Part 7
All three students assigned to me were English-language students. The first was a
twenty-three-year-old Toronto housewife, who said her professional name was Bambi
Kramer, and advised the school to address her mail accordingly. All new students at Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres were requested to fill out questionnaire forms and to enclose
photographs of themselves. Miss Kramer had enclosed a glossy, eight by ten print of
herself wearing an anklet, a strapless bathing suit, and a white-duck sailor's cap. On
her questionnaire form she stated that her favorite artists were Rembrandt and Walt
Disney. She said she only hoped that she could some day emulate them. Her sample
drawings were clipped, rather subordinately, to her photograph. All of them were
arresting. One of them was unforgettable. The unforgettable one was done in florid
wash colors, with a caption that read: "Forgive Them Their Trespasses." It showed three
small boys fishing in an odd-looking body of water, one of their jackets draped over a
"No Fishing!" sign. The tallest boy, in the foreground of the picture, appeared to have
rickets in one leg and elephantiasis in the other--an effect, it was clear, that Miss
Kramer had deliberately used to show that the boy was standing with his feet slightly
apart.
My second student was a fifty-six-year-old "society photographer" from Windsor,
Ontario, named R. Howard Ridgefield, who said that his wife had been after him for
years to branch over into the painting racket. His favorite artists were Rembrandt,
Sargent, and "Titan," but he added, advisedly, that he himself didn't care to draw along
those lines. He said he was mostly interested in the satiric rather than the arty side of
painting. To support this credo, he submitted a goodly number of original drawings and
oil paintings. One of his pictures--the one I think of as his major picture--has been as
recallable to me, over the years, as, say, the lyrics of "Sweet Sue" or "Let Me Call You
Sweetheart." It satirized the familiar, everyday tragedy of a chaste young girl, with
belowshoulder-length blond hair and udder-size breasts, being criminally assaulted in
church, in the very shadow of the altar, by her minister. Both subjects' clothes were
graphically in disarray. Actually, I was much less struck by the satiric implications of
the picture than I was by the quality of workmanship that had gone into it. If I hadn't
known they were living hundreds of miles apart, I might have sworn Ridgefield had had
some purely technical help from Bambi Kramer.
Except under pretty rare circumstances, in any crisis, when I was nineteen, my funny
bone invariably had the distinction of being the very first part of my body to assume
partial or complete paralysis. Ridgefield and Miss Kramer did many things to me, but
they didn't come at all close to amusing me. Three or four times while I was going
through their envelopes, I was tempted to get up and make a formal protest to M.
Yoshoto. But I had no clear idea just what sort of form my protest might take. I think I
was afraid I might get over to his desk only to report, shrilly: "My mother's dead, and I
have to live with her charming husband, and nobody in New York speaks French, and
there aren't any chairs in your son's room. How do you expect me to teach these two
crazy people how to draw?" In the end, being long self-trained in taking despair sitting
down, I managed very easily to keep my seat. I opened my third student's envelope.
My third student was a nun of the order of Sisters of St. Joseph, named Sister Irma,
who taught "cooking and drawing" at a convent elementary school just outside Toronto.
And I haven't any good ideas concerning where to start to describe the contents of her
envelope. I might just first mention that, in place of a photograph of herself, Sister Irma
had enclosed, without explanation, a snapshot of her convent. It occurs to me, too, that
she left blank the line in her questionnaire where the student's age was to be filled in.
Otherwise, her questionnaire was filled out as perhaps no questionnaire in this world
deserves to be filled out. She had been born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where her
father had been a "checker for Ford automobiles." Her academic education consisted of
one year of high school. She had had no formal instruction in drawing. She said the
only reason she was teaching it was that Sister somebody had passed on and Father
Zimmermann (a name that particularly caught my eye, because it was the name of the
dentist who had pulled out eight of my teeth)-Father Zimmermann had picked her to fill
in. She said she had "34 kittys in my cooking class and 18 kittys in my drawing class."
Her hobbies were loving her Lord and the Word of her Lord and "collecting leaves but
All three students assigned to me were English-language students. The first was a
twenty-three-year-old Toronto housewife, who said her professional name was Bambi
Kramer, and advised the school to address her mail accordingly. All new students at Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres were requested to fill out questionnaire forms and to enclose
photographs of themselves. Miss Kramer had enclosed a glossy, eight by ten print of
herself wearing an anklet, a strapless bathing suit, and a white-duck sailor's cap. On
her questionnaire form she stated that her favorite artists were Rembrandt and Walt
Disney. She said she only hoped that she could some day emulate them. Her sample
drawings were clipped, rather subordinately, to her photograph. All of them were
arresting. One of them was unforgettable. The unforgettable one was done in florid
wash colors, with a caption that read: "Forgive Them Their Trespasses." It showed three
small boys fishing in an odd-looking body of water, one of their jackets draped over a
"No Fishing!" sign. The tallest boy, in the foreground of the picture, appeared to have
rickets in one leg and elephantiasis in the other--an effect, it was clear, that Miss
Kramer had deliberately used to show that the boy was standing with his feet slightly
apart.
My second student was a fifty-six-year-old "society photographer" from Windsor,
Ontario, named R. Howard Ridgefield, who said that his wife had been after him for
years to branch over into the painting racket. His favorite artists were Rembrandt,
Sargent, and "Titan," but he added, advisedly, that he himself didn't care to draw along
those lines. He said he was mostly interested in the satiric rather than the arty side of
painting. To support this credo, he submitted a goodly number of original drawings and
oil paintings. One of his pictures--the one I think of as his major picture--has been as
recallable to me, over the years, as, say, the lyrics of "Sweet Sue" or "Let Me Call You
Sweetheart." It satirized the familiar, everyday tragedy of a chaste young girl, with
belowshoulder-length blond hair and udder-size breasts, being criminally assaulted in
church, in the very shadow of the altar, by her minister. Both subjects' clothes were
graphically in disarray. Actually, I was much less struck by the satiric implications of
the picture than I was by the quality of workmanship that had gone into it. If I hadn't
known they were living hundreds of miles apart, I might have sworn Ridgefield had had
some purely technical help from Bambi Kramer.
Except under pretty rare circumstances, in any crisis, when I was nineteen, my funny
bone invariably had the distinction of being the very first part of my body to assume
partial or complete paralysis. Ridgefield and Miss Kramer did many things to me, but
they didn't come at all close to amusing me. Three or four times while I was going
through their envelopes, I was tempted to get up and make a formal protest to M.
Yoshoto. But I had no clear idea just what sort of form my protest might take. I think I
was afraid I might get over to his desk only to report, shrilly: "My mother's dead, and I
have to live with her charming husband, and nobody in New York speaks French, and
there aren't any chairs in your son's room. How do you expect me to teach these two
crazy people how to draw?" In the end, being long self-trained in taking despair sitting
down, I managed very easily to keep my seat. I opened my third student's envelope.
My third student was a nun of the order of Sisters of St. Joseph, named Sister Irma,
who taught "cooking and drawing" at a convent elementary school just outside Toronto.
And I haven't any good ideas concerning where to start to describe the contents of her
envelope. I might just first mention that, in place of a photograph of herself, Sister Irma
had enclosed, without explanation, a snapshot of her convent. It occurs to me, too, that
she left blank the line in her questionnaire where the student's age was to be filled in.
Otherwise, her questionnaire was filled out as perhaps no questionnaire in this world
deserves to be filled out. She had been born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where her
father had been a "checker for Ford automobiles." Her academic education consisted of
one year of high school. She had had no formal instruction in drawing. She said the
only reason she was teaching it was that Sister somebody had passed on and Father
Zimmermann (a name that particularly caught my eye, because it was the name of the
dentist who had pulled out eight of my teeth)-Father Zimmermann had picked her to fill
in. She said she had "34 kittys in my cooking class and 18 kittys in my drawing class."
Her hobbies were loving her Lord and the Word of her Lord and "collecting leaves but
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