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‌Epilogue

Paris was cold, gray, wet, crowded, and, compared with what we had been used to paying in Africa, scarily expensive. After several failures we found a room at the Hôtel Lisbonne, at the top of rue de Vaugirard, between the Odéon Théâtre and rue Monsieur-le-Prince. No central heating to speak of, not much hot water, a shared toilet on another floor, but somehow cozy and welcoming. We lived in cafés, bars, restaurants, movie theaters—anywhere where it was warm. We took our meals at one of a nest of cheap restaurants on rue de la Harpe.

As in Rome, we scanned the classified columns of the Herald Tribune, looking for jobs to keep us going. Joe struck first: a post teaching English at a lycée in Grignon, near Versailles. The pay wasn’t much, but included room and board, and was less than an hour by train to Paris.

I landed a job running a school for the U.S. Army in a village called Étain, near Verdun, in eastern France. It was 300 km from Paris, but the pay compensated: $500 per month.

My mother had sent over a suitcase of winter clothes. Even so, with sheepskin jacket, heavy sweater, scarf, ski gloves, and hat, the three-hour drive on the White Nile was an ordeal. Meaux, Châlons-sur-Marne, Verdun, and Étain with the icy rain in my face: every hour or so I had to stop at a roadside café for hot tea laced with double rum to chase the chill from my bones.

In Étain I found lodging at 5, rue du Pont with Mme. Xardel, an amiable widow who had seen the armies of two world wars march past her door. Each morning I put on a coat and tie and motored to Caserne Sidi Brahim, a French military base that had been converted to a U.S. Army transport and logistics center. The schoolmaster arriving by motorcycle made me a kind of instant celebrity among the soldiers. My job was to teach 50-year-old black sergeants the basics of English grammar. My classroom was the movie theater, my office the space behind the movie screen.

It was a long, lonely, dreadfully cold winter. In the afternoons after work I tramped the trenches of the déboisé Verdun battlefield, where the earth had been so churned up by shellfire that no tree would ever grow again. I visited the forts of Douaumont and Hardoumont, flattened by German artillery, and “La Tranchée des Baïonnettes.” That bleak battlefield, where more than half a million men my age had perished, left a deep impression.

Each weekend I motored to Paris to join Joe at the Lisbonne, or, if there was snow on the road, I trained from Verdun, changing at Châlons and arriving at La Gare de l’Est, whence millions of young men had departed for the front, never to return.

To be with Joe in Paris was inspiring. Our friendship was the rock we both stood on. With the present dismal and the future bleak, we spent hours in bars weighing up options. We talked about going to Brazil, but that would be backtracking. And of course our families were urging us to give up this crazy adventure, come home, and get serious.

The fact that I picked up a $500 paycheck at the end of each month kept me optimistic. This was more money than I was used to. The dollar still went a long way in France. It was satisfying to be solvent. I had PX privileges, meaning a bottle of Jack Daniels could be had for $3.

My dad visited, and it was wonderful to have him there. At 63, it was his first trip outside the U.S. We had not met this way before—more like man to man than father and son. I was proud to be his son and hoped he would be proud of me one day.

Upon tasting Pernod for the first time: “It will never be a popular drink.”

Upon viewing a Deux Chevaux: “It looks like a car made in someone’s backyard.”

He sat in on my classes, listening to me teach my sergeants how to read and write:

“Son, you have the most challenging job of anyone I know.”

I took time off work, rented a VW Beetle, and we visited the cathedrals of Reims, Chartres, and Notre-Dame. At first I was afraid we wouldn’t have much to say; but then I realized we shared large areas of common accord. Never had I felt a blood relationship more strongly. I wondered why. Maybe the trip across Africa had opened my eyes; maybe the truth comes out abroad.

My father was a true southern gentleman. He rarely talked about himself, and never complained. He suffered terribly from the loss of his family, but he carried his pain with dignity and only said:

“It is a lonely life.”

Mme. Xardel had a weakness for Verlaine. She was always repeating:

Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches

Et puis voici mon cœur qui ne bat que pour vous.

While I was at the base she and my father sipped tea and chatted. They were both about the same age. Mme. Xardel was a widow and my father divorced. Neither spoke a word of the other’s language, but they seemed to get on famously.

I employed an attractive, intelligent, well-educated (Bryn Mawr College) wife of an officer to teach English to a handful of soldiers who had actually graduated from high school. Some G.I.s expressed a desire to learn French. I hired Monique not for her brains, but for her award-winning chest. French classroom enrollment doubled. By parsing sentences on the blackboard I was making headway with my sergeants. The construction of our language became clearer to them. The base commander congratulated me on starting up a “cultural center” in the movie theater.

Monique was 19 but had not yet passed her driving test. During the interview she said her mother could drop her off at the base, but she needed a lift home after class. I neglected to say it would be by motorcycle.

We left Caserne Sidi Brahim with the White Nile purring between our legs.

There are four steps to seducing a girl on a motorcycle.

STEP 1: You stop at the first bar for a couple of beers.

STEP 2: You gun the machine from the first stoplight. You rocket ahead. Your startled passenger screams and hangs on for dear life.

STEP 3: You drive like a maniac, leaning into curves to scare your passenger, who now clings to you like a limpet. You can feel her boobs pressing against your back.

STEP 4: You have a liberal landlady who doesn’t mind whom you bring home, your father or your motorcycle mate, because she’s lonely and enjoys company and a bit of mischief.

What sustained me through those long winter months was my diary. Gide said that few of his friends remained true to their youth. Almost all compromised, which they called “learning from life.” His Journals encouraged me to keep on jotting down small and insignificant entries, usually while dining alone, as I did each night at La Sirène, Étain’s only restaurant. As these entries began to add up, I noted my determination to become a writer. But of what? Essays? Novels? Short stories? I had no idea.

Spring came at last. Once more it became a joy to jump on the machine. I visited Sedan, Metz, and Nancy, and explored the Maginot Line. My sergeants passed their exams. We had a booze-up in a local bar. They could look forward to promotion and pay raises.

In Paris Joe had run into Pauline Badham from Birmingham, Alabama. Her brother, J.T., had been his best friend at Princeton. Pauline was married to Joe Pinto, who had gone to the Lawrenceville School and Yale; but he came from a prominent Moroccan Jewish family and had grown up in Casablanca and Tangier, where his family ran a successful sugar and tea business.

Every weekend we were invited to their beautiful apartment at 59, boulevard Lannes, where we downed dry Martinis and listened to Joe talk about Morocco. If we missed Africa so much, he asked, why didn’t we go to Tangier?

The idea was appealing. We had heard good things about Morocco. But what would we do when we got there? How would we support ourselves in Morocco? It turned out that Joe’s father, Jacques, had been one of the founders of the American School of Tangier. We wrote the school and filled out forms. Our teaching experience in France came in handy. The Pintos recommended us, and we were offered jobs in Morocco! On July 2, 1962, we hopped aboard the White Nile and, for the second time in less than a year, set off for Africa.

The plan was to spend a year in Morocco. Like in Lerici, we had no idea what to expect. I ended up staying 17. It was that good. In Tangier I became a writer. It was where I met and married Ellen Ann Ragsdale, a world traveler from Little Rock, Arkansas. Joe was my best man. Ellen Ann and I moved to England to raise our family. Joe became the headmaster of the American School of Tangier; he stayed in Morocco the rest of his life.