The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  And so she wept as she let him kiss her and unbutton her blouse and lift up her skirt and take what he wanted from her. He groaned loudly as he moved roughly into her, breathing hard as if it was a pleasurable moment, a wanted moment, a moment to cherish.

  Jess closed her eyes. And still she wept.

  When Warren was done he sagged against her, face pressed into her neck. Jess opened her eyes at last to see a five-year-old child standing sleepily before them, having parted the low-hanging branches that Jess had thought would conceal forever what had just happened. Instead, Victorine stared in confusion at the sight of a man’s body pressed close to Jess, at Jess’s skirt lifted far higher than it should be, at the tears on Jess’s face.

  “Victorine,” Jess gasped, pushing Warren off her.

  He stumbled backward, hands fumbling with his trouser buttons and Jess caught sight of his face. The expression he wore was not one of gloating, roistering victory as she’d expected. But something else.

  He reached out a hand for her and Jess recoiled, thinking he was going to hit her now, not content with the physical violence he’d so far inflicted. But he touched her hair instead, almost tenderly, and said, puzzled, “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

  Jess backed away, tucking Victorine behind her, outrage unleashed at last—that he would think the only abomination in what had just happened was his disappointment.

  “Did you really believe I would fall in love with you just because you kissed me? Just because you did…that?” Her voice was as deadly quiet as a sniper tiptoeing through a defeated village, and colder than the bitter winter of the Ardennes. She could not yell or scream; her anger was so ferocious it was almost beyond her control. “I loved Dan a long time before I ever kissed him,” she hissed. “There is a very big difference between this…” She shifted her eyes contemptuously to his unbuttoned fly. “And love.”

  She turned from Warren, picked up Victorine and carried her back to the car, the child’s sweet soapy smell pressed into her neck where Warren’s mouth had been only moments before. She prayed to God it was too dark for Victorine to have seen very much. That she was too young to comprehend, least of all to commit to memory, what she had witnessed.

  The most appalling part of the whole appalling evening was that, in an abhorrent way, Jess had won. Warren had got what he’d obviously long wanted but had found that the way he’d obtained it had made it not to his liking. A bathetic end to the game for him and a victory for Jess as hollow as any in Europe that had cost millions of lives.

  For all of the long, silent ride back to Paris, Jess thought of three things. The U.S. Army soldier saying ain’t nobody going to stop me having her. Dan saying I love you. And her terror at what those words would bring upon one of them.

  The bomb, it seemed, had just gone off.

  Twenty-nine

  Jess was in London longer than she’d expected. The war in Europe finished just as she arrived. Everybody cheered and drank champagne and kissed. Jess didn’t. Instead, she lost the contents of her stomach at the thought that maybe if she and Dan had strung Amelia along just a few more days, then Amelia’s threat would have amounted to nothing. But then she heard that Dan’s division was likely being sent to the Pacific and while it didn’t make her stomach feel any better, it reassured her that she’d done the right thing. Imagine if she’d been responsible for sending Dan’s battalion off to the unknowns of Asia with a new CO who was a stranger to both the men and to decency?

  She handed in her accreditation papers in London but it took a month to organize passage for her back to New York. Troops being repatriated had priority.

  She received two surprises in London. The first was a letter, forwarded from the Hotel Scribe and obviously opened by Warren Stone. Warren had enclosed a note that read: I couldn’t let you leave without seeing this.

  The letter was from Dan. It said:

  Jess, I know it’s a cliché that a writer like you will detest but you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Better than the best; you were the miracle.

  I keep asking myself—if I’d never gone to your party at the Scribe, would that be better? Then we’d still be the best of friends, and I’d still be able to see you. But I shake my head because half of you isn’t enough. All of you isn’t enough. None of you is unthinkable.

  I was out on a raid last night and I thought perhaps I would die and that would be good because then I wouldn’t feel like this but I know you left because of my men and to throw it in your face by dying would be too cowardly. Besides, I know how you’d feel if I died and I can’t do that to you.

  Be happy, Jess. I can bear this if I know you’re happy. Otherwise my life has nothing in it at all.

  Jess sank to the floor, brought to her knees by Dan’s letter, as Warren Stone had intended her to be. It took her a long, long time to stand up, to splash her face with water, to pour herself a whiskey, and light, then stub out, a cigarette, unsmoked.

  Because the other surprise, she knew now, was that she wasn’t going to New York alone. She was taking a child with her, inside her womb. A child whose father was unknown. She and Dan had always been careful but she wasn’t dumb enough not to know just how many rubbers had failed in wartime. And then there was Warren. He hadn’t bothered with a rubber.

  Only a couple of days separated the last time she was with Dan from that awful night with Warren. She would never know. And she would never want Dan to find out what had happened. He would kill Warren with his bare hands and then he really would be court-martialed.

  All of which made it more important that Dan marry Amelia, if he hadn’t already, and forget about Jess.

  Love, she thought wearily as she stared out at the bombed husk of London. War makes us monsters or angels, but so too does love. And now she would leave behind in Europe the love that Dan had made for her out of the ashes of war, a love ruined finally by monsters.

  * * *

  “You’re back!” Bel folded Jess into her arms when she appeared in her office two weeks later, skinnier than when she’d left, older—so much older—knowing too much and not as good at pretending as she used to be.

  Bel held her at arm’s length after the initial hug and cast her eyes over Jess critically. “Thank goodness,” she said, seemingly satisfied, sitting down to light a cigarette. “You need to eat, Jessica May, get your curves back, but I don’t see why we can’t have you back on the cover in a couple of months. Nobody remembers Kotex now.”

  Kotex. Even Jess struggled to think what on earth Bel was talking about. The dimmest memory of a field in upstate New York, a cow bellowing in the background, Bel stepping out of a car to speak to her, a conversation with Emile—God, she’d all but forgotten Emile too.

  Jess fiddled with a cigarette and then put it away.

  “We’re doing a feature on Stella Designs and their patriotic dresses soon. You’d be perfect for it. I’ll set it up.” Bel smiled as if it were just like old times; she hadn’t even mentioned the war.

  But how could anyone pick up the life they’d once lived, like a gown that had been tucked away in a forgotten cupboard, slip it back on and resume the smiling and the laughing?

  “I thought I’d keep reporting for you,” Jess said.

  “Reporting?” Bel tapped ash off her cigarette. “I don’t need any more war reports. Bar the Pacific, it’s all but over. Paper supplies will be back to normal soon. You’ve done your job. You can have some fun.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Jess said honestly.

  “Of course you can.” Bel was adamant. “No good comes from moping. Everybody wants to start afresh, to kick up their heels, and they need to know what to wear while doing it.”

  Kick up their heels. Dance on the graves of the fallen. Whoop over the bodies of the living dead from the camps. Grind out their cigarettes on the memories of the missing. Jess shook her head. “I might see what else I can pick up. Thank you though,” she added, resurrecting her manners from the place they�
��d been stowed, unneeded in war.

  “Well,” Bel said, looking a little miffed. “My offer will stand. I’m proud of what you did over there. But you don’t have to do it any longer.”

  Jess kissed Bel’s cheeks and walked out onto the street, to an assault of busses and cabs and horns and neon signs and intact buildings and people wearing colors other than khaki and carrying purses instead of weapons, unhelmeted, not a gas mask in sight, or a jeep, or a drop of blood.

  And so, for the next two months, Jess tried. Yes, everybody had heard of her, yes they all thought that her skill behind the camera and her ability to put words together was outstanding. They would be happy to have her. Except…

  Except that the male correspondents were coming back. And the men in the U.S. Armed Forces. Those men needed jobs more than she did, she was told, because they either did or would soon have a wife and children to support. She’d have someone to support her. She was a knockout! What man wouldn’t want to support her? Wink, wink. In fact, why didn’t they go out together and get a drink that very night?

  “No, thank you,” Jess said. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you, over and over again.

  In a city plastered with propaganda posters of red-lipsticked women in aprons cooking roast dinners, posters that exhorted women to lay down their tools and their pens and their minds and leave their jobs to the more deserving returned soldiers, Jess soon heard the news about Betty Wasson. Betty had been a CBS correspondent throughout the war and had returned, imagining she’d be employed by CBS in the States now that the war was over. They turned her down. And so Betty Wasson, who’d put together five broadcasts a day from Greece, who’d been wrongly detained as a spy and who’d kept her cool even under questioning from the Gestapo in Berlin, had returned to her pre-war job as an assistant to the food editor at women’s magazine McCall’s. Dorothy Thompson, former European bureau chief for the New York Post, was back writing fluff for Ladies’ Home Journal. What hope did Jess, a mere reporter for Vogue, have in finding serious work when women like this couldn’t get any?

  Then she saw a piece in the New York Courier that said the brave and much-decorated Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Hallworth of the United States Army was returning to New York with his wife, Amelia. He would be taking up his position as Editor in Chief of the newspaper. And Jess, telling no one besides Martha what she planned to do, knew that she and the child she carried inside her had to get out of New York forever.

  PART TEN

  D’Arcy

  Thirty

  After she stepped away from her embrace with Jess, D’Arcy went upstairs and did a lot of thinking in her Buly-perfumed tub. A lot of doubting. And quite a lot of hoping.

  She knew Jess wouldn’t answer a direct question. She’d made it clear that D’Arcy must ask Victorine. So, instead, the next morning, D’Arcy asked Célie to prepare another dinner in the folly and to deliver an invitation to Josh. She spent the entire day, her last at the chateau, tying up loose ends, terrified that he wouldn’t come.

  She dressed early, in a startlingly pink 1960s Miss Dior minidress with a high-buttoned neckline and elbow-length sleeves, and sat alone in the folly with her thoughts for half an hour before Josh arrived at the appointed time.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said with a smile that wasn’t teasing or flirtatious or anything other than just plain old D’Arcy. She poured him a wine, and refilled her own glass, already long since drunk.

  “Will I need to catch up to you?” he asked, nodding at her glass.

  Her stomach flipped and her heart squeezed at both the gentle humor and the note of worry she could hear in his words, at the way she could interpret him so much better than just last week when she’d have thought he was issuing a reprimand. “I don’t think so,” she said as Célie brought out plates of steaming, buttery dorade once more, along with crazily shaped, garden-fresh honeyed carrots and leaves of salad so green that even fine arts–trained D’Arcy couldn’t name their precise shade.

  D’Arcy waited until Célie had left before she began. “I asked Jess this morning if she would come to the exhibition in Sydney.”

  “What did she say?” he asked, thankfully not pointing out that, as Jess’s agent, he really should have been involved in the conversation.

  “I want her to see Victorine, my mother, again. Jess wants to as well. But she said she’d have to ask you to accompany her; that while she’s done a lot of uncomfortable traveling in her life, age was rather limiting her adventuring now.”

  “And you asked me to dinner to see if I would?” He sipped his wine.

  As D’Arcy sat across the table from Josh, surrounded by beauty, the air between them thickset with something else entirely, she gathered her courage to her like a favorite dress. “No,” she replied.

  Josh frowned.

  “Sorry!” she stuttered. “I did mean what I just said but it came out wrong. God, I’m shit at this,” she added with a wry smile and he finally looked at her as if she’d piqued his interest and perhaps he didn’t despise her.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” D’Arcy said, choosing her words carefully, very aware that he might say no and go back to the chateau, “but could we go for a walk? I want to say something but it’s hard enough with us both just sitting here…” It was hard enough just to say that, to admit she felt vulnerable and awkward and unwilling to resort to witty repartee.

  Josh nodded and stood. They walked toward the canal, the last frantic rustlings of small animals and the buzzing of insects gathering their last supper agitating the air. In D’Arcy’s muddled thoughts, one clamored more loudly than the rest: that choosing what seemed to be the path of least hurt did not always have the intended consequences, if Jess and Dan and her mother were anything to go by.

  She could just say that it was important for Jess to come to the exhibition, that it would only be possible for Jess to come if Josh came too; to put him in a position where he couldn’t say no. But he needed to choose and she needed to ask. But first, she needed to explain.

  “I found out that Victorine couldn’t have children. And I’ve been so mad…no, that’s a lie. I’ve been so…sad,” she made herself say it, “…because if Victorine’s not really my mother, I thought that meant I had no one. Which is why I’ve been a bit of a bitch,” she finished. “Finding out about her has made me feel a little lost.”

  She stopped walking, realizing they were beside the tree she’d sat beneath with Jess. The tree that had, like Jess, tried to tell her what she needed to know. The tree that unwound serenely to the floor of the little wood now and D’Arcy smiled. Because she knew the answer. She wasn’t lost. In beginning to unravel the mysteries, she had found someone else inside her who was worthy of being freed.

  Josh gave her the smallest and briefest smile in return. “Thanks for telling me. You haven’t been a bitch. But no matter what’s happened, I’m not interested in a one-night stand.”

  Are you still interested in anything else? D’Arcy wondered. But there was more she had to confess before she could address what he’d said. “I sent an email to Dan Hallworth, inviting him to the exhibition too. I told him that Jessica May was still alive, and that she would be there.” Josh was back to frowning. It wasn’t a good sign but D’Arcy kept going anyway. “Just like I need to talk to my mother, Jess needs to talk to Dan. I think she thinks she did something he won’t forgive her for but, like she said, forgiving someone is the bravest thing you can do. She needs to forgive herself. And she’ll only do that if she speaks to Dan. You probably think I’m meddling but I feel as if Jess and Dan aren’t finished yet. I’d like them to finally have that promised kiss from the photograph. But if you want to tell her not to come because of it, I’ll understand.” Her voice finally trailed off.

  “That’s very…” Wrong. Interfering. Presumptuous. She waited for him to condemn her. “Romantic,” he finished.

  A flicker of hope. It gave her the strength to keep going. “Everything that’s happened made me thin
k that if the woman I’d believed to be my mother could hurt me so much, I couldn’t imagine what kind of hurts might come from a person—a lover—who wasn’t required by the bond of family to be always there and always kind.”

  She dared to look at his face, which was surprised at best, unreadable at worst. “I’d like you to come to Australia, not for Jess, but for…me.” The last word was a whisper that D’Arcy spoke to the ground, a far cry from her usual directness. “I know that’s probably not much of an incentive. And I need to say that it’s a risk for you, coming. I don’t know when I’ll truly be un-lost. Which means I could easily be sad and grumpy and like I’ve been for the past week. You said you wanted a slower life, a more relaxed life. What’s happening in my life right now isn’t exactly relaxing.”

  Josh hesitated, then asked, “D’Arcy, how old are you?”

  Which meant he wondered too. Would that make everything far too complicated for him? “The right age to be Jess’s granddaughter,” was all she said.

  She felt his finger touch her under the chin and lift up her face so he could see her properly. “Go back to Australia tomorrow like you’d planned to. Talk to your mother. And…”

  And it was nice knowing you. She closed her eyes against the sound of his next words.

  “And perhaps I’ll see you next month,” he finished.

  Perhaps. Which meant it might not all work out. But then again it might.

  The things we do for might and for hope, Jess had said. D’Arcy had just been truly honest about the things that mattered for the very first time and, in return, she’d received a shard of hope. It was worth the discomfort and trepidation it had cost.

  PART ELEVEN