The French Connection

France forms the bookends of my parents’ five-year marriage, almost all of it spent in that country. Letters they wrote give me details about their move to France in 1955, after they were married in Texas, and their bitter transatlantic split in 1959-1960. In between those dates my brother Cooper and I were born there. After their divorce, France summarized the rancor separating these two wildly mismatched people. As I get older, I look back on their push-and-pull and wonder what might have happened had my French connection remained in place.

In the beginning, newlyweds Shirley and Mark enjoyed their new life. Married that March in McAllen, Texas, my mother had flown to France to connect with my father, who had moved to France to pursue a career in the auto industry while working a day job as a mechanic on a U.S. Air Force base in Chateauroux. A typed single-spaced letter my mother wrote to Dearest Ones (presumably her parents and sister in Tyler, Texas) on August 3, 1955 brims with details about the TWA flight from Idlewild (now JFK) Airport in New York, to Gander, Newfoundland, to Paris. After reuniting, they were Americans in Paris. My mother wrote, “Wednesday we walked to the section where the fine shops are. All the shops are beautiful—didn’t buy anything except a thing for my hair.”

Stylish at the auto show.

Saturday they took the train to Chateauroux, a trip of a bit more than two hours. She related: “Mark thought he could rent a car, but couldn’t—we did rent a two wheel, two seater Vespa scooter. You should have seen us—especially me in a tight skirt. No one pays any attention to you.”

Signs of dissatisfaction appear immediately. “Monday I was awful lonesome, but kept busy, mostly washing. Visited the little house for a while with the Sgt.’s wife and at 6:00 Mark came in and I opened cans and we ate. . . Yesterday I washed some more and then walked to Niberne, a town about 1 ¾ miles from here and bought bread. I wanted two loaves but I must have said twa instead of du and ended up with three of them. Had a cup of French coffee and walked home.” Later in the day they looked at apartments in Chateauroux. She wrote, “Mark likes it here in the country, but it is too lonely since cleaning is nothing and then all I have to do is read or sit. So into town we go. Too, I want a bathroom of my own.”

Her first impressions of the locals were very positive. “The French seem to be nice people and the country is all like a picture. The flowers are so beautiful I can’t describe them, and Daddy, you would love the gardens, they are about the size of our backyard and have two rows of all kinds of vegetables.”

“Mark looks wonderful—it is so nice to be with him again—haven’t been mad a time, yet.” That is offhand comment, in retrospect, was ominous.

My father typed a paragraph at the end of the letter. “Dear folks, now you know about Paris. Actually we only hit the high spots—and we ate at some really crazy restaurants, Russian food on flaming swords—snails, all kinds of things. Shirl is happy about the week in Paris and as soon as we really get settled we will write more often. Love, Mark.”

I have little other documentation of the four years my parents spent in France. My brother and I were both born there at the base’s hospital. Photo albums show happy scenes, my parents in stylish outfits at car shows. I’m decked out in cute toddler clothes and a beret, and clutch baguettes bigger than me.

Fed up with financial and personality clashes, my mother returned to Tyler with my brother and me in 1959. Dad stayed in France. She exchanged rancorous letters with him via airmail. She saw him as financially feckless, he sneered that she needed to go to charm school. In 1960 she moved to her hometown of Mission, Texas and there we remained.

She emphatically stated her feelings in her will from January 27, 1960, signed when she was 39 years old. The will said:

I realize I have made no provision in this will for my husband, MARK K. WALLACH. We are not now living together as husband and wife and the greatest portion of my estate consists of property which I have inherited from my father and mother, JARED J. LISSNER and EVA M. LISSNER, and of property I owned prior to my marriage. In view of these facts it is my intention that my said husband should receive no share of my estate, since it is my wish and judgment that my estate should pass to and vest in my children.

The Hidalgo County Recordings column in the McAllen Monitor of May 7, 1961, listed her divorce suit filed in the 92^nd District Court in Edinburg. I know because she saved the clipping—given to her in a card that said “The News is Out” with a note on the inside: “Shirley, Here Tiz. I’ll get the stamp on next trip, D.” She kept the card and clipping in her wedding album. Was she being ironic, sentimental or simply a thorough chronicler of her life, as evidenced that she often typed letters on carbon paper to keep her own copy? In the early 1980s I did exactly that when I wrote letters to her.

I remember nothing of France, although I must have known as much French as a two-year old could learn. We traded the South of France for the South of Texas, two geographies that defined my parents’ wildly divergent personalities.

Our home had some evidence of France. The kitchen featured a framed drawing of dogs peeing against a wall, a famous piece popular with tourists by Boris O’Klein called “Naughty Dogs."  We had the photo albums. My mother was good friends with a saleswoman named Paulette with a charming French accent at her favorite clothing store, the Valley Mercantile in McAllen. My brother and I learned whatever French songs American kids knew at the time, like “Frère Jacques.” Classmates in my elementary school thought I had trouble pronouncing the letter "r."

France insinuated itself into my parents’ acidic views of each other. My mother saw it as the symbol of what she loathed about my father: his Eurocentric snobbery, his disdain for her and her Texas viewpoint, his self-absorption. My father lamented that my brother and I didn’t speak French, dressed like ranch hands rather than boulevardiers, didn’t travel around Europe, didn’t appreciate opera, ballet and art. and didn't have love affairs with beautiful older women like all the sophisticated French (men) do. No middle ground existed in their positions.

Needless to say, France, the land of my birth, never ranked high on my list of adolescent interests. To do so felt like a betrayal of our mother. I look Spanish in high school, not French. If I had dual citizenship, it never meant anything. Any vestigial knowledge of the language stayed buried in me. I took Spanish rather than French in high school and college, then Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Portuguese as an adult with a language-learning obsession.

Still, France mattered as the empty place in my earliest memory where my parents were a couple and Cooper and I absorbed the local culture.

I visited France in September 1984 during a month in Europe. My mother had died of cancer that January, I was a freelance writer between relationships and so I locked the door on my Brooklyn studio apartment and jetted off on Virgin Atlantic for the extended travel I never had after college. After London, I moved on to Paris and bought train tickets for the two-hour trip to Chateauroux.

Returning to Paris.

I remember feeling anxious on the train. What was I doing? I didn’t speak the language and knew nothing about my destination other than its name. I wrote about the experience in the December 1984 edition of a short-lived publication called New Men’s News. Titled “In Search of Memories,” it records a forlorn pilgrimage to see where my mother had lived and loved, and where I began living:

I had to see Chateauroux.

I did that during a month-long vacation. Once there, I walked down one road, then back, confused. Now what? The staff at the local tourist office couldn’t speak English; I couldn’t speak French. I indicated with a State Department birth registration form that I wanted to find the Air Force base. They shook their heads.

“Le hospital c’est kaput?” I asked, mangling three languages in one sentence.

“Oui, c’est kaput,” a woman said. She did sketch a route to the old “base Americaine” on a map. With this help I strolled through the noontime streets. I clutched every detail, and thought, “So this is it.” Little cars were parked on the sidewalks, and most stores had closed. Parents and children walked hand in hand, and my throat tightened. There, 25 years earlier, went I.

I walked out of town to a highway. Far away was a toy-like air traffic control tower and the former air base. I thought, “This is far enough.” I took a picture and turned around.

Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody rushed out and gasped, “Monsieur Wallach, oui?” I bought croissants, and got caught in a rain shower. The ordinary events matched the way my mother lived—steady and dependable.

Returning to Paris, I felt relieved and somehow empty . . . A part of me will always be vacant, but the search cleared away the gnawing I felt inside. There’s no place left to go, except headlong into my own history.

That line—“There, 25 years earlier, went I”—reaches out, 40 years later, to describe the French connection I explore. In the past decade, I became a big fan of French music of the eras of Django Reinhardt, Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker and France Gall. And I put a lot of time into French new wave and other genres. I’ve seen many of the classics: Breathless, Jules and Jim, Elevator to the Gallows (with that incredible soundtrack improvised by Miles Davis), Bob le Flambeur, Rififi, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Alphaville, Shoot the Piano Player. The damning Holocaust film La Rafle, about the roundup of Paris Jews in 1942 by French cops, haunts me. 

While French movies from any era are enjoyable, those of the 1950s and 1960s especially resonate. I find myself peering around corners, watching those parents with children, noticing the cars and fashions, mentally strolling the rain-glistened boulevards and casting my mind back to the what-ifs of life.

• What if my parents remained married and we settled into a stable expatriate life?
• What if my parents divorced but my mother remained in France and my brother and I had a bi-cultural upbringing?
• What we my parents divorced and we returned to Texas but our father took us to France for visits to introduce us to what he liked about France and Europe? 

The last is the most plausible scenario, but it requires a radically retooled father with the financial resources to afford a European family vacation, not to mention an ability to accept and bond with boys from Texas. Both points, I know from experience, were in the realm of fantasy.

I can't change the past but I can change the present, and I did. Since that trip to Chateauroux, self-acceptance and curiosity replaced that vacant feeling. That didn't happen tout de suite, but in my own sweet time. And I'm sure I'll be back to France. A visit, some maturation and that stack of airmail letters colored in some of the blank spaces of my life’s cartography.

What more can I say? C’est la vie.