OTHER LANGUAGES

 

From my vantage it looked absurd, like my Dad, a five-foot-three World War II veteran might be a terrorist risk, but of course it was his pacemaker—he couldn’t go through the airport metal detectors, so they had him enduring the public humiliation of standing spread-eagled—beltless, shoeless and coatless—while some barely legal cretin with hair gel wanded his crotch and ran palms along his thighs.

Dad took it with predictable pragmatism, head centered, eyes forward, stone-faced, still the stoic soldier. I know that in his mind anyone rubbernecking, refusing to mind his/her business, should be comforted to know that airlines were taking such random precautions these days, unilaterally suspicious no matter whom you were, what you represented, which continents you’d liberated. To me, it was a distractionary scam perpetrated by an impotent industry, and I suspect that secretly we’d all feel safer if they only wanded bearded immigrants who managed 7-Eleven night shifts.

Of course, I really didn’t understand any of them; not Homeland Security, not Kwiky Mart Muslims (probably hardworking family guys, like Abu), not airport rules which allowed three-inch scissors but not four, not the paranoiac 9/11 hangover of the average citizen, certainly not Lieutenant Wayne Rimathe, my father, who’d stormed ashore at Omaha Beach less than an hour after the first infantry wave on D-Day and wound up being the only man in his platoon to survive the war and who had every right to spout, here and now, beneath the wand, dusty clichés like ‘freedom isn’t free’ while I—never a veteran, never a Boy Scout, never even on the grade school safety patrol—could only hover like a schmuck and roll my eyes.

Still, from my vantage—where freedom was perfectly free—my father’s airport ordeal seemed to be an abominable imposition. Borderline nuts.

But at least I got him on board. That was my ordeal. He’d turned eighty-six this past February and it was now October and I’d first suggested this trip two years ago in what I saw as a potential last chance for him and me, a father and son who’d never been close, never really spoken the same language, to make a final stab at ‘bonding’—that awful concept connoting something forced, desperate and rarely successful—and I chose this venue because it would make the mission more archeological than emotional.  Dad—who to this day has never hugged me, tousled my hair or even given me a playful thump on the shoulder—didn’t do emotional.

Not strictly true. I remember one occasion. Maybe I was nine or ten; we had finished dinner but Dad was still at the table; in the other room there was a television set which he could see from where he sat. On it was some World War II footage, specifically the liberation of a concentration camp, and my mother, batshit crazy anyway and instantly dismissive of anything that captured Dad’s attention, snorted, ‘Another stupid war movie,” as she went to switch it off. I knew there wouldn’t be a fight; Dad was too old school for fighting or divorcing. But I glanced to see his reaction and was knocked for a loop to see him silently, steadily, sobbing. Literally sobbing, with tears streaming down his face. “Ellen,” he replied in a tone so even it was eerie, like the documentary’s narrator: “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, do you?” It was a quiet synopsis, an explanation rather than a rebuke and made without inflection, but it was huge—the only time I’d ever heard him use the word ‘fuck’ and certainly the only time I’d ever seen him cry.

I didn’t know everything he’d done overseas, but I knew for sure he’d been to the places that dotted the itinerary I’d laid out—that or his military personnel file was bullshit. I’d found them inside the battered brass-hasped suitcase in the spare room in Chelsea about ten years ago. Nothing clandestine intended; I can’t remember what I’d been looking for, but not for these—I opened the old case and found what I supposed was Dad’s essential memorabilia (hardly anything) starting with some impossibly precious kindergarten papers showing that on May 3, 1929, the ‘Today I was a Good Rester’ list included Wayne. There was an old valentine with an heart-studded elephant reading ‘I’ll be Yours if You’ll be Mine’ addressed to ‘Mother’; a Home of the Bulldogs yearbook, Class of 1941, where on page 37, a one-by-one shot of Wayne Rimathe in a narrow tie, slicked-back hair made his Dumbo ears look even sillier and described his activities as Boy’s Glee Club, Hall Guards, R.O.T.C. and contained, like all the other photos, a one-sentence personality summation: ‘Small but mighty powerful’.

Beneath the yearbook was a leather-bound ‘Life in the Service’ diary that was nearly empty; he hadn’t even gotten through the ‘personal description’ page, penciling in his weight and eye color, then under ‘complexion’ writing ‘lousy’, which was probably true since he has no sense of humor that I’m aware of. Under collar size he’d written ‘who knows?’ and nothing more in the whole volume, as if by the time he’d reached collar size the thing had become so irrelevant as to be a bother. His enlisted records covered his basic training in Fort Belvoir and OTS in the same location; he’d been commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in July of ’43 and according to his discharge papers, never rose beyond that rank though he’d been part of the largest troop mobilization in history—a slap in the face, I thought. His foreign service preparation included classes like camouflage and sex morality and indicated that on 12 Jan 1943, he’d had ‘Section VIII’ read and explained to him—Colonel Klinger’s out. From Virginia he’d been assigned to the 121st Engineer Combat Battalion, 29th Infantry, where on D-Day, he’d landed at Omaha at H-Hour plus sixty minutes.

The dog-eared documents didn’t tell any more. Neither did the service bars, victory ribbon or his ‘Today I Was a Good Liberator’ AGC medal. But the ‘After Action’ report did, and it was reprinted on virtual museum web sites across the internet. Dad’s landing craft had been struck by an 88 mm shell before it even unloaded, killing nearly everyone on board.

When I asked him about it and why I’d never heard the story before, he’d shrugged it off. “I had other things to do than talk about it; pay mortgages, mow the lawn, raise you—your mother wanted nothing to do with the war, didn’t want to hear about it. It was a nuisance to her, before her time; it might have been the Crusades or something else that puts you to sleep in History class, and after a while, I figured nobody remembered enough about it to care.”

When I pushed it, he told me that he’d been the second man off his LCI and it had exploded behind him when he was neck-deep in water and that’s what saved him, but he seemed maddeningly casual about it, as if the anomaly of his survival, and by default, my existence, was something of only moderate consequence to him, like a chance encounter that had led to a successful job interview. I didn’t get it. He was even more laconic about what happened next. Having attached himself to a group from another company, he told me he’d slept that first night in a hedgerow outside Vierville-sur-Mer next to the corpse of a slain German officer, using the grey tunic, stiff with blood, as a cover. In the morning he’d returned to the landing site to look for what was left of his battalion and found the beach strewn with Allied dead as far as he could see, many still washing ashore. He was reverent about it, for sure, but odd and detached from the human perspective, as if he was describing a promising wheat field suddenly blighted with fungus. Only after prodding had he shown me the photographs he’d taken; first, in Saint-Lô, a strategic crossroads town that he’d helped reduce to rubble as it was freed, and then some in Nordhausen where he’d been assigned after the war to locate civic-minded ex-Nazis of sufficient character to run the show when the Americans left. Some of the pictures showed murdered POWs from the nearby V2 factory’s slave labor camp, worked to death and lined up like railroad ties. To me, this might explain his mysterious breakdown over the Holocaust documentary—he’d seen it firsthand—but not why he seemed more interested in the story of how he’d come across his camera, an Argus C-3, than the sad, vacant-eyed bodies he’d photographed.

The flight was event-free and Charles De Gaulle was predictably cosmopolitan, simultaneously bored and bustling; it looked like the prow of a huge glass ship populated by entities in outlandish costumes babbling gibberish, and lined with fashion posters of starved, gangly French models that no matter how beautiful still made me think of armpit hair.  I steered Dad through customs, where they seemed almost nostalgically nonchalant about their charge, perhaps because nobody had flown a jet into the Eiffel Tower lately; the agent looked like the only response to our explanation of why we were here was “So why are you telling me this again?”

We located Colin Bishop amid the sea of chauffeurs and tour guides, and quickly. Although I’d spoken to him several times on the phone, exchanged countless emails with him as we set our route, I’d never seen him, yet I recognized him instantly—a big, bald paste-colored Brit who looked like he’d played a few devastating rounds of rugby—I later found out that he’d been in the U.K. equivalent of the bush leagues. He was in his mid-forties, my age, and had been the saving grace of the whole trip since Dad’s primary objection all along, apparently, was that we’d make a mess of France because we didn’t speak French. But Colin was not only English but bi-lingual, with a French wife, and Dad had consented to come along only after I told him that, or more precisely, after he himself had spoken to Colin at length and decided that he passed the white glove test.

Colin was an ex-pat from Sussex whose world view was the opposite of most Englishmen in that he loved the French and hated the British, grouping (I think) us uppity spun-off Americans among the latter. He’d been eking out a living in Normandy for a decade, taking morbidly curious tourists and ‘Band of Brothers’ aficionados around D-Day sites in his Citroën C-Crosser ‘BattleBus,’ blowing the mind of the most anal historian with his encyclopedic knowledge of Operation Overlord. His agenda, beyond employment, was apparent once you saw his price scale; a dawn to dusk tour of the Liberation Route from the landing beaches along the coast to as far inland as you could make would cost you a hundred eighty euros unless you happened to be a World War II veteran, in which case it was free. He had an obsessive attachment to these vets for reasons that, even when this was all over, I never quite worked out.

But Colin’s world view was clear from the moment he pumped my hand with a brusque, slightly contemptuous smirk, saying, “So you’re Nat,” emphasizing ‘you’re’ as though I was an inevitable disappointment, then embraced my father with a sincerity that bordered on ferocity, startling me and startling Dad beyond the simple recognition that it was a warmer gesture than I’d ever offered him—or probably ever felt like offering.

Colin dispensed with the ‘How was your flight?’ crap and launched immediately into what I came to understand as Colinishness—blustery but not obnoxious chatter, insightful historical references sprinkled with satire-tinged and extremely witty non sequiturs. He was infinitely curious about every detail that Dad could remember about his D-Day experiences, and though Dad remained somewhat tight lipped and uncomfortable beneath the spotlight, he pointedly—and with an emphasis as stunning as Colin’s hug—boycotted any idea of himself, a twenty-two-year-old who’d been cast into something way, way over his head, as any sort of an icon or hero. It’s fair to say that I heard more, learned more, divined more about Dad’s personality on that two-hour ride through the burnished Norman countryside than I had in the forty-five years that had preceded it.

Still, I had the uneasy sense that the two of them were sharing some cosmic secret, probably because even with my pre-trip due-diligence I’d never heard of places like Pegasus Bridge and Ste-Mère-Eglise—significant sites that each knew intimately and had stories related to. I offered up a comment here and there so that my presence (and by default, my sponsoring credit card) would not be entirely overlooked: “I never heard any of this stuff growing up, you know? We were raised on birthday magicians and Scooby Doo cartoons—there wasn’t this kind of lessons-learned interaction. In Dad’s house, children were not to be seen or heard.”

“Like snipers?” Colin replied, but the statement wasn’t directed to me.

We were booked into a small three-star hotel a mile or so from the coastline, a little way beyond the spiky, green-domed cathedral of Bayeux. I remembered enough about history to know that the town was indelibly associated with another battle: Hastings, 1066, when the Normans kicked some serious English butt. I would have mentioned it as a smug rejoinder to Colin’s coolish handshake had he not had already espoused a disdain for his own countrymen—and had the victory not been an aberration. As I assumed he knew far better than me, nine times out of ten when the British and the French dust it up, the British win—and don’t have to weave tapestries to prove it.

Dad and I settled into the rationally comfortable Merôtel; an art deco bar in the lobby boasted a selection of Calvados, the Norman equivalent of Cognac only distilled from apple cider, and we washed down a couple of these with some yeasty Belgian beer, then split a too-rare flank steak which we wouldn’t have finished anyway because we were still stuffed with that oxymoronic airline food that’s simultaneously inedible and filling. Afterward, back in the little three-table bar area, we tossed back a couple more Calvadoses (Calvadi?), relishing the soul-fire in silence because we’d already begun to run out of things to say to each other—I suddenly wished that Colin had stayed with us instead of going home to his wife and teenagers (reminding me that I should be, but wasn’t, calling my own.) Colin intended to meet us in the morning, which was many hours away, so finally, claiming jet lag when what I really felt was restless, empty inebriation, I begged off.

But before I rode the elevator up, I spent a long moment beside it, watching Dad gaze out the plate glass window toward the route along which he’d arrived sixty-five years ago this past June, and I imagined that if anybody in the hotel had the right to view the scene with some pretty complicated sentiments, it was him. I probably watched him for fifteen minutes, and in that time his face changed—it went from bleary, boozy blankness, a character of his generally dispassionate attitude, to a scowl of torment that was so perverse and frightening that spit caught in my throat. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking about—didn’t want to. He’d never evidenced the slightest need for catharsis on any front, not wives or wars or the long-ago career at Jiffy Mix where he’d never been able to rise above middle-management, nor had this been the purpose of me dragging him over here in his eighty-sixth year—I was far too selfish for that; the experience was more about me. But it occurred to me now that I might be poking an unwanted flashlight into dark spaces, places that might otherwise have passed into eternity within a handful of years, unlit and undisturbed, and if that was the case, I wondered—strike that, I knew—that the trip would prove to be a huge, huge mistake.  

At about eleven o’clock I heard Dad enter the room directly next to mine, putter in the john for a minute, then go immediately to sleep. The walls were silly thin, which is why I didn’t turn on the television, which was all French infomercials anyway. When awake, Dad was a quiet, morose drunk, but asleep he was boisterous. Snoring and gurgling and smacking the headboard.  I made it until two AM before I gave up the ruse, and with salty sea smells just outside the open window, I threw on some sweats and running shoes and headed downstairs where I had the Merôtel desk clerk—a weird hybrid Asian Frenchman who looked exactly like Oddjob from that Bonds flick—stand in front in the autumn frost and point out the road that led to Omaha Beach.

There was only one, so that’s one I headed down—into what the clerk called bocage, an archetypal blend of woods and pasture creased by sunken lanes and the high thick hedgerows that had proven so deadly to the assault force 1944, who’d seen them from the air but had not realized they were fifteen hundred years old and as impenetrable as the Wall of China. I jogged slowly, without much heart for the exercise, still light-headed from the brandy, past fields of emaciated corn stalks, shadowy gîtes, half-timbered farmhouses and spooky granaries, many of which had probably been standing sixty-five years ago. Mingled smells of manure, brine and wood smoke shuffled in my senses; I trotted down cold asphalt, suffused, then refreshed by a steady silence broken occasionally by a farm dog yipping or a rooster crowing and once, by some lunatic throwing gears way too quickly down some torturous Norman lane.

I realized that if this was the only road to the beach, then it was likely the same one that my father had swept for mines with the Combat Engineers and it was impossible not to consider the terror that must have accompanied each fractured step taken by the young jug-eared 2nd Lieutenant in those early days, when the war’s outcome was not yet certain and the epic near-disaster of the landing was still fresh in everybody’s mind. But it occurred to me an instant later that I was not retracing his steps at all; I was heading toward the beach instead of away from it, and so, following the path of his enemy.

Not that Dad and I are enemies; we’d never been close enough for that. Mother’s doing, I’m sure—from as young I can remember, I was impregnated with fear of him; a role from which, to be fair, he didn’t shy. It gave a small and ominously quiet man an aura of unassailable power and I think he liked that—I’m sure he did. “When your father finds out what you did…” and, “He’s coming!” were common buzzwords from my childhood and though they rarely resulted in anything more dastardly than a span in my room, more long-term troubling was the time I spent during such incarcerations trying to overhear what my mother was whispering downstairs—I thought she was embellishing details to Dad, exaggerating my poor report card or backtalk or neighborhood prank, but I later found out that he wasn’t even there—she was alone, embellishing to herself.

Mother began to seriously change when I was about fourteen; I think, in retrospect, it’s schizophrenia or something close—but try getting her in for a diagnosis, even surreptitiously… Her threats became peppered with, “I’ll tell Hitler and he’ll come gas you,” which sounds ludicrous, but I assure you, it was neither meant nor taken that way. It wasn’t so much the bluff as the methodical process of intimidation by which she’d try any form of terrorization to maintain control, and for a woman who had no use for the war, it had suddenly become expedient.

The beach was supine and still. Flecks of light dappled the water whenever the moon slid from behind a black bank of overcast. I’d come out of hedgerow country into the farming commune of Vierville-sur-Mer, then down a draw to a broad circle meant for parking vehicles. The channel was in flood tide and the water was only a few yards beyond. Capping the lot was a map of V Corps’ 1944 operations with all the corridor markers and infantry arrows and division icons showing who’d done what and penetrated where. I could barely make it out, but I did see that Dog Green—Dad’s landing sector, the same one that opened ‘Private Ryan’—was directly in front of me.

So after months of cajoling Dad, rationalizing with him, bargaining and heartstring-tugging, it turned out that I was standing on the very spot I’d convinced him we should experience together. Here I was, without him. Well, I was the kid who looked for and usually found the presents in advance of Christmas morning and maybe this was my gratuitous, spoil-the-party self. Likely, though, perched at the crest of the single most significant locus of Dad’s life story, I was doing him a service nonetheless—at least I hoped so—taking quiet time to consider Wayne Rimathe’s strength of character as a human being if not a father, where in a few genuine and monumental do or die moments, he done and not died. Maybe it had been sheer luck, a charm, but when you distill it to the source—the single motile spermatozoa that created you outrunning the hundred million others who would have created someone else—what isn’t? Tomorrow would be here soon enough and we’d be back with Colin to reminisce about the gore and glory; for now, I wandered the tidal flat, believing implicitly that because of Dad’s survival, whether via stamina or serendipity, I had my own place on these empty, bloodless sands.

Truth was, I felt closer to him alone than I had when we’d been together.

There were cliffs to the right and again to the left and all the way to the water line, a spread of round, flat stones called shingles. I remember Dad saying something about them—they were above the tidal range and he’d had to cross them once ashore. I discovered that it was nearly impossible to walk on them, and I couldn’t imagine running over them with a hundred pounds of equipment, including wire cutters and a carbine, meanwhile braving interlocking fields of machine gun fire from casements and pillboxes on the bluffs. He’d gone down several times, he said, until he realized that in the interest of living he’d better toss everything away, even his boots. No shit, I thought.

The tide had begun to slip out in overlapping rolls as I approached the National Guard Memorial, which seemed no less eerie in the darkness than the still-intact Nazi strongpoints—gaping concrete maws in the cliff. I walked all the way to General LeClerc’s Memorial on the Avenue de la Libération roundabout and by the time I got back, the beach was a thousand feet wider in ebb tide and morning was just poking at the edges of the sky.

I crossed through the parking lot. A big, thick-bodied gentleman was squinting up at the beach map; he was old but solid-looking, clearly from my father’s generation. He was dressed in the kind of thick, vanilla-colored sweater that Hemingway wore and had a woolen newsboy cap pulled low on his brow, making me figure he was a Frenchman. But when I passed him on my way to the Vierville road he hailed me in a husky Long Island accent: “Nobody but a New Yorker goes jogging at six o’clock in the morning, am I right?”

I told him I was a Michigan jogger, and he spread open his hands—powerful, protective hands, broad as serving platters. The gesture was both conciliatory and one that said, ‘But I wasn’t that far off, was I?’ He smiled with a pleasure that seemed genuine; it turned out he had some colleagues who were members of the Detroit Athletic Club, and on the strength of that hardly-remarkable connection, we shared some conversation. I told him what I’d come to Normandy for; that my Dad was sleeping off an evening’s worth of Calvados, and we’d be doing the proper D-Day tour in an hour or so.

The sweatered gentleman—his name was Jonathan Leitmann according to his card, and I found out later, when I Googled him, that he was a high-powered law partner in a well-known Manhattan firm—nodded his approval. “You’re a good boy to come with him, Nat. My sons, the three of ‘em? Salt of the earth, God bless ‘em all, each one brighter than the last. But get them to give a fuck about this sort of thing? Nostalgia? No chance; sooner get ‘em to skydive. You’re doing a good thing here.” His grin was broad and sad and convincing, and if I’d been on a jury, any jury, his client would have walked.

“You came alone?” I said.

He shrugged. “I came for the weekend. That’s all I was looking to do—spend a couple days on the landing front. I was first wave, 116th Infantry, 29th Division. My memories of that morning are not good ones. So I figured I’d see it the way it is today; remember it that way, not like I’ve been remembering it. I wanted it quiet, maybe with kids playing in the sand. Sixty-five years ago, I couldn’t wait to get off this beach. Now I can’t seem to leave.”

His nose was gigantic, the color of a dirty penny, like one of the Bulmer apples we’d seen in the orchards on the drive in. It was dripping and he pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at it.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Three weeks.”

He had a suite at the Domaine de Villers near Deauville, a glamorous resort town I’d considered, but passed on as being too pricey, especially at a time of year when there wasn’t much resorting to be done. He shrugged again; he’d reached a station in life where he could empathize with the second-guessers and still choose the path that was best. Or possibly he’d always been that way. “I’ll stay until I’ve had my fill. Guess I haven’t yet.”

We chatted a bit more; I told him that we’d just arrived and he assured me we’d like the overall reception in Normandy: “They only get an A minus in being French up here—they don’t hate Americans.”

My mobile shortly made it time to go if I was going to make it back to the Merôtel in time to meet Colin. Even though I was paying for a private tour (my own, Dad’s, of course, was free) his brochure had made punctuality his number one priority. I shook Leitmann’s gigantic hand, gloveless, calloused and preternaturally warm in the early morning chill, and I had a strange, nearly overpowering desire to hug him. Okay, I’ll be frank; it was more than that. I wanted to bury my face in the Norwegian wool and clutch at him. I wanted to tell him that once, on a bet, I’d gone skydiving and loved it. I wanted to tell him about my copywriting job at W. D. Levine where we’re down to a single client who, should they bolt, guarantees my unemployment; I wanted to tell him about my marriage where we’re playing that ‘getting to know each other stage’ film in reverse; I wanted to tell them about my kids who are always giving me the sideways once-over, making me ask them, self-consciously, “What?”—he’d get that. I wanted him to hug me back, call me a good boy again—I wanted to be the fourth, maybe-not-so-bright son, but the one that took Dad back to see how the beaches look today, after all the corpses had been buried.

But I didn’t of course. I was intimidated by the whole size of the planet, the complicated patterns, the dialects of disaffection, and I didn’t want to piss off Colin. I did hang defiantly over the parking lot parapet for a number of extra minutes, watching Jonathan Leitmann pick his way methodically, expertly, successfully over the bank of ghost-white shingles, boots on, then head west toward a much broader expanse of sandy beach, his direction the opposite, the absolute opposite, from the one that I had taken.

*

 

When Nat rolled in, Colin and Wayne were already in the Merôtel dining room, hunkered down and snug, sipping coffee. Nat wondered if he’d get sent to his room for being late, but nobody seemed to notice.

Colin was going a mile a minute, and as Nat sat down, he turned and said, “I was telling your father, you think you have a time of it with political correctness in the States, in the U.K. they don’t even teach World War II in the schools anymore. Nada. Nobody wants to offend the bloody Jerries.”

“What about the Battle of Britain?” Wayne asked, and Nat noticed that his father had a jelly-covered croissant in front of him. In all his years of growing up, he’d never known his father to eat anything in the morning, not a piece of toast, not a Cheerio; it was his regimented and immutable breakfast tradition—nothing but coffee.

“Yeah, that might get an honorable mention,” Colin went on, and did a passable Churchill: “'Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed…’ They like that part.  But if it’s anything with these wankers, it’s World War I. That one’s safe. The Great War. That, they’ll teach.”

Maybe his father was hung over; maybe that explained the croissant. Anyway, Wayne looked no worse for the wear. Better, even. A blurry scowl was his customary morning mask, but today, he glowed. If his expression was not exactly pleasant, it was focused. Plus, he never spoke when he first woke up—never—and now he was responding to everything Colin said: “But those were Germans, too.”

“Oh, yeah, steady on, Lieutenant, you’re being logical! The DFC won’t stand for it. World War I was a big cluster fuck you see; everyone suffered equally. It was just a long, wet mess in the trenches until nobody bloody well knew whose side anyone was on anymore. We don’t blame the Jerries for that, not really, so it’s PC to teach it. Beside, everybody who fought in it is long dead.”

“Well, we’re going, too,” replied Wayne, being morbid and empirical. “Five, ten years on, we’ll all be gone and they can start teaching World War II again.”

“Yeah, and I’ll be out of work, too, won’t I?” said Colin, and somehow, with his accent, his attitude and his mock moroseness, it didn’t come across as disrespectful. “American pensioners coming back to Normandy for a look around—you’re my biggest clients by far. What’ll I do? I’ll have to move to bloody Saigon.”

Nat wanted to insinuate something, to become part of the flow. His timing was late for the school talk since the conversation had moved on, but he dropped inside it anyway: “Don’t your teachers teach that if America hadn’t hopped on board—maybe a little late, but even so—if we hadn’t joined the war—not that we wouldn’t have, but, if we hadn’t? The lesson would be in German.”

“The Yanks?” Colin laughed. “Oh, you’ll love this. I’ve got a nephew in third form; last year, his class put Harry Truman on trial, a mock trial, for dropping those atom bombs. They made a big production out of it, had the local press there and all. All those innocent civilians killed. Bloody kangaroo court it was; how do you think they found him?”

Nat fingered a lawyer’s business card he had in his front pocket. The question was rhetorical. He tapped his watch. “Sorry, I know I was late, but...”

Colin nodded, collecting the maps he’d spread out earlier for Wayne to go through. “You’re the boss, son; let’s get moving then.”

“Nothing from the buffet?” Wayne asked, slipping one of the maps into his belt pack beside his passport. “Try a croissant; I got talked into one; turns out they’re pretty good.”

They had a circuit planned, beginning with the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer; an immaculately kept mall lined with whitebeam trees trimmed to resemble parachutes but which in truth looked more like giant spearmint Jujubes. The walkway to the gravestones was flanked by the colonnaded memorial where a twenty-foot nude Adonis reached skyward, meant to represent the spirit of youth rising from the water—the channel water in which so many had drowned on D-Day before firing a shot. Nat, in a peculiar comment, asked Colin if he’d posed for the sculpture, and for the sake of sportsmanship Colin didn’t roll his eyes but answered with a self-effacing head shake: “If I had, mate, they’d have had to use a lot less metal,” which somehow, Wayne found funny.

Colin had arranged for Wayne to raise the American flag along with the cemetery’s military attachment, and as he did so, Wayne seemed agitated and constrained, tugging the cord reluctantly, hand over hand, watching as the flag went up. He seemed even more so afterward when a young woman from the French ‘Comité du Debarquement’ clasped his hands in earnest respect and thanked him heartily, even tearfully, for that long ago morning when he’d spilled ashore in France.

Afterward they toured the beaches, and though Nat had been there before, he didn’t let on; he seemed mesmerized with the site and kept surveying the long tidal flat, up and down, while Wayne stood fifty yards away, at the water’s edge, without expression.  

Later, beneath the cylindrical sea front monument with the near-pidgin inscription—'The Allied forces landing on this shore which they call Omaha Beach liberate Europe’—they were waylaid by a dozen passengers from a bus who inquired in ponderous Eastern European accents if Wayne was a D-Day veteran, and when they found out he was, they insisted on having their photograph taken with him. A bloated, severe-looking man with a Rollie Fingers moustache said he was a ‘Euro Piaţa’ editor from Bucharest; all were Romanians tourists, some dressed in brightly-colored and archaic chemises. Wayne obliged them because they were so persistent, posing for shot after shot, and later at a seaside café, over croque-monsieur—the French version of a toasted ham sandwich—and Norman hard cider, Colin said: “I know, I was thinking the same thing. Fucking Romanians fought with the Nazis.”

“Maybe it was their mea culpa,” said Nat, and it was the first time that Colin treated him like he’d made a point.

The afternoon was blocked out for Saint-Lô; the ramparted commune that Wayne had asked specifically to have included in the itinerary, primarily, Nat assumed, because he had photographs of how utterly it had been ravaged in 1944—Samuel Beckett called it the ‘Capital of the Ruins’, and at the time it was debated whether to rebuild it or leave it as a testimonial.

Ironically, their destination was one of the few Saint-Lô buildings unscathed by the bombs, the Chapelle Saint Adelin. It was a squat stone structure just beyond the city walls where Colin had arranged, in Wayne’s honor, a reception to be attended by such luminaries as a commune of twenty thousand could drum up—the mayor, someone from the municipal council, the chapel curator Monsieur Mignon (whose name according to Colin meant ‘Mr. Cute’), a celebrated artist who’d done diorama of the gothic Saint-Lô cathedral both pre and post-war and a reporter from the ‘La Manche Libre’ who had been assigned to interview Nat rather than Wayne, looking to do a story on the next generation’s perspective on Tom Brokaw’s ‘Greatest’. Otherwise, no shortage of guests were expected since there was a skirted table of champagne and Crème de Cassis and a barman pouring kir royales. Nat figured that his father would think the hullaballoo seriously over the top, but Wayne seemed almost impatient to get there.

Mr. Cute proved to be every bit of that; he was Wayne’s height and about half his weight. But his high-pitched invocation, when translated by the diorama-maker, was heartrending to the point of being pathetic—he’d been fourteen years old in 1944 and his parents and sister had all been killed in the Nuit de Feu, the Night of Fire, the savage, frequently misdirected Allied air assault that had preceded the D-Day landing. When he was done speaking, Mr. Cute bowed from the waist and handed over a commemorative plaque, city keys, a municipal flag, a glossy, expensive book called ‘Basse-Normaundie’ and seemed almost to be groveling.

Wine was passed around, and then some more, and everyone circled a screen that showed a loop of archival footage; the city’s miserable history from the German occupation in 1940 through the crucial summer of 1944. Afterward, the reporter found Nat and took him aside to a small table she’d set up beneath a giant 29th Infantry yin-and-yang insignia.

Her name was Thérèse and she was simple and pretty and spoke in a broken accent that Nat found adorable as she struggled to find precise wording for basic questions; she asked about his life and career, his family and childhood, his hobbies and aspirations, going beyond the scope of anything she could possibly want to write about. His ego was stoked and nearly an hour passed before he realized that his father and Colin were gone.

“You tell me. Thérèse will play up the language gap; she’s good at that, that’s why I asked her—she’ll take forever even to get his name down properly.”

“I wouldn’t think it will be long. I can’t imagine long. Half an hour?”

Wayne’s face was ashen, his lips torqued in such a way that Colin repeated himself carefully, nodding: “You tell me. We’ll make it work. Whatever you need.”

“I think it’ll be whatever they need.”

They had slipped out of the chapel and back to the BattleBus midway through the Saint-Lô documentary and had driven into the heart of the city, dodging suicidal bikers, passing beneath Peugeot billboards, slowing near a small stand selling D-Day artifacts that Colin said were mostly modern helmets the proprietor picked up on eBay and left to the tides for a month in a secret cove. They parked on Rue Franck Innocent beneath a orange-leafed chestnut tree opposite a dun-colored, modern-looking strip of storefronts and appartements with a glazed facade covered in perforated latticework. “I’ll be damned if I don’t remember this street,” said Wayne quietly, squinting, craning his neck and looking up and down. “It’s changed, though.”

“I’ll bet it has,” Colin answered.

He rang at Number 62, the single building in the row that looked like might have been standing before the war. It had vaults, turquoise shutters, iron balconies and an upper-story with a little roof terrace. Colin rang again and a clipped voice said, “Oui?”

“It’s us, we’re here,” Colin answered and was buzzed inside.

They climbed to the top of a balustraded staircase, slowly since Wayne had begun to stiffen up after the long morning walk. At the head of the stairs, they approached the second apartment door; it opened and a slender old man about Wayne’s age looked out, smiled softly and somewhat vaguely and said, “I am Henri Vioget, you will please come in.”

The room had an odd antiseptic smell to it, like it had been recently scrubbed, but with mouthwash rather than cleanser. “Your English is excellent, sir,” said Wayne as he stepped inside behind Colin.

 “Thank you; I was two years working in Atlanta. I’m a masseuse. Come in, this is my wife. This is Adélaïde.”

A small, sturdy old woman sat on a cushioned rocking chair, moving on its wooden haunches deliberately, like a metronome. Her arms were folded across her chest; she was wearing a crisp, flowered, full-apron housedress and a lace shawl; she appeared to have dressed up. There was a small harvest table set up with two bottles of red wine without labels—possibly homemade—and a plate of Choco Marbré biscuits.

“This is Lieutenant Rimathe from Michigan,” said Colin. He pronounced it ‘Mitchigan’.

“Not Lieutenant. Wayne. Please, I’m Wayne Rimathe, I’m from Chelsea,” he said slowly. He held up his right palm as a Michigan map and pointed to where Chelsea would be, about three quarters of the way down his lifeline. Clearly you had to be from Michigan to understand what he was doing, but the couple wasn’t even looking. The woman rocked in silence, her chin rigid and high, her eyes averted, her demeanor proud and almost haughty. A gruesomely realistic crucifix with an écorché Christ hung above the telephone and that seemed to be what was holding her attention.

The husband had seated himself on a hard kitchen chair, his hands clasped in front of him, tighter than would seem normal, head bowed. “We’re glad you came, Mr. Rimathe,” he said slowly. “That sounds odd. But it’s so.” He was wearing a gaudy shirt, black with garish white fern shapes silkscreened on it. His face was sunken, but lively. “Have some wine; we’re ready to hear you say what you have come all this way to say. My wife—Adélaïde—she has no English though, I warn you.”

“That’s fine,” Wayne replied. “Colin is prepared to translate. That’s what he’s here for. I have asked him to repeat what I say, every word, without changing any of it, nothing, even for the sake of clarity. Or decency. If you have questions, I’ll answer them. I’ll hold nothing back.”

The husband nodded without looking up. Behind him, you could see into the small bedroom where a goose feather mattress nearly swallowed up the entire space; another crucifix hung above it. It was an intimate place and Wayne kept his eyes averted as he poured a single, full glass of wine.

Instead, he glanced briefly at the main part of the apartment, where the walls were colorful with children’s art and lined with shelves held that santos statues and several different imprints of encyclopedia; there was an old treadle sewing machine in one corner and a small couch laid with grainy burlap pillows. They were apparently cat lovers, as evidenced by the Garfield paraphernalia scattered around, the saucer of cream beneath Henri’s wooden chair, and finally, a ragged-looking tomcat who came tiptoeing warily in from the scullery.

Wayne drank his wine and pulled up another hard kitchen chair, situating himself between the French couple. Colin stood behind him, placing strong, possessive, rugby hooker’s hands on the carved chair back. Wayne began: “Sixty-five years ago, there was an incident just outside the village of Saint-Laurent, at a certain farmhouse in the hedgerow country. It involved a young girl, probably fourteen or fifteen years old at the time.”

Colin translated. The woman offered no cognizance towards the words in either language, but Henri bobbed his head in affirmation. “Mr. Bishop has explained this to us in advance, in some detail. I assure you, so there is no question, Lieutenant Rimathe, that Adélaïde was this girl involved.”

“Yes,” said Wayne. “Colin has done me a considerable favor by locating the remaining family based on my description of the cottage, the retaining wall, the little courtyard with the mulberries; the things I could remember.”

Wayne allowed himself a muted sigh, making no more sound than the wind in the fiery chestnut tree outside. “That second day, June 7th it would have been, I’d latched onto to a small group, remnants from several companies, less than fifteen men all told; my own company had been pretty much destroyed. That’s what you did in those first hours if you were lost and leaderless—and the Nazis were genius at spotting officers and concentrating fire their way—you joined who you could because there was nothing else to do. We bivouacked in a pasture by a stone gateway, and very, very early the third morning, a red-haired girl on a bicycle rode by and waved at us. We couldn’t imagine what she was doing out so early in a fire zone; going milking was the consensus, though most of the cows were already dead from the artillery. Fifteen minutes later two truckloads of German infantry arrived. They flanked us and began an envelopment. We knew they must have been tipped off and we realized by who. We flattened, returned fire, tossed grenades, but we had no automatic weapons; we lost four men in five minutes and would surely have been wiped out completely had not a squad of Rangers come along and joined us, finally causing the Germans to fade back. When the Rangers left, they took our wounded with them; they had a captured German doctor at a château by the coast and he was being forced to treat our casualties. An hour later, the girl rode by again, this time heading the other way; I can still see the color of her faded pinafore on that pretty country lane…”

Colin was converting the words to French with circumspection, pausing to consider phrases from time to time, and this satisfied Wayne as to the precision of his translation. Henri’s lips were quivering and he held the fingers of his left hand with his right so tightly that they were turning white. Adélaïde’s expression never changed; she rocked, hands folded over her apron, eyes locked into middle distance.

“We sent a runner to find out where she was going. It was nearby, down a small ravine in a stand of mulberry trees—the hovel where she lived. We hardly gave the matter thought, didn’t really speak about it when we deployed in that direction. I was afraid, and eager to acquit myself before these strangers, so I went along. I was afraid because when I landed, I’d thrown away my rifle and boots and I was worried that somehow, they’d find out I’d taken others off a dead GI who lay near me in the hedgerow where I slept. I went along with them, all the way along to the farmhouse, where we demanded cider from the father and when he went to fill our canteens from the cellar, the mother tried to send the girl out the back. We’d thought of that, of course, and had posted someone. Me. I brought her back and one man held the parents at gunpoint while we dragged the girl to her bedroom. We tore away her clothes. The family was poor, desperately so; it was obvious—she had no underthings. One by one we took turns assaulting her—savaging her—and some of us more than once. We’d have taken the mother too, but we had nothing left. I see the faces of the parents now; it’s not horror, not anger, not shock—it’s closer to shame. They couldn’t protect her. I don’t know if they were involved with Germans or not; I assumed so then, but the whole thing might have been coincidence. It doesn’t matter.  Either way, I’d already done what I feared most on that choppy boat ride over from England with men around me puking and praying, preparing to die. I’d asserted the legitimacy of my cowardice.”

As Colin translated this last bit, his voice broke though he’d heard the story on the phone when Wayne had spoken to him some weeks before.

Now Wayne rose from the kitchen chair, stood stone-faced at attention, casting his eyes steadily toward Adélaïde, and then at Henri. “There were countless boys that died bravely that first June morning, and the next morning after that, and on many more mornings until the end. I was not among them. I’ve nothing more I can say to you Adélaïde Vioget, or to you Henri Vioget, except that I am so heartily, heartily sorry. I disgraced their victory. And your own.”

Tears came then, and he indulged them, briefly but unreservedly, perhaps because they came to him so rarely. Henri allowed him this indulgence; Adélaïde said nothing, did not appear to allow or disallow anything, but only rocked and stared at the bloody Christ above the phone. Yet, something perceptible must have changed in her because the tomcat suddenly stopped lapping cream and leaped toward her where it cradled in her lap.

Henri whispered gently to her in French, whereupon, without acknowledging her guests, she rose and hobbled to the bedroom and closed the door.

Now Henri spoke to them, directly, softly, with fastidiousness: “You say my English is good, Lieutenant Rimathe; perhaps it is so. I will therefore speak without asking translation from Mr. Bishop, because I want the words to be very much my own. The words are this: You are no coward. It took tremendous courage simply to come from America to say this. Your Army—to every man and woman who still lives, and you included—deserves the eternal and unconditional gratitude of France. I fought four years with the F.F.I. and I know the moral incongruities of war. I know there are no rigid boundaries, that your scruples go to the wind, and I did things for which I myself have not apologized, but should. I have heard your story before, of course; Adélaïde’s parents told me of this circumstance before I married her, as though they were doing me a kindness, as though in knowing, I might no longer have any use for her. I fear that they did not, or for anything after the war; the father committed suicide in 1950 and the mother died soon after. They were simple, even stupid céréaliers; they acknowledged no allegiance to France, none to freedom, and in the end, none to their own daughter. Like many, they cultivated relations with the Germans to obtain basic survival rations; I still don’t fault them this—we cannot assign Mother Teresa standards in a time without saints.”

He lifted himself from his chair and pulled a couple of the kid drawings from the wall along with an envelope from the pharmacie that was stuffed with photographs. His demeanor lightened as he passed a stack of pictures over; the first one showed a pair of auburn-haired children, eight or nine years old, one a boy and one a girl playing jeu de raquettes on Normandy beach. “Jules and Domi, our great-grandchildren,” smiled Henri.  “You see? This is what those brave young men who gave their lives allowed us,

Lieutenant Rimathe, and why you offered your own life so readily in that pasture by the gateway. You threw away one rifle, but then you picked another up. Others might not understand, so what more do I care to say?”

But there was something more. Wayne reached into his belt pack and withdrew photographs of Nat, Nat’s wife, and Nat’s children. “This is my family, Mr. Vioget. My wife’s ill, but… My son is a creative director at a big Detroit advertising firm. He’s very successful. His son, my grandson, is third baseman on the varsity baseball team though he’s only a sophomore. Ashley is in the dramatics club; she plays a cello and sings like an angel.”

Colin, whose own veteran father had abandoned the family when he was three years old, lifted his hands from the chair back and turned his attention elsewhere, shifting from foot to foot.

Now there really was no more to say, and soon afterward, they left. In the BattleBus heading back to Chapelle Saint Adelin, Colin broke the persistent, prodigious silence. “It went well. They understood; he did, anyway. We won; that’s what counts. Wars aren’t fought by Marquis of Queensbury rules. Nothing’s delineated. Last year, I had a chap on the tour bus tell me that all along the road to Berlin he took wedding rings, he took cash, he took heirlooms. Hell, I’ll be honest, he told me he took scalps.”

His voice had taken on a harder edge, but Wayne was somewhere on his own.

Wayne said, “Mr. Vioget was kind, but he was wrong. The Underground had it rougher than we did, by far. It makes me wonder, if you’re dehumanized once, can you ever get your humanity back? Or is it like having your appendix removed? I know I learned hatreds over here that lodged inside me. When I got back, I didn’t lose those. If anything, I applied them.”


*

They were back at the chapel, crossing the gravel walkway when Nat came up. “There you are; you had me worried for a minute.”

“I needed air,” his father answered.

“I figured it might get to be too much for you. Seriously. But come on, Thérèse—she’s the journalist from the paper—she needs a picture of us for her story—the two of us, underneath the banner they put up inside celebrating the 29th.”

“I’ll take a picture, but not that one. I don’t want to go back in there with those people. Have her come outside and take her picture with the trees behind us. Look how beautiful they are in full color. Completely peaceful; it’s hard to imagine.”

Thérèse obliged them, and while Colin slipped back in for more champagne, she fussed inordinately with composition, expressions, postures.  “Come on, Nat,” she said. “This is France, it’s okay to touch! Put your arm around his shoulder!”

Eager to please her, he did, and he felt awkward about it because the gesture pulled him so close to his father’s face that he could smell the aftershave and hair tonic and wine. He felt his father’s delicate bones beneath the windbreaker, he felt the slight geriatric tremble in the autumn cold, and then, he felt a tentative hand creep around his own shoulder.

Thérèse emailed him a copy of the picture, and even though he could see that both their faces were flushing red with embarrassment, it wound up being the only photograph from the trip he kept.