1963. I was sitting in the handsome dining room at the hotel where
we stayed one night in Andorra, the small country in the foothills of the
Pyrenees between Spain and France. With me were my grandmother and
grandfather—Helen and Ira Frisbee, my mother’s parents. They had decided to
build their own trip around the conclusion of, and my return from, a
two-semester stay at Stanford’s campus in Florence, Italy, picking me up at the
Florence train station.
My wallet with passport had fallen out of my jacket pocket
as I got off the train, and I had enlisted the station police in the frenzied
task of finding what I’d lost. I spoke better Italian than I have at any time
before or since and the head of the station police lectured me grandly on how,
if there were any possibility whatsoever of finding the wallet, he would.
I was dubious, but an underling in an oversized hat, approached us after about forty-five minutes with something in his hand. The Captain grabbed my
wallet ostentatiously, turned and presented it grandly to me.
“And what have I been saying, signore?” he asked me, smiling proudly and pushing aside his
underling. It was he, the Captain, who had accomplished this near miracle with
so little effort.
I thanked him profusely, of course, wiping sweat from my
brow. I expressed great admiration for the way in which he did his job, the obvious
effort he put into solving any problem that might arise on his watch, the
superior intelligence carried in the genes of all his ancestors—yes, I covered that as
well—and eventually, he said, “Oh, no, I need no extra money for this.”
Strange, because I’d offered none.
I bestowed blessings on his children and their children and
all his blood line into perpetuity, and saw my grandfather fretting his way
toward us some distance away, looking at his watch, and dragging my grandmother behind him like a
little toy truck.
“Gramp!” I yelled. “Good work! You found me.” But the man
was weighted down by the stresses of his most recent attempt to drive on “these
damn foreign roads.”
I soon stepped behind the wheel, much to his relief. I was, at this point, loving
the man—in spite of his inclination to blame foreigners for not being more like
US. Soon we were negotiating the narrow city roads, which had been built long
before any engineers had had reason to imagine more than one lane with a
mule-drawn cart in it.
A friend had warned me weeks before. “All you really need to
know is that you have the right of way if you are as little as two inches ahead
of the car to the right or left of you. And even more important,” he added,”
that other guy has the right of way if he’s just a dog’s hair ahead of you—and
he will take that right of way and drive your right off the road with it.”
It was true. Remember to follow that one rule, and you will
avoid infinite numbers of potential fender-benders. But don’t forget the prayers.
You’re as lost without them as a teenager who just dropped his wallet on the
track at a train station.
>>
“Bill can speak Italian and French,” my grandfather would
say to anyone who would listen. It was an exaggeration of my abilities, without
question, but I could always help find a bathroom when Gramp needed one. And, as
I’ve said, I could demonstrate a degree of mastery if I lost my wallet and
passport.
As we sat in the Andorran dining room, our conversation
managed to merge with the not-unfriendly conversation of a Scots couple at the
next table. (They warned us early on that they weren’t “Scottish.” Nor was
their favorite drink “Scotch,” which, as they rather disparagingly noted,
Americans tend to “drink with water and ice. Which just won’t do.”
“How do you drink it?” Grandfather asked, frowning, “and I’m
assuming you do.”
“A fine Scots whiskey,” the gentleman explained very kindly
and patiently, “should be sipped without any addition of water or anything
else.”
“Well,” my grandfather said. “That’s not the way I drink it,
I assure you, not the way I’ll ever drink it, either.”
“Truly?” asked the man at the next table, mildly amused.
“Truly!” my grandfather said. Case dismissed.
Our Scot raised a hand as if about to sign a contract and
said, “Can I suggest an experiment?”
“If it involves drinking Scotch—er, Scots—at room
temperature with no water or ice—no,” he declared rather firmly, as if someone
were asking how many anchovies he wanted in his morning orange juice.
“What I was going to suggest was that you try a sipping
glass with a fine single malt Scots whiskey after dinner with me,” said Mr.
Scot.
“After dinner?”
Grandfather asked. “I always have my drink before, always will. No thank you,
sir.”
I couldn’t restrain myself. “I would love a bit of Scots whiskey after dinner,” I said. I did,
in fact, rather like the stuff—though I’d never had anything with genuine
distinction to it. But, at nineteen years of age, I liked my coffee very black,
my wine round and fruity, and my Scots whiskey straight up.
“Very good,” said the gentleman, even more amused. His wife
at long last joined the conversation, and we were off into more expected
subject matter, like where precisely we were from, what we did there, and how
we happened to be taking this trip.
“I have an accountancy firm,” Grandfather said, when asked
what his profession might be.
“Ah,” said the Scot’s wife, “I might have guessed.”
I liked these people. They never beat around the bush or
equivocated and yet they said everything so elegantly.
“Might have guessed what, may I ask?” wondered my
grandmother, perhaps a bit testily.
“Your husband,” said the woman with a warm smile, “is very
specific in his likes and dislikes and habits.”
“Yes, he is,” said Grandmother, her face reddening slightly.
“Good character traits in a man who deals with figures,
taxes, money,” said Mrs. Scot. “I imagine your Ira is very good at what he
does.”
This changed the tenor of the conversation. “Indeed, he is,”
Grandmother said. “And what does your Bruce do?”
“Very little,” said Bruce. “I am a co-director of the
Edinburgh Cultural Committee. We sit around and write reports on what we would
do to stimulate more touristic activity if we only had the money to do them.
But we don’t have the money. So I think we could say I don’t do much for a
living.”
“But I would guess that your work involves you in everything
from theater to festivals to universities to the making of Scots whiskey,” I
put in, and our little space of the dining room seemed to brighten noticeably.
“That’s right,” said Brenda, Bruce’s wife.
“So you are doing a rather refined and exciting sort of
nothing, sir.”
“Yes,” my Grandfather agreed. “Sounds very good to me.” He
was proud of the warmth his grandson was bringing to the conversation. “Tell
them what you’ve been doing for the past six months, Bill.”
I couldn’t help it.. At this point in a conversation, I
often felt like the gawky puppet brought out by a ventriloquist to bring some
charming wit to the pleasantries. I said I’d been studying at Stanford-in-Italy
for half a year and I’d had wonderful opportunities to travel with other
students.
“Cheaply,” I assume, Bruce chuckled.
“Hostels, hitch-hiking and handouts,” I affirmed.
“Bill speaks Italian and French,” grandfather put in with
genuine pride. “Say something in Italian, Bill.”
I sighed. “Qualcosa in
Italiano, Bill,” I said, and Bruce thoughtfully changed the subject.
“How about some fine Scots?” he smiled at me. He served me a
small glass of the whiskey, no ice, no water, room temperature, and it seemed
to me as fitting a conclusion to a meal as any liqueur.
“Like it?” Bruce asked.
“Very much,” I said. “Want to try a sip, Grandfather?”
“No,” said Ira, very firmly.
>>>
Five years before, the first time my grandparents had me
join them for a European tour, we had avoided France assiduously. “The French
are dirty people,” Grandfather explained, though I never knew what exactly he
meant by that. I pieced together a vague understanding having something to do
with such obscenities as naked breasts in the Folies Bergeres and other dangerous and damaging cultural oddities
he’d heard about. Perhaps slipshod bathing practices.
On this trip, however, having traveled for a week in
France—Paris, mainly—with old social friends and having emerged no worse for
the experience, Grandfather had incorporated into our trip a brief stay in
Provence, two days in Lourdes, and four days in Paris.
By the time we arrived in Paris, though, my grandparents
were exhausted. Grandfather had done the lion’s share of the driving, since I
had been sick with food poisoning for most of the road trip, and his driving
skills didn’t measure up well to the dangers around every bend of the narrow
European roads. He'd left countless angered and frightened French peasants
shaking their fists in rage after the car passed, and nearly hit, them and their
horses, donkeys and cattle.
Worn out from (and not just a little outraged by) all of that, my
grandparents decided to take it easy for our final four days abroad. They
napped and read and, occasionally, emerged from our little hotel in Paris to
wander among the shops and witness whatever Paris had to offer within a short
walk of their hotel room. I imagined my grandfather watching the older men in
their grease-stained berets playing bocce
ball and declaring, “What a silly game, Helen.”
And I imagined my grandmother saying, “Yes, dear.”
Meanwhile, I had four heavenly days in which to explore
Paris on my own. I gawked at Les
Invalides, wandered through Shakespeare
& Company, spent hours at L’Orangerie,
sat by the Seine with my notebook and aspired to complete a fitting poem, asked a
woman, in French, how to get to L’Hotel
Byron (where Le Musee Rodin is
housed) only to have her tell me, in English, “Just keep going the same way
you’re headed, and turn right at the fourth corner. You’ll run right into it.”
>>>
In the early evening, I would return to the hotel, and my
grandparents would be sipping their evening Scotch and water, the Scotch brought
in a plastic bottle from home. I would shower, and they would order me up a
CocaCola. Then I’d write three or four pages in my journal, and at about six,
I’d knock on their door—clean, refreshed and ready to read them my journal entries
of the day.
What I must say is that they listened as I read—listened deeply, taking it all in as if it
mattered somehow. And when I was finished, and had described the last muscular
curve on the bodies of those partaking in Rodin’s passionate Kiss, Grandfather would look with deep
pride at his wife and say, “Wasn’t that nice, Mommie?” And he meant it. Truly.
And I knew. “I wish I could write like that,” he’d add. And we would sit in one
of the sweetest and most personally affirming auras of mutual appreciation I’ve
ever experienced.
Then we would make ourselves presentable and go out to
dinner, and dinner in Paris with Ira and Helen was always an adventure. The maitre d’hotel would show us to a seat
while Grandfather developed a joke for him. Something about the pigeons on the heads
of the statues outside, perhaps. And the dignified Frenchman had no idea what
sort of response my grandfather sought.
“Eh, oui, monsieur,” he would say, which Grandfather assumed
to be the cold, Gallic temperament that so many people had warned him about.
A waiter met us at the table, asking for Grandfather’s wine
order, which always frosted him because he didn’t like wine. (“Don’t they know
it gives me gout?” he would ask us). And once when he’d asked for a martini,
dry, with an olive, he was given a blank look and served a full glass of vermouth,
distilled and bottled by Martini, Italy’s famous maker of vermouth.
This experience made grandfather bark about the restaurants
in Paris being uncivilized (“They can’t even mix a simple martini,” he’d moan
quite loudly) and I was beginning to plot ways of tossing him into the Seine.
Instead, however, I decided to get his goat by ordering escargots for dinner.
“What’s ‘S-car-go’?” he asked, as I gave my order to the
waiter.
“Snails,” I said off-handedly.
“Did you say, ‘snails’?” The word nearly stuck in his
throat. “The boy is ordering snails!” he declared as if his entire life
were standing before him with utter horror on its face. “He’s going to eat snails!”
he would add.
“Yes,” I looked up to see the shock on his face. I’ll
confess it. It was one of the cheap passive aggressive thrills in life, pulling
my grandfather’s chain, ordering—say, for example, snails—in an elegant manner,
drinking a fine glass of wine with the meal, and enjoying every unique,
garlic-laden, buttery bite.
“Enjoying that?” Grandfather asked after my third bite. He winced every time my fork reached my mouth.
“Very much,” I affirmed. “Want a bite?”
Well, no!” he said firmly. But I finished every bit of it—every
snail—thanking him for the experience and smelling intensely of garlic for
weeks.
