important than anything. Same with Williamsburg. A very few days, staying in a one-room house owned by my godfather’s ex-wife Jacquie, and every single tourist spot the town had to offer, including 18th century food and carriage rides.
Paris was her masterpiece. (Dad chipped in with an equally hectic weekend trip to London, where we trudged by the Tower, saw the ruins wrought by the Blitz still unrepaired, Sunday church service at Westminster Abbey, walked and walked and walked and choked on the coal smog until two little kids had to stop…) What did Mommy do in Paris? Everything.
Versailles, Fontainebleau, Mal Maison, the Louvre, the Place de La Concorde, the Place de L’Opera, the foremost museum of impressionist and expressionist art in Paris, the sewers, the catacombs, she took us everywhere, including the American Drugstore on the Champs Elysée, and the Notre Dame Cathedral.
She also got her hair done. She was always a beauty, of the corn-fed Ohio variety that people respond to without thinking Hollywood, but I will never forget how she looked after she came home from a Parisian beauty salon. Movie star. Perfect hair, perfect face. Thinking that was her true self. She worked as a translator on the Manhattan Project after all. And she wanted Susie and me to understand the great big world we lived in.
When Dad was home, weekends and after work, we did the other stuff. The Eiffel Tower. Back then, closed for repairs from the middle level up, but back then I was afraid of heights. The diagonal elevators in the Tower were scary enough. Restaurants and cafés. He had found the good places in his many trips before. I remember a place called Au Cinq Pan D’Orge, which offered only appetizers, piles of plates of them on top of one another.
Our apartment. Lavish French of the time. Beautiful view. Joke of a kitchen. Tiny stove, oven, and refrigerator, all the size of a breadbox. Why grocery shopping was a daily must. Good stereo. How do you know your dad was faithful to his wife through many trips to the most glamorous city on earth? Fine stereo and only three LPs. Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, and Bobby Darin. My mother wasn’t the only one who listened to “Strangers in the Night” when the other is away.
Then the other shoe dropped. French engineers could NOT understand computers. The year assignment was canceled, and we were going to be transported back home as if my Dad had done something wrong. Which he hadn’t. Why the return was also going to be First Class. We had a week to drive through the south of France before boarding the most glamorous ocean liner in the world, the Leonardo Da Vinci, in Genoa, for what amounted to a ten-day Mediterranean cruise to New York.
By then, of course, Susie and I had already been through a lot. Four days after my tenth birthday, Paris celebrated Bastille Day and Charles de Gaulle was in the parade, after having been nearly assassinated at a crime scene I actually witnessed. (Blown up highway underpass…) Dad tried to give me a glimpse of Le Charles through a weird thingamajiggy made of cardboard and mirrors designed to let short ones see taller ones. I lied to my dad, said I saw him because he had hoisted me so high up to make it happen, but I didn’t see De Gaulle that day. I was just there. That day. We were also there on that day when Jackie lost her baby Patrick, world news everyone would come to forget when her husband had his head blown apart six months later.
We became more of a family on our trip south. Three chateaus — Chenonçeau, Amboise, and one other I don’t remember — plus a series of scrubby towns including Avignon and Nougat. In Nougat we stayed at the Daphne Hotel where we all got bedbugs and my Dad and I had a bonding experience. I realized as we motored toward Avignon that I had not returned the gigantic clunky key to the room. I finally broke down and cried my crime. Whereupon, Dad reached into his pocket and produced the key he had also failed to hand in. We wound up putting them in a beer glass in my Dad’s bar back home as a remembrance of that shared moment.
Then we reached the French Riviera. Where Dad and I had a further bonding experience. (There have only been a few of these. We were mostly not close in later years.) We arrived in a seaside town called Menton, lovely, unspoiled, the beach a horror of large pebbles that probably prevented it from becoming Nice. We loved it. Somewhere in here we lost a day and almost missed our boarding date on the Leonardo. There was a bistro, a small place, dark, small tables, and a small singer named Edith Sanski. We were having an indifferent dinner, and she was the entertainment.
Life changing moment. She sang three Piaf songs in a row. She was young. She sang beautifully. I was mesmerized. Intoxicated. I was in love for the first time in my life. I just sat there and stared at her.
What does my cold, standoffish ‘Lord Laird’ dad do? He leaves the table, approaches her onstage, and whispers to her. She looks my way and follows my dad back to our table. She smiles at me and then leans down to kiss me on the cheek. Best moment of my ten years of life till then.
Of course he teased me after the fact. Kept calling her Edith Pinsky. I couldn’t be mad at him for that. He was recognizing that my emotions were not trivial. And we were about to find that life was more serious than love. Between us and Genoa was the Grand Corniche, one of the most treacherous roadways in France.
The most frightened I have ever been in a car. Which is saying something.
A lot like this road in fact. Narrow, 2K mountainside,
hidden corners with unknown traffic, and Euro drivers.
We were nine hours on the Grand Corniche. My dad, a pilot, had to have his hands pried off the wheel after he got us to where we had to be. What happened afterwards changed me forever…
Yeah. What happened there on that day…
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