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| Andree and the Mighty Titan |
Before there was an Andrée Pesci, there was an Andrée
Descheneaux of Fairfield, Connecticut.
Her father, Ernest, was French Canadian from Trois-Rivières on
the Saint Laurence seaway, and her mother Margaret was Slovakian, a delightful
lady, sweet but, as concerned her children, a bar of tempered steel.
I first noticed Andrée around 1963 as she was performing a
solo dance at Western Connecticut State College in Danbury, Connecticut. I did
not know, until later in our budding relationship, that she had been legally
blind since birth, largely because this was a matter of indifference to both
Andrée and her mother, who treated her no differently than her siblings, a
brother Earnest and twin sisters Sandy and Sonia.
By the time The Lions Club came knocking at her mother’s
door, Andrée had excelled in all her elementary school classes. She had an ear
for music and sang wonderfully well. Much later, early in our marriage, she and
a piano accompanist opened a new venture, a club in Glastonbury owned by Gordie
Howe, “Mister Hockey” of the Whalers.
She excelled as well in college. She made Who’s Who in
Colleges Across the United States and mastered fencing, although she had been
stricken since birth with pendular nystagmus, a condition brought about, her
mother said, by a forceps delivery. Those afflicted with pendular nystagmus are
unable to focus because their eyeballs oscillate quickly back and forth. She
also was subject to migraines.
The Lions visitors told her mother that if she permitted her
daughter to attend what later became WESTCONN – then Danbury State Teachers
College -- the Lions Club, devoted to the sight impaired, would pick up the tab
for all expenses including tuition, books and readers.
Her mother told the visitors she’d think about it.
Fast forward four or five years. After graduating from
WESTCONN, Andrée was told the college would not certify her to teach in public
schools. The reason given her was that she was legally blind and could not be
expected to teach sighted students.
Almost immediately she wrote to then Governor John Dempsey,
who had a soft spot in his heart for the visually impaired, recounting her
accomplishments in great detail and asking the governor if he could intervene
with the decision makers.
He wrote back there was nothing he could do. So, Andrée
secured a teaching position at a Catholic girl’s high school in Greenwich
Connecticut – where she, unsurprisingly, excelled.
One of her students, upon graduating from college, secured a
writing position at the Wall Street Journal. This student used to travel by
bicycle from Greenwich to Stamford, Connecticut to visit with her former
teacher, where Andrée had found a second position at yet another Catholic
girl’s school.
She wrote again to Dempsey citing her recent accomplishments
and employment as a teacher in Catholic schools. He wrote back saying – sorry,
there was nothing he could do.
Andrée later attended Fairfield University, where she met
Father Bond, who taught a course in aesthetics, and greatly influenced her.
Bond was the author of four novels, one concerning the establishment, growth
and development of Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford under the tutelage of a
French Mother Superior who spoke a kind of pidgin English accented with
mellifluous French overtones.
Andrée’s world, thanks mostly to her mother, was populated
by heroic personalities who regarded difficulties as bridges to success.
On receiving her masters in American Studies from Fairfield
University, the first college in Connecticut to offer a degree in this new
discipline, she wrote once again to Dempsey, who wrote back – “Andrée, you
win,” after which she was certified to teach in public school.
It will be well to note here that the vision impaired are
too clever for words. When you cannot rely on your eyes, you rely on your wits
and other of your senses, including your common sense, sometimes misused by
those who are too perfect for words.
One day, picking Andrée up in Greenwich, I noticed she had
covered her blackboard with scribbling’s, her lesson plans for the day.
“Andrée, what use is all this? You can’t see the board.”
“They don’t know that.”
“They?”
“The students.”
They didn’t know she was blind. She had memorized the
scribblings on the blackboard, pointing to this or that text as she went along.
During her tests, she patrolled the aisles, and there was no cheating.
One day, I had a problem finding a specific pair of socks in
a cluttered sock drawer. It took her about five seconds to discover the
invisible socks.
“Andrée, how is it you can’t see and I can see – and you can
find the socks, but I can’t?”
In her most compassionate, teacherly voice: “Well, Donald,
we see through the eye, but with the brain.”
Dempsey was himself familiar with the surmounting of
difficulties. He succeeded Abraham Ribicoff as Connecticut’s governor, large
shoes to fill, who left office to become a member of President John Kennedy’s
administration. Dempsey was the first governor since the colonial period that
had been born in Europe -- Cahir, County Tipperary, Ireland -- and began a 30
year period in which Connecticut, a former puritan colony, had only Catholic
governors in office.
At a time of sometimes undisguised anti-Catholicism, this
arc, pointed in the direction of political equity, was revolutionary. Governor
Ella Grasso, the first in the nation woman governor who had won office in her own
right, was a regular attendant at Saint Mary’s Church in Windsor Locks.
Andrée’s first public school employment was at Ridgefield
High school, where she taught American Studies, among the first teachers of the
subject in Connecticut. She also taught film study, Composition and, a rarity
at the time, semiotics and vocabulary. And no one mumbled in her classes.
Two of her students told her, forty years after they had
graduated, that she had significantly influenced them. One became a lawyer who
had, he said, home schooled his children. He saved a framed comment – not flattering
– she had made on one of his papers decades earlier. The second student, a
lifelong friend of the first, also saved a decades old favorable comment she
had made on one of his papers. And he recently sent her two books, one a
collection of humorous stories he had written concerning his boyish adventures
at a camp, and the second a memoir he had edited of a Jewish family displaced
in a prisoner of war camp in Poland and Russia.
Both remarks, kept for so long a period of time like pressed
flowers of the field in an old book, fragrant with age, provide testimony of
how the heart, an always young athlete, leaps over time to set the always
living past blazingly before our eyes.
Her sight had grown worse as a result of the close work she
had done teaching. Dempsey would have been proud of her subsequent years
laboring for the state. She worked for the state for nearly three decades years
before retiring. She moved quickly through the ranks from an intake worker to a
fraud investigator to an energy consultant.
During her last few years with the state, her husband
noticed that she had begun to withdraw. As he put it, “That world conquering
smile of yours has dimmed,” possibly the result of her failing sight.
All this changed with the arrival of Jake, a Fidelco guide
dog for the blind operating out of Bloomfield, Connecticut. Jake, the most
regal of German Shepherds, brought her out of the doldrums and liberated her
spirit. She was independent once again, a force of nature. This independence
was Andrée’s natural state and, once recovered, it would suffer no diminution.
As a fraud investigator, Andrée saved the state millions of
dollars. There was a hitch, of course.
Saving money reduces the budget for the succeeding year. Such cost-saving measures were not looked
upon kindly by state administrators who depended upon fixed budget increases.
As an energy consultant, she saved state expenses by
advising state’s clients how they might more economically spend taxpayer funds.
As her mother had done when she was yet a restless but unfailingly obedient child, Andrée became
masterful at saving pennies, which both of us used, in successive trips to
Europe, to see the Old World before her sight deteriorated altogether. We
traveled on separate trips to Italy, three times, to France, three times, to
Spain, to Scotland, and then as our funds diminished, to places in the United
States, most memorably to a horse farm in Tennessee.
Riding horses was an easily fulfilled passion with Andrée.
Everywhere we went, we searched out horses and military cemeteries. In a small,
overlooked cemetery in Italy, glistening with white, sun-washed stones, we
paused and prayed at the tomb of Audie Murphy’s best friend. We did this, among
other reasons, to honor Andrée’s father, Ernie, who operated in four branches
of the service and had in his basement in Fairfield, Connecticut, ration cans
from World War II and a firing range.
All these good people, including members of my own family,
the heroes of my boyhood, are now gone.
“I wish,” Andrée said to me a couple of weeks go, “there
were something more permanent than a fleeting memory I could keep among my
treasured things so that beauty will not be lost forever.”
Well now my beauty, perhaps this poor offering may serve as
a casket of memory. Had you written it, it would have been far better -- but
also, more boastful.
And both of us know how you hate to boast about your
triumphs.
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