Luke and I went Christmas shopping after he recovered. He desperately believes in Santa—we have sold it hard, I don’t know why—and has been trying to arrange his Christmas list to fit the dimensions of Santa’s sack, which he studies in illustration. “You know what is the problem?” he says as he turns from the Bon Marche toy catalog to his Thomas Nast pictures of Santa. “I don’t think that a big race set is a good idea; it won’t fit.” He loves the Christmas windows and a Louis Armstrong song called “Zat You, Santa Claus?”
After nearly four years in Paris he has developed a complicated, defensive sense of his own apartness, rather like his dad’s.
He recognizes that his parents, his father particularly, speaks with an Accent, and this brings onto him exactly the shame that my grandfather must have felt when his Yiddish-speaking father arrived to talk to his teachers at a Philadelphia public school. I try to have solid, parental discussions with his teachers, but as I do, I realize, uneasily, that in his eyes I am the alter kocker, the comic immigrant.
“Zo, how the boy does?” he hears me saying in effect. “He is good boy, no? He is feeling out the homeworks, isn’t he?” I can see his small frame shudder, just perceptibly, at his father’s words. I had thought to bring him the suavity of the French gamin, and instead I have brought onto him the shame of the immigrant child.
I sense too that he is in a larger confusion: What’s French, what’s American, where am I? His French vocabulary is very large, but he doesn’t like to use it, or show it, except in extremis. (He always seems to know the answer to the question, in even the most rapid and complicated French, “Would you like a little treat/candy/pastry?”) A family is a civilization, and a language is a culture, and he is left with a sense of being doubly islanded. Watching the children at the gardens, he turns to me. “All children in New York speak English?” he demands. Yes, I tell him, and he imagines the unthinkable: a world of English speakers, where English is the public, not the private, language.
When we go out to eat—at the Balzar or at a nice French-American place called the Cafe Parisien—we play the game of Imaginary Restaurants, making up places we would like to open. (My best so far is a Franco-American inn specializing in game, called Les Fauves.) He has invented a restaurant that will be called the Toy Store Restaurant, and will serve an eclectic menu, French and American: baked chicken—fresh from the oven, hamburgers—fresh from the oven! And something everyone likes (dramatic pause): fruit salad! He has intuited his way toward a New York coffee shop.
But: “No French people,” he says decisively. “No French people!” I say, with genuine shock; increasing his French-bashing was not the reason we came here.
“No,” he says. “I’m the owner, and it would be too nervous.” He sees himself as the next Toots Shor, and wants to feel relaxed, ready to put an arm around his clients and pound their backs, without worrying if he remembers the word, which language he is speaking.
In other, unconscious ways he is thoroughly French and will, I fear, be lost in New York when we go back. He ate a hamburger for the first time on July 4. He took three bites, pushed it away, had some ice cream, his normal routine, but the next morning he said, “I liked the hamburger”—decisively—“but I did not like that sauce you served with it.”
“What sauce?” I said, puzzled. I hadn’t made a sauce. “That red sauce,” he said, disdainfully, with exactly the expression I have seen on the face of Jean-Pierre Quelin, the food critic of Le Monde, when he gets a corked glass of wine. “I did not like that red sauce.” He means, of course, the Heinz ketchup, bought at La Grande Epicerie, in the American specialties section.
When he went back to New York, his one trip, to interview at a New York nursery school, where you have to go a year and a half before you enter, he was asked what he liked to eat for breakfast, and he said, “Croissants and confiture.” Everybody laughed, thought it was cute, though he was being serious as hell. It is, perhaps, a truth of expatriate children that rather than grow up with two civilizations, they grow up with less than one, unable somehow to plug in the civilization at home with the big one around. They grow up, we have noticed with other kids, achingly polite, and watchful and skilled, “adult,” and guarded.
His one island of calm and certainty remains the Luxembourg Gardens. He is master there, and he has his itinerary nearly perfectly arranged: first the playground, then the carousel, then the ponies, if there’s time, and then a crepe from the crepe man. He rides the horses now, upright, and I feel sure that any day now he will ask for a stick.
Nothing stops the wheel, though, and now even the puppet shows have been revolutionized: Las Vegasized, Americanized, globalized. At God knows what expense, and rolling dice of a size I can only imagine, this Christmas M. Desarthis discarded the reliable run of Cochons and Tresors and launched an entirely new kind of spectacular called La Valise Enchantee, complete with an original recorded score, with drums and organs, and black backgrounds and animated fluorescent fish and squirrels. In terms of his little park theater this is a ratchet up of enormous dimensions—and all very well done by a staff of four new puppeteers, though with the slight tang of the lounge act.
I can only imagine that M. Desarthis, in the French manner, decided that he was slipping behind the times and thought of this as a way to modernize. It couldn’t be a bigger hit with Luca, who plays the cassette we bought of the show and has committed it to memory, racing over the French word he doesn’t know with suave Sid Caesar inventions: “Quand il etait tres petit, sa maman s’amusait… hunsta whoosta weestsa….” I like the new show, but I am worried about what is going to happen to the Cochons.
On Christmas Eve we saw a department-store Santa at Hediard, shopping for champagne. We stood in line behind him; Luke was not a bit shaken. When we got home, he said to his mother:
“We saw Santa at Hediard. I think he was just getting a little cheap wine for his elves.”
The lyceens, the high school students, are on strike this Christmas, and we see them march by the windows of our new apartment along the boulevard Raspail. Like the protesters in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno who march with the banner “Less Bread! More Taxes!” the lyceens are, officially, striking for more classes and harder teachers. But their strike has nearly universal support: The government is for it; the opposition is for it; the press is for it.
What is startling and instructive to an outsider is how earnest the French lyceens look as they march; they have a worn-out, exhausted, genuinely oppressed look that is miles away from the overfed, ironic complacency that American kids of the same age have. This is the consequence of the school system. The lyceens normal, nonstriking day begins at eight-thirty in the morning and often runs to six o’clock in the evening and, for all the reforms that have been attempted in the last twenty years, is still conducted in an atmosphere of rote-learning, reflexive authoritarianism. (You see even ten- and eleven-year-olds emerging from school at the end of the day pale as veal, clutching for a pain aux raisins, starved for a little pleasure.)