French Lessons: A Memoir (5 page)

I have a cold-war imagination. My image for forgetting
and repressing is an iron curtain coming down in front of
my face, a curtain like the curtain at a play, only hardened,
rippled in place in such a way that it looks at a distance like
regular cloth.

The first business letter that was ever addressed to me
came from Radio Free Europe, a radio station broadcasting
for the Free World from Behind the Iron Curtain. The letter
came with its own return envelope. I sent back a dollar and
got a thank-you note from Bradford Simpson, Ford Simpson's father and chairman of RFE's Minnesota branch. Radio Free Europe was a bunch of right-wing Republicans, I knew what that meant when I was six, but it didn't stop me
from mailing in my dollar. It was my right, like the right to
get the toy out of the Cracker Jacks. I grew up in an age of
clipping and saving cereal box tops, Bazooka Joe cartoons,
and the S&H green stamps that my grandmother let me lick
into her premium books.

From the vestibule, where I read my letter from Radio
Free Europe, I could walk down the hall between the front
staircase and the living room (where the record player was),
and straight to my father's library. The room was dark: there
was a huge mahogany desk, built into a wall, surrounded by
shelves. There was a gigantic leather lounge chair that vibrated if you pushed a button ("the contour chair," we
called it, by its brand name) and a steam-filled radiator, hissing slightly, where the magazines sat on a trellised radiator
cover. On the desk was a blotter in a frame of leather, ink
doodles on the blotter, real cartridge-pen ink. The black Underwood adding machine occupied the space to the right of
the blotter.

My mother sat at my father's mahogany desk and wrote
bills. She calculated her income on the black Underwood
adding machine. I was allowed to sit at the desk, too, and do
my homework. The World Book Encyclopedia was on the first
left shelf, so I could look up facts.

I made a thorough search of my father's desk. I opened
every drawer and every box in every drawer. Yellow legal
pads covered with his writing were stacked to the top of the
left file drawer. In the right bottom drawer I found gray cardboard boxes. There were black and white photographs of
dead bodies in them. In several photographs hundreds of
bony corpses were piled on top of one another in giant
heaps. I had never seen a dead body, not even in a photo graph. When Mrs. Nelson, my first-grade teacher, died in
the fall of second grade, I didn't have to go to the funeral
because there was an open coffin. "It isn't right for a little girl
to have to look at her teacher's corpse." Here, multiplied by
thousands, was what I wasn't supposed to see. This was
what death looked like.

Not every body in the photographs was dead. People
were standing up, but they didn't look human. Their bones
stuck out too much. You could see the sockets where one
bone connected to the next. Some were naked, some wore
striped pajamas that fell off their bones. One man tried to
smile. His face was more frightening than the expressionless
faces-he was reaching for life, but it was too late. There
were photographs of human hair and teeth and jewelry arranged in neat piles, as though they were being exhibited in
a museum. "U.S. Army" and a series of numbers was
stamped on the back of each photograph.

My mother told me that the photographs were taken by
Mr. Newman. He was a photographer for the Army when
they liberated the concentration camps at the end of the
war. His photographs were evidence at Nuremberg for what
the Nazis did. He had returned to Minneapolis after the war,
where he opened a photographic portrait studio.

I took the photos to class to show the other third-graders
what had happened in the camps. My mother had gone
through the photos and removed the ones she thought
were too upsetting, but I wanted to take all of them, especially the upsetting ones, where you could see the death
right close up, the way the flesh hung off the skeleton, the
hip bones that looked like shelves. I believed in facts. I believed that my friends had no right to live without knowing
about these pictures, how could they look so pleased when they were so ignorant. None of them knew what I knew, I
thought. I hated them for it.

I explained to them about the camps, Hitler, how many
Jews had died. To shock them. They had to know! I had to
tell them. Or was it just that I missed my father. I was trying
to do what he would do, be like him.

My mother got the idea that she would take us to live in
the South of France. She had a specific city in mind, Montpellier. What was my image of France, then? I imagined a
house where we would be together near the water, the way
we were together in the summers on Wildhurst Road. My
mother said there would be palm trees and warmth in
Montpellier. "I need a change," she said, "I need warmth."

From her sleepy, afghan-wrapped cocoon, she went into
high gear, arranging a passport photograph for herself, me,
my brother. She hired Mr. Newman, the concentration
camp photographer, to take our passport photos. For no extra charge, he offered to take a group portrait of the three of
us.

Oh sunny France, I can see myself there underneath a
palm tree. I will be a French girl, like Madeline in the Madeline books who lives in an orphanage with other girls and
walks in a straight line and gets a visit from Miss Clavel when
she goes into the hospital with appendicitis. My brother
thinks France is a dumb idea. Why should he leave his
friends to go to some place where he knows no one, where
he's never been, where he's never wanted to go. Besides, he
takes German.

In Mr. Newman's group portrait, my mother is looking far
into the distance. The cheeks that were round and glowing
in the portrait of her dancing with my father are sunken in. My brother looks carved in stone; his jaw is clenched. I am
the only one in the picture with my mouth open (I have an
overbite and can't close it). I am the only one who is smiling.
I want to go to France.

President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a year and a
half after my father died on Wildhurst Road. My mother had
abandoned her France plan by then. The opening of my
brother's school play, A Thurber Carnival, fell the night of the
assassination. My mother and I sat in the audience, waiting
for the word that the show had been canceled. A student
came on stage and said JFK would have wanted the show to
go on.

My mother and my brother and I sat close together in the
TV room upstairs and watched the funeral of JFK. There was
a flag folded in a triangle, just like at my father's funeral. A
soldier handed the flag to Jacqueline Kennedy just as a soldier had handed it to my mother. The newscasters commented on the world leaders as they walked down
Pennsylvania Avenue. De Gaulle, the president of France,
floated over the rest. He wore a hat that reminded me of
Abraham Lincoln's stovepipe hat, only shorter. Instead of a
band all around it there was a visor in front that stuck out in
line with his enormous nose. The newsmen commented
on the special relationship of de Gaulle and Jacqueline Kennedy, who was able to speak to him in fluent French. I
learned from Kennedy's funeral that Washington was designed on the model of Paris. The Champs Elysees was a
grand boulevard that ran between the Arc de Triomphe and
the Place de la Concorde; Pennsylvania Avenue ran between
the White House and Capitol Hill. The newscaster told how
de Gaulle had marched down the Champs Elysees after the liberation of France: "How familiar this funeral procession
must feel to the French leader; yet how different in mood."

Thursday night in our house. My brother walks in
through the back door. It's snowing in November. His white
and brown Blake School football "away game" uniform is
black with mud. "We lost. I'm not hungry." He disappears up
the back stairs. My mother and I eat dinner together at the
yellow linoleum kitchen table. She has gone back to work
for the Hennepin County Department of Welfare, where
she had worked during the Depression before she got married. Work has revived her. "You wouldn't believe the language they use!" Her clients say "horse's ass" and "motherfucker" and "fuck you." She talks in horror about the way
they talk back to her. I can tell she likes their swearing.
Maybe, secretly, she would like to swear, too.

What am I doing? In third grade I am racing to get the most
book reports. I read every orange biography in the series of
Famous Lives. I read some of them in ten minutes, to rack
up another report. In fourth grade, the year Kennedy dies, I
am playing "heads or tails" in the cloak room with Mary S,
the tallest girl in our class, who has a coin she stole from her
father with a woman's breasts on one side and her bottom
on the other. In fifth grade I am in Mrs. Larkin's homeroom.
She rewards us for work well done with a red witch sticker.
In Mrs. Larkin's history class we try to understand the passage of time. We wind a string around and around the playground. The string represents the number of years since Dr.
Leakey's Man roamed the earth. In Mrs. Larkin's class I
watch Walter Cronkite interview Socrates before he takes
the hemlock in "You Were There at the Death of Socrates." In fifth grade I am taking my first French class with Mrs.
Holmgren, watching the hair on her legs through her nylon
stockings, registering her foreignness. As ringleader of our
French class, I organize us to put alarm clocks in our desks,
each one set to go off at the exact same moment in the middle of Madame Holmgren's French lesson.

"Ah mon Dieu. Qu'est-ce qui se passe? Mais quel est ce
bruit?"

I love to hear Madame Holmgren get upset, in French.

Leaving

My mother and I drove to Wayzata, Minnesota, to find me
a dress at the Mother Daughter Shop. They sold mother
clothes and daughter clothes on adjoining racks. The
daughter clothes didn't fit me, "too tight in the bust," my
mother kept saying. In the mother clothes I looked
ridiculous-a child imitating an old lady.

The girls in my school wore Lanz dresses to dancing
school. The dresses were tight in the rib cage and waist.
They fanned out into flouncing skirts. I could not zip a Lanz
dress around my rib cage, even if I took three sizes too big.

"It's so hard to find you anything to wear! We'll just have to
try again."

"I can't help it! It's not my fault!"

"I didn't say it was your fault, dear."

We drove home back home in silence. As soon as my
mother unlocked the door to the house, I ran up the back
stairs and slammed the door of my room. A voice in my
head was saying, "You're in a bad mood because you're an
adolescent." I had been reading Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen, by Arnold Gesell, kept on the shelf in the TV room. It
showed everything that happened to an adolescent: there was a picture of the shape changes in the adolescent body
and a description of the adolescent mood which included
unexpected bursts of temper. It didn't help my mood to
know I was an adolescent; knowing I was one seemed like
part of something awful that was happening to me. I kept
seeing myself from outside myself, as though I were always
looking at myself in a book. But I couldn't change the book.

I called Connie, my closest friend living within walking
distance of my house.

"Help, I think I got my period."

"How do you know?"

"It's not like real blood. It's brown."

"Gross!"

"I don't have any Kotex."

"So ask your mother."

"Forget it."

"What do you mean, forget it."

"Just forget it. I'm not telling."

"Alice!"

"She bugs me. She'll make a big deal out of it."

"So go to the drugstore."

"No, I feel too queer."

"All right, all right, I've got an emergency kit with six Kotex
and a belt. My mother gave it to me when I turned eleven.
You can have it. But you better figure something out for later.
This is going to happen to you again, you know."

I studied the construction of the Kotex. I could simulate it
with a few layers of toilet paper. This method worked for a
year, but it destroyed my underwear. I hid them, pair by pair,
in a corner of the closet. Levine Blue found them when she
was cleaning up:

"For goodness sakes, why didn't you tell me you got your
period."

My mother called me downstairs to her room in back of
the house. She was lying on the bed in her characteristic
pose, wrapped in the beige afghan.

"It's no big deal."

"Imagine my shock when Levine told me. Really, Alice,
what is the matter with you?"

"Nothing. It's no big deal. Just forget it."

I didn't know what age I was. Chronologically I was
twelve, but I corresponded more closely to the Gesell chapter on age sixteen. I thought I might be even older inside
and was forced to live as a child. I thought that my father
dying meant that I couldn't be a child even if I wanted to,
that I had to toughen up. I thought that getting my period
early was a test, to see if I could take care of myself. My body
had gone on ahead of me to see if I could catch up.

At fourteen I had Mrs. Hill, a legendary teacher, for ninthgrade physics. I could see the gleam in the eyes of my classmates as Mrs. Hill engaged us in an experiment using the remarkable powers of fulcrums. I looked around, saw how
excited they were, and laid my head on my desk. In my head
there was a story competing with the story of the fulcrum; it
involved a man in a suit coming to rescue me from the
schoolroom, taking me to the bank of a river, lowering me
onto grass, covering my face with kisses, professing desperate love. I could make the story shorter or longer depending
on how much time I had. All I had to do was put my head
down on the desk, cover my face with my arms to block out
the light, and start the picture going in my head.

Mrs. Hill was sick. Miss Gray, the Headmistress, substituted in physics class. Miss Gray's favorite activity was standing in the hall with her hands folded over her stomach,
watching us march into Chapel. The thought crossed my
mind that it wasn't a good idea to put my head on the desk
in front of Miss Gray, but I didn't have that much control
over the situation. Once the story started rolling in my head,
I couldn't keep upright. Miss Gray called my house that
night and asked my mother, "Is she anemic? Is she often like
that with her head in her hands, sleeping all day long, she
who used to like facts and had more book reports than
anyone?"