I once heard someone expound on his theory that whether or not a French Canadian family in New England were Democrats or Republicans depended on which town they had settled in and who the dominant opposing English speaking ethnic group was. If, as around here, the Anglo-Scot yankees who were Republicans dominated, they would be Democrats in opposition to them, if the dominant group were Irish Catholic - who are, to the surprise of many, not traditionally classified as yankees but who are overwhelmingly Democrats in New England - the French would adopt the Republican identity. I think it's probably somewhat less true now than thirty or forty years ago when I believe I heard that theory, the mixing of the ethnic groups and rearranging of identity being somewhat modified. It is certainly less true that there is the hard distinction between Irish and French Catholics, in many towns around here there used to be two Catholic churches, one Irish and one French. With the priest shortage and the suicidal refusal of the hierarcy to expand the priesthood to married men and women, most towns have lost all of their churches. In the town I grew up in there was one which was required by the dioceses to have a French speaking priest, which is one of the reasons I learned to speak French somewhat well "for an Irishman" as one of my dearest friends who died yesterday put it.
She and I had French in common first, when she moved here I met her while I was working behind the desk in the library. She said something in French to her husband and was a bit surprised when I said something to her in French. She was surprised to find out I had about as Irish a name as you could have. We soon became friends, both her and her husband who, despite his French name didn't feel confident enough to speak it. Being shameless, I speak it, errors and all and don't bat an eyelash. If she noted one I pointed out that I learned from the Arcadians around here from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, whose French is far more antique than the Quebecois who were her family.
She was thirty years older than I am, she had a stricter, 19th century style childhood, with a formidable, Jansenist, grandmother who wouldn't talk to her grandchildren except in French ("Lose the language and you lose the faith") and a father who made her leave school when she was fifteen to work in a factory until her inevitable marriage ("Education is wasted on girls") despite her being far and away a better student than her brothers. But despite the differences we became close friends and, through me, she and my mother became quite close, too.
I quickly found out, as she devoured the contents of the library, that she pretty much had read EVERYTHING. Even my dear old Latin teacher, who read widely in a number of languages had not read as much as she did in two. Her vocabulary was far larger than mine or even that of my mother, whose use vocabulary might be the largest one I've encountered. She was the kind of person who you could be talking to about some incident in town and she'd say, That reminds me so much of what happened in.... what was that play by Ferenc Molnar? .... and be surprised that you didn't know it. She also read the news and was up on everything and was one of the most reliable volunteers in town. One thing she refused to do was learn to use a personal computer on the basis that she'd had to learn to use one in her position as secretary, way, way back and she didn't want to have to keep learning new software when she retired. She'd handle anything in the library except that and do it as well as anyone else.
One of the last conversations I had with her, she told me she never bothered reading novels anymore (new ones, I suspect she'd already read all of the old ones) because she was too interested in real life to be interested in the banal stories about make believe people that constituted the top authors today. She read voraciously about people, mostly travel writing - Paul Theroux was her favorite, though she told me that she couldn't read him after The Last Train to Zona Verde because it was too depressing and dispiriting. It's one of the few books she respected that she told me I shouldn't read.
To a lot of people in town, she was a retired secretary, a quaint little French Canadian woman who they seemed to figure was a rather simple person. Perhaps part of their confusion is that she was always knitting. She was entirely unassuming and, unless you talked to her about something that called on her incredible store of knowledge, she was quite happy to not let anyone know about it.
She was a Democrat, a quite liberal Democrat and someone whom despite what she called her "Victorian" childhood, in her mid-90s had no qualms about discussing issues around sexuality, if the topic came up. I know she shocked someone she was talking to once when they talked about how disgusting "gay sex" was in her presence. She shocked everyone by saying "Anal sex has risks but it's no one's business what adults do unless they're in public and not only gay men do it." I never talked about sex with her and certainly not my sex life with her. As a straight laced, New England Irishman, decidedly not of the Boston Southie variety, I was not comfortable talking about it. I know she wouldn't have blushed, no more than she did when she talked about how ignorant she was on her wedding night. I was red as a beet about five words into it and she was someone who was never, ever vulgar or coarse. I can feel my face burning, blushing as I remember it.
She was one of the most genuine intellectuals with one of the greatest souls I've known and I'll miss her.
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