Jean-Michel walked me all over the island, showing me places my father would have seen and explaining that it would not have been unusual or surprising if my father had hired his father, Jean, as a guide around the island and to take him to the best small islands for duck hunting. He took me around the 365 tiny islands in Jolie Brise, his canot chausiais, or boat of Chausey, especially adapted to the dangerous navigational conditions of the archipelago. When the tide was in, Jean-Michel wound in and around the tiny islands in serpentine fashion, Jolie Brise skimming over the menacing rocks beneath the surface of the sea within my arm’s reach. I realized that one would have to have grown up on this island to know how to avoid the treacherous rocks and guide someone through the archipelago, as Jean-Michel was doing for me. As his father, Jean, did for my father, Joe. Only the naming of each island and the cries of the seabirds that must have sounded exactly the same sixty-two years before, broke the silence. It felt like we had stepped back in time.
Over the next few days I learned some of the history of the island, as only a native and a historian could tell. One evening, several days into the visit, we sat over dinner and wine and Jean-Michel spoke. He showed me his copies of the same photographs that I had. It was a humbling moment to hold it in my hand and know that they were saved by both men in photograph albums until they died, telling no one what it meant. Now, sixty-two years later, their children sat together and tried to understand. Jean-Michel told of the enormous poverty that existed on the island during World War II. The Chausians could not leave the island to pursue their livelihood as fishermen, and they suffered greatly. “I cannot say why our fathers became friends and we can never really know that.” he said. “I do know that your father must have brought supplies to my father, and work, hiring him as a guide. But most importantly, he brought hope that this war would someday be over and that life would resume again. I can only hope that in having you here I have somehow begun to repay that debt”. And with that, the tough French sea captain and the middle-aged American woman looking for her father’s story, holding tight to her memories, both wept.
In the days that followed, we saw more of the island and accepting that we would never quite understand, speculated mentally on what if it were indeed true that my father wanted to adopt young Jean? What if? Jean-Michel may not have been born, or perhaps he would not have grown up on Chausey. What if? Joe Baker would have had a child and there would have been no need to adopt another, myself, 4 years later. Or perhaps in an alternate universe, we could have been brother and sister. What if?
The day before we were to leave Chausey, we had lunch with neighbors of Jean-Michel and Marie Odile’s on Chausey. A wonderful couple named Jean Paul Batas and his wife, Jacqueline. Jean Paul was in his seventies, a retired sea captain, who lived on Chausey with his parents and moved to the mainland during the war. He moved back after the war and when he married, his wife moved there as well. As a newly married couple, they lived next door to Jean Thévenin, his wife and family, and were great friends. Jean Paul and Jacqueline hadn’t heard of us or why we were visiting. Jean-Michel explained to them in French, that I was an American who discovered that my father had been to Chausey during the war and had known young Jean Thévenin. As a matter of fact, there was some farfetched story about my father having wanted to take young Jean back to America. And then time stood still. Jacqueline, looked at Jean-Michel and I and asked, in French, “Joe? Joe de Philadelphie?” Joe? Joe of Philadelphia? I felt Jean-Michel; sitting next to me, turn to a pillar of stone. I looked to his wife, Marie Odile and asked, “Did she just say what I think she said?” Marie Odile, dumbfounded, shook her head yes, and said, “This is the first we are hearing about this”. Although neither Joe nor Jean told their children, they had told other people, and so, it was true. I looked to Jean-Michel with new eyes and an understanding that in another life, had our fathers’ journey turned another way, we could have been family. Through this connection, we were in fact family, finally understanding and sharing some of our father’s unspoken dreams. I knew at that moment that my father had truly wanted a son or daughter, and through the murkiness and horror of war he had been denied one child, finding another in me.
Connected as family in spirit, Jean-Michel and I walked to the spot where our fathers stood together, the place that was revealed when the tide went out. The American soldier in search of a child and the French teenager in search of a father, crossing paths in that dark night of 1944, looking at the unknown photographer and at us, their own children, through six decades of time into the future, waiting for the tide to come in.
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