Song of the Amorous Frogs – Part 1

A Story of Paris in the 1920s

I’d been working on my new story for days already, but even though I had what I thought a strong start, and a plot had begun to take shape as I wrote, a title eluded me. Then, as often happens, it came in a flash, when other concerns consumed me. But how striking, how right: “The Song of the Amorous Frogs.” Once heard, who would forget it, who would not take a second look?

It had come on a sun-pierced April day as I strode through the Jardin des Plantes.  I was on my way to the Gare d’Austerlitz, where I would meet the train bringing Clem back from Toulouse.  I had no time to spare.  I’d lost myself completely in the critique of my cubist figures, given by my teacher, André Lhote, whose atelier I attended three mornings a week, and suddenly I was late. 

Not even the fiercely modern Paris Metro could take me all the way from Montparnasse to Austerlitz.  Someday maybe it would, but not yet.  And horrendous traffic had stopped the autobus dead still, at Place Monge.  It didn’t help that it was market day.  Impatient, I decided to leave the bus and continue on foot.  I so hated the thought of making Clem wait.  And I hated even more the thought of not greeting him the moment he stepped off the train. 

It had been so long since we’d said “Goodbye” at the same station when Clem left.  As I had written then to my friend, Claudia, back in St. Louis: “Clem leaves today for Toulouse and it will be doleful here without him.  No one fills his place.”  Of course no one had, because no one ever could.

And so I was rushing through the garden, where the two of us often strolled at leisure on such days, flâneurs savoring the air scented by spring flowers and delighting in the puffs of pink petals fallen from the flowering trees and swirled into the air by gusts of wind.  Spring was my favorite season in Paris – until summer, fall and winter became my favorites in their turn.

But that day, instead of the melodies of song birds, I heard only the crunch of gravel under my shoes as I hurried – a muted crunch, since in Paris even the gravel was refined.  I hurried past the impeccably Parisian Hôtel de Magny; the Gloriette de Buffon, high up atop the maze hill; and the Ménagerie, where Rousseau had seen, and learned all he knew about, the tigers and zebras and imaginary jungles that fill his paintings. I gave none of them a second glance as I huffed and puffed like a train myself toward the station.

Then, suddenly, even the gravel crunch disappeared, supplanted by a booming screech, the like of which I’d never heard anywhere, and certainly not in Paris. It came from a trough of water plants some yards away, in the plotted garden across from the glass houses. Clem and I had walked past the trough many times, on our way to the tunnel entrance to the Alpine Garden, but never before had I heard such a racket.  Time after time it pulsed through the spring air and pierced my ears.

At last I realized that the dreadful screech was the sound of frogs in the grip of whatever lust is called for frogs. Surely there had to be some beautiful phrase in French to elevate even the horrible noise I heard into the realm of gorgeousness, if only I knew it. But I didn’t. So I was left only with the din.

But it was Paris – the Paris I’d dreamed of through long (not quite, but almost, interminable) dreary years in St. Louis, before I finished my degree at Washington University, and made my escape abroad. It was Paris, Paris in the 1920s, Paris made not just for art and light and dining, but also, as they say, for love. And so, of course, the gorgeous phrase reached my ear almost as soon as I became aware that I needed it:

“C’est la saison de l’amour.”

Of course! “It’s the season of love.” I heard the words spoken by the chic Parisian grand-mère to the petite granddaughter who stood beside her, clutching two fingers of her right hand as they peered into the brackish water, for a glimpse of the creatures whose voices – fueled by love – outstripped their bodies by multiples of tens.

“L’amour?” the innocent one asked, looking up at her grandmother’s kind, knowing face.

“Oui, ma Cherie. Tu comprendras bientôt. You will understand soon.”

And with the phrase that transformed the awful sound into that beautiful thing, amour – a thing I understood myself, thanks to Paris and Clem – came the title of my story: “The Song of the Amorous Frogs.”

I worked out the phrase exactly as I rushed on. Gare d’Austerlitz was still fifteen minutes away, even if I hurried, almost at a run. And then the labyrinth of stairs and tunnels and platforms to negotiate. And if the train happened to be early …

I rushed on, thinking of Clem and of the amorous frogs and how now, with him back in my arms and my bed, the story would flow – like our love, now that we were to be together once again.

 

II

We met in Colorado Springs the first summer of the war, where I’d gone to visit my sister and her husband, who were there seeking a cure in the pure mountain air for his tuberculosis at one of the sanatoriums offering hope to the near hopeless. Clem was there from Chicago with his young wife, a patient too. Consumption, as so many still called it, had her in its grip. She would be consumed by it.

Clem stayed by her side through the days, weeks, months of her pitiful decline. My sister and brother-in-law (he would recover and they’d return to their life in Houston), befriended them and offered what encouragement they could, in the face of a reality that did not suggest recovery for Clem’s wife. By the time I visited, even Clem had come to know that his beloved would not recover – a truth she had accepted already.

Only a month separated me from Clem in age, but the unimaginable agony of a beloved’s certain death – unimaginable to me –  marked a difference in our understandings of loss and pain that seemed almost unbridgeable. Though I had such little to offer of experience or wisdom, my company seemed to give him some comfort at the times he could not be by her side.

Sometimes, in the evening, after an anguished day, while the nurses prepared her for her fitful night, he and I would sit together in the deep white chairs on the wide porch – mostly sitting silent, watching the sun set over the mountains in the near distance. Unless he spoke, I tried to stay quiet out of fear that some unintended glibness might infuse anything I said – unintended, but perhaps ignorantly unavoidable, because I had not yet had to feel such excruciation as fate had thrust upon him, upon them. They were both so young to have to know such heartbreak.

I’d finished my first year of college, and with a patriotic fervor reserved for the young and unknowing, I’d enlisted in the Army the afternoon of the day I’d finished my last exam in the morning. I was just old enough that I could join without my parents’ consent, so I told them only after signing the forms. There’d been tears from my mother, of course, and a stern reprimand from my father. But after only a little while their mood shifted to resigned pride in their only son. Since I had a few days to pass before reporting, we all agreed that I should make the journey to Colorado. There was no knowing when – or if – I’d have the chance again.

On my last evening, after my few days there, sitting on the porch alone with Clem, I knew that I dreaded leaving more than I’d ever dreaded anything before – though I couldn’t say, even to myself, exactly why. We sat in our usual silence until long after the sun had sunk below the mountaintops. And then it was time for me to pack, and say my goodbyes to sister and brother, before an early morning departure.

I longed to reach out and touch Clem to let him know how completely I’d still be with him, even though I’d gone across the country, and perhaps across the ocean. But I had no knowledge of how to do such a presumptuous thing. He stood when I did, and after a moment, looking at me with tears in his eyes, he reached forward and put his arms around me and held me close.

“I’ll miss you,” he said. “I don’t know if I have the strength to see this through without you.”

I had no words. I held him close too, as a brother would. But no, not a brother. Something else; something that frightened me even though I couldn’t name it. We stood there in the dark for a long minute, our arms around each other, he weeping softly; I felt his tears on my cheek. When I pulled away and turned to go, tears had come into my eyes too.

(This is a longer work of historical fiction - too long for a single post, so I’m serializing it in 6 parts, one every other day until finished. Apologizing in advance for so many emails. I promise not to make this a habit. You can read any parts you miss on my Substack space, RECOLLECTIONS, REFLECTIONS, FANTASIES, FICTIONS - and I’ll bring all the parts together there when done.)