Air Force Brat

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  The village, of course, had a boulangerie and a charcuterie, although I don’t remember ever seeing a fresh market there. Many of the larger towns set up an outdoor market once a week or twice a month but the backwater villages were lucky to have their own bakery. Some of the villages didn’t even have that. Thionville, the little neighboring village that was pummeled so thoroughly during the last skirmish between the Allies and the Germans was merely on the bread route of a traveling bakery van. This may seem like no biggie to most Americans, but to a Frenchman, not having access to constant loaves of French bread was almost tragic.

  While my mother rarely shopped in the village for anything she needed, it was my happy responsibility to stop by the village boulangerie every afternoon after school to pick up the dinner baguette. Madame would singsong greet me as I entered: “Bonjour, Suzanne!” as if I were going to spend more than half a franc or buy more than one baton of bread. For a kid, being so genuinely welcomed every day by an adult was quite a rush.

  Ars even had a patisserie and the boys and I loved to look at all the beautifully formed confections in the window. Once, Tommy dug deep in his Levi’s pockets to purchase an incredible bright green frog with bulging silver dragees for eyes. Unfortunately, one bite revealed that the delectable craupaud was filled with brandy. The sharp disappointment (not to mention discomfort) in my brother’s face remains an indelible memory for me.

  Other foods indigenous to the area, but ones that never made it across the Atlantic, were the many dishes made from the truly ubiquitous Mirabelle plum. These plums grew everywhere in the area and the villagers used them in tarts, sauces, puddings, breads and the awful Mirabelle dessert wine. My mother loathed the wine, but my father didn’t mind it a bit.

  I might mention here that the effect on my mother of moving with four children across the Atlantic to rural France. An elegant woman, not given to “roughing it” in any sense, my mother was a gifted painter. She was sensitive to beauty and had an easy smile and a wonderful sense of humor. The last served her well during our tenure in Ars-sur-Moselle.

  Since my brothers and I spent most of our days at school, and my father was on base, the day to day of village life fell to my mother. She was the one who spoke to the coal man, arranged pick up with the garbage collector, planned and cooked meals in a village where she spoke almost no French.

  Adapting quickly to her primitive surroundings in France, my mother set up her canvases and oils to capture the little village streets and, once winter came, the snowy hilltops visible from our home’s balcony. Even so, the jolt of leaving the States with all its comforts and conveniences (not to mention the cocktail dresses and parties) to the dark, cold and barebones little spot on the map in France was formidable.

  My mother and I were toured Europe together in the late eighties. One day we had lunch at a charming hotel across from the Bahnhoff in Zurich. Over a lovely salmon and glass of wine, she mentioned that she'd been to Switzerland once before, many years earlier. Seems she and my father had made a middle-of-the-night run to Basel from Kaiserslautern when a visiting American friend they were entertaining realized she had missed her return flight to where ever she was supposed to be and would need to catch up with her party in Switzerland. I think, as the story goes, that it was my father who encouraged her to stay (this was at the point when the wine hadn't yet begun to flow into a nonstop river.) He came up with the idea that he'd drive her to Basel (about four hours each way) in another couple hours. (God! Don't stop the party, for heaven's sake!) The idea seemed a solid one until it came time to go and it became clear that my mother, as usual, was the only one still fit to drive. My father, ever gallant, couldn't allow my mom to drive to Switzerland alone (after all, the whole idea had been his), so, they quietly left the apartment (and four sleeping dependents), and drove all night, round trip, to Switzerland. They were back before we woke the next morning (a school day) and the Rice Krispies were popping and crackling in our bowls as per usual.

  I have several vivid memories of my beautiful, ivory-skinned mother, her thick auburn hair pushed back in a silk scarf, the sleeves of her cashmere pullover pushed up as she shoveled coal in the basement of our French house to keep us warm during the treacherous French winters. My father, often trapped at the base by bad weather and the twenty twenty miles of now impassable French roads, or sometimes just the demands of his command, was frequently absent from our experience “on the economy.”

  This particular memory also includes Tommy perched nearby on the first stone step of the basement stairs leading to the kitchen, with a pile of rocks in his lap to fire off at the rats if they scurried too near my mother. I wasn’t allowed in the basement during these operations but an occasional squeal from my mother would send me and my younger brothers flying halfway down the stairs, usually in time to see the back end of one or two large rats with tails as long as shoe strings whipping behind them as they disappeared into the dark corners of the basement.

  Chapter Six

  Military Schools and Education

  We settled quickly into village life. Since the school year was about to begin, my father divided us children up among three schools. None of them was convenient, least of all the one he chose for me in the heart of the village. My older brother Tommy rode the bus to the air base every morning. (It was driven by an insane, personable, older airman who’d been busted down twice to airman first class for God knows what crimes). Tommy’s round trip to Chambley and Ars took two hours a day. Longer, once winter came, and sometimes he could not come home at all due to impassable roads in villages without snowplows. Then he stayed with my father at the BOQ, grateful to have “the Old Man” all to himself.

  Kevin and Terry took a smaller, much older bus to the American Army School in Metz. From what I can remember and was later told, most overseas base schools were ill-equipped and lacked in quality teachers. My own gigantic gaps in education can be traced to this second-rate schooling for dependents overseas. I missed, for example, learning to tell time, embarrassing myself literally hundreds of times before I finally sat down at thirteen with a book and figured it out on my own. I missed the part where long division and fractions were supposed to be taught. I missed anything have to do with American History; it was, oddly, never covered in any class in any grade during my entire tenure at military base schools.

  The teachers were college graduates who had a desire to travel. Many of them were loners, offbeat or just plain weird, in addition to being unqualified to actually teach anyone. In the seventh grade in Kaiserslautern, Germany, for example, I remember taking a test while my young, attractive teacher tapped her pencil and stared at the clock, the picture of impatience. Her weekend travel bag was packed and parked at the foot of her desk. It was Friday and she was ready to bolt to parts unknown, maybe Berlin or Wiesbaden or Paris. I recall she neglected to collect the test papers when the bell finally rang. She just wished us a hurried “happy weekend” and was gone.

  For my schooling in France, my father decided that I was to attend the all girls’ convent school in the village, L’Ecole des Filles. The school was situated in a very old stone building surrounded by a large cement yard enclosed by tall cement walls topped with barbwire fencing. It was separated from the French boys’ school by a narrow alley used only by service trucks. The boys were noisy and rowdy. We could see bits of them in their own enclosed yard from our courtyard. They were patrolled by solemn, gruff-looking monks.

  I know very little of the order of nuns who ran my school. I remember sitting in the office of the Mother Superior with my father when he enrolled me, but I didn’t speak enough French at the time to understand what they said. I only ever caught glimpses of this woman afterwards. My world at the school was ruled by a Granny-Clampett sized woman known simply as “Ma Soeur.” The sound of her name soon came to remind me of the warning hiss of a striking adder.

  Ma Soeur wasn’t nice and Ma Soeur wasn’t happy. Her eyes spoke the truth that her smiling lips and sing-songy voic
e belied: she hated children. She was completely and totally feared by all my classmates—even the “good” ones.

  While I was at the school, I saw Ma Soeur repeatedly demand that little sobbing girls “removez les lunettes” in order that she might more effectively strike them across the cheeks with her ruler. I once saw her rip out months of embroidering in front of the whole class—while she berated and humiliated the poor girl whose gift was, evidently, not needlepoint.

  My own relationship with Ma Soeur was somewhat complicated. Clearly, she was not allowed to strike “l’Amercaine” and yet I may have given her more cause for frustration and fury than any of her obedient, cowering pupils.

  I sat at the back of the class in a double wooden desk that I shared with a girl named Michelle. Michelle was assigned to me to help me along. Because she was considered the smartest girl in the class, the ideas was that I would not drag her down too much.

  The other American girl in the class was Susan Scibetta. She was less of a problem in class because she was totally compliant, extremely gifted, and very quickly fit into the flow of the class day. She was soon getting B’s on her own dictees. I, on the other hand, was apt to disrupt class by asking where the water fountain was (there wasn’t one) and whether or not we got Halloween off.

  Susan sat with Nicole, who was recognized as the second-smartest child in the class. Unlike Michelle, who was big and plain, Nicole was delicate and beautiful with a serene Madonna’s smile. Even so, as smart and sweet and determined to please as both Michelle and Nicole were, in my year there I saw both of them brought to tears by Ma Soeur.

  The schoolroom was large, with a set of four floor- to-ceiling windows on opposing sides of the room. Ma Soeur sat at the front of the room before a cracked blackboard that stretched the full width of the room. The opposing wall, where I sat with Michelle, held the massive double doors that led to the hallway and out to the cement courtyard. My job was to “fermez la porte” whenever someone visited our classroom. This was usually the village priest, who came to torture us every Tuesday with readings from our Catechism and to hear our recitations of the same. If anyone could be more sour and mean-spirited than our little nun, it was “Mon Pere.” Since I wasn’t positive he was in on the “be nice to the Americans” pact that Ma Soeur and the other teachers seemed to abide by, I kept a low profile when Mon Pere visited. It was just as well. While I quickly picked up the language, my recitations were less than perfect and my dictee always a downright disgrace. Much of this was due to my personality: I was a bright but indifferent student—even in American schools. The idea that I needed to memorize four or five pages of French poetry for a solo recitation the next day was almost immediately dismissed by me as unnecessary. I remember Michelle telling me one day that I didn’t need to worry about memorizing a particularly long and boring tract—I just needed to read it over. I needed to read it over “one hundred times!” That initially amused me, I realized it was an insult.

  The school was very primitive. It had been standing for over a hundred years, and looked it. There were no ballpoint pens. We used dip fountain pens that held only a charge of ink for every dip into the well. We had pencils, to be sure, but we did our sums on little chalk slates that we held up when Ma Soeur barked at us, then erased with little pastel-colored sponges.

  Not surprisingly, Ma Soeur tied Michelle’s success together with mine. If I did not perform, Michelle would be punished. It was a painful motivation, forcing me to step out of my natural inclination to “let it slide” and take the “C.” With poor Michelle taking the bullet for my laziness or lack of ambition, I was forced to work harder than I ever had in school before. Many school nights found me in tears trying to commit long strings of incomprehensible foreign words to memory.

  Even with my protected status as an American, there were times when my teacher took her best shot and struck home. I was supposed to always copy Michelle’s dictee in order to improve what could be improved: my handwriting, the occasional recognition of a familiar word, the osmosis understanding of correct French grammar. But it was hard to be dependent on another, to “be the dummy,” as I saw it. Very quickly on, and to Michelle’s dismay, I insisted on writing my own dictee. A dictee was simply a matter of Ma Soeur reading a tract to the class, who would then write it down with correct spelling and punctuation. I remember clearly the first (and last) time I chose to do it on my own. After I finished, Ma Soeur invited me to the head of the class where she smiled broadly, saying over and over again “Verrrry bad, Suzanne!” (This was an insult in itself since she knew I understood French well enough without having to speak to me in English) Then she read my dictee aloud to a nervously laughing class. (They were in a bind: they knew Ma Soeur expected them to laugh derisively at me, but they wanted my favor on the playground later, too). Finally, she placed a ruler into my cahier and ripped out the offending page. This was the extent of her attempt to humiliate or punish me. I remember being embarrassed by the experience, but I had already assessed her as a bully, and got over it quickly.

  Later, on the playground, my friends bustled about me, eager to make amends for having laughed at my abysmal dictee. I was somewhat forgiving of their betrayal since I had to imagine the dictee sounded like something a retarded and drunk foreigner might’ve written, and because they were a good audience to my strutting impersonation of Ma Soeur without too many nervous looks over their shoulders.

  The playground was more like a cement prison yard. There was certainly no playground equipment or grass. There was just us girls and stone walls. The girls liked to cluster around me and the other Susan, and to touch our long hair. Most of them had pixie haircuts and pierced ears. We all wore cotton tabliers—little smocks that kept the ink and chalk dust from our clothes.

  Our recess out in the courtyard was the only time all day we had to eat the lunch we had brought from home. (There was no lunch break or cafeteria.) There were toilets in the school but we girls were not allowed to use them. They were for the Sisters. Instead, there was a small open-air shed at the back of the courtyard that was covered with straw. It stank badly, understandably, and of the few times I poked my head in to check it out, I actually witnessed girls eating their lunch amid the stench while they waited for their friends to finish. I never had difficulty waiting until I got home to use the bathroom.

  Once a week, Ma Soeur would herd us all out into the school courtyard and down the narrow alleyways to the heart of the village to the village Catholic church. The church in Ars is several centuries old, with a parish registry that dates back to 1673. I sat in it every week for Mass, staring up at the cold, forbidding stone walls, the beautiful stained glass windows, and the ancient, faded tapestry of our beaming Lord over the pulpit. The priest would walk laboriously up the winding stone staircase to the pulpit and deliver Mass. We girls were always seated in the first three rows. Once, I remember Ma Soeur leaned over from where she always sat on the aisle and hissed to me that I was not there to enjoy the pretty stain glass glass windows. I guess I must have been smiling or something.

  We had Thursdays off but attended school half days on Saturday. Every Saturday we gathered up our desks’ china inkpots and promenaded up to where Ma Soeur stood at the front of the room dispensing little dippers full of ink into them. We would then pop the little pots back into the holes in our desks for another week of blot-free writing in our cahiers. Making unsightly ink blots in your notebook was a particular pet peeve of Ma Soeur and was guaranteed to get you slapped or, at the very least, screamed at with full-frontal spittle. I often wondered how those poor girls turned out in later years. Did they become militant feminists? Did they turn away from Catholicism? Did they grow up to become meek and obedient wives? Did they start drinking too much at an early age?

  I say my relationship with Ma Soeur was complicated because although I felt fairly certain she did not like me, and resented my presence2 in her classroom as a disruption, she could be nice. Once, during a history lesson—and one that I had
comfortably tuned out of—she was strutting about the classroom and droning on and on about something when suddenly she stopped by my desk and put her hands on the back of my chair. I woke up when she raised her voice and practically shouted: “…at that point the brave Americans came in and SAVED FRANCE!” Instantly, all my classmates clapped and smiled insanely at Susan and me as we took credit for D-Day and the saving of the French Republic. (We were so totally rock stars on the playground later that day.)

  I also remember another time with Ma Soeur which always tempers my picture of her as a total sociopath forced to teach mewling, despicable children. It was early evening on Christmas Eve in the village. I had never seen Ma Soeur outside of the classroom, but I ran into her—both of us alone and she strode over to me, grabbed my hand and shook it, saying “Joyeux Noel, Suzanne,” with tears in her eyes. I suppose if anything could move her to joy or emotion, it might be the birthday of our Savior. But there was something else in the way she reached out to share it so sincerely with me. I actually felt love from her. For this reason alone, I cannot characterize her as the meanest person I have ever known.

  Chapter Seven

  A Boy’s Wildest Adventure, A Mother’s Worst Nightmare

  The afternoon was wet and gray when we found the dead body. It had rained for three long, dreary days. Tommy had been clearing the entrance to the bunker for a week. It was providential that I was with him that morning as he usually shunned my company in favor of solitude or the two hulking Scibetta boys—my friend Susan’s brothers and our far neighbors on the outskirts of Ars. Tommy, impatient to resume excavation, allowed me to accompany him to help haul and carry rocks away from the entrance to the bunker. I’m not sure what kind of child I must have been to have considered this something I wanted to do, but there I was, slipping and picking my way on the muddy, steep ground, to where the mysterious bunker lay hidden.