Paris was a place of wonder. It was a
real city, my first. I loved it, even peopled as it was by foreigners who
insisted on speaking a foreign language and expecting me to understand—me,
transatlantic princeling that I was! I had no intention of learning their
jabber, yet later did, to a near-native pitch of fluency. My parents, however,
remained staunchly hopeless at languages. Even after years abroad, they could
barely navigate across the front page of a French-language newspaper. This
never changed, although Dad became proficient at swearing in German, and Mum
did master the memsahib vocabulary in French necessary for shopping and
traveling and ordering in restaurants. Happily, back in those early days of
exile Dad had a friend to help him around: an American in Paris, one Charlie
Lemmon, who had entered the city as a G.I. at the Liberation and, romantically,
had married the first Frenchwoman to give him a kiss, thereafter going native
to the extent of changing his name to Charles LeMon and acquiring French
citizenship. A photograph in one of our old family albums showed him sitting at
his kitchen table in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, scowling Gallically
rather than beaming Americanly, wearing a beret and smoking a Gauloise (you can
tell—short, squat white cylinder, no filter) with a ballon de rouge in front of him. Despite all these clichéd French
trappings, which included a (gray) Citroën 2CV parked in the street below and a
résidence secondaire in Normandy, M.
LeMon spoke French abysmally, with a strong American accent; fortunately, his
wife, being a native, was the genuine article, and for my parents a true entrée
into the heart of France, the Frenchness of whose people was a never-failing
source of wonder and amusement to them.
We stayed in Paris
long enough, and I’ve been back often enough since, for the place to insinuate
itself into my marrow as one of the deepest-rooted of my many homes, the
dream-place I visit most often in my mind, after Geneva
and just before Ireland.
Joyce, the magus, called it “the last of the human cities.” It still is, with Rome. Over the year we spent
there I must have scampered dozens of times up and down the steps of
Montmartre, ridden a hundred metros, eaten a hundred tartines beurrées, played a hundred times in the Luxembourg
gardens, where in the spring the sprinklers rotated their rainbows. And I
decided that when I grew up I wanted to be a metro, for Paris was my universe, as it is the metro’s.
I wanted no other. We were content there, foreignness notwithstanding. The plan
was to eventually send me to a local American school, but then Fate barged in
and arranged for Dad to get sacked from RCA (drink? dalliances? sheer bloody
ineptitude? I’ll never know). He soon found another, slightly ludicrous job (I
suspect that, like me, he was a much better schmoozer than an employee, what
with bars needing propping up all over the place) with a small American
manufacturer of electronic keyboards and carillon bells. The company’s European
office was in Geneva.
I didn’t object to going. For one thing, I was in no position to, being only
six. For another, Paris was my universe, so I
naturally assumed “Geneva”
was a distant neighborhood in my universal city. (As indeed, in a sense, it is:
One of its nicknames is Petit Paris,
and the Empire architecture and cafes along its boulevards convincingly
duplicate those of its grander sibling.)
So Geneva
was to be our new home. But before we went there Dad took us to London, not to see the
Queen but to buy a car (although we saw the Queen too: still young, quite
lovely, and just starting in on her record-breaking reign). He’d had struck a
deal with one of his ex-RCA cronies on a slightly-used gray Ford Squire station
wagon with wood inlays and British plates (SYU 729), not a bad ride for the
time, with red vinyl seats, chrome bumpers, synchronized first gear and an AM
radio. How Dad acquired it, or for how much, or via what matey backdoor
arrangements, I never knew or cared, but that quick visit across the Channel in
early ’57 was my first of many tastes of Britain, and Mnemosyne has transcribed
the experience into a series of vignettes of such everyday minutiae as (of
course) Underground trains that were deeper-running and more sinister than the
friendly Paris metro, with the ghostly pong of Virginia rather than Caporal
flavoring the warm subterranean air; elephantine double-decker buses with a
pukey sea-sway on the upper deck; pavements broad and gray and surprisingly
bereft of cafés, although quite well-littered. London,
like Paris, was
slow in shrugging off the effects of the war. It reeked of peasoupers,
pigeonshit, coal fumes, cheap perfume, detergent, and cut-rate kerosene. I
remember a restaurant in Soho that featured coffins instead of tables and from
which I acquired a small plastic spoon in, roughly, the form of a skeleton—and
suddenly, out of one of the dustiest drawers of memory, occasioning screams of
panic and an all-points search high and low, pops the stuffed seal from Harrods
that I lost on Trafalgar Square. Far more concerned with my seal was I than
with Nelson, or the pigeons, or St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.
Tea came later, also at Harrods, where a replacement stuffed seal soothed the
howling brat. There must have been pubs: Dad was with us, after all, and
families with small kids used to snuggle in the snugs, which tended to be
cozier places than the chilly basement flats and redbrick “semis” most
low-income families were condemned to in those pre-council housing days. We
stayed in a Bayswater hotel and had tea, and scones, and hearty John Bullish
breakfasts, and went to Madame Tussaud’s and the Tower and Windsor Great
Park to see the deer. We
did other echt-Englisch things that
tickled Mum’s fancy; she read the likes of Waugh and Galsworthy, and therefore
was an Anglophile. She loved the place. But London
never touched my heart the way Paris
did, and does, although for sheer down-and-out potential I found it nonpareil,
many years later, when for a year or so I was down-but-not-quite-out there.
