The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  Before her mother could reply, Dan Hallworth arrived, smiling broadly, obviously so incredibly happy to be on the cusp of seeing Jess again after all this time. But he also halted when he saw Victorine, concern replacing the joy that D’Arcy had wanted to believe would be fixed on his face forever.

  “What a mess,” Victorine said, rubbing her forehead with her hand; the patina of tragedy had made the lines on her mother’s face stark while everyone else in the room was soft-blurred with unawareness.

  “What do you mean?” Dan asked.

  “Jess had a baby,” Victorine said sadly. “All those years ago. One of the reasons she stayed away after you’d married Amelia was because she found out she was pregnant.”

  “Jess and I have a baby?” he whispered, and D’Arcy flinched as if his pain were hers too.

  “That’s just it,” Victorine said. “She didn’t know. Warren Stone…” D’Arcy could see the visible effort it took for her to keep speaking. “Warren Stone raped her. I saw it. She could never be sure whose child it was. She knew what you’d do to Warren Stone if you found out. She didn’t want to burden you with a child conceived out of hate. But she loved her daughter.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Dan asked haltingly.

  D’Arcy’s breath held as Victorine told Dan about Ellie and James. That Jess had thought James was Dan’s son. That she couldn’t let James and Ellie elope because Ellie might be Dan’s daughter. That instinct had told Ellie to go back to her mother’s house when the baby she’d conceived with James was ready to come. That she’d hemorrhaged and died.

  “Did the baby die too?” Dan’s voice was barely audible.

  Victorine smiled at last. “No. This is the baby.” She gestured to D’Arcy. “Jess gave her to me.”

  “D’Arcy is Jess’s granddaughter?” Dan asked, looking at D’Arcy with love spilling from his eyes.

  “And quite possibly yours, too. In a real sense, not just through me,” Victorine said, her voice suddenly choking as if she couldn’t bring herself to say any more.

  What else was coming? D’Arcy remembered to breathe. And then she asked the question that had been sitting at the edges of her awareness since her mother arrived. “Where’s Jess?”

  The silence said everything. It was a visceral thing, merciless, pressing itself down on D’Arcy’s shoulders, almost making her legs buckle beneath her.

  Victorine tried to speak. Don’t say it, D’Arcy thought. She reached out a hand to Dan, who looked as if he might collapse too.

  “I dreamed of Jess last night,” he said wretchedly. “She was lying beside me, smiling her inimitable smile. Nothing has ever made me feel so good in all my life as receiving one of those smiles.” He stopped for a moment, eyes looking through them all and perhaps into the past, to a time when Jessica May smiled just for him. “Then she kissed me. And she said…goodbye.” He breathed in sharply. “In all the time I knew her, we never said goodbye to one another. You don’t say goodbye to someone in wartime unless…”

  “No, no, no,” D’Arcy cried furiously. “That’s not how it was supposed to be!”

  “Nothing was,” Dan said dully.

  D’Arcy almost had to walk out of the room to stop herself from crying. What right did she have to weep? She’d only known Jess for two weeks. Dan had mourned her and loved her all his life. She realized Josh was holding on to her as tightly as she was holding on to him. Because he had loved Jess too. Everyone did. It was impossible not to. And now she was gone.

  Then she found herself held in an embrace, Dan on one side, Victorine on the other, her mother and her grandfather, two people she knew she loved unquestioningly, watched over by Josh, a man she knew she loved unquestioningly too. It was a love she never wanted to, in fifty years’ time, weep for because she’d had to surrender it.

  “Champagne,” Dan said suddenly and gruffly. “We need champagne.”

  D’Arcy nodded a little uncertainly while Josh went to track down a bottle and some glasses left over from the opening party. Dan pulled the cork from the bottle and passed everyone a glass.

  “Once upon a time,” Dan said, his words soft, “Jess asked me to raise a glass for her. One day, when your heart is mended, and you think of me, raise a glass for me, won’t you? We’re worth remembering, she said. I never did raise that goddamn glass. Because I thought, I hoped…that it wasn’t over. And far from being mended, my heart…”

  He closed his eyes, unable to go on.

  “Well,” he said after a long moment. “I think you know how my heart feels right now. But she deserves all of our raised glasses. Because she is most certainly worth remembering. To Jess,” he said, his last words strong, as Jess deserved them to be.

  “To Jess!” the others cried, proclaiming his toast to the gallery filled with her works, her artistic works and her works of flesh and blood, remembering her, celebrating her, vowing, as D’Arcy was doing, to live and to love the way Jess had never been able to.

  Then Josh kissed her forehead and wrapped his arms around her. “After the exhibition,” she said to him, the idea forming as she spoke, “let’s go back to the chateau and hang all her works there. Let’s open it to the public so that they can see it. Let’s make the world raise their glasses to her too. If that’s okay with both of you.” She looked over at Dan and Victorine, who nodded.

  “You should run the Jessica May Foundation from there too,” Dan added. “Make it yours. Make the chateau a place where women can have time and space to make their art. Let Jess’s legacy continue to grow, every day.”

  “Really?” D’Arcy said, awestruck at the thought that a foundation to which she’d once looked to for support might now be something she could use to support other women artists like herself to achieve their dreams.

  “Really,” Dan said.

  “I think you’ll find,” Victorine said with a teary smile, “that you own Jess’s chateau. When she gave you to me, she told me that she would bequeath it to you upon her death.”

  “And you should also come to New York and meet James. Your father,” Dan added.

  A father. Something D’Arcy never thought she’d have. She looked across at Victorine, who nodded, blinking hard.

  There were almost too many things happening for D’Arcy to grasp them as individual hurts and losses, as well as wonders and astonishments. She suddenly felt as if she understood Balzac’s belief that a person was made up of ghostly layers, layers that image-taking stripped away each time a photograph was taken. The photographs Jess had taken of D’Arcy had stripped away much of what D’Arcy thought she was, and everything she didn’t need. She hoped that her documentary about Jess had done the same, that it had torn off the layers Jess had wrapped herself in after the war so she now appeared as she really was: bold and strong and beautiful and so well loved.

  Then, as Victorine embraced Dan, Josh and D’Arcy turned to look at the images of Jessica May moving across the screen before them, smiling as if giving them her blessing. A blessing, D’Arcy realized now, Jess had bestowed on her when they’d embraced on the terrace of the chateau, an embrace D’Arcy could feel again now, reaching beyond death, bequeathing to Josh and D’Arcy the promise of a long and beautiful life. The long and beautiful life that Dan and Jess had never had, the long and beautiful life that D’Arcy had never imagined having, lay now, astonishingly, before her. She sealed the promise with a long and beautiful kiss on Josh’s lips.

  Author’s Note

  In some ways, this was the hardest book I’ve ever written. So many characters and storylines and time periods to bring together the way I imagined them in my head. In other ways, it was the easiest book I’ve ever written. Jess and Dan were two characters who came effortlessly to me; they were a true gift from the writing muse. But of course there were lots of reasons this happened, not the least because of all the amazing research material that couldn’t help but inspire me to write.

  I first became aware of Lee Miller when I was writing The Paris Seamstress.
Her story was immediately captivating: a famous model and Man Ray’s lover, she wrote and photographed some extraordinary stories for Vogue during World War II, but her work was largely forgotten thereafter. Her son, Antony Penrose, knew very little of his mother’s remarkable past until after she’d died. It was his wife, when clearing out the attic at Farley Farm—Miller’s home—who came across Miller’s sixty thousand photographs and negatives, plus clippings, cameras and wartime souvenirs, stored haphazardly in cardboard boxes. Penrose resurrected her legacy and she is now widely regarded as one of the war’s preeminent photojournalists.

  How could anyone not be inspired by this woman?

  But I also knew that I couldn’t write her life story. Some terrible things happened to Lee Miller in her life, not the least of which was that a family friend raped her when she was just seven years old, infecting her with gonorrhea. It was a tragedy that I wasn’t sure I was equipped to write about; what could I possibly know about how that affected Lee throughout her life? Also, I wanted to write another dual narrative like my previous book, The Paris Seamstress, and I couldn’t do that by sticking to the facts of a person’s life. So I decided to use Lee as the inspiration for the character of Jess.

  My story begins with Jess’s modeling career hitting a major hurdle when an image of her is sold to Kotex to use in an advertisement. This actually happened to Lee Miller, although at a slightly earlier time than I have used in the book. It’s hard for us to imagine how shocking appearing in a sanitary product advertisement was at the time and how it could possibly ruin someone’s career, but it was and it did. Miller gave up modeling after that as nobody wanted to see the “Kotex girl” in photographs designed to show off evening gowns. Condé Nast did discover Lee Miller, as he discovers Jess in this book, and Miller was one of his favorite models; his influence was instrumental in her successful modeling career. The pictures Toni Frissell is taking of Jess in the opening scene are based on pictures Frissell took for the cover of Vogue in 1942.

  My descriptions of Italy when Jess arrives there in 1943 are based on Martha Gellhorn’s piece “Visit Italy,” published by Collier’s in February 1944, and Margaret Bourke-White’s pieces “Salt of the Earth” and “Fifth Army Field Hospital,” taken from They Called It Purple Heart Valley, published in 1944, and from her piece “Evacuation Hospital,” published in Life in February 1944. The scene set during the Easter service in Italy is based on “Easter in Italy: Americans Pray within Earshot of German Lines” by correspondent Sonia Tomara, published in the New York Herald Tribune in April 1944.

  Martha Gellhorn tells Jess that a photograph of a naked woman painted in camouflage colors is used during lectures. This is true; Roland Penrose, a photographer and Miller’s lover—later husband—lectured in camouflage during the war and he used this image of Lee Miller as his “startle slide” to make sure everyone was paying attention.

  The letter that Warren Stone reads to Jess about the “inherent difficulties” of having women in the war is taken from The Woman War Correspondent, the U.S. Military, and the Press by Carolyn M. Edy. The other letter Warren Stone quotes to Jess, from a major in the Surgeon General’s office, about the supposedly devastating effects on the “female apparatus” from parachute training is taken from Never a Shot in Anger, the memoir of Public Relations Officer Colonel Barney Oldfield, as is the anecdote about Capa et al. missing their parachute training school places because of a drunken party the night before.

  Martha Gellhorn did stow away in a hospital ship to become the first woman correspondent to land at Normandy. I used her piece “The Battle of the Bulge,” published in The Face of War, as the basis of the scenes set in Bastogne and the Ardennes. I have tried as much as possible to only put Martha in places that accord with her actual movements during the war, but obviously her relationship with Jess is a fiction.

  Many female correspondents wrote letters to SHAEF protesting the restrictions placed on them during the war, and thus the scene in which Jess writes a letter, supported by the other correspondents, is based on an amalgamation of those letters.

  Iris Carpenter’s visit to Omaha Beach and her subsequent court-martial is recorded in Carpenter’s memoir, No Woman’s World: From D-Day to Berlin, a Female Correspondent Covers World War II. I have also used Ernie Pyle’s June 1944 wire copy (he was correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper business) titled “Omaha Beach after D-Day,” published in Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946, as the basis for Jess’s descriptions of how Omaha Beach looked after D-Day.

  Lee Carson’s ability to avoid court-martial through the employment of her eyelashes is recorded in Oldfield’s memoir. Catherine Coyne, Lee Carson and Iris Carpenter were all real people, and I have tried to, once again, have their appearance in Jess’s life accord with their actual movements during the war. Both Iris Carpenter and Lee Carson were given permission to access all areas at around the same time as Jess is granted this permission in my book.

  The scene where a singer is brought into the Hotel Scribe to entertain the correspondents as well as the sign propped on the piano and the attempts at misogynist humor the following morning are all detailed in Oldfield’s memoir, which is, quite accidentally, an awful chronicle of the widespread sexual harassment of women throughout the war. Also recorded in this book is the incident about the German girl bearing a note from a U.S. soldier, which she thought was a special pass, but which is in fact anything but. Oldfield notes, seemingly without censure, that the writer of the note must have “enjoyed himself and…had a sense of humor as well as generosity of spirit.” I have tried not to exaggerate the way women were treated during the war, but I know many of the incidents I’ve written about must seem unbelievable.

  I wanted to write about Ravensbrück concentration camp, the only concentration camp exclusively used to imprison women during the war, but this camp, because of its location, was liberated by the Russians, not the Americans. So the concentration camp that I have used in this book is an amalgamation of Ravensbrück and other camps like Buchenwald and Dachau, and I have drawn on Lee Miller’s and Iris Carpenter’s reporting of those camps. After Lee Miller photographed Dachau, because the photographs were among the first taken of any of the camps and the sights were so shocking, she sent a cable to her editor at Vogue that read: “I implore you to believe this is true.” I have borrowed this wording for Jess.

  Many correspondents did not believe the concentration camps existed until after they came upon them, which Jess alludes to. General Collins did make the civilians in the town of Nordhausen bury the dead as punishment for turning a blind eye to the horror that existed right on their doorstep, and the practice of taking German civilians from nearby towns to the concentration camps to see what they had ignored is also noted in The Women Who Wrote the War: The Compelling Story of the Path-breaking Women Correspondents of World War II by Nancy Caldwell Sorel. Jess’s experience of coming upon the camp and having machine guns trained on her is based on what happened to Marguerite Higgins, correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, when she reached Dachau.

  The view attributed to General Patton about “fornication without fraternization” is detailed in Oldfield’s memoir.

  The description of Hitler’s apartment is based on Lee Miller’s piece “Hitleriana,” published in Vogue in 1945. I have appropriated the infamous photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub and given this to Jess.

  Iris Carpenter was the reporter who came upon a U.S. Army soldier raping a German girl in 1945. She never reported on this incident for the Boston Globe but wrote about it in her later memoir, published in 1946. She records the reaction of the officer to whom she reported the incident—that the main problem with war was that there were women near it. Jess’s report, “I’ve Got a Pistol and There Ain’t Nobody Going to Stop Me Having Her” is based on Iris’s recollections in her memoir.

  The story about the 371st Fighter Group and Yvette, the injured girl who became their mascot and good-luck char
m, is true. At a field hospital in Italy, an orphaned Italian boy stayed for several weeks and he also became a kind of mascot for both the nurses and the nearby battalion. Fiction is all about what is possible and both of these examples made me believe that it was possible for Victorine to have been accommodated in a field hospital for a few months.

  Many other sources provided useful information to help me write this novel. For information about female correspondents during the war, as well as the sources listed above, I also used Women War Correspondents of World War II by Lilya Wagner, Women of the World by Julia Edwards, and Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II by Penny Colman.

  To understand Lee Miller’s life, I read Lee Miller’s War, edited by Antony Penrose; Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke; and Lee Miller: A Woman’s War by Hilary Roberts. My description of the area around Carentan is based on “Unarmed Warriors” by Lee Miller. Martha Gellhorn is another extraordinary woman and for details about her life, I referred to her collection of reportage published as The Face of War and Caroline Moorehead’s biography, Martha Gellhorn: A Life. I also read Gellhorn’s fiction to understand more about her turn of phrase.

  Les Faux de Verzy do exist in a forest near Reims.

  The division Dan belongs to is based on the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, although I have occasionally had to take a little license with their precise movements; it is likely he would have been called out of Italy earlier than Easter to prepare for the invasion, the division fought at Anzio rather than Cassino, and it went across to Berlin, rather than Munich.

  The intricacies of the battles of World War II and life in the U.S. Army were drawn from Antony Beevor’s The Second World War, David Drake’s Paris at War, and The Historical Atlas of World War II by Alexander Swanston and Malcolm Swanston. I also visited Utah and Omaha beaches as research for the novel as well as the Omaha Beach Memorial Museum, the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, and the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Église. I confess to this being the most difficult area of research for me as I knew nothing about army ranks and the difference between a platoon and a company and a battalion when I began; any errors to do with this are mine, and while I have tried my best, I am not an expert and hope I have it mostly correct.