Janet Pocorobba ’89: Smith in My Life

Mademoiselle Gantrel appears in my mind from time to time, snow-capped and distant, like the Alps. Arriving at our house at Smith College for evening cocktails, she stamps snow from her high leather boots and shakes the fat flakes from her beret.

In the long living room, my friend Katie, another first-year student, and I are waiting for her with glasses of sherry and clove cigarettes. Mlle finds us, smiles her half-smile and plucks a filterless Gauloises from her pack.

“The sensual detail in Colette’s prose is remarkable,” she says in French, pinching a shred of blond tobacco from her tongue.

Later, my housemates and I will gossip about her leather miniskirt, the length of her fingernails, the shape of the mole above the right corner of her mouth. There were her brains and her beauty, and her first name, Martine, which spoke of the new possibility of making a man’s name into a woman’s, a man’s world into our own.

Mlle Gantrel was (and still is) a professor of French studies. In her class on the 19th-century novel, we watched her engage with Balzac, Flaubert and Proust, her passion for them surfacing in a kind of icy purpose. Cool, I realized for the first time, was this aloofness cresting over the hot lava of passion.

I sat in the front row to inhale her mastery. I bought a beret and wore it to the café in town, where I smoked Gauloises. I learned to like espresso. Before long, I had to admit I spoke French haltingly. I coughed when I smoked. I preferred maxi, not mini, skirts.

But Mlle was teaching me something else. That one could be smart and glamorous. That books—and life—were worthy of deep discussion. Studying week after week not only Mlle’s fashions—silk sleeves fluttering as she unearthed long yellow legal pads from her briefcase—but her books as well, I learned that literature was not locked up in a jeweled box, to be unlocked with the Key of Meaning. We could open it with our very own hearts and minds.

After I left Smith I ended up teaching English in Tokyo. To pass the time and learn something about Japan, I took up lessons on the three-stringed shamisen. My teacher taught in English. She wore a leather jacket and a Beatles cap. She was divorced.

“I don’t want to live ordinary life,” she said when I met her.

In my first year at Smith, I lived and studied with remarkable women, all of whom encouraged me to know my own mind, to find my own truth. Through them—and later, through this music maverick in Japan, with whom I studied for four years—I began to follow my own passions. And it had to do more with who they were than what they taught.

Starting with the trail of bread crumbs laid out for me by Mlle (I still wear a beret), the role models in my life have been powerful motivators for going out there and becoming the woman I want to become. Their examples give me a vision of what’s possible, of faith in a future at all. Often, when the road gets dark and twisty, I recall their lives as well as their lessons.

As a professor myself now, I wonder whether teaching isn’t simply this: the humble but profound notion of leading by example.

Whenever I meet a Smithie in the world today, we clasp hands and gasp, “What house?” I am convinced that our palpable bond has something to do with the models we were for each other at Smith, and that this set us on the path to becoming the brave, free women we are today.

Spring 2019 Smith Alumnae Quarterly

Have a story about how Smith has influenced your life? Send your 600-word essay to saq@smith.edu for consideration.

Illustration by Hannah Barczyk