All Jake on the Western Front

All Jake on the Western Front

ONE

Jake Brown: Hellertown, Pennsylvania, August 25, 1972

I still dream in French.

I can’t for the life of me say why. It’s been more than 50 years since I carried on a conversation in French, and I was never all that good at it. I couldn’t put three sentences together any more.

But nearly every night it’s the same. If I’m lucky, I see me up a telegraph pole on an Army base, or drinking good red wine in a cafe. But more often, I’m not so lucky, and I dream I’m in a rickety little aeroplane, as they called them back then, going down over the battle of the Somme. I’m in the Argonne Forest trying to run from I don’t know what and scarcely able to move my legs for the pile of dead bodies of men I knew and men I killed.

And in the background, I hear voices in French, just barely, and I strain to understand them.

I’ve never really told anyone about it. I don’t know why I’m telling you now. We didn’t talk about some things back then. And I really didn’t want to think about them. But the things you don’t want to remember are the things you can’t forget.

More than all of that, I think of her. Her name was Henriette. Henriette Fellonneau. I called her Yette.

She was my gal, a real peach. I was her beau. It was wartime. We called it the Great War, though it wasn’t so great in my opinion. And I guess she and I helped each other through some hard times. She’s dead now more than 20 years, and I never told anyone much about her, because then I would have to explain why I didn’t stay with her. And then I married someone else, and, well, you know...

You can call me Jake. Everyone else does, though it’s not really my name.

I guess you can say I earned it in the service, the first time I was in the service, you know, the Pennsylvania National Guard, not the Army Air Service where I spent my time during the Great War. We were stuck down in New Mexico, waiting for orders that never came to cross the border and chase Pancho Villa, like the New York National Guard. But we never did.

It was kind of boring, which was swell in my book. It got me out of the electrical shop back in Bethlehem, where I was living at the time.

One day, one of the other soldiers, a joker named Randy Proffitt, a mechanic friend of mine from Bethlehem, he asked me how I was doing, and I said, “It’s all Jake.”

I’m not sure what was so funny about it. That’s what we all said back then. It meant that things were swell.

But the next time Proffitt saw me, he called me Jake. And then everyone else in the company did, too.

When we got back to Pennsylvania, we were out drinking, me and Randy and a few of the other guardsmen, and my brother Ed was along for the ride. I guess we were all a little bit tight, you know, blotto, the way soldiers get telling stories and drinking, and they were calling me Jake, and Ed sat up straight and started calling me that too, except sarcastic-like.

Now, Ed could be a so-and-so when we were young. He was a real Dutchie, though he tried to pretend he wasn’t. You still could hear it in his voice.

I used to say that if he was twins, his twin would be a turd. He was always lording it over me. He owned the business, after all, Brown Electric, over there across the street from the bar here in the Eagle Hotel, and I was the little brother who worked for him. When I wasn’t married, which was most of my life, I lived in an apartment up a back staircase in the building.

But Ed took to calling me Jake, and then it stuck, so that all my nieces and nephews and their kids — I never had none of my own, that I know of, hah! — always called me Jake, too.

My parents named me Webster Major Brown. I guess they ran out of first names; there were six of us kids, and my old man was one of 11 children, so all the good names must’ve been taken. In the family, they called me Major, which was my mother’s maiden name. So with three last names, It was just as well that someone came along and renamed me Jake. That’s Jake with me.

I think I already mentioned that today’s my birthday. Eighty years old. Never thought I’d live that long. There were a couple times during the war when I didn’t think I’d live through the day. And more than a couple times when I was drinking when I didn’t think I’d live through the night, not the least because my brother or my wife would have killed me, and me deserving yet.

My wife is named Mae. I married her twice: the first time right after the war. I don’t remember the year, maybe 1921 or so, though I do remember I met her at a Valentine’s Day party somewhere and we were in the same social group for so many years. But I was such a horse’s ass when I drank that she left me in the 30s, Napoo, as we said in the war. That was French, kind of, for “It’s finished, there ain’t no more.”

Then I got old and settled down. I didn’t so much quit drinking as the drinking quit me. For so many years, we were real good friends, me and the bottle, and then it just left me. I probably deserved it. Then me and Mae got to be friends again. She never stopped being part of the bigger family; spent more time with my brothers and sisters and their kids than with me, as if she was more than just a Brown by marriage. We decided to move in together again to share our Social Security checks when we were older. But my older sister Essie — she was so old she could have been a waitress at The Last Supper — and her husband Arthur, who’s already in his nineties, decided that we young kids shouldn’t be living in sin. We were in our 70’s for Christ’s sake, but we got married again to be proper and all, and I moved out of Ed’s building and into Mae’s house.

Eighty years old. Today. Hoo Boy! Reminds me of the story of the three old guys in the nursing home. One of them says, “Today’s my birthday, I’ll bet you coots a dollar you can’t guess how old I am.”

One of the old men says, “You’re 82.”

“Nope!”

The other old guy says, “You’re 84.”

Again “Nope.”

Then an old lady walks by and says, “What are you old goats laughing about?”

The first guy says, “I just bet them they can’t guess my age, and I took their money.”

The old lady says, “Can I try?”

“Sure,” he says.

She walks over to him, pulls down his zipper, puts her hand in there and feels around and then says, “You’re 83.”

The old man is stunned. “How’d you know that?” he asks.

“You told me yesterday,” she says.

Yeah, my jokes are as old as me. But the fact is, in my mind, I’m still 26, like I was when I went to France, hoping to fight. I did some. But I did most of my service in support of the doughboys who did most of the fighting. My thinking is just the same as it was then. My body, not so much.

Growing old is not for sissies. I think that other Mae said that, Mae West, not my Mae Brown. Parts hurt you didn’t know you had. You can’t get around much, so you sit and think about things: things you done, things you should have done, things you shouldn’t have done, especially those last two. You can’t remember what you did yesterday or what you’re supposed to do tomorrow, but you can remember things that happened 50-60 years ago like they just happened. Especially the stuff you wish you forgot.

Birthdays always get to me that way. Today I was going through some boxes and found a letter from that gal I had in France during the war,

Well, the truth is, I went looking for it. Henriette. Yette. Like I said, she was a real peach, black hair, eyes so dark they looked black, too. She was just 20. I was 26 going on 14. She wanted to get married, and I think maybe I did, too, at the time. Probably shoulda. I know she loved me.

But I kind of got in a jam at the end there in France. I’ll tell you that story, if you care to hear it. And I kind of shipped out in a hurry and left her there, and I really don’t know why I could never go back and get her or even answer all her letters. It was like being paralyzed.

And as for speaking French, even if I don’t remember too much of it, I know this letter by heart. I pieced it together back then and I can’t forget it. It’s here in my pocket.

“How my love for you is growing, Dear Brown,” it starts. She called me Brown, I guess because that’s how the military calls you, by your last name.

I’m trying to translate here:

“The separation only makes it stronger. When you were here, I only thought of the time when I would see you, the evening after you departed. I was wishing it would be 5:30 again so I could have you near me. Maybe you will smile in reading this. I bet you have an impossible time translating this. Mon ami, hear my prayer. Think of me. I am so unhappy and sad without you.”

Then she tells me what’s going on in France.

“Dear Brown, I will tell you the news of Coutras,” That’s where she was living. “Four girls have been married. Two with American soldiers, one with a Serb and one with a Spaniard.” She was giving me a hint, I think. “Life is calm, monotonous. The weather is gray. Awaiting your dear letter. I send all the love that I can, especially to you, with tender kisses. I shall always be yours. I have sworn to you and no one else.”

Signed, Henriette.

Like I said, I never even told Mae about her. It wouldn’t matter. I wasn’t married when I was in France. I could have had a girl there. I wasn’t no cad.

She kept on writing. I stopped writing at some point. What was the use? Then she got tired of waiting for me.

Yette died in 1951. I got a telegram. It shocked me. Not that she died. Well maybe a little bit. But the fact that she never let go, even though she married someone else a few years after I left her. And that she had among her last wishes that I be sent a telegram about her death.

And I guess I never let go either. I can’t help but wonder what life would have been like if I had gone back for her, if I had decided to live in France.

Wondering: That’s what old people do.

TWO

Michael Brown Kiefer, Phoenix, Arizona, 2019:

Jake Brown was my mother’s uncle, and he was a storyteller, though in his day, the word “storyteller” wasn’t a compliment. It meant that maybe the stories told weren’t quite truthful. Or maybe he wasn’t telling everything.

And maybe I’m a storyteller, too. So maybe together we will tell the whole story. Maybe Henriette will help.

Jake was the black sheep of the family. And if my mother or her sisters were still alive, they would be unhappy that I was telling my version of the story. Or letting Jake tell his version of it. They preferred not to talk about him.

I had almost forgotten about him until two years ago, when my cousin Dave came to Phoenix.  Dave and I hadn’t seen each other in more than 40 years, and we were trying to catch up over beers and dinner, and eventually we landed on our mutual fondness for Uncle Jake, his bizarre apartment, the stale candy he gave out, his stuttering jokes.

Then this: When Jake died in 1978, Dave was in his early 20s and still living in Pennsylvania.  His dad, my uncle Henry owned the building, which he had inherited from Ed Brown, my grandfather. And Henry asked him to clean out Jake’s old apartment.

It was a mess. Jake hadn’t lived there for years, because he lived with his wife, and the little studio was full of books and pots and pans and broken furniture, the detritus of a long life.  But there were piles of papers, and Dave rooted through them.

“I found letters from Jake’s girlfriends in France,” Dave told me, and I was instantly intrigued. 

I asked to see them, and he promised to send them — if and when he found them in the detritus of his own long life.  They were somewhere in his house in California, in a bag, maybe, or a box, or a closet.

This was too tantalizing.  I’d been a journalist for more than forty years, at least half of that as an investigative journalist, and I thought this was worth exploring, so I started, a little at a time.

[. . .]