The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  I said, “You didn’t get a chance to wear them.”

  She hesitated, then continued folding. “No dancing shoes,” she said.

  I said, “And dancing barefoot on the streets of Paris in these crowds . . .”

  I finished buttoning my blouse and turned to my own packing.

  “They were my mother’s,” Liv said. “The gown. The gloves.”

  The second wedding ring. The love of photographs.

  She said, “I took them from her wardrobe after she died.”

  I considered this: what it meant to have a mother who wore fancy gowns, who settled her gloved right hand in her husband’s left to dance to a live orchestra. To lose a mother like that, or any mother. To have a father to lose.

  She tucked the gown and gloves back into her rucksack, then held my pack steady as I eased my bandaged arm through the strap.

  I nearly tripped over Fletcher sitting on his own pack outside our door. I would have tripped over him had he not reached out and grabbed my arm.

  “Ouch!” I cried out.

  “Sorry,” Fletcher said. “Sorry.” Then to Liv, “Whom do we join, then?”

  Liv’s eyes under her dark brows were clouded with a doubt I hadn’t seen before.

  Fletcher stood and hoisted his pack, swinging it hard up against his shoulder. “We do need to get out of town before that MP chap changes his mind, in any event.”

  “You were staying here with your old pal Hemingway,” I said. “But we’re happy to have your company.”

  “My jeep. You’re happy to have my jeep,” he joked.

  Liv’s and my plan had been to hitch rides wherever we could. Not much of a plan, but that’s how we’d gotten to Fletcher.

  “My jeep and my tent,” Fletcher said.

  “You have a tent now?” Liv said. Then to me, “He has a tent now, or so he says.” As if this were a deciding factor, as if we might not let him take us in his jeep if not for the tent.

  “Not much of a tent,” Fletcher admitted. “Just a little pup tent.”

  “He’s suddenly looking more attractive, isn’t he?” I said to Liv.

  “The shaved chin?” Liv said.

  “I think it makes his ears look a little smaller, doesn’t it?”

  “The shaved chin does?”

  “The fact that he has a tent.”

  Liv and I set off, and Fletcher fell in with us. We pushed through the lobby and out the door, onto the walk.

  “I understand Iris Carpenter and Lee Carson are likely to be assigned to the First Army press corps despite their numerous acts of insubordination,” Fletcher said. “Whether that means SHAEF is giving up or we’re too far from Washington or too close to the end of the war for anyone to care, I’m not certain, but it seems likely we’re to be left alone if we—”

  “Jane and I are to be left alone,” Liv said with a little pop of anger even she didn’t seem to have expected. “And SHAEF? ‘SHAEF’ is just an acronym. ‘Strategic Headquarters.’ It isn’t a damned acronym getting in Iris’s and Lee’s and our way. Don’t depersonalize the bastards who are trying to keep us from what we need to do.”

  I flinched at the word “bastards,” at the word “need,” remembering again Charles’s description of her as a gal who photographed like a man but didn’t smoke and didn’t curse. Still, the major had let us go when we were right there, when he knew we were right there, and it wasn’t like Liv to swear, to use a word like “bastard.” It wasn’t like her to need anything—or to admit to a need, anyway. Though there had been that moment at the Dives River, Liv and Fletcher floating together in the green water, their fingers intertwined.

  Liv heaved her pack into the jeep. It landed with a heavy thunk that seemed to shut off argument. Fletcher threw his in beside hers, then took mine and threw it in, too. He climbed into the jeep. She climbed into the back, saying I should take the front; it was less bumpy and I would be more comfortable.

  She said, “The US First Army is already headed northwest of here.”

  “Having declined to stay for the champagne, as I understand it,” I said. “Not a Hemingway among them.”

  Fletcher grinned despite himself. “Right,” he said. “Yes, well, the Canadians and my fine countrymen, Dempsey’s men, are farthest north. Perhaps we join them? They’ll head for Le Havre and . . .”

  “And Dieppe,” Liv continued for him. “Then probably to Dunkirk.”

  “To Dunkirk,” Fletcher said almost under his breath. His brother had been evacuated from Dunkirk to spend two more years at war, to father a child who would never be born, to spend his last moments at Dieppe climbing over the dead bodies of men he’d called friends, only to be killed himself.

  Patton’s men were south of us, Liv said, headed southeast to hook up with the Americans and French heading up from Marseille, assuming they took Marseille. Operation Dragoon—the Champagne Campaign, people were calling it. They had taken all but the port cities, which were expected to fall any minute. “Light casualties, I heard,” Liv said. “The Jerries in full retreat. Nothing much interesting there.”

  Fletcher slipped the key into the ignition, his expression full of the sadness of Dunkirk and Dieppe, of Edward.

  Liv squared her camera between her feet. “I vote we find the US First,” she said. “They’ll head through northeastern France and into Belgium and Holland. They’ll likely be the first into Holland.”

  Fletcher glanced at her in the rearview mirror, relieved that somehow she hadn’t chosen the path to Dieppe or Dunkirk with the Canadians or the British, who were more likely to look the other way at two AWOL American women. I tried to think of something flip to say about Liv’s preference for non-champagne-drinking American boys, but came up empty.

  I said, “I suppose we might be mistaken for Iris and Lee as long as we don’t all four show up at once”—never mind the improbability of me passing either for Iris Carpenter, who was the daughter of a British movie magnate and looked like she ought to be one of his stars, or Lee Carson, whom Newsweek had dubbed America’s best-looking journalist.

  “You’ll have to hide your camera, Liv,” I said, “since Iris and Lee are both journalists, not photographers.”

  Fletcher turned the key and the jeep engine kicked alive with a rattle. “Shall we head toward Compiègne, then?” he said, no more able than I was to yank back the curtain of cigarettes and “bastards” and “damns” to expose Liv.

  “We’ll be the first to report from Germany,” I suggested wryly, wondering if we hadn’t known on some level even on the morning we left the field hospital that Germany was our real destination. Wondering if Paris hadn’t been an illusion all along. And trying to sort out why Liv didn’t want to follow Patton. Why, if we were willing to risk joining American troops, weren’t we setting the more direct course for Berlin? Belgium wasn’t front-page news. Belgium was not the photographs the papers would run. Was that why Liv wanted to go to Belgium?

  Fletcher eased the jeep through streets cluttered with the detritus of war: white flags still hanging from the windows, barricades not yet cleared, bullet-pocked storefronts that would be left for some time as proof that the Germans had been in Paris but in the end had lost.

  “Liv,” I said, “you don’t think we ought to hook up with Patton’s—”

  “The First Army,” she insisted.

  And it was only after we’d driven in silence through the streets of Paris and on into the countryside that I thought of Liv’s brother. Perhaps Geoff was with the First Army? I turned around to say something about him, to ask Liv if she thought her brother was in Belgium, sure suddenly that she was looking for him. Her eyes were such an empty, emotionless blue, though, that my voice caught in my throat.

  She was looking for Geoff, I supposed, just as I might be looking for Tommy if he hadn’t gone off and married another girl, just as Fletcher might have looked for Edward if he hadn’t died at Dieppe.

  “Two months,” Liv said, turning to the windshield, to the road ahead. �
�Two months ago, he flew all the way from New York to London just to see me.”

  I tried to make sense of what she was saying: her brother had flown to London to see her?

  “Two months ago,” she said, “we were at your country house in Chichester, Fletcher, talking about having a family together, a girl and a boy, one of each.”

  We pitched Fletcher’s pup tent in a field that night, not sure where we were and too tired to consult the map, but certain from the distant sounds that we were not yet at the front. Liv disappeared into the tent almost the moment it was up, as if she meant for me to have some time alone with Fletcher. He laid his bedroll out on the ground beside the jeep, and the two of us sat on it, leaning back on the jeep’s hard metal. A fog began to settle low. The damp ground smelled earthy and close.

  “A bite of pudding?” Fletcher said, and he offered me the chocolate bar from his pocket.

  “We call it dessert,” I said.

  “Yes. We consider that barbaric,” he said.

  “The barbarians being . . . ?”

  “Anyone who can’t trace their lineage back to Alfred the Great.”

  I unwrapped the chocolate and took a small bite, then handed it back. “It’s hard to believe anyone would give up this ‘pudding,’ even for at a nice clean table back at the Scribe in Paris,” I said.

  He took a bite himself, and chewed it, and swallowed. “Only the finest for you, Jane.”

  He offered me the chocolate bar again, and I held his hand to steady it as I took a second bite, and I let my hand linger on his as long as I could without feeling foolish.

  “It’s Sunday night,” he said. “Back home, the mums will have headed back to London. The girls will be so sad.”

  “Maybe Mrs. Serle will have made them a ‘pudding,’” I said.

  He laughed, and he said, “Yes, I suppose she will have done. The berries will be in, and the first of the figs.”

  “My mother makes a berry cobbler that will make you want to hit your mama,” I said. I swatted a mosquito, thinking of the no-see-ums even in the daytime at home. It was Sunday afternoon in Nashville. Mama used to make cobblers on Sunday afternoons, which she served with milk poured from her special pitcher.

  “The peaches will be ripe now,” I said. “Mama’s peach cobbler is the best.”

  Fletcher offered me the rest of the chocolate bar and, when I declined, wrapped it back up.

  “Fletcher,” I said, “what do we do if ever you don’t come back? When you go off by yourself, I mean.”

  He tucked the chocolate into the pocket where he kept the photograph of Elizabeth. “You leave my bedroll and my pack wherever you are, in case I can get back to it, and you take the jeep and the Webley, and you carry on.”

  “Without you?”

  He took out a cigarette, but didn’t light it. “Do you suppose Charles knows you and Liv are traveling together?” he asked.

  “Does Charles know?” He might not, I supposed. She’d written her husband just as I’d written my mother, but we’d only mailed them from Paris; they wouldn’t have received them yet.

  “I don’t know what Charles knows,” I said. “I suppose he will have heard, though.”

  “The MP only asked about Liv,” Fletcher said.

  “The MP?”

  “That Major Adam Jones. The man asked if Liv was Liv before letting her go. He said he had orders to apprehend Mrs. Olivia James Harper and return her to London.”

  If the MP had been looking for a Miss Jane Tyler, he hadn’t mentioned it.

  But I didn’t want to think about Liv and Charles. I didn’t want to worry whether the MPs would continue to pursue us now, whether the reprieve Major Adam Jones with his snowdrop hat had granted us would extend beyond those few moments of celebration.

  I said, “Look at the moon, Fletcher.”

  In the mist, it glowed eerie and haunting. The dampness tamped down the sounds of the countryside, too: the chirping of night frogs, the hum of crickets, the more distant booms and rattles of war.

  I turned to Fletcher, thinking I would just kiss him.

  “Well then, we ought to get some rest,” he said, and he stood and offered a hand to help me up.

  Liv lay in her bedroll in the low little tent that night, but her breathing wasn’t the easy, even breath of sleep. She didn’t speak at first, and I didn’t either. I climbed into my bedroll and lay with my eyes closed, exhausted but awake. I focused on making my breath slow and easy, as if I’d fallen asleep.

  After a few moments, she whispered, “Charles sees the truth. He believes in sparing the public their breakfast stomachs, but he won’t print anything but the truth.”

  The darkness so reminded me of the darkness of our tent in the field hospital that first night, when we’d talked so easily, but I didn’t say anything.

  “He thought the liberation of Paris would be the moment of the century, but he looked at the photos,” she said. “The other papers, they’ve all run what they expected the liberation to be, what we all wanted it to be, what I photographed. But Charles looked at the photos and he saw what was actually happening here, and that’s the photograph he ran.”

  Not the kisses and the flowers and the cheers, the singing of the “Marseillaise,” but wartime written on the face of one ordinary person who was afraid or angry or exhausted, still at war even as the crowds around him celebrated what we all wanted to be the war’s end, but was not.

  “One soldier shooting in the midst of the celebration,” Liv said. “Another dead.”

  The Red Cross stretcher-bearers moving into the frame, toward the dead boy whose face was blurred out. Would the photograph have been any more powerful if it had shown his face?

  “It’s as if I’ve boiled the whole war down to this one moment in Paris that isn’t at all the war,” Liv said. “That shows the war less, even, than my shots of that operation by flashlight back at the field hospital. Less than the story you wrote about that night.”

  I knew she needed me to say something, to deny what she was saying or even just to acknowledge that she was right. But it was late and I was tired and freshly rejected, and the jealousy nibbling at the edge of our friendship left me unable to do anything but pretend sleep.

  OUTSIDE COMPIÈGNE, FRANCE

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 1944

  It was a nerve-shattering experience. We “ran off” the map and had to navigate by guess.

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch correspondent Virginia Irwin, from “A Giant Whirlpool of Destruction” in the May 9, 1945, issue

  Fletcher didn’t know how long he lay in his bedroll—fifteen minutes or fifty or more—but the moon had almost disappeared entirely into the mist when the flap of the tent opened and Liv emerged out of the darkness, dragging her bedroll. She wore not the gray undershirt and gray long johns she always slept in, but rather a long, fancy thing that left the white of her neckline and arms so bare and ghostlike that for a moment he thought he was dreaming her. For that moment, he expected to see Charles join them, the red tip of his cigar cutting through the fog.

  “Fletcher?” she whispered.

  He hesitated, finding his voice. “I’m here, Livvie,” he said finally. “Right here.”

  She arranged her bedroll beside his and lay down on top of it. White skin. Red gown.

  She curled up to him, shivering at his side, and he unzipped his own bedroll and slid his arm around her, pulled her to him almost like he sometimes did with the little girls at his country house when they were missing their mums and their fathers and their modest little homes, when they were not understanding the cost of this war to them.

  “Fletcher,” she said, her breath slightly ripe with the late hour, her eyes shadowed in the mist, the dreamworld light.

  He hated to touch the red silk of the gown with his rough, dirty hands.

  “Fletcher, was Charles the one who started the rumor?” Her voice so faint that it, too, seemed to belong to a dreamworld.

  He stared up at the starless sky, at t
he dim glow of moon behind the cloud cover now. He wanted to ask which rumor, but he didn’t want her to have to answer.

  “The rumor that I was pregnant,” she whispered.

  Fletcher inhaled the damp air deeply, blew his breath out in a long sigh.

  She turned toward the dim glow of the moon. “To keep me from getting security clearance or to get me sent home after I’d gotten here. To keep me from getting myself killed.”

  Fletcher turned toward her, and she snuggled more deeply into him. He smoothed a wrinkle in the gown with his thumb.

  “He was the one who told me I should come,” she said, not so much with accusation as with regret.

  Fletcher stroked her hair, as silky as the gown, trying to attend to her words, trying to think of something to say other than that she would be fine, that everything would be fine. Then her lips were pressing his, softly parted. Her tongue pressing into his mouth. He tried to resist, told himself he had to resist, that this was her grief speaking, that she would regret this and he would, too. But her breath was warm on his skin and the night was cold and bombs sounded in the distance, muted but real, very real, and the drone of the planes and, occasionally, the hazy light of a flare flashing dimly, glowing with the moon. And the touch of her fingers on his cheek was achingly soft, the slide of her fingers over his chest, his ribs. And even softer, the skin of her neck against his fingertips, his cheeks, his lips. The sharp line of her ribs and her surprisingly full breast, the sharp hip bone, the softer belly. And he had wanted her for so long without allowing himself to want her, had wanted her since the night in the barn when he’d dreamed of her, since the moment he’d seen her in that first shock of Saint-Lô, since even before that, since he’d poured wine into her glass at Trefoil, with Charles sitting by her side. Since the day in Charles’s office when she’d eyed him so coolly, when all he’d done was ask her to fetch him tea. Of course he’d known—even then, he’d known—that she was no office girl. He’d seen the way she captured so much of a person in a photograph, without even a slant of light, and he’d wanted to be known that way. Even before he met her, before he saw how beautiful she was—that naive kind of beauty that somehow didn’t recognize itself—he’d wanted to be known by her, and to know her. But she had been Charles’s girl even then, and he’d been reduced to pretending he thought her no more than an office girl; he’d been reduced to asking her to bring him tea with lemon just to see the rise it brought in her, the spark in her flame-blue eyes.