steel-gray hair wrenched into a prim bun,Miss Fitzpatrick was a caricature of the spinster schoolmarm, living with her elderly sisters and puttering to school in an ancient, pea-green Morris Minor that never went above thirty miles per hour. She always wore homemade, long-skirted Liberty-print dresses with a starched lace handkerchief attached to her lapel by a large safety pin. For thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds reveling in the rebellious atmosphere of the late 1960s, watching our elders scream, “Fuck the pigs!” at anti-Vietnam rallies, she should have been a gift from the gods: the ultimate fossil to satirize and send up.
Yet no one ever uttered a disrespectful word in her classroom. Other teachers had to bellow to get our attention. Miss Fitzpatrick could silence a class of rowdy adolescents with the raise of an eyebrow. When she read us the poetry of Verlaine and Ronsard, the room became so quiet that the only sound was the rhythmic pop of tennis balls from the courts outside. She transfixed us with French novels. When she read Antoine de St. Exupéry’s memoir of his desert plane crash, I held my breath as she reached the passage where the downed pilot sees the nomad coming to his aid. In French, she read St. Exupéry’s mellifluous paean to universal humanity and, looking up over the wire spectacles perched on her nose, translated it in her sweet, soft voice: “You are the well-loved brother.…” In the pause that followed, I wasn’t the only one snuffling into my Kleenex.
Miss Fitzpatrick spoke French with an impeccable Parisian accent, and spun tales of regional life in Normandy and Provence as if she had supped on soupe de poisson in every portside café and cheered the boule players in every sycamore-shaded square. In fact, she had never left Australia.
Every afternoon, in French class, she drew us a little bit further into her illusory world. As the cicadas drummed in the eucalyptus trees outside the classroom window, I filled exercise books with essays on French culture so detailed that in one, oncuisine, I noted that a satisfactory accompaniment for saumon au beurre blanc would be a Puligny Montrachet 1961. The only salmon I had ever tasted had come out of a can, and wine, in our house, meant sweet sherry.
Unfortunately, when it came to the language itself, I didn’t turn out to be the prodigy I’d hoped. I could read and write well enough, memorizing great swaths of obscure vocabulary. But when the words left the page and floated out into the air, they might as well have been Swahili. Because I learned words by writing them down, my brain stubbornly clung to the way their spelling was supposed to sound in English. And because I had trouble understanding correct pronunciations, I had trouble reproducing them. My spoken French was a raspy collection of diphthongs in which I habitually swallowed the consonants that should have been stressed and barked out the ones that were meant to remain silent.
When I told Miss Fitzpatrick that I wanted a French pen friend, she said she’d be delighted to help.
I forgot to mention Paris.
I had imagined fiery dispatches from the Paris barricades, scrawled in haste on table napkins. Instead, Janine wrote to me on delicate azure stationery, her letter folded as carefully as a piece of origami, her penmanship impeccable. Her address was a placid village in Vaucluse, Provence, a village so tiny I searched in vain for it on all the school library’s maps of France. St. Martin de la Brasque, population 516, didn’t even have a high school. Janine boarded during the week in a town called Manosque, near Marseilles, where the disciplinary regime sounded tougher, if possible, than the tyranny being exacted upon me in Concord.
In some ways her letters were a great advertisement for the French education system. Written half in French, half in English,they rarely contained a grammatical slip. Janine had started studying English two years earlier than we had begun
Yet no one ever uttered a disrespectful word in her classroom. Other teachers had to bellow to get our attention. Miss Fitzpatrick could silence a class of rowdy adolescents with the raise of an eyebrow. When she read us the poetry of Verlaine and Ronsard, the room became so quiet that the only sound was the rhythmic pop of tennis balls from the courts outside. She transfixed us with French novels. When she read Antoine de St. Exupéry’s memoir of his desert plane crash, I held my breath as she reached the passage where the downed pilot sees the nomad coming to his aid. In French, she read St. Exupéry’s mellifluous paean to universal humanity and, looking up over the wire spectacles perched on her nose, translated it in her sweet, soft voice: “You are the well-loved brother.…” In the pause that followed, I wasn’t the only one snuffling into my Kleenex.
Miss Fitzpatrick spoke French with an impeccable Parisian accent, and spun tales of regional life in Normandy and Provence as if she had supped on soupe de poisson in every portside café and cheered the boule players in every sycamore-shaded square. In fact, she had never left Australia.
Every afternoon, in French class, she drew us a little bit further into her illusory world. As the cicadas drummed in the eucalyptus trees outside the classroom window, I filled exercise books with essays on French culture so detailed that in one, oncuisine, I noted that a satisfactory accompaniment for saumon au beurre blanc would be a Puligny Montrachet 1961. The only salmon I had ever tasted had come out of a can, and wine, in our house, meant sweet sherry.
Unfortunately, when it came to the language itself, I didn’t turn out to be the prodigy I’d hoped. I could read and write well enough, memorizing great swaths of obscure vocabulary. But when the words left the page and floated out into the air, they might as well have been Swahili. Because I learned words by writing them down, my brain stubbornly clung to the way their spelling was supposed to sound in English. And because I had trouble understanding correct pronunciations, I had trouble reproducing them. My spoken French was a raspy collection of diphthongs in which I habitually swallowed the consonants that should have been stressed and barked out the ones that were meant to remain silent.
When I told Miss Fitzpatrick that I wanted a French pen friend, she said she’d be delighted to help.
I forgot to mention Paris.
I had imagined fiery dispatches from the Paris barricades, scrawled in haste on table napkins. Instead, Janine wrote to me on delicate azure stationery, her letter folded as carefully as a piece of origami, her penmanship impeccable. Her address was a placid village in Vaucluse, Provence, a village so tiny I searched in vain for it on all the school library’s maps of France. St. Martin de la Brasque, population 516, didn’t even have a high school. Janine boarded during the week in a town called Manosque, near Marseilles, where the disciplinary regime sounded tougher, if possible, than the tyranny being exacted upon me in Concord.
In some ways her letters were a great advertisement for the French education system. Written half in French, half in English,they rarely contained a grammatical slip. Janine had started studying English two years earlier than we had begun
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