Our Fathers

Our Fathers

by Harry Buschman

Gordon Mulloy stood at his living room window in his stocking feet overlooking the street below. He was 62 years old, unmarried, and due to retire next year with absolutely no plans in view for the rest of his life.

He wore a short unkempt beard which he grew to mask his baldness. He held a notebook in his hand and tapped it rhythmically on the side of his leg. On the cover, written in black magic marker, was the title “D-Day 1944 (12)”.

Inside the notebook was the twelfth chapter of Gordon Mulloy’s chronicle of the invasion of the Normandy coast in World War II. His father died that day at Omaha Beach ... it was also Gordon’s first birthday.

He never saw his father and he grew up wondering what his life might have been like if he had a father like most of his friends did. Although his mother married again and his stepfather had been a kind, understanding man; even kinder and certainly more generous than some of the fathers his friends had, he missed the special blood relationship his stepfather couldn’t give him. The result was a lifelong fixation on his father’s last day of life on Omaha Beach.

It had taken him nearly ten years to work his way up to chapter 12. The first five or six went quickly but the going was slowing down now and there were times he thought he would never get the damn thing done. As he stood at the window, he considered the possibility that maybe he didn’t want to finish the book. Maybe there couldn’t be an ending to such a story. Perhaps it was too vast, too monumental, like something that begins and ends long after it happens. The feeling was not new to him. It had been growing inside him for years.

Gordon was too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam––he had been conceived out of synchronization, so to speak, with the rhythmic cadence of war. It left him feeling guilty, he was the son of a dead war hero and unfortunate enough to be unfit for duty by reason of age. He bore himself like a servant––in an obsequious manner, slightly twisted as though avoiding a blow. Some people thought he looked devious ... that he might be hiding something behind his back. Well, indeed he was––it was himself of course. Women didn’t trust him. His mother, while she was alive, always told him how much he resembled his father.

He needed a place to think about the book. There were too many distractions in his apartment. Out the window he could see people coming and going, trucks, buses ... and the sound of voices filtering up the air shaft from the delicatessen downstairs. He couldn’t think here. He needed a place where nature would be the only distraction. The beach would be good––Queer Beach.

Out east of the umbrella line and blankets that marked the limit of Lot 9 at Jones Beach stretched an endless expanse of white sand and dunes known as Queer Beach. There were no life guards out there, no noisy three generation families sitting under rented umbrellas. Queer Beach was much the same as it might have been to the Dutch settlers 400 years ago.

It was kelp lined along the high water mark, and back from the water, hidden from view, were softly undulating sand dunes capped with coarse beach grass. It was a place where fishermen with ten foot poles, and a north wind behind them, could cast out beyond the breaker line and patiently reel their elaborate lures back again, hoping against hope to have hooked into something edible.

It was also a place where middle management men of advanced age sometimes took their starry eyed secretaries for serious discussions concerning their future with the company. It was also a place where gays of both genders would seek to hook up and talk of Tennyson while their portable CD players played Chopin. Back in the grass fringed dunes the rites of love were practiced in infinite variations in the glare of the sun and the raucous accompaniment of nesting gulls.

But on the whole it was a quiet place, no life guard whistles, no ball playing children and no hot dog stands. Gordon Mulloy, in the middle of his third draft of chapter 12 detailing the invasion of Normandy in 1944, thought he could avoid interruptions by spending an afternoon at Queer Beach.

That's why Gordon went to Queer Beach this particular afternoon. To finish this long and detailed account of a story that had been told by better writers than he many times before. What could he add to the history of D-Day? He never saw the place ... but his father died there, and he wanted the rest of the world to know how ... and why.

He was trying to establish the modus operandi of the gliders sent up the night before the invasion to prevent a counter attack by German troops stationed at Merville. But even out here on Queer Beach he found it difficult to concentrate. Even without the distractions back home in his apartment. Nature was a distraction in itself.

The fishermen distracted him. Their frantic heaves to cast their lines out beyond the white water. Their sudden spasmodic jerks of the pole, hoping to set the hook and their inevitable chagrin when they realized there was nothing on the line. The birds distracted him by their endless burrowing through the kelp lined shore, their graceful avoidance of the incoming waves and their constant territorial bickering.

There was the added distraction of the wind. Gordon had three notebooks with him and to keep them open to the pages he wanted, he kept his foot on one of them, a piece of driftwood on another and the third one on his lap. Everything, it seemed, was a distraction, and it was difficult to set his mind on his notes.

The distractions back home over Leo’s Delicatessen were different. The deliveries every morning before six a.m., the sour salami smell that seemed to lodge itself in his bedroom and Leo’s commanding voice bursting through the ventilator, up the air shaft to his writing room. Life above a delicatessen was a great distraction––but, then again ... he had to admit ... so was Queer Beach.

He decided to close his books for a while. He stuffed them in the tote bag he brought with him and stood up. He kicked off his shoes and slapped them together to shake off the sand, then dropped them in the bag with his notes. The sand was hot so he walked down to the water’s edge. There, it was cooler, firmer, and as silky smooth as a billiard table. He slung the tote bag over his shoulder and began walking eastward. There was nothing to distract him now and he began to wonder if the book he was writing was the source of his distraction. Perhaps it was a distraction in itself. He had no incentive to finish this monumental work on the Normandy invasion. It was an old story now. Personal accounts––movies––official documentation––everything was known. Why pick through the bones of it? Nothing would change. The dead were dead and life went on without them.

It seemed self-serving to stir it all up again. What cheek! A writer who had never been there wanting to add his two cents to the conversation. There was something addictive about D-Day, and that troubled him. He looked out to sea and noticed a family of dolphins breaking the surface beyond the breaker line. “Probably feeding on the striped bass the surf caster couldn’t reach.” He began to talk to himself.

“Were there dolphins out beyond the line of breakers at Normandy, and did they feed that morning? Was the sand as silky as this and was there a line of grass capped dunes extending along the beach as far as my eye can see? Were there fishermen and lovers there? Dumb questions ... who can answer such foolish questions? I’ve been alone too long with this book, I’m making things up ... things that didn’t happen. There were 10,000 casualties that day. Isn’t that enough for me?”

He let his tote bag slip from his shoulder to the sand, and reached inside. He withdrew his three notebooks and flung them one by one into the breaking surf. Immediately, he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders, as though he could go anywhere and start something new. He was sick of the words of war, of the facts and figures of war, of its body counts and its dead and missing. The notebooks drifted westerly and at the same time moved outward with the tide. In five minutes they would be out of sight and he would be free of them forever.

He began walking westward, keeping pace with his notebooks bobbing in the surf. He could barely see them now and when they were gone it would be a good idea, he thought, to go home and get the other chapters––from one to eleven, and all his notes, his research. Bring them out here on a windy afternoon like this with the tide ebbing out ... the war was over.

He hurried back to his car and opened the windows. Then he turned the fan on full to get rid of the heat that had built up inside. The urge to destroy the manuscript was strong in him and he was impatient to start a life of his own before it was too late. He knew he made the right decision, and during the trip home he considered just how much of a job it might be. He had been working on the project nearly twenty years. He thought he should get some boxes from Leo at the delicatessen, he would need about three good sized ones, and then wait for a windy day and launch the whole kit and kaboodle out to sea one box at a time.

When he drove into the parking lot next to the delicatessen, he found Leo sitting on a chair tilted back against the side door of his delicatessen. Both men were within a year or two of each other but from vastly different backgrounds. Leo was German, the son of a corporal crew member of a Tiger tank. When Leo found out Gordon was writing a book on the D-Day invasion, he began to tell him what life was like in Germany when he was a boy ... “Too good I don’t remember. But my father rode a tank into Russia and had to walk back on one leg. On one leg he walked back, He left his other leg back in the tank.”

“He was with the wehrmacht?”

“A fanatic ... but his leg broke his heart. You can’t do the goose-step on a wooden leg.”

Leo’s mother eventually divorced his one-legged father and came to the USA to work in her uncle’s delicatessen. She often said to Leo in a sad tiny voice ... “Ach, little Leo. What a waste of a man, it would have been better to lose his life instead of his leg.” She was an excellent German short-order cook and eventually built up a clientele at her uncle’s delicatessen. “Mrs. Scharnhorst you should really have a store of your own, the potato salad is out of this world!”

Her potato salad recipe was passed down to Leo, and he was one of the very few delicatessen owners who still made his own. Whenever Gordon bought some he would say, “Leo, you should bottle it, or can it, or whatever they do to it. It’s precious! It should be available nationwide.”

Gordon rolled his window down and leaned out to Leo half asleep by his back door. “I need some boxes, Leo.”

“You’re God forbid, not moving ... don’t tell me.”

“I need to get rid of some junk, Leo. Everything comes in, nothing goes out. Eventually a person gets snowed under.”

Leo stood up and stretched. “I been up since three o’clock in the morning. This time of the day I get a little peace and somebody who should know better wants boxes.”

“How is Mrs. Scharnhorst?”

“About the same,” Leo answered.

“Oh, is she ill? I didn’t know.”

“Ill? No she’s okay––she’s about the same, that’s all. She’s always the same.” Leo tilted his chair forward and stretched slowly and luxuriously like a cat. “Well, come on inside, let’s see what we have for boxes. Where have you been all day, your car’s been gone?”

“I made a big decision today, Leo.”

‘You’re not getting married. Make no promises––talk to me first, it’s a big step at your age Mr. Mulloy. Ask the advice of a man who knows only too well.”

“No, I’m not getting married, Leo. It’s a little late for me ... as a matter of fact ... “ Gordon shook his head sadly. “My whole life ... isn’t it amazing? I never realized it ... I have been married to my father.”

“For this you need boxes?” The two men entered the hallway that led to the back room of the store. Cardboard boxes were stacked along one wall.

“I’m chucking it, Leo. I’m throwing out everything I’ve ever written about D-Day.”

Leo’s mouth dropped. “How is this? As long as I’ve known you ... it’s been D-Day this and D-Day that. Now, suddenly it’s over?”

Gordon rooted through the boxes piled in the hall and picked out three sturdy prune juice cartons. “These will be fine, Leo ... yes, suddenly the writing is over. The whole thing was a waste of time. The war was a waste of time––the money and the people. Writing about it is an even greater waste of time.”

“Well, maybe you should of come to me twenty years ago. I could have told you that.” Leo lowered his head and his voice was very low. “Our fathers,” he said. “Never had the chance to be fathers.”

“It used to bother me about our fathers, you know––being on different sides of the war and all that,” Gordon said. “now I think I’ve lost track of the sides ... it’s all the same now.”

The bell rang in the delicatessen. Leo sighed and retied his apron. “Sides ... who knows from sides? There’s only one side. We both got screwed, You and me and all the mothers and fathers. All I’m sure about is the potato salad.” As he opened the back door of the delicatessen, he turned to Gordon ... “Fill up your boxes,” he said.

Gordon climbed the stairs to his apartment, put the boxes down and let himself in with his key. He could hear Leo talking downstairs with a woman. “I am making chicken croquettes tomorrow, Mrs. Feinstein, I shall think of you. May I save you a few?”

All these years, Gordon had been listening to Leo and his customers. He knew them all by name and their voices were so familiar that their faces appeared in his mind’s eye whenever he heard them. It was the part of his life he cherished most. He had no family, there was no life in his apartment and the routine of Leo’s Delicatessen was ... he just realized, the happiest part of his life.

©Harry Buschman