Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

I had heard stories about my father Glenn’s year in Meudon, France, since I was a kid. He’d gone with his parents–my grandparents Helen and Karl Grossman–to this southwestern Parisian suburb in October 1928. My grandfather had come to study music for a year with Nadia Boulanger (her picture is below) at the Paris Conservatory, and my grandparents had lived in a hotel right next to the train station in Meudon.

My father was circumspect about his year abroad.  He said he was often left in the hotel lobby when his parents would go out (presumably to a restaurant in Meudon or to a play or concert in Paris). When my brothers and I would tease him about being fluent in French, he’d say, “I can only remember La plume de ma main (the quill-pen of my hand).” I have one photograph of him with some little Meudon friends (whom Dad called “some little French toughs”), so he obviously met and communicated with some of the locals.

My brother Karl has my father’s old school notebooks in an old leather valise from that year abroad. Glenn had written thousands of numbers in cursive, and had doodled axes, pyramids, shovels, and zigzags in class at Institut Notre-Dame, the Catholic elementary school just west down Rue Alexandre Guillmant, where instruction was in French.  He had to wear a black uniform (I have a picture of him), but what he really thought about that blousy black outfit we’ll never know. Foret Domamiale is a huge forest to the west of Meudon, where today there are many acres of sports stadia, tennis courts, and walking trails. I’d like to think my grandparents took little Glenn there often.

Today, 79 years later, my husband and I traveled by train to Meudon (shown below), fulfilling my dream of actually seeing the town where my father and grandparents had lived. We took the RER train to Meudon Val Fleury and then walked along with a Danish woman who offered help in finding my grandparents’ home. The Danish woman had lived in Meudon for 40 years with her physician husband. We first went to Meudon’s Hotel de Ville (city hall) where we got an excellent map and a town guidebook.

We profusely thanked the Danish woman and then walked to #10 Rue Alexandre Guillmant, the address indicated on the two yellowed “Recepisse de demande de carte d’identite” sheets–perhaps their visas–my grandparents had carried with them. The four-story white building was right across from the Meudon train station, about 6 miles and maybe a 20-minute train trip from central Paris. It may have been a hotel in 1928-29, but #10 was now an apartment building. There were garden areas and trees in the back of the building where my father might have played.

That year in the capital’s outskirts couldn’t have been easy for my grandmother. Helen was not in the whirlwind center of Paris where she could walk to cafes and shops (like I am able to do). She was stuck out in a suburb with a lively six-year-old while her husband was studying violin and composition in the City of Light. When her husband was home, he was practicing the violin or reading musical scores, needing everybody to be quiet. Free time with his wife and little son was probably hard to come by. Whatever excitement Helen may have felt as she waved goodbye to her friends in Cleveland and her relatives in central Pennsylvania in the fall of ’28, I’m sure the reality of a winter in a northern European city was not quite so romantic. Perhaps she and Glenn frequently took the convenient train into Paris.

Paris in the 1920s was described as being in the “twilight years” or the “interwar years.” France had been devastaed by the Great War’s trench warfare. It was too early for Hitler, and the Depression was a year off. At the salons, galleries, palaces, and cafes, Ernest Hemingway (below) and Henry Miller were holding forth, along with Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali, Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray. Jazz and surrealism flourished, haute couture reinvented itself, James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake, and Josephine Baker redefined dance. But this artistic frenzy was not happening in Meudon.

Today in Meudon we had a delicious lunch on linen tablecloths at Le Relais des Gardes restaurant on Avenue General Gallieni. From the flavorful rolls and wonderful red wine to the smoked salmon, lamb, and white fish, we relished the food and enjoyed the setting where my grandparents had perhaps enjoyed a meal.

Actually, it’s my Grandmother Grossman who is responsible for my being here at all. It was she who first told me to go to Paris when I visited her suburban Cleveland home in 1963. I can still see the late afternoon sun backlighting her chair and the needlepoint project in her lap as she encouraged me to see the European capitals. How could I have known then that I would someday walk the streets with leaves falling in the French town where she had gone walking, shopping, and visiting so many years ago. I raise a glass of burgundy to you, Grandma.