Dear old Fred

How I loved to round the corner on my trudge home from school on Wednesday afternoons to see Fred’s dull orange Citroen 2CV parked in our circular drive. Like every Wednesday after school in 1973, we were about to embark on an adventure to a far-distant land with our own private French instructor and his genuine swag, charm, and unscrupulously sadistic ways.

We met Fred one night at a dinner party at my uncle’s where Fred happened to start speaking to my middle sister in French. She, being exceedingly bright, was able to impress Fred enough to cause him to run off, almost literally, singing her praises to my uncle, which was how this whole idea about private French lessons got started.

Fred looked a bit like the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. He taught at a French lycee in Los Angeles where he also consulted on movies and gave private lessons (among which his favorite had to be Raquel Welch considering the amount of time he spent telling us about a particularly tight sweater she’d been wearing).

I was the oldest sibling, but I knew the least about the French language–nothing! When my uncle asked me what sort of lessons I’d be interested in, he assumed I’d say tennis, but I surprised him about wanting to learn French. My sisters had both taken it in school and my middle sister was already in her second year–they were both worthy. But I was about to be relegated to the tennis court, which was why I had to be adamant. My boyfriend’s family spoke bits of French, which piqued my curiosity in the first place. I had to jump at this opportunity.

During our first class together we sat around the kitchen table with Fred, a bit giggly and trepidatious, getting acquainted with each other and our new textbooks. He sat there for a while with us and then stood up continuing his lecture. He sauntered around the table the way people do when they’re thinking. He then began standing for most of the lessons, enacting a charming yet authoritarian position with all of the charismatic demeanor of every Frenchman you’d ever seen, though he never smoked cigarettes inside (thankfully, because these were the days when people did). He made quick work of teasing us with whatever weaknesses he could find. We quickly grew on each other.

His drink of choice was iced coffee with sugar, but that was because the outside temperatures sometimes ran into the 100 degrees F. He would arrive parched after the drive, and who knew if the air conditioner worked in that car of his. Until that time I hadn’t even heard of iced coffee and I didn’t know how he could drink such a substance. But I got one ready for him at the start of the lesson. It probably helped to make him even more irritable in retrospect.

Soon we got along so famously that Fred would dictatorially walk around the table behind us until he would stop in back of one of us and thuggishly punch one shoulder. Then he’d take his hand and push said shoulder down while repeating the question, then he’d push the shoulder harder, interrogating and torturing us for incorrectly conjugating a verb. We simultaneously giggled and whimpered, which wasn’t conducive to flowing thoughts. Then he’d let up, just before terminal damage began. Thankfully, he was charming and had a French accent; otherwise, he would never have gotten away with that!

He inflicted another type of punishment onto my youngest sister when one day he decided to make her copy the entire textbook verbatim.  When she finally completed it and presented the laboriously handwritten packet to him, he took it from her and with his typical French smirk and without even giving her the decency to admire the pages, he ripped them up in front of her face. She remembers it to this day with residual bitterness, although I can only hope that she isn’t still harboring it!

It also didn’t take long before I was up and out of my seat two-thirds through our three-hour class to prepare dinner for all of us. No one minded, because they all liked to eat.

In a single-parent family, when the only parent in the home is an alcoholic, it’s a comfort to have one solid thing that you can count on.  And that thing was Fred. Arriving at a time when we needed stability the most, he proved a worthy force–the French lessons  themselves were a mere side note.  He could have been teaching Caligraphy, Astronomy, or how to make paper airplanes. I’m quite sure he has no idea just how much he meant even though I did try to tell him once.

After he moved back to France to take care of his aging parents. who have both since passed, we got back in touch over the phone a few times. He kept telling me, “I’m an old man now,” but his young voice laughed like it used to do. He kept asking me to repeat myself, and I obliged knowing that my shoulders were safe.