Read Online French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan - Free Book Online

the fourth-grade reading level.
    We stayed in one of those hotels in the Latin Quarter that
looks tiny from the outside, although when you go in, the
staircase goes up forever, the top-floor rooms have sloped
ceilings, and the windows look out onto a hundred roofs on
which you can see the cats prowling.
    When my mother and I finished climbing all the stairs to
our little room, there was a bouquet of flowers waiting for
us: Mr. D had sent them.
    Mr. D was a francophile in the grand manner. He owned a
big department store in Minneapolis, and he collected art.
He was Louise's father, Louise who had been in my class
since the first grade, and I wanted him to be my father. I
wanted to steal him from her.

    From the beginning I had gone into Louise's house like a
thief. There was a huge oil painting in the front hallway with
giant letters arranged on it to spell the word "LOVE." I
looked at the painting and thought "yes." I remember all the
details of that house, the material on the couches, the white
wool rugs, the curves in walls and furniture, because I
wanted it all. I remember the details of Louise's body-the
first hair under her arms, the freckles on her chest when she
got tan-because I wanted to inhabit that body, to be the
person whose father was Mr. D.
    I spent the night at Louise's house, in the trundle bed next
to her. She had an asthma attack in the middle of the night.
She wheezed and moaned. Her father came to take care of
her. He talked to her and gave her medicine. It seemed unusual to me that her father came, not her mother (I didn't
know that her mother was an alcoholic). I was annoyed that
Louise had to get sick, because she was getting so much attention that I was left out. But if she were really sick, if she
died, I'd get her father all to myself.
    Because of my desire that everything that was Louise's be
mine, everything I saw in that house was a lesson. As we
grew I learned what Louise knew: I learned about the stages
of Mondrian's painting, from figures to abstractions; I
learned about the German expressionists and how they
were different from the French impressionists. I knew how
to tell the difference between a reproduction and an original. I learned about triptychs and oils and pastels and charcoal. I learned that the most beautiful art was French. Mr. D
would walk us up and down the gallery that led from the
main house to the new addition, telling us about each painting and each artist. In the same way he'd walk us through the
woods and teach us the names of the plants. Everything he
said stuck.

    In the basement of the D's house, next to the woodpaneled room where Louise and I watched Bonanza on
Sunday night, was a storage room whose walls were lined
with shelves. The shelves were covered with boxes. There
were gray boxes with the name of the D department store
printed on them in red, and red boxes with the D department store name written in gray. There were boxes big
enough for a toaster and small enough for a ring. No matter
what size present Louise was giving, she always had the perfect box to wrap it in.
    Louise was painfully shy, and I brought her out. Other
kids thought she was a snob; they were afraid of her. But I
would get her to talk to me. She told me all about her father,
what he liked, how to please him. She let me in on her passion for art and suffering, her sense of manners and how we
should behave. She wrote my mother perfect-thank you
notes on Crane's stationery every time she spent the night at
my house. Louise's favorite painting at the Art Institute was
Rembrandt's Lucretia: a blood-stained woman pointing a
sword at her own heart as she rang for her servant with her
free hand. (Louise looked like Lucretia, with shining brown
hair, translucent skin, and a fine Roman nose.) Lucretia became my favorite painting, too.
    We spent more and more time with Louise's father. He
seemed to like our company better than anybody else's.
Louise