"With My Child at Rouen"

WITH MY CHILD AT ROUEN





I seized and rushed her to the sacred spot,


The burning-place of Joan, a market now,


To build with her in this historic square


A memory for later years, perhaps


One solace for a journey such as this,


When she might stand again, with her own child,


And whisper in her ears unknowing, "Here,


Here once my daddy held me by the hand.


Look, child, even though you may not understand."





-"European Footsteps", c. 1965

My father penned this touching verse on our first familial trip abroad. I read it for the first time after I had my son, which was many, many years later. Though a brilliant essay on "modern" Europe, my father's travel journal did not usually focus on his family. This prophetic exception reveals a tender awareness of relationship and the passing of a father's legacy.

........I remember standing in that square, and my father telling me in cryptic terms of young Joan's appalling fate. Being a precocious child, I, unfortunately, understood it all too well. You can't really couch the concept of public incineration.





On the set of Jeopardy.





Me: (charmingly) "I'll take French euphemisms for $50..."


Host: (cagily) "Joan will stake her life on it"


Me: (still smiling) "What is Fille Mignon?"


Host: Nicely done, Liane. Did you say you were an only child?





Yes, history and I were old friends. Usually left to my own devices on Saturday mornings (like most onlys) I had seen every Hollywood historical epic from Ben Hur to "Gidget". The events of the last 5000 years were permanently (if slightly inaccurately) engraved on my psyche. If anyone could imagine a crowd of French clerics roasting a teenybopper on a bonfire, it was me.



Waldo let go of my hand, and I shuddered in the blustery chill of a French summer afternoon. Unable to stop staring at the site where the stake itself had stood, I forced myself to think about something else. Fortunately, an opportunity presented itself, in the form of a fragrant French market. I advanced to peruse the legumes, when suddently I spied something very disturbing.

I turned slowly...catching a glimpse of pale flesh out of the corner of my eye. In the words of the inimitable (except by me) Carol Channing, I intoned, "Something is not right...". Sure enough, behind a glass cabinet, I spied rows and rows of ...gasp!...tender young rabbits... hung like chickens...their hind legs poised as if to ready to leap from the pickle they'd found themelves in. Rabbits! Ohmygod! The gaul! The Frogs eat rabbits! As if Girl BBQ wasn't enough! What next?

I knew what was next, and the thought filled me with terror. I hugged Bunny ever tighter, covering her eyes lest she glimpse such a gruesome fate. After all, nothing in her short life had prepared her for this. From the lofty shelves at F.A.O. Schwartz to frolicking at the Polo Lounge, Bunny had led a charmed life. Until now, that is.

I clutched her to my breast, and ran to the one person who could, if pressed, fight off the entire French Foreign Legion - my governess, Miss Doucette. Blurting out my shocking discovery, she grabbed Bunny and in a trice, stuffed her into the back seat of the ridiculously large Cadillac that we had brought with us to motor through the narrow winding streets of Europe. Just in time, as by now I had spliced the two storylines together and heard cries of "Heretique! Heretique!" as the rabid, rabbit-hungry crowd fanned the flames of inquisition. Fortunately, my father was soon pining for Napoleon, and sped us out of this dangerous ville.

Needless to say, my appetite went on a 24 hour hiatus. For the remainder of France, Bunny kept a low profile, and spent most of her days locked in our suite, listening to jazz and wearing a Jayne Mansfield scarf and sunglasses. "Just wait til we get to a nice Protestant country...you'll be safe there," I whispered. But Bunny never made it. She was swept off a seaside sidewalk in the South of France, in a James Mason moment, hurtling down, down, down, over the cliffs, onto the rocky surf below. "Easy come. Easy go," he slurred. "A fitting end for a hare on the lam."

That night, a tear fell down upon my pillow. My only friend was gone.