The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  “Do you think we’ll make it?” she said to Iris.

  “It’d certainly be the definition of irony to have finally been allowed to come, and then to crash land on the beach,” Iris replied.

  “Maybe I’ll just close my eyes and pray,” Jess said.

  In the end she prayed, but she couldn’t make herself shut her eyes. The sea, a beautiful holiday blue, was full of battleships and tugboats, all flying silver barrage balloons above like misshapen moons, the sunlight dancing off the silver, off the water. Here and there, drowned tanks and derricks could be seen among the ruins of bombed-out boats. The hulking gray of the Mulberry harbor fingered the ocean and bulldozered piles of metal hedgehogs spiked menacingly from the sand. Foxholes, which just days ago had sheltered men, gaped out of the cliff.

  They landed safely and Jess and Iris hopped out, sharing a relieved grimace to find themselves alive and intact and in France. On the beach beside them, medics prodded the sand with spades, removing the bodies that had, until now, been temporarily covered over in the rush. Row after row of sticks marked each resting place, and from each stick wafted a canvas bag. Jess walked among them, in the European Theater of Operations, a place where the actors would not come back to life once the curtains came down, focusing not on the things one would ordinarily admire on a beach—the color of the water, an unusual shell—but on the things one should never behold by the seaside.

  Worst of all was the tideline. The beach was so wide, the difference between high and low tide so marked, that the high water mark had become the most poignant reminder that what lay now on the beach had once been the living. Yardley hair tonic, Bibles, a baseball mitt. Razors, letters from home, pistol belts. Sticks of camouflage cream, a guitar, shoe polish. The remainders of men who would no longer polish their shoes.

  Jess made herself walk across the beach. All you have to do is take photographs, she told herself. Your job is the easiest of anyone’s in France. And so she snapped the tideline, knowing she would ask Bel to run a wide-angle shot across a bifold, four pages in all. It would be her attempt to say, without words, that while the official rhetoric was that casualties were lower than expected—which everyone in America would take to mean that few had died—“lower” still meant thousands and that nobody could sit on Omaha Beach and feel anything other than devastated.

  * * *

  Five days later, Jess was still in France. As usual it wasn’t her fault; she hadn’t been able to get a ride back to London on a plane or a ship as they were full of wounded GIs whose need was greater than hers. She’d lost Iris Carpenter. Warren Stone was probably standing at port in England ready to lock Jess up the moment she returned. But she’d been smart enough to have the pilots and medics sign a paper attesting they had no room for her, which she looked forward to handing to Warren once she reached England.

  She was beyond filthy; when she’d been told thirty-six hours, she hadn’t bothered to bring a change of clothes, thinking it would only weigh her down. She was almost out of film and she’d had to send all her used films back to London in a press bag despite her misgivings that it might end up in the censors’ trash can.

  Now, she was picking her way across the sand, toward the cemetery, where she could see someone studying the graves, silent. His stance was familiar—back unbending, the air of command apparent—although his helmeted head and uniform made him look much the same as every other soldier in France.

  The figure turned around slowly, face altering when he saw her.

  “Major Hallworth,” she said, only just raising a smile.

  “Captain May,” he replied, his expression matching hers.

  She felt it before it happened, the press of tears at the back of her cowardly eyes, all the goddamned tears she’d refused to allow herself to shed for the past five days because a woman was not allowed to fall to pieces if she ever wanted to be allowed back into France. She didn’t say anything, willed her eyes to dry out but they refused to listen and so at last she said, her voice wobbly, “I think there’s a good chance I’m going to cry.”

  “Come here,” he said, lifting his arms and she walked into them, helmet pressed awkwardly into his shoulder, crying now, but only for a few minutes because if he could stomach everything he’d seen, which would be so much worse than what she’d witnessed, then so too could she.

  “Sorry,” she said, drawing back. “And thanks. I haven’t had a shower for five days. It’s an act of bravery in itself coming close to me right now. I think you just repaid the favor you owed me.”

  “Jess, holding you while you cry isn’t repaying a favor. It’s being a friend.” His voice was soft, a lovely caress amidst the savagery.

  She shook her head. “God, don’t say that. I’ll start crying again.” She smiled. “It’s good to see you alive.”

  “It’s good to see you too.”

  “Do you have to get back?”

  He checked his watch. “Not for an hour.”

  “Then come with me.”

  She led him to a small ridge, a place she’d sat a few times over the past couple of days, watching the activity on the beach. They sat there now, backs against the rock, flattened blackberry brambles twisting forlornly around them, and she told him about Martha’s escapade and the parachute jumps they’d been denied due to having delicate female apparatus and what she’d said to Warren in reply.

  He laughed and she saw his face relax for a moment, the lines furrowed on his forehead suddenly fall away, but return just a moment later.

  “Oh no,” she said with a sudden flash of horror. “Not Jennings?” She gestured to the graves behind them.

  “Not Jennings. But a hell of a lot of others just like him. Some didn’t even make the ground alive. Their time in the U.S. Army consisted of a training camp in England, a plane ride across the Channel, then death in the air.” He rubbed his face but it didn’t erase the troubled expression. “I was ordered to take this afternoon off to sleep; I haven’t slept properly for a week. But now that we’ve secured the causeway and the beachheads have been joined up, I had to come here.”

  Jess jumped up. “I’m keeping you from sleep. You should go.”

  But he stayed where he was and patted the ground beside him. “No, this is what I need. To laugh. To talk…” He stopped.

  “Tell me about it,” she said, sitting back down.

  “Have you ever seen an airborne division in the sky?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “It’s kind of beautiful. There are so many parachutes. It’s like, I don’t know, watching a thousand pure white hankies flutter to the ground. That’s if you can shut out the vibration of the C-47s and the fact that you have to carry eighty kilograms of equipment, which is more than what some of the younger GIs weigh. We had to jump before we’d reached the landing zone; Jerry was throwing too much at us. Then we were in the inferno, a sky filled with fire and smoke so thick you couldn’t see your hands, the entire carcasses of damaged airplanes hurtling at us through the sky; I saw so many men hit by their own plane before they’d even reached the ground.”

  He stopped and she waited, knowing he hadn’t finished, that the terrible stories of what “invasion” actually meant were numberless and that he wouldn’t have said any of this to anyone else because he was the man in charge, the one who did the ordering and the listening but never the confessing.

  “We were supposed to land around Sainte-Mère-Église but we landed all over fucking Normandy, split by the Merderet River,” he continued. “The men near Carentan landed in mud to their necks and it sucked them under like quicksand. The gliders came down too hard and impaled themselves on Rommel’s damned asparagus and all that survived was the equipment. The crickets we use to call to one another to rendezvous were useless because nobody was in hearing distance of anyone else. A brand new private got stuck in a tree, hanging from his chute, and we found him, not taken prisoner by the Krauts as he should have been but riddled with one hundred and sixty-two bullet and
bayonet holes. Scattered at his feet were the ripped pages of his prayer book. Greater love hath no man than this,” Dan quoted, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

  This time, it was Jess’s turn to reach out for Dan’s hand, just as he’d done at Easter. Because in spite of the fact that Dan’s division had been unable to land in their drop zones, they’d taken the town of Sainte-Mère-Église by the early morning hours of D-day, thus securing a defensive position to prevent German reinforcements arriving on the beaches. That success had been much spoken of, but not what it had cost to gain.

  “I was never more relieved than when I found Jennings after only a couple of hours,” he eventually said.

  “Thank God,” Jess breathed.

  “By D-day plus two our division only had two thousand fighting men left. That’s less than half the number who left England.”

  They sat in silence after that. Below them, on the beach, they watched litters disgorged from ambulances and onto airplanes, a never-ending stream of men who would return home vastly different to how they’d used to be.

  Neither let go of the other’s hand. At last Dan said, “Are you waiting for a ride back to England?”

  “How did you guess,” she said, ruefully acknowledging her state of extreme dishevelment.

  “I remember how well the fellas in public relations look after you. Let’s go. I’ll find you a chauffeur.”

  As they wound their way down to the sand, Jess noticed the more than usually deferential “sirs” sent Dan’s way and she suddenly understood when she saw one man nod at Dan and say, “Lieutenant Colonel.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel?” she asked.

  He flushed, reminding her of Jennings. “And Battalion CO.”

  “How many men are you in charge of now?”

  “About seven hundred and fifty.”

  And she was glad, foolishly glad; with someone like Dan in charge of all those men, the invasion might actually succeed.

  Within an hour she was stepping into a plane and Dan was asking her, “When will you be back?”

  “Soon, I hope. None of the female correspondents are allowed to stay over here yet.”

  “Make sure you send me a note and come find me when you do. And,” he paused, “Victorine…”

  “Is well and happy. I’ll go see her again, tell her you’re okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  She saw him waiting by the airstrip as the plane took off into the sky, not waving, just watching her leave, then, at last, turning around to go back to fighting to win a war. All the way back to England, she held her right hand—the one Dan had held—inside her left, but it didn’t comfort her the same way he had.

  * * *

  When Jess arrived back at the Savoy and handed her uniforms over for cleaning and delousing, she learned that Iris Carpenter had been court-martialed. Iris had strayed from the “beachhead” and the Ministry of Information was trying to make an example of her. As well as that news, there was a letter waiting from Martha.

  I couldn’t sit around in a nurses’ training camp forever. So I managed to get out and I’m on my way to Naples. I don’t have any orders or papers or a goddamned passport—they took everything off me—but I can sweet-talk my way into anything. Everyone’s so focused on France I don’t think they’ll care about me all the way over in Italy. If I can find a unit of French or Canadians who’ll let me attach myself to them, then I can avoid the rules of the U.S. Army altogether.

  You do a damn fine job of France and I’ll do a damn fine job of Italy.

  Marty

  Jess smiled as she read Martha’s words. It would have been nice to have Martha by her side. But Martha was right to go to Italy and escape Warren Stone. SHAEF had managed to get rid of one woman. Jess prayed they wouldn’t be able to get rid of any more with Iris’s trial.

  Thankfully Iris had ambiguity and a colonel on her side. Nobody could define precisely what was meant by the beachhead. “Colonel Whitcomb, who gave me an escort to Cherbourg, told them the beachhead stretched as far as the town,” Iris told Jess over whiskey that night. “And none of the PROs were able to produce a different interpretation from anyone as high up as a colonel who’d actually been in France.”

  “So they let you off? Will they let you back though?” Jess asked, moving from joy to hopelessness in the space of those two sentences.

  Iris grinned. “Brigadier Turner told me, eyes bulging, that it would be a very long while before I got orders to go to Normandy again.”

  “Why are you smiling, then?” Jess asked despairingly.

  “Before I left Normandy, I had Colonel Whitcomb issue me orders to return to the beachhead as soon as possible.”

  “Bravo!” Jess cheered, chinking her glass against Iris’s.

  “I think you’ll find that, after this brouhaha, they’ll have to change something about the way they handle women over there,” Iris finished.

  Luckily Iris was right. After the bungled court-martial, SHAEF PR did have to change the way they let women into France. Every woman who wanted it was issued permanent orders to go to France, and those orders were valid for an entire month. Jess hugged her papers to her chest, unable to hide her smile even from Warren.

  His attempt to dampen her spirits by telling her she had to wait a week for transport didn’t make a bit of difference. Besides, he looked cowed for once, as if all the fighting and the losing was wearying him. Jess was hopeful that, once she was in France, she wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore and he would let go of their feud and they could both just do their jobs.

  She used the week before embarkation to say goodbye to Victorine and to visit her friend from boarding school days, Amelia, with whom she had continued to exchange letters. Amelia had been begging Jess to visit since discovering she was in England.

  “Jessica May!” Amelia said when Jess arrived on the doorstep of a grand country home in Cornwall. “I couldn’t believe it when you telephoned. Come in.”

  Jess hugged Amelia, who looked as devastatingly pretty as she had in school. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Oh, but I have.” Amelia waggled her left hand at Jess. “I got myself married, remember.”

  “I can’t imagine you a married woman,” Jess said as she followed Amelia into a masculine drawing room adorned with stags’ heads and other hunting souvenirs.

  “I can’t imagine myself a married woman either,” Amelia said with a grin, before commanding a maid to bring them champagne. “I’m having to work very hard to behave myself.”

  Jess laughed. On the rare occasions Jess was actually in school in Paris, she and Amelia had, most weekends, snuck out of the boarding house and into the jazz clubs of Montmartre, where they’d refined their drinking and kissing skills even though they were only sixteen.

  “Luckily he’s a corporal or a colonel or an admiral or something in the Navy—I can never remember all of those ranks—so he’s on a ship somewhere and I’m here hosting house parties.”

  Jess’s hand tightened on her champagne glass. “Aren’t you worried about him?” she asked. For Victorine’s sake—at least she thought it was for Victorine’s sake rather than her own—Jess worried about Dan every morning when she woke and every night before she slept.

  Amelia laughed. “He’s a friend of Daddy’s and almost as old so let’s just say that the war is very convenient.”

  “Why did you marry him?”

  “For freedom, of course.” Amelia stared at Jess as if she were being obtuse. “Married, I have the money and the means to live life as I choose. I wanted a military husband. I well know from having a military father how little time they spend with family. It suits me perfectly; I don’t have to behave all that much,” Amelia finished with a wink. “You’re lucky I’m even awake. Last night’s party didn’t finish until dawn.”

  “Shouldn’t you be doing war work? I thought all the women in England—”

  “Jessica May!” Amelia exclaimed. “Or are you really an imposter? Br
ing back my friend. You’ve become so…earnest.”

  Jess sighed. She was earnest. Where was the laughing girl who’d danced all night at Greenwich Village clubs or at Condé Nast’s parties, wearing beautiful gowns and a much-photographed smile, who’d fallen into bed with Emile at all hours of the morning and had damn good sex? Had she really been that person?

  She took a large swallow of champagne. How was it possible to see Omaha Beach and not be earnest? “For today,” she said to Amelia with a weak smile, “your job is to make me not quite so earnest.”

  “Hallelujah.” Amelia raised her glass, sipped, then something like earnestness fell over her face too. “It really is good to see you,” she said. “Everyone sleeping it off up there,” she raised her glass to indicate the bedrooms on the upper floors, “has only known me with all of this.” Her hand swept around to encompass the large room with its expensive but fusty adornments. “Whereas you knew me before any of it.”

  Jess stayed that night for Amelia’s party but, rather than finding solace in another man’s arms as Amelia did, Jess went to bed early and wrapped her arms around herself, Amelia’s words playing through her head: you knew me before any of it. And the reply Jess hadn’t made: But where did that world go? And, without it, who are we?

  Twelve

  Over the next few days in France, Jess discovered what a goddamn joke the “rules” designed to “protect” women were. The press camp for the men was miles further back from the front and thus a hell of a lot safer than the Fifth General Hospital outside Carentan where Jess was posted. As a woman, she had absolutely no access to press camps, which meant no access to briefings, or to maps, or to news about hot spots and likely strafing attacks and the day’s objective or anything else that would actually give her an idea which part of the country was safe and which wasn’t. When Jess had pointed out that this would put her at more risk than the men, nobody seemed to care. And she still had to wait in line with her stories; hers were sent back to London, where the censors tore them apart and then directed them on to Bel, which meant that her words occasionally made no sense as she wasn’t allowed to review them. Whereas the men submitted theirs direct from France after their very own censor had checked them and allowed the men a final edit.