Madame Mieux’s laughter preceded her like a warning siren. She taught French in a loud raucous voice that went with that language as smoothly as wool with silk, though her gutturals were okay and her r’s rolled like dice. Madame Mieux had breasts, and breasts bothered Joey. He preferred them hidden under clothes that billowed. Madame Mieux used makeup, and that was disapproved of; she wore tight skirts, and that was frowned on; she hennaed her hair in a style she said was à la française, and that was widely thought vulgar; she collected bracelets on her wrists, and that was deemed tasteless; she hobbled about on open-toed high heels that made her look ridiculous; she put her hand on your arm when she spoke, her eyes widened as if to swallow your ears; and her accent was so fraudulent as to mock your meager understanding of la patrie and la parole.
She appeared to take a fancy to Joey, who had initially enrolled in enfant French in order to avoid Latin for at least another semester. He was told that Latin would help his English, but it was Latin that was dead. German was the other tongue that the academy was prepared to make you wag with some proficiency, but when, during his application interview, he saw that knowledge of German was, in his case, assumed, he kept contentedly quiet and let them believe what he had only let on. It was a technique he would perfect. So to graduate he had to have French. Madame Mieux was a spilling handful, however, and he began to have doubts that he would make it. At first Joey appreciated her apparently genuine vulgarity in such a crowd of stodges. As it proved, she was a deceiver, too. She came from some coarse place in New York City; she was an old maid and not an old madame; her hair wasn’t hennaed, she wore a red wig; and she yelled in her classes and stood close to talk because she was hard of hearing. Every student of hers eventually discovered these things — it was what they learned.
However, in addition, Joey acquired this: among Madame Mieux’s affectations was a love of French music, and indeed she could do a good imitation of Edith Piaf growling the verses of “La Vie en Rose.” One day, on a portable player that Mr. Hirk would have listened to without complaint, she played for the class a song by Hector Berlioz. Listen to the diction, she admonished them. The song was called “Absence” and was sung by Eleanor Stebber, of whom Joey had dimly heard. Now he understood what was meant by “the long line.” He was transfixed. Here was a purity, a beauty, of which he knew too little to dream.
The rows of impassive faces alongside him — listening to the diction, he supposed — made him realize how lucky he was that he could hear what was being sung and how unlucky he was that he could neither sing nor write nor critique but simply be moved by this poignant work whose words he understood only through the sound of the song itself, having let his attention to the diction slip. It was his solace, his secret delight, his cherished difference, and because his expression was probably as wooden as the others’, his response was as hidden as a bee in a blossom. Yet Madame Mieux had caught something. Her quest for a protégé had sharpened her faculties. She had seen light like the shadow of a cloud cross his face. It was no doubt on account of the diction.
When the song was over, she said to the class: This lady was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. If she can speak French, so can you. Wheeling, West Virginia, Joey thought, running the words back and forth between his ears, what a paradisal place the name must designate. A number of years had to be disposed of before Joey discovered that the divine singer was Eleanor Steber, pronounced “Steeber,” not the Stebber of Madame Mieux’s mangling. Marcella Sembrich, Eleanor Steber: worth a caress.
Madame Mieux scribbled a note to Joey on one of his examination papers. It was a vapid vocabulary and conjugation test that she had decided to award a C even though a minus should have been added — her note said. Your classroom demeanor shows promise, she wrote, beginning to pencil her observation in French, a gesture that she then thought better of and crossed out. Joey knew what “demeanor” meant. It meant she had designs. Had she, in class, been more properly dressed, this thought would not have crossed his mind, for he was not vain about his person or interested in hers. She asked Joey to fetch books from the library for her. Delivering them to her office, he was requested to fill a vase with water from the bubbler in the hall to refresh a few flowers she was rearranging. At receipt of them she grabbed him and delivered a peck to each cheek. She saw how red her busses left him, and this encouraged her. See you in class, she said to his retreating back in a tone she usually reserved for speaking to her cat. An angora, it lay its swollen body down to sleep in a basket that Madame Mieux parked on the windowsill in her office. There it could look out without opening its eyes.
Sundays he would sometimes hitch a ride into town to see his mother. They’d have dinner together and chat. Miriam would tend to fall into reminiscence if Joey did not keep his hold firmly on their present life. Madame Mieux was useful for that. As Madame was presented to her, Miriam could only be amused, and she asked detailed questions about the teacher’s dress, questions that sharpened Joey’s eye for such things. Miriam concluded that Madame Mieux favored autumnal colors — rust, plum, ocher, tan, mauve — because they complimented her henna dye job. Miriam, whose hair had been jet as a Jew, and blond when English, insisted that, though it was true that Europeans, the French in sad particular, used henna as if it were soap, nothing whatever went with it but the dance hall.
And Miriam wanted to know what the flowers were, and was the vase nice? However, Joey had not done his homework. He had paid no attention, disappointing still one more expectation. Well, it’s better to have your teacher sweet on you than you sweet on your teacher. Maybe you can get a B out of her. Joey wondered — not aloud — what it would take to reach an A. Nor did he say he didn’t want a B, because that would relight an old argument. His mother did not understand her son’s preference for mediocrity. At first she thought he must be basically a plodder and was pretending to be aiming at what he couldn’t miss. It’s smart to want to be dumb if dumb is all you can do, she said, but where was his ambition? where was his pride? how did he feel when Debbie brought home Bs? and was so bubbly inside when he was so sober? because she did dates and all the things that teensters were supposed to do — examined herself in all the mirrors, felt wounded by the wind, would sulk in her room if the phone that rang wasn’t ringing for her, loved the drumstrum music kids liked at her age … while Joey’s lugubrious preferences were for distant English horns or Saturday orgies at the opera … at least a little Fledermaus, Miriam thought, a bit of Gypsy Baron, would be a relief.