Elizabeth Ruhland, the younger Atkins daughter, remembers the adjustment. “A few months into her time, she got comfortable,” says Ruhland, a senior marketing manager at Sirius XM Radio in New York. “One day, she came downstairs for breakfast and said: ‘Guess what? I just had my first dream in English.’ ”
Lagarde and her host father forged a connection that, although neither knew it at the time, would endure deep into her professional life.
“She was older than our children and a little more experienced. She was never, ever a troublemaker, ever, okay?” says Bill Atkins, 72, who now lives with Marion in South Carolina. “She was like a daughter. . . .We would talk with her, but it wasn’t filled with a lot of emotion like some teenagers and children. With her, we’d have really good discussions, whatever was on my mind, something she observed being in Washington.”
* * *
At the beginning of her senior year in 1973, Page 4 of the Scribbler, the Holton-Arms student newspaper, carried the big news: “Holton Welcomes Christine Lallouette.” In a brief interview, the French newcomer expressed surprise that American women were not all “really fat and awful” and instead found them weight-conscious to “an obsession.”
At the end, the article perfunctorily noted her career ambition: “Christine eventually hopes to be a cultural diplomat for France, and plans to study political science when she returns next year.”
She joined the dance troupe and took courses in history, English and math. And even though she ended up with a career involving numbers, she disliked the subject so much that she wrote, “please, no math,” in her yearbook testimonial.
Within the social stratosphere of Holton-Arms, where President Gerald R. Ford’s daughter, Susan Ford, was also a student, Lagarde hung out mostly with a small band of outsiders, among them: Maggie Quiroga Mainor, the Argentine daughter of an international relations executive, and the late Gabrielle “Gabby” Geaslin Swartz, the daughter of a purported CIA operative.
Lagarde herself had an unusual background, which she alluded to in a mostly fictional story that she wrote for the Holton-Arms literary journal Scroll. The piece, titled “Noblesse Oblige,” drew on her mother’s roots in the French nobility during the 1800s.
Still, Lagarde never felt that she or her group quite fit in with her well-heeled and more traditional classmates.
“We were not especially the Holton types. I was a smoker. Gabby was a smoker. We were a little gang. We were not the typical, good, well-behaved, perfect girls,” Lagarde says with a hint of dismissiveness in her voice. “Gabby, she had a car. We’d sneak out and have lunch at Burger King.”
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