Dreaming in French

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In a way, my parents were both on the run, Astrid from Appalachia, and Frank from whatever it was in America that constrained his very being. My father came from a wealthy Connecticut family that expected its sons to be lawyers, and though Frank had loved music more than law, he had followed in his father's footsteps. I always wondered why he didn't rebel. In his mild-mannered way, he, too, had a wild streak — after all, he married Astrid — but he claimed he had no talent for music, and maybe that was true, though Astrid said he simply lacked the courage of his convictions.

Frank's mother didn't approve of Astrid. She found her wild and bohemian and, it was obscurely understood, lower class. She made overtures after they were married at City Hall, inviting them to lunch in Greenwich and presenting them with a punch bowl in a Tiffany box, but the damage was done and neither Astrid nor my father ever entirely forgave her. I had only met her twice, the second time when I was eight and we were returning to New York from my Kentucky grandmother's funeral. We drove up to Connecticut, where we sat through a formal lunch in a vast blue dining room, after which Lea and I were presented with identical leather-bound copies of the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I don't think Lea ever read hers, but I devoured Little House in the Big Woods on the plane. Though I barely knew her, I felt a little sorry for my Connecticut grandmother. Her Christmas and birthday presents always included a card expressing the wish that we could see each other more often, but when I pointed this out to Frank, he replied that there was nothing to prevent her from coming to France. She never did, though, and we rarely traveled to America. Our home was in Paris and Frank saw no reason to drag us back and forth across the ocean when there were so many more pleasant places in Europe to visit.

My parents met in New York, where Frank worked for a law firm and Astrid had come to be an actress, boarding a Greyhound bus in Louisville with ten dollars in one pocket and the address of Radio City Music Hall in the other. You would think that Astrid would have been a natural on the stage but, like most extravagant personalities, she was only good at playing herself. She did enjoy a moderate success as a chorus girl, because of her lovely, long legs, but she was too tall to be a leading lady, and by the time Frank came along, she was working as a coat-check girl at Shrafft's and wondering what had happened to her dreams.

She and Frank met on the Madison Avenue bus, where he sat on her hat. Astrid always believed that luck only comes to those who tempt it, and she had bought the hat at Bergdorf's with her last thirty dollars, a sum that equaled her monthly rent on Cornelia Street. The hat was sitting on the next seat, and when Frank came along, he didn't see the box and sat right on it, crushing it under his weight.Astrid let out a shriek. She was looking particularly fetching that day, in a cherry-red Claire McCardell dress with a yellow belt, and when she shrieked, Frank first thought she was mad and, then, after he got a look at her, realized she was the most striking woman he had ever seen. Astrid grandly refused to let him replace the hat, but accepted an invitation to dinner at Lutèce. That night, she entered another world, where waiters called her Madame and served her rich foods in creamy puddles. It was the first fancy meal she had ever had, and she reveled in every morsel, from the quenelles de brochet sauce Nantua to the bombe glacée that came for dessert, rimy and sumptuous on its silver platter. My mother always said that luxury is wasted on the rich, that you have to have been brought up on Velveeta and crackers in order to truly appreciate the fine things in life. Afterward, they took a carriage ride through Central Park. It was a balmy spring night; the Japanese cherries around the reservoir were in bloom. By then they were just soft shapes in the dark, but their scent perfumed the air. Frank held her hand and asked her to marry him. She thought he was kidding, but then she looked in his eyes and realized he was serious. "Why don't you sleep on it?" she said.

He did, and in due course, Astrid moved in to his Gramercy Park apartment, to the dismay of his parents, and the delight of her sister, Maybelle, who stayed with them when she visited New York. Maybelle wasn't fat back then, and though she didn't have Astrid's sense of style, she was a flirt of the first order and quite turned the head of Frank's colleague Phil Atwater, who joined the ranks of the many rich men Maybelle might have married, if they'd only behaved like gentlemen.That spring, to make up for their City Hall wedding, Frank took Astrid to Paris on the Queen Mary. They traveled first class and Astrid wore a different cocktail dress every night. In those days she hadn't yet learned to flout convention, and she dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. I have a picture of her standing on the deck in cat-eye sunglasses, her hair caught back in a scarf, and if you didn't know anything about her, you would think she had spent her life on ships, when the truth was that, until that day, she had never even seen the ocean.

My parents found themselves in Paris. There was something in them both that could only flourish in exile, like plants that do better in hothouses than in their natural habitat. They stayed at the Montalembert and strolled over to the Deux Magots every afternoon, where they sat on the terrace and Frank talked about the existentialists. In fact my father didn't care for Sartre and Camus; he found them depressing and boorish. His true loves were Balzac and Maupassant, whom he had studied at Yale. Back then, as she would have been the first to admit, Astrid couldn't have told one from the other, but, thirsty for culture, she soaked it all up like a sponge.The night before their return to New York, she wondered out loud why they had to go back. What was the point of having money if you couldn't do what you wanted with it? Frank was so seduced by this notion, which ran counter to all his family's precepts on thrift and prudence, that he agreed; though he insisted later that they go back to New York so he could get himself transferred to his firm's Paris office, prudence winning out in the end, as it usually did with my father.

It is said that Americans come to Paris to reinvent themselves, and my parents were no exception. Unmoored from his Yankee roots, Frank was finally able to become the gentleman scholar he had always wanted to be, devoting himself to his library and the collection of rare opera recordings that would in time consume most of his leisure. It was Astrid, however, who underwent the truly glorious transformation: The French love caractère, and my mother had caractère to burn, as well as the adaptive skills of a chameleon.Paris was her finishing school, the atelier in which, layer by layer, she acquired her polish, a process aided by the fact that, as she would have been the first to tell you, the French can't tell a Rockefeller from a hillbilly. She started with the usual stints at Alliance Française and Cordon Bleu, conjugating irregular verbs and making béchamel with the other American ladies, but as she told Frank, she hadn't come to Paris to become Betty Housewife. Then she met Grace, who explained that no one expects Americans to speak French, let alone cook.

After they returned from Afghanistan,Astrid had the apartment painted. She hired one of Grace's protégés, a Chilean Maoist on the run from the Pinochet regime. "We need a painter, not a terrorist," Frank objected, but she talked him into it in the end, assuring him that Armando had been trained as a housepainter. This turned out to be a slight exaggeration, but before my father could protest any further, Armando had moved into our chambre de bonne, his sole possessions a guitar and a Che Guevara poster that he affixed over the bed. Lea was sure he was going to murder us all in our sleep, but I was smitten.

"No more neutrals!"Astrid cried."I want color!"Armando obliged her with a shrug, as if he had long grown used to the caprices of rich women. He painted the dining room cerise and the hallway lapis, the living room the vibrant yellow of buttercups. I followed him from room to room, making cow eyes and offering him Cokes. Astrid kept cases of them in the fridge — it was the one thing she missed about America — and he would gulp them down thirstily, handing me back the empty bottle with a disdainful expression. When he was finished, the apartment looked like a jewel box, and it was generally felt that Astrid had pulled off a coup. "She has some nerve, your mother," Grace said admiringly. Frank was the only one who noticed that the corners were sloppy, and that Armando had only done one coat in the hallway.

Armando hung around for a few more weeks. Frank, who enjoyed a political debate, tried to engage him a couple times at the dinner table, but Armando just frowned and changed the subject, until Frank finally gave up.As he didn't seem like the type of person who would blow things up, I assumed that he had done something more intellectual, like write songs against the government or distribute leaflets, which people were always doing in Paris. Then one day he disappeared, without even leaving a note. I thought he must have had a reason. Pinochet's henchmen must have tracked him down, maybe even kidnapped him. He was probably in danger. In my bed at night, I played scenarios in my head where I saved him and, in his gratitude, he pledged eternal love to me. Then Lea saw him with a girl in the Luxembourg Gardens.Typical, she said, but I was crushed, and I resolved to never love again.

Copyright © 2009 by Megan McAndrew