‘Tea With Pierrette’
Tough and Easy Stages

By John McCabe

During the war, I was with the XIX Tactical Air Command Headquarters, Ninth Air Force, a sergeant. But I was sure no big shot in that superb group of airmen who were General George S. Patton’s vital support in the victorious drive across Europe. Although from time to time I hosted or put together some soldier shows, I was mainly a clerk-typist with the melancholy job of compiling the casualty and killed-in-action lists of all those heroes of ours who met war’s cruellest fate.

It is little wonder that, on my time off, I would want to socialize divertingly with the people of France who lived in the cities we stayed at during the moves across Europe. I spoke some elemental French but wanted to learn more, and this meant getting out among the French people. The same was true of my best friend in our outfit, an ebullient character, Sergeant Sammy Rosenblatt. Sammy and I used to wander into local markets and bistros in order to cultivate our acquaintanceship with the average Frenchman.

One day, in the city of Laval, we met a French gentleman, Monsieur Pierre Narbeburu, who invited us to his home for dinner -- where we met his charming wife, Madame Narbeburu, and his pretty daughter, Pierrette. No boy-and-girl-hanky-panky thoughts by Sammy and me about Pierrette. She was a straight-forward French girl interested in meeting American soldiers for all the best reasons, prominent among them the desire to learn English. During that dinner, Sammy and I spoke our usual fractured French, quite enjoying the practice. What I didn’t know of the language, Sammy seemed to know.

At the end of our lovely evening with the family, Pierrette asked Sammy and me to return in two days for afternoon tea the purpose of which she announced, was the opportunity for her to learn more English. We would (she said) oblige her by then speaking nothing but our native tongue. Would we do this for her? Indeed we would, and did.

Just as Pierrette wished, not a word of French was spoken.

What we could not have foreseen was that this little visit would prove to be one of the most hilarious experiences Sammy and I had ever experienced up to then. Hilarious, yet at the same time quite frustrating -- because as funny as it all was, out of pure politeness Sammy and I couldn’t emit a single laugh.

We couldn’t laugh because Pierrette had never -- although her pronunciation was fine -- Pierrette had never learned contemporary English syntax and usage. Indeed she had learned her English in a kind of time warp. Pronunciation from some old English recordings of Shakespeare, English phrases from a French-into-English conversational manual that had been published in 1891, 10 years before good Queen Victoria died.

The result was that Pierrette’s English conversation was as if we were seated in the dear Queen’s very parlor having tea with her personally. Pierrette’s uses of English were highly formalized, spoken as if they came directly from a textbook, as indeed they had.

Moreover, Sammy and I were made to feel like British nobility because Pierrette instead of calling us “Monsieur Sammy” and “Monsieur John” as she had at dinner, discovered in her manual that “Monsieur” translated to “Sir.” And both of us were called so during our tea. It is best for me to transmit this in dialogue form.

PIERRETTE ( Greeting us at the door ) Ah, Sir Sammy! Sir John! What an extreme and esteemed pleasure it is to see you again.

SAMMY Uh, thanks very much, Miss Pierrette. (I mumble the same.)

PIERRETTE ( Directing us to the parlor, pointing to the appropriate chairs .) Would you have the goodness, Sir John, to occupy the chair near the writing desk. And Sir Sammy, you to occupy the chair by the window, ( We do so .) Ah, is this not a delightful circumstance? Your so splendid visit. ( Sammy struggled with suppressed laughter .) Remember, please, to correct my English if it departs from rectitude of form. (We both nod solemnly.)

JOHN ( Looking appreciatively about me,) You have a lovely home.

PIERRETTE Yes, it is, is it not?

SAMMY ( Getting into the proper Victorian speech mode Pierrette has established for us ) The decor of this parlor I find particularly exquisite in its colorations and conformations.

PIERRETTE I am charmed to hear you aver so, Sir Sammy.

JOHN I wish to confirm my colleague’s opinion. Your fireplace in its own gently elegant and endearing way is a masterpiece. ( Pierrette loves the sound of the word ‘endearing’ which is not in her vocabulary and demands to know its variety of meanings. She then writes all this down in a notebook labelled “Les Mots Anglaise Curieux.”) Thanks, Sir John.

All this continued for some time -- indeed all the way through tea -- and it became very apparent that Pierrette loved unusual words. So Sammy and I concentrated on using them and she would eagerly copy them down, spelling, meanings and all, in her little book. I can recall our using such esoterica as “esoterica,” “conflate,” “peckish” (in reference to hunger), “obsequies,” when Pierrette said she had been to a funeral that morning and other words out of the ordinary. By this time Sammy and I were feeling rather peckish, and our hunger was more than satisfied by being given caviar canapes overlaid with salmon strips. And thus our visit ended in an effusion of mutual regards, still using the stilted Victorian vocabulary. But Sammy could not resist a few non-Victorian words of farewell.

“Mademoiselle Pierrette,” he said, “you are a real cutie-pie, two words of American slang that are virtually untranslatable. But somewhere along the line, someone who has the time and knows American English will one day tell you the essential meaning of that phrase. It is entirely complimentary. So just remember: You are a genuine cutie-pie!”

We left, and Pierrette was murmuring the words to herself as she stood in her doorway, waving to us. “Cutie-pie, cutie-pie.” Knowing her sense of determination, I am supremely confident that one day she learned what those two words meant. And how they expressed our affectionate regard for a sweet French young lady.

John McCabe, year-around resident of Mackinac Island, has for decades been professional actor, drama professor, and show business biographer. The Town Crier has asked him to share, from time to time, some of his memories.