The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  Warren had made sure to stress that she wasn’t to leave the field hospital without permission from the CO. And then he’d added, smiling, that he was going to France too. It had taken all of Jess’s willpower not to say, But that’s a little too close to danger for you, isn’t it? Instead she’d swallowed the retort and prayed that he’d stay at his cozy press camp and that she’d never have to see him again.

  But she did hold on to his words: without permission from the CO. She knew a CO who’d give her permission, she was sure of it. It wasn’t exactly what Warren had meant but nor had he been precise enough to specify that he was referring to the CO of the hospital—and she would take full advantage.

  At her new home on French soil, she quickly became adept at diving into the slit trench behind her tent whenever the Germans flew over at night strafing, at pretending the enormous red welts of mosquito bites didn’t itch like the devil, at never being alone, not even on the toilet—the latrine had a row of six seats and more often than not at least one or two of the other places were occupied by nurses clutching their precious rations of Scott paper. It was incredible the conversations that could be had while doing one’s business, especially during the rare quiet times, which everyone dreaded, because that was when the nurses would finally break down.

  She also became expert at sleeping in spite of the maddening ringing in her ears from the constant boom of shells and guns, at eating in spite of the way the smells of ether and gangrene and blood seemed to coat the inside of her mouth. Most of all, she became proficient at pretending not to be scared, at only crying in the shower, at being the one to tell the new nurses to sleep under their cots rather than on top, or the one to move aside and let the new recruits lie beside her when she heard them sobbing as the Stukas shrieked overhead, at telling them it would be all right.

  She remembered her first night in Italy and knew that she was just as scared now as she had been then, but she also knew how to hide it better. Humor and dispensing practical advice were her chosen means for this, making a show of demonstrating how to tip one’s head upside down at the end of each day and shake it thoroughly before bed in order to dislodge another day’s worth of the thick yellow dust that covered everything; the bombed-out earth of France had taken to the skies in search of refuge, where it floated around them all day long, discovering what everyone in France already knew: there was no place of refuge. France was no longer France.

  Once past the seductive vista of silky blue sea at the edge of the country, everything changed. On the beach and between the hedgerows, the land was scarred with shell craters, slashed with foxholes and trenches and wretched with newly dug cemeteries. Boards painted with red skulls and crossbones and menacing warnings about the dangers of mines were as commonplace as apple trees. New roads unfurled brutishly from the maws of bulldozers and were quickly overrun with convoys of military vehicles. Each set of crossroads bore a pole stabbed into the earth with arrows directing traffic to the different units: Madonna Charlie, Missouri Baker, Missouri Charlie. Strung over everything like Christmas tinsel were reams of wire for communications.

  Her days consisted of hitching rides on ambulances to collecting posts closer to the front then watching as ambulances brought in men from the battlefield, their faces stark white beneath the dirt and cut through with tears. Many were uninjured bodily, but their minds were lost somewhere in France, and Jess photographed the medics working with especially gentle hands to do whatever they could, which was very little, for those men.

  The bocage fighting in the area was the dirtiest anyone had ever seen, from the castrator mines that leapt up and detonated at crotch height, to the surrendering lone German soldier who would emerge with hands up until the American GIs came to take him prisoner, whereupon he would leap to the side and the machine guns hidden in the hedgerows would mow down every American soldier who’d thought the white flag was the one thing that could be relied upon in war. But nothing could be relied upon, not anymore.

  At an aid station near La Fière she recognized the insignia of Dan’s division among the men and heard that his battalion was in the area, that they’d succeeded in cutting a line across the Cherbourg Peninsula, that they’d been fighting unrelieved and without replacements for thirty-three days and had achieved every mission they’d been set and never given up any ground they’d taken. The news that he was alive made her the one crying silently in her cot at the hospital that evening, wondering why she was shedding so many tears over a man who was just a friend, but reasoning she would do the same for Martha if she’d suddenly, after a long silence, heard good news about her.

  * * *

  The day after the Germans, who’d been gathered in the surrounding hedgerows like deadly nesting birds, finally capitulated at Saint-Lô, she begged Major Henderson to allow her a ride on an ambulance out to the town. “It’s been captured, which means it’s no longer the front, so I’m allowed to travel there,” she reasoned.

  He just shook his head, not to prevent her, but because he knew he couldn’t. “Look after yourself,” he said and she thanked God that the surgeon she’d helped one night in Italy, the one who had Dan’s brother’s stethoscope, was the one in charge of the field hospital and that he usually did his best to help her get to where she wanted to go.

  The reports she’d seen of the siege of Saint-Lô, written by her male counterparts out of the luxury of their very own press camp at Valognes, with their very own set of jeeps, censors and couriers, had spoken grandiosely about the glory of the battle. When Jess climbed out of the ambulance at Saint-Lô, try as she might, she couldn’t find the glory.

  The town was destroyed, unlivable, another victim of war. In front of one shattered villa, magenta fuchsias bloomed in profusion over the body of a dead American soldier, a fluffy white rabbit hopping over his leg. It was a surrealist composition worthy of Man Ray but Jess didn’t photograph it. How war could so easily make a corpse inhuman. This man had died on soil not his own in order to secure one small town and had then been left to the attentions of rabbits. Someone in America was crying for him, imagining him honored with prayers and farewells, when the only sound to wing him toward death had been the crash of bullets, the boom of exploding shells.

  Hours later, Jess walked back to the road, leaning against a wall, thinking, waiting for the next vehicle to drive by. Why was she there? What good would any of her photographs do? Show truths that mothers wouldn’t want to know, remind people of things that should never be relived. She needed to get ready to offer a smile and a stream of banter to pay for her ride back to the hospital but the last thing she felt like, after clambering through the carcass of Saint-Lô, was being the Jessica May everyone thought she was. Before she was ready, she saw the distant dust cloud even more thickly and she waved to flag down the oncoming jeep.

  The jeep pulled to a stop and she couldn’t help but raise a smile when she saw Dan’s face.

  “Don’t tell me, you still don’t get a driver or a jeep,” he said, face grim as he jumped out.

  She shrugged. “You know I don’t.”

  “It’s lucky I was coming to find you, then,” he said in a very un-Dan-like tone. “You can’t stand around outside towns that have only just been liberated. You don’t know what’s about to fall out of the sky, or if there are snipers still around. I stopped at the hospital and Major Henderson said you’d left eight hours ago. I thought you’d had the shit strafed out of you by the Stukas.”

  “All I have to rely on are the reports that come in from the wounded men about where the front has moved to. I’m doing my best with the little information I have,” she said. “So don’t be mad. I don’t need mad right now.”

  “Tell me you at least have a gun.”

  She shook her head.

  He swore again. “I’ve got a spare Colt in the jeep. It’s yours. Come to dinner and I’ll show you how to shoot it.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Dinner, as in food. On plates, not out of a ration box. Come
to the camp and have dinner.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling at last.

  “Well, in that case…” She climbed into the jeep and tilted her head back, closing her eyes, the images from the past few days shuttering relentlessly through her mind. She snapped her eyes open and looked at Dan.

  “How the hell do you do it?” she asked.

  He didn’t have to ask, do what? Instead he grinned and said, “Well, my preferred method is to take correspondents out to a fine dinner of C-rations at my equally fine mess tent.”

  She hit his arm. “At least you called me a correspondent rather than a model.”

  “I want to finish the evening alive,” he teased.

  The banter relaxed her for the first time in days. A friendship like this was almost the only way to stay sane and she knew she would do her damnedest never to do anything to ruin it.

  “I have something else for you besides a gun,” Dan said. “In the back.”

  She reached around, past Dan’s submachine gun, ammo belt, machete and rope, and withdrew a pair of paratroop boots that looked as if they might fit her. “Are these for me?” she said excitedly, then laughed. “I’m sure that, once upon a time, I would have saved that sort of excitement for sapphires, not second-hand brown boots.”

  She tugged off her now scuffed and almost worn-out boots and replaced them with the almost-new ones. Her toes danced with the satisfaction of being shod in something comfortable, and her ankles, which were sore from walking, now felt as if nothing at all was the matter. “I think it’s probably the best gift I’ve ever been given,” she said, propping her feet on the dashboard and studying them. “Although I’m sorry someone had to die for it,” she added quietly.

  Dan glanced over at her. “He didn’t die. Just had half his skin burnt off. He’s gone back to Texas. He knew I was looking for boots for you and he told me to give you his. He’s one of the men you photographed on Easter Sunday.”

  Neither spoke for a long moment. Then Dan added, “And if you think that next time I give you something it’ll be sapphires, then you’re as nuts as this whole damn war. Now get your filthy feet off my dashboard. That’s another order.”

  Jess laughed again and saluted. “Yes, Sir!”

  * * *

  When Jess jumped out of the jeep, it was to applause. She looked around, bewildered; was Eisenhower arriving at the same moment? She could see nothing worth applauding until at least two men she recognized, Sparrow and Jennings, stepped forward and warmly shook her hand. Jennings’ hand was adorned with a bandage—he’d sliced his palm with a knife, he explained abashed, and Jess smiled at his obvious proneness to fortunately minor accidents.

  “My girl is prouder of me now than when I was shipped over here,” Jennings, who looked as if he was at last growing into himself, taller and more filled out—despite the rations—added, using more words than he’d ever managed with her before. “Every time she shows her friends the picture of me in Vogue, they just about die of envy and wish I was theirs instead.”

  Sparrow, who obviously hadn’t had his confidence shaken out of him by the war, erupted into laughter at the thought of Jennings being so in demand, and Jess smiled. Then another man pressed to the front of the group and, rather than shaking Jess’s hand, he embraced her. His face looked somewhat familiar. “I was on the mountain at Easter,” he said and Jess realized she’d photographed him, the look on his face so fervently prayerful, her camera having caught, in that moment and in that one man, what every man there had been feeling.

  Then Sparrow said, rather unexpectedly and seriously for once, “One of those graves at Omaha was my brother’s. My mum was happy to see he’d been buried with friends.”

  All Jess could do was squeeze his hand. As each man clamored to tell her about the picture she’d taken of him, or his brother or friend or neighbor, or of the story she’d written him into, she was swept off to the mess tent by a wave of admiring men, deposited at a table and given a tin mess tray.

  “C-rations,” Jess said, breathing in the smell of a meat and vegetable stew she was sure she would never have eaten two years ago but that now looked better than caviar. “And bread with butter! I haven’t seen anything other than a K-ration in two weeks.”

  “Then you should have this to go with it.” Jess looked up to see Dan passing her a mug with what she assumed might be coffee and discovered—coughing when she took too large a swallow—was cider.

  He gestured behind him to a cider barrel. “We found it and thought it’d be a shame to waste it. Especially now that we have a week off.” He handed her a cigarette.

  “Lucky Strikes,” she sighed, lighting up. “They only have Chesterfields at the hospital. You know, I might never leave here.”

  At which the men cheered, as if they’d be more than happy to have her stay. While she chatted over dinner and put the Rollei into service, all Jess could think was: at last she’d found a place where she belonged.

  * * *

  At dinner, the men who’d known Victorine in Italy asked about her. “If I’d realized I was coming to dinner,” Jess said, “I would have brought the pictures she’s drawn for you. She thought the pictures might stand in for her good-luck kisses.”

  “Some GIs over in the 371st Fighter Group have got their own Victorine,” Sparrow mumbled through a mouthful of food, and the other men nodded. “A girl called Yvette,” Sparrow continued. “Krauts killed her sister and wounded Yvette so bad she had both her legs amputated. So the GIs made her a tent from parachute silk and they fly her with them wherever they go. Because she has no one else to look after her. She’s their mascot, like Vicki was ours.”

  Nobody spoke but the night flickered with the poignancy inherent in what Sparrow had said: both that the men needed something to believe in—anything—in order to keep hope alive, and that somewhere in the darkness there was a girl called Yvette who could no longer walk.

  “We’ve all had to find new good-luck charms now we no longer have Vicki.” Sparrow finished both his dinner and his story and Jess wondered if she’d misjudged him when she first met him in the jeep in London, whether he had more substance than she’d thought. Or if war had deepened his character.

  “Would you mind if I photographed your lucky charms?” she asked, looking across at Dan for permission, knowing that pictures of the men with their new talismanic objects would be a moving follow-up to her Victorine story.

  Dan nodded and the men rose to their feet. They crossed the field, past lines of washing strung from tent to tent, past water bags swinging from tripods, past a phonograph singing into the night. In each tent she saw the same thing: GIs transformed into heartbreakingly young men. The Domino “Sweeten It” sugar tablet that one had carried with him since Italy because, he said in a terrible understatement, life in Europe was damn short on sweet stuff; the red tin of Tuxedo Club pomade that had sat in another man’s pocket and deflected a bullet; the green wrapper from a cake of Camay soap that a WAC with a lovely smile had given another as a keepsake because she’d had nothing else to gift.

  There were also the much-folded and studied photographs of mothers or wives or girlfriends or dogs or horses or even strangers like her. So many of the men had pictures of beautiful women from magazines or calendars, their faces and bodies creased into pocket-sized shapes. What did those pictures remind the men of? Jess wondered as she saw, many times, the photograph of her naked back, the one the PRO in Italy had ruined for her.

  And another that she’d forgotten: Jessica May in a floor-sweeping Lelong ballgown with a full princess skirt, thin straps crossing her back, which was otherwise bare, the fabric having been scooped away down to her sacrum. She looked as if she had no place in this world she now found herself in, as if she came from another universe entirely and that was, she supposed, the point of the pictures: they were the only means, out here, by which beauty could be held in the men’s hands. And perhaps the pictures reminded each GI that there was anot
her world beside this one, a world they could return to, if only they survived.

  She kept smiling as if it wasn’t at all disconcerting to know that so many men kept pictures of her. After one over-eager private asked if she would go to dinner with him in Paris once it was liberated and she’d deflected him, kindly, she saw Dan studying her face. Before she could ask him why, Jennings interrupted them. “Sir, there’s a man asking for Captain May.”

  “A man?” Dan queried.

  Jennings flushed. “He said his name was—”

  “Warren Stone.” A voice Jess recognized all too well cut across Jennings.

  “It came to my attention that you were missing,” he said to Jess. “I was about to put an order out on you to be apprehended and taken back to London.”

  “Did you miss me?” Jess said glibly, to hide the fact that she was furious. She was acutely aware of the many eyes on her, eyes belonging to men whose stories she’d been photographing for the past hour, men who were treating her like she was one of them, which Warren Stone was about to destroy by making them think she was his possession and worthy only of contempt.

  He no longer looked cowed and weary but rejuvenated and as malicious as ever. And his sudden appearance told her that he hadn’t let go of his vendetta. Fury clogged her throat at the thought that perhaps this was what he’d meant by his threat in the bar at the Savoy—that every time she thought she was happy, and doing a good job, he would appear and destroy everything. And then she realized he had someone with him, someone she knew. Emile.

  She froze, eyes fixed on Emile’s face. His smiling face, but the smile was not one of joy at seeing her. It was the same callous smirk he’d tossed her at the Stork Club in Manhattan the night she found out he’d sold her off to the highest bidder. She knew instantly that it wasn’t coincidence he’d palled up with Warren. And if she’d thought she was mad a moment ago, now she was raging, the strength of it burning her throat and her eyes like white phosphorus.