French Lessons: A Memoir (24 page)

Bardeche's last letter to me almost succeeded in its goal: I
hid it because I dreaded rereading it, or writing about it.
Since retrieving it, however, I've rewritten the chapter again,
making him more evil, more monstrous, conforming to the
portrait he paints of himself "The monster speaks! It's hideous." His avuncular charm has faded.

The opposing players in my drama, the Mouchards and
the Bardeches, have only one trait in common: they both
survived losses brought on by the Second World War. 1945,
1945: why does it feel so close, why am I still fighting the battles of another time and place, as though they were mine?
What do I have in common with those families? In a dream sequence in my imaginary movie about my trip to Canet, I
run back to Bardeche's study and challenge him; tell him I
despise him, that he is lying, that he can't face the truth of his
own guilt. I refuse to eat with his family, out of ethics. I put
on my headphones, and I put him on the stand.

Returning Home

I'm not writing only about French anymore. French is the
mark of something that happened to me, that made me
shift into another language. Was it my father? Why do I keep
circling in my work around intellectual men and their political crimes, their innocent or noble or charming surfaces and
their shameful undersides?

One day I remembered that my father's nickname for me
was Alkie. I had been working on my memoir for several
years, so I was in the business of such details. Why hadn't I
made a place in my story for his name for me? Alkie, ajewish
name. Also Alkie, short for alcoholic.

I called my mother.

"Why did he call me Alkie and why did he drink?"

"Guess he did call you that occasionally. It's a Jewish name
or something. You know you were always such an engaging
child, we adored you."

"So how did his drinking affect his personality?"

"It didn't really; it didn't have any effect on his work."

"Didn't the smell bother you?"

"I was used to the smell of tobacco and alcohol."

"Didn't it affect your sex life?"

"Oh, you develop a tolerance. It's people who don't drink
who can't tolerate it, you know; people who drink can drink
an enormous amount and it doesn't bother them."

"So if it had no effect, what were you so worried about all
the time?"

"Because it was killing him. You don't understand, he
wasn't the kind of person you could tell what to do. If a person doesn't want to stop you can't make them. It's like
Nancy Everett who came to dinner the other night. She's
huge. She knows it. But she's not ready to do something
about it. You can't make someone ... Look, what you have
to understand were the times. Everyone drank, since Prohibition ended, it was a novelty. Of course, no one knew then
how bad it was for the heart. We made all those drinks, Pink
Ladies. I could make all those drinks. And I hated the cocktail parties-there was never anything to eat, I used to get so
hungry. Once in Washington they served Martinis and I got
such bad indigestion I had to take a taxi home. It was the
times-everyone in Washington drank."

"I'm not interested in the times, I'm interested in our family. People aren't alcoholics because of the times."

"Yes they are, Alice, yes they are."

I started talking to everyone in my family. I talked to people on the phone, I called them up and took notes, as
though it were an interview. I filled legal pads. My sister was
appalled when I told her I had written down what she said.

"You're turning the family into a research project-I don't
want to be an object for your study. And you didn't even tell
me you were doing it until after. It's underhanded. And it's
cold."

But I didn't feel cold, I was burning.

One day I went to the library meaning to prepare a course and stayed there all day, looking up stray details from my father's work life in the New York Times Index, the newspaper
microfilm, in indexes from books about Joseph McCarthy.
Before I was born, he had defended a man named "Scientist
X," charged with spying-I looked up the accounts. The
only book which mentioned my father was the account of
an incident from the 1930s, a Rutgers professor was fired by
his Nazi department head and my father had defended him,
pro bono, for the ACLU. My father was not a hero in the book.
His statements were a little too grandiose, and he settled too
soon. The authors concluded that he must have had a lot of
other work to do.

Everyone in the family remembers my father working at
the dining room table after dinner, his legal pads spread out
all over the table. Even though he had his own study, he
liked to be there, right in the middle of us, working, showing who he was, how impressive, Harvard Law Review, lost
in his own world right in our midst.

We share a Phi Beta Kappa pin, "Sidney Joseph Kaplan,
University of Minnesota, 1928" engraved on one side and
"Alice Kaplan, University of California, 1975" engraved on
the other. The man who could go to a symphony and come
home and play the music on the piano by ear. The man who
could win an argument in law school class against Felix
Frankfurter-someone even wrote about it in a remembrance of Frankfurter and my brother sent me the article
when I became a professor; at the time I cried in a mix of
competitive longing and grief and I thought, "This is who
my father was, a man who could take on Supreme Court justices when he was twenty."

Learning French was connected to my father, because
French made me absent the way he was absent, and it made me an expert the way he was an expert. French was also a
response to my adolescence, a discipline to cover up the
changes in my body I wanted to hide. My mother had a lot
to say about that:

"So why didn't you tell me when you got your periodgod, you were strange."

"Well, you were strange, too, Mom, you were strange,
too."

During these long conversations my mother and I kept
calling each other "strange" in order to say that we thought
the other person hadn't understood:

"Look, I'm the one with the tragic childhood, not you.
My mother had a nervous breakdown when I was three,
and she went away to a hospital for two years. An older
cousin came from New York to take care of us. None of
my sisters even remember, but I used to lie in bed at night
and worry that my mother was going to die."

"That's funny, I used to worry you'd die, too."

"Then when mother came home she was so vain, she
stood in front of the mirror for hours and tried all her
clothes on."

"I know, you told me that."

"Oh, and you know I used to hate those office cocktail
parties. I used to call up to see if he had been drinking and if
he had I was panicked about him driving home and I used to
drive downtown to the office-I drove in those days-and
picked him up. I was afraid if he drove home he'd kill somebody. My friend Loretta was saying the other day how great
those cocktail parties were. I didn't say anything. They were
horrible."

"So tell her, mom."

"I think I'll call her up and tell her."

One weekend I flew home to talk to my father's brother
for the first time in fifteen years. I had never talked to him
about my father. I stayed with my cousin Ann, who dug up
old photographs, including a letter my father had written to
this brother at the height of the Depression, advising him
not to go live in Paris:

With all its excellence, Europe has absolutely nothing to
add in the way of background to a man who is not in a
position to spend a great deal for it and pay for it. Poverty
in Europe would defeat the primary purposes of your
plan. I know, although as you know, I have never been
there.

and

What would it avail to eat and sleep in Paris (if that) if
you could not avail yourself of what Paris has to offer?
What good to be in France if you were tied down to a
4 x 8 room with a bug-ridden bed in a "pension"if you couldn't travel-if you couldn't attend L'Opera or
L'Opera Comique when you reasonably wanted to-if
you didn't have the price of the requisite number of
"aperitifs" at the Cafe de la Paix or any other cafe you felt
like sitting at. What good the whole damned works if you
didn't have the margin d'argent to afford you that minimum flexibility to make the whole experience a liberalizing influence.

His little brother took his advice and stayed home. My father, who was six years older and already working, eventually supported him through law school. I wonder if my
father would have wanted me to go to Europe? What would
life have been like? Would we have been very rich (like Mr.
D)? What would it have been like to rebel against a real father (like my sister got to do), instead of inventing an imaginary
one? And would I have had the same suspicions, the same
secrets, would I have even wanted to know French?

When my brother read my father's letter he was struck
like me by all the envious detail about Paris, the Cafe de la
Paix and the Opera and the size of the room, and as a kind of
afterthought, he said to me: "Remember, they used to speak
to each other in French all the time when they didn't want
us to understand."

"What do you mean? They didn't know any French."

"Oh, yes they did, they used their college French, they
used to say things all the time right in front of us."

If I try really hard, I can just remember what their college
French sounded like, their funny flat "r"s and the highminded tone. And then it fades away.

While I was home that weekend I went out to the lake
where I grew up and I talked to the people who live in the
lake house now. I took a photograph of the water in the exact spot where the dock had been, where my father and I
were together in the minutes before he died. In the photo I
took, the lake looks dark and churning and a little oily, from
all the motorboats. I remembered my father now, not just
the monument I built to house him. I remembered his slow
deliberateness; I remember not knowing whether he was
slowing down for me, a child, or whether he was trying to
cover up the clumsiness of a few too many drinks. I remember his voice, too, every syllable stretched out and the raspiness of tobacco in it. I see myself back there on the dock the
day of my eighth birthday, the day of his funeral, trying to
paint the trees across the water, and mad, because I couldn't
get my trees to look like the real ones.

The first day of class. I look out over my classroom. Most
of the students are just back from their junior year. They
have that look-the way they wear their clothes and part
their hair. I see it in their eyes, they're transformed, they
want me to help them keep it all going.

I haven't been in France for six months and I'm rusty, I'm
out of shape for French. I'm in the middle of a sentence and
I wonder how I'm going to get to the end, my intonation is
off a little and I hear some air in my "p"s. I start correcting
myself, I'm feeling double. I say the ritual words, a welcome
to the course, and I settle down. I'm in my French persona.

In graduate school one of our classmates took an overdose of insulin and went into a coma; when he came out, he
had severe brain damage. His name was Larry. He couldn't
speak much at all and when we visited him we tried speaking to him in French. We wanted to think that the French
was hidden safe somewhere inside him, waiting for us to
coax it out. But he had lost his French completely.

Why did I think of him just now, when I'm so near the
end of my story? Because sometimes I don't want to need
French so much. I want to be free of it. No more secret lan guage, no more veering off, no more wanting in and never
quite getting there. Because I can't imagine not having
French. I think I would starve without it.

I can't stand not to be in France in June, the month of my
birthday and the month my father died. The smells and
sounds in the air are too strong at home-the newly cut
grass, the fireflies, all the sounds of his death. So every year
around the same time, I start speaking to myself in French
and dreaming in French, and swearing in French when I'm
driving my car. Maybe this book will put a stop to it.