The summer I spent working for the embassy in Paris was a highlight of my young life. It was also one of the hardest things I have ever done. Fresh out of school from Vassar when I left, I had never been further then two states away from home. It took near constant pleading with mother for her to set up a job for me at the embassy there. The husband of her oldest friend Cilia was the ambassador, mother had gone many times to visit them. I was to be a secretary for the secretaries, not glamorous, but just being in Paris—capital of art and style—was enough to set my heart a-flutter. I had been exchanging letters with Claudine, the head secretary, for a few months before I left. They outlined my roll, what to wear, protocol all of the dry things. In the last letter she included the address and a picture of my apartment, I nearly fainted! I was going to live in an apartment provided for me by the American embassy in Paris! Oh what fools we can be in youth. When the day came to leave I was so in shock that it didn’t seem real. Waiving farewell to mother, father and the twins at the airport was like watching a film. The flight was terrible, loud bumpy and we were grounded in Greenland for two days because of weather over the Atlantic.
When we landed at Charles de Gau in Pairs I was a dejected little creature, yearning for a hot bath. I tugged my trunk to the curb in the rain and waited for a cab, oh what a fiasco! He didn’t speak English, I didn’t speak French, I had no Franks and the address was off by a number. It was three hours from landing to finally standing at the stoop to my new home. Fourth level and the elevator couldn’t fit my trunk! Well that was it, I was tough but there is only so much a person can take at once. I broke down crying right in front of that silly little cage of an elevator. I just sat on my trunk and felt sorry for myself, damp, cold, tired and far from a familiar face.
I don’t know for how long I was sitting there before this tall handsome man walked up, I assumed he was just going to be another French pig (my attitude to the poor French was tarnished that afternoon) come to hit on the foolish American girl. But what a nice boy he was, he lugged all my luggage to the top of the stairs with out saying a word, I just sat on the top step and sobbed. What a wreck, I was feeling perhaps the least attractive I have ever felt in my entire life. And he was so kind, gave me a smile every time he’d make it to the top with one more load. It turns out he wasn’t talking because he thought I was French and he only spoke English, I wasn’t talking because I couldn’t stop crying! Well when I finally said thank you he just about did a summersault. He was a private in the army and had been in France just a week himself. He was accompanying a piece of art on loan from the Smithsonian to the Louvre. It was on loan for a year and the Americans insisted it have an around the clock American guard, my luck was turning. He didn’t know anybody in the whole city, at least I had Cilia, he never spoke to the other soldier because they had opposite shifts. So there we were to American kids lost and alone in Paris France, the most romantic city in the world, and what did we do? We sat on a cold step and talked about nothing at all for hours. That was my Walter, we’ve been happily married 51 years.
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