The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  I heard Fletcher moving, making his way to the ladder and down it. When he didn’t return in the time it might have taken him to relieve himself, I slipped down the ladder to find him sitting just outside the barn door, an emergency kit opened before him and the small scissors from it in hand. Mixed with the country smells was a hint of chocolate.

  I sat next to him and leaned back against the rough wood of the barn. “Can’t sleep?”

  “I am in sorry need of a trim,” he said.

  “And outside in the dark in the middle of a war zone with no mirror is just the time to be cutting your hair? I do see how that would keep you awake at night, though, being a little unkempt.”

  I took the scissors from him and told him to scoot forward so I could get behind him. “I can’t promise much, but I’m pretty sure I can do this better than you can.”

  I’d cut Mama’s hair for years, although I didn’t offer up that fact.

  I knelt behind him and slid the fingers of my left hand through his hair, which was dirty-rough with the living outside, the coarse gray strands obstinate against the dull blade.

  “It’s Tuesday night,” he said—a comment I gathered was meant to explain why he couldn’t sleep.

  Snip. Snip.

  “How do you keep track?” I asked.

  “The girls back at Trefoil will have had a splendid weekend with their mums,” he said, the emphasis on “end” rather than “week.” “But they’ll be sad now, with their mums gone back to London.”

  While I cut his hair, he told me about the evacuee schoolgirls Liv had met, who’d arrived at his family’s country house with their cheap little suitcases gripped in one hand, their gas masks in the other. Little girls whose mothers came on special weekend coaches to see their children but returned on Sunday nights to jobs at military barracks and airfields and munitions factories while their husbands fought in Africa, or Italy, or France. The way he spoke of them—particularly of a little girl named Ella who hadn’t spoken since her mother died—left me wondering if the longing in his voice was for home or for fatherhood. His parents, like the girls’ mothers, lived in London, but the butler and housekeeper who cared for the Roebuck country home cared for the girls as well.

  I imagined Mrs. Serle as a woman like Mama—who had lived on the servants’ floor at the Stahlmans’ until she’d become pregnant with me. I suppose it said something about my mother, or perhaps about the Stahlmans, that they kept her on at all then, although of course they couldn’t have an unwed mother and her child living in their home. Mama had moved back in with my grandmother and taken the long trolley ride to Belle Meade every day. “Mrs. Tyler,” the Stahlmans started calling Mama then, the dignity of the married title not for Mama’s sake but rather to preserve the fiction that their help were all decent and respectable.

  Fletcher said, “Serle says the girls spend their Mondays throwing toys out of the pram, and Tuesdays picking them up.”

  “The girls are babies?” I said.

  “It’s an expression.”

  I said, “Like my mama. The summer I was nine, I was getting so thin I had to stand up twice to cast a shadow.” I didn’t say that was the summer after Grandma died, the summer Tommy and his friends peered through the garden shed window to spy on Old Cooper and found me sitting amidst the fertilizer and shovels and rakes, reading a book and eating a cheese sandwich because cheese would keep all morning in the damp heat. I didn’t describe their taunting, or my happiness the first time Tommy came to the shed alone, the first time we snuck out to play in the stream. I said, “I grew so fast that year that Mama said I’d be able to hunt geese with a rake by summer’s end.”

  Fletcher tilted his head back a little, laughing warmly.

  I said, “I take no responsibility for this hair, Fletcher Roebuck, if you’re going to be flopping your head all over the place.”

  And I thought of how well my height had served me. I’d been sixteen when I graduated from high school and started typing for the Banner, but no one seemed to realize how young I was. It was 1938 and jobs were impossible to find, but Mama had worked for the Stahlmans, who owned the paper, since she was sixteen herself.

  I said, “That was the summer I got my first dictionary.”

  Old Cooper had found a discarded one somewhere and brought it to the garden shed for me.

  “The summer I started schooling Mama on vocabulary,” I said lightly.

  Every night on the trolley home, she asked me to teach her a new word. “Tell me a word I don’t know, Janie,” she would say, and I would offer up words like “copious” and “writhe” and “gambit,” and she would repeat each one. When I replay those trolley rides in memory, I hear the bone-tiredness in Mama’s voice, the worry, but as a child I heard only her curiosity. She would ask me to tell her what each word meant and how it was used in whatever I’d read, and about the book itself. Others on the trolley would join the conversation, maids like Mama heading home after the long days I spent reading in the garden shed or the tree, or sneaking out to play with Tommy. Sometimes, if I ran out of talking before we reached our stop, Mama and I would sing together, the way we sometimes did at the Stahlmans’ sink. She never let me stay for more than one song when she was washing dishes; she always sent me off to read. But if I offered up a good word on the trolley, one she’d never heard before, she would sing with me all the rest of the way home.

  Fletcher asked about my father, and I started to say that my father was no longer with us or something similarly vague, to leave the implication that I had a father but he’d passed away. In the stillness of Fletcher’s head under my hands, though, I felt him waiting for my answer. And some worry kept him, too, awake at night, and maybe it was the war, but it seemed to me to have something to do with a more personal shame like mine, like never having known your father. I imagined saying it: Whoever my father was, my mother was never his wife. But I just kept trimming Fletcher’s hair with the scissors, not wanting to lie to him and yet not wanting him to think of me that way.

  Shelling began to sound in the distance, far enough away to be background war to us. Fletcher pulled a half-eaten chocolate bar from his pocket and peeled back the wrapper.

  “Hershey’s finest?” he offered.

  “I do like chocolate,” I said, trimming carefully around his generous ears to avoid snipping his skin, although the scissors weren’t sharp enough to be much danger. “Even ration chocolate.” It was fortified with an overabundance of flour to prevent melting. “But I don’t much care for hair-covered chocolate.”

  “How can you tell with this chocolate?” he asked, and he laughed as he broke off a piece and set it on my tongue.

  SAINT-LÔ-PÉRIERS ROAD

  FRIDAY, JULY 21, 1944

  I don’t want any women attached to my unit. Send them back!

  —Associated Press North African bureau chief Wes Gallagher, according to AP journalist Ruth Cowan

  All we needed was a break in the incessant rain. We’d been at the front for days, and we were wet through and through despite our rain ponchos, so chilled that we couldn’t imagine it was really July, that back home people were drinking iced tea and fanning themselves on front porches, eating sliced watermelon and corn freshly cut from the cob, and peach ice cream. We weren’t alone—everyone at the front was wet and miserable. Everyone anywhere near it was. Wet from the rain and being out in it every minute, cold from being wet and from the chill coastal air.

  “One clear day, one clear morning,” Liv said, “and the breakthrough will come.”

  Breakthrough. The word was everywhere. The troops and supplies were amassed on the beachhead, ready for the push to take back France. Getting tired of being ready. General Bradley himself—the commanding officer of the American troops in Normandy—had shown up at the Vouilly Château the day before, slipping quietly into the barn opposite the old bakery, coming to the press rather than calling the press to headquarters so as not to alert the Germans to Operation Cobra, which he was there to exp
lain. The weather needed to clear enough for air support to go in first, though—the US Eighth and Ninth and the British Royal Air Forces: B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers, B-26 Marauders, and the fighters, the P-38s, P-47s, and P-51s. The largest air strike ever ordered—that was what we were waiting for at the Saint-Lô–Périers road.

  Now Eisenhower was here, too. He’d flown in from London in a heavy storm, only to have General Bradley tell him the attack he’d come to witness had been called off due to weather and admonish him for risking the flight.

  Fletcher did a great imitation of Eisenhower flicking his cigarette into the mud, and in a rotten imitation of the general’s voice said, “‘Perhaps the only perk to being Supreme Commander is that I can’t be grounded, even by you, sir.’”

  “This damned weather is going to be the death of me,” Eisenhower was said to have remarked.

  “The death of us,” Fletcher said. “He means the death of all of us here at the front. The death of the Allied effort.”

  Waiting. It takes a bigger toll than you might imagine when every second offers the specter of the military police taking you into custody, or of a battle beginning that would be the end for so many and might be the end for you. I’d done what I was supposed to do while I waited. I’d written a piece on the waiting:

  All of war is waiting for something. Waiting in a mess tent line for bad food. Waiting for orders, or for daylight or darkness, for the weather to clear enough for planes to fly. All of war is waiting except when you’re in it and you wish all you had to do was wait.

  We waited, and Fletcher taught Liv and me to shoot.

  The first time Fletcher put the revolver that had been his brother’s in my hands, it made me more nervous than I would have imagined.

  “Lordy, Fletcher,” I said, “correspondents aren’t supposed to carry weapons!”

  “Of course they aren’t, Jane,” he agreed. “It’s against international law. But you and Liv are AWOL. What’s one violation more?”

  “And you, Fletcher?” Liv said.

  “I’m not a correspondent. I’m a military photographer, one of the few benefits of which is that I am allowed a weapon.”

  He turned me toward a tree and wrapped his arms around me, guiding me in the aiming of the thing. I hit the trunk that first shot, with his hands warm on mine, the stubble of his beard brushing the edge of my brow and his chest against my back so that I was sure he could feel the thud of my heart. My gaze was not on the tree I was to aim for but rather on my arms lined up with his, my hands in his palms, my breasts pressed together in the posture. When Fletcher let go and told me to fire on my own, the bullet hit nowhere near the target.

  “For someone who so obviously loves the feel of a gun in your hand, it’s sad that you’re such a bloody lousy shot,” Fletcher said.

  As he dipped his head to reload the gun, Liv mouthed, “A playboy,” and made a face that left me wanting to laugh, and feeling slightly ridiculous, too.

  When Fletcher looked up, she said, “I think Jane needs a man in her sights rather than a tree”—her voice as serious as if by “a man” she meant a German soldier. She cut me a sly look only when Fletcher again tended to the gun.

  Liv hadn’t done much better when her turn with the pistol came, but then Fletcher hadn’t put his arms around her to show her how to shoot.

  That was the first of our daily shooting lessons, after which Fletcher left the gun with us and set off in the jeep for the press camp at the Vouilly Château. He went to the ten a.m. press briefings most mornings, and sometimes to the late-afternoon ones as well. He went to deliver his film to a contact who sent it on to military intelligence so it could be used to plan the attack. Or that’s where he said he was going, anyway, often giving us shooting lessons first and always leaving us the Webley, always asking Liv and me if we were sure we didn’t want him to send out our work. He could have slept nights at the press camp, in a dry tent in the château’s pasture, waking to pressed clothes and a hot breakfast, food not scooped from ration tins but rather served on china that was washed afterward by staff while he attended the press briefings in the château’s living room. But sleeping at the press camps would have meant leaving Liv and me.

  I saw him headed away from the press camp, though, when he said that was where he was going, and in the hours before dawn, too. The Germans were just a few thousand yards away here, so he used his telephoto lens to peer over at them, capturing what the terrain on the German side was like, what equipment they had, and how they were dug in. I didn’t know whether Fletcher would go beyond the front into German territory, but I tried to watch him go whenever he left us, in case he didn’t come back. I had no idea what I would do if he didn’t return, but I knew that if it were Liv and I, he would come after us, and it seemed I ought to at least know where someone might begin to look for him if it ever came to that.

  We gathered with a number of other journalists and military men in the bombed-out farmyard each morning, already used to the stench of dead cows. Ernie Pyle was there. Fletcher introduced us to the Scripps-Howard columnist, who took off his helmet and smiled shyly, his eyes about the saddest I’d ever seen. I took his hand, not quite a handshake—so few men could comfortably greet a professional gal. His palm was sweaty-nervous in mine.

  “Looks like a lousy day for a bombing, doesn’t it?” he said.

  I remembered a column of his I’d read, one from Africa: Pyle had shared a ditch with an American soldier during a German strafing run, and when the plane was gone he’d tapped the soldier on the shoulder and said that had been close, hadn’t it? The soldier hadn’t answered him, though—the boy was dead.

  Pyle said to Liv and me, “There’s a snowdrop making his way around this splendid French countryside looking for you.” He ran a hand through his hair—red and thinning, and gray at the temples. “But I suppose you know that?”

  I scanned the barnyard almost involuntarily. Military men were everywhere, but none were wearing the snowdrop-white helmet, gloves, and belt that distinguished the US Army military police from anyone else in a class A uniform.

  Liv said, “A snowdrop,” repeating Pyle’s words without appearing to care as much as I knew she did.

  “Average height and build, with a ridiculous little mustache and a nose tilted just so.” Pyle tipped his nose up comically. “As if to sniff for prey. Piggy, almost colorless eyes, too—although you don’t want to get close enough to him to see that.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” Liv said with a lift of one dark brow. Then, “I hope you’ve worn your track spikes, Mr. Pyle. Miss Tyler and I plan to sprint the whole distance to Paris once we’ve broken through the German line here, and we’d hate to leave you behind.”

  Pyle and everyone listening laughed—of course they did. Liv had that way about her that left men wanting to feel charmed by her. She could read aloud nothing more than the orders calling off the strike each day, and if she meant to make them laugh, they would laugh. She could read the arrest-on-sight order with our names on it and men would laugh.

  The same thing about her that drew their laughter caused them to allow her to win at the poker games we played to pass the time while we waited, although they let me win, too. We played for sticks of gum and for cigarettes, which we bet singly or in the three- or four- or nine-packs that came in the ration accessories: Lucky Strikes (“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”), Chesterfields (“Milder—Cooler—Better Taste”), Camel (“Turkish & Domestic Blend”), and Chelsea (packaged inexplicably slogan-free). Even after the others started going down badly and began to play in earnest, we kept winning. Liv had to be reminded that three of a kind beat two pair, and she claimed “trips and a pair” once, not realizing that was a full house, but she won more than anyone. She was up four sticks of gum and thirty-six cigarettes, including two fancy French ones we all agreed could count as a ration three-pack each, when the men took to calling her Pitiless Livvie. The French cigarettes were thin and black, and Liv and I felt rather glamorous as we smok
ed them together, flaunting our success. I’d have thought that would be just the kind of thing to turn the others against Liv—her lighting those two fancy cigarettes and handing one to me even before the game was over, so that their owner had no chance to win them back. But it only made the men love Pitiless Livvie all the more.

  We harvested the few green beans and carrots and squash left in the farm’s garden for dinner after the others had returned to the press camp that night. I said a quick, silent prayer the way Mama and I did at home (“Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts . . .”) and I made a tiny, surreptitious sign of the cross over my heart before brushing most of the dirt off the vegetables and eating them with an M tin of meat and beans. We slept, and when I woke in the darkness, I knew Fletcher had left us. His bedroll was there, though, and his gear was in the jeep still parked below.

  Liv woke as I returned to the hayloft. “Can’t sleep?” she asked. Then, “Where’s Fletcher?”

  She and I opened the doors in the gable and sat with our feet dangling over the edge, high above the ground. Somewhere in the distance, a cow mooed into the moonless night. I wondered how long it would be before Fletcher had enough light to get whatever shots he was trying to get, and when he might return.

  “Charles came to London to see me off even though we’d said our good-byes in New York,” Liv said. “That’s why we spent the night at Fletcher’s country home, why I know Fletcher. I’d still be back in New Hampshire, developing my film in a sink at night, if not for Charles.”

  She reached up and pulled a piece of hay from my hair, rolled it between her fingers.

  “‘You must be Olivia James. I guess you’re pretty good with a lens.’ Those were his first words to me.”