Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [9]
Back at the Branson School, in her senior year, Julia had published a witty essay in the literary magazine that began “I am like a cloud.” She was born, she wrote, with deficient tear glands, which meant that at the slightest emotional stimulus her eyes began to flood. Sitting in the theater she tended to embarrass everyone around her. Yet this did not mean she was a maudlin creature, she emphasized, far from it. She might look weepy and vulnerable, “but in my innermost inner I am as hard as a nail!”
No, she wasn’t hard as a nail, at school or later. The warmth she projected was genuine. But Julia had a firmness at the core, a constitutional strength of spirit that helped her pass smoothly through her first thirty years without the trauma or self-pity that might have attacked another woman in the same situation. She was always too tall to receive the abundant romantic attentions that someone with her charm had every right to expect; she was ruefully aware that she had wasted most of the time she spent at Smith; she had flubbed both her dream career as a writer and her actual career in business; and her single status at age thirty was like a medal of dishonor proclaiming inadequate femininity. None of this forced her psyche into neurotic twists and turns. Julia could not be toppled: there wasn’t an ounce of self-destruction in her personality, and her confidence ran so deep she hardly noticed it. But she knew that Donovan’s office had been her salvation, and that the war years put her on a road she might never have located otherwise. She always kept her OSS signaling mirror in a kitchen drawer.
The most important person she encountered in Ceylon was the man who would make her Julia Child. The two of them became friends right away, since Julia attracted friends as naturally as she laughed. Apart from her sociability and her impressive skills at the Registry, however, Paul Child found few points of contact with this big, jovial Californian. It wasn’t so much that their backgrounds were different—nobody had a background like Paul’s—but that Julia still seemed embedded in hers. Raised carefully in a manner befitting her parents’ comfortable ambitions for her, she was naive and inexperienced—a “grown-up-little-girl,” Paul thought. He, by contrast, had lived like a character in a boys’ adventure story. His father, who worked in the Astrophysical Observatory at the Smithsonian, had died in 1902, when Paul and his twin brother, Charlie, were only a few months old. Their mother, Bertha Cushing Child, moved the two boys and their sister back to Boston, where she had grown up. A trained contralto, she managed to support the family by teaching and performing, and received good reviews for her appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Handel and Haydn Society. Meanwhile, the boys studied violin and cello, and their sister took piano lessons. As soon as they could all manage their instruments, Bertha booked the quartet for salon performances as “Mrs. Child and the Children.” Music was only the first of Paul’s numerous careers. After high school he worked in a stained-glass shop, learning to cut and glaze, and then he headed out west. Over the next few decades, he was a waiter in Hollywood, a tutor for an American family in Italy, a woodcarver in Paris, and a teacher at a couple of private schools in New England. Along the way he acquired a black belt in judo and became an avid photographer, painter, gardener, and poet. At the OSS he worked in the visual presentation unit, which prepared maps, charts, and graphic displays, and he was setting up the war room in Kandy when he met Julia on the veranda of the tea plantation.