Deux Rochelles

Workings of memory are always a mystery. This is a story I wrote years ago that I don’t think ever made it into one of my published collections:

When I woke up today I was thinking of the word Rochelle. Just that: Rochelle, a French town. Quickly followed by New Rochelle, in New York State. I had thought of neither for years. Yet here they were, linked as always by a decision of the imperious Charles DeGaulle.

Monsieur Chaigneau’s craggy, distinguished features swam into my mind’s eye. He was the only native of Rochelle I ever knew; dead loyal to DeGaulle but appalled at his politics. We shared an office at an American garrison outside Paris the spring President DeGaulle kicked NATO out of France. I was editor of the garrison newspaper. M. Chaigneau was the post’s community liaison.

M. Chaigneau was dismayed at tension between old allies. He attempted futilely to smooth things over with Franco-American cultural events. He stood to lose his livelihood when NATO left. His stories of survival in Rochelle under Nazi occupation were stark.

A second less-distinguished, rather callow and New York sort of face came next to mind; the only resident of New Rochelle I ever knew. I’ll call him Dow, but that wasn’t his name.

The North Fort was a ghost town: abandoned temporary barracks from the Second World War stretched empty and lightless for miles. Huge wooden mockups of troop transports, still wreathed in rotting embarkation nets, showed where soldiers practiced for MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign against the Japanese. Civilian contractors swarmed the barracks, preparing them to serve one more conflict: Vietnam. The plumbing didn’t even work. The trick was to take a roll of toilet paper, find a toilet not yet used by another GI, do your business and leave it for the contractors to clean up.

One small cluster of barracks had been provided lights and running water, and a mess hall, but they hadn’t got around to toilets even there. There was not an officer to be seen anywhere; we were roughing it the Army way until things were up and running. Senior non-coms liked this just fine; officers would slow things down. And being assigned as cadre meant their odds were good to avoid Southeast Asia for at least another full tour, maybe long enough to retire.

For amenities we had the main fort, a short bus ride away, fully operational and crammed with Fourth Division soldiers preparing to deploy Theaters, PXs, Class 6 Stores, snack bars and doughnut shops; everything a small town had. But that wasn’t enough for Dow.

His previous billet had been heaven: clerking in an Army office in Paris, required to wear civvies to avoid offending French sensibilities. The Army rented a Paris flat for his squad; no barracks for him. In the jargon of the day, he had it knocked — until he didn’t.

The ghostly North Fort was a long way to fall from Paris. We swapped Paris stories as an antidote for the grim surroundings. Dow was fascinated that M. Chaigneau took on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook to translate. A Lessing fan who spoke French, Dow wondered if the old man could pull off such a difficult feat. M. Chaigneau had been impressed that I remembered French Rochelle as the scene of a rollicking adventure in The Three Musketeers. Dow thought every literate person must know that.

But transition from life on the boulevards to baggy fatigues in a fort without plumbing preyed on Dow. More than once he said he was going over the hill; more than once he said he was losing his mind.

His harping on mental illness led me to tell him the Army legend about a soldier always searching for a particular piece of paper. The legend goes the soldier one day started picking up and examining each piece of paper he came across. He would shake his head sadly, say “that’s not it,” and move on. He did this day in and day out. His sergeant worried about his obsession. His captain worried about it. But he kept on examining every piece of paper, even trash during police call. “I’ll know it when I see it,” was all he would say.

So they sent him to an Army shrink. He examined every piece of paper the shrink let him touch: “that’s not it.” The legend is vague how the shrink tried to plumb his obsession. He never stopped searching. Eventually the Army concluded he was unfit for duty and gave him a medical discharge.

“That’s it,” he said when they gave him his discharge.

Dow laughed at the story, but lapsed back into melancholy. Days went by. Little by little the cadre got North Fort up and running. Regular assignments replaced clean-up details. The first recruits arrived for processing. I lost track of Dow and thought no more about him. I was editing the North Fort news out of a former dispensary when I heard about a GI who had been AWOL for a year and showed up at headquarters in the middle of the night.

He was dressed in European clothing, had hippie-long hair. This apparition told the astonished duty officer he had to find his father right away — and named our commanding general as his father. Told the general didn’t have a son his age, he was very confused. He confessed he had memory issues — couldn’t remember where he had been lately.

The MPs came and got him and took him to the mental ward; eventually somebody ran his fingerprints and discovered he was AWOL. He calmly denied his identity and kept asking for his father, the general. Dad would straighten it all out.

He was tractable and friendly, even when they put in him new fatigues and escorted him to a military barber who nearly scalped him. He just kept asking for his dad and smiling peacefully. All drug screens were negative. Our major, the commanding general’s public information officer, just shook his head. The kid was so plausible, he said, some senior staff secretly wondered about the general’s earlier life.

The better part of valor however was to issue the freshly shorn soldier a medical discharge and ship him home to New Rochelle without comment. New Rochelle, New York? I asked. Do you know any others, my major said. Just the original Rochelle, in France, I said.

A couple days later, in the brand-new North Fort snack bar, somebody hailed me from across the room. It was Dow with a fresh crew cut, neatly dressed in civvies and lugging an AWOL bag. He said he was waiting for the bus to take him to the airport. We both ordered burgers and Cokes and chatted about nothing in particular. He said he was going back to Paris soon but exchanged his New Roclelle home address for mine in Florida. We finished our burgers and sipped our Cokes.

“Finally out of the Army, huh?” I said.

“I got an early discharge,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

“What?” I didn’t think I could have heard him right.

“Remember the soldier always looking for a piece of paper?”

“Well sure.” I suddenly had a very bad feeling.

He laughed happily. “I elaborated on your theme.”

Then he leaned in and very quietly told me he thought amnesia and the commnding general’s alleged paternity were more elegant than walking around examining every scrap of paper, because he didn’t have to stay on-post to pull it off. He had spent much of his time away in Paris with his girlfriend. He unzipped his AWOL bag and produced his discharge papers. “Story has the same punchline,” he said with a skunk-eating grin. He waved the discharge. “That’s it!”