For Some, a Little Raison D'Être

For 30 Years, Students in an Alexandria French Class Have Shared Their Lives While Laboring Over Subjunctives

Thirty years is a long time. Longer than most wars, mortgages and many marriages. And it is certainly a long time to take a French class. Yet, for 30 years, from 10 a.m. to noon every Wednesday, Kathleen Diamond has been teaching her French class in Alexandria. To many of the same 11 students.

Katherine Martyn, 95 and still soigneé in light wool and pearls, comes religiously every week, from a retirement home in a taxi these days, having given up driving after her husband died. Leaning heavily on a walker, she reports the progress she is making translating a memoir, "A Joyful Noise," into French, and fiercely resists all attempts to learn French slang, or anything not distingue.

Martha Stafford, 83, battled rare leukemia nine years ago. When she lost all her hair during chemotherapy, she bought a wig, assiduously looked up the French words for "bone marrow" and "cancer," and rarely missed a class. She can't really explain why. "I've just been there forever," she said. "Though I hate to admit it, because I'm not that good."

It's not as if they're all fluent. Martyn speaks with a distinct North Carolina accent. Molly French's accent reveals her South Jersey roots. Electra Beahler often mixes her French with her native Greek or a stray Spanish word she picked up while living in the Dominican Republic. And they all marvel at how much one can say while avoiding the subjunctive tense at all costs.

And it's not as if they're all best friends. A few see one another for lunch now and again. And some did travel to France together in the 1980s and 1990s, daring one another to go on balloon rides, take barge trips or eat raw oysters. But they still address one another as "Madam" and use their last names. They use the formal "vous" when speaking to one another, to show a certain distance and respect.

It's just that, together, they're "the French class." For decades, each has been sitting at the same place at the table -- Martyn to the teacher's right and either Mimi Mackall or Dorothy Graham, whoever arrives first, to the teacher's left. Although they have long finished their original textbook, each must give a presentation of their choice every week and be prepared to answer questions.

And, over the years, between conjugating verbs and discussing French politics in halting French, they have shared their lives. Births. Deaths. Divorces. Successes. Frustrations. The slow creep of age. "We know a lot about each other," said Hedi Pope, 87. "If you live long enough, it can be very interesting."

And through all the chaos that life can throw at you over 30 years, there is a certain comfort in having two predictable hours in a butter-yellow room at the Campagna Center on Washington Street. Safety in the familiar gilt-edged mirrors on the walls, cushy wingback chairs, floral divans and brass chandeliers, and the large polished cherry dining room table at which the French class gathers.

The people who have left the French class, save for the occasional man who lasted a semester, have not dropped out. They've fallen ill with Alzheimer's. Or died.

More Than Just French

Diamond never imagined the class would last this long when she came to what was then the YMCA and asked for a job. She said she was a "slender, raven-haired, twentysomething" with a master's degree in 16th-century French literature and two toddlers at home. To get students, she had to compete with a host of other classes, such as Modern Dance for Figure Control, Poodle Grooming, and Bridge, a Whale of a Game, offered during the day to keep the ladies of Alexandria busy.

All these years later, Diamond is still slender at 60, but her hair is white. Her toddlers are grown men with toddlers of their own. Her marriage is over. Her parents have died. The Y is gone, and all the old classes, save hers, have ended as the women of Alexandria went to work.

It has become an old joke that she's either a very bad teacher or that her students are very slow and that's what's taking them so long. It's just that, for her, too, the class has become about more than French. She still takes attendance. She still assigns homework. She still collects the $95 tuition for each 10-week semester. She still raps authoritatively on the table with her knuckles at the start of class and asks her students to speak in French: "Toujours en français, s'il vous plaît."