The Girl Who Loved Them Both

My dad had been dead twenty years when my French lover shared what he had learned about him. I knew some things. That French girls were beautiful. That he wanted to return to France and drive through Normandy before he died, to climb and dip over the emerald hills, the trees heavy with apples waiting to be plucked and pressed for Calvados. That death had a smell of its own. That he was lucky to live during that first wave storming Omaha Beach on June 21, 1944.

We drove the three-and-a half hours from Paris to Colleville-sur-mer when finally, a road sign announced the town, population 200, where residents lived in ancient stone houses huddled near the town square, flowers bursting from window boxes everywhere. The Chambres d'Hôtes Le Clos Tassin was a nineteenth century house filled with angles and light, constructed of tawny stone with brick trim, red poppies filling the window boxes. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling beams, the light dancing over the polished parquet floors. We were less than a mile from Omaha Beach.

“Can we see the beach before it rains?” I asked Frédéric.

He smiled and said something to the proprietor, who took our overnight bags and handed us an umbrella from a ceramic stand by the door. “Shall we walk,” Frédéric asked. “It’s not too far.”

Frédéric held my hand, the umbrella in his other. The sky had grown somber and threatening earlier in the afternoon, and now the temperature cooled during the twenty minutes we walked. We found ourselves along a bluff above the sea, which was silver and tranquil like the quieted wind. The sky had darkened to a bruise and now began to rumble. “The angels are bowling,” I said. Frédéric looked at me, puzzled. “When I was a child and afraid of thunder, my dad told me it was only the angels bowling. He even taught me to bowl to show me there was nothing to fear.”

He nodded as if my explanation made perfect sense. “And when the rain begins, is it the angels crying?”

“Only the angels who lose the game,” I said.

The rain finally fell, pitting the ocean like hammered pewter. Frédéric opened the umbrella and held it over our heads, brushing away the drops collecting in his hair. The rumbling stopped, and the rain’s soft patter was the only sound, the beach a silent tomb that had cradled the dead on D-Day before they were buried in other silent places. I didn’t feel the need to talk. I only felt the need to feel my dad nearby. I think he would have been happy I was there since he never made it back before he died.

“Tomorrow morning we’ll walk on Omaha Beach in your dad’s footsteps and visit the bunker he must have run to,” Frédéric said. “Do you want to collect some sand as a souvenir? We could use my toothbrush case.”

I thought for a moment. “Yes, that would be lovely.”

The day was grey, but the rain had subsided. We drove to the beach because we planned to visit the American Cemetery, and later the D-day Museum in Arromanches-les-Bains. I thought of my dad’s parents, who I didn’t remember and only knew from their photos and the stories my parents told. I wondered how they had felt when four of their five sons went away for years to fight in WWII. One of them, my uncle Paul, was killed and buried in the American Cemetery. I told Frédéric I always wondered what else my dad did during his three years in the army. Although he had always joked about distributing nylons and chocolate to the beautiful French girls, I knew it didn’t take him three years to do it.

“Your dad also served in New Guinea and the Philippines,” Frédéric said. He had done painstaking research not just because of his interest in the war, but to please me. I was pleased, but embarrassed because I hadn’t known the extent of my dad’s service, and I should have. I should have wheedled it out of him and cared more when I was a kid. And now it was too late to tell him how impressed I was. That now I knew he was much more than the dad who tried to ruin my life as a teenager when he drove me to parties, grilled my dates, and grounded me for curfew violations.

But all I could think of to say was, “Wow! I’m really grateful he lived through Normandy and the Korowai cannibals in Papua didn’t get him.” My dad would have called me a smartass.

The beach was very wide. I could see how intractable it must have been for thousands of soldiers crossing it, scampering up the bluff to the bunkers while the Germans shot at them from their hiding places. The restless sea roiled and spat, just as my dad said it did that morning, fog and clouds smothering the shore. The sand was nothing like Florida’s Gulf beaches where we had moved when I was a child, swaths of sugar and shells hot under the cheerful sun. Omaha’s sand was the color of pale rust, and I thought of the blood that had stained it long ago, all the blood from all the boys who died there. I took off my shoes and the sand was cold from the sea. The wind blew the sea grass zigzagging up the bluff almost flat. It was too sparse to have offered cover to the soldiers, moving targets with nowhere to go while the Germans above them kept shooting.

My dad had turned twenty-three the month before D-Day, several years before he met my mom and older than a lot of the boys. He was a gangly, Irish six-footer sprinkled with freckles. His easy grin and shock of red hair earned him nicknames like Red and Mac, the short version of his surname, McCoy. As a Staff Sergeant with the 293rd Joint Assault Signal Company (JASCO), he told me on a rare occasion when he talked about the war that he had orders to set up radio communications on Omaha Beach for the 6th Engineer Special Brigade.

But the landing had been a disaster. The amphibious tanks that were to precede the infantry were lost to the inclement weather. German mortars and machine gun fire reduced those that made it ashore to burning hulks. The Generals who were part of Operation Overlord had not anticipated German resistance when, months earlier, they had chosen Omaha to unload men and supplies. But German troops were waiting. The landing crafts got as close to shore as they could, with many of them stalled in deep water, forcing the soldiers to disembark and wade or swim the rest of the way. The men in my dad’s detachment were following the 2nd Platoon, 294th JASCO and they could see what was in store for them.

“So much for making Paris by morning,” my dad said one of the soldiers had joked to lighten the dread.

Another of the men tugged on my dad’s shirt, his voice cracking with fear as he leaned in and spoke. “Mac, Mac, I can’t swim,” he said. “I can’t swim!” Only slightly more than five feet tall, the angry sea would have swallowed him whole when he jumped from the landing craft and failed to get his footing on the sandy bottom.

My dad was an excellent swimmer and far less worried about the deep water than the bullets whizzing by his ears. The mortars and gunfire were deafening, but single bullets whizzing by his ear reminded my dad of people whistling. Low and merry, I thought, like the boy in the landing craft assessing the women in Paris if he ever got there. All the young men were helmeted, their only protection, except for their prayers.

“Then a shell hit our landing craft,” my dad had said. They ended up losing a third of their vehicles and half the communications equipment. “I just thought about doing my job and willed myself not to panic or vomit.”

My dad said to the soldier who couldn’t swim, “Don’t worry, Shorty, you can piggyback. We gotta jump now, so climb on my back. We’ll get there. We gotta go now!”

Shorty wrapped his arms around my dad’s neck and jumped on his back, his head above my dad’s. The Germans at the top, where Frédéric and I had stood the evening before, were picking off the running men below. The beach was partitioned for the landing parties into names like Dog White and Easy Red. My dad waded to shore toward the area tagged Fox Green, intent on clambering the bluff to the bunker midway up with Shorty back on his feet.

Frédéric and I followed the path marked by the lack of reedy grass that had been trampled after so many years. Frédéric pulled me along when the path became steep and climbed down the eroded steps into the bunker before me to make sure it was safe. Only part of it still stood, once a fortified concrete cube dug into the ground and extending above it, with tiny glassless windows soldiers used to fire their guns. My dad had been here, the bleached concrete sharing no secrets, nondescript, it could have been the ruins of a child’s playhouse, a jail cell, someone’s beach sanctuary.

I wanted at that moment for Albert Einstein to be right. That there are many dimensions of time and place, and we can revisit the past by traveling on bent light. I could feel my dad here on this beach, once a deathtrap, now serene. He had always wanted to come back, but I had come for him. I felt a little less like an orphan.

We sat in the bunker, the shy sun peeking through the clouds, the sea now tinged with its light. Frédéric had shared his research with me, albeit in French, which I could mostly understand. He translated the phrases that had flummoxed me, but between what he shared and what my dad had told me, I had a stronger sense of what D-Day meant.

“So, you haven’t told me what happened when your dad made it to shore. What happened with the radio communications? Did he stay in touch with Shorty after the war?” Frédéric asked.

I told Frédéric that he was able to set up the radios for the Engineer Special Brigade. But Shorty was dead when my dad reached the shore, shot between the eyes. All my dad said was he heard the whistling above his head, and Shorty’s arms went slack. He never said if he carried him to the bunker or left him on the beach. Just that he was dead. “I’m not even sure if he knew his real name. My dad was awarded a Bronze Star, but I don’t know if it was for trying to save Shorty or something else. He never said and I never asked.”

Frédéric held me while we stood peering at the sea from the tiny glassless window. “I think he would have liked you,” I said. “He was very picky about my boyfriends, but he would have liked you.”

“I love you,” is all Frédéric whispered in my ear.

Frédéric proposed on the drive home to Paris. We spent the next year planning our life together, interpreting immigration rules, and me practicing my French. We spend the last of those months battling Frédéric’s leukemia as if it were a hidden trove of Nazis at Omaha Beach.

Frédéric died on a cold, windy January day. All these years later, I still tinker with the clear plastic toothbrush holder with the rust-colored sand inside. I turn it upside down and let the sand spill from end to end, like a two-minute egg-timer reminding me how fleeting time is with those you love.

I like to think my dad and Frédéric are angels sitting on a ledge in a windowless bunker tucked below a bluff on Omaha Beach, my dad sipping a Manhattan, and Frédéric a Perrier and grenadine, bracing against a June storm, the beach undulating in the wind. My dad offers to teach Frédéric to bowl once they’re back in heaven. They argue over General Eisenhower’s strategy. My dad finally shares how he cried and swore when he discovered Shorty dead, and whether the silk stockings and chocolates ever got him anywhere. “I like you, son,” he says to Frédéric. They clink their glasses in a toast. “To the girl who loved us both,” they say.