Monsieur Dupont

by Angela Townsend

If my world shrinks to all that my arms can carry, Monsieur Dupont shall be saved.

Along with my mother’s quilts and my hard drive, I will salvage the wiry Gund hedgehog from 1986. He is six inches of plush and polyfill. He is an important Frenchman. He is language and longing with plastic eyes.

My mother—the poet—taught me to read by age three, and my father—the child—amassed animals for me to name. Fifty-eight when I was born, he was built like a mesa with a voice somewhere between Johnny Cash and Billy Graham. 

Lithe and lyrical, with eyes the color of tea, my mother kept me safe. Overgrown and effusive, an English garden left fallow, my father multiplied companions.

He could not stop buying stuffed animals, congresses and convocations of them at a time. Two identical beagles had such pleading eyes, he couldn’t leave either behind: “They are brothers who need each other.” The tie-dyed squirrel and curly cat spilled stories all the way home, and he recited them from his whitewater mind before dinner.

The animals were evidence that God giggled, emissaries of a world where an only child need never be alone. When my father decided that his five-year-old should learn French, it was natural that the creatures assemble around us.

We began with solemn tapes on my bedroom boom box. Dad assembled a dozen students in a circle, which we joined as equal members. 

“Before we begin,” a disembodied voice instructed, “choose a member of the class to represent your teacher. As you practice, all shall speak in his direction.”

I looked to Dad, but he looked to the hedgehog, who disappeared in his hand. Like all my animals, the hedgehog had a proper name, but from that hour he became—

“Monsieur Dupont.” Dad glistened like an inventor. “Our professor.”

“Our professor!” I shrieked with delight. Dad’s ideas were my language.

For four weeks the fourteen of us gathered, beginning each class with “Bonjour, Monsieur Dupont.” I was young enough to see the hedgehog nod back. Like everything from my father’s mouth, including the hypothesis that my nose would become a trumpet if I picked it, I accepted that Monsieur Dupont was a native Frenchman, kind and good and eager to help us.

In a month’s time, the tapes grew dull and autumn wooed us elsewhere. My father named my Nerf ball “Little Yellowfriend,” which made us laugh when we both proved incompetent at catch. 

My mother—the mystic—made pies and glued googly eyes to gourds for the church jamboree. My father—the deacon—boomed about Jesus, hundred-proof theology in a geyser over my head. Floury old women let me “waitress,” delivering ham salads my mother and I agreed were inedible but pretty.

I forgot about French but brought Monsieur Dupont to school. “And how did he get such a wonderful name?” Mrs. Torini asked.

“He’s a French teacher. He was born in Paris.” I was as loud as all who feel loved. “He’s going to teach my Dad and me how to speak French.”

Mrs. Torini was kind, but next year’s teacher recoiled.

“Maybe someday you will learn French,” Mrs. Andress cautioned. Months later, she called our house to demand whether my parents had put me up to calling her “facetious” as some kind of joke.

“No, she just knows what that word means,” my mother explained. “Did she use it correctly?”

“She did.” 

Meanwhile, Dad was thinking en francais again. This time we would enlist Muzzy, the shaggy proto-Shrek of 1980s infomercials. Together with his disparate companions, ten-foot-tall Muzzy could teach your child everything from Gaelic to Mandarin. Enchanted, Dad purchased the series and presented it to Mom and me with the same carbonation he’d brought to his sales career.

“We are about to embark on an exceptional adventure!” he promised. All my capillaries cheered. It went without saying, but Dad reminded me: “Bring Monsieur Dupont.”

We reported for an episode each night, the green mercy-beast supervising a congregation of peculiars. There were mice and kings and a shy bicyclist who wished the clock tower “Bonsoir!” There was La Princesse, who Dad agreed was me. There was a pointy dastard named Corvax, all sharp edges and incompetence. 

And there was Le Grand Muzzy, built like my father and invincibly kind. 

We learned enough French to sing songs and locate the library. Monsieur Dupont made the nightly shortlist for my pillow. I joined the junior choir at church.

If hedgehogs taught French and green deacons defeated dastards, my father would live forever. Even when it slapped me suddenly that he was “old,” my middle school mind was calm. Ours was a plush forest of words and sacraments, sacred silliness with shining eyes.

“Is she too old for this?” I heard my aunt ask my mother one Easter, a yellow bunny in her hand.

“Not at all.” My mother knew her thirteen-year-old.

It was Ordinary Time when I saw Dad stumble in the church basement, a silver tower of communion cups in his arms. Those big hands shook like prophets under heavy hail. The church decided to switch from glass to plastic. 

High school French was sterile until Madame Graham retired and the school scrambled for a replacement. The best they could do was William Dunn, magnetic warmth in an ascot and affectations. He was as American as squeeze cheese but insisted we call him “Guillaume.”

Scarcely older than our AP French class and considerably less fluent than Monsieur Dupont, Guillaume clung to teenage kindness. “This is my first full-time position!” he shrieked. 

We would keep him safe. He would keep our afternoons flamboyant. We watched Evita with subtitles and listened to noxious French boy bands. But we started to forget three years of conjugations. My friend Jay passed me a note: “How are we expected to remain victorieux under these circumstances?”

“He is a good man,” Dad determined when I shared our dilemma. “You are his maiden voyage. He will grow into his calling.”

I cannot report whether that ever happened. But Guillaume had one incendiary idea.

“Mes chatons!” Guillaume addressed us as his kittens, a primary reason I was committed to keeping him safe. “Today we learn at the knee of . . . Le Grand Muzzy!”

Green mercy filled the pull-down screen. Tears flooded my eyes. My father had Parkinson’s. I was never going to master French. I did not have a forest. I did not have language. 

“Ma petite choux, are you okay?” 

“Oui. J’adore Muzzy.”

My father died on my mother’s birthday, a month before I left for college. I could have taken a perfunctory exam to get out of the freshman language requirement, but I signed up for Italian, the language of my mother’s mother. A Brillo-top tempest from Milan gave me more language in a year than all the French of my life.

Today I collect Eiffel Towers, not Leaning Towers. Silver and compulsive, they cover my desk. I name cats for Les Miserables characters. I join and quit churches like cigarettes. I sing Johnny Cash songs in the car. I forget that words like “facetious” make it sound like I’m showing off. I bear Monsieur Dupont from apartment to apartment. 

I dream of my father in an unbroken circle. Animals are everywhere. The forest is guarded by cherubim, but the garden grows wild. Language collapses into communion. I will be as loud as all who know they are loved.

Renewal

by Laine Derr

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Angela Townsend is the development director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She has an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary and a BA from Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, LEON Literary Review, and The Razor, among others. She loves life dearly.

Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from J Journal, Full Bleed + The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.