Chapter One

New Billet, New Worlds to Conquer

One morning several years ago, when my son was six, I sat at the breakfast table watching him eat his Fruit Loops and mindlessly mentioned to him that when I was a girl I used to eat Fruit Loops, too. He put down his spoon and looked at me with surprise. “Were they in color back then?” he asked.

I suppose, as boomer parents, my husband and I had made much about the fact that when we were kids there were only three flavors of ice cream and three television channels and we didn’t wear seat belts or bike helmets. Our son firmly believed that our childhood idea of a good time involved watching the moon change its orbit or guessing how much grass had grown over the summer in the back yard. But the truth is, many of my memories seem to be in a softer shade of black and white. For all that, they were, it seems to me, exciting and colorful in themselves.

When our plane landed at Orly Airport in Paris that September afternoon, I had seen enough film clips of Jackie Kennedy poised at the top of the non-motorized gangway to take a moment and strike a similar poise when I “saw Paris for the first time.” This was, of course, before the days of the equipment scooting right up to the gate. In 1962, you still had to climb down to the tarmac and walk across the runway to get to customs. It would be a little harder for a romantic child today to weave her way through the Pizza Huts and magazine stands and moving sidewalks inside Charles DeGaulle airport, past customs and baggage claim to where the Metro opens up to take her into the heart of Paris before she ever got to say “I am now on French soil!” There’s a reason the Pope doesn’t fly Coach—he’d never find an empty spot to kiss the ground upon debarking.

Paris in the sixties was, to a starry-eyed nine-year old, the perfected picture of Paris in my dreams. It even smelled different from America, or at least New York City, from where we’d just flown. I’d been practicing my French vocabulary for months, but it was pretty clear, right from the beginning, that learning and speaking a foreign language was not going to be as easy as I thought.

As I understand it, my mother had preferred that my Dad come back to the States to collect us all when it was time to join him in France. This may have had something to do with the fact that my brother, Tommy, although only eleven years old, could be very strong willed and my mother didn’t relish attempting to bend his will during what promised to be a challenging journey. Or maybe with four children, and having never been overseas herself, she just wanted the extra support. On top of that, this would be her first flight ever. Whatever the reason, my father did fly back to escort us over, only to be thwarted at the last minute—as we were all boarding the plane. He’d flown over “space available” on the TWA flight into the New York International Airport (three years later it would be renamed JFK International Airport) but wasn’t able to get a seat out on our flight.

For us kids, it was also our first airplane flight and we probably never enjoyed one more. Once Dad knew he wasn’t going to make it on our flight, he paged the family of a buddy—also on their way to France—so that we might all travel together. The Scibettas would be living in our same village. Their Dad—Captain Scibetta³—was a flight surgeon at Chambley who had become good friends with Dad during the time the two were in France waiting for their families to join them.

The Scibettas were a family of four boys and one girl which nearly perfectly matched our own family of three boys and one girl. Susan Scibetta became my best friend for the whole of the time that I was overseas. We were both dark-haired, bright, and short. We were both scheduled to be registered at the convent school in the French village so we would not only be neighbors but the sole American schoolmates in a French school.

As soon as we landed on French soil, it was clear that we had all taken a huge step back in time. Gone were the neon signs of Rome, New York, from where we’d moved. Gone were the super highways, the outdoor movie theatres, the McDonald’s hamburger stands and early morning television cartoons. Gone also were the bright colors that had earmarked the beginning of the new decade. France was tired and gray and, more often than not, black.

Paris was Paris, however. When I saw the Eiffel Tower for the first time, I gasped as if seeing my favorite fantasy character come to life. My memory of the first time I saw Paris always has a cheesy, scratchy-record Edith Piaff song playing in the background. Absolutely magic.

Captain Scibetta, a bald, stern-looking man who, I am told, was really extremely witty and fun, met us at the airport with a large station wagon which, amazingly, the three adults and nine children were able to fit in. We drove to a restaurant outside Paris where we all had a wonderful lunch, and then the Captain drove us all the three hours from Paris to our new home. (Richard Scibetta gained some fame years later when he went to the USSR to bring back Gary Powers after Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down and he was captured by the Soviets.)

Our view of the French countryside was a very different one from the countryside we’d left back home in upstate New York. Although we traveled on the equivalent of an interstate highway in France, it was, in some stretches, little more than a dirt road. The villages looked uninhabited, with dark, largely windowless stone buildings, linked together in long, uninterrupted expanses of filthy, quarried stone.

“At least they have telephones,” Terry pointed out helpfully to my mother at one point in the trip. The straggling telephone wires dipped and swayed from pole to pole across some of the village streets. I’m sure, from the looks of the primitive villages we were passing, she wasn’t feeling very confident about our new billet.

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “Now if they just have electricity.”

I gave him a sour look. “Don’t upset Mom,” I hissed.

When we first drove into Ars, Captain Scibetta pointed out the train station at the entrance to the village.

“Not unlike most village train stations,” he told my mother, “it has the best dining in town.” I remember looking at him to see if he was being funny. But, as usual with adults, I couldn’t tell. Later, my father was to confirm to me that what he said was true and we would eat at the train station on and off throughout our time in the village.

My new best friend’s dad stopped at the apartment building that he and his family were renting and unloaded everyone before tucking us five back into the car for the drive across town to our own house. As we drove, I suppose my mother became more apprehensive while we four children became much more excited. The village looked less like a place where normal people lived and more like a movie set from the eighteen hundreds. It reminded me of the field trip my class had taken the month before to Jamestown where we saw how the pioneers made butter and forged their own buttons and stuff.

The clothes the villagers wore, from their ubiquitous berets to their old men’s baggy pants, were mostly ancient ebony wools. The village facades were dark with a thick patina of coal dust. The roads were unpaved, the villagers' expressions untrusting and worn. It appeared that urinating in the street—in full view of the world—was de rigueur. Any restaurant or shop could have been easily transplanted back to the 1920s without any loss of believability in the dress, setting or food.

The fact was, from the moment I stepped foot in Ars-sur-Moselle, the remote and hilly village in Alsace-Lorraine that would be my family’s home for the coming year, it was immediately obvious that it was a fantasy world beyond my child’s dreams and expectations.

The house my father had rented for us was beautiful. I could almost hear the sigh of relief from my mother as we drove up to the crest of a long hilly street. The house was fairly large, with a bright orange Mediterranean tile roof. A wrap-around balcony gave access to each of the three bedrooms from the outside. There was a large side garden, a double garage and a full basement.

We were home.