by Rozsa Gaston
Two days later, one of my roommates handed me a message. Someone named Annabel something-or-other had called about a babysitting job. I guessed immediately the Anglo-half of the Anglo-American family was the mother. How many American women were named Annabel?
I called the number again. This time, a live person answered.
“This is Ava Fodor returning a call from Annabel about an au pair job,” I said, wishing my roommate had gotten her last name. I didn’t want to sound too informal to a prospective employer, especially a British one.
“I see. What did you say your name was?” Her commanding voice told me I was speaking with the female head of the household.
“Ava. Ava Fodor.” I enunciated each syllable clearly, careful to make the right first impression.
“And who was it at the club that recommended you?”
No one. What was it about clubs and recommendations? Thinking fast, I said “Mr. Shelton.” He was the one who’d invited us to a reception at the Hartford Racquetball Club years earlier, so I hoped he might still be a member.
“Mr. Shelton?” The woman at the other end wasn’t giving anything away. I couldn’t blame her.
“Mr. Fred Shelton?” I offered weakly. Please God, let the Sheltons still be members. Please, God.
“Oh, you mean Fred and Nancy Shelton?”
“Yes. They’re our next-door neighbors,” I said, emulating her English accent. Inside, I gasped with relief. Thank you, God.
“In West Hartford?”
“Yes. On West Hill Drive.”
“I see. And what are your parents’ names, dear?”
“Walter and Helen Rusk.” They were my grandparents, but so what?
“And do you have any babysitting experience?”
“Oh yes. Quite a lot.” Now I was using British syntax: “quite” instead of “a whole lot.”
“Have you ever lived with a family as a babysitter?”
“Well, I lived with the Sheltons for a summer while I took care of their daughter.”
“Do you mean Rebecca?”
“Oh, you know her?” What a relief. “Yes, I looked after her a few summers ago down in Renwick.”
The woman on the other end of the phone gave a laugh like tinkling bells. Had I said something funny?
“Just a minute.” I heard the murmur of a male voice in the background. After some sort of interchange I couldn’t make out, she got back on the line.
“Hullo?”
“Yes, I’m here.” I tried to sound erudite, cultured, worthy of keeping her children’s English up to snuff.
“We’re looking for someone to look after our three children. There are two boys and a girl: ages six, eight, and eleven.”
“That would be fine.” It was hard to sound enthusiastic as well as British. Something about the two didn’t go together.
“Then I’ll be in touch, dear.” She clicked off before I could respond.
That was it? Why hadn’t she asked more questions? Had she been laughing at my pathetic American accent? My face flamed as I put down the phone. It was so hard to interpret someone from another country.
I spent the rest of the day despondent; knowing I’d blown it with God, blown it with the British lady, blown it with everyone in general. Still, it occurred to me to call the Shelton’s just in case I hadn’t entirely blown it and a friend of theirs named Annabel asked about me. Then I remembered they were down at the beach that weekend. I couldn’t afford to call long distance so I decided to wait until Sunday evening when I planned to visit my grandparents for dinner.
That Sunday the Sheltons weren’t back yet when I got to my grandparents’ house.
“Nana, do you know when the Sheltons are coming back from the beach?”
“Why do you want to know?” my grandmother snipped, looking at me suspiciously.
“No reason. I just thought I might take Ginger for a walk when they get back,” I explained, referring to the Shelton’s dog. “She’ll probably be desperate to go out after a long car ride.”
The practice of hiding almost all personal information from my grandmother had become ingrained in me. She had a way of using whatever I told her as evidence of my misguided ways. I wouldn’t mention the au pair job unless something came of it.
“Well, Nancy mentioned some sort of benefit they were going to this afternoon in Renwick, so I doubt they’ll be back until late.
“Okay.”
I hung around after dinner, long after my grandmother retired to her bedroom with a thimbleful of Dubonnet to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Finally, I heard the Shelton’s station wagon pull into their driveway. Not wanting to force myself on them after a long drive, I watched from the window until I saw Uncle Fred come out the back door with Ginger on her leash, straining and raring to go.
Quietly, I slipped out the front door then walked in the other direction, knowing I’d run into him halfway around the horseshoe-shaped drive, out of sight of my grandmother’s bedroom window.
Within five minutes, his courtly, medium-tall figure loomed in sight. He was scratching Ginger’s ears as they rested by the stone fence that bordered West Hill Drive from Farmington Avenue. I ran to him.
“Ava, what a nice surprise to see you.” His face broke into a smile as he spotted me.
“Hi, Uncle Fred. How are you?”
“I’m fine. Nancy and I were just talking about you with our friends today.”
“You were?”
“We saw the Griffiths this afternoon down in Renwick, and they asked about you. Do you remember them?”
“I – uh – I’m not sure.” The Griffiths? Weren’t those the folks with the trampoline in their backyard?
“Nancy told Annabel Griffith what a terrific job you did babysitting Becca a few summers ago.”
Annabel Griffith? The same woman I’d spoken with on the phone?
“Is that the lady with the English accent with the trampoline in her backyard?”
“That’s the one.” He nodded thoughtfully, looking approvingly at me. His eyes on mine offered an antidote to my grandmother’s baleful glances.
“They mentioned you’d spoken to them about a job babysitting their children in Paris for the school year.”
“That’s just what I was going to ask you about, Uncle Fred. I – I gave them your name as a recommendation.”
“Already done, dear. Nancy raved about you to Annabel.”
“Uncle Fred, you’re too amazing!” The thought of a year in Paris made my heart pound. My face tingled as I imagined a whole world full of foreign cultures and countries to learn about. Much more appealing to generalist, adventurous me than deconstructing a Bach fugue.
Our eyes met, his filled with kindness and love. Everything was perfect for one shining moment, until my grandmother’s face popped into my head. How would she receive the idea of me going abroad for a year? Any proposal coming from me was out. It always was, on principle.
“Umm – if Mrs. Griffith wants me for the job, how should I handle telling my grandmother?” Very few people outside our immediate family knew what a prickly character she was. To outsiders, my grandmother presented herself as a paragon of Southern warmth and charm. Even I was impressed by the incredible snow job she did on my friends. “Your grandmother is sooo nice,” they’d trill after meeting her and being offered a piece of homemade fudge or a brownie. But Uncle Fred was one of the cognoscenti.
Although my grandmother was Boston-born, she’d been raised all over the place: Charleston, West Virginia; Los Angeles and La Jolla, California. Her father had been a hotel manager. Her mother ran off before my grandmother was old enough to remember her. After an unsettled childhood, she had enjoyed five years in Athens, Georgia with her first husband, a professor of agricultural at University of Georgia. Then he died of leukemia at age thirty, closing the chapter on the happiest years of her life. When she came north as a young widow her identity as a Southern woman had firmly cemented itself in her soul. To this end she occasionally referred t
o African Americans as ‘darkies’ and had a feminist sensibility mired deep in the Antebellum South.
“Don’t say anything to your grandmother. If the Griffiths offer you a job I’ll have Nancy speak to her,” Mr. Shelton advised.
“Oh, Uncle Fred, thank you so much! I love you,” I said, truly meaning it.
We both knew if the idea came from me she’d veto it. Coming from the Griffiths via Nancy Shelton, her socially prominent neighbor, my grandmother would probably swoon with pleasure at the proposal.
On the way back to my apartment, I recollected memories of the Griffiths. I’d met them down in Renwick – a private enclave next to Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the summer I babysat Rebecca Shelton. The Sheltons owned a beachfront cottage in Renwick, three houses down from the Griffiths. Everyone in Renwick was very rich or related to someone who was. It was all inherited wealth, something I knew because my grandmother had harped on the topic countless times as in, “Fred Shelton can afford to be nice to Nancy because he’s never had to work for a living.” My grandmother never had to work for a living either, but in her case she’d never been nice to my grandfather, whom she barely tolerated.
Mrs. Griffith was young, pretty, blonde, and British. She walked around at the beach in a teeny tiny bikini showing off her unbelievably slim post-third child figure in an effortless sort of way. I’d admired her hugely, although I never dared speak to her. It went without saying that anything I said to her would sound stupid, and then I’d sound even more stupid when she replied in her British accent and I wouldn’t be able to understand a thing.
I was fourteen, about to enter ninth grade, the year before I’d been shipped off to Maine. The Griffiths were the perfect sort of all-American-with-a-European twist family I longed to be part of. My own family was twisted all-American except for one exotic European kink in the form of my father, a Transylvanian poet my mother had married at the tender age of twenty-four.
Poets, by and large, do not bring home the bacon. My father suffered the added disadvantage of not speaking English. Three months after arriving in the United States, at age forty-seven, he met my mother at a party thrown by a friend and patient of my grandfather’s. My father had found work as a janitor at the Hartford Theological Seminary, a job he’d got through a sympathetic priest with a Hungarian background who’d read about him in the newspaper. He’d been photographed stepping off a plane in February 1957, an exiled Hungarian refugee persecuted in his own country for journalistic views he’d expressed against the new Communist regime. My mother melted at his dashing ways; hand kissing, smoking with a cigarette-holder, and wearing his jacket flung over both shoulders. What more could a girl ask for?
Apparently, a lot. My grandmother was not amused. The way she’d spit out the “‘p” in, “Your father, the poet” came out as if she’d said “Your father, the pauper” or “the pickpocket.” There went Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and John Donne, all out the window of my grandmother’s estimation. If you couldn’t make a good living or marry someone who did, you were no one in her book.
Predictably, my parents’ marriage fell apart soon after my mother tired of life with a man twice her age who didn’t speak English and had no money. They divorced when I was four and my father now lived in Yorkville, the Hungarian-German neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
My mother resided in Greenwich Village in New York City with my younger half sister and brother, having divorced her second husband, an Italian-American man from the Bronx who hadn’t worked out well either. We were vaguely aware of each other, but since my grandparents took me at the age of fourteen months for a summer babysitting stint that lasted the duration of my childhood, my grandmother hadn’t been understanding of her daughter’s lifestyle choices. After two disastrous marriages, both to men my grandmother deemed unsuitable, my grandmother washed her hands of her only daughter. I’d received Christmas and birthday cards from my mother throughout my childhood, but no visits after age five, when my grandmother made it clear she was no longer welcome. My grandfather had gone along with her to keep peace in his home.
The Griffiths summered in Renwick and wintered in Paris. How cool was that? Paris, to my fourteen-year-old imagination, was someplace beautiful and elegant where people ate croissants for breakfast on balconies festooned with intricate, curlicue designs outside grand, high-ceilinged apartments. At age six, my grandmother had taken me to see the film The Red Balloon. My bookcase was filled with Babar the Elephant books I’d read as a child and couldn’t bear to give away. I knew all about Paris.
While the Griffiths were in residence at their summer beach house, their trampoline was available for any of the Renwick kids to jump on during the day. Most of the time, the Griffiths weren’t home. They were at the beach or the Club playing tennis or golf. My young charge, Rebecca and I would drop by almost every day to jump on the trampoline.
That summer, I fantasized I was the eldest child from a family such as theirs, jumping up and down on my own trampoline. Rebecca was my adorable, blonde, five-year old sister. We lived in Renwick in the summer and in Paris in the winter. I’d jump with a dreamy expression on my face, hoping I’d spring into another life altogether like Alice down the rabbit hole.
A week after my conversation with Uncle Fred, my grandmother called. It was unusual for her to call at all since I’d begun living on my own with a group of other girls all connected up with the music college I’d bombed out of. Four of us rented the first floor of a three-family house right down the street from the gas station where I worked. It was six blocks from my grandparents’ street, right over West Hartford’s town line in Hartford where the bad neighborhood began. It was close enough that I could still walk over to their place for the occasional non-fun family get-together, but far enough away to ensure I didn’t bump into them or anyone they knew.
“Ava, I have something to ask you,” she said, sounding strangely formal, as if she were playacting or something. Usually, she never asked family members anything, she just told us what was what. I immediately knew something was up.
“Yes, Nana?” I asked, praying this might be the follow-up to Nancy Shelton’s talk with Annabel Griffith.
“Well you certainly don’t deserve this, and I have no idea why they thought of you, but do you remember a family down in Renwick by the name of Griffith?”
“You mean the family with the trampoline and three kids?” I could hardly contain myself, but I needed to act surprised.
“Yes. Win Griffith’s father is retired head of Aetna,” she said, referring to Hartford’s biggest insurance company. Who knew? Who cared?
Apparently, my grandmother did. “Well you must have made quite an impression on them although I don’t know how,” she continued. The faster my grandmother’s put-downs flew, the better the news would be. Her compliments to family members were routinely served with a sizeable splash of vinegar. My heart thumped in my chest.
“Well, they’ve asked Nancy Shelton to ask you if you’d be interested to babysit their children this school year in Paris.”
“Oh wow! In Paris? Yes! I’d love to.” I tried to sound as if the idea hadn’t already occurred to me, been engineered by me, in fact.
“They wouldn’t pay you much, but it would be a way for you to stay out of trouble.”
The thought of the amount of trouble I could get myself into on my own in Paris compelled me to sit down, phone receiver trembling in hand.
“I’ll spend the year applying to colleges, Nana. You’ll see. I’ll get into a good school.”
“You already got into a good school thanks to your grandfather’s and my connections, and then you threw it all away.”
“I’m going to do it this time without your connections, Nana. I want to do it on my own.” Hadn’t I just set up this babysitting job on my own? Her recurring mantra on my grandfather’s medical degree flashed into my head. Your grandfather only made it through Harvard Med School because of his photographic memory. Whatever either of us ac
hieved, we could never win with her.
“You’ll do it this time without our financial support, Ava. We’re done tossing good money after bad. First your mother, now you. When you come back from your year abroad you’ll either go to secretarial school or get a real job.” My grandmother’s plans for me were always plans for herself. In her eyes, my gas station one didn’t count and for once, I was in agreement with her.
In your dreams, lady, not mine. “Okay, fine. I accept!”
“Then get yourself over here for dinner tonight, and I’ll have you run over to Nancy with the news. Make sure you thank her profusely. She must have told the Griffiths some whoppers about you for them to offer you a job.”
“Nana, I did actually babysit Rebecca for an entire summer. Maybe that had something to do with it.”
“Be here by six. And if I were you, I would pick up some flowers for Nancy. She went out of her way for you.” Even though you don’t deserve it lingered in the air, unspoken.
My grandmother was artwork. Even if I hadn’t wanted to spend a year in Paris, I’d have gone anyway, just to get away from my substitute mom’s bottomless well of negativity and not-really-well-meaning advice.
The next few months flew by like white lightning. On a golden late September evening, I boarded my flight to Paris – excited, exuberant, and ready for adventure. Goodbye West Hartford, goodbye gas station, goodbye Nana, goodbye to all that.
And bonjour, City of Light.
CHAPTER TWO
Au Pair in Paris
Working for the Griffiths turned out to be a dream job. Mrs. Griffith was not only gorgeous, but nice, and fond of wearing Laura Ashley dresses. She taught pottery classes. Mr. Griffith was a Yale grad, now president of the American College in Paris. He was tall, athletic, and pleasantly attractive in that “hail fellow well met” sort of way I’d come to France to escape. He was the only adult male I ever saw, in our neighborhood of École Militaire, who carried a gym bag to and from work with a squash racket sticking out of it instead of a porte-documents, or briefcase.
