The Race for Paris (19 page)

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.

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

T
he 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 cartoon 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.”

O
utside 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.

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

L
iv 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.”

B
efore 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.

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.”

W
e 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.

L
iv 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.