The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “I was thinking, ma’am,” the major said to Liv, “that you might want to get out of here before I mistake you for Mrs. Harper.” He looked to Fletcher. “We have information that Mrs. Harper is traveling with a British military photographer named Fletcher Roebuck. You haven’t seen him, I don’t suppose?”

  Fletcher tugged unconsciously on his ear. “No,” he said. “No, I’m sure I haven’t done, but if I see either of them I will certainly let them know you’re looking for them.”

  Fletcher took Liv’s arm to hurry her out the door before the man changed his mind, but she didn’t budge.

  “The photos,” she said.

  “Beastly hell,” Fletcher muttered.

  The major was disobeying orders for no apparent reason other than some odd combination of the goodwill of the moment and his admiration for Liv’s work.

  Liv linked her arm in mine. “We need to get our work out, sir,” she said.

  The major laughed, a big booming laugh from underneath the silly mustache and the pale hazel eyes.

  Fletcher said, “Liv, you can’t send your photographs uncensored, and no one has any idea when the censors will show.”

  Safely outside the Scribe, we laughed even harder than the major had. When we’d stopped laughing enough to catch our breaths and get the words out, finally, Fletcher said there was a press wireless facility at Cherbourg, that if we could somehow get our work to Cherbourg, they could transmit directly to the United States.

  “Cherbourg!” Liv exclaimed. The city was two hundred miles away, at the northernmost tip of the Cotentin Peninsula. But with the line already formed at the Scribe’s unmanned censorship tables, our work would not be the first out from the Scribe.

  Moments later we were in the jeep, heading for Orly airbase, Fletcher easing us through the throngs of people again, and the trucks and army cars and motorcycles clogging the road. Liv, in the front seat, set my typewriter in her lap. I took the scrawl of my piece out and read it aloud to her, editing as I did, and she typed as ferociously quickly as she could.

  At Orly we found an American Piper Cub just about to depart for Cherbourg.

  “I don’t care who gets the credit, I don’t want the credit, I only want the photos to get to the press pool, to be shared,” Liv told the pilot.

  “Don’t be going all noble on us now, Livvie,” Fletcher said. “We know you a damned sight better than that.”

  Three minutes later the plane was in the air, carrying a story banged out in road-bumpy typescript and a sack of film to deliver to the darkroom staff at Cherbourg along with instructions that if they worked quickly they could have a part in the first news of the liberation of Paris to reach the world.

  “Now the arm, Jane,” Fletcher said, and he asked around until he found a doctor at the airbase. The doctor unwrapped my bandage and had a look at the wound, and asked who in the world had dressed it. Fletcher allowed that he had, without fingering Liv for having put him up to it.

  “The antibiotic, too?” the doctor said. “You’d make a fine medic, son, if you’re ever inclined to set aside that camera.” Then to me, “I might have put a few stitches in to save you a scar, but that’s a fine job is what that is.” He redressed the wound and said if I left the dressing in place for a few days, it should heal well enough. Then he excused himself, saying he’d best get along or they’d leave for London without him.

  “London?” Fletcher said, and he joined the doctor long enough to arrange with the flight crew to get his film to British intelligence headquarters there.

  Back in Paris, we checked for news of Liv’s brother—nothing yet—and we set aside our work for the white and red Burgandies, the red Bordeaux, the champagne and brandy and cognac, rum, Calvados, Armagnac, all hidden from the Germans in anticipation of this day. We raised our glasses time and again, and we shouted with the crowds and sang when others sang, and we laughed and hugged and kissed. We kissed other correspondents at the zinc-topped bar in the Scribe basement, and strangers in the streets.

  We were on the Pont des Arts between the Louvre and the beautiful Gare d’Orsay, and we had just finished singing the “Marseillaise” again when Fletcher wrapped his arms around Liv, scooped her up and spun her, her feet lifting from the bridge. He set her down again, and he kissed her—not a French double kiss but rather his mouth pressing hers, his lips surprisingly urgent, the stubble of his beard on her sun-touched skin.

  I was as startled by the gesture as Liv was. I stared at the wooden slats of the bridge under my feet, at the light-jumpy Seine below, trying to think of something funny to say that might ease us out of the moment. The only words that came to mind, though, were those final words of the “Marseillaise,” the call for the French to take up arms, to water the fields with blood.

  Fletcher rubbed his upper arms as if trying to warm himself. He looked to the Eiffel Tower outlined in the distance. “It’s rather incredible, isn’t it?” he said. “To be here now, for this.”

  Liv looked at me as if just remembering me, and she reached up and wiped a tear from my cheek. “You’re crying, Jane,” she said.

  “It is something. It is,” I said, pressing the back of my hand to my cheek. “Liv,” I said, despising my thought even as I voiced it, “don’t you wish Charles were here?”

  Liv was already turned back to Fletcher, though, and he was tipping a bottle of wine someone in the crowd had passed to him, filling Liv’s glass. He poured carefully, but the deep red wine overflowed the rim, spilling onto Liv’s dirty fingertips.

  PARIS

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 1944

  Scoops depend on luck and quick transmission, and most of them don’t mean anything the day after they are published.

  —Photojournalist Robert Capa

  The celebrations of the liberation of Paris were carried around the world by radio as they’d happened, John McVane of NBC sharing the actual sounds of the bells of Notre Dame I’d only written about, and all the world hearing de Gaulle proclaim “Víve Paris!” from the Hôtel de Ville. Even before that, while we’d waited on the fringes of the city with no facts from inside to report, the AP’s Don Whitehead had telephoned the US embassy and spoken to a caretaker who, from a window overlooking the Place de la Concorde, gave him detail enough to write a full piece. It had run in the American newspaper Saturday morning editions, scooping those of us who’d never imagined the telephones still worked, much less thought to call. The first photos from the liberation, though, had to wait for the photojournalists to take them and get them to the United States. They ran in the Saturday late editions, and so we crowded around the Scribe’s registration desk with everyone else Sunday morning to wait for the papers, to see whose photographs had run.

  “Perhaps you would like to see the last registration card that was signed before you arrived?” the manager offered for entertainment. “Look at the name: ‘Joachim Hugo Klapper, Gestapo.’ All the Gestapo stayed here.”

  This particular German officer had checked out only hours before we’d arrived, but now the hotel’s walls were decorated with Allied maps and plans of operations. The heaps of khaki bags and gas masks had been cleared and the ground floor was full of the stuff of Allied news: radio and telegraphy equipment, broadcasting studios, typewriters. Censors reviewed copy at the tables while maids scurried to clear the endless paper tape produced by the telex machines. Bathroom space was difficult to find, many of the loos having been taken over for film developing. And a transportation room off to one side doubled as a mail room, the beds with their red eiderdown quilts piled high with V-mail envelopes—including the letters Liv and I had written in the weeks we’d been AWOL—and pushed against the wall to make room for stacked jerry cans of gasoline.

  It seemed every journalist in France lounged in the lobby that morning, or crowded into the basement bar, eyeing the double magnum of champagne and the demijohn of Armagnac that were as much decoration as was the charcoal drawing of Charles de Gaulle. Floyd Davis of Life had sketched a colored-pencil c
artoon of the bar scene: a brutish Ernest Hemingway, Janet Flanner, and William Shirer of CBS at the front table while Lee Miller and others partied in the background and Robert Capa, in battle dress, observed. Miller, finally released from confinement, had settled her Baby Hermes typewriter in room 412 along with a dozen jerry cans of gas on her balcony. She was in the lobby that morning, entertaining us with a roster of fictional military personnel she’d invented to command the Scribe—Captain Calamity, Corporal Sanction, and General Nuisance among them—when a courier dropped the bundles of newspapers on the reception counter.

  The courier was trying to escape through the crush of journalists already pulling off the strings when I caught a glimpse of the New York Times front photo, above the fold: a crowd celebrating around an old car in Paris, captioned “Parisians Celebrate Arrival of Allies.”

  The photo was not full page. It was not full bleed. The headline on the paper already read “Allies Sweep to Troyes, Nazi Rout Grows.” And the photo was attributed only to “U. S. Signal Corps Radiotelephoto.” But it was Liv’s photograph of the crowd celebrating in front of the barricade: the dark-haired woman atop the old car, among them and yet not quite, somehow; the wheelbarrow spinning behind her; the eyes that Liv had said were her mother’s eyes, although you couldn’t tell much about them in the grainy black and white of newsprint.

  Fletcher began grabbing papers from the hands of other journalists, looking at them and holding them up for Liv to see her photograph in a dozen papers, saying to the gathered journalists, “It’s Liv’s shot.” And all around her now our fellow journalists were thumping her on the back and offering to buy her champagne, saying, “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow,” with no sign of the envy that was welling up in me.

  I touched her arm at the elbow and whispered, “Your mama and daddy are looking down on you now, Livvie, busting every button on their angel wings.”

  I looked at the photo in one paper and in another, fingering the bandage on my arm underneath my clean, untattered blouse. It was such a moving photo, all champagne and toasts and the bells of Notre Dame.

  Fletcher plucked one of the newspapers from the front desk and rolled it into a tube in his hands, his eyes looking back at Liv full of joy but with something troubled underneath.

  “How does it feel to be the photographer of the moment?” he asked.

  Liv looked at the papers spread across the dark wood of the front desk as if it couldn’t be her photo, as if someone else must have taken a shot of the same moment—the same camera angle, the same light—and seen something entirely different than she’d seen.

  “I don’t know, Fletcher,” she said.

  She eyed the banners spread out on the desk: the New York Times late city edition, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle.

  “Where’s the Daily Press?” she asked, her words slipping out quietly.

  Fletcher stuck the newspaper in his hands behind his back and started to say something, then faltered, his eyes filled with what looked like pity.

  “Where is it?” Liv repeated.

  He handed her the rolled newspaper, Charles’s New York Daily Press. Its front page offered a photo of the chaotic shooting in the plaza of the Hôtel de Ville. In the foreground a rifleman aimed for the sniper in one of the spires of Notre Dame while the crowd sank back from their celebration, some turning to run or seeking refuge in doorways and under cars while, already, the Red Cross stretcher-bearers moved into the photo at one edge, headed for a soldier who lay dead on the plaza. That soldier’s face was blurred out, but you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know to look. It was a powerful shot—one that couldn’t have been taken from Liv’s and my position underneath the jeep.

  “Perhaps Charles never saw your photographs,” Fletcher said, but the hand reaching up to tug on his ear told the truth his words denied: Liv’s photo could only have been so widely distributed through the press pool. It was made available to everyone.

  Liv set the Daily Press on the front desk, the gray-white of the paper stark against the deep brown of the wood. She carefully tore the top half of the front page from the paper and folded the half page—the banner and the headline and the photograph that wasn’t hers—into a rectangle. She was tucking it into the pocket where she kept that last letter from her brother when I became aware of the quietly insistent words of a reception clerk.

  “Vous êtes Madame Harper? Madame Olivia Harper? Nous avons un télégramme pour vous.”

  Liv looked up at the clerk, a surge of hope surfacing. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m Olivia Harper.” Fearing the clerk might not understand her, she said, “Oui. Yes, I am. Yes, that’s me.”

  The clerk smiled, and several of the journalists laughed warmly. One speculated that the telegram was from Life magazine, begging Liv to come on staff. Another said it was no doubt from Mrs. Roosevelt, offering her congratulations on the photo, and I thought of the note in my pocket, and “Operating Room by Flashlight.” Had I written my Paris piece carefully enough?

  Liv took the thin envelope from the desk clerk and eased the glued flap open slowly lest her own carelessness undo whatever good might be inside. Prisms of sunlight splashed down on her from the chandeliers. Other journalists prattled on around us and began to fall away in twos and threes, this telegram of no interest to them. Liv pulled out the thin sheet and read it silently, then refolded the fragile paper, put it back in the envelope, pressed the flap against the other edge. She looked up at Fletcher—at his clean-shaven cheeks nicked at the corner of his mouth, tender from being under the growth of beard for days again, protected by the stubble.

  “Congratulations from Charles,” she said. “He’s arranging my passage home.”

  Outside the hotel, the square was again filled with still-ecstatic French men, with women walking arm in arm with men in uniforms, and everywhere children untethered from their parents, running free. The German signs that had dominated the square were gone, the swastikas replaced with the Tricolor, the blue and white and red. The Opera, stripped of its kommandantur sign, cast sharp shadows in the bright sunlight. The clocks had been reset.

  Liv, looking up to the intricately carved winged creatures atop the Opera, said, “What am I doing here?” her words sinking into the crowd in the square, the women and men and children, everywhere the children.

  Fletcher reached down, touched a strand of dark hair at her forehead, longer now than it had been when I first met her.

  “They forget to tell you the only way to photograph this war,” he said, “is to stand up like a bleeding idiot and point your camera when anyone with any sense has his head tucked low in a trench, praying to any god who might listen.”

  Liv shook her head slowly, wanting to make him understand what she didn’t understand herself. “Not that,” she said. “Even if I didn’t care about dying—”

  A small redheaded boy bolted past us, jostling Liv. He kept running, a second child close on his heels, a little sister with the same strawberry blond hair. The girl was gone before we even saw her expression, her thin legs and square shoulders and flying red hair disappearing into the crowd.

  “Sometimes I think I have one small piece of this,” Liv said, “that some photograph I’ve taken has captured some truth about this war, but . . .”

  She looked again to the Opera building—a building that could be photographed as a monolithic whole or in small bits of intricately carved detail, neither of which did it justice. That was the way it was, covering war. The little bits of detail you could get on paper or on film were just that, little bits that didn’t tell the whole story. And you couldn’t possibly capture the whole of it no matter how far back you stepped.

  PARIS

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 1944

  I want to stick it out until I get to Berlin.

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Virginia Irwin in a cable to her editors, who had offered to relieve her

  Liv insisted on setting off from Paris late that same afternoon,
despite Fletcher’s cajoling and arguing and practically pleading for her to wait until morning, to give the idea a decent night’s sleep in a decent bed in a decent hotel.

  “Every bleeding journalist here is marinating in champagne for at least a few days,” he said.

  “Jane isn’t bleeding anymore,” Liv said.

  “I do have a lovely scab, though, thank you very much,” I agreed.

  The fact was I couldn’t bear to stay in Paris any more than Liv could. I’d gotten my liberation piece off and I’d gotten my letters on their way to my mother, and I’d even gone to mass that morning, and there was nothing more for me in Paris.

  “Read the headlines,” Liv said. “‘Allies Sweep to Troyes, Nazi Rout Grows.’”

  I said, “The troops are already in Reims.”

  There was no war left to cover here, and the longer we waited, the farther we got from it. It seemed preposterous, how anxious we were to leave the clean sheets and soft mattresses, the fresh baguettes and champagne. But the comfort was oddly discomfiting. Nothing I would write in Paris could save boys like Joey dying in the field hospitals, boys like the one with the blurred face in the photograph Charles had run.

  “Stay here with Hemingway if you want, Fletcher,” Liv said. “Jane and I are going to cover the war.”

  Before we packed, Liv unwrapped my bandage to check my wound, which she declared “much better” before redressing it with clean gauze and a smaller bandage we’d taken from the emergency kit. I put my untorn blouse back on, and she turned to packing her gear, pulling the red gown and gloves from the bottom of her rucksack to refold them.