The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  Thirty-two

  Later, as he left Amelia’s room, head pounding, wanting to lie down in the dark and—yes, he could admit it—cry, he knew that in trying to fix it, something had shattered after all. His soul.

  “Damn you, Jess,” he muttered for the millionth time since Germany. One day, this will fade. You once told me that everything does. Why should this be any different? But he’d been wrong. Like the coal seam fires burning beneath the earth’s surface for thousands of years, flameless, persistent, the slow burn making them almost impossible to extinguish, what he felt for Jess would never fade.

  He would have to pretend, for Victorine’s sake, that he was happy. But he didn’t know if he could ever do again what he’d just done with Amelia.

  “Papa!” The cry made him swivel and turn into Victorine’s room. Her face was wet with tears and he held her and shushed her until she stopped sobbing.

  “Did you have a dream?” he asked.

  And, not for the first time, she nodded and said, “The man was there again.”

  “What man? What did he do?”

  But Victorine just shook her head as she always did, unable to articulate anything more about the man and why he had frightened her so. He slid her back down onto her pillow and straightened her sheets, frowning at a noise like rustled paper.

  “What do you have in there?” He expected to see one of her many war souvenirs, the ribbons and peg dolls and scraps of khaki that she’d collected from nurses and soldiers alike but what he found were sheets of newspaper. He couldn’t help smiling at her peculiar and endearing ways and he lay down on the bed beside her, wanting to keep her safe from dreams. He fell asleep himself, only to be plagued by dreams of his own, dreams about Jess.

  * * *

  Dan was at the breakfast table early as usual, having slunk out without waking Victorine, or so he’d thought until she appeared not ten minutes later, clutching the newspaper he’d found in her bed last night, the newspaper with the pictures from his new correspondent on the front cover.

  Victorine’s eyes were round and serious as she turned them on Dan. “You saw Maman,” she said inexplicably.

  Walter eyed Dan over his eggs.

  Dan ignored his father and spoke to Victorine. “I haven’t seen Jess,” he said, picking up his hat even though he hadn’t eaten anything.

  “But she took these.” Victorine pointed to the photographs in the newspaper.

  “A man called Monsieur Durant took them,” Dan said.

  Victorine frowned at Dan as if she was disappointed in him. “I’m not hungry,” she announced, slipping out of the room.

  “She sure is a funny kid,” Walter said, studying Dan, who set his face into the most inscrutable expression he could muster. “But do you know what I think?”

  Dan didn’t respond, which didn’t prevent Walter from continuing. “That whoever this Jess is, it’d be best if Victorine stopped mentioning her. A child can only have one mother.” Walter wiped his mouth on his napkin and threw it onto the table.

  I’d have to cut out her heart to stop her from talking about Jess, Dan wanted to shout. Instead he turned on his heel and strode out the door.

  * * *

  That afternoon, another story came in. And more pictures.

  As Dan studied them, he could see, now that Victorine had lifted the blindfold, that the pictures were taken either by Jess or a very skilled copycat. One was solarized perfectly, a technique that so few photojournalists would bother with, but which had always been one of Jess’s trademarks. He read over the article and now he knew why yesterday’s had punched him so hard in the gut: her phrasing was everywhere, the whisper of her voice in his ear as he read.

  And so it went on, every day. Each time he went out for a quick drink at the bar down the road where newspapermen congregated, he was asked about his new correspondent. Everyone assumed the mysterious stringer was a man. Nobody suspected it was Jess.

  Someone I met in the army, Dan would answer, and the person he was talking to would groan and slap him on the back and curse Dan’s good fortune: to have survived the war unscathed, and to have unearthed a photojournalist from the rubble of that war who had lifted the bar so high, the rest of them could do nothing but walk underneath it.

  He spent a week wound tight with fury, that she would reach out to him like this, professionally but not personally. Still, he read each dispatch from her as it came in, searching for a message, a clue, but he found nothing. And so he said nothing. Did nothing. Until he heard himself shouting at his editors in the morning meeting and realized that, even under intense fire from the Germans, he’d never shouted at his men before.

  He closed the meeting, picked up his hat, locked his office door and left, driving upstate to nowhere, he’d thought, until he turned into a driveway at the house where Jennings’ parents lived.

  “Just the man I wanted to thank,” Mrs. Jennings said as she embraced him and poured tea for him and cut him an enormous slice of cake. “I think you had the hardest job in the war, keeping my son alive. I expected he’d be returned to me with at least a few scratches but he looks the same as always.”

  Dan smiled. “He didn’t tell you about the broken bones?”

  “I can’t see those. They must have healed up just fine.” Mrs. Jennings sipped her tea. “I still can’t believe the two of you used to hide frogs in the maids’ beds but for three years gone you were fighting a war. And doing an excellent job of it too, I hear.”

  “I did what everyone else did. No more. No less.” The reply rolled off Dan’s tongue the way it always did, succinct and a little clipped, signifying that they should talk about something else. Because how could anyone do an excellent job of leading men to their deaths or, if not death, serious injury? How could anyone look at Amelia and say he’d done an excellent job?

  “What’s he doing now?” Dan asked. “The end was such a rush that I didn’t get a chance to find out whether he was coming up here to stay with you or going back to the city.”

  Mrs. Jennings pushed her plate away. “I’d appreciate you speaking to him for me. He always listens to you. He’s a little…lost.”

  “That can’t be right.” The vehemence in Dan’s voice surprised them both. He paused and ate a mouthful of cake before he continued. “I just meant that he was a stronger man at the end than he was at the beginning. I thought he’d land on his feet.”

  “He is a stronger man.” It was Mrs. Jennings’ turn to pause. “But what does one do with the sort of strength one learns when fighting a war?”

  Mrs. Jennings’ words played over in Dan’s head as he drove back to the city, Jennings’ address written on a piece of folded paper in his pocket. What had Dan done with everything he’d learned? Nothing. He’d become, in fact, a coward. Sitting behind a desk at the newspaper offices, restlessly shuffling his feet through meetings, avoiding his wife, pretending to Victorine that everything would work out fine.

  At a nondescript block of apartments in Midtown, Dan rang the buzzer until a slurred voice answered.

  “Jennings?” Dan asked uncertainly.

  The door clicked open.

  The man who greeted Dan held the shadows of Jennings in his face, overlaid by someone puffier, unshaven and slightly rank, still smelling of the night before. “What are you doing to yourself?” Dan demanded as he snapped on the lights so he could see more clearly.

  Jennings flinched and reached up to turn the lights off. “Same thing as you,” he said to Dan. “Forgetting. Except I’m not doing it with a wife and a child and a job as the editor of a newspaper. I’m doing it with this.” Jennings gestured to two empty bottles on the floor.

  Dan couldn’t help but stare at the cliché before him. The returned soldier who couldn’t separate himself from everything he’d seen and who drank himself into oblivion because real life had become more terrifying than running into the maws of the Germans. “You’re wallowing,” Dan said sharply. “I never thought you’d be the one to turn out li
ke this.”

  Jennings laughed bitterly. “And how many of your men have you seen since you’ve been back, Sir? None, I’ll wager. I bet all you’ve done is avert your eyes from the ones like me weaving drunkenly down the street.”

  Dan dropped into the nearest chair, rested his face in his hands and closed his eyes. It was true. He had averted his eyes each night from the ex-soldiers as they vomited in the street. Where had his compassion gone? In France, if one of his men had drunk as much as he could to steel his spine the night before battle, Dan would have talked to him. He’d have told him he had his back.

  Behind his closed lids he could see Jennings’ face as they’d driven back from the concentration camp. He could see Jess’s picture of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier testifying about what had happened to her at Ravensbrück. And suddenly he knew the thing he’d been trying to ignore since he’d arrived back in America: it wasn’t over. There was an aftermath. And that to turn away now was the most craven thing he’d ever done.

  “Get in the shower,” Dan said, his CO voice coming back to him as easily as if it had never left. “Shave. Get dressed. You have a new job and that is as editorial assistant on the New York Courier. Your first job is to come with me to see Sparrow’s parents. I’m going to write about what’s left behind after a war, and you’re going to help me.”

  * * *

  And so he did. In some kind of frenzied response to Jess’s articles, he wrote about the fallout in America. He didn’t just speak to the men; he spoke to the women too, the ones who’d worked and earned money and looked after themselves during the war and who’d now had to give back their jobs to the returning men. Women whose contributions had been largely forgotten, who sat disconsolate in immaculate kitchens waiting for their husbands to come home from work. He spoke to Betty Wasson, who confirmed what he’d begun to suspect: that the only job waiting for Jess in America would have been as a model once more.

  In each edition of his paper he ran his stories and Jess’s stories, lest anyone forget that just because the guns had been silenced and the bleeding had stopped, war lasted forever for those who’d been there. He had copies of the papers sent to Monsieur Durant at the hotel address he’d been given.

  He never knew for certain if Jess read any of his words, but he felt the quality of her photographs and her reporting strengthen and, in turn, her brilliance made him dig deeper and recover the forgotten skills of reportage that he’d not used in all those long years of war.

  He wasn’t at all surprised when he received a telephone call from someone he knew he could trust that Durant was a front-runner for a Pulitzer Prize for Telegraphic Reporting. He was stunned, though, when he was also told that Dan Hallworth was leading the pack for a Pulitzer Prize for Reporting.

  * * *

  “You’ve taken us where we want to be, son.” Walter Hallworth clapped Dan on the back when he returned home that night to find his father waiting for him in his study. “I’m proud of you.”

  Dan was used to his father appearing in his study on an evening when some particularly toothsome story had broken and the newspapermen of the town had been vying for the disclosure nobody else had. Used to his father’s need to chew over the news like a Sunday roast meant for savoring. But he wasn’t used to his father complimenting him. Even after he’d been made Lieutenant Colonel, Walter Hallworth hadn’t seen the need to write to congratulate his son. Obviously Dan’s source had seen fit to telephone Walter too and spread the report, even though nobody would know for sure until the Pulitzers were announced next month.

  “Thanks,” Dan said awkwardly and was saved from having to accept any more unexpected compliments by the bizarre appearance of his wife.

  He’d seen as little as possible of Amelia since that awful night when he’d tried to do the right thing and had almost destroyed himself. But he’d done enough—buying her jewelry and flowers and kissing her cheek—to keep her, he’d thought, reasonably happy. Victorine had certainly not sported any more red cheeks.

  “Amelia,” he said, recovering from the surprise and chastely and automatically kissing the upturned cheek she offered him. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

  “How could I not wait up to congratulate my husband?” she said.

  Dan shook his head at his father’s loose tongue. Who else had Walter told of what was only a rumor at best or gossip at worst?

  He saw his father grimace at Amelia’s invasion of the study, a space Walter held as sacred and meant only for men. But still Amelia crossed to the sideboard and poured three whiskeys. “Cheers,” she said, passing the glasses around.

  “Cheers,” Dan said, sipping, although he felt like downing his in one go, a thought intensified by Amelia’s next words.

  “Your mysterious correspondent is a contender too?” she inquired.

  Dan was thankful for his father’s brusqueness. “Mysterious?” Walter said. “All correspondents are damn slippery creatures. Never where you want them to be but so long as they send in the goods, which this fellow delivers in spades, then they can be as mysterious as they like.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Amelia said smoothly. “I’ve only ever known one correspondent: Jess. Was she mysterious?” Amelia arranged her features to make it appear as if she was thinking. “She never gave me that impression. She always had a face that was far too easy to read. Unlike mine now, of course. Nobody can read anything under this mess.” She gestured to her face and Dan felt a sudden need to sit down, which he resisted. Amelia couldn’t know who Durant was. But if Victorine had worked it out…

  “Who is this Jess that everyone keeps talking about?” Walter’s irritation at having his tête-à-tête with his son ruined was palpable. “A war is no place for a woman. And that’s why.” He indicated Amelia’s empty sleeve.

  Dan heard Amelia’s gasp and felt his own body stiffen. He knew his father hadn’t meant to be cruel. And he also knew that Amelia would make Dan pay for that barb for months to come.

  “You need to apologize to Amelia,” Dan said.

  Walter shrugged. “The war is no place for a woman,” he repeated. “I’m sorry if you disagree.”

  “That was hardly an apology,” Dan said sharply.

  “My skin is thick, as you can see.” Amelia offered an ironic smile. “The apology will do. And in answer to your question, Walter, Jess—otherwise known as Jessica May—was a photojournalist we knew in Europe. She reported for Vogue. I wonder what she’s doing now? Not that it matters. She’d never be any competition for you or your Monsieur Durant. Women don’t win Pulitzers, I believe.”

  “You’re damn right they don’t,” Walter said.

  With that Amelia floated out of the room, the waft of her silk nightgown sending a draft through the room, the thickness of her scent lingering behind her.

  “Now, where were we,” Walter muttered. He raised his glass. “Celebrating. May the best man win.” Walter tipped the whiskey down his throat and Dan at last allowed himself to sink into the nearest chair. May the best man win.

  * * *

  After his father had left, Dan went upstairs to his wife’s room and prepared to do what he should have done months ago. He pushed the door open and walked across to Amelia’s bed, where she lay feigning sleep.

  Her eyes flickered and he saw, a millisecond before she was able to hide it, a look of resignation on her face. He almost laughed: that she seemed as uninterested in sleeping with him as he was in sleeping with her. Why then, continue with the charade?

  “I haven’t come to seduce you,” he said dryly. “But rather to finish it. You can say I was the one who was adulterous in the divorce application. I’ll pay you a generous allowance; you’ll have the money you wanted, everyone will be happy.”

  “You’ll be happy.” She sat up, leaning against the upholstered bedhead, the low-cut neckline of her nightgown showing him more of her flesh than he wanted to see but it stirred nothing in him.

  “I think you will be too,” he said.

 
“It’s convenient for you to think so. But I’m happy with the way things are.”

  “Really? You mean your first instinct when I sat down on your bed wasn’t to think of a reason you were indisposed? You want me the way a woman ordinarily wants the man she’s married to?”

  “I think you’re confusing sexual attraction with marriage. They aren’t the same thing. One can be had without the other.” Amelia reached out to the bedside table, opened her cigarette case and lit up, blowing smoke into the room, reminding Dan of the smoke that had once danced through the Hotel Scribe when he’d lain in bed naked with Jess.

  “Marriage is all about advancement and appearances,” Amelia continued. “I’m just the kind of wife who enhances your reputation. Despite my deformities, Americans think I’m charming and just the sort of woman you ought to have by your side when you attend parties and dinners. It doesn’t hurt that I’m deformed—in fact it makes you more of a saint to have taken me on. I’m not sure what they would think about—”

  “Don’t say her name.” He stood up. “I’m done negotiating. I tried. I did what you wanted. It hasn’t worked.”

  Amelia was silent a moment, watching him. Then she surprised him by nodding. “Wait until after the Pulitzers. You don’t want to be dogged by an impending divorce, for which you will have to pretend to have committed adultery, when you’re being judged on your professional abilities. Divorce is still the eighth deadly sin, you know. Then, if you still want to be free of me, I’ll say yes.”

  He was so stunned he didn’t reply. He’d expected they would have this conversation back and forth for months until he eventually wore her down. “Thank you,” he said, resisting the urge to leap into the air and cheer. For there was no possible reason why, after the Pulitzers, he would want to stay married to Amelia.