When in French by Lauren Collins Page A

bar and one soda per week. Swimming in the spring-fed lake was mandatory, as was communal showering afterward, unless you had swimmer’s ear, a case of which I soon contracted.
    The wake-up bell sounded at 7:45. I would sail through the morning activity periods, counting my cross-stitches and plucking my bows. But after lunch, when we repaired to our bunks for an hour of rest, my spirits would plummet. While my bunkmates jotted cheery letters to their families, I whimpered into my pillow, an incipient hodophobe racked by some impossible mix of homesickness and wanderlust.
    Several nights into the session, I wet the bed. I told no one. Even with the parrots as camouflage, rest hour became a torture. Each afternoon I sat there, marinating in my ruined sleeping bag, convincing myself that catastrophes happened to people who ventured away from their hometowns. “ COME GET ME ! I can’t make it three weeks,” I wrote in a letter home. “I will pay you back, just take me away, please!”
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    T HE PROGNOSIS, in the weeks that my father remained in intensive care, was that he would never work again. One day he got up out of bed and, ignoring the protests of his doctors,checked himself out of the hospital. He resumed his law practice the next week. His recovery was an act of obstinacy, an unmiraculous miracle attributable only to a prodigious will.
    Still, it was hard when he came home. Like many victims of brain injuries, he was forgetful and paranoid. His temperament had changed; he was irrational where he’d been lucid, irascible where he’d once been calm. Even more confusingly, as the years went by, I had to take the fact of this transformation on faith from my mother—I’d been so young when it happened—mourning her version of a father I couldn’t quite recall. The accident knocked our confidence, aggravating an already fearful strain in the family history. My mother coped with the situation, my brother accepted it, but I was furiously bereft. My desire to tackle Romania, or the Blue Ridge Mountains—my sense of confidence that I could, even—evaporated as I imagined my fate mirroring that of my mother, who was nine when her father had
his
accident.
    John Zurn—she and her siblings always called him that, in the manner of a historical figure—had been the vice president of Zurn Industries. It was a plumbing products company, founded in 1900 by his grandfather, John A. Zurn, who had purchased the pattern for a backwater valve from the Erie City Iron Works. At thirty-four, John Zurn was a man of the world. As part of his prep school education, he had studied French and Latin. Now a tutor came to his office once a week to drill him in Spanish. Zurn Industries was counting on him, in the coming years, to take its floor drains and grease traps into Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
    On December 3, 1959, John Zurn boarded Allegheny Airlines Flight 317, en route from Philadelphia to Erie. Attempting an emergency landing in a snowstorm, the plane slammed into Bald Eagle Mountain, near Wayne. The crash killedeveryone aboard except for a sportswear executive, who declared, from his hospital bed, “The Lord opened up my side of the plane and I was able to jump out.” As the
Titusville Herald
reported, John Zurn had been particularly unlucky: “Mr. Zurn boarded the ill-fated Flight 317 on a reservation listed by J. Mailey, who was coming to Erie to conduct business for the Zurn firm. Apparently last-minute plans were made for Mr. Zurn to travel to Erie in his place. Five children are among the survivors.” The Maileys and their seven kids were my mother’s family’s next-door neighbors.
    My grandmother, a thirty-one-year-old widow, remarried two years later. Her new husband was a cancer widower, with a girl and a boy of his own. Together they had two more children. In a photograph taken sometime in the mid-1960s, the brood,